I love shopping on Black Friday. Not, mind you, because I am one of the crazy people who gets up in the middle of the night and stands in line waiting to stampede into their local Wal-Mart for $1000 big-screen TVs. You see, at most stores, the early bird specials run until 11 a.m. or even noon, and in addition to the big impressive doorbuster specials, there are loads of smaller bargains that are the sort of thing I am actually interested in buying for my kids (or Ed, but it was all kid purchases this year) (unless you count the telephone, which was a "oh good grief, does it just figure that our phone would randomly quit working at 4 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving?" purchase)

The thing that most people don't realize is that (at least near me), by 10 a.m., the crowds have evaporated, but the stores are still staffed like they're bracing themselves for the zombie apocalypse. I walked into Radio Shack (seeking buy-one-get-one Hexbugs, a pair of photo keychains, and a cheap digital camera, all kid gifts) and was met at the door by two bored employees eager to help me locate whatever I wanted. I had everything I needed and was out the door in less than five minutes. Target took a bit longer, but that was because I succumbed to the temptation to browse. (Although all I bought in the end was a phone and a three-pack of toaster-oven-sized cake pans; Molly has been asking for an Easy Bake Oven, and I suggested we get some small pans and try the toaster oven as a substitute. I'm OK with letting her turn the toaster oven on as long as she lets me know she's doing it. The only big question is how warm an Easy Bake gets inside and thus what temperature to set the toaster oven at. You would think this information would be available on the Internet but googling for "substitute toaster oven Easy Bake" gets me nothing useful. She doesn't need overpriced Easy Bake mixes because I actually put together a cute little Easy Bake cookbook based on recipes I found online for one of Molly's friends as a birthday present, and I could just print off a copy for Molly.)

Anyway, the thing that is remarkable about afternoon and late morning Black Friday shopping is how incredibly low-stress it is. The stores are empty, everything but the "minimum five per store!" items are in stock, and there are no lines for anything. It's great.

Incidentally, I asked the cashier at Target and even at opening, she said there wasn't much of a crowd. It may just be that the people in my neighborhood are disproportionately not the Black Friday shopping type ... or it may be a sign that we are in for a a Bleak Retail Season (tm). If I owned Target stock, this would make me nervous. (Which reminds me, I should post soon about Molly's experimentation with day trading.)

Do any of the weirder varieties of Lutherans** believe in the Rapture?

** by "weirder variety" I mean, "NOT the ELCA or even the Missouri Synod." (I would be shocked if the ELCA believed in the Rapture -- like, stunned speechless and saying things like, "are you SURE? no, I don't believe you; you are simply wrong" and very surprised if the Missouri Synod did.)

Happy birthday, notthatedburke and probably_lost!

Remember that Democratic Congress I got you for your birthday back in 2006?

Well this year, a health care bill showed up for your birthday! Only, I didn't order it -- honestly, I mean, I looked at it in the catalog and I thought, "oooh! they would totally like that!" Only instead of "ships in 24 hours" it said "coming soon!" but with no date and I was pretty skeptical that it would arrive in time.

So someone else must have gotten it for you! Which is pretty awesome -- I mean, it's clearly a beta version and it doesn't have all the features the order page mentioned BUT it's actually much more fully featured than I was expecting. Happy birthday!

(It still doesn't beat the present that arrived one day too late for your actual birthday, twenty years ago. I mean, srsly. That's got to be the best one ever.)

I wrote/salvaged a whopping 198 words today.

The problem is that this is a work scene and I don't know what CNAs doooooooooo. Well, actually, after spending most of my productive time today googling and reading stuff about CNAs, I actually have at least some sense of it: they bring meals, they feed patients who can't feed themselves, they check blood glucose for diabetic patients, they bathe patients, they move patients to prevent bedsores, they help patients go to the bathroom if they need help and change diapers if they're incontinent, they change sheets, they act as general gofers for the nurses, and they respond to people's call bells, among other things. When I started actually trying to incorporate that info into the work scene, I hit a whole new layer of stuff I don't know. She's just arrived at work in the morning; does she have some back room where she can hang up her coat? Does she get to work right off delivering people's breakfasts or is there more to it than that? If a patient required bathing, how often would she be doing it? I want for her to have some times when she can chat with (or listen to) patients; what tasks could she plausibly be doing in those scenes? Presumably personal care stuff for people too sick/weak/shaky to do these things for themselves... If she's sitting and feeding a patient and some other patient rings their call bell, is she supposed to hop up and respond, or does someone else do it? Do CNAs get assigned to particular rooms or are they supposed to just jump for whichever nurse needs them to jump at any given moment? Etc., etc., etc.

One of the things that was clearly wrong with the book as it stood was that it got started much too slowly. So, I pretty much scrapped the opening and wrote a fresh version that kicked things into gear a lot more quickly. For example, Heike no longer has to drive down to Chicago to get the Ark; it shows up at her door via UPS. (Actually, I need to check and make sure UPS is plausible and it wouldn't necessarily be the USPS or FedEx.)

Yesterday was fabulously productive; I wrote 3,000 words.

Today was less so. I sat down to at least poke at it a little and was going to knock off for the day with a token effort; then I checked to see how many words I'd written and it was 97. That was only three words short of 100, so I went back to add at least a few more, and wound up writing 443 total for the day. Since that's only 57 words short of my standard daily minimum goal when I'm being self-disciplined, I suppose I should go back and keep working, but I've reached the end of a scene and the new scene is going to require a bunch of rewriting instead of writing fresh, although when I look at it tomorrow I may decide it needs to be written fresh, too. We'll see.

I'm 5,871 words / 21 pages into the new version of the novel, and it currently stands at 92,410 words total.

I'd rather see my city elect the Lauraist as Mayor than see Question 1 pass in Maine.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you're a voter in Maine, GO VOTE NO.

I have never done NaNoWriMo and I'm not doing it this year, but I have decided I'm going to try to revise the Ark of the Covenant novel (because I re-read it yet again, decided it was better than I'd thought when I decided it was hopelessly flawed, but that the first section needs to be completely thrown out and re-done) by November 30th.

I have no idea how to log progress on something like this, nor do I know where people go to get those fancy ticker bars, but whatever. I may not post updates anyway, although being cheered on is always a pleasant distraction from real work nice and encouraging.

Also -- and this is entirely related to the novel, FYI -- back when I first moved to Minneapolis, there was this church in a sort of a quonset hut right at Lake Street and the river; it had a ginormous billboard that said PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD Wednesday 7 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 9 a.m. 11 a.m., or something like that. (I remember the PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD part but not the precise schedule.) It was torn down to make way for the (much, much nicer) building that now includes both apartments and the Longfellow Grill. Although during the construction of the building, just after they'd finished most of it and literally days before the sprinkler system was to be turned on, it was struck by lightening and burned to the ground.

When the church was being leveled, I remember reading about a local controversy regarding whether to mark the site, because there had been a church (I think it may have even been in the quonset hut) that was noteworthy for being an early adopter of radio broadcasts....however they used their radio show to spew anti-Semitic vitriol for years and years, and contributed to what was at the time the extremely anti-Semitic atmosphere of Minneapolis.

I would really, really love to know the name of the church and its minister. My attempts to Google the info led me repeatedly to this guy, and that's not right. First of all, he was based in Michigan, and second, I could have sworn the church in question was Protestant.

Does anyone know this info, or do any of you have better skills with google?

Also, a nursing question: is there a difference between a "ward" and a "unit" or is it just that once upon a time, everything was a ward, and now it's always a unit, at least to staff? Heike no longer works at a hospice; part of the storyline is going to be her discovering that she wants to do hospice work. She's also she's much younger, a CNA instead of an RN, and working in the oncology {ward/unit/whatever} at a hospital in downtown St. Paul.

I live in Ward 12, so although I have some opinions about other wards, they tend to be vague and uninformed. Here's who's running:

Brent Perry (Socialist Action)
Rick L. Nyhlen (Independent)
Charley Underwood (DFL)
Sandy Colvin Roy (DFL) (incumbent)

( Read more... )

I am pretty sure that is IT for my ballot. Hurray! All Minneapolis voters can use the Precinct Finder on the city website to (a) figure out where they'll go to vote and (b) see a sample ballot so they can find out now which offices they'll be voting for. My primary tools here were the list of Candidate Filings plus Google. If you're not registered, don't forget Minnesota has same-day voter registration.

I've done roundups of local candidates in previous years, but I think I did it right before Election Day. This year, I started these posts way further in advance. As a result, I've gotten all sorts of responses from the candidates themselves, which has been interesting but then makes me feel obligated to do follow-up posts.

On with the follow up:

1. Jason Stone responded here, basically just to add a little more information.

2. Dave Wahlstedt complained that I dismissed him too quickly, and said that he was misquoted in the SouthWest article I linked to. On looking at his website and some other information, I'm convinced that he's right I was too offhand with him based on that article. However, I am not going to vote for him because I feel a profound nervousness about putting the parks into the hands of someone who describes himself as a "Liberty Candidate" in any forum -- quite often, that's code for "Libertarian in all but name." Moreover, he talks about how the parks should be offering a "return on investment." And -- to some extent he's right; one of the things that impresses me so much about Erwin is his desire to look for outside funding sources. And in his TV interview (local access cable), Wahlstedt gives the example of Sea Salt as an example of how the parks could raise money; it's a private business that pays rent, but it's also a totally AWESOME asset to the park. I guess what it boils down to is that I have a lot of trouble trusting Republicans. This hasn't always been the case; I have, in the past, voted for Republican candidates on a couple of occasions. (Not many! But some.) But the more damage they do to the state I live in, the less inclined I am to trust anything any of them say.

3. Speaking of Republicans, that Republican party site with links to interviews has some links to Michael Martens, the BAT candidate. I was disturbed to see that one of them is from a Ron Paul/Michele Bachmann forum. I have some inherent prejudices against Republicans running for office, but I do not usually assume they're all as batshit crazy as Michele, or support her batshit craziness. Unless they go to rallies for her, in which case... he didn't SAY anything crazy in that interview but it definitely raised my wariness of him. (Michele, if your google alert turns this post up, please feel free to drop by and tell me how totally crazy you aren't, oh you woman who hid in the bushes to spy on a gay rally, which I think may have been the very first time I read your name and thought, "wow, she is NUTS.")

4. John Charles Wilson, who wants a sovereign communist nation for the Lauraist movement, stopped by to complain that I characterized him (and others) as joke candidates and loonies. For the record: I consider pretty much all current secessionist movements in the U.S. to be made up of nuts and/or complete lunatics. When in addition to being a separatist movement a group bases itself on a religious ideology AND demands as its territory a circular piece of land defined by a 240-mile radius surrounding Minneapolis (which for the record appears to include most but not all of the state of Minnesota, a huge chunk of Wisconsin, a good sized piece of Iowa, and small bits of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Illinois) I really don't feel an obligation to take it seriously.

That said, I think Wilson is less of a lunatic (and certainly less of an embarrassment to the state, not to mention doing far less damage) than Michele Bachmann.

If I get around to it (and my Internet connection speeds up) I will do Ward 12 City Council. I don't think that one should take long.

Carol Kummer wrote back to me two days after I e-mailed her, which is a respectably prompt response, I think. I asked her about her endorsements, first off, and here's who she listed:

AFSCME Council 5
Mpls Fire Fighters #82
Police Officers Federation of Mpls
Stonewall DFL "A" rating
WomenWinning

FWIW, I tend to view a Police Officers Federation endorsement as a substantial minus. Our PD has a lot of problems -- really ugly, awful problems. (A news story about that arrest, if you'd prefer not to watch the video footage.) I don't have a lot of faith in the Minneapolis Police Department, though to be fair, my personal interactions with them have all been neutral or positive. (But I am a middle-aged white woman. Very few of the people who get the crap beaten out of them by the police in Minneapolis are in my particular demographic.)

(And if you're wondering why I said I wanted a well-trained police department in my previous post -- I would like our police officers to be trained not to use the minimum force, rather than kicking the shit out of a guy who's down and subdued.)

Back to Carol Kummer.

She's also supported or endorsed by Sen. Linda Berglin, Rep. Jeff Hayden, County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, City Council Member Sandy Colvin Roy, andformer State Senator Wes Skoglund.  She says she only seeks endorsement of elected officials who live in the district. So, fair enough.

I asked her what she considered to be the biggest difference between her and Jason Stone. She didn't really answer that question, but instead listed her experience and some of the projects the board has accomplished during her tenure. (Which includes some really great stuff.) (Come to think of it, this may be why it's usually so hard to dislodge Park Board incumbents: practically anyone on the park board can type of a list of accomplishments and it's guaranteed to be full of things that will fill people with warm, positive feelings. The restoration of the WPA walls along the creek! The gorgeous new Wabun picnic area near the falls, with its fabulous wading pool! The restored walking/biking trails on the river! There's nothing there not to like.)

I asked her if there was any local politician that she particularly admired or aspired to be like. She responded with a list of attributes she thought were shared by effective public servants:

- Most decide to run because of a desire to serve people and/or to correct an injustice;
- Once elected, their focus is to learn and do the best possible job for their constituents;
- Deep roots in their communities and a sense of commonality, ability to relate and to communicate and 'play nice' with their colleagues;
- Stick-to-ativeness and ability to work with others to accomplish goals.

I tend to agree with her on these.

Here's the big issue with Carol, honestly. In the various infighting over money and the Park Board in the city this year, there was a group that wanted to give the Park Board independent authority to levy taxes; I thought this sounded like a really bad idea, but it didn't wind up on the ballot anyway so I didn't do a ton of research on it. Anyway, Carol Kummer favored the idea; the whole incumbent board favored it, according to a friend, though he may have been speaking a little hyperbolically. At any rate, after spending the entire damn afternoon reading arguments about how finances are done in Minneapolis, I actually think the way we do them NOW is pretty reasonable: we have a couple of finance wonks, plus three council members and a park board rep who set property taxes and allocate the money. It seems like this is a situation that provides for some balance.

So, I'm probably going to vote for Stone.