It's sunny, sixty-four degrees and payday. sigh

I tried to post a couple of entries at the end of last week, but blogger seems to be experiencing intermittent technical difficulties. Nusuth.

The past few days have been excellent for a variety of reasons and in direct contrast to the days of glumness which proceeded them.

I was still feeling glum on Friday when I went home at noon (Friday is my half day). Kris goaded me into being productive, though, and I was better for it. In fact, that one act alone probably changed my entire mental state. At Kris' prodding I quit sulking around the house and went outside to do some yardwork. I mowed the front lawn, weeded the lawn and the sidewalks, and edged our island flower bed (which has seven years of grass growing in it). I'm unfit, of course, and this work made me quite sore. After two hours in the yard I took a hot bath to sooth my sore (and flabby) body.

Kris and I then ventured downtown. We got sandwiches at Fishers (one of only two good places to eat in Canby) and ate lunch in Wait Park. It was sunny, but cool. There's not much better than eating lunch with your wife in the park on a sunny spring day. After grocery shopping, we came home and watched the Mariners win again. Woohoo!

I cannot even remember what I did on Saturday. I know we watched the ballgame, but the rest is a blur. I suspect it involved much loafing around. We fixed pork together in the evening.

Yesterday, Dave and I spent a couple of hours working on expanding our Linux knowledge. We got Samba running on Hercules and then played around with its configuration files. It was eduational and productive. After Dave left I spent a couple of hours playing Black and White. This was my first real block of time that I've allocated to the game. The game is beautiful, and quite fun. I'm having trouble with a couple of the quests, though, and find that frustrating. Also, I've encountered a funny bug: for some reason, the game draws a stand of about a dozen trees hanging in the air above my island. The trees are there even if I quite and restart, so their positions are coded into the save file. I can pluck the trees and move them elsewhere as normal. Ha.

Later in the evening I watched Dr. Strangelove with Kris. Though I'd seen it a couple of times before, I think I enjoyed it more this time than previously.

Can't wait to do more Linux work.

Biked to work for the first time in three weeks. It was great. The birds were singing, the air was cool but calm. Traffic was light and the bike was handling nicely. In fact, it was the smoothest ride I've had all spring. And the best ride. This is the exhiliration that I remember from previous years of biking. If I can lose some weight the exhiliration will be present more often. It's not good when biking is drudgery, but it's fantastic when it's something to anticipate!

Redhat has announced the impending release of Redhat Linux 7.1. I'm running 6.2 right now, with some alterations, and don't know whether or not I'm going to want to upgrade in any way. My current philosophy is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'm able to add whatever packages I need when I need them, so I'm not sure what use upgrading would be.

Meanwhile: I'm researching methods for integrating a Macintosh into a mixed Windows/UNIX environment. I have one Macintosh at home (and a couple here at work) that I'd love to integrate into my existing network. There seems to be no easy solution, but I'll keep searching until I find a practical one that I can implement.

In my previous two years on the City of Canby Budget Committee I've been quiet. Very quiet. I don't say much unless I have strong opinions about the issues at hand, which is rarely. Or, if I do have strong opinions that are obviously outnumbered, I generally keep silent. In the past, my opinion has often been overwhelmed. I did not agree with Mayor Scott Taylor's vision for the city, and I did not agree with the direction that he and the council seemed to be leading. Barry Lucas and Terry Prince were the two lone bright spots. An occasional citizen member would support my views, but citizen members rarely came for more than one meeting.

This year is different (as I think I've mentioned before). This year, all of the citizen members are attending regularly. Most of them hold opinions in strong opposition to those of the current council. Admittedly, the current council is better than the previous council; however, they still tend to favor beauracracy over the public's wishes.

Tonight's meeting was enough to finally crack the shell that I've been living inside. The city is currently facing a budget shortfall of $222,000 (I thought this was $212,000, but somewhere an additional $10,000 came up short). There are a whole host of options before the budget committee, and it's impossible to detail them all. Suffice it to say that there are many ways that the budget shortfall can be addressed: reductions in staff, reduced funding to partner agencies, closing the swimming pool, increasing fees, contracting services to outside agencies, etc.

Tonight, despite all of these options, and before the entire budget document has been fully examined, the committee attempted to balance the budget through only two methods: reductions in force and reduced funding to partner agencies. This galls me. It really galls me. It fucking pisses me off. This is the equivalent of saying: "Okay, we have a family budget that's short because Dad missed some work. We need to find a way to cut some money, but we're only going to look at groceries and entertainment expenses." To continue the analogy, why not consider transportation? Why not consider clothing? Why not consider reducing utility usage?

I asked these questions tonight, before we started hacking at the two portions of the budget on which we were focusing. "Why don't we consider that the swimming pool projects $39,000 in additional revenue through increased fees? Why don't we account for the fact that the technical services department believes that they can save $20,000 by contracting certain services? Why are we spending $2,500 annually on a web page?" The answers were unsatisfactory and boiled down to, "We don't have time — if we're going to lay people off, we have to let them know. Besides, we can't really save money here or there. The departments have already cut as much as they can."

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

We certainly do have time to wait, to take our time, to methodically analyze the budget document, to examine all possible sources of revenue and of savings. The people whose jobs we just cut tonight would thank us for taking the extra time to look more closely at the budget. Instead, the committee charged ahead and just hacked at this and hacked at that. When all was finished, the partner agencies saw total funding reduced from $158,000 to $54,000. Several of the agencies had their funding from the city completely eliminated. Four city jobs were completely eliminated and several others had their funding reduced.

I will admit that I was not alone in my anger. Nearly all of the committee, at-large public members and city council members alike, recognizes that this is a difficult task and does not relish the thought of making any of the cuts. In the end, though, I was the only vote (of ten) that opposed the proposed reductions.

Fortunately the committee has the ability to restore these cuts if additional savings or additional revenue can be found.

There are so many things I don't understand. Why can't the city just unilaterally reduce the salaries and benefits of its employees by five percent. The savings would be huge! There are contract issues and collective bargaining issues and legal issues that are just beyond my realm of knowledge. I've never been in a union (and never will be, despite the fact I recognize their role in society — they are not for me), I've never been a contracted employee, and I've never studied law.

Now I'm pissy. It's raining hard outside, but I should really ride my bike tomorrow. The cleaning woman comes in the afternoon, though, and I don't want to come home to her. Kris has suggested that we meet someplace for dinner. Maybe I'll take her up on it and skip my ride.

On a positive note: In Alex Rodriguez' homecoming, the Mariners are defeated the Texas Rangers by a score of nine to seven. Woohoo!

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — The Education of Henry Adams   For book group this month, I selected The Education of Henry Adams. It was a difficult book.

2004 — Geek Squad   Though I was fairly well integrated with my classmates in grade school, by the time I reached junior high I had gravitated toward a clique of geeks.

2003 — NEW! Cookie Barz   NEW! Cookie Barz are not cookies. They are not candy bars. They're waxy turds doomed to fade from the market as soon as the Nabisco marketing campaign has run its course.

2002 — A Fabulous Discovery   Since I was in downtown Portland, it seemed natural to stop by Powell's Technical Store. While in the store, I made a fabulous discovery: moleskine notebooks.