Busy Weekend but Easy Sunday. 15 Months of Cleanup.

Some weekends are busy, others are slow. This weekend brought some of each. Sunday was the slow day when I finally had time to relax. Among other things I caught up (mostly) on my blog backlog. The things I posted Sunday tell the story:

• Playing my D&D game on Friday night
• Having our joint 102nd birthday party on Saturday
• My retrospective on the year 2023— which had been in the queue for 3 weeks!

So, what did I do Sunday? For starters I slept in... though not as much as I expected after being up past midnight both Friday and Saturday. I did allow myself to take a nap late afternoon to catch up.

Hawk and I had lunch on Sunday with two of our friends who couldn't make it to our party Saturday. Well, I guess they could make it but they chose not to. They are hyper-vigilant about Covid and won't take a chance on indoors things like parties, even among groups of known friends who are all vaxxed. Sadly part of the new normal is some people are still in crisis mode with no exit criteria defined. Anyway, we met at a restaurant that has outdoor dining. The weather isn't the greatest for eating outdoors this time of year, but at least it wasn't raining at lunchtime.

A Home Office Move Out and Back

In the evening I decided to tame the mess that had taken over my desk. Last week I moved my work area downstairs to Hawk's crafting table. I did it because she needed to work at home all week, and we conflict too much over talking needs when we work in the office together for more than a few hours. I did a similar move in Sept. 2022 during a heat wave. My office setup is smaller than hers (she's got more external monitors) so I made the move. And now, like in 2022, I moved back after a week.

The thing was, while my computer and extra monitor were off my desk last week, the piles of stuff that have been growing around them got worse. And with cleanup for the party on Saturday, stuff wound up all over the desk. I knew if I didn't clean it up Sunday evening it would be an agonizing mess to deal with while trying to start work Monday morning.

I could have just cleared up the space in the middle of my desk. Indeed, that's what I did first, so I could set up my laptop and reconnect it to the external monitor. But I figured as long as I was in cleaning-things-up mode I might as well sort through the pile of papers in what I call the "landing zone" on the corner of my desk. It's basically an unlabelled inbox.

Desktop Archaeology

As I worked my way down through the pile of papers, sorting them into three piles— to keep, to trash, to shred— I felt like an archaeologist working a dig site. I was scraping my way down through older and older history.

In the top layer were a few things I tossed atop the pile in the last month or two: a primary election re-registration card and a few financial/medical statements. Then there was a layer of stuff from 3-4 months ago. Then June 2023. Then March 2023. February 2023. When I got to paperwork from January 2023 I mused how I'd just reached stuff that had been buried for a literal year. And there was still more below!

My desktop dig reached all the way back into 2022. I found an insurance card... issued for 2023. We have a different insurer in 2024. Oops, I guess I didn't need that. I had a receipt from a hotel stay in October 2022. That was the oldest thing on my desk. 15 months old! Why did I even have that?

All the stuff I wanted to actually keep I sorted off into appropriate folders. That meant, of course, creating some new folders for things. And by "creating" I mean repurposing old manila folders and hanging folders with new labels and putting them in my file drawers.

Oh, but putting new stuff in the file drawers in the office means having to take old stuff out. There's only so much space in the office. What's old, in this case? For one, I pulled out a folder of maintenance records for a car we sold in 2022. That goes to the industrial shred bin. (It's too much for our home shredder.) Then there are taxes from a few years ago. Those we keep, but down in the Hobbit Hole.

I thought about leaving the 2017-2021 tax folders in a neat pile on my desk to take downstairs later but then decided that if I didn't move them immediately they'd simply wind up on the bottom of the next archaeological dig. So I tucked them in one of our storage bins down in the Hobbit Hole where there's paperwork dating back to the 1990s. And now my desk is clean! Well, at least that one corner of it is clean. 🤣

So, About Sen. Bob Menendez...

It's time for me to comment on US Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. Actually it's well past time. I've been meaning to do it for months but haven't gotten around to it. The situation with Sen. Menendez is that he's facing federal charges for conspiring to act as an agent for foreign governments, specifically Egypt and Qatar. Authorities allege that he and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for official acts taken to benefit the countries.

Part of the reason I say it's past time for me to write about this is that in the past 12 months I've written numerous times about US Representative George Santos (R-NY). Recall he's the clown who lied up and down about his qualifications for political office, spent months telling even wilder lies when confronted about the first set of lies, also faced federal charges for what he did, and after surviving a few failed expulsion votes earlier in the year was finally expelled from Congress in December.

In the time that I posted numerous times about Santos and called for his resignation and/or expulsion, I've posted nothing about Menendez. Yet aren't Menendez's alleged crimes way more serious than Santos's? Where's my outrage on Menendez? Why haven't I also called for Menendez to step down?

For one, as I've noted before, this isn't a politics blog. Although politics is a thing I pay attention to daily, I write about it when the mood strikes me and I have time. So the fact I've written about one thing and not the other isn't an indication one is more important than the other.

Two, the availability of facts is not comparable. Allegations against George Santos began with investigative journalism. Ample facts about him were established in the public domain months before criminal charges were filed and almost a year before the successful expulsion vote against him. During that time any reasonable person could look at the publicly available evidence and determine that the guy was totally full of shit. Moreover, Santos acknowledged many of these facts publicly— while at the same time adding more obvious lies to the public record.

With Menendez there are lurid allegations from authorities, but the facts behind those allegations are not public, they are secret. The facts won't become public until at least the start of a criminal trial a few months from now. Menendez has denied all the allegations. It's also worth pointing out that when authorities made similar charges against Menendez years ago, he was acquitted.

I don't minimize the severity of what Menendez is alleged to have done. If he did it, he should resign. If or when facts emerge to support the charges, he should be expelled if he hasn't already resigned. But right now we don't have those facts.

BTW, if this sounds like "Innocent until proven guilty," it is. Sort of. I am not holding as the standard that a politician must be proven guilty in a court of law before calling for their removal. In Santos's situation there were ample facts in the public record for a reasonable person to make determination, based on facts, that he was unsuitable for continuing in public office. With Menendez whatever facts exist are largely not in the public record so we'll probably have to wait for the criminal trial to run its course before we know.

Timeless S1E1: Hindenburg

A week ago I watched the pilot episode of Timeless, a 2016-2018 TV series about time travel. It's a cat-and-mouse type story where two groups have time machines. One is trying to change things the in the past, the other is chasing after them trying to prevent world-altering changes. I already wrote a few thoughts about the pilot in general. Now I'd like to share three thoughts about specifics in the in S1E1, "Hindenburg". Spoilers marked.

1. The "What If?" Game

Early on in the episode we learn the thieves have travel back in time to the day the Hindenburg explosion in 1937. The characters challenge each other— and, by extension, us— to think how history could be different if there was no Hindenburg disaster.

"It could have made Germany stronger going into WWII," Hawk suggested.

"Ennnnh," I objected. "The Hindenburg was a bad design with its hydrogen flotation. A successful demo success would have risked German aeronautics pouring more time and money into a fatally flawed design."

"But a success there could have intimidated the US into staying out of WWII..."

Except the US did stay out of WWII for two years. And when the Japanese thought they could intimidate us by bombing Pearl Harbor and destroying half our Pacific fleet, they miscalculated. Their attack, which did hobble our Pacific fleet, galvanized the country into action. It spurred us to join WWII and, more importantly, awoke us from a long stupor of underdeveloped manufacturing capability.

Ultimately the time-thieves' plan was ( Spoiler (click to open) )

2. An Oddly Timed Plot Reveal

At the climax of the episode the writers make a plot reveal that seems premature. ( Spoiler (click to open) )

3. "Killing [them] in the Cradle"

As the three protagonists are discussing what happened before they return to present day, Lucy declares to the other two, ( Spoiler (click to open) )