Real People

Avatar
by Lisa

When I was in college, I went out to a bar with some friends. They had a friend, who had graduated a year or two previously, visiting; this guy came out with us. This friend-of-a-friend and I were sitting at a table while everyone else was getting a drink, and the guy said he wanted to meet a beautiful girl like me … but he doesn’t know how to approach one. What, he asked me, would be the best “pick up line”? To which I quickly answered “Hi, I’m Eric”. Why is speaking to a cute girl different than talking to any other human being?

I subsequently learned that, indeed, young attractive women are treated a lot differently — the sort of things people assume are acceptable make the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ recording … well, not surprising. My office at the University had been a photography darkroom. It had two separate rooms — an antechamber and the darkroom part. A friend of mine and I were in the darkroom part, and she was on the phone with someone. Glenn, one of my work-study students came in to speak with me. Not wanting to interrupt her conversation, I asked him to come into the antechamber. He proceeded to back me into a chair, physically restrain me by sitting on me, and kiss me on the mouth. My rather loud entreaty for my friend to come into the other room was met with an annoyed “I’m on the PHONE”. Luckily she finished her call before the student got beyond unwanted kissing, and he backed off when he heard her walking.

And to people who say “but no one reported it happening, so it didn’t happen”. I didn’t report the student either — there’s no evidence. There’s nothing beyond my say-so. And I’m sure he’s going to say it never happened. And that’s a scenario where I at least knew the person. Random guys at a club who take similar liberties — how would that work? Gently move his hand from my crotch to the table, then ask for his name and number? Remove yourself from the situation, and make sure a friend stays close to you at the club — that was my realistic solution.

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Avatar
by Lisa

Mmmmm!

dsc_9941

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups raisins
  • 4 cups white whole wheat flour
  • 8 Tbs. sugar
  • 8 Tbs. cinnamon
  • 2-1/4 tsp. yeast
  • 2 tsp.  sea salt
  • 1/2 cup whole milk
  • 3/4 cup warm water
  • 1 large egg
  • 9 Tbs. unsalted butter
  • 3T cream

Method:

Soak raisins in warm water for 5 minutes, then drain.

Add 2T sugar to warm water and stir. Sprinkle yeast on top of water and let sit until yeast is frothy.

In a stand mixer with bread hook attachment, combine flour, 2T cinnamon, and salt. Mix to combine. Add milk, egg, 3T of butter, and water. Mix for about five minutes. Knead raisins in by hand to avoid crushing them.

Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature until the dough looks slightly puffy, about 60 minutes.

In a small bowl, combine the remaining 6 Tbs. each cinnamon and sugar. Melt 4 Tbs. of the butter.

Line a baking tray with a silicone baking mat. Divide the dough in half. Roll each piece out to 1/4 inch thick. Spread the melted butter on the dough. Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar mixture evenly over both rectangles.
Roll each rectangle into a cylinder. Place on silicone baking mat, seam side down. Brush loaves with cream. Let rest at room temperature until the dough has risen, 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
Heat the oven to 375°F. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes – loaves will sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Place loaves on a rack to cool.

Potatoes!

Avatar
by Lisa

We finally harvested our potatoes — we got twenty potatoes, so a good bit more than we started with … but no where near what I expected given the size of the plants. I think we planted too late because a lot of the roots had tiny little nubs that would have become potatoes in a few more weeks. Good to know for next year 🙂

Harvesting was fun — we tried pulling the plants, but only found five potatoes. So we started digging around in the soil by hand — got fifteen more potatoes that way, and Anya loved it.

Definitely planting potatoes again next year. Sweet potatoes, however, were a total bust. We had some decent sized vines, but nothing.

dsc_9934

Christmas Dress – Initial Planning

Avatar
by Lisa

I purchased a really interesting book called the Building Block Dress. Ever notice a designer sells ten different patterns that are all tweaks of the same dress? Evidently that’s actually a thing in fashion design — you really do have a base pattern and all of your “looks” are modifications of this base. Makes sense from both a manufacturing and a design standpoint. Cars are designed the same way — there’s an underlying chassis upon which a lot of different variations are bolted. This book teaches you to make your own modifications. Which means you don’t need to buy the three different almost-the-same patterns, but rather you can purchase one and modify components as needed.

The book includes a “dress planning” template — for me, “planning” has generally been an e-mail to a few friends or a blog post about the pattern I’m using and the fabrics I am considering. Selecting different components and drawing the dress is new for me … but I’ve got my first dress planned! Now I just need to get Anya’s Halloween costume sorted so I can work on other projects 🙂

anyachristmasdress-buildingblockdressworksheet

Loopholes

Avatar
by Lisa

When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.

Tax End Run

Avatar
by Lisa

Donald Trump’s massive tax deduction explains why he so wants to get rid of estate taxes — you can take depreciation on buildings *but* you get bit when you sell the property (if I bought it for 1 million, took a quarter mil in depreciation, but then sold the thing for 2 million dollars … your net gain is 1.25 million dollars). Or when you die and it goes through probate.

*But* if we get rid of the estate tax … then someone without financial need to sell their buildings can avoid taxes due to depreciation, hand the properties over to their beneficiaries without incurring tax … and, bonus, those beneficiaries can continue writing off depreciation against their earnings.

Halloween Bag

Avatar
by Lisa

Early this year, I purchased a kit to make a Halloween tote bag for Anya. I had tried piecing it together several times, but stitching a straight line at exactly 1/4″ is not my forte. My last attempt, though, used a sewing machine foot that has a guide for a seam allowance of exactly 1/4″. WooHoo! I was able to get the little blocks pieced together. I want to get some of the rainbow spider web fabric to make a Halloween skirt next year too.

Now I’m almost finished with the bag — just need to stitch the letters. I didn’t quite follow the instructions. Or maybe I just didn’t understand the instructions. It seemed to me like the exterior and the fusible fleece were quilted, but the bag interior was not. I sandwiched all three layers and did my quilting. I also used my serger to make the side seams. That seemed like a more durable solution.

Front (oops, I still need to remove the chalk lines I used to quilt the bottom portion!)

img_20160930_235405

And back:

img_20160930_235412

Non-solutions

Avatar
by Lisa

This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.