Decision Time

So it's decision time on schools and I still don't feel confident in making the right decision. My kid is a great kid, but she is a bit quirky (no surprise there) and shows hints that an extra year of pre-k might not be a bad idea. Or she could well be ready in a couple months, and we're just overly concerned parents. It's hard to know for sure. Should something like a teacher student ratio freak us out so much?

And if we do get her into k. Which school? It's good to have options, but the truth is that each place has it's pros and cons. You're never going to get everything you want. I guess this is like 90% of the other big choices in life. You've just got to make the best call you can for that particular moment and in the end pretend you knew exactly what you are doing.

It gets easier as a parent, right?

Public Transport

So today is the first time I've driven to work all year. So I've been regulated by someone else's schedule instead of my own. I've traded in about an hour of NPR time for an hour of reading time on the buses/train.

Mostly it's been because my dad has been around, sharing the car and helping to shuttle the kids around on their many journeys. But I've discovered that there is a free shuttle bus near my house. If I leave my house early enough and walk ten minutes, I can get to work completely free. No gas. No parking. Just a little bit of time on my own two feet. Absolutely free. Even with the employer offering up free trainrides, that $3 parking at Caltrain has always been a little bit of a limiting factor for me. I would have to stop by the machine to pay for parking. I'd need to carry around money to pay for parking. Compared to hopping in the Prius, it just hadn't seemed worth it.

Theere are only two drawbacks. I do have to get up a little earlier to make it all work. The bus schedule doesn't line up exactly with the train schedule and my morning commute becomes closer to an hour than a thirty minute drive. Second, I don't help get the kids ready in the morning. I guess that isn't so bad, but I do miss them a bit on those mornings.

So I guess the current gameplan is to try to take public transportation more. Save a little money. Given the duties with the kids, I'm hoping for about 3 days a week.

Bad Reponse

I hate that I'm blogging about Palin today, but I feel I must.

I understand why Palin feels like she's being unfairly attacked by the media. She's got nothing to do with this nut in Arizona. She's never met him and if she did, I'm sure she'd have nothing good to say to him. Yet the broad brush being painted is that her and her ilk with their hyperbolic language have increased the level of violence out there.

She's a pundit who's now in the awkward position of trying to say her words mean something, but don't have any consequences. But the truth is as the language gets coarse, so do the actions that follow. It will always be impossible to assign any proximate causality between her words and these sort of random viiolent actions, but to say they are completely unrelated is probably not possible to.

So I get that she's in a bind, and Sarah does what she does best. She plays victim. She lashes out at the media. She throws more fuel out there. She's well within her right to do so.

But what she fails to grasp is that this is not how a President would or should act. A president needs to rise above us vs. them sometimes and reach for the broader us. This was a time to reach out to everyone, but she is just not capable of that. She'll continue to sell news, but I don't think she's ever going to get a serious shot now.

I'm actually a little sorry not to see her get a chance for the big ticket. I was waiting to see one of my favorites, Tina Fey, evicerate her in 2012.

This was also about the guns.

So every couple of years, some nut takes a big bad gun and takes out random people for no sensical reason. Yesterday, I shared some thoughts on the political language part of the issue. Today, I just wanted to make a remark on the gun side.

I can't stand the NRA. They take a reasonable position that people have a right to bear arms and they turn it into every nut should be able to buy a gun to kill lots and lots of people. This is not about hunting. This is not about self-defense. This is about expelling lots and lots of bullets and making sure these occassional nuts can do maximum damage.

But this has become one of those issues that very few politicians want to take on. The NRA has seemingly won this battle and no one is willing to acknowledge that certain weapons should not be out there and available. In fact, the trend has clearly been to making guns easier and easier to get. It really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Condolences for all the victims in Arizona

I watched Meet the Press yesterday. They had a panel of four or five people talking about the tragic events in Tuscon. The panel included some of her best friends in Congress and fellow members of the Arizona delegation. But there was one guy that really didn't fit the panel. He was a newly elected member of Congress from the Tea Party. He had never met Giffords. The whole point of him being on the show was to say that there are crazy people on the left and the right. This isn't the fault of the Tea Party.

This tea party guy was literally correct. There are crazy people on the left and the right. And this shooter appears to be stupid and crazy without a real coherent political philosophy or agenda. He's just a frustrated crazy person.

But I do think political discourse matters a great deal. He may have been crazy, but Palin's infamous map and the invitation by the tea party candidate to shoot assault weapons and take out Giffords probably helped point this guy in the crazy direction. There were numerous death threats against people during the healthcare "debate" last yaear. A rationale person could have a hard time figuring what is acceptable behavior let alone the crazy people.

Freedom of speech is a great thing. But the rhetoric has gotten worse in the last few years. But Giffords said it best herself when after her office was vandalized she made a reference to Palin and noted that people need to realize there's consequences to their actions.

And even though she doesn't like it, Palin's vitrolic language has set her up to have to defend herself. How she is able to respond could very well determine her future political viability. She's going to have to show that this is a turning point for her. And honestly, I don't think she's capable of doing it.

I'm sorry for everyone hurt in this. It's the sort of random thing that should never happen to good people. I wish strength for Giffords on her recovery.

Rose Bowl

All I wanted for Chistmas this year was Rose Bowl tickets. I'd never been to a big time sports event and wanted to try it at least once in my life. That and I never get to watch Wisconsin football out on the west coast. Wifey reluctantly agreed to the tickets and sharing the experience with me. But she certainly complained about it enough.

Getting to the Rose Bowl was in itself a little daunting. I did not want to drive over an hour and then struggle to find a $40 parking spot. So Wifey and I took public transportation, which consisted of an Amtrak train from Fullerton to LA, a Gold Line Metro from LA to Passedena and then eventually a shuttle bus from Passedena to the stadium.

The train had 3 TCU Hornfrog fans. What I learned is that Hornfrog Fans and all other Texas Fans have their own little hand gestures in support of their school. Not something I've come across before. The Hornfrog hand gesture is a peace sign with the index and middle fingers bent over instead of extended straight out. Seriously, all their fans walk around doing this to each other all day. Those 3 Hornfrog fans readily identifiable in their purple were vastly outnumbers by the red-clad badger fans in the train car.

The disparity in numbers became even clearer when the train reached LA. There were a few tiny pockets of purple adrift in a sea of red. Overall, I don't think taking public transportation saved us any time or money. It may even have cost us some time, but I'm guessing it was still less stressful than having to drive and sit in traffic.

Passadena was soaked in red. We got there just after the end of the parade. The streets were covered in very cold people and lots of trash. We walked around a bit there really wasn't much to see after the parade. We caught an early lunch which was very nice. Almost any meal without the kids feels that way now.

This town knows what it's doing. By the time we left lunch, the streets were surprisingly clean. Crews were removing plywood from all over old town. We got in a surprisngly fast line of shuttle buses. I don't know how many busses they had, but it seemed like at least a hundred. No joke.

At this point, Wifey was begining to feel a littel sorry for the TCU fans who were outnumbered at least 5 to 1 everywhere they went. Then it ended up that there werre about two sections for TCU and the rest was Badger Nation. But somehow our tickets were smack in the middle of Horn Frog Territory. Their band and cheerleaders were about 40 rows directly in front of us. We got that stupd handsign in our faces all day. There seemed to be about five or six other Badgers in our section and that was it. I have to say the TCU fans were extremely kind and there was no trouble at all. Very nice to see.

Navy Seals are cool. I'm jumping out of a plane soon, just like they did.

People take an awful lot of digital pictures these days.

It was a great exciting game, but the wrong team won.

Getting out was a little toughter than getting there. Absolutely exhausted by the time I got home.