General Life Update, with Ramblings

Missionaries

I know this is The Right Project For Me, because no matter how long I ignore the missionaries, the sooner I get back into doing the research, I find fascinating stuff. (Hey, Shore Leave's over, I need something to obsess on!) For instance, the first post-KJV version of the Bible printed in America was printed by a woman, Joan Aiken - daughter of the man who printed the first Bible in America (a King James).

That's just cool.

In the meantime, it's Thursday March 22, 1820 for Lucia Holman and "Owhyhee is now the nearest land" and things are going to jazz up quickly. They're also going to get horrifically long-winded, so someone pray for the stamina of my fingers. I think I'm going to have to figure out how to get the scanner to do character recognition before I get to Hiram Bingham's book, because that guy is a serious gasbag. There's a project for the weekend, as I have been given actual work to do at work.

Last night maureen_the_mad asked the fair question of why I felt it necessary to retype all this stuff. The answer is, because my notes make the most sense to me when I've got all my quotes lined up chronologically, so I can cross-reference everything and see trends build. And every little detail is turning out to be important. For instance, during the sea voyage, Lucia had this little toss-away line - "spending a half hour in idle chit-chat with Mr. Loomis about our want of room and convenient accomodations, as our neighbors have." A nothing line, right? Not worth the finger power of keeping, right?

Until you find out that the Whitneys had to crawl over three trunks just to get to their room, and I think it was the Binghams who had to sleep with half the larder in their room. And suddenly that stupid little nothing line of Lucia's becomes a really glaring light on the beginnings of the schism between the Holmans and everybody else. Since I never know what's going to be useful in the end, I'm throwing everything and the kitchen sink into my timeline.

Dumb Cards
No wonder they won't let DC rule itself, the inmates are in control of the asylum. Take Metro, and I wish you would, because the NY subway beats our fancy-dancy metro on just about all counts. Yeah, the NY stations and trains are grubbier. But they also run 24/7 (I have been stranded without metro on several occasions; they used to stop running the trains at noon on Sunday), and it only costs $2 a ride (as opposed to metro's constantly increasing "guess the fare!" policy).

Then they came up with "Smart Cards." The general idea - that you could pay for both your trip and your parking on one card - was long overdue. But being DC, they managed to be as back-asswards as possible. For one thing, they announced that one day you would ONLY be able to leave parking if you had a loaded smart card - but they barely advertised it, so they had people all messed up as they tried to get home. Furthermore, they didn't advertise at all that you would have to pay for parking from 9am until closing, as opposed to the old 3pm - 10pm model. So whole bunches of people who thought they'd pay cash or not have to pay at all suddenly needed smart cards.

And how did you get smart cards? Not at metro! The sensible thing would have been to put "buy a card" kiosks at all the stations - so of course, it took them weeks and weeks to do that. Until then, you could go to metro center, or theoretically to a dozen grocery stores around town. Except that when I went to the local Giant, they were all "Yeah, they say you can get the card here but you can't. Go to Metro Center."

This sucks bad enough for the locals; I can't imagine the hell for the tourists who don't know what's going on.

But this morning (right when I needed to finally get my own smart card, because I'm going downtown to see Cyrano as a patron, not an usher) - this morning, they really iced the cake.

You see, they don't have *enough* smart cards. They tag everyone moving through the system, you'd think they know how many regular riders there are and have data on the numbers of tourists, but no. They're running out of smart cards. The solution?

To stop selling them as of Monday. UNTIL SEPTEMBER. Not print more, not stop selling for just a week or two (which would be bad enough) but for a full month plus. And in the meantime, since they won't retro-fit the parking barriers, if you don't have a smart card, you have to go buy a second paper farecard with exactly the amount you will owe in parking to use to get out of the lots. So we've gone from a system where you needed one fare card and cash to where you need two fare cards, one of which has to be bought new with exact cash.

Every. Single. Morning. For. Five. Weeks.

*headdesk*

I'm really glad I get up early. I'm really glad I read the paper before I go to work. Because that meant I could get to the big local metro stop at 6:15 a.m., before the parking needs to be paid and before the panic buying starts. So now I've got one of those cards nestled in my wallet where my student ID has been hanging out.

Have I mentioned that you have to pay $5 just for the bloody card? The little paper ones, which had to be printed by the million, were free, but the plastic one that will lower production costs you have to pay $5 just to own.

(This is, as a side note, making me wonder where I stuck my NY subway card; an item of mild interest because that bugger has $5 on it, and I will be going back to the city in the fall when I finally get the wicked tickets this weekend. When I find it, I'm going to simply carry it in my wallet; it's no less useless to me than a lot of the other things that collect there, like my grad school ID. Which I only use these days to get a lower price at museums in NY. Because that's one thing DC does do right - the people own the Smithsonian, so the people get in for free.)

Thus endeth my rant for the day. Gotta go do what I'm paid to do for a bit.

Grrrrrrr....

Warning, abortion-related ranting.

I've got respect_otters on my friends list. Respect for Otters (it comes from a child miswriting "be kind and respectful of others") is a liberal social commentary blog. Love it. Forget which of my friends clued me into it.

Today's article was very interesting - it was about elective abortion for cases of fetal health, and the woman who runs Otters is handicapped, so she had some really thought-provoking things to say about the choice to abort fetuses who were sometimes healthier than she is. (One of the articles she links to talks about a woman who has aborted twice because she doesn't want them born with an extra finger like she was. An extra finger! Even child-disliking me is thinking "are you NUTS?")

But then one article had a quote that just made me see red:
"People will come into my office in tears and say they've been against abortion their whole lives," he said, "but they'll make an exception for themselves."

You betcha. They'll make an exception for themselves - but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they would fight tooth and nail anyone else making that decision. Two of the articles quote women who've had fetal-health-related abortions referring to them as miscarriages or procedures - in one case because she didn't want to be caught up in the anti-choice hysteria, and one because she didn't really consider what she did an abortion.

You had an elective abortion, honey. Your moral ground is no higher than the teenager who screwed around and the woman whose birth control failed. All three of you decided that you could not cope with this child at this time for reasons of your own. And chew on this next time you see a picket line outside a clinic -- while a few of the anti-abortion laws have loopholes for rape, incest, or the health of the mother, none of them have loopholes for the health of the child. Not one. If Roe vs Wade is repealed, you don't get to mark that little Gift from God "return to sender" no matter how broken it got in the shipping.

While I have no doubt that there is a terrible emotional hell for women who have to choose to lose the child they wanted, I'm livid that there are women out there who want to use the right we all fought for just for themselves, while congratulating themselves as being "better" than the rest of us pro-choicers.