2009, Year In Review
Last year started with the swearing-in (and swearing-at, by many people) of a big-eared Kenyan atheist communist socialist Muslim Nazi as president, and for the most part I think he’s doing a fine job. And by this I mean that he is equally an object of disgust from people on the left who thought he’d wave a magic wand and transform the country overnight, and people on the fearful right who are afraid he’d do just that. The net result is that with much kicking and screaming on all sides, our country is in better shape internationally, and we’ve made a little bit of progress on many issues. Be very glad you don’t have that guy’s job; the country was on fire when he was hired, and half the people are impatiently waiting for him to single-handedly put it out, while the other half are pouring gasoline.
In May I got clobbered by a perforated intestine, had major surgery, was laid up for 6 weeks, and have been working furiously at recovery ever since. I’m getting around just fine, though I do have stuff inside that worries me. Time will tell. There is a silver lining, however, and it is the care and support that I received from friends, family, and from everyone at the college. I am grateful, not least for the chance it gives me to think even more highly of them.
In August our office was moved into shared space with another support group and we are now an unstoppable force of faculty support. This arrangement has worked out very well. And, people can find our office!
In September the highlight of the year was our son Lucas’ wedding to Emily Coogan. I have been meaning to write about the wedding, but suffice here to say it was a delight and well worth the trip to Michigan despite my not being in great condition to travel at the time. They are living and working in sunny California, the ungovernable (but much warmer than Illinois) state.
Somehow in all this I learned to ride a unicycle as part of an effort to restore my sense of balance that was damaged in my bike accident 5 years ago. That effort has been successful, and I also have a new way to act far too silly for my age.
My “unicycle” this year will be PhP and MySQL. I’ve been pecking at them for a while now but I’m pulling out the stops on study and application.
Over break I’ve been relaxing, working out, studying, doing little stuff around the house, plotting for installation of a new kitchen sink, troubleshooting our Internet connection, rebuilding computers (including a new laptop!) and gaining weight from holiday goodies. I’m sure I’m not the only person in America with that last item, maybe January will be more Spartan.
Let me leave you with one stanza from a wonderful poem, Once In A Blue Moon, It’s New Year’s Eve, from Digital Cuttlefish. Just enough, I hope, to make you want to click through and read the rest of it:
It isn’t the same, but it never can be,
As time, and as life, moves too quickly for me,
The days—hell, the weeks—are a bit of a blur
And things are not ever the way that they were.
I guess I just mean that I want you to know
That I hope you are happy and well, even though
I may miss you much more than the law should allow,
Just once in a blue moon… like now.
As our beautiful blue planet wheels along its cosmic path, there are no signposts saying: “New year begins HERE”. And as nearly everything follows from something else, the idea of beginnings and endings is a trifle fuzzy. The current time is always “now”, and it’s as good a time as any left to us, to begin.
NOTES:
- I’ll link to MrsDoF if she chooses to write a New Year’s post (hint, hint)
Thanks for the link to Cuttlefish, somehow I missed it.
Your work on the unicycle has inspired me to start something from beginning to… well I would say end but I don’t want it to have a finite end.
Thanks
Happy New Year. Good luck with the programming.
I mostly agree with the Obama assessment. But I am disappointed with a couple of things … the decision to not allow release of more Abu Ghraib photos, using the same basic reasoning the Bush administration used in trying to prevent any release.
I’m also disappointed with what what the health care reform bill will end up being. I think he mishandled this file. Without universal single-payer, the “reform” will get un-reformed, e.g. screwed up just as soon as all the special interests find out how to scam it.
WD – yep on both counts, and other things as well. My approval is “he’s doing as well as could possibly be expected with the tepid support of his own party”, not “he’s doing everything right”. Presidents do not have unlimited power (think Johnson on Vietnam) and and the Democrats are hiding behind, and blaming Obama as if he did.
If Democrats locked arms and said; “Public. Option.” we’d have one. And so on.
Am I just being all nostalgic, or did we not, perhaps long ago, have representatives who would do what they thought was the right thing? Dirksen, Simon, Humphrey, etc. What are these chicken-schites we have today afraid of?
You are being nostalgic, but yes we DID have those guys. One of them is named Alan Grayson now. We need to clone him.
And by this I mean that he is equally an object of disgust from people on the left…
There was a time when I took this sort of statement seriously, but that was many years ago. Someone who can’t please diverse groups of people could just as easily be doing a really lousy job. If you’re equally despised by people who know what they’re doing and people who don’t, you’re despised for good reason.
What Obama has done is embrace most of the worst of Bush’s policies, particularly in the area of defending the use of torture, and continuing the use of kidnapping and extra-legal killings to deal with the “War on Terrorism”. People who criticize Obama here, and I’m one of them, criticize him because he has effectively made these things an open part of U.S. policy. We will pay dearly for this down the line, because once a government decides that it doesn’t have to obey the law, there is no law where the government is concerned.
We are now at that point, and you can blame Barack Obama for that.
I’m not some fucking idiot who expects things to be fixed overnight. What I expect is to see progress and an attempt to reverse old wrongs. There has been none of that. There have only been excuses and ad hominems against the people who bring this up. I’m not terribly impressed by people who don’t accurately portray a situation, and then imply that I’m a shithead for not seeing it their way.
You’re more than welcome to call me a Pollyanna on the subject of Obama, and you might turn out to be completely right. I am sometimes slow on the draw about these things. For instance, it was well into Reagan’s second term before I figured out what a bad bargain he was.
But I hope not. He has made some progress, and I think he’s trying to change attitudes, because presidential fiat can be overturned by the next president. I hope he’s playing the long game against an embedded Bush infrastructure. I can’t even pretend that my hopes don’t affect my evaluation of current events.
Thanks for that year in review.