Category: Before

I’m cataloging the books that I picked up yesterday, working on a university press book about race and the justice system. It’s marked with a yellow “Used” sticker from a college bookstore. I flip through the pages and notice some highlighting — Damn, I wouldn’t have picked it up if I’d noticed that. A closer inspection finds that the highlighting is isolated to the first nine pages — the introduction. The corner of the ninth page is bent over as a page marker. The 290 pages that follow appear to be unread — a dropped class. I finish cataloging the book. Now bored of data entry, I refresh Bloglines and click through to a couple of sites. Then I write this blog entry; and just as I’m finishing the sentence that’s three sentences back — “…a dropped class” — one of the bulbs in my desk-side lamp burns out. It flashes blue-white and then the room is dark.

There’s less than a day left to cast a bid on this miniature replica of George W. Bush’s hat. The eBay auction closes Monday at 10:00 am Pacific Time. The high bid, as of Sunday afternoon, is $22.81. The auction proceeds are being donated to MoveOn.org.

We went to The Woodland Park Zoo on Friday. My earliest traceable memory is of a zoo, and since then I’ve been to the San Diego Wild Animal Park a couple of times. The last time was years and years ago. I felt sort of zoo illiterate. But the monkeys eased me into things.

The Beans for Breakfast printable calendar for September is ready to be downloaded, printed out, and to have calendary things done with it.

I know that some of you will be concerned that the squares are slightly smaller this month. Others will ask, “What happened to the little circle at the top of the page? How am I supposed to center my thumbtack?” I sympathize with these issues, but I hope that you’ll focus on the strengths of this month’s calendar. For instance, the calendar comes packaged for two different paper formats with different, but equally satisfying, length/width ratios. (And besides, you can locate the middle of the page based on the thumbtack hole from the last calendar. Place September over August, line up the edges, and hold it up to a light. The August thumbtack hole will show through the page. Mark the spot on the September calendar with a pencil, and recycle August.)

The files are trim 57 kb PDFs:
Letter-size
A4 Format

Samantha’s apolitical boss was convinced to make a contribution to the Republican party in exchange for an award and a “replica of George W. Bush’s cowboy hat” with one of his famous quotes printed on it. She got some grief from Samantha and the business’s bookkeeper, and eventually promised to give the hat to Samantha to auction off on Ebay in order to raise money for the Kerry campaign. (Unfortunately she doesn’t regret making the donation so much as she finds the auction idea sporting.)

So we have up for auction one slightly used trophy with a tiny reproduction of a George W. Bush’s cowboy hat mounted on it. The plaque has a genuinely hypocritical quote by President Bush printed on it. Hopefully we’ll be able to partly offset Samantha’s boss’s Republican donation with a progressive donation of our own. Proceeds from the sale will be used to make a donation to MoveOn.org — one of those controversial 527 organizations that’s putting out ads against Bush. (Contributions to the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party have to go directly to the campaign — they can’t be raised by a third party like me.)

The auction is here. It ends on Monday, September 6. The opening bid is $5. Bid early and bid often!

On Friday we went to the Dayments’ August Everything Party. Things took a surprising twist at around 9:00 when the party turned into a wedding.

Samantha and I wandered around her neighborhood on Saturday afternoon. Things were blooming, and Samantha had to touch everything that had flowers or fruit. She broke off berries, flowers, and vegetables and broke them open to see what was inside. When she couldn’t break something open, she sawed it apart with her dull Perfumania pocket knife.

We saw b.b. guns at two different yard sales, and I bought an optical mouse for a dollar. Then we went back inside and Samantha beat Bowser in Super Mario World.

On Sunday, we went to the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe with John and Tyd. The fair had at least one of nearly every kind of animal that I can think of and several animals that I never would have thought of.

Here’s another batch of graffiti and street art photos. We’ll begin with a little apathy

One of the things that you learn when being taught to type on a typewriter is to leave two spaces between sentences. Two-spaced gaps between sentences is a recognizable sign that a page is typewritten, but the rule wasn’t designed with that typographic end in mind. It was meant to discourage having to interrupt the first word of a sentence with a hyphen and a line break. By typing an extra space, the typist was more likely to get the warning bell indicating that the end of the line was approaching. The typist would know to hit return and start fresh on the next line rather than risk running out of space on the first word of a sentence.

I learned how to touch type on an IBM Selectric Typewriter in Mr. Fredricks’ keyboarding class during my freshman year of high school. Mine was the last typing class in the school that used typewriters. The next year’s classes used PCs running WordPerfect on DOS. With auto-wrap they presumably weren’t taught that rule. It was outdated.

I still type two spaces at the end of sentences. It’s habit. But your browser takes back the second one and keeps it for itself.

I’ve been sitting at my desk at home, working at the computer. The desk faces a big window that looks out onto the neighboring condos’ parking lot. The window is open, but the blinds are drawn. Along with the background noise of car traffic, I hear my neighbors coming and going. For example, a man with a nasal voice came into the parking lot an hour or so ago and he was telling someone, “They said they’d deposited a bonus check, but I’m already overdrawn. I checked my account, and it turned out that the bonus was eleven dollars.”

There have been two women walking back and forth outside for awhile, walking between the condo building and something in the street. I presume that there have been two women — the voices of the people that have been walking past have consistently been women’s and there have consistently been two voices — but I haven’t been paying close attention, and I can’t be sure that the passersby have been the same two people.

But the thing is, the two women walked by just now, heading out of the parking lot, and one of them said, “I want an alligator so bad!”

“Hey, Sam.”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking of maybe getting one of those pre-paid cell phones down at the Pay-Less. You know, . . . the little Motorola kind.”

“You’re tied to a tree, dog.”

“Maybe you’re right.”