Old Pictures

Mostly from Liz's sith grade field trip to Mackinac Island.

Hurricane Week

One Tuesday, when I last wrote, we were going blueberry picking. The hurricane had passed through New Orleans and the city was picking up. Tuesday night, having found few blueberries, we went down to Mike's farm to get the rest of the blackberries. Mike's TV is on all day and all night; that's how we found out the levees had broken and the city was awash.

Wednesday at work was the first time I watched the news channels, just in time to see the looters on film. My first thought was that those people should be shot, not for stealing, but for so stupidly stealing the wrong stuff. Plasma TVs? Clearly no one on the ground had much perspective on the size and scope of this disaster, where starvation, malaria, and typhoid were lurking around the next bend and there was not likely to be a live outlet for months.

A friend's daughter, a recent college graduate, was living in New Orleans and called her mom to say "everything's fine" after the hurricane went through on Monday. After the levees broke there was no word from her until Saturday when she got out. I got this email today:

Thanks everybody for your prayers for Jessica Carroll stuck in New Orleans, and her family. I've rec'd several emails asking about her.... She was able to get out late Saturday nite. A small group of her neighbors (including a retired fireman) were able to hike out to a vehicle stashed on high ground before the storm. They put boards on trolley tracks and drove a little, moved the boards, drove a little more, and were able to get to the highway where the National Guard told them to turn back. Apparently they were not letting people out under their own power. Their vehicle joined with some NBC vehicles and broke through the road block (!) and were able to get to Mississippi about 11:00 p.m. (where our Leelanau County food is being delivered). Sounds like it was a horrendous journey. She's now made it to Baton Rouge and is with her sister who brought her clothes, etc. They will be making their way to Chicago soon. She was able to get out with her 14-year-old cat in a back pack, some photos, and her toothbrush.

So many questions about this short narrative. Why were cell phone communications knocked out and why weren't they restored sooner? Turn back? How? Why? After the week that was, do they really expect people to trust the authorities to take care of them?

On Thursday there was a horse trailer set up outside Hansen's grocery taking donations of food, clothing, and household goods for hurricane victims. Anna was excited when I put pop-top cans of spaghetti into our cart, but I told them they weren't for us. I also bought a can of Similac, being sure to explain to Anna that mothers who had chosen to breast feed would not have to worry about finding clean bottles, formula, or clean water to mix it with.

The horse trailer was a local spontaneous effort. People bought extra groceries and brought clothing from home. Others stayed for hours to sort and box items. On Friday the trailer left for the International Aid warehouse in Spring Lake, Michigan. By Sunday noon, food was in the mouths of hungry people in Mississippi. The trailer is back at Hansen's, with another at the Leelanau Enterprise building, and another at Plantmasters.

On the news today, it's all about who should have done what. Meanwhile I am looking at the gas prices and anticipating a hard winter, at least financially. The kids started back to school today, so it is time to start canning tomatoes, peaches, and pears.

Is it Hacking If You Do It To Yourself?

Anna commandeered my picture of the beat-up cat, which was going to illustrate a commentary on poker and Intelligent Design. Oh, well, my writing energies have been spent on leelanau.com arguing the school funding thread.

With my new monitor the photos look better but the blog template looks washed out. I opened the template last night and started messing with the color settings using the minimal information from HMTL Made Really Easy. I'm not sure I'm pleased with the results, but it was fun to play.

I want to create a better index to topics and repost some pictures now that I have a monitor that doesn't make them all too dark to see. But that will be later. Today Kathleen is taking Anna and me to Otter Creek to show us where the wild blueberries grow. Shelagh leaves for UM tonight and she wants no help or advice from me while she packs. She is taking everything under the sun, about 5 times as much stuff as she needs, but nobody asked me......

Anna Blogs Again

Our boy definitely has had better days than this.


LISTEN TO THIS !!!!!!!!!!!!!


Our cat, Boy (who if you've been wondering is a boy) got attacked by something on his right side
right above his eye . Boy (who is an outdoor indoor cat) can't go outdoors .( Witch is a bummer for
Boy because he spends most of his time outdoors and hates using the litter box.) By the way I'm Anna .Well Bye

Here's Mom again. Check out
Shelter Life, a blog from the East Bay (California) animal shelter.

Catching up

We are still waiting for the state legislature to decide how much money our schools will get for their operating budgets this year. Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids School District is on the brink of receivership. One of the promises of proposal A was that our property tax funds would be pooled so that all public schools would have a secure source of funding. Humph. There has been an active discussion of school funding issues on leelanau.com. This discussion has directed my attention to a bit of history: it seems that in the early 1990's then-governor Engler decided to finance his tax-cut frenzy by taking money from the school pension fund. A judge later ruled this illegal, but not before then fund had been depleted, just in time to miss out on the bull market of the late 90's. Today, contributions to that pension fund is one of the fastest growing expenses for school districts, right up there with health insurance and gasoline.

A lesser known provision of Proposal A was to transfer 100% of the responsibility for funding the teachers pension fund to the local school districts. (Previously their share was 5%.) This is how people like my state senator can say that school districts are "getting much more money than before proposal A" and be technically correct. They get to divest themselves from responsibility from the mess, implying that if school administrators can't make ends meet with "much more money", they must be poor money managers.

This should not be a surprise. Public schools have been a battle ground for the reckless right wing. Indeed, their ultimate goal seems to be the end of the public school system and the ascendancy of religious education in its place. Because the American public rejects this ultimate goal, they must work towards it by engineering crisises like our current situation. If it took 10 years for policies of the early '90s to yield results, that's okay! Killing public schools is a long term goal.

Google Earth

Years ago, before I gave birth to Anna, I used to find myself on our roof every September, straddling the peak, looking down at my family in the yard. Usually my husband was shouting directions to me about our TV antenna or some other job that needed doing, but sometimes I just took advantage of the ladder leaning against the backside of the house to scoot up and see what the world looked like from on high. The September sun lit up my family from the same angle as my perspective; they seemed to have the world's spotlight on them.

I don't do this much anymore. When we put the addition on our house we put a new roof on that half of the house. You don't traipse all over a new roof like you do a roof that's going to be replaced soon. When cable internet became available I finally bit the bullet and got cable TV, so now we don't have a TV antenna to maintain. With older teenagers, I hardly see my family all in one place at all, let alone from a bird's eye view.

But here's what we look like. This is an image from Google Earth, a new download from Google that accesses a huge cache of satellite photos to make an easy to use picture of the entire earth.

Our house is the largest building, the one with the two tone roof and the driveway/walkway seeming to point at it. The barn is directly behind the house. Richard's shop is the dark-roofed building on the right. The odd dark blob in front of his shop is our big pine tree, melded with its own shadow in the image. Between the shop and our house is a bare spot in the yard with a dark dot in the middle of it. The dot is Anna's tower, the one that is behind her in the sunflower picture of the last post.

I deduce that this picture was taken in late June, judging from the shadows and the fact that my garden is already shrouded in weeds. If I read the documentation I could find out how often the pictures are updated, but none of us have read the documentation yet. It is too much fun to just type in an address and go there.

And you do go there. Anna has been following the roads from our house and checking out her friends' houses and her favorite beaches. She types in "Boulder, Colorado" and the image pulls back from our house and the earth below spins until it zooms in on Boulder. She sees much of the same landscape that she saw while actually flying there. She can go to Africa or Hawaii or Chicago the same way.

Not all neighborhoods are depicted in such detail. Just north of us, in Leland proper, the image is just different colored green pixels. My folks' house in Lockport, NY is a detailed image, but older, with no leaves on the trees.

Google Earth seems to have features aimed at prospective tourists, but they fall short in our area. Asking it to mark restaurants, it tells us that you can eat at a Ben Franklin's in Lake Leelanau. There is no Ben Franklin's in Lake Leelanau, and I've never been to any Ben Franklin's that served food. Oh well, when you live in a rural area you are forever having to deal with city people's preconceptions.

Seeing our house from above (and knowing that anyone else can see it) raises some interesting possibilities. Richard wants to write a message in the driveway. I'm wondering how long before farmers are planting corporate logos into their cornfields. We are both inclined to do something highly visible in the yard so that we can see how long it takes to update. Maybe we should just finish the roof.

Google Earth is free. You have to download the program from earth.google.com.