January 2018 – Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Women’s March 2018: March to the Polls

Last Saturday was the second annual Women’s March, held in cities across the country and around the world. There really isn’t a single cause to march for; there’s a plethora of causes, all meaningful to some of the people attending.

Last year’s march was a direct response to the election of a man who brags, not confesses – as that would imply remorse – about sexually assaulting women because he is rich and can get away with it, as well as responding to a political movement that seeks to reduce choice and equality for anybody outside their core support base, which is typically white men. And so we march for equality and choice, and the right to fight back against sexual assault and harassment.

Our political system is a mess of contradictions. In the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln described our government as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but the people elected at the federal level are increasingly out of touch with the average person. The base congressional salary is $174,000 a year; assuming a standard 40-hour work week for 52 weeks, that calculates out to over $83 per hour. Yet the federal minimum wage is $7.25 – an annual salary of $15,080, assuming it’s a full-time job, and the highest state-level minimum wage is only $11. There are no specific set skills required to run for Congress… what exactly is it that makes them worth $83 an hour compared to people we rely on daily in every aspect of our lives, from restaurant employees to retail workers to teachers and more? At best, to run for Congress you need enough money to start the process – it’s not an appealing process to the average person who is struggling to put food on their tables. As so we march for a living wage.

Our federal representatives have affordable health care provided by our government as one of their many benefits, yet debate whether the rest of us should. Most are college educated, yet again, seem too willing to pull federal money from education at all levels. And we march for education and health care, which are key to being one of the great nations of the world.

There’s a declining number of veterans in Congress – at one point, the House and Senate included significant percentages (see here), and has moved away from that – which is perhaps how the support for our active military and veterans has declined. I don’t mean supporting the wars – that’s a different political discussion – but the people who are willing to put themselves in danger to protect our country’s interests. Congress, having shut down (again) specifically declined to fund our active military salaries, yet continue to fund their own salaries. Our active military make far less money than our federal representatives; they live on those funds. As so we march for the people who have and are putting their lives on the line for us, only to be forgotten by our government whenever they become inconvenient.

Over the years, the laws have evolved to ban slavery, extend voting rights to women and minorities, and more, recognizing in particular that we are a secular nation and as such, our laws should reflect that separation of church and state in order to allow diversity to feed into our system and improve our country. We know the United States can do better, because we have repeatedly improved ourselves. To paraphrase The Last Jedi, we’re not fighting what we hate, we’re marching for what we love.

And we vote.

Setting goals for 2018

We are taught at karate that goals we set are goals we get, and are encouraged to set goals for the year. These are some of the goals I have set for myself this year:

Test for my Tang Soo Do black belt – this is a no-brainer, it’s what I expected to do in October. The tests are held at our regional tournaments, which happen twice a year, so I expect to test in April.
Renew my Project Management Professional (PMP) certfication – actually, I completed this since I wrote it down. Yay! One down! Time to start on the next cycle. It’s a continuous learning opportunity, requiring 60 credits of training every 3 years, so as soon as I finish, I start towards the next cycle.
Add a new garden bed – this has slightly changed since I wrote it down. I entered a sweepstakes and won a discount towards a Garden Tower, so I’m adding that instead of a more traditional raised bed. It will be my first foray into vermicomposting, which involves worms.
The garage door lets in a little bit of light… and leaves… and air.

Garage door projects – this is actually two projects in one. The door from the kitchen to the garage is an interior door; it allows a bit of light and air in. It’s not terrible, but combined with the need to replace or improve the garage door seal, I’m paying more for heat than I should be.
Duolingo recently added Korean as a language option. Since we learn snippets of Korean at karate, I thought I’d try picking up a bit more. I don’t have time for daily lessons at the moment, my current goal is at least once a week.

I’ll come back to these later in the year with updates.

Thoughts on Words of Radiance

Two months late, I have finished re-reading Words of Radiance, and am finally starting Oathbringer. Once again, we follow the stories of Kaladin, Dalinar, and Shallan, among others, as they strive to rebuilt the Knights Radiant with minimal knowledge on what the Knights could actually do. As far as the overall plot goes, that’s all I have to say… go read it, it’s fabulous.

As far as individual plot lines go, I found myself drawn to Shallan Davar. All of the point of view characters are well-developed with riveting plot lines. In The Way of Kings, Shallan was introduced as a young lady forced out of her comfort zone. In Words of Radiance, she stretches past that, arriving in the Shattered Plains, meeting her betrothed, and more to her surprise than anybody else’s, develops into a leader.

Her betrothed has a history of failed romances; Shallan has a history of one, which turned out to be with an assassin who almost killed her. (In his defense, she wasn’t the target.) Shallan arrives at the Shattered Plains, establishing her own place in the mess of the war camps, seeks out the group that was responsible for the failed assassination attempt, and is generally more snarky than society allows. In other words, she’s an awesome character that clearly develops across the books. So do the other characters, I just happen to like Shallan’s snarkiness.

Accident details

It’s been a couple months now since my car accident, and I realized that the details get fuzzy the further past it I get. While part of me would love to forget it, I’m still dealing with some of the aftermath and do want to preserve the details somewhere.

There’s not much I can say about the commute that day. It was a Tuesday, and it was raining, so there was stop and go traffic on I-355. I was in the middle lane, because there’s a pot hole in the right lane a little bit after the toll, and you feel it more when you’re moving slow, so I try to switch back to my normal lane after that point. It was a little chilly, I had switched to my winter coat instead of a sweatshirt, but I wasn’t wearing a hat, and my gloves were in the pockets.

I was in the open road tolling lanes, very solidly stopped in traffic around 7am, when I happened to look in my rear view mirror and saw a pickup truck barreling towards me. I had just enough time to swear (and believe me, the word was not “fudge”) and glance at the distance to the car in front of me before the pickup slammed into me and pushed me into the next car. My steering wheel airbag deployed and caught my face, I could feel it on my lips. My foot airbag also deployed – I didn’t realize that existed – but it pushed my foot off the brake. After a stunned moment, I realized I was moving again as I slid into the back doors of two cars, one in my lane and one in the right lane. I swore again (still not “fudge”) and slammed my foot onto the brake.

When I was sure I was done moving, I shifted my car into park and turned off the engine. I think I glanced behind me and registered that the pickup was attached to my car. I’m not sure of the order immediately after that. At some point, the pickup driver came up to the trio of cars stuck together and called out, asking if everybody was OK. I remember turning the engine back on, so I could lower my window and respond – it hadn’t registered yet that the back window was gone, shattered across the back seat. I texted my co-worker to let her know I’d been rear-ended and would be late, called and left my boss a voicemail (as it turns out, he was behind me in traffic – he passed after the accident, but didn’t recognize my car because “the truck was still on [my] trunk”), then called my mother-in-law a couple minutes before my daughter left for school. This is, as it turns out, a way to panic your child; by the time I next looked at my phone, I had a text message asking for details. I declined the offer of a ride from my mother-in-law, since I had no clue what the process or timing would be, saying I’d call back later if I needed one.

That done, and with my front doors wedged against two other cars, I used my phone to take photos – of the pickup sitting on my trunk, and of the two cars I was wedged between. At some point, the pickup driver told me he was going to try backing up off my trunk, so I made sure my foot was solidly on the brake again, just in case. Once that was done, I sat waiting until emergency personnel came through checking on everybody. When asked if I was OK, I said I was, but was feeling a bit trapped. (I’m not claustrophobic, I just don’t like sitting idle.) Traffic had been passing in the left lane and on the shoulder; the firefighters closed off the shoulder so the accident vehicles could gradually move into that space.

Once the cars in front of me had moved, I turned the engine on again and eased over to the shoulder, and finally got out of the car. I walked around to the trunk, checked my work laptop (survived!), and took a couple photos. I sent a photo of my trunk to my co-workers and my daughter, and posted it to Facebook. And then I began the arduous task of gathering everything in the car into reusable shopping bags from the trunk before the tow truck picked up my poor car. I did fairly well – I missed my sunglasses and a chocolate in a back door pocket, and the tow truck driver later reminded me to grab my iPass. It was about an hour after the accident when I finally sat down in the tow truck; it was almost another hour before the police officer finished writing up the report with the details on all six cars involved.

I received the first copy of the accident report and permission to leave the scene, so I rode to the tow yard and called my insurance from their entry hall. If you’ve never had to do this, it is a tedious process, as the insurance needs all of the details from the accident report – details on all of the drivers and vehicles. Once that was done, we moved to the next step of arranging a rental vehicle through the insurance, and having the rental company pick me up from the tow yard. I ended up driving a lovely Kia minivan for most of a week.

I’d love to say that I then went about my day as normal. I did go to work, but only for a couple hours, as several coworkers were urging me to go to Immediate Care, particularly once a bruise started appearing on the bridge of my nose. As it turns out, I had a mild concussion and was told to take a few days off of work… and in no uncertain terms, not to participate in the black belt test three days later.