Half Changed World

I appreciated the kind responses to Thursday's post.  Here's the plan:

• I'm paid up for TypePad through nearly the end of the year.  So there's no need to do anything immediately.
• I'm going to give myself permission to blog when I feel like it and not to blog when I don't, and not to feel guilty about it.  We'll see if it works.
• Before my TypePad account expires, my plan is to move the blog over to WordPress.  While the import function ino WordPress.com is quite impressive, there's not a way to preserve the current URL structure.  (In other words, all of the hyperlinks would be broken, even if I had www.halfchangedworld.com pointed toward the new blog.)  However, it appears that I can do this if I run WordPress off my own site.  (Or to be fair, it appears that it can theoretically be done, and I have confident that T will be able to do it in practice.  On my own, probably not.) Since T is already paying for web hosting that can accomodate multiple domains, we should be able to do this at no or minimal extra cost.
• Once I'm on WordPress, I'll have the option of adding extra authors (Typepad only allows this at its most expensive tier).  Extra authors might help preserve this commenting/reading community even when I'm posting less.

I think it's a sign of a blog that is seriously ill, if not on life support, when most of your posts are apologies for not blogging more often.  I'm thinking about pulling the plug.

• Next month, I'll have been blogging for five years.  According to Typepad, this is my 1,013th post.  It's not that I have nothing left to say, but I'm not spilling over with ideas the way I used to.
• When I started this blog, I was at a job where I was frustrated with the policies, was not allowed to speak my mind, and had a fair amount of time to kill.  That's not the case these days.  I've done three presentations already this month, and have four more scheduled.  I'm loving it, but I'm exhausted by the time I get home.
• My kids are getting older, and are staying up later, especially in the summer.  The window of time between when they go to bed and when I collapse myself is shrinking.  And I'm somewhat less willing to post about them as they get older.
• It's not just me.  Laura at 11d had a post recently about how the blogosphere has changed, and I think she's on the mark.  I used to love the big kerfluffles (remember the Perfect Madness posts?) where we'd all read and post and link and then post some more to respond to the points that someone else had made.  It had the wonderful heady feeling of being in college and staying up until two in the morning because you were discussing the meaning of life and solving all the problems of the world.  I haven't had that feeling in a while.

So why keep it?  Because I'll miss you, my readers and commenters. The level of civility and thoughtfulness that has always characterized the discussions here is really quite remarkable, and not that common.  And (to be honest) because I still mumble about wanting to write a book someday, and having a built in "platform" might help me sell it.  On the other hand, I might be more likely to stop mumbling and start writing without the blog.

Even if I stopped posting, I do think I'd like to keep my archives alive somewhere.  Not sure I'm willing to pay Typepad for that.  Is there a simple way to migrate from Typepad onto one of the free services?

On Monday, T and I drove back from Rhode Island to Virginia.  Rather than spending the whole day in the car, we took a small detour and stopped for a few hours at Storm King Art Center.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed walking around the site looking at the sculptures.  (We had the place almost to ourselves, with most guests staying on the trams that will take you around.) 

The featured installation this year is Maya Lin's Wavefield, where she has shaped the earth to make waves of grass.  Because of the heavy rains of the past month, we weren't allowed to walk over and through them, but only observe them from the outside.  I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by the effect, surrounded as we were by the swooping curve of the mountains around us.  It did make me think about the degree to which the other shapes of the park are man-made, which was interesting.

As it happens, the Corcoran's Maya Lin exhibit is closing this week, so I went after work on Thursday.  This also features her visions of landcape, with three large pieces that each mimic topographical lines in different ways.  My favorite of them was the 2×4 landscape, a gigantic hill made up of 2×4 boards cut to different heights.  It creates a pixellated effect that is odd to see in real life.  Before they disassemble it, they're letting small groups walk on it — I wish I had known about it in time to register.

Between online banking and email, I rarely send old fashioned mail any more.  But today I found myself with a stack of envelopes (and one package) to send.  They included:

• our property tax payment (which I might be able to make online, but for a twice a year payment, I haven't bothered to spend the time required to figure it out)
• several checks for deposit (the flip side of going to an entirely online bank is that I need to mail in deposits, not including my paycheck, which is direct deposited; however, the bank gives us prepaid envelopes)
• a RSVP card for a wedding
• two condolence cards (both to former colleagues who lost a parent recently)
• one Netflix envelope
• two DVDs that Amazon sent to me by mistake along with some books that I did order (I asked them what they wanted me to do, and they sent me a prepaid label and asked me to mail them back).

What do you still mail?

Hey, I'm back from vacation, so semi-regular posting may resume soon.  (I still have a business trip coming up, and a generally hectic schedule at work, so I'm not promising regular.  I know I still owe you all another health care reform post.)

We had a nice trip, which included visits to both sets of grandparents, my high school reunion, and visits to some friends.  The weather was absolutely awful for a while in the middle which led us to a sudden trip to Toys R Us for more board games, but then was nice on either end.  Did you know Monopoly now comes with an extra die that speeds things up?  It still is a long game, but doesn't take forever the way it used to.

Vacation for me means reading.  I read Blood Lure, by Nevada Barr, the Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, by Maggie O'Farrell, and Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.  Blood Lure was mindless fun.  Esme Lennox was a choice of my sister-in-law's book club, which she passed on to me. It's the intertwining stories of a girl growing up in colonial India and Scotland and her great-niece today.  I liked it, although it left me somewhat unsatisfied, with the contemporary story being much weaker than the historical one.  Netherland was a disappointment, given the great reviews it's received.  It reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I found similarly frustrating — lovely writing, but I didn't give a darn about any of the characters.

I feel silly and dramatic even saying this, but since I got some worried notes on Facebook, I figured I should check in.  (And for those of you not in the US — there was a major accident on the DC metro this evening — the local news is reporting 9 dead.)   I'm not a red line rider, so it didn't even mess up my commute. 

I'm crazy busy at work getting ready for my vacation, and then I'll be on vacation, so don't worry about me if I don't post for a week or so.

I work on other programs affecting low-income families, not health care.  But if Congress passes a true health care reform year, and no improvements in the programs that I work on, I'll consider it a success.  And if we get everything on my organization's policy agenda for 2009 but health care reform crashes and burns, I'll be disappointed.

Ezra Klein is blogging for the Washington Post now, and he's got two really good pieces today, one from this morning on why the CBO cost estimates are putting health care reform in danger and one from tonight on the Finance committee's revised plan. Basically, the budget office has told Congress, no, you're not going to save enough money with comparative effectiveness research and improved health care IT to pay for the expansions in coverage you want to see.  If you want real health care reform, the choices are to come up with the money from some other source (e.g taxes of one sort or another) or to get serious about cost-controls (e.g. take a chunk out of insurers' hides, and possibly out of doctors' as well.)  The no-hard-choices fairy isn't going to save you.

It's looking like Congress isn't really going to tackle these hard choices until after the Fourth of July recess.  Which means that the next few weeks are a great time to weigh in with your Representative and Senators about the need for real health care reform — including a public plan — and the need to pay for it with comprehensive tax reform.  If you really want single payer, go ahead and tell them that, but then tell them about what you think is second best, because single payer isn't happening, not this time around, and it won't be more likely in 10 years if this round collapses.

Are you paying attention to the health care debate, or have all the different bills made your eyes cross?  Are you waiting until things sort out a bit to pay attention?  What burning questions would you like answered?  As I said, this isn't my area of expertise, but if I don't know the answer, I probably know where to find it.  If you want to get into the wonky details yourself, my favorite health policy sites are Families USA, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

You've probably heard of the "Restaurant Week" promos that happen once a year in a lot of cities — a bunch of restaurants all agree to offer a limited fixed price menu at the same bargain price for one week a year.  It's a nice way to get to try restaurants that are usually out of your price range, and gets the restaurants more customers during a generally slow time of year and lots of publicity and goodwill.

Well, this year Cookie magazine helped organize "Kids Restaurant Week" in three cities, including DC.  Adults pay $29, kids pay their age, special early seatings.  We generally have given up on going out with the boys to any restaurant fancier than Applebees, because it's just not worth the money to buy food that they won't eat, and it takes too much of our energy to keep them sitting nicely.  (Although we've discovered that a pair of bubble teas will buy us a good 45 minutes sitting at the local dim sum joint.)  But we decided to give Wasabi a try, since N likes the takeout sushi from Trader Joe's, and I hoped the food on a conveyor belt would distract D even if there was nothing he was willing to eat.  And it's right near my office.

We got there a little late, due to some parking issues.  (We discovered that our minivan no longer fits in the parking structures downtown since we installed a bike rack.  And most metered spots are off limits between 4 and 6.30.)  But they were very welcoming when we got there.

It turned out to be far more of a success than I had anticipated.  They had a kids meal planned out, with chicken karage, avocado rolls, sweet potato tempura and strawberries with ginger.  Somewhat to my surprise, D adored the chicken.  And adults could just eat of the conveyor belt or the menu.  The boys were thrilled by how the staff turned the standard wooden disposible chopsticks into kids chopsticks with the clever use of a rubberband and the rolled up paper wrapper.

At the end of the meal, the manager (or owner?) stopped by and was very welcoming.  He asked where we lived, and when we said Virginia, he told us they were opening a new branch in Tyson's in the fall.  He said that would be a more kid-friendly set-up, with more room, and the chefs working on display in the middle. 

I wouldn't have imagined taking the boys to Wasabi without the incentive of kids restaurant week, but at the end, they asked if they could go back.  And we probably will.

The New York Times had an article last year on how smartphones are becoming seen as a necessity.  Overall, it was sort of an eyeroll inducing article, and most of the commenters on the site did seem to be rolling their eyes.  But I do think it made a good point about how as a group (whether a work team or a group of friends) reaches a saturation point with the technology, it becomes harder to be the outlier.  People start to assume that you don't have comments on an email if you haven't responded in a few hours.  People get sloppy about making detailed advanced plans because they assume they'll be able to reach you by phone.

At work, they asked us sometime last fall if we wanted blackberries, and I said no thanks.  I check email from home anyway, and didn't feel like I wanted to be on constant call.  But most of my team got them, and within a few months, I went back to my boss and asked if it was too late to change my mind.  As it turns out, she had also said no previously, and was having second thoughts as well.  So we both got them.

I've had it for a couple of months now, and I'm pretty spoiled by it.  I still hardly use it as a cell phone — but the always-on connection to the internet and email is darned addictive.  Before I had it, I couldn't imagine paying for a data plan out of pocket — I was quite content with the combination of my iPod touch and a cheapo pay-by-the-minute cellphone — but now if I went to a job that didn't pay for the service, I might come up with the money to pay for it myself.  It's a perfect demonstration of the hedonic treadmill.

This week, there's been some buzz about IRS guidelines saying that personal use of a company cell phone is a taxable fringe benefit, just like use of a company car.  This is apparently something that's been the official policy for years, but essentially no one has known about it (and it's pretty small change compared to use of a car).  My understanding is that the new IRS guidelines were designed to clarify the rules and create a "safe harbor" so you didn't have to track all your use and allocate it across business vs personal, but what they actually did is draw attention to the policy.  I think that in theory, it does make sense to treat these phones as a fringe benefit, but in practice, it's way too much hassle for the amount of money that would be collected.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had a great blog post about the iconic image of Tiananmen Square— the unarmed man facing down a line of tanks.  It described four photographers' versions of the same photo, the differences between their angles, and what they went through to get their film out of China, in those days before digital photography.  I remember vividly watching the television coverage of the uprising — my sister was graduating that week, and so I remember getting dressed in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, watching the coverage unfold.

I'm not a basher of the "MSM," but it really does seem like the coverage of the protests in Iran is fundamentally not at the same level.  I think that I have to agree with Megan McArdle (gasp) — this is what happens when you close all your foreign bureaus.  There's still information coming out via tweets and other sources, but I'm having trouble piecing it together into a story, since I have a full-time job and can't spend my day online.  But it does seem like "At least one killed in election protests in Iran"  (which is the Washington Post's current headline) doesn't quite capture the moment of what's going on.