My dad at the post office. They don't have pens stolen since they started putting the flowers on the pens. They look funny, though. :)

Driving to thanksgiving. Finally, no traffic. :)

November 21, 2006 :: Preparing for Thanksgiving

That's just a photoshoped image of Holly...I was showing her how to use photoshop to enhance and art-ify photos.

Thanksgiving is almost here...Turkey!

November 18, 2006 :: A stop in Fairfax, Va for some Salvadorian Food

Finally, good Salvadorian food.

Too bad we weren't really hungry. Ever heard of a Papusa? We were the only gringo's there.

November 18, 2006 :: Torts Outline at Panera

I've completed half of my first version of my Torts Neglegence outline, and transferred half my notes into it. Holly is cheerfully enjoying the morning smell of microwaved cinnamon scones and lunchtime loaves of bread baking and french onion soups being ladled and wafting through the coffee laden air.

This morning was interesting, as we got my Jeep's Virginia state inspection, and met some interesting people. Getting up at 6am was the easy part. Bella's nibbling on my ears as an early alarm is honestly charming. Getting to Virginia this early with Holly was a little more demanding, but she's usually cheerful, too. We went accross DC, through tenleytown, and over the Chain Bridge into Arlington. South on Glebe past Marymount University got us to a familiar Exxon which boasted inspections and emissions testing at precisely 8am. We waited until the owner arrived at 8:30, and talked with a really nice, large framed, thirty's aged asian man named Dung, who wanted to practice his english.

Dung is a really nice guy who sounded more slavic than asian, so I asked and he said that he was speaking Mongolian with his colleague at the garage. Their "R's" were very russian sounding, with a distinct roll of the tongue, completely different than the french or pretentious english rolling of "R's." He was a fast worker who, when his boss, the short, friendly, but brusque looking asian owner, asked him to do something, there was a spring in Dung's steps. I was struck by an apparent presence of strong work ethic by his manner. I didn't get the owner's name, but walked with purpose, and a scowl. But when he spoke, he smiled and called everyone, "brother."



We left with renewed energy in the innate friendliness of people. Many District of Columbians are wrought with the "get out of my way" mentality, even when not in a hurry. Times like these refresh my memory that there are many, many nice people who enjoy being around nice people. Plus, if you need a friendly garage in northern Virginia, I cannot vouch for their ability, but I give this service station an A+ for friendliness.

November 18, 2006 :: What a week

It was a nice evening with Holly tonight. We had an italian meal at Armand's...ok, it it was ok. Then we shopped for some consumer electronics at Best Buy, and had coffee at StarBucks. It's good to see the distinction between "getting" coffee and "having" coffee. I love the latter.

A brief stop for Drano, and we went home. We were tired, too.

Finally, we settled to a nice episode of BSG.

Does it get any better for tired, chilly friday? We'll see tomorrow :)

early morning reading.

I, of course, moved to the breezeway to read most of the time before class, as any part of the inside of the building is closer to 82°F than anything comfortable by humans. The administration said that the heat has something to do with the temperature outside being in the 60's which causes the heating system to spew hot air in the 90's unchecked. It creates a hot, dry air environment. Those of our class lucky enough (no sarcasm) to have Professor Thomas for contract law were also lucky enough (sarcasm) to take a mid-term in that swealtering heat this past tuesday.



This themometer shows the mid-eighty's temp.

Law school is fun :)

November 15, 2006 :: Criminal Law TA Session

We are reviewing defenses like Neccessity, Entrapment, Mistake of law, Mistake of fact, and Duress.

We are also talking about attempted crimes and strict liability, etc.

Sigh.

November 15, 2006 :: Dog Jumping Deaths in Scotland

After seeing my own dog jump off a bridge this past Saturday, I have been interested in why a dog might perform such an act.

In Bella's case, I strongly believe that she saw the wall of the bridge as being similar to the brick retaining walls at home, and assumed solid ground is always on the other side of similar short walls.

However, one Wikipedia article suggests some other possibilities. The Overtoun bridge dog deaths in Scotland suggest that some bodies of water carry scents that make the air just off the bridge smell like something the dog really wants. This is interesting. I also found another blog about the same bridge, and I similarly found another article on dog suicide which talks about the Overtoun bridge as a reading lesson to teach English. There are more articles, but I'll leave that to the reader to research.

This might remain a mystery, but it will be some time before I get the image out of my head of my dog hanging from a bridge by her harness. Crazy dog.

November 14, 2006 :: Contracts Mid-Term

Brussel Sprouts on the stalk... for no particular reason

It's 6am and I take a Contract Law mid-term exam in three hours. I've read notes and worked multiple choice questions from 3am until 4:30am, and just woke up to go to school and read and work more before the test.

Offers, acceptances, considerations...

I don't remember my last assent to anything. Oh yeah, the assent to have less life for the return of school assignments, and the like. And less tv.

And what's the deal about having a "mid" term exam two weeks before the end of classes for the term? I suppose that it's possible that I question a lot.

I now assent to a shower.

November 11 , 2006 :: A walk in the park, and Bella's Near Demise

Bella's Bridge Holly standing on the bridge for scale

November 11, 2006, was a beautiful day. At 7:30 a.m., I picked up Holly from her work trip, where she'd been in California for a week. Since we decided to spend the day outside D.C., I brought Bella along for a day of fun. After all, it was a warm, seventy degree, November Saturday. Little did we know that it might be Bella's last day on Earth.

We went west and saw the Manassas National Battlefield Park, which looked like a nice place to take a long walk and recharge. So, we stopped, paid $6 admission to the park, and started walking. One of the landmarks of this park is the stone bridge. This bridge would be the landmark of our day, too.

The Stone Bridge at Masassas National Battlefield Park Note the low walls from the walk

Made of stone, it's a high bridge, but it's walls on the bridge are somewhat low while walking on top of the bridge. In fact, they resemble a lower version of the stone retaining walls on our daily walk around Chevy Chase, DC. Over the past couple weeks, Bella has taken to jumping up onto these retaining walls and trying to chase squirrels, one of her obsessions. While I've been trying very hard to dissuade this behavior, my corrections have not been working. I would regret that.

While on the bridge, and before I could react, Bella hopped up onto the side of the bridge and over the side. I gasped. I jumped to the side to see if she was still on the leash. At some point I loudly blurted an expletive. An extreme sense of urgency overwhelmed me, and it was hard to tell if I was holding her weight. I felt much adrenaline flowing at this point.

Dangling from her harness over a bridge The small child should show scale

She was dangling by her harness and leash, some 15-20 feet over the rocks and stream. We'd never been there before and didn't know how deep the stream was. She looked... concerned... no, almost panicked as she swung over the bridge by the leather leash like a clocks pendulum. I've seen her wiggle out of this harness in the past, and it looked like that was going to happen any instant. I considered letting her fall into the water below, but not knowing how deep it was, I quickly thought in a flash that the best thing was to try to get her back up.

I started pulling the leash, and since I always kept it double twisted around my wrist, there was no chance of my loosing the leash. I saw the harness high on her shoulders as she hung there. As I got her high enough to grab her harness's handle, she started using her feet against the rock to attempt scrambling up the vertical rock wall. I held the harness high into her armpits to keep her from falling out of the harness. It was all working. By now, Holly had enough vantage to help pull Bella's butt as Bella got up and over the top of the wall. I pulled Bella off the wall and put her down on her feet on solid ground. She stood there, wide eyed and panting. My adrenaline dump was so intense that my hands and legs were shaking uncontrollably. Bella continued to breathe fast and deliberately like she almost died. She had, in fact, almost died. It was all extremely harrowing.

We continued our walk

We walked from 10am until around noon, when we got back to the car. We spent the rest of the day out. Later in the evening, we went scrambling around the large rocks and hills at the Potomac Rover around the Chain Bridge. She goes up rocks really well.

I wonder why she decided to "end it all" today. Luckily she changed her mind. Luckily I read a book about hiking with dogs years ago when I thought that I would take Athaena. Luckily I read the chapter about how helpful harnesses can be when hiking with dogs, as they allow a pet owner to help a pet out of bad situations. Had the leash been attached to the collar she was wearing, she would have fallen to her doom, or broken her neck. It was Shadow's old harness she was wearing, so thank you Shadow, too!

Whew! She's sleeping now behind my chair as I write. She's dreaming quite a bit, barking, panting, and running in her sleep. I have to sigh and think, "crazy dog."

From Bella's Bridge Incident Album

November 10, 2006 :: After election day thoughts

US Constitution Photo by Mark Solomon, Nov 4, 2006

These are some of my thoughts. It's about 4am and Bella woke me up to bark at something, so I sat down and wrote this.

After election day, is there hope for the future?

Since the next congress is chaired by all democrats, (committees, the floor, etc) I looked at the Democratic National Convention's agenda at http://www.democrats.org//agenda.html

I wonder how much of this will actually be pushed and signed in the next two years?

Their six-point plan's top three points are:

1. Real honest/open govt. Something I know we've been lacking

2. Real security. Interestingly, at least four sub-articles referenced on this page are about Donald Rumsfeld needing to be replaced (Overcome By Events...as we all know), and at least another five articles are about Iraq. I'd like more definiteness here. Are we talking about the security of building a new fence along our southern border that gets mandated but not funded? What security are they talking about specifically?

3. Energy Independence. Simply put, this is the root of almost all of the world's evils right now, and with the current presidential administration's uber-close ties to big oil, it's no surprise that oil prices doubled in the six years of their presidency terms. When I was first learning finance, I was told to look for approximately 20% increases per year of investment, as that was a five year doubling plan. This was in the late 1980's regarding mutual funds. Today, when must mutual funds are earning half that, Bush has been fortunate to create those great, 6 year doubling rate of earnings again for his real constituency in days when the rest of America's investors are making half that. Kudos to a brilliant plan for making money to those in the oil industry.

Not much has been done to effectively become anything but more dependent on oil. In our time, when twenty years of technology can go from four megabytes of RAM costing $400 in the late 1980's to putting 60 gigabytes of songs in a 12 year old's back-pocket for under $250, the entire automobile industry "boasts" about today's sedans fuel efficiency when it gets a whopping 25+ miles per gallon. This is essentially the same as the comparable models of cars from the late 1980's when honda's were getting upper 20's and lower 30's of MPG. Today, same models, same MPG. Why? Toyota's advances in fuel efficiency caused by electronically controlling intake and exhaust valves to most use all combustible fuel while minimizing pollution would have allowed for increased fuel efficiency, but those same smaller engines gave Toyota the ability to make their trucks larger; result: no net decrease in fuel usage, but a more impressive "ride," to be sure.

Consumers have been mislead with the addition of ethanol in gasoline, as its production is cheaper with the goal of lowering petroleum use. Drug dealers call this "cutting" their product, as a less expensive additive can "stretch" their product. So, if gasoline at the pumps is being cut because oil prices went from $30 a barrel to $60-70 per barrel, the price should go down, right? Well, it's stayed the same with the addition of 10% of ethanol. Why? Market burdens/fluctuations, oil reserves, cost to industry to get ethanol, etc. Someone is making a lot of money. Heating oil costs and natural gas prices have tripled over the last six years, too, and their use of "bio-diesel" and the like have had the exact same effect on heating oil prices: stabilized at the tripled rate.

According to a Feb 2, 2006, article at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06033/648770.stm, venture capitalists "invested" $4.4 billion in alternative fuels between 1999 and 2004. The Bush administration was investing over $26 billion in wars to secure the oil pipelines in Afghanistan while searching for Osama Bin Laden, and securing not only democracy and freedom in Iraq, but also their oilfields. Hmmm. There seems to be a vast imbalance of both priorities and funding in the world of the energy industry in modern times. Maybe the democrats will do better, since this is, after all, number three on their to-do list of priorities.

My conclusion to all these thoughts, for now, anyway, are that now that Congress is no longer a "rubber stamp" for the Executive, for the next two years there may be more "uniting" being done by the Executive now that it HAS to. Maybe there will be more discourse between branches and less mandating to the people. Much in the way a sculptor sees a vision and creates that vision, perhaps Congress will see a future where technology and funding will be used to make a sustainable environment where the environment can co-exist peacefully with cultures, who, by the way, get along better between themselves, too.

We can hope...

It can't hurt to cross our fingers but watch this Congress with the same skepticism that those in power often loose focus, and, irrespective of political ideologies, power corrupts. Fast government = bad government. More discussion/public civil argument = good politics. A longer "news cycle" that focuses on actual, important issues is good; week long "media circuses" about the latest food health scare, who can marry whom, and the latest holiday game console only distract people from war, people still dying in Darfur, daily violence in the middle east, and executives indefinitely holding suspects without any judicial process... all bad things... but all old news.

But, still, let's hope.

Nov 2, 2006 :: Halloween Festivities

From 20061029_nn_s...

It was a fun, friend and family filled weekend this past weekend in the old 757.