Bobcat practice ...

I spent a few hours today practicing on the Bobcat, getting my skills back enough to plow snow at the railroad this winter.

The railroad got a new Bobcat last spring, and it is a lot easier to work with than the old one was.

I'm no expert, but I'll be able to plow ...

Speaking of experts, John sent this video along earlier this week:

Not something to try at home, to be sure.

Well, it wasn't the Police Blotter, anyway ...

Michael showed up at the railroad this morning to unexpected congratulations.

The Baraboo News-Republic printed its weekly summary of vital statistics (births, marriage licenses, applications for domestic partnership) on Wednesday and picked up on our domestic partnership application filed Monday.

We didn't see it because we don't get the print version of the paper, reading it online as we do, and we probably wouldn't have noticed it anyway.

Roberta did, though, and before long everyone out at the railroad knew, so Michael and I spent the day getting congratulated and answering questions about the domestic partnership law.

I got mileage out of my explanation that Michael was confused about the law, thinking that "domestic partner" meant "domesticated partner", believing that the law would make me behave myself.

Fat chance.

Thanksgiving

Jim and Adele joined us for Thanksgiving, on the understanding that we would not talk about the commotion at railroad.

Jim is one of the railroad's charter members, and is a link back to the Stanley days, because Jim worked at the railroad as a teenager in the 1950's. He is the railroad's unofficial historian. Jim's memories were put on videotape last year, and will be an enduring record.

The food was good, dinner was fun, and Jim and I swapped stories about growing up on the river until Michael and Adele signaled a halt to the stories.

Living Hell

If you have any doubt about the living hell that far-right Christians will create if given the chance, study the proposed "anti-homosexuality" law in Uganda.

Among other things, the bill requires citizens -- even a father or a mother -- to report homosexuals to the government for prosecution within 24 hours of learning about the person's homosexuality, imposing a three-year jail sentence on those that do not.

Mandating that a father or mother to turn in their own son or daughter on pain of imprisonment is an Orwellian twist even I hadn't imagined, something right out of Stalinist Russia. All in the name of Christian family values, I suppose.

And if you have any question about the raw, primal hatred and hypocrisy of far-right Christians like Pastor Martin Ssempa, a prominent backer of the bill, a man tied to prominent figures on the far-right Christian movement in this country, ponder this:

The bill mandates the death penalty for HIV-positive gays who engage in sexual conduct, but mandates no penalty at all for HIV-positive straights who engage in sexual conduct.

Uh huh ... and this in a country in which the vast majority of HIV is spread by straight men. In the 1990's, 30% of the pregnant women in Uganda were HIV positive, and roughly 60% of the new HIV infections in 2008 were in women.

Weird

The internet can be weird.

I stumbled across a site last night that is dedicated to photographing all the gravestones in the United States and Canada. The project is connected with genealogy research, apparently, allowing folks who are interested in tracing their family history to look at gravestones without having to travel.

I poked around a bit, discovering that the cemetery in Lake Delton is partly photographed, the Dellona cemetary is not yet photographed, and so on. I managed to find a few family gravestones, but not most.

On a chance, I did a search for Bill Baker's grave, knowing only that he was buried in Baker Hill north of Toronto. Lo and behold, I found a picture of his gravestone within a few minutes.

When I last saw Bill's grave, it was a hole in the ground, raw and ugly, with no stone, of course. I'm heartened to see that is is, as of last August, clean and well kept.

I thought about looking for my favorite gravestone, in the Texas State Cemetery, which proudly (and inaccurately) proclaims "The only good thing that lasts is Texas. God Bless Texas!". I stumbled on it when Helen's aunt Helen was dragging us around the cemetery a number of years ago showing us the grave of an ancestor who is a "Hero of the Texas Revolution", but I don't remember the name of the man who is underneath, so I couldn't find it.

The site, Find-a-Grave, is volunteer driven. Volunteers photograph in cemeteries near their homes, adding records bit by bit, and sometimes acting on requests forwarded by the website.

The idea of cataloging gravestones is an interesting one, if weird. I decided to help out, and volunteered to be a photographer. I'll work in the Lake Delton cemetery, adding the older graves bit by bit, but I'll respond if I get requests to locate and photograph graves in other area cemeteries, as well, if asked.

Oops!

From this morning's "WOW" report from the railroad, in a section talking about all the work Dale Terrill did decorating for the Santa Trains:

"On top of all that he managed to bring in garland, wreaths and Christmas lights which he hung up with Don Taylor. Oops."

Michael and I have been wondering what happened to Don. Silly us, looking around for him on the ground.

Closed Session

The Saturday paper had an article, "Dells Chief says no to retiring, but city talks of job".

The gist of the article was that the city's personnel committee met in closed session last Tuesday and discussed Police Chief Bret Anderson's retirement and another job for him. According to the article, "The closed session, attended only by members of the committee, discussed Anderson becoming a supervisor in the city’s public works department, Mayor Eric Helland said after being questioned by the Events. Members of the committee are Mayor Helland and Alderpersons Dar Mor, Dan Gavinski and Joan Ragan."

The new job would be an "oversight" position in the city's Department of Public Works, which, according to the article, Mayor Helland thought was needed "because the city has issues with overtime in the public works department, and it is trying to get a "better handle" on the overtime." Helland went on to say that he wasn't dissatisfied with DPW director Mike Horkan's work, but "He's got a lot on his plate."

"We’re not dissatisfied with Mike’s (Horkan, public works director) work," Helland said. In fact, he said Horkan was a workaholic, and he has seen "nothing but excellent work from him. He's got a lot on his plate."

I wondered, at the time, if the article was a case of more between the lines than on the lines, and made a mental note to ask a friend, who is on the Dells City Council, about it when I saw her.

Well, this morning I found out. The seemingly innocuous article seems to begun that will be a spate of letters to the editor:

Don't create another tax burden

Great timing showing yet another "tricky dicky" move by the Dells police chief.

On the front page he is trying to get a supervisor’s job with public works and on the second page he has the department and the city involved in another lawsuit. It is another $60,000 screw up by the chief and his administration and now they want him as “oversight” in public works. Where was the “oversight” for the Dells chief?

If Dale Darling can’t control overtime abuse then fire him and get someone who can. Don’t create another tax burden for incompetent public officials. Enough is enough.

Cindy Retzloff, Wisconsin Dells

I have a suspicion that we haven't heard the last of this one. Its tough trying to run a small town where everybody knows everybody else's business, closed session or not.

Clean Up

Peggy and Rich came by yesterday morning with Peggy's orange-cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, on their way out to clean up the ditches along Berry Road.

I went with, and we chatted away as we walked up and down the road, spearing trash in the ditch and bagging it.

Berry Road is mostly unbuilt -- we have six houses along a three-quarter mile stretch -- and little used, despite Jerry's complaint that a car comes along every half hour these days, making us almost an Interstate.

The east end of the road seems to be a collecting spot for beer cans. My guess is that teenagers party along there at night, but I don't know.

We collected three bags of trash and put them out for collection on Friday.

Rich came over after we were done and leveled the driveway. Leveling the driveway consists of roaring his pickup up and down the driveway backwards, dragging the snow plow. The plow picks up gravel from the high spots, and spreads it out into the low spots, somewhat like a road grader in reverse.

As dumb as it sounds, it works, and my driveway is as level as it was the day it was put in, if not quite as brand-spanking-new.

All this cleaning and leveling prompted me to get some of my own work done. I pulled the solar light sticks from along the sidewalk and garage pad so that I won't run them through the snow blower when the white soggy descends on us tomorrow, and started to clean out the basement.

The basement is an unholy mess. Peter was building something down there last summer, and he managed to spread tools, bits of wood, and sawdust all over the basement, meanwhile digging stuff out of half the storage bins in the place.

I got going on it, and maybe I'll get it done with another month's work.

Undomesticated Partnership

Michael and I have been planning to become domestic partners under the new law enacted last summer, and it has been a slow process.

Slow, actually, is too optimistic to be accurate, because we've been doing estate planning, and it has been moving at a pace that makes an arthritic snail look like A.J. Foyt.

Anyway, we decided last week that we aren't going to wait forever, lawyers be damned, and we went down to the County Clerk's office today and registered.

We bought rings in Madison on Friday while down replacing a dining room chair that got broken -- don't ask, it was Peter talking on the phone about his new car, and I haven't a clue -- and we decided to just start wearing them on the spot.

The rings are simple silver bands, nothing fancy. Simple enough that nobody has notices them, and that's the way it should be.

Turmoil

The railroad has been in turmoil since last weekend -- changes in management -- and I've been getting more than my share of e-mails and telephone calls from folks on both sides of the matter trying to draw me into the dispute.

I'm just not interested in organizational politics, and I never have been. So I'm not playing, and that seems to bother both sides more than it should. I don't know why it bothers the folks who are into organizational politics that some of us just don't care, but it always seems to, as far back as I can remember. I guess some folks liked seventh grade. Not me.

Jack has the flu, so I conducted on Saturday. I like conducting, although it is hard work for me because of my back, and I had a good time. I like conducting in the slower periods, because I can give the folks who come out lots of personal attention instead of dealing with herds.

I was supposed to conduct today, too, and I went over about 8 am to get everything set up and do the track inspection. I got that done and Steve and Pat -- an engineer/conductor team -- showed up unexpectedly, so I took the day off, getting stuff done around the house.

It was sunny yesterday afternoon, and it was a pleasant break from computers and railroads, even if I did get several phone calls about the railroad turmoil.

Not so lucky was Michael.

He was working in the museum shop at the railroad all day, and the shop was something of gossip central, I understand. Michael has even less tolerance for this nonsense than I do, and he was not a happy camper when he got home, either the first time when he took a mid-day break to come home and fume for a few minutes, or the second time at the end of the day.

Ah, the luck of the draw.

Ramadan?

As predictable as locusts, the "keep Christ in Christmas" letters have started in the Baraboo papers this year, and it isn't even Thanksgiving yet.

Today's letter, in the form of a poem, struck me for this line:

"Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa ...
In hopes to sell books by Franken and Fonda."

Huh?

Ramadan, a month-long period during which Muslims fast and purify themselves, moves around the calendar a bit, but usually occurs during the late summer or early fall. Ramadan, unlike Christmas, is most definitely not an exploitative, commercial holiday extravaganza.

Never let total ignorance get in the way of taking offense, I guess.

The balance of the poem was a whiny, almost paranoid, stream of complaints about retailers and others who don't, apparently, doff their caps to the satisfaction of Christians, with lines like:

"As Targets were hanging their trees upside down ...
At Lowe's the word Christmas — was nowhere to be found.
At Kmart and Staples and Penneys and Sears ...
You won't hear the word Christmas; it won't touch your ears.
Inclusive, sensitive, di-ver-si-ty ...
Are words that were used to intimidate me."

I suppose that this sort of drivel is born of frustration that our culture has moved beyond Christian dominance, but I can't help but wonder why Christians are so determined to insist that Christ is incarnate in every blue light special.

In fact, I can't help but wonder what happened to the second part of the word "Christmas", originally "Christ's mass".

Do the Christians who write these letters know that Christmas is a religious holiday? Maybe they do, but I'd never know it from the "Mailbag" of the local papers.

We haven't yet gotten around to bitch-slapping letters over whether Christians should put their creches on the courtyard lawn, but I suppose we will. I don't look forward to it.

Windows 7

My four-year-old laptop started the long, slow but inevitable slide to hard drive failure last week -- the error log lit up like a Christmas tree -- and I decided I had to replace it before it failed, whether or not I wanted to spend the money right now.

After researching to try to find a reasonable price/performance point -- it turns out to be just under $1,000 in today's laptop market, a huge reduction from the days when folks had to spent $2,500 to get a decent laptop -- I settled in on a HP DV6 1360, which is one of HP's best selling mid-price laptops.

The internet discount houses were selling the model for $900 - $950, but I was lucky, thanks to a one-week "special buy" price at Staples, and I got the laptop for $750, after rebates.

It showed up last night by UPS, just as I was headed out for a meeting in town, and I set it up today, while Michael was off to meetings and volunteer work.

The laptop, like almost every computer these days, is running 64-bit Windows 7, and I was leery.

Windows 7, unlike Windows Vista, has been getting good reviews, but I've been an IT manager and owned a technology consulting company, and I knew that switching over from a 32-bit operating system to a 64-bit operating system promised trouble for legacy applications.

The applications I use most -- Firefox and Open Office -- are current and work perfectly within the 64-bit world, but I also use a lot of relatively expensive legacy software, circa 2000 - 2004, like Photoshop 7 and Visio 2000, and I was in no rush to drop a few thousand bucks replacing software right now.

It turned out not to be a problem. Windows 7 runs most of my legacy software just fine it "compatibility" mode. The few exceptions -- a little program to pick a color off my computer screen and give me the hex values for use in designing websites, for example -- were low-end applications that I could replace easily for next-to-nothing.

I had to update my anti-virus and internet security programs and all of my printer drivers to move from 32-bit to 64-bit, but that was expected. So no harm, no foul on that score.

Windows 7 itself, in marked contrast to Windows Vista, is a joy to use. The operating system seems robust, and Microsoft finally managed to create an operating system that is more-or-less intuitive.

So all's well.

Marian the Librarian

The library's bookmobile manager resigned last week and Michael was offered the job yesterday.

Michael has been a volunteer staffer at the library every week because he likes the work and the library staff, so he took the job, starting January 4th.

Good for him.

And good for me, too, because I can make "Marian the Librarian" jokes now, until he gets tired of them and beats me with a stick.