Happy Halloween! I've got some fun photos of Halloween shennanigans at work yesterday up on Flickr. We carved pumpkins, decorated cupcakes, and watched the Thriller video. Good times.
Taken with my phone (so excuse the low quality), this is a view of the pumpkin patch near our house. That orange glow on the hills? All pumpkins.
This is the tree right outside our condo (as seen from our front porch). Autumn in Colorado ROCKS.
Guess who I got to see speak today?
It was so awesome! Of course, the waiting for about four hours was less awesome, but still worth it. He spoke at Mountain View High School, less than five miles from our house. In total, there were probably around 2,000 people there — but still, what an incredible experience to see him speak in such a relatively small venue! We had pretty great seats, as you can see.
My favorite part was when he started to say, "If I become president..." and someone in the crowd shouted, "WHEN!" and the entire gym was on its feet, clapping and cheering. It was pretty astounding.
Look at my handsome husband! A couple more photos added to the birthday set — I took actual film photos and had to get them developed!
This is maybe my new favorite picture of me. ;)
Yesterday, we took off and drove up to Aspen to see some fall color and celebrate Brandon's birthday. click here to see all the photos!
I promised more photos of the blue hair, and now there are a few on my flickr page! This one and several others are from my volunteer day this Wednesday. My company gives us a day off to go volunteer for the cause of our choice. My group chose education, so we went and sorted donated books in the morning, then changed clothes and headed to a local high school to talk about our careers in the afternoon.
Just a fun photo of us and friend/coworker Gwen at friend/coworker Hannah's wedding.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.The article also dives into the question of whether following or "friending" people on these sorts of sites truly constitutes a social relationship. Can I be friends with someone I've never physically met?
As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. […]
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist.And, according to the author, this social network of "weak ties" is incredibly powerful. I have a friend online — who, incidentally, I have only met once in person — who calls this, "the wisdom of the internets." She has a blog with a large (3,000+) following of avid readers. If she has a problem or a question, her cadre of readers is usually the first place she turns for advice.
Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.
That's the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.
That's the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now.
[…]
And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our "intellectual and moral strength." Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents; that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.
Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility – that's the essence of America's promise.
We had so much fun when Mom and Emily came to visit at the end of July! Finally got some photos uploaded. Don't miss the video of the elk and the marmot!
Unlike any actor who has preceded him in the role of the Doctor or the Prince of Denmark, David Tennant is both an accomplished Shakespearean (he has often turned out for the RSC) and a complete and utter Doctor Who fanboy fruitcake.
[…]
The Stratford production's swift sell-out suggests that the audience is anticipating a rare kind of cultural twofer: Shakespeare's most celebrated hero, performed by the actor who now gives life to television's most celebrated hero. And in the case of both parts, it's hard to be unaware that you are watching only the latest of a long line of interpreters. New Doctors must overwhelm or accommodate the shades of William Hartnell and Tom Baker just as new Hamlets must compete with the ghosts of Olivier, Gielgud and David Warner. Tennant has already performed one successful act of exorcism. He seems destined to complete a second.
After 40 years, playground equipment at Heights Park in Richardson to be removed
Thought you might be interested in the article from DMN…Our HOA went to bat for the Rocket ship and such to be sure they were turned into sculpture and remain in the park. I have this vivid memory, Lacy, of your being in the TOP of the Rocket ship, unwilling to come down alone and me about 8 months pregnant with Emily…Climbing up to the first stage was ok, but the second and part and the third were absurd…Small openings where I had to literally heave my middle, soon to be delivered Miss Emily, through the opening before the rest of me sort of. NIGHTMARE! At dusk when there was NO ONE there of a normal size to assist. On the other hand, I am thankful there was no YouTube then or cell phone cameras…… - Mom
Finally got most of the vacation photos uploaded! You can view a slideshow or pick and choose which ones to look at!
Enjoy!
The only reliable way to cut oil use — to reduce the flow of money to Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, to reduce the odds that the planet just keeps getting hotter — is to make oil more expensive.
This, of course, is precisely the specter that has been raised by opponents of new carbon rules. Gas costs way too much already! Yet that argument gets cause and effect almost perfectly backward.
Oil has become so expensive mainly because the world is using so much of it. Yes, making it more expensive — about 40 cents a gallon more expensive by 2030, according to two analyses of the current bill — will bring some medium-term economic pain. But the pain can be greatly reduced through broad-based tax cuts, financed with the revenue raised by a good cap-and-trade system (or, as many economists prefer, a carbon tax).
More important, raising the cost of energy could bring enormous long-term benefits. It could make the country more secure, strategically and economically.
“The real concern,” said Nathaniel Keohane, the head of economic policy and analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund, “should be our vulnerability to $7-a-gallon gasoline that is a function of global demand and stagnant supply.” Goldman Sachs recently suggested that $7-a-gallon gas was conceivable.
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.
…the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today…
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. […] And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus [time spent watching TV instead of thinking or working] as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.
This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.
A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.
[…]
The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.
According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”
The trees around our house have started blooming! I have no idea what these pretty white trees are, but they always bloom first at our house.
This is our pretty crabapple tree (at least, I think that's what it is) right at the foot of our stairs.
