a week of changes

The past ten days or so have been full of changes in my work life and in my flyball life. The end results are still settling out, but it seems that both sets of changes are for the better at least as far as I am concerned.

Last Thursday at work two people were fired from my department, due to "inappropriate use of work resources" as the official reason. One of them was someone I've worked with since I began at Immunex in 2001, and I'm rather sad that he is not around anymore. It's a very weird situation, in a way, as he left before the announcement and I'm pretty sure I won't see him again any time soon. It's very odd to just have someone essentially up and disappear, and leaves a vague sense of disquiet even though I know why and how it happened. I sent him a short email wishing him the best to his personal account, but I'm sure talking to anyone outside of his family is very far down on the list right now. His departure left a void in our group, as he was heading up a couple of projects, and so those had to be reassigned. On Tuesday the decision was finalized and announced - I will be the purification lead for the next FIH (first-in-human) molecule that will be coming to us in early April. This is a great opportunity for me, although it is sudden, and I intend to prepare and make the most of it.

In my personal and flyball life, change has come as well although not nearly as neatly. The tension and disagreements between two people and the rest of the club finally came to a head last Sunday, and ended up with the two people being voted out of the club. This was not a good situation, there were plenty of mistakes on both sides, but it is now over and done with and we can move on with our lives. I've been learning even more interesting information about interactions between other club members and these two people since Sunday, and every word I hear just confirms that we made the right decision. I ended a friendship over this situation, and perhaps it is one that I should have ended earlier, but it was only in the past two weeks that I was truly sure of what that person was doing behind my back. I don't need that kind of stress in my life, and the old saw "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" has never held more true for me.

It will be interesting to see how the changes to both my personal and professional lives settle out over the next few weeks. I firmly believe they will all be for the better and that I will benefit over time from both of them, even if they don't seem that way right now. There is plenty of work to be done, and I'm moving forward to meet the challenges ahead.

(Yes, I am being deliberately generic in my comments to avoid names. If you know who I am talking about, please do not post it publicly)

I love technology

Through the power of the internet, I have just purchased a PDF copy of Wil Wheaton's new book Sunken Treasure and sent it to my Kindle.

The future is now and it is awesome.

so, where are the books?

I named this blog "Bikes, Books, and Border Collies," but until today I haven't made a single post about books. This has been slightly on purpose, as while I enjoy writing and talking about books, I didn't want to lock myself in to writing reviews of all the books that I read. I did that for a time on livejournal, and my own psyche made me feel guilty when I fell behind, so that I finally stopped posting entirely with this as one of the reasons.

With that said, I love reading and I love books, as anyone who has spent any time with me will know. My total time reading fluctuates from month to month, depending on travel, free time at work, and time spent in Warcraft, but I typically read 80-100 new books in a year, with a few rereads of old favorites mixed in. I belong to a book club with several women from work, where we have read everything from nonfiction (The Female Brain) to juvenile fiction (Harry Potter books 6 & 7) to serious historical fiction (Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles) to trashy fiction (The Bergdorf Blondes) over the past three years or so. I spend a lot of my own allowance money on books, and usually have a stack of " books-to-read" sitting in my office to work through as time allows. I also receive books as gifts, and have several from Christmas and my birthday waiting in the current stack. However, since I ride a motorcycle to work, my cargo capacity is limited, meaning that it is difficult to take Anathem or Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles or World Without End with me to work, where I tend to have a free block of time available to read while I eat lunch. So these books have sat in The Pile, wistfully waiting for a flyball tournament, free time at home, or a trip away to be read and loved.

Now, enter the Kindle, the e-book reader that Amazon debuted a while ago. Two of my friends have the original version of the Kindle, and absolutely adore it to any who will listen. I started considering one in late January, and my interest was definitely piqued by the announcement of Kindle2 in early February. With my annual review last week including information on my bonus, I went ahead and bought one on Thursday with next-day delivery for Friday, so it was waiting for me on my doorstep when I returned home from work on Friday. Over the weekend I have played with it a good bit, and completely read our next book club book (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society), and am firmly entranced by it and thrilled to have it. My only issue now is wishing I could "trade-in" some of the hardbacks in The Pile for Kindle versions! I may just take a few of them to Half-Price Books in order to do so...

From the first opening of the box, I was impressed with the presentation of the Kindle. Amazon has definitely taken a lesson from Apple in the importance of having good packaging, and just opening the layers with pull tabs printed "Once Upon A Time..." made me smile. The e-ink display was set to a diagram asking me to plug in the Kindle, then turn it on via the power switch, making it the easiest gadget start-up I've ever seen. Within five minutes I was reading my book club book comfortably from my couch, having bought it via the built-in connection to the Kindle store. Over the weekend I read quite a bit, obviously, and I never had any eyestrain or issues with the text - in fact the adjustable text size came in handy when I took out my contacts before bed on Friday evening. Many people whine about there not being a backlight in the Kindle, but I find this to be a bonus rather than a problem, as backlit screens are more difficult to read and draining on the battery. The Kindle is reputed to last 4+ days with the wireless signal turned on and 14+ days with it turned off, and I'd much rather have that and deal with my own lighting than to have to plug it in every day. After all, it is a book replacement, and complaining that you need the same conditions to read the Kindle as you would to read a book seems a little prissy to me.

I've used the file conversion offered by Amazon to convert and send two PDF files (the two flyball rulebooks) wirelessly to my Kindle, which worked beautifully and inexpensively at just $0.10 apiece. I also downloaded quite a few books from The Gutenburg Project, which provides various digital copies of copyright-free and copyright-expired works. Of the books I downloaded, namely a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and nearly all of the Frank L. Baum Oz books, I was able to directly drag two to Kindle (.txt files) and have about 75% of the others converted by Amazon to Kindle format and sent back to my email account for free. There are a few books that could not be converted, for some reason, but I have not had time to fiddle with it to find out why. All of the converted files look just fine on Kindle, and although the first disclaimer bit is often oddly formatted the actual book text has been perfectly fine. Finally, I can browse the Kindle store from Firefox and buy things for download, to have them already there and waiting for me the next time I turn my Kindle on. How cool is that! And as a last interesting touch, when you put Kindle to sleep it displays a random picture that so far includes author portraits, manuscript pages, and the Kindle logo.

So far I am quite happy with my purchase. Yay for technology meeting reading!

the ethics of pregnancy

I've been watching the story of Nadya Suleman, the woman who gave birth to octuplets a few weeks ago, with a sense of horror growing with everything I hear. In a nutshell, this woman has six children as a single mother, all by sperm-donor IVF, and decided to have an IVF session to have more. One IVF doctor had already told her no, so she found another one that was not only willing to do the procedure, but break established protocol and implant more embryos than the clinical standard. And so she wound up pregnant with septuplets that turned out to be octuplets when they were delivered by Caesarian section at 30.5 weeks gestation.

This woman has no job, has been accepting disability for back problems for years, lives with her parents after they lost their original house because they bought one for her, has no husband or partner, and STILL had IVF to have another 8 babies. She is also apparently a fan of plastic surgery and has had several operations to look more like Angelina Jolie.

This situation is so far beyond the line that it's not even in the same timezone. I find this woman morally repugnant, I am disgusted at her waste of public resources, and I am appalled that any doctor would feed her insanity. Ms. Suleman is far more interested in attempting to get onto talk shows, start her own reality show, whine to the press, entertain offers to become a porn star, and generally be a self-absorbed wretch than she is willing to parent any single one of her fourteen children. I firmly believe that she lost the right to the octuplets when she had to have a team of 46 people to deliver them, all paid for by the state as she has no insurance, and could not be bothered to even stay in the hospital with them. I have one acquaintance who had a premature baby recently, and she and her husband are at the hospital with their child from 8am to 8pm every day. I doubt Ms. Suleman has spent more than an hour per day at the hospital with her octuplets unless there are cameras involved. I feel that the state needs to take all fourteen of her children away from her, sterilize her, and leave her to support herself completely on her own. While I am encouraged by the tide of public opinion being very against her, I somehow doubt this will happen and all fourteen of those children will grow up poorly cared for and with a low chance of success in life. What a waste.

As idiotic and narcissistic as Ms. Suleman is, I am even futher appalled and upset at the doctor who would give this woman IVF at all. I have a feeling that there is going to be a significant backlash against IVF centers after this situation, and I believe it is high time for that. It is highly irresponsible to implant multiple embryos at one time, and I think it should be illegal to implant more than three - and if any splits occur, the pregnancy should be reduced to three, no questions asked. There is absolutely no reason to try to have quadruplets or higher order multiples, and anyone who has a moral problem with selective reduction should also have a moral problem with undergoing IVF in the first place. I am actually quite impressed by the Roman Catholic Church, who recently stated that they are against IVF for the same reasons that they are against abortions and birth control.

From a strictly evolutionary point of view, I am firmly against IVF as a concept. More and more couples go through IVF to have children, because they are unable to have them on their own. Perhaps that is genetics telling you something, people! If you are unable to get pregnant or carry a pregnancy, as hard as it is I think that is a pretty clear sign you are not supposed to have children. It's not fair and it is very hard on many women, as our society places great value on having your own biological children, but that's the way it is. What are these IVF daughters going to do in thirty years? Will they even be able to get pregnant naturally? Or will they also need to have IVF to have children? It seems to me that you should just let nature tell you whether you can have children and accept the answer, whether that answer is yes or no.

And humans should never, EVER have litters.

love is being warm

My birthday was a week or so ago, and one of the gifts that Chris got me was an electric blanket for my side of the bed. I am always cold, and have a space heater under my desk at work and an electric heated jacket for riding on the motorcycle. This winter I've been so cold that I've taken to sleeping in my thick long-sleeve flannel PJ's with another long-sleeve tshirt underneath, which combined with an extra blanket on my side of the bed has been just enough to keep me comfortable.

The electric blanket has changed all of that.

I can now sleep in a single set of PJ's, any of the ones I own, and sleep well and warm through the entire night. I haven't woken up shivering since the blanket, and the only problem left is how to deal with it when Chris is actually sleeping at the same time. He runs hot and doesn't sleep well with the heat of the blanket touching his back where it overlaps his side of the bed a bit. At least for now, this problem only occurs 1-2 days per week so is easily dealt with.

Having a warm bed to go to, and a blanket to keep me warm all night, is like being wrapped in love. My husband loves me enough to keep me warm when I'm asleep, despite the disadvantage for him.

rising from the ashes

At about this time last year, the relationship between my mother and her husband finally became completely untenable and she filed for divorce. The divorce was finalized last summer, leaving my mom happily on her own, and with some unnecessary jewelry that still had valuable stones. So when she was here for Christmas, I took her over to Foxfire Jewelers where she worked with one of the artisans to use the stones from the rings to make a single new ring. From her engagement ring, wedding ring, and his wedding ring she had a 0.7ct cushion-cut diamond, four small marquis diamonds, ten tiny brilliant diamonds, and three slightly larger brilliant diamonds. The artisan was able to use all but one of the small brilliants in the design, based on a solitaire that was available for sale in the store that day.

The artisan began with a sketch the day we were there, along with a detailed description of the stones and their placement as well as sizing and metal type information. A few weeks later, they created a hand-carved wax model and used photoshop to put the diamonds into it, for a better look at the positioning and such prior to making a final model. This view shows the center stone, the four marquis diamonds, and two of the tiny diamonds - the other eight tiny and two small brilliants are on the sides of the ring, with the smalls set on the side of the solitaire and the tiny ones set into the sides of the ring.

Last week Mom got the email that the ring was complete, and so I went over to pick it up. I will have it through early next week, and I have an appointment to have it appraised Friday before packing it to ship (well-insured!) to Mom on Monday. As it turns out, her arthritis has enlarged her knuckles enough that we now wear the same ring size, so I've been wearing the ring every day (with her blessing) and it is a lovely piece of jewelry that is comfortable to wear and very, very pretty. The stones in it are very sparkly and it's hard to get a photo of it on my hand, so the official one from Foxfire will have to do. It's a great ring and I hope it brings my mom many years of happiness...and maybe one day (far in the future) return to me...

surprise snow and shunning

This morning I walked down the hall to the living room, only to look outside and see about 2" of snow on the ground. This startled me enough that I actually jumped a little, I was certainly not expecting to see snow again this winter! I took this picture with my iPhone after letting the dogs out to potty, as there is also a full moon out right now and it looked really gorgeous with the snow. Amazingly, shortly after I took this photo the snowplows came through, which is not a normal occurrence but was welcome nonetheless. The snow apparently started late last night, as Chris had left me a note telling me he had no problem with me taking the car to work. The weather people are calling for more snow tonight, so we'll have to figure out what to do about that - perhaps I can go pick up Chris' work computer so he can work from home tonight.

In other weirdness, last night nearly all of 228th street was closed off for police activity, from 9th down near the Extended Stay all the way up to Meridian. We had to go out and around Country Village to get home. Nothing is showing up on the internet as to why that much of the road was shut down in clear weather, so I am rather curious.

I found a story in the Seattle Times this morning describing how Abbotsford BC is using shunning to combat gang violence. This is a town just over the border into Canada, where we often travel for flyball tournaments and where many of our Canadian flyball friends live, so that makes it more interesting to me personally. However, the real value is in the fact that a whole town is using social pressure to convince the gangs to leave. I firmly believe that shunning and public shame are woefully underutilized tools in this day and age, and that much bad behavior runs rampant because nobody is willing to call the wrongdoers out. It used to be shameful to behave poorly, now it is practically a badge of honor amongst certain social groups and that is such a toxic thing for society, it's unreal. While lifting the stigmas against needing legitimate social help or having a mental illness are excellent things for society, unfortunately too many people have taken this too far and now feel no shame about gaming the system for as much "free stuff" as they can get. In this case, I hope that the public social pressure does indeed convince these hoodlums to leave town, which would be a great success and example for many other such towns across north America.