Dear Readers
For those of you who like just clicking to support worthy causes, here is a nice way to support the Animal Rescue Site. RantWoman is posting this as a service; RantWoman herself may or may not get around to clicking, but you dear readers are invited to sign up.
--- On Tue, 6/30/09, The Animal Rescue Site <reminder@theanimalrescuesite.com> wrote:
> > Dear Supporter,> > Your friendly Tuesday reminder from The Animal Rescue Site:> > Make a difference today! > > Click on the purple button at The Animal Rescue Site and > give food to an animal living in a shelter or sanctuary > --at no cost to you.> http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/tpc/ERA_063009_ARS> > SEND A CHALLENGE E-CARD TODAY:> > Help your favorite eligible organization win a prize in The> > Animal Rescue Site $100,000 Shelter+ Challenge - together > with Petfinder.com by sending a Challenge e-card! Click> here:> http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/selectecard.faces?siteId=3&ThirdPartyClicks=ERA_063009_ecard> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++> > Every item you purchase funds at least 14 bowls of food > for animals in need.
> >
> ***
> > Thank you for your support!> > Sincerely,> > The Animal Rescue Site> http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/tpc/ERA_063009_ARS>
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Don' mess wid my EYEDROPS!
RantWoman is SUPPOSED to be grateful for the nice young woman who left a message on RantWoman's voice mail about finding RantWoman's pouch full of necessary medications. RantWoman is SUPPOSED to feel lucky the items were found and not just tossed into the trash. RantWoman IS relieved that she does not have to call around some more and try to track down the lost item. RantWoman will just cope with needing to wait until 1 pm tomorrow to rendezvous with the earnest young voice.
However, if RantWoman were only grateful this post would not be happening. Here's why RantWoman is annoyed both with the earnest young woman and with RantWoman's pharmacy:
IF YOU FIND LOST MEDICATION ON THE BUS, PLEASE JUST TURN IT INTO THE BUS DRIVER!
Metro has a very functional policy about medication lost on the bus. Metro understands that people who carry medication around on the bus tend to do it because they need their medications throughout the day. If someone loses medications on the bus he or she can call into Metro dispatch. Metro will look up which coaches were serving the route at about the time the medication was lost. The dispatcher will contact the drivers of those coaches and ask them to check for the item. If the item is found, a passenger can either make arrangements to intersect with the bus or pick it up at Metro Lost and Found the next business day.
How does RantWoman know this? Metro's lost and found info on its web page says so. So do bus schedules, RantWoman believes. More importantly, RantWoman, urk, has used this service before, and she is VERY grateful to the driver or to the person who turned the lost item into the driver. RantWoman really, really, really wishes the nice young woman had just turned RantWoman's lost item into the driver instead of carting it off on a ferry to another whole area code!
See RantWoman called Metro. The dispatcher made the call and RantWoman received a cellphone message that the item had not been found on the bus RantWoman guessed she was on when the item went missing. RantWoman sighed and groaned; RantWoman was a little uncomfortable and was very sheepishly debating whether to call and see if the item had in fact gone missing on an earlier bus, the last time RantWoman had specifically remembered having the item.
RantWoman was tired of lugging around a larger than usual volume of necessary papers and tools. RantWoman really was mortally embarrassed about the thought of calling Metro again. RantWoman considered the option of being able to intersect with the other coach in the bus tunnel, but RantWoman decided just to head home and unburden herself before trying any other measures. Luckily RantWoman got the voice mail and discovered she can do stop-gap measures until she can connect with the lost item.
RantWoman does give the young woman credit for resourcefulness. Once the item had been carted off to another area code, the young woman at least called the pharmacy listed on RantWoman's prescription labels so RantWoman got not only a call from the nice yound woman but a slightly mysterious phone call from the pharmacy suggesting another call might occur tomorrow.
Clang, clang, clang. Now why would RantWoman be annoyed with her pharmacy? The nice young woman got RantWoman's phone number. RantWoman suspects she should simply stick one of her business cards permanently in her pouch with her medications, but RantWoman thinks the nice young woman got RantWoman's phone number through the pharmacy. RantWoman thinks this should in fact be some kind of violation of some thing to do with patient information. RantWoman has too long a list of other vexations on her schedule tomorrow to go ballistic about this topic--this time.
When RantWoman talked to the young woman, the young woman mentioned plans to leave the item at a different pharmacy from RantWoman's usual one. However, the young woman readily agreed that it would make sense just to rendezvous with RantWoman. It turns out the young woman also works very near a cat RantWoman is cat-sitting for so, aside from matters of timing, RantWoman would have the option of doing two necessary tasks in the same trip. Well RantWoman would have the option....
However, if RantWoman were only grateful this post would not be happening. Here's why RantWoman is annoyed both with the earnest young woman and with RantWoman's pharmacy:
IF YOU FIND LOST MEDICATION ON THE BUS, PLEASE JUST TURN IT INTO THE BUS DRIVER!
Metro has a very functional policy about medication lost on the bus. Metro understands that people who carry medication around on the bus tend to do it because they need their medications throughout the day. If someone loses medications on the bus he or she can call into Metro dispatch. Metro will look up which coaches were serving the route at about the time the medication was lost. The dispatcher will contact the drivers of those coaches and ask them to check for the item. If the item is found, a passenger can either make arrangements to intersect with the bus or pick it up at Metro Lost and Found the next business day.
How does RantWoman know this? Metro's lost and found info on its web page says so. So do bus schedules, RantWoman believes. More importantly, RantWoman, urk, has used this service before, and she is VERY grateful to the driver or to the person who turned the lost item into the driver. RantWoman really, really, really wishes the nice young woman had just turned RantWoman's lost item into the driver instead of carting it off on a ferry to another whole area code!
See RantWoman called Metro. The dispatcher made the call and RantWoman received a cellphone message that the item had not been found on the bus RantWoman guessed she was on when the item went missing. RantWoman sighed and groaned; RantWoman was a little uncomfortable and was very sheepishly debating whether to call and see if the item had in fact gone missing on an earlier bus, the last time RantWoman had specifically remembered having the item.
RantWoman was tired of lugging around a larger than usual volume of necessary papers and tools. RantWoman really was mortally embarrassed about the thought of calling Metro again. RantWoman considered the option of being able to intersect with the other coach in the bus tunnel, but RantWoman decided just to head home and unburden herself before trying any other measures. Luckily RantWoman got the voice mail and discovered she can do stop-gap measures until she can connect with the lost item.
RantWoman does give the young woman credit for resourcefulness. Once the item had been carted off to another area code, the young woman at least called the pharmacy listed on RantWoman's prescription labels so RantWoman got not only a call from the nice yound woman but a slightly mysterious phone call from the pharmacy suggesting another call might occur tomorrow.
Clang, clang, clang. Now why would RantWoman be annoyed with her pharmacy? The nice young woman got RantWoman's phone number. RantWoman suspects she should simply stick one of her business cards permanently in her pouch with her medications, but RantWoman thinks the nice young woman got RantWoman's phone number through the pharmacy. RantWoman thinks this should in fact be some kind of violation of some thing to do with patient information. RantWoman has too long a list of other vexations on her schedule tomorrow to go ballistic about this topic--this time.
When RantWoman talked to the young woman, the young woman mentioned plans to leave the item at a different pharmacy from RantWoman's usual one. However, the young woman readily agreed that it would make sense just to rendezvous with RantWoman. It turns out the young woman also works very near a cat RantWoman is cat-sitting for so, aside from matters of timing, RantWoman would have the option of doing two necessary tasks in the same trip. Well RantWoman would have the option....
Friday, June 26, 2009
"Disappointing"
RantMom rode the SLUT! She took Irrepressible Grandson with her on a SLUT excursion. RantMom of course referred to it as The Streetcar.
RantMom has not really lived in Seattle long enough to remember that other Streetcar, the Waterfront Streetcar lately displaced by the Sculpture Park and transmogrified into those green buses that run along the downtown waterfront. RantMom is also probably too polite to call anything "the SLUT," not even if she listens to enough RantWoman tirades.
Why does RantMom pronounce the SLUT "disappointing?" The odds of waterfront contact look promising as the SLUT heads down Westlake but then it just veers into the rest of the Mercer Mess. The SLUT goes halfway to anything interesting and then just stops and turns around. The SLUT goes nowhere near any actual waterfront. All of its stops are out in the middle of concrete, separated from actual waterfront by acres of parking lot.
RantMom noted one destination she might be interested in, the Center for Wooden Boats. Alas, although the voice calling the stops is clear and crisply articulated, it omits the kind of tourist orientation and mention of interesting destinations that many bus drivers provide. RantMom had no idea where to get off for the Center for Wooden Boats so she and The Boy just rode to the end and turned around.
Talk about disappointing. South Lake Union includes several dining establishments. Well, RantWoman just does not picture RantMom introducing the grandson to Hooters. There is a yacht brokerage which RantWoman cannot imagine needing. There is a nice path along the lake and a tiny patch of something that could charitably seem like a park.
RantWoman long ago used to work out at a gym that no longer exists at the south end of Lake Union. RantWoman many times walked along the lake to her great delight. Well at times there have been those "protected (non)migratory waterfowl (geese) about in great number and bestowing their droppings all over the path. This was some time ago though and RantWoman wonders whether the forces of progress have had any impact on the geese. RantWoman supposes she could ask Irrepressible Nephew... Maybe she will just help RantMom choose other cheap destinations.
RantMom has not really lived in Seattle long enough to remember that other Streetcar, the Waterfront Streetcar lately displaced by the Sculpture Park and transmogrified into those green buses that run along the downtown waterfront. RantMom is also probably too polite to call anything "the SLUT," not even if she listens to enough RantWoman tirades.
Why does RantMom pronounce the SLUT "disappointing?" The odds of waterfront contact look promising as the SLUT heads down Westlake but then it just veers into the rest of the Mercer Mess. The SLUT goes halfway to anything interesting and then just stops and turns around. The SLUT goes nowhere near any actual waterfront. All of its stops are out in the middle of concrete, separated from actual waterfront by acres of parking lot.
RantMom noted one destination she might be interested in, the Center for Wooden Boats. Alas, although the voice calling the stops is clear and crisply articulated, it omits the kind of tourist orientation and mention of interesting destinations that many bus drivers provide. RantMom had no idea where to get off for the Center for Wooden Boats so she and The Boy just rode to the end and turned around.
Talk about disappointing. South Lake Union includes several dining establishments. Well, RantWoman just does not picture RantMom introducing the grandson to Hooters. There is a yacht brokerage which RantWoman cannot imagine needing. There is a nice path along the lake and a tiny patch of something that could charitably seem like a park.
RantWoman long ago used to work out at a gym that no longer exists at the south end of Lake Union. RantWoman many times walked along the lake to her great delight. Well at times there have been those "protected (non)migratory waterfowl (geese) about in great number and bestowing their droppings all over the path. This was some time ago though and RantWoman wonders whether the forces of progress have had any impact on the geese. RantWoman supposes she could ask Irrepressible Nephew... Maybe she will just help RantMom choose other cheap destinations.
Henny the Arson Dog
RantWoman presents yet more evidence of her nerd credentials. RantWoman is poking around the Fire Department website on a Friday night because of one of those late afternoon Friday emails full of interesting facts and provocative points. Okay, RantWoman is not a total nerd. Instead of poking around on topic, RantWoman got sidetracked reading about Henny the arson dog:
http://www.seattle.gov/fire/FMO/Henny/default.htm
RantWoman does not have a Seeing Eye Dog. RantWoman does not want one and anyway RantWoman thinks other people need one more than she does. Ordinarily, RantWoman would let people who have seeing eye dogs be ambassadors about the topic, but RantWoman is really enjoying Henny the arson dog: Henny the arson dog is a black lab who was in training to be a seeing eye dog, until....
Not every dog of a given breed is cut out to be a Seeing Eye Dog. One very big doggy no-no that will wash a dog out of a Seeing Eye Dog program is excessive sniffing. RantWoman has a friend whose first seeing eye dog during graduate school, a big sweetie of a yellow lab was ALMOST too into sniffing. She also would really have liked to chase squirrels much more than she was allowed to, though this dog held it together for a solid career as a seeing eye dog and even a good spell of retirement.
Because RantWoman already knew about sniffing and Seeing Eye Dogs, she really enjoys hearing and reading about Henny, Seattle's arson dog. Henny's handler was on the radio awhile back and RantWoman almost posted then so perhaps it's providence now. RantWoman herself would have absolutely no interest in a career ferreting out and distinguishing different hydrocarbon scents with her nose; she finds herself very glad Henny is on the job. RantWoman is also lazy and definitely recommends you poke through the link and read about Henny yourself. Plus, if you get tired of reading about Henny, you might even run into the other topics RantWoman was fixing to post about. Take a look. Guess.
http://www.seattle.gov/fire/FMO/Henny/default.htm
RantWoman does not have a Seeing Eye Dog. RantWoman does not want one and anyway RantWoman thinks other people need one more than she does. Ordinarily, RantWoman would let people who have seeing eye dogs be ambassadors about the topic, but RantWoman is really enjoying Henny the arson dog: Henny the arson dog is a black lab who was in training to be a seeing eye dog, until....
Not every dog of a given breed is cut out to be a Seeing Eye Dog. One very big doggy no-no that will wash a dog out of a Seeing Eye Dog program is excessive sniffing. RantWoman has a friend whose first seeing eye dog during graduate school, a big sweetie of a yellow lab was ALMOST too into sniffing. She also would really have liked to chase squirrels much more than she was allowed to, though this dog held it together for a solid career as a seeing eye dog and even a good spell of retirement.
Because RantWoman already knew about sniffing and Seeing Eye Dogs, she really enjoys hearing and reading about Henny, Seattle's arson dog. Henny's handler was on the radio awhile back and RantWoman almost posted then so perhaps it's providence now. RantWoman herself would have absolutely no interest in a career ferreting out and distinguishing different hydrocarbon scents with her nose; she finds herself very glad Henny is on the job. RantWoman is also lazy and definitely recommends you poke through the link and read about Henny yourself. Plus, if you get tired of reading about Henny, you might even run into the other topics RantWoman was fixing to post about. Take a look. Guess.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Farewell Farrah
RantWoman knows that the King of Pop just expired. The whole internet / Twitterverse hiccuped rather severely when his passing was announced; this hiccup caused RantWoman an immediate spasm of desire to say as little as possible of anything that would get her own offerings snagged in further hiccups as topical additions to the internet get indexed. RantWoman sends deep condolences to all of MJ's loved ones and fans. RantWoman really does not relate to music videos or The Gloved One's musical ouevre. RantWoman is also glad MJ seems to have close personal friends who enjoyed and appreciated him, especially since RantWoman found herself reading too high a percentage of media references that caused her to go "Ewwwww." RantWoman generally has a reflex not to believe every lurid news bit that crosses her path; in this case though RantWoman is just glad she is not close enough to the gloved one to have to help digest every horrid sensational item that oozes out of the global media.
With all the above out of the way, RantWoman now proposes to leave the poetic memorials and playlists and public adulation to fans who truly appreciated The King of Pop and to get about memorializing Farrah Fawcett, the figure more solidly on RantWoman's mind.
It's not even that relating to Farrah is a slam dunk for RantWoman. Well, RantWoman is horrified to look at some of her high school classmates graduation pictures and to see Farrah's hairdo repeated over and over. RantWoman on the other hand is a brunette. RantWoman is much more Kate Jackson than Farrah Fawcett, that is if RantWoman's female detective idol Nancy Drew, the old Nancy Drew with the boyfriend named Ned and the roadster fits anywhere in the Charlie's Angels pantheon in the first place.
RantWoman has read acres of feminist objection to the 70's sexism of Charlie's Angels, Fawcett's best-known role. RantWoman herself has watched many an episode where RantWoman found herself yelling pointlessly at the screen not to do x or y because of course it will lead to difficulty. Nevertheless, RantWoman secretly enjoyed images of women who knew how to take command of the situation, who drew their guns when needed, and who thought about more than whether Tide would take out stains or what to serve with Hamburger Helper. RantWoman never related to the blond shag, but she did relate to the three women being a team. RantWoman found Charlie sort of revolting and is glad he left the on-screen heavy lifting to the women. RantWoman did not exactly find the angels adequate role models, but they did work better than, say , Barbie.
RantWoman is also glad that Farrah Fawcett got to play other more complex roles. RantWoman admits she has consumed a lot less of Fawcett's later roles and she is inclined simply to take other chroniclers' word for it as far as the quality of these roles.
What draws Farrah back into RantWoman's mind though is her struggle with cancer. RantWoman is puzzled because some media accounts mention one specific kind while Wikipedia mentions a whole bigger scarier pantheon. RantWoman feels no particular need for excessive precision: whichever it was, there are more than sufficient ways for things to be awful.
RantWoman watched RantMom struggle through round after round of treatment for two cancers. RantWoman on purpose took pictures of RantMom sans hair when RantMom was wearing both fashionable turbans and, not to understate it, disagreeable wigs just to keep her bald head warm during MT winters. RantWoman can only imagine the monstrous indignity not only of losing one's hair but of being Farrah Fawcett and losing hair during cancer treatment. RantWoman remembers kind of having to insist that RantMom let people who love her help her through some of the worst of it and RantWoman is pleased to see that Ryan O'Neal stuck by Farrah to the end.
So how to say farewell: RantMom is cancer-free; RantWoman is sorry that did not happen for Farrah Fawcett. RantWoman hopes Farrah will be well-remembered and that other fans will pry themselves away from doing the Moonwalk to give Farrah her due.
With all the above out of the way, RantWoman now proposes to leave the poetic memorials and playlists and public adulation to fans who truly appreciated The King of Pop and to get about memorializing Farrah Fawcett, the figure more solidly on RantWoman's mind.
It's not even that relating to Farrah is a slam dunk for RantWoman. Well, RantWoman is horrified to look at some of her high school classmates graduation pictures and to see Farrah's hairdo repeated over and over. RantWoman on the other hand is a brunette. RantWoman is much more Kate Jackson than Farrah Fawcett, that is if RantWoman's female detective idol Nancy Drew, the old Nancy Drew with the boyfriend named Ned and the roadster fits anywhere in the Charlie's Angels pantheon in the first place.
RantWoman has read acres of feminist objection to the 70's sexism of Charlie's Angels, Fawcett's best-known role. RantWoman herself has watched many an episode where RantWoman found herself yelling pointlessly at the screen not to do x or y because of course it will lead to difficulty. Nevertheless, RantWoman secretly enjoyed images of women who knew how to take command of the situation, who drew their guns when needed, and who thought about more than whether Tide would take out stains or what to serve with Hamburger Helper. RantWoman never related to the blond shag, but she did relate to the three women being a team. RantWoman found Charlie sort of revolting and is glad he left the on-screen heavy lifting to the women. RantWoman did not exactly find the angels adequate role models, but they did work better than, say , Barbie.
RantWoman is also glad that Farrah Fawcett got to play other more complex roles. RantWoman admits she has consumed a lot less of Fawcett's later roles and she is inclined simply to take other chroniclers' word for it as far as the quality of these roles.
What draws Farrah back into RantWoman's mind though is her struggle with cancer. RantWoman is puzzled because some media accounts mention one specific kind while Wikipedia mentions a whole bigger scarier pantheon. RantWoman feels no particular need for excessive precision: whichever it was, there are more than sufficient ways for things to be awful.
RantWoman watched RantMom struggle through round after round of treatment for two cancers. RantWoman on purpose took pictures of RantMom sans hair when RantMom was wearing both fashionable turbans and, not to understate it, disagreeable wigs just to keep her bald head warm during MT winters. RantWoman can only imagine the monstrous indignity not only of losing one's hair but of being Farrah Fawcett and losing hair during cancer treatment. RantWoman remembers kind of having to insist that RantMom let people who love her help her through some of the worst of it and RantWoman is pleased to see that Ryan O'Neal stuck by Farrah to the end.
So how to say farewell: RantMom is cancer-free; RantWoman is sorry that did not happen for Farrah Fawcett. RantWoman hopes Farrah will be well-remembered and that other fans will pry themselves away from doing the Moonwalk to give Farrah her due.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Blog o' the day
Before I get completely deluged by Twitter input, a great site about accessibility!
http://minttwist.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/accessible-web-design/
Okay, so it's in "British." RantWoman bets you can handle it!
http://minttwist.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/accessible-web-design/
Okay, so it's in "British." RantWoman bets you can handle it!
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Childcare Preparedness--in ID
Dear Red Cross. Thank you very much for the nice brochure that was left on my doorstep yesterday. Okay, I KNOW there are a whole bunch of new people in my building since the last round of disaster education. I HOPE some of them will read the stuff and of course I will listen for chatter on the breezeway about it. Personally though I am sorry to say I cannot read it. In fact, at least half the people on my hallway cannot read the pamphlets left on our doors. Some of us are blind / visually impaired. Some of us read limited English. Maybe I will give mine to RantMom at least.
RantWoman supposes she could have asked more forcefully how the recent campaign was going to handle the fact that people in the area the campaign focused on speak at least 100 different languages. RantWoman knows it's a nice brochure. RantWoman COULD have asked, but RantWoman has decided she wants a job where she does not have to talk about disaster preparedness 100% of the time. RantWoman would like a job with lots of other responsibilities where she could interact with personal and organizational preparedness in one initial push and then a couple times / year on a maintenance basis. RantWoman could also easily see that the endless RantWoman take on others' efforts could get, well, a little tiresome.
RantWoman hereby takes a break from disaster preparedness in Seattle to meditate about the state of child care center preparedness in ID:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_id_childcare_safety.html?source=mypi
RantMom had spells of running in-home day care centers in two states long ago so RantWoman is kind of hardwired to have interest in the daycare biz. RantWoman may even read the report referenced in this article. Yeah, right. RantWoman may ASPIRE to reading this article....
More to the point, during RantWoman's recent gigs doing disaster preparedness for low-income people, she often encountered people who asked questions RantWoman herself couldn't answer. When someone asked RantWoman about preparedness at schools, day cares, special medical providers, veterinarians, RantWoman without fail had to say something along the lines of "well, you need to ask the organization." RantWoman has anecdotal evidence that customers asking about preparedness is often a big motivator for organizations to take steps toward getting better prepared. So, even if you don't think your household is perfectly prepared, feel free to bring up preparedness for places you and your family go regularly and services you depend on. Even if you just find out what Plan B is during disasters, that preparedness will help you be better prepared.
RantWoman supposes she could have asked more forcefully how the recent campaign was going to handle the fact that people in the area the campaign focused on speak at least 100 different languages. RantWoman knows it's a nice brochure. RantWoman COULD have asked, but RantWoman has decided she wants a job where she does not have to talk about disaster preparedness 100% of the time. RantWoman would like a job with lots of other responsibilities where she could interact with personal and organizational preparedness in one initial push and then a couple times / year on a maintenance basis. RantWoman could also easily see that the endless RantWoman take on others' efforts could get, well, a little tiresome.
RantWoman hereby takes a break from disaster preparedness in Seattle to meditate about the state of child care center preparedness in ID:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_id_childcare_safety.html?source=mypi
RantMom had spells of running in-home day care centers in two states long ago so RantWoman is kind of hardwired to have interest in the daycare biz. RantWoman may even read the report referenced in this article. Yeah, right. RantWoman may ASPIRE to reading this article....
More to the point, during RantWoman's recent gigs doing disaster preparedness for low-income people, she often encountered people who asked questions RantWoman herself couldn't answer. When someone asked RantWoman about preparedness at schools, day cares, special medical providers, veterinarians, RantWoman without fail had to say something along the lines of "well, you need to ask the organization." RantWoman has anecdotal evidence that customers asking about preparedness is often a big motivator for organizations to take steps toward getting better prepared. So, even if you don't think your household is perfectly prepared, feel free to bring up preparedness for places you and your family go regularly and services you depend on. Even if you just find out what Plan B is during disasters, that preparedness will help you be better prepared.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Ode to Whole Foods?
RantWoman has really not visited the "Cascade" neighborhood near the WA Talking Book and Braille Library in just ages and ages. While RantWoman has not been looking, the place has sprouted a whole bunch of new monster structures. high-rise housing, hulking glass-covered structures that, RantWoman assumes must house other things besides dwellings, and even a Whole Foods
RantWoman has gone by the Whole Foods in some circles affectionately known as "Whole Paycheck" a few times on the number 8 bus. Obviously, if RantWoman calls the place "Whole Paycheck," RantWoman may need to upgrade her paycheck, but RantWoman continually aspires, like many an urbane consumer to shop above her current pay check. In that vein, today when she was done at WA Talking Book and Braille Library instead of plopping back on the SLUT or just walking to her next bus stop, RantWoman decided to check out Whole Foods.
RantWoman decided to write about this for an eccentric reason: because of its location, this particular Whole Foods is the sort of place RantWoman will see enough to maybe bring in blinder friends who otherwise might not even know it's there. Whether or not RantWoman's friends would ask for help if RantWoman were not around, as a clump of friends, we might all just set off together and see where things go.
RantWoman was kind of charmed by the superhuman-sized enameled family with Asian features on the entry courtyard; the long bank of steps up to the surrounding building also looked intriguing architecturally, but RantWoman opted not to check much out. Instead, RantWoman made a beeline for the store.
At Whole Foods, after one gets past a bank for floral things, there is a maze off to the right of the entry. The lighting gives RantWoman a headache, the price tags on the shelves are impossible to read, and RantWoman found the prepared food / latte stand section of the store distracting.
Produce is always a good place to start. Once RantWoman got used to the idea that she was going to need to go from blurry pod to blurry pod instead of up and down aisles, she just plunged in. RantWoman was delighted to see both fresh figs and delightfully succulent locally-grown strawberries. Locally grown berries are a heavenly idea: RantWoman wound up not purchasing any because she was perplexed about how to get them home in her bag without turning the perky little green baskets into strawberry puree. Note: RantWoman also saw the more stable-looking plastic clamshells of berries, but couldn't imagine them after getting to taste the locally grown ones. RantWoman also thought seriously of buying some figs, but there was no price tag in sight. RantWoman got so distracted by the initial fruit options she paid no attention to what was going on in the green leafies / broccoli / cabbage realm.
RantWoman has the slight sense she might be disappointed about veggies compared to the Roosevelt store. The Roosevelt store has lovely displays of vegetables with nicely done signs RantWoman can almost read about why one would care about 3 or 4 colors and flavors of beets or what that organic leafy stuff is. Perhaps RantWoman missed something or perhaps someone thinks people in the middle of the city care less about different flavors of beets.
Eventually, RantWoman made it past enough fruit and produce to run into grilling supplies, long coolers of, RantWoman thinks, cold beer and then meat and fish. When RantWoman was shopping the meat department staff were all clumped in a big mass having some sort of pep rally / tasting session. RantWoman is all for staff morale; she just would have looked more attentively at the meat offerings if the clump of staff had not been impeding her navigation. Overall the impression was less open and inviting than at the Roosevelt store by the same name,
After the meat department, RantWoman did find a few linear shelves full of products RantWoman could hypothetically be interested in like breakfast cereal and crackers. What is it, though, with grocery stores and lighting? Somehow it is considered cute or energy-efficient or just chic to have less lighting in the aisles and to point a lot of bare bulbs at the product. This adds up to extra shadows in the aisles and since the bare bulbs wind up ppointing at consumers as well as products, spots of bright light amid the shadows. RantWoman thinks she is not alone in preferring much more even illumination. RantWoman also thinks there are probably ways to accomplish this without either full fluorescent washout or massive outflow of megawatts. The problem is not only Whole Foods. RantWoman knows of at least one Safeway that also has this problem in several departments. To be blunt, this kind of lighting gives RantWoman a headache.
Even worse, since RantWoman is shopping a little past her pocketbook, pennies matter. Bad lighting plus excessive coyness about pricing is really not a happy recipe for RantWoman making the choice to actually buy rather than peer at product and put it back on the shelves. Unlike Safeway's trademark black pring on red (contrast? what's that?) Whole Foods sales signs have nice lettering and good contrast; the problem is that everything else is tagged in small labels right on the shelves. The aisles are dimly lit. RantWoman knows the place runs pricey so she tends not to take chances on the Whole Paycheck issues. In short, RantWoman was interested in some of the products but she bought little partly because she found dealing with prices so tedious.
Okay, so there is one product that is almost always guaranteed to entrance RantWoman: shopping bags. RantWoman has no particular opinion about the Mayor's yearning for less shopping bag trash; RantWoman just aims for things that are easy to pack and easy to carry. Usually this means long handles for toting on shoulders rather than in pre-arthritic hands. A really big highlight of RantWoman's visit to Whole Foods: not one but TWO really delightful totebags. One is large and black with either short handles or one long enough to go over the shoulder.
The other bag is called the Feedbag. First it folds up and zips into a compact pouch. Second the stiff burlap exterior makes a great stabilized bottom. Third the bag has THREE inside pockets. The only thing that would send RantWoman further into orbit about either bag would be reflector features. Considering the day though, the bags are one thing likely at some point to lure RantWoman back in for purchases.
RantWoman found her way past the coolers and on to prepared foods, lattes and the dining area. RantWoman briefly considered how that all would work for say business time lunch. RantWoman did not spend much time evaluating that whole wing of the store beyond that. RantWoman thinks the glass and view onto Denny Way might in fact work, at least as long as all the construction doesn't take out many more trees.
After RantWoman got home and poked around the internet, she noticed a nice downloadable PDF file of the weekly specials. The only problem from RantWoman's perspective is that the PDF is laid out for cuteness, not tagged or executed in a way that makes it easy for RantWoman to read with a screen reader and figure out which prices correspond with which items. RantWoman poked and prodded at the file several ways with no improvement. It is possible RantWoman does not know some key trick; she certainly does not know offhand what to do as an alternative but she has encountered other files like this and highly recommends other presentation choices. Perhaps if the info were available in a way RantWoman could use, she would ask for and actually buy things.Riding the Purple SLUT
RantWoman did it. She rode the SLUT. er the South Lake Union Streetcar both to and from her afternoon in Allentown.
RantWoman repeats her advice re terminology: if people call it the SLUT, just go with it and see where that takes you. Unfortunate acronyms notwithstanding, RantWoman could in fact like the trolley thought quite a bit and not only on phonetic grounds. True, around Seattle "trolley" mostly means workhorse electric-powered, or sometimes underpowered bus coaches on center city bus routes. The trolleys drop their wires, some of them bounce really well on bad pavement. They go out of service at the first hint of ice or snow.
In other words, "trolley" conjures associations that only a diehard transit nut would really feel warm and fuzzy about, and something pristine and modern could be a welcome conceptual upgrade.
RantWoman rode the orange train out and the purple train back. She can definitely attest that they are modern. RantWoman could not exactly figure out what was supposed to happen as far as paying her fare with her ORCA card, but who would quibble with a free ride?
RantWoman especially likes the full-throated pre-recorded electronic voice calling the stops in clear well-articulated English. If pre-recorded stops became the norm, RantWoman would miss some drivers' editorializing as they call the stops and some preacherly delivery and other entertaining variations. On the other hand, RantWoman is all for integrating newcomers well into the fabric of our society, including hiring anyone who can handle the transit driving realities. Alas, some drivers have accents that strain even RantWoman's deep familiarity with her mother tongue spoken as a second language. RantWoman would not mind in the least relieving these drivers of stop-calling duties.
Then we come to other dimensions of the phrase "riding the purple SLUT." All RantWoman can think of is a protest song she used to be around a lot about "We're shameless hussies and we don't give a damn. We're loud and we're raucous and...." RantWoman will spare the blog the rest of the song, although she does think there could be some party potential here: fill the purple SLUT with a lot of boisterous women singing the shameless hussies song at an 80's protest nostalgia party. Well, it could work...at least once.
Meanwhile, RantWoman notes the top of the hour news that NOW has elected Terry O'Neill its new president. RantWoman has no opinion one way or another about the two slates of candidates. RantWoman has historically liked that NOW is a strong active organization, but RantWoman has for a number of reasons, not just her buddies and the shameless hussies song, not really been at the center of NOW campaigns. But who knows...?
RantWoman repeats her advice re terminology: if people call it the SLUT, just go with it and see where that takes you. Unfortunate acronyms notwithstanding, RantWoman could in fact like the trolley thought quite a bit and not only on phonetic grounds. True, around Seattle "trolley" mostly means workhorse electric-powered, or sometimes underpowered bus coaches on center city bus routes. The trolleys drop their wires, some of them bounce really well on bad pavement. They go out of service at the first hint of ice or snow.
In other words, "trolley" conjures associations that only a diehard transit nut would really feel warm and fuzzy about, and something pristine and modern could be a welcome conceptual upgrade.
RantWoman rode the orange train out and the purple train back. She can definitely attest that they are modern. RantWoman could not exactly figure out what was supposed to happen as far as paying her fare with her ORCA card, but who would quibble with a free ride?
RantWoman especially likes the full-throated pre-recorded electronic voice calling the stops in clear well-articulated English. If pre-recorded stops became the norm, RantWoman would miss some drivers' editorializing as they call the stops and some preacherly delivery and other entertaining variations. On the other hand, RantWoman is all for integrating newcomers well into the fabric of our society, including hiring anyone who can handle the transit driving realities. Alas, some drivers have accents that strain even RantWoman's deep familiarity with her mother tongue spoken as a second language. RantWoman would not mind in the least relieving these drivers of stop-calling duties.
Then we come to other dimensions of the phrase "riding the purple SLUT." All RantWoman can think of is a protest song she used to be around a lot about "We're shameless hussies and we don't give a damn. We're loud and we're raucous and...." RantWoman will spare the blog the rest of the song, although she does think there could be some party potential here: fill the purple SLUT with a lot of boisterous women singing the shameless hussies song at an 80's protest nostalgia party. Well, it could work...at least once.
Meanwhile, RantWoman notes the top of the hour news that NOW has elected Terry O'Neill its new president. RantWoman has no opinion one way or another about the two slates of candidates. RantWoman has historically liked that NOW is a strong active organization, but RantWoman has for a number of reasons, not just her buddies and the shameless hussies song, not really been at the center of NOW campaigns. But who knows...?
ORCA Bliss and ....
For the record, RantWoman has done it. She has successfully put her monthly disabled pass onto her ORCA card. Well the proof will be in the pudding come July 1, but http://www.orcacard.com/ and RantWoman's bank both agree it should have happened.
Of course, now RantWoman has a bunch of annoying "betcha didn't think of that one" questions:
--RantWoman sometimes does projects where a bunch of disabled people need to get somewhere further out than their basic disabled pass will take them for free. RantWoman as project manager might really like a way to add money to people's ORCA card wallets so that people using ORCA could use their own disabled passes and get the appropriate disabled discount. RantWoman does not see any other way for, say, a project to pay the appropriate fare for someone's travel.
--Will people with disabled passes be able to pay cash to add money to their wallets at train stations just like everyone else? Even if this is possible, for groups of any size RantWoman thinks it would be ever so much easier to have a list of everyone's pass numbers and then to bundle adding money to their wallets with one list and one bank transaction. RantWoman thinks people who get their passes from their employers and have their employers do this kind of list-based transaction for the part usually paid for by their employer might also like to be able to add money to their wallet separately from their work. For instance, suppose RantWoman had a job and got a SoundTransit two-zone fare from her employer. But for some reason, RantWoman wanted to add money to her wallet for instance to pay a ferry fare. How would that work?
--RantWoman is not quite a total floozy, but when it comes to ADDING money to RantWoman's ORCA wallet, RantWoman would be perfectly happy to let anyone who wanted to add money to her wallet and thinks in fact that should not be too difficult. RantWoman thinks taking money OUT of her ORCA wallet should be another whole problem. Still, in RantWoman's rich fantasy life, if she suddenly had a flock of admirers adding money to her ORCA wallet, RantWoman might take into her head to want to transfer money from her ORCA wallet to pay for her monthly pass. Is that possible? Is that something anyone foresees being able to do.
RantWoman should of course just fire these questions off to the ORCA folks, but RantWoman is so stunned that her bank transaction worked that she thinks she will wait a little while before torturing anyone with all these questions.
Of course, now RantWoman has a bunch of annoying "betcha didn't think of that one" questions:
--RantWoman sometimes does projects where a bunch of disabled people need to get somewhere further out than their basic disabled pass will take them for free. RantWoman as project manager might really like a way to add money to people's ORCA card wallets so that people using ORCA could use their own disabled passes and get the appropriate disabled discount. RantWoman does not see any other way for, say, a project to pay the appropriate fare for someone's travel.
--Will people with disabled passes be able to pay cash to add money to their wallets at train stations just like everyone else? Even if this is possible, for groups of any size RantWoman thinks it would be ever so much easier to have a list of everyone's pass numbers and then to bundle adding money to their wallets with one list and one bank transaction. RantWoman thinks people who get their passes from their employers and have their employers do this kind of list-based transaction for the part usually paid for by their employer might also like to be able to add money to their wallet separately from their work. For instance, suppose RantWoman had a job and got a SoundTransit two-zone fare from her employer. But for some reason, RantWoman wanted to add money to her wallet for instance to pay a ferry fare. How would that work?
--RantWoman is not quite a total floozy, but when it comes to ADDING money to RantWoman's ORCA wallet, RantWoman would be perfectly happy to let anyone who wanted to add money to her wallet and thinks in fact that should not be too difficult. RantWoman thinks taking money OUT of her ORCA wallet should be another whole problem. Still, in RantWoman's rich fantasy life, if she suddenly had a flock of admirers adding money to her ORCA wallet, RantWoman might take into her head to want to transfer money from her ORCA wallet to pay for her monthly pass. Is that possible? Is that something anyone foresees being able to do.
RantWoman should of course just fire these questions off to the ORCA folks, but RantWoman is so stunned that her bank transaction worked that she thinks she will wait a little while before torturing anyone with all these questions.
Plague update
RantWoman is taking a break from swine flu for a few moments to explore other diseases which seem either scarier in fact or potentially at least as scary as swine flu.
First, take tuberculosis:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/larrydonohue/archives/171509.asp
RantWoman finds herself in this vein reflecting on current health policy debates. RantWoman notes that many health care providers are promising to cut costs by managing chronic conditions better. RantWoman wishes to point out that all protestations of such good intentions will go up in smoke immediately if people do not have access to primary care. RantWoman sees no way that access to primary care will happen without a publicly-based plan.
RantWoman remembers the grassroots healthcare summits of a couple years back when even people in really conservative places like, say, Mississippi voted overwhelmingly for the concept of single-payer health care. RantWoman wishes she could imagine coping with potential pandemics without bringing up national health care. RantWoman also knows that universal coverage is not sufficient for getting an early handle on emerging pandemics. However, RantWoman's braing short-circuits back to the topic every time pandemic flu comes up.
In terms of pestilence, we must of course worry obsessively not only about conditions affecting humans but also about plant maladies. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_wheat_of_doom.html RantWoman is impressed by the fearmongering about wheat crops at risk and equally impressed that copy-editing new media style at the Seattle PI produced this whole piece and never once listed the name of the disease. RantWoman supposes sticking the professor's name in one's favorite search engine would do the trick. RantWoman also wonders whether some strains of wheat might in fact be resisitant to this condition or whether there are other ways to control this by deviating from monoculture or.... RantWoman wonders this but she herself has other amusements ahead of more research on her to-do list.
Now the topic we all know and love, swine flu.
King County is up to somewhere between 1 and 3 actual deaths.
Here is WHO's latest update
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_06_19/en/index.html
Since RantWoman is fixated on pedestrian issues and health equity, RantWoman will add the following links just for good measure:
Half of road fatalities are pedestrians, motorcyclists, bicyclists
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2009/road_safety_report_20090615/en/index.html
Healthcare equity is always a good thing
http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2009/global_health_20090615/en/index.html
Taking the SLUT to WTBBL
RantWoman's father, time was, as a nonprofit media strategy sometimes used to say "I don't care what you say about me, just keep saying it." True enough, the non-profit was a symphony that otherwise steered clear of scandal and slander and more than average levels of innuendo. Still, RantWoman offers that thought to the perpetrators of the SLUT, the South Lake Union Streetcar or another much more felicitous acronym RantWoman is considering trying to get paid for.
RantWoman still thinks the SLUT is silly and duplicates bus lines all over the place. RantWoman still thinks it's a goshdang civic decoration when some other areas of town with already proven ridership still need more bus hours. RantWoman thinks the SLUT is a lame approach to all the economic and policy imperatives colliding in the Mercer Mess. RantWoman voted at least TWICE against panhandling by billionaires and could certainly drum up further tirades in that vein.
RantWoman is even peeved that the SLUT connects directly with exactly 0 of the buses she rides regularly. RantWoman could certainly add a transfer to something in the tunnel and connect with the SLUT at Westlake. However, unless RantWoman is seized with an irresistible imperative that she categorically MUST ride the SLUT, like as not when RantWoman gets on the road she is going to take potluck and just walk from a bus stop.
However, in the interest of giving the SLUT a fair shake, RantWoman is, when the occasion coincides, willing to try it. Today MAY be such an occasion. Today from 12-2 at the Washington Talking Book and Braille library WTBBL is Friend Day at the local chapter of the American Council of the Blind. (RantWoman actually cannot keep chapters straight and is not necessarily in the market for more meetings to go to, so she apologizes for lack of precision on this point.)
This morning's web-based reconnoitering yielded several cool things. First over the last several years, WTBBL has undergone some organizational shifts. In the picture was, charitably, a real estate land grab and a misguided effort to move the physical location to Olympia completely inaccessible to the 400-some volunteers who contribute thousands of hours of dedicated volunteer service annually to keep the place open. Now WTBBL is administered by the WA Secretary of State. RantWoman notes this because enhanced web presence appears to be a huge benefit of this change. Several different topical links show up directly in a Google search. The Homepage looks like it is designed for services in the 21st century. Directions include excellent descriptions of how to get to the place via several bus routes and even the SLUT. What is not to like!
RantWoman still thinks the SLUT is silly and duplicates bus lines all over the place. RantWoman still thinks it's a goshdang civic decoration when some other areas of town with already proven ridership still need more bus hours. RantWoman thinks the SLUT is a lame approach to all the economic and policy imperatives colliding in the Mercer Mess. RantWoman voted at least TWICE against panhandling by billionaires and could certainly drum up further tirades in that vein.
RantWoman is even peeved that the SLUT connects directly with exactly 0 of the buses she rides regularly. RantWoman could certainly add a transfer to something in the tunnel and connect with the SLUT at Westlake. However, unless RantWoman is seized with an irresistible imperative that she categorically MUST ride the SLUT, like as not when RantWoman gets on the road she is going to take potluck and just walk from a bus stop.
However, in the interest of giving the SLUT a fair shake, RantWoman is, when the occasion coincides, willing to try it. Today MAY be such an occasion. Today from 12-2 at the Washington Talking Book and Braille library WTBBL is Friend Day at the local chapter of the American Council of the Blind. (RantWoman actually cannot keep chapters straight and is not necessarily in the market for more meetings to go to, so she apologizes for lack of precision on this point.)
This morning's web-based reconnoitering yielded several cool things. First over the last several years, WTBBL has undergone some organizational shifts. In the picture was, charitably, a real estate land grab and a misguided effort to move the physical location to Olympia completely inaccessible to the 400-some volunteers who contribute thousands of hours of dedicated volunteer service annually to keep the place open. Now WTBBL is administered by the WA Secretary of State. RantWoman notes this because enhanced web presence appears to be a huge benefit of this change. Several different topical links show up directly in a Google search. The Homepage looks like it is designed for services in the 21st century. Directions include excellent descriptions of how to get to the place via several bus routes and even the SLUT. What is not to like!
Friday, June 19, 2009
Comment Period Extended for Ped Master Plan
Do not waste time. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Go straight to http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/pedestrian_masterplan/.
Read as much as you can. WRITE COMMENTS. There will be a hearing at the Seattle City Council on July 21. RantWoman has it in her calendar.
RantWoman herself means to read more of the Seattle Pedestrian Master Plan and then to comment. Good thing she now has another week to do it. You too! Read it. Digest it! Comment.
At first pass, when RantWoman went to a sort of pep rally for the project, she was impressed that the project made lots of efforts to map different characteristics of roadways, pedestrian realities and economic development realities. Now RantWoman needs to read more because she is all but certain that there are elements which need that definitive RantWoman take!
Tonight for instance, RantWoman is peeved about one whole set of topics that as far as RantWoman knows is completely lacking from the ped plan: being a pedestrian, getting around only on foot or public transit gives one a whole different set of choices from those with a car:
--Wanna swim or go to the gym on the way to or from the rest of your day. What are you going to do with your suit and gym clothes for the rest of the day? Some places can handle this question; some cannot. True, if one is an energetic pedestrian, a lot of exercise is just built into one's daily routine, but people still do need the joint benefits of swimming or the other benefits of weight training and things one does most easily in the gym.
Whatever your fixations, Read the plan. Dream. Comment!
Read as much as you can. WRITE COMMENTS. There will be a hearing at the Seattle City Council on July 21. RantWoman has it in her calendar.
RantWoman herself means to read more of the Seattle Pedestrian Master Plan and then to comment. Good thing she now has another week to do it. You too! Read it. Digest it! Comment.
At first pass, when RantWoman went to a sort of pep rally for the project, she was impressed that the project made lots of efforts to map different characteristics of roadways, pedestrian realities and economic development realities. Now RantWoman needs to read more because she is all but certain that there are elements which need that definitive RantWoman take!
Tonight for instance, RantWoman is peeved about one whole set of topics that as far as RantWoman knows is completely lacking from the ped plan: being a pedestrian, getting around only on foot or public transit gives one a whole different set of choices from those with a car:
--Often when RantWoman leaves the house for the day, her calendar includes multiple different activities in multiple different places: work meetings, exercise or public events or shopping.Even when RantWoman tries to trim her baggage, carrying items needed for each activity can still add up.
RantWoman feels lucky to feel hale and hearty and able to carry quite a bit. RantWoman sometimes feels awkward about needing temporary places to stow part of her baggage for short intervals. RantWoman knows other people who must have the same problem because at many kinds of events she can pinpoint who came without a car by the volume of auxiliary gear they also are toting around. It would be REALLY nice if the ped plan thought of addressing this kind of need for people who choose the pedestrian route.
--The library wants to ban wheeled vehicles. This would be because the kind of tourists who take a lot of pictures and buy lattes and get souvenirs in the gift shop USUALLY do not come in with their luggage in tow. However harried professionals do. Elderly people who use wheeled backpacks to tote their library materials around do. Committed pedestrians with back trouble do. People who have agendas in their day between their home and the airport do. Some though not all of these people would be delighted to have places to leave their luggage. However people who basically tote their offices with them may have plenty of reason to pack the office in a wheeled suitcase. Having this kind of ban at the library immediately subtracts from people's ability both to choose alternatives to the car and to use library resources.
--The ability to walk to school is a big driver in pedestrian planning but in many neighborhoods, the schools people can walk to SUCK and any parent with even an iota of aspiration for something better for their children will have to move heaven and earth to get kids into programs across town and then put the kids on the bus for hours / day.
Even when there are dedicated staff trying hard, as opposed to clueless clucks stuck somewhere on their way out the door, parents in poorer areas working two jobs have no time or resources to do the extra fundraising done by parents at many middle class schools. A realistic ped plan might seriously consider helping do things to equalize resources so that sending one's kid to a school he or she can walk to would not mean sentencing them to permanent educational apartheid. The Seattle School District is currently going through one of its spasms of rethinking school assignment. So far the walk to school issue is on the radar but the resource issue most assuredly is not.
--Speaking of schools and poor neighborhoods, the ped plan is stunningly silent about neighborhoods where a lot of people with limited English, ie people who fill out surveys in other languages when available see car ownership both as an entirely rational way to solve their horrible transportation needs and a sign of success American style. Because bus routes tend to be designed for commuters rather than neighborhood circulation, people in poor neighborhoods often have to take two buses to go to locations comparatively nearby. This of course takes disproportionate time and makes car ownership seem almost mandatory. Fixing ped infrastructure in these areas is critical, but it takes more than sidewalks to make a walkability oriented lifestyle realistic.
--Search at public buildings: people with cars can leave their pocket knives, butter knives and other questionable items in their cars. Confirmed pedestrians are likely to have very useful items confiscated with no hope of return if they have the temerity--or absentmindedness--to bring such along. Again, the ped plan is completely silent about this inconvenience, and RantWoman is firm on this point even though she is also aware that people carry along God knows what for decidedly unbenign purposes.
--Wanna swim or go to the gym on the way to or from the rest of your day. What are you going to do with your suit and gym clothes for the rest of the day? Some places can handle this question; some cannot. True, if one is an energetic pedestrian, a lot of exercise is just built into one's daily routine, but people still do need the joint benefits of swimming or the other benefits of weight training and things one does most easily in the gym.
Whatever your fixations, Read the plan. Dream. Comment!
Attack Receptionist
Sooner or later all receptionists have to be enforcers. A lot of the time if they are good, they do it nicely and no one even realizes the receptionist is being enforcer. Other times the enforcer part is perfectly obvious and an office needs the fiercest enforcer that money or enthusiasm can get.
At the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, the main receptionist can certainly be a bear. For a few different reasons the enforcer role is a little more firmly part of the essential job functions than at other places. This story is not one of those moments. This is a story about reasonable accommodations, another key term in the world of working with people of widely varying abilities, aka people with disabilities, aka the differently abled, aka a whole bunch of other current or archaic terms.
Neither the receptionist nor RantWoman really can see worth spit. Both of us pass a lot of the time: we usually recognize people visually at quite a distance. We don't bump into each other or walk into walls. None of this necessarily means either of us can reliably tell from any distance whether computer applications are closed out on a screen. In fact, to work with computers, we both need different reasonable accommodations, a point RantWoman might fulminate about some other time.
RantWoman has only heard one side of the event that triggered this reflection but, knowing the two participants RantWoman is confident enough of her points to blunder cautiously forward anyway. The event that triggered this post was one of those communications moments that just happens sometimes. The receptionist asked another volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center whether he was done using one machine because a customer arrived and needed a plact to work. Apparently a tone of voice was off or someone had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed because minor growling and snarling ensued.
RantWoman has no desire to parachute in and play SuperDiplomat, a laughable concept anyway. However, RantWoman is reflecting on another essential job function for volunteers at the Friendly Neighborhood center: that is to maintain a reasonably courteous and respectful atmosphere. And what would be the reasonable accommodation here: as the world's most irrepressible nephew would hear, "use your words." Ask nicely. Listen carefully. Communicate, don't just assume ... because some of us spend too much time trying to pass.
Now, how to bring this up? Stay tuned.
At the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, the main receptionist can certainly be a bear. For a few different reasons the enforcer role is a little more firmly part of the essential job functions than at other places. This story is not one of those moments. This is a story about reasonable accommodations, another key term in the world of working with people of widely varying abilities, aka people with disabilities, aka the differently abled, aka a whole bunch of other current or archaic terms.
Neither the receptionist nor RantWoman really can see worth spit. Both of us pass a lot of the time: we usually recognize people visually at quite a distance. We don't bump into each other or walk into walls. None of this necessarily means either of us can reliably tell from any distance whether computer applications are closed out on a screen. In fact, to work with computers, we both need different reasonable accommodations, a point RantWoman might fulminate about some other time.
RantWoman has only heard one side of the event that triggered this reflection but, knowing the two participants RantWoman is confident enough of her points to blunder cautiously forward anyway. The event that triggered this post was one of those communications moments that just happens sometimes. The receptionist asked another volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center whether he was done using one machine because a customer arrived and needed a plact to work. Apparently a tone of voice was off or someone had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed because minor growling and snarling ensued.
RantWoman has no desire to parachute in and play SuperDiplomat, a laughable concept anyway. However, RantWoman is reflecting on another essential job function for volunteers at the Friendly Neighborhood center: that is to maintain a reasonably courteous and respectful atmosphere. And what would be the reasonable accommodation here: as the world's most irrepressible nephew would hear, "use your words." Ask nicely. Listen carefully. Communicate, don't just assume ... because some of us spend too much time trying to pass.
Now, how to bring this up? Stay tuned.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Eggplant and pasta
One more darn thing to file:
Eggplant and Pasta
RantWoman is charmed by the idea of eggplant and swordfish, something she has never thought to do.
RantWoman is also thinking about the flavor and chemistry effects of the salt and then fry eggplant prep technique. RantWoman suspects that the flavor effects of this approach are one of those pleasures lost if one is too rabidly anti-salt. Unfortunately there are people who are much better off it they avoid salt. Wonder if the roasted flavor would hold up if one just did the light olive oil, herbs, eggplant under the broiler roast thing instead of frying.
Eggplant and Pasta
RantWoman is charmed by the idea of eggplant and swordfish, something she has never thought to do.
RantWoman is also thinking about the flavor and chemistry effects of the salt and then fry eggplant prep technique. RantWoman suspects that the flavor effects of this approach are one of those pleasures lost if one is too rabidly anti-salt. Unfortunately there are people who are much better off it they avoid salt. Wonder if the roasted flavor would hold up if one just did the light olive oil, herbs, eggplant under the broiler roast thing instead of frying.
Where they fix Light Rail Cars
RantWoman is the sort of geek who finds info about the size and scale of railroad repair yards oddly fascinating. RantWoman is also intrigued in a mechanistic way with the "plug and play" swap in and out aspects of this all.
Where they Fix Light Rail
Where they Fix Light Rail
Two Disability-Related Blogs
RantWoman keeps getting really good refs to this blog off Twitter:
http://www.evengrounds.com/
RantWoman especially commends all the great web accessibility content on this site.
Also see:
http://specialneeds08.blogspot.com/
For those of you who wonder why RantWoman does not do a blog roll of her favorite stuff here, a couple notes:
--RantWoman needs a place to blow off steam for example about the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing will, if RantWoman has anything to say about it, shortly have its own blog and RantWoman thinks she will certainly put blog roll from these sites there. So stay tuned.
http://www.evengrounds.com/
RantWoman especially commends all the great web accessibility content on this site.
Also see:
http://specialneeds08.blogspot.com/
For those of you who wonder why RantWoman does not do a blog roll of her favorite stuff here, a couple notes:
--RantWoman needs a place to blow off steam for example about the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing will, if RantWoman has anything to say about it, shortly have its own blog and RantWoman thinks she will certainly put blog roll from these sites there. So stay tuned.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
How not to make bus cuts
Look here for various issues in current official King County mtetro policies.
http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/407266_transit17.html
http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/407266_transit17.html
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
More Powerpoint please
Stop the presses! Take RantWoman's temperature. RantWoman is asking for more Powerpoint. Has RantWoman gone out of her mind? Is RantWoman about to be assimilated by the Borg collective? Possibly, but not on account of Powerpoint, at least this time.
Here's the deal: Friday RantWoman went to, basically a large brainstorming session intended to build partnerships and help peple apply for funds related to broadband services from the economic stimulus package. The event opened with a series of several short speeches about state and federal matters related to broadband technology. The speeches were all tight and effective, but there was one little problem: some of them involved jargon, acronyms and concepts that might not be familiar to everyone in the room.
It actually was quite possible to do the rest of the exercises for the day without worrying about some of the terms. However, RantWoman is the sort of nerd who goes home and reviews materials and sometimes learns more about key concepts. RantWoman suspects that some in the crowd might happily do that about this content.
The other interesting point: RantWoman marched in at the beginning of the event and asked as a reasonable accommodation for a copy of the Powerpoint to be used at the event. This took a bit of fluttering about and was awkward because RantWoman also had brochures and business cards she wanted to deploy. However, it all happened and RantWoman is glad it did. RantWoman in fact finds herself wondering whether all those nice sighted people might also have liked a copy of the Powerpoint to review. In fact at some events, there is a way afterward for anyone who wants to download the materials. RantWoman would suggest adding that option...
Here's the deal: Friday RantWoman went to, basically a large brainstorming session intended to build partnerships and help peple apply for funds related to broadband services from the economic stimulus package. The event opened with a series of several short speeches about state and federal matters related to broadband technology. The speeches were all tight and effective, but there was one little problem: some of them involved jargon, acronyms and concepts that might not be familiar to everyone in the room.
It actually was quite possible to do the rest of the exercises for the day without worrying about some of the terms. However, RantWoman is the sort of nerd who goes home and reviews materials and sometimes learns more about key concepts. RantWoman suspects that some in the crowd might happily do that about this content.
The other interesting point: RantWoman marched in at the beginning of the event and asked as a reasonable accommodation for a copy of the Powerpoint to be used at the event. This took a bit of fluttering about and was awkward because RantWoman also had brochures and business cards she wanted to deploy. However, it all happened and RantWoman is glad it did. RantWoman in fact finds herself wondering whether all those nice sighted people might also have liked a copy of the Powerpoint to review. In fact at some events, there is a way afterward for anyone who wants to download the materials. RantWoman would suggest adding that option...
Digital Transition
RantWoman is REALLY liking her Twitter feed for the chance to monitor breaking news. Unfortunately, RantWoman wants a way to remember without having to search Twitter. Hence she is also stowing info for further reference.
This link about accessibility and the transition to digital television came along just as RantWoman was wondering about the topic.
http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/digital-tv-transition-and-its-impact-on-people-with-disabilities
RantWoman still has not dealt with the two coupons she has for the two televisions she has not plugged in. RantWoman supposes time is of the essence especially if she wants a box that provides BOTH access to the closed captioning (for people in her life such as ferrener husband who read the captioning) and the video description for when RantWoman actually takes an interest in what the blobs on the screen are about.
Add "look up accessible converter boxes" to RantWoman's to-do list. Sigh.
This link about accessibility and the transition to digital television came along just as RantWoman was wondering about the topic.
http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/digital-tv-transition-and-its-impact-on-people-with-disabilities
RantWoman still has not dealt with the two coupons she has for the two televisions she has not plugged in. RantWoman supposes time is of the essence especially if she wants a box that provides BOTH access to the closed captioning (for people in her life such as ferrener husband who read the captioning) and the video description for when RantWoman actually takes an interest in what the blobs on the screen are about.
Add "look up accessible converter boxes" to RantWoman's to-do list. Sigh.
Baby Jesus sought separately
RantWoman is contemplating two examples of death by spellchecker. First, RantWoman's email contains both the original posting seeking an "operations manger" and the correction pointing out that of course they are seeking an "operations manAger." This email was sent out to a bunch of language professionals and the people who manage them. RantWoman reports this just to give others courage: we all blunder, so get up dust self off, and try again.
The second example of death by spellchecker is just one of those great English homophones: words spelled differently that sound exactly alike. RantWoman mentions this partly because she knows many blind people, especially blind people who do not read much braille, who spell phonetically. RantWoman suspects that might be the issue in this case and she simply notes that English is a monster sometimes but one still cannot rely only on one's spellchecker.
RantWoman finds this last point humbling for a further reason: RantWoman is THRILLED with how much easier it is to proofread when she lets her screen reader help. RantWoman is almost completely incapable of proofreading text she has been writing and thinks she knows well. After all, RantWoman would just do it right the first time of course. Even when RantWoman does not already know the material, RantWoman suspects that when she reads visually, she does what a fair number of other people she knows also do: her brain just fills in a lot based on some kind of intangible predictive wiring and only occasionally gets brought up short when something in the text severely violates the terms of the prediction. Subtract substantial visual function from either of these practices, and you can imagine the results.
Enter the screen reader. The screen reader catches missed spaces, misspellings, misinterpretations, and all kinds of errors of ommission. The screen reader would NOT catch misued homophones if they are spelled correctly. Rats.
The second example of death by spellchecker is just one of those great English homophones: words spelled differently that sound exactly alike. RantWoman mentions this partly because she knows many blind people, especially blind people who do not read much braille, who spell phonetically. RantWoman suspects that might be the issue in this case and she simply notes that English is a monster sometimes but one still cannot rely only on one's spellchecker.
RantWoman finds this last point humbling for a further reason: RantWoman is THRILLED with how much easier it is to proofread when she lets her screen reader help. RantWoman is almost completely incapable of proofreading text she has been writing and thinks she knows well. After all, RantWoman would just do it right the first time of course. Even when RantWoman does not already know the material, RantWoman suspects that when she reads visually, she does what a fair number of other people she knows also do: her brain just fills in a lot based on some kind of intangible predictive wiring and only occasionally gets brought up short when something in the text severely violates the terms of the prediction. Subtract substantial visual function from either of these practices, and you can imagine the results.
Enter the screen reader. The screen reader catches missed spaces, misspellings, misinterpretations, and all kinds of errors of ommission. The screen reader would NOT catch misued homophones if they are spelled correctly. Rats.
Monday, June 15, 2009
ORCA Monday
One good thing about penning email over the weekend is that one's Mondays can be filled with unintentional productivity even before one is fully organized to do real work. Granted, when it comes
to ORCA, RantWoman's standards for productivity are REALLY low. Today RantWoman received guidance that was not quite correct about the links she would see first. Then RantWoman hit one minor and one major obstacle before progress ground to a halt again.
RantWoman just received the following communication from ORCA customer service:
Good morning, Thanks for contacting us about your ORCA card. I apologize for the service you've received thus far and hope I can help.Your card is considered "registered" because we obtained your personal information as required by the Regional Reduced Fare Permit program. What we should have instructed you to do is to select "Yes, I have registered card" when you wanted to add it to your My ORCA account. As a result, you're unable to do this as the system keeps giving you the "card already registered" message. To fix this, unfortunately, you will have to create a new My ORCA account. This is the workaround until we find a better solution. The old username will remain in the database, but your card will be connected to the new one. I've listed a step-by-step process which should help you do this. 1. Go to http://www.orcacard.com/ home page2. Click on "Get ORCA now".3. In dialog box that appears, click on "Yes, I have a registered ORCA card." Click "Continue"4. In the new dialog box, enter the numbers from the front of the ORCA card just purchased and my zip code. Click "Continue"5. In the new dialog box, enter answer to my security question. Click "Continue"6. A new dialog box allows you to create a new account with ORCA..... I hope this helps out and I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Please contact us if you have any other questions.
RantWoman reports:
--Found the I have an ORCA card link. RantWoman suspects this is new somewhere in the intervening weeks since she first set off on this journey.
--Found the text about the Regional Reduced Fare Permit. RantWoman STRONGLY suggests redoing the UI so this info is on the TOP page and the user is guided about what to do so he or she does not already have to use this. RantWoman concedes the teensiest tiniest possibility of user error: RantWoman tends to read the minimum necessary on a web page and it's possible that she could have learned what is there sooner by reading the page herself. However, coming back to the point about what to put on the home page....
--Entered the requested numbers and secret code for RantWoman's card. RantWoman can hardly contain her thrill to have gotten this far, but wait:
--Enter zip code of mailing address? RantWoman's mailing address has a different zip code from her residential address. Try the mailing address first. Ix-nay. Try the home address. Success! Well yeah, except that will screw RantWoman up if any credit card info input does a zip code verification. Put that on the list and worry about it after...
--Enter answer to secret question asked when you received the card? WTF??? RantWoman does not remember even being asked. The computer wants her to enter her favorite food.
RantWoman would NEVER use that as a secret question just because her tastes in food are much too catholic and much too subject to the whim of whatever new interesting thing she has eaten lately. RantWoman always has to choose a secret question that refers to a historical fact: what year was your favorite composer / writer/ role model born? What was paternal grandmother's maiden name? Something like that. The main thing is RantWoman has to CHOOSE a category she can remember and then report the answer to the secret question.
At this point, RantWoman had two choices: reply to the email or TRY to talk to a human. Perhaps RantWoman should have replied to her email.
Enough said? The guy on the phone listened to RantWoman's question and then wrote down some information, more information that RantWoman thinks she should have had to give him. RantWoman THINKS he understands her problem and he promises to call back, so....
to ORCA, RantWoman's standards for productivity are REALLY low. Today RantWoman received guidance that was not quite correct about the links she would see first. Then RantWoman hit one minor and one major obstacle before progress ground to a halt again.
RantWoman just received the following communication from ORCA customer service:
Good morning, Thanks for contacting us about your ORCA card. I apologize for the service you've received thus far and hope I can help.Your card is considered "registered" because we obtained your personal information as required by the Regional Reduced Fare Permit program. What we should have instructed you to do is to select "Yes, I have registered card" when you wanted to add it to your My ORCA account. As a result, you're unable to do this as the system keeps giving you the "card already registered" message. To fix this, unfortunately, you will have to create a new My ORCA account. This is the workaround until we find a better solution. The old username will remain in the database, but your card will be connected to the new one. I've listed a step-by-step process which should help you do this. 1. Go to http://www.orcacard.com/ home page2. Click on "Get ORCA now".3. In dialog box that appears, click on "Yes, I have a registered ORCA card." Click "Continue"4. In the new dialog box, enter the numbers from the front of the ORCA card just purchased and my zip code. Click "Continue"5. In the new dialog box, enter answer to my security question. Click "Continue"6. A new dialog box allows you to create a new account with ORCA..... I hope this helps out and I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Please contact us if you have any other questions.
RantWoman reports:
--Found the I have an ORCA card link. RantWoman suspects this is new somewhere in the intervening weeks since she first set off on this journey.
--Found the text about the Regional Reduced Fare Permit. RantWoman STRONGLY suggests redoing the UI so this info is on the TOP page and the user is guided about what to do so he or she does not already have to use this. RantWoman concedes the teensiest tiniest possibility of user error: RantWoman tends to read the minimum necessary on a web page and it's possible that she could have learned what is there sooner by reading the page herself. However, coming back to the point about what to put on the home page....
--Entered the requested numbers and secret code for RantWoman's card. RantWoman can hardly contain her thrill to have gotten this far, but wait:
--Enter zip code of mailing address? RantWoman's mailing address has a different zip code from her residential address. Try the mailing address first. Ix-nay. Try the home address. Success! Well yeah, except that will screw RantWoman up if any credit card info input does a zip code verification. Put that on the list and worry about it after...
--Enter answer to secret question asked when you received the card? WTF??? RantWoman does not remember even being asked. The computer wants her to enter her favorite food.
RantWoman would NEVER use that as a secret question just because her tastes in food are much too catholic and much too subject to the whim of whatever new interesting thing she has eaten lately. RantWoman always has to choose a secret question that refers to a historical fact: what year was your favorite composer / writer/ role model born? What was paternal grandmother's maiden name? Something like that. The main thing is RantWoman has to CHOOSE a category she can remember and then report the answer to the secret question.
At this point, RantWoman had two choices: reply to the email or TRY to talk to a human. Perhaps RantWoman should have replied to her email.
Enough said? The guy on the phone listened to RantWoman's question and then wrote down some information, more information that RantWoman thinks she should have had to give him. RantWoman THINKS he understands her problem and he promises to call back, so....
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Comic o' the day: Russell Peters
RantWoman likes to laugh. RantWoman has been known to laugh very hard at things that are rated PG-13 or that would make, say, her mother wince.
Meet Indian-Canadian comic Russell Peters
Russell Peters Live
RantWoman would quibble with the video quality but she still laughed very hard.
Go all Fan on the guy:
http://www.russellpeters.com/
Meet Indian-Canadian comic Russell Peters
Russell Peters Live
RantWoman would quibble with the video quality but she still laughed very hard.
Go all Fan on the guy:
http://www.russellpeters.com/
Swine Flu and IT
Today for something different RantWoman's screen reader bounced over her daily Computerworld feed including something that caused RantWoman to put pandemic into the search bar on the Computerworld site.
Is IT Ready for Pandemic after mergers, layoffs?
RantWoman's major takeaway: if you make a bunch of plans and get call ists worked out and then half the topical names quit or get reorganized or laid off, you could have a problem. RantWoman would say, well chek your disaster prep every six months when you change your clocks and check the smoke detectors. Of course if half the workforce is temp and contingent anyway, everyone is going to rely on their adhoc informal functional networks anyway, but RantWoman will try to avoid wandering into that zone.
The article contained sensible points about business continuity planning and links to disaster recovery sites. It also contained hysterical comments calling on the US to close our borders and missing the point that the flu virus is kind of a different beastie from the prions that cause mad cow disease. After two such comments, RantWoman felt little need to read further in the comments.
But wait. Those articles are from April and RantWoman's email had something recent. Search string is everything. Try "swine flu." Bingo. Spammers and fake meds. Twitter. Ads. Phew. What a relief! Pretty much the average internet shooting match:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/googleSearch.do?cx=014839440456418836424%3A-khvkt1lc-e&q=swine+flu&cof=FORID%3A9#1667
And at the WHO
What is Phase 6, Moderate Severity?
Update 48
Is IT Ready for Pandemic after mergers, layoffs?
RantWoman's major takeaway: if you make a bunch of plans and get call ists worked out and then half the topical names quit or get reorganized or laid off, you could have a problem. RantWoman would say, well chek your disaster prep every six months when you change your clocks and check the smoke detectors. Of course if half the workforce is temp and contingent anyway, everyone is going to rely on their adhoc informal functional networks anyway, but RantWoman will try to avoid wandering into that zone.
The article contained sensible points about business continuity planning and links to disaster recovery sites. It also contained hysterical comments calling on the US to close our borders and missing the point that the flu virus is kind of a different beastie from the prions that cause mad cow disease. After two such comments, RantWoman felt little need to read further in the comments.
But wait. Those articles are from April and RantWoman's email had something recent. Search string is everything. Try "swine flu." Bingo. Spammers and fake meds. Twitter. Ads. Phew. What a relief! Pretty much the average internet shooting match:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/googleSearch.do?cx=014839440456418836424%3A-khvkt1lc-e&q=swine+flu&cof=FORID%3A9#1667
And at the WHO
What is Phase 6, Moderate Severity?
Update 48
Peanut Butter Wheat Germ Improvisation Cookies
RantWoman assumes the world already knows she likes to eat. Here RantWoman will even eventually assume the world might like to eat things RantWoman likes to eat, like her favorite peanut-butter wheat germ improvisation cookies.
RantWoman tends to favor high fiber, less sugar than average baked goods. RantWoman consumes plenty of flax oil and salmon, olive oil and food high in omega-3 fatty acids. RantWoman does not obsess about the low-fat or super-low cholesterol. For instance, although RantWoman is not quite Julia Child about butter, she does have some in her kitchen for the odd baked potato or even very occasionally toast. RantWoman also relies on eggs a good bit for protein and iron.
RantWoman mentions all this partly because she just got back results of her latest blood tests: Nothing in danger zones; good cholesterol a little low; bad cholesterol a little high. RantWoman could certainly stand to exercise more. RantWoman will consider tweaking her consumption of eggs and butter, though just getting more exercise sounds like more fun.
Now the basics of the recipe:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
1 cup margarine*
1 cup peanut butter^
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
Cream above ingredients together; use margarine wrappers to grease baking sheet(s). If the margarine is at room temperature and you want exercise, just do this by hand; RantWoman usually uses her mixer, but see note about more exercise.
3 c sifted flour#
2 tsp baking soda
generous 1/3 c wheat germ
Mix dry ingredients into the butter peanut butter egg mixure
Dough should be stiff enough to roll into balls easily with your hands. Walnut-sized balls will make lovely small cookies. Place the balls on the cookie sheet. Use the tines of a fork to press criss-crosses into the dough. Bake 8-10 minutes. The bottoms of the cookies should be slightly brown. If a pan or two gets too dark, use those for dunking.
*RantWoman baked these once with half butter and actually did not like them as well as when she just uses decent corn oil or canola margarine. RantWoman really dislikes margarine brands that overdo whatever chemical it is that has the buttery taste but causes workers in microwave popcorn plants bad lung problems if they breathe it all day.
^RantWoman is a snob about what she will use for peanut butter sandwiches. She tends to favor Adams Old Fashioned or the fresh grind from her neighborhood food co-op. For cookies though, sorry world, RantWoman just uses what's cheap.
#RantWoman sometimes just makes these with half all-purpose and half whole wheat flour. In that case maybe two tablespoons of wheat germ is enough. If you use only all-purpose flour, definitely use the generous 1/3 cup of wheat germ.
This will make 6-7 dozen smallish cookies. They freeze beautifully and can be packed equally well in lunchbox-sized bags or in larger quantities for sharing.
RantWoman tends to favor high fiber, less sugar than average baked goods. RantWoman consumes plenty of flax oil and salmon, olive oil and food high in omega-3 fatty acids. RantWoman does not obsess about the low-fat or super-low cholesterol. For instance, although RantWoman is not quite Julia Child about butter, she does have some in her kitchen for the odd baked potato or even very occasionally toast. RantWoman also relies on eggs a good bit for protein and iron.
RantWoman mentions all this partly because she just got back results of her latest blood tests: Nothing in danger zones; good cholesterol a little low; bad cholesterol a little high. RantWoman could certainly stand to exercise more. RantWoman will consider tweaking her consumption of eggs and butter, though just getting more exercise sounds like more fun.
Now the basics of the recipe:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
1 cup margarine*
1 cup peanut butter^
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
Cream above ingredients together; use margarine wrappers to grease baking sheet(s). If the margarine is at room temperature and you want exercise, just do this by hand; RantWoman usually uses her mixer, but see note about more exercise.
3 c sifted flour#
2 tsp baking soda
generous 1/3 c wheat germ
Mix dry ingredients into the butter peanut butter egg mixure
Dough should be stiff enough to roll into balls easily with your hands. Walnut-sized balls will make lovely small cookies. Place the balls on the cookie sheet. Use the tines of a fork to press criss-crosses into the dough. Bake 8-10 minutes. The bottoms of the cookies should be slightly brown. If a pan or two gets too dark, use those for dunking.
*RantWoman baked these once with half butter and actually did not like them as well as when she just uses decent corn oil or canola margarine. RantWoman really dislikes margarine brands that overdo whatever chemical it is that has the buttery taste but causes workers in microwave popcorn plants bad lung problems if they breathe it all day.
^RantWoman is a snob about what she will use for peanut butter sandwiches. She tends to favor Adams Old Fashioned or the fresh grind from her neighborhood food co-op. For cookies though, sorry world, RantWoman just uses what's cheap.
#RantWoman sometimes just makes these with half all-purpose and half whole wheat flour. In that case maybe two tablespoons of wheat germ is enough. If you use only all-purpose flour, definitely use the generous 1/3 cup of wheat germ.
This will make 6-7 dozen smallish cookies. They freeze beautifully and can be packed equally well in lunchbox-sized bags or in larger quantities for sharing.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Two, two, two trains at once
Yesterday morning on RantWoman's excursion of the day RantWoman saw the new Link Light rail trains in the downtown bus tunnel. RantWoman has seen them there before and definitely considers this a sign of progress.
Last night RantWoman was out pedestriating about her 'hood. The new Forest Street bus facility is starting to look more plausible, though RantWoman admits she is surveying from a distance because all nearby sidewalk is still blocked off.
More notable than the bus facility: RantWoman was strolling down MLK when she noticed not one but two trains going in opposite directions through the foliage at her nearest station. Mind you, the visual effect is a little like the astronomers who track things passing in front of other things by what gets blocked out. RantWoman saw white blocking out the green foliage. Then she noticed the white was moving both direction. Cool. Two, two, two trains at once. going opposite directions just as they should.
Sigh. On the return leg of RantWoman's trip, RantWoman had a brief brain cramp about the state, still, of the entryway to the Mount Baker station and considerable adjoining sidewalk. Let's just say RantWoman will keep looking. However, RantWoman was close enough to the trains to note that one cycle of trains seemed like merely average train rumble and two other cycles sounded like some bearings really need to be greased or there is some other reason for cutting metal noises that RantWoman hopes will go away.
Go trains!
Last night RantWoman was out pedestriating about her 'hood. The new Forest Street bus facility is starting to look more plausible, though RantWoman admits she is surveying from a distance because all nearby sidewalk is still blocked off.
More notable than the bus facility: RantWoman was strolling down MLK when she noticed not one but two trains going in opposite directions through the foliage at her nearest station. Mind you, the visual effect is a little like the astronomers who track things passing in front of other things by what gets blocked out. RantWoman saw white blocking out the green foliage. Then she noticed the white was moving both direction. Cool. Two, two, two trains at once. going opposite directions just as they should.
Sigh. On the return leg of RantWoman's trip, RantWoman had a brief brain cramp about the state, still, of the entryway to the Mount Baker station and considerable adjoining sidewalk. Let's just say RantWoman will keep looking. However, RantWoman was close enough to the trains to note that one cycle of trains seemed like merely average train rumble and two other cycles sounded like some bearings really need to be greased or there is some other reason for cutting metal noises that RantWoman hopes will go away.
Go trains!
Friday, June 12, 2009
ORCA trying again and again
set sarcasm filter MAXIMUM
Dear ORCA
The ORCA card number listed above is a free--and zero-value-- one RantWoman was given at a public event. It registered fine. So far, RantWoman has been completely unable to assign her own card with her Reduced Fare Permit #zzzzzzz to this account.
RantWoman is a self-employed businessperson. RantWoman has a disabled pass because she is legally blind.
Today after making a bus trip that should indeed have subtracted some money from RantWoman's wallet, she realized she has a business need to be able to track the expenditures from her wallet. She also has a bank account and would greatly appreciate the convenience of being able to purchase her new pass each month and add to her wallet from the privacy and convenience of her own office.
RantWoman has contacted your agency previously and has gotten 3 different equally ridiculous suggestions about how to solve the problem. One person suggested creating a new ORCA account. This suggestion offers no indication of how this would help the error message about the CARD already being registered.
The other two contacts referred RantWoman to two different links that she does not see on her view of the ORCA webpage. RantWoman does not see these links either visually, no surprise, or with her screen reader. To RantWoman that is a pretty good indication that they are indeed not there.
The fact that these suggestions refer RantWoman to links she does not see causes her to think perhaps the customer service staff sees a different version of the webpage than members of the public. There might be several good reasons for this. It was a little disconcerting to hear the phone equivalent of a blank stare from the customer service agents spoken to when RantWoman suggested this possibility. Getting referred to non-existant links is no help at all in RantWoman's efforts to register her own Reduced Fare Card.
RantWoman would appreciate your very prompt attention to this problem. RantWoman is quite sure there are other employed people with reduced fare permits who would also appreciate being able to add funds to our card the same way users of other cards do.
Best Regards
RantWoman
reduce sarcasm filter.
Dear ORCA
The ORCA card number listed above is a free--and zero-value-- one RantWoman was given at a public event. It registered fine. So far, RantWoman has been completely unable to assign her own card with her Reduced Fare Permit #zzzzzzz to this account.
RantWoman is a self-employed businessperson. RantWoman has a disabled pass because she is legally blind.
Today after making a bus trip that should indeed have subtracted some money from RantWoman's wallet, she realized she has a business need to be able to track the expenditures from her wallet. She also has a bank account and would greatly appreciate the convenience of being able to purchase her new pass each month and add to her wallet from the privacy and convenience of her own office.
RantWoman has contacted your agency previously and has gotten 3 different equally ridiculous suggestions about how to solve the problem. One person suggested creating a new ORCA account. This suggestion offers no indication of how this would help the error message about the CARD already being registered.
The other two contacts referred RantWoman to two different links that she does not see on her view of the ORCA webpage. RantWoman does not see these links either visually, no surprise, or with her screen reader. To RantWoman that is a pretty good indication that they are indeed not there.
The fact that these suggestions refer RantWoman to links she does not see causes her to think perhaps the customer service staff sees a different version of the webpage than members of the public. There might be several good reasons for this. It was a little disconcerting to hear the phone equivalent of a blank stare from the customer service agents spoken to when RantWoman suggested this possibility. Getting referred to non-existant links is no help at all in RantWoman's efforts to register her own Reduced Fare Card.
RantWoman would appreciate your very prompt attention to this problem. RantWoman is quite sure there are other employed people with reduced fare permits who would also appreciate being able to add funds to our card the same way users of other cards do.
Best Regards
RantWoman
reduce sarcasm filter.
Bus-ted!
What the #$*@ is RantWoman supposed to do? This morning RantWoman was on the middle leg of her 3-bus ride to her destination. The layovers between the buses were all short and RantWoman was basically well-pleased with her riding experience.
The drivers were courteous. The drivers were all doing an excellent job of calling the stops. The buses were close to schedule. The weather was clear. Traffic was minimal. The rides were smooth. The passengers were helpful, especially one on the last leg who not only showed RantWoman to her destination but also provided lovely conversation on the pedestrian part of the trip.
There was just one problem. One VERY big problem. The driver on one leg of the trip was TALKING ON HIS CELLPHONE! How did RantWoman know it was the driver talking on his cellphone???? The very same exact voice that was quite appropriately calling the stops was between stops having an obviously one-sided conversation that RantWoman is certain must have been a cellphone. The content was not overly emotional. Driving conditions were excellent. Passenger decorum was holding steady. And the driver was talking on his cellphone!
RantWoman has heard second-hand that talking on a cellphone while driving a bus is a firing offense. RantWoman has no idea whether bus drivers are allowed to talk on the phone if they have a hands-free device. RantWoman really would prefer not even to have to think about the issue, especially when the very thing that helps RantWoman bust the conversation is something the drivers most certainly SHOULD be doing like calling the stops.
RantWoman generally takes a dim view of talking on the cellphone while driving. In fact, RantWoman will usually brusquely disengage from her conversation partner if it becomes clear that the person is talking on a cellphone while driving. Today's driver seemed well in control and driving conditions were very favorable. This is one reason RantWoman is Ranting in her blog instead of ranting some other directions.
But dear drivers, consider yourself warned: no matter how grateful RantWoman is for drivers who call the stops, no matter how little RantWoman wants to have to bust anyone for talking on the cellphone, RantWoman can and will do it!
The drivers were courteous. The drivers were all doing an excellent job of calling the stops. The buses were close to schedule. The weather was clear. Traffic was minimal. The rides were smooth. The passengers were helpful, especially one on the last leg who not only showed RantWoman to her destination but also provided lovely conversation on the pedestrian part of the trip.
There was just one problem. One VERY big problem. The driver on one leg of the trip was TALKING ON HIS CELLPHONE! How did RantWoman know it was the driver talking on his cellphone???? The very same exact voice that was quite appropriately calling the stops was between stops having an obviously one-sided conversation that RantWoman is certain must have been a cellphone. The content was not overly emotional. Driving conditions were excellent. Passenger decorum was holding steady. And the driver was talking on his cellphone!
RantWoman has heard second-hand that talking on a cellphone while driving a bus is a firing offense. RantWoman has no idea whether bus drivers are allowed to talk on the phone if they have a hands-free device. RantWoman really would prefer not even to have to think about the issue, especially when the very thing that helps RantWoman bust the conversation is something the drivers most certainly SHOULD be doing like calling the stops.
RantWoman generally takes a dim view of talking on the cellphone while driving. In fact, RantWoman will usually brusquely disengage from her conversation partner if it becomes clear that the person is talking on a cellphone while driving. Today's driver seemed well in control and driving conditions were very favorable. This is one reason RantWoman is Ranting in her blog instead of ranting some other directions.
But dear drivers, consider yourself warned: no matter how grateful RantWoman is for drivers who call the stops, no matter how little RantWoman wants to have to bust anyone for talking on the cellphone, RantWoman can and will do it!
Disgusting
RantWoman hesitates to rant about the fiasco of David Letterman's recent jokes about Sarah Palin and her family only because RantWoman does not think either one needs more attention. However, RantWoman is so disgusted by Letterman's jokes about the Palins' second daughter and the baseball player, so offended by his lame protestations that this is just humor that RantWoman is just shamelessly going to pour on the full measure of scorn Letterman's boorish behavior deserves.
Bear in mind, RantWoman is not a huge fan of Sarah Palin. RantWoman can understand the sexy pretty girl effect she undoubtedly added to the Republican campaign. RantWoman does not even think it terrible to have at least one candidate of any gender in the presidential campaign who knows how to field-dress a moose and who does not shy away from the title "Caribou Barbie." However, RantWoman does not find the recent Vice-Presidential candidate to be a role model of a western woman politician of anywhere near the stature of long-ago Seattle mayor Bertha Knight Landes, anti-war voter Jeanette Rankin, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, or a host of other figures.
RantWoman admits she could concur with Letterman's suggestion that Governor Palin do more optometrist ads. RantWoman could easily succumb to the temptation to play family therapist: it's no wonder Palin's 16-year-old daughter ran off and got pregnant with her Lothario boyfriend: mom had 3 other kids with a 4th on the way. Mom had a campaign and a state to run. Who the heck had any time for Bristol? Fortunately for all the rest of us, RantWOman does not have the right letters behind her name to qualify her to make the latter pronouncement. Sufficient for RantWoman's point: no matter how little RantWoman thinks of Sarah Palin, there is absolutely no excuse for making jokes that sound like invitation for some oversexed sport star to rape a 14-year-old.
The forces of sexism and snarky TV show host humor are so nauseating that RantWoman feels obliged to speak up simply in the name of decency. RantWoman finds herself wondering whether there is even one woman on Letterman's writing team. RantWoman really hopes there is SOMEONE with the sense to speak up when humor goes beyond the pale!
Bear in mind, RantWoman is not a huge fan of Sarah Palin. RantWoman can understand the sexy pretty girl effect she undoubtedly added to the Republican campaign. RantWoman does not even think it terrible to have at least one candidate of any gender in the presidential campaign who knows how to field-dress a moose and who does not shy away from the title "Caribou Barbie." However, RantWoman does not find the recent Vice-Presidential candidate to be a role model of a western woman politician of anywhere near the stature of long-ago Seattle mayor Bertha Knight Landes, anti-war voter Jeanette Rankin, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, or a host of other figures.
RantWoman admits she could concur with Letterman's suggestion that Governor Palin do more optometrist ads. RantWoman could easily succumb to the temptation to play family therapist: it's no wonder Palin's 16-year-old daughter ran off and got pregnant with her Lothario boyfriend: mom had 3 other kids with a 4th on the way. Mom had a campaign and a state to run. Who the heck had any time for Bristol? Fortunately for all the rest of us, RantWOman does not have the right letters behind her name to qualify her to make the latter pronouncement. Sufficient for RantWoman's point: no matter how little RantWoman thinks of Sarah Palin, there is absolutely no excuse for making jokes that sound like invitation for some oversexed sport star to rape a 14-year-old.
The forces of sexism and snarky TV show host humor are so nauseating that RantWoman feels obliged to speak up simply in the name of decency. RantWoman finds herself wondering whether there is even one woman on Letterman's writing team. RantWoman really hopes there is SOMEONE with the sense to speak up when humor goes beyond the pale!
Muppet Mania
Before RantWoman digresses about a thread from Twitter, RantWoman heartily recommends Jim Henson's Fantastic World ,an exhibit current at the current exhibit at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. RantWoman confesses: this exhibit is on her must-see list, but she has not seen it yet. RantWoman is recommending in preemptively for a few different reasons: an ad on the radio prompted her to think of the exhibit. An annoying and tasteless item out of a Twitter thread about swine flu reminded her. Most of all, RantWoman is kind of an embarrassing Muppets fan.
RantWoman is the kind of Muppets fan who, faced with the requirement to write a research paper her senior year in high school chose the Muppets for her topic. RantWoman did a tolerable amount of research. RantWoman spent a tolerable amount of time organizing her thoughts. RantWoman did not spend very much time actually writing her research paper--until the night before it was due. RantWoman then pulled the first ever all-nighter of her school career. Although RantWoman herself has not looked, RantWoman believes the resulting tour-de-force survived either in one of RantMom's boxes of priceless memorabilia from her children's multifaceted achievements or, a more alarming possibility, in one of RantWomans own boxes of such artifacts that came west on the truck that moved RantMom to Seattle.
The final twist on this masterpiece though: RantWoman's beloved teacher was still reading RantWoman's essay aloud to inspire other student essayists four years later when Little Sister passed through that same phase of the high school experience. Anyway, by the time RantWoman gets around to seeing the exhibit it might be on its way out of town and RantWoman thinks, sight unseen, that the exhibit deserves more attention than that.
Advance billing includes the chance to imagine oneself as a puppeteer, to perform karaoke for some of the Greatest Hits of Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, as well as works favored by that soppy hapless duo Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear. There is a downloadable podcast. If the thought of paying admission at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame might give you heart failure, there appear to be some volunteer opportunities. Also, there are ways to look around for discounts and coupons, a quest definitely on RantWoman's to-do list. In fact, if you would rather go look for good coupons and stand in line to see the exhibit than to read further RantWoman fulmination, please feel free to head out now.
See further fulmination departs from one of the Tweets this afternoon when "swine flu" was "trending" on Twitter. RantWoman made NO effort to read the whole thread, but her screen reader happened across one that RantWoman found really tasteless about how Kermit the Frog died of swine flu in connection with Miss Piggy. The first reason RantWoman found this tasteless is that Jim Henson did in fact die of a badly treated respiratory infection of some sort and RantWoman definitely thinks the world is poorer due to his premature death.
The second reason RantWoman finds this tasteless has to do with Miss Piggy's well-known fanatical attachment to her beloved "Kermie" and Kermit the Frog's affectionate indulgence of this mania. The actual Tweet contained lexicographical elements of a form that definitely could be taken two ways neither of which is in good taste when talking about such all-consuming romantic devotion, one theme of which was Miss Piggy's over-the-top objections to any insinuation that either half of this romantic duo might in more conventional practice be considered food. In fact, rather than spread any more verbal condiments over this topic, RantWoman is simply going to repeat her exhortation to go see the exhibit if you can.
RantWoman is the kind of Muppets fan who, faced with the requirement to write a research paper her senior year in high school chose the Muppets for her topic. RantWoman did a tolerable amount of research. RantWoman spent a tolerable amount of time organizing her thoughts. RantWoman did not spend very much time actually writing her research paper--until the night before it was due. RantWoman then pulled the first ever all-nighter of her school career. Although RantWoman herself has not looked, RantWoman believes the resulting tour-de-force survived either in one of RantMom's boxes of priceless memorabilia from her children's multifaceted achievements or, a more alarming possibility, in one of RantWomans own boxes of such artifacts that came west on the truck that moved RantMom to Seattle.
The final twist on this masterpiece though: RantWoman's beloved teacher was still reading RantWoman's essay aloud to inspire other student essayists four years later when Little Sister passed through that same phase of the high school experience. Anyway, by the time RantWoman gets around to seeing the exhibit it might be on its way out of town and RantWoman thinks, sight unseen, that the exhibit deserves more attention than that.
Advance billing includes the chance to imagine oneself as a puppeteer, to perform karaoke for some of the Greatest Hits of Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, as well as works favored by that soppy hapless duo Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear. There is a downloadable podcast. If the thought of paying admission at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame might give you heart failure, there appear to be some volunteer opportunities. Also, there are ways to look around for discounts and coupons, a quest definitely on RantWoman's to-do list. In fact, if you would rather go look for good coupons and stand in line to see the exhibit than to read further RantWoman fulmination, please feel free to head out now.
See further fulmination departs from one of the Tweets this afternoon when "swine flu" was "trending" on Twitter. RantWoman made NO effort to read the whole thread, but her screen reader happened across one that RantWoman found really tasteless about how Kermit the Frog died of swine flu in connection with Miss Piggy. The first reason RantWoman found this tasteless is that Jim Henson did in fact die of a badly treated respiratory infection of some sort and RantWoman definitely thinks the world is poorer due to his premature death.
The second reason RantWoman finds this tasteless has to do with Miss Piggy's well-known fanatical attachment to her beloved "Kermie" and Kermit the Frog's affectionate indulgence of this mania. The actual Tweet contained lexicographical elements of a form that definitely could be taken two ways neither of which is in good taste when talking about such all-consuming romantic devotion, one theme of which was Miss Piggy's over-the-top objections to any insinuation that either half of this romantic duo might in more conventional practice be considered food. In fact, rather than spread any more verbal condiments over this topic, RantWoman is simply going to repeat her exhortation to go see the exhibit if you can.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Multiprocessing
Something has to give. Or maybe more than one something and RantWoman will STILL have too much on plate.
It's officially a pandemic yet, and pandemic flu is trending on Twitter. It will still be a pandemic tomorrow.
RantWoman will not opine about markets and labels and hopes for vaccine. Instead RantWoman will note morning radio's reports of, in the local vernacular, the First Nations community in Northern Manitoba where there have already beens something like 22 deaths. A couple nights ago As it Happens had a piece on that community and previous pandemics. Not much stuck in brain from earlier report except location and flu. Today's report had toddler being flown to Winnipeg but not much else to be done except cold baths and Tylenol.
Oregon notes its first death from swine flu, someone with multiple other conditions.
Friend on Twitter confesses her own Household Hazard Hunt query. Post RantWoman's confessions in that vein another time along with random small disaster prep discussions of the viral chatter sort.
RantMom, her wonderful sibs and probably a passle of other farm kid cousins are vacationing their hearts out in the home environs. RantWoman would make the morning I love ya call on the cellphone family plan, but they are probably half done with their day and too much farm kid peppiness will just make RantWoman feel like even more of an urban slug than she already does. Someone famous that RantWoman decided on a whim to follow also gets up late and he has half a million people following him get up.
Twitter link on Chronicle of Philanthropy live discussion about foundations in recession. Read bulk of text then flip in and out read updates. I LOVE their site, once I figured out how it works. Fine line between info overload and grazing / fertilizing / cross-pollinating. Need to get the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing on solid footing so read this instead of some other ....
NEED to do paperwork for some other projects and work on a third proposal. Need to partner with someone who needs office skills experience so I can just coach.
It's officially a pandemic yet, and pandemic flu is trending on Twitter. It will still be a pandemic tomorrow.
RantWoman will not opine about markets and labels and hopes for vaccine. Instead RantWoman will note morning radio's reports of, in the local vernacular, the First Nations community in Northern Manitoba where there have already beens something like 22 deaths. A couple nights ago As it Happens had a piece on that community and previous pandemics. Not much stuck in brain from earlier report except location and flu. Today's report had toddler being flown to Winnipeg but not much else to be done except cold baths and Tylenol.
Oregon notes its first death from swine flu, someone with multiple other conditions.
Friend on Twitter confesses her own Household Hazard Hunt query. Post RantWoman's confessions in that vein another time along with random small disaster prep discussions of the viral chatter sort.
RantMom, her wonderful sibs and probably a passle of other farm kid cousins are vacationing their hearts out in the home environs. RantWoman would make the morning I love ya call on the cellphone family plan, but they are probably half done with their day and too much farm kid peppiness will just make RantWoman feel like even more of an urban slug than she already does. Someone famous that RantWoman decided on a whim to follow also gets up late and he has half a million people following him get up.
Twitter link on Chronicle of Philanthropy live discussion about foundations in recession. Read bulk of text then flip in and out read updates. I LOVE their site, once I figured out how it works. Fine line between info overload and grazing / fertilizing / cross-pollinating. Need to get the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing on solid footing so read this instead of some other ....
NEED to do paperwork for some other projects and work on a third proposal. Need to partner with someone who needs office skills experience so I can just coach.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Walkability Whine of the day
A couple days ago RantWoman had to pay a visit to one of her medical providers. The visit is its own rant: there are only so many ways to make tedious medical tests entertaining and RantWoman is darn short of any. RantWoman does want to rant about walkability. RantWoman would actually like to find a picture of the very facility she visited to make her point but the vast oceans of searchable material did not yield anything helpful in the few short minutes RantWoman wanted to devote to her quest today.
The facility has a lovely parking lot in the back with tolerable attention to pedestrian amenities. The facility has a lovely driveway so that people arriving in vans or taxis have reasonable paths to the front door from a long U-shaped driveway in front of the building. However, RantWoman is far from the only patient streaming toward that very facility from the nearby bus stop.
The bus stop is itself lovely. Thanks to both passengers and bus driver complaining about problems with a previous placement of the bus stop, new signage and a lovely concrete foundation arose at the desired location. There is a good traffic signal. The sidewalk is in fine condition. What could possibly be wrong????
The problem from RantWoman's perspective is thtat there is no separate pedestrian walkway from that lovely bus stop to the lovely front door. There is either a glorious expanse of lawn with some shrubbery and flowers for punctuation or there is the fire lane / driveway into the parking lot.
People are generally responsible drivers and do not tend to come barreling out like the proverbial bat out of hell. However, the word is "generally." Once in awhile, someone is not paying attention or the zillions of vans and delivery vehicles in the front parking lot get stacked up in ways that RantWoman finds very disconcerting. RantWoman does not necessarily advocate paving a strip of sidewalk across the glorious front lawn, but the continual need to risk life and limb doing what to RantWoman seems like a perfectly normal, reasonable, predictable pedestrian move does rankle RantWoman.
And maybe it is just as well RantWoman cannot find a picture. If RantWoman had a picture, perhaps a whole bunch of other facilities might think they are off the hook because RantWoman is not talking about them. Go look at your own facilities for your own darn selves! If you don't know what to look for, ask someone who comes regularly on the bus!
The facility has a lovely parking lot in the back with tolerable attention to pedestrian amenities. The facility has a lovely driveway so that people arriving in vans or taxis have reasonable paths to the front door from a long U-shaped driveway in front of the building. However, RantWoman is far from the only patient streaming toward that very facility from the nearby bus stop.
The bus stop is itself lovely. Thanks to both passengers and bus driver complaining about problems with a previous placement of the bus stop, new signage and a lovely concrete foundation arose at the desired location. There is a good traffic signal. The sidewalk is in fine condition. What could possibly be wrong????
The problem from RantWoman's perspective is thtat there is no separate pedestrian walkway from that lovely bus stop to the lovely front door. There is either a glorious expanse of lawn with some shrubbery and flowers for punctuation or there is the fire lane / driveway into the parking lot.
People are generally responsible drivers and do not tend to come barreling out like the proverbial bat out of hell. However, the word is "generally." Once in awhile, someone is not paying attention or the zillions of vans and delivery vehicles in the front parking lot get stacked up in ways that RantWoman finds very disconcerting. RantWoman does not necessarily advocate paving a strip of sidewalk across the glorious front lawn, but the continual need to risk life and limb doing what to RantWoman seems like a perfectly normal, reasonable, predictable pedestrian move does rankle RantWoman.
And maybe it is just as well RantWoman cannot find a picture. If RantWoman had a picture, perhaps a whole bunch of other facilities might think they are off the hook because RantWoman is not talking about them. Go look at your own facilities for your own darn selves! If you don't know what to look for, ask someone who comes regularly on the bus!
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Saturday Night Swine Flu update
The second person confirmed to have swine flu has died in King County. May she rest in peace.
The news will emerge on Sunday that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and his wife are quarantined in Shanghai because someone on the mayor's flight for his trade mission was showing flulike symptoms.
RantWoman has not poked at WHO stats this week. Last time she did, whatever one thinks of the numbers and countries' capacity to detect cases, one could understand other countries' urge to disinfect and scrutinize anything arriving from the US. Would this slack off if suddenly proportionately much larger number of cases started getting detected somewhere else? Perhaps best not to have to find out and just live with the sanitizing.
The volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing who pointed out the relevance of hand sanitizer has taken to doing lots of things in rubber gloves. He is a wheelchair user and RantWoman found herself thinking of the multicultural masculine habit of spitting in the street. RantWoman knows of nothing associated with the Y chromosome that would require frequent spitting, but RantWoman can attest that the revolting practice is multinational. Mercifully it is not universal.
If RantWoman needed a manual wheelchair, she would use good gloves just on the grounds of ordinary disgustingness. RantWoman is not sure she wants to think about the matter of wearing the same gloves one goes tooling around the slime-covered byways in to poke and point at things in the Friendly Neighborhood center. Probably another reason hand sanitizer is topical.
A doctor was on the radio yesterday talking about some of the intransigent people who came into her clinic without any of the worst telltale symptoms and WOULD NOT LEAVE until the clinic did blood tests. RantWoman thinks that is NUTS: why spend a second longer than you have to in a doctor's waiting room full of germs, germ vectors, and multiple options for mutant germ conventions?
RantWoman emailed her friend the STD doctor about something else and asked what was likely to be the theme issue at an annual professional meeting. Swine flu did not even register.
RantWoman emailed her friend the chemical physicist turned translator. Chemical physicist, aka RantScientist, most certainly concurs with RantWoman that the word "quantum" should not be seen in public with sentences about housing construction.
RantScientist is already an ardent germ-phobe and militant handwasher for multiple reasons of her own. RantScientist's capacity to rant at formidable length so vastly exceeds that of RantWoman that sometimes RantWoman just has to stand by in awe, even if not necessarily in complete accord:
RantScientist writes
Going back to the house calls of my childhood would go a long way toward slowing down infections and would make life much easier for many of us. The last place I want to be when I'm sick is in a waiting room full of sick people, and just traveling is hard to do when really sick. (Don't even get me started about what dangerous places hospitals are for sick people...) Why not a van with essential devices in it for any routine testing, a mobile lab as is used in many other contexts?
All of these problems really go back to the basic problem of our predatory approach to health care costs. A real national health care system like what other people in the world enjoy would make a huge difference. For instance,the Australians only pay 2% of their income to support their system (4% ifthey're rich), and it works. When I was sick for several months (with acompletely treatable, non-chronic, common disease that should have been under control in a couple of weeks if the original doctor hadn't been such a greedy idiot) thanks to the incompetence and insanity of the American WeDon't Care system, meaning several months with no income, I still had to paythe outrageous medical premiums and all that the insurance company didn'tfeel like paying for. Guess who had to go into big debt again after a delightful period of owing nothing to the credit card banker vultures? Ifigured that in the aftermath, 40% of my taxable income was going to the insurance vultures just for premiums.... I would need to make over $150,000per year for my insurance premiums to even be just 5% of my income (and that will undoubtedly change upward in July, when the vultures will inevitably decide to up my premiums again - 24% last year, they tried for 38% the previous year since I had the audacity to actually get sick the year before, so I had to go to a $5000 deductible which I don't really have).
Anyway - if we had a rational system, preventive measures (which are cheaper than dealing with the inevitable disease) would be so much easier to deal with. But what can we expect from a system that doesn't cover blood glucose testing kits for diabetics but does cover amputations when they can't control their glucose?!? (RantScientist lives in a different state; RantWoman thinks some WA healthcare providers do a better job in this area.) So we're hardly going to do the obvious thing and provide free supplements of things that are proven to help boost the immune system, such as Vitamin C or Shaklee's Nutriferon (an herbal supplement concocted after years of research by the Japanese scientist who discovered human interferon). Or a systemt that won't provide ways for the schools to quickly isolate sick children (without forcing their parents to lose workdays) and treat them properly immediately, instead of waiting until theinfection spreads to half the class. And of course just providing governmental financial support for extra sick days when facing the prospectsof a pandemic might make restaurants and workplaces a lot safer. Too simple?Or too sensible?
...
>from OCA's Weekly Newsletter> <http://www.organicconsumers.org/>> > "Despite years of warnings by public interest organizations, such as the> Organic Consumers Association and the Humane Society of the U.S., intensive> confinement factory farms are incubating deadly viruses that could set off a> deadly epidemic....> > A dangerous and rapidly spreading strain of influenza, which combines> genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not> seen before...
I suppose it could also be an escapee from a lab... But pigs can definitely harbor human, bird, and pig viruses - so if domestic birds can get "birdflu" from wild birds, I imagine a pig could do the same (even if humans arethe immediate vectors from the pig's point of view rather than directcontact with birds). So it could be a "natural" brew.
But I worried about that possibility of "lab escapees" when the killer E.coli bacterial strain came out a while back - a biologist friend had expressed concern years before about E. coli (ubiquitous in mammalianintestinal tracts, including humans) being used for genetic engineeringpurposes. When I did translation work later on genetic engineering, Irealized why he was worried. E. coli, for instance, which is well characterized genetically and easy to grow, is used as a little factory for making large amounts of genetic material from foreign sources (with desirable properties) that can be injected into other organisms (including higher organisms such as plants, where they are transferred typically through a pathogen).
One-celled organisms include circular bits of DNA called plasmids in thecytoplasm (besides the chromosomal DNA in the cell's nucleus). Specificgenes with specific properties can be inserted into these plasmids (called vectors). A typical procedure is to use vector plasmids already carrying antibiotic resistance to also carry the gene of interest: the vector plasmid enters the E. coli, which are then grown in media containing the antibiotic so that only those which harbor the plasmid of interest (containing the new gene plus the antibiotic resistant gene) will be resistant to the antibiotic and thus will be fruitful and multiply. Then these plasmids can be transferred to other types of cells relevant to the final goal, e.g., a plant pathogen to eventually impart the desired property to the plant. Desirable properties can include such things as resistance to common pesticides (so the pesticide will kill weeds but not the crop) or increased production of something valuable by the plant (e.g., a particular vitamin).
These plasmids are easily shared outside the lab with other microorganisms(even of different species) as well. This is why antibiotic resistance(carried by the plasmids) easily crosses species barriers amongst the one-celled crowd, and hospitals are like country clubs for the microbeasties(bringing diverse populations into contact that would rarely meet in the wild). For instance, if a particular antibiotic targets a particular component of the bacterial cell membrane to make it leaky - an antibiotic resistance gene might alter the component enough to make the antibiotic ineffective. Another antibiotic is needed with a new target. Until themicrobeastie develops another gene to block the new antibiotic, of course.
Viruses are much simpler entities than bacteria and take over the reproductive apparatus of a cell, churning out copies of themselves. The antiviral tamiflu seems to inhibit production of a particular membrane protein in cells targeted by the bird flu virus. The virus can get in, but its viral copies can't easily break out to infect other cells if that virus needs that protein for escape. Of course, this only works with the right virus that uses the right escape mechanism.
Generally the antivirals are effective only very early in the infection(within the first 48 hours), when they can seriously inhibit reproduction of the virus. Many people don't know they are infected until too late for the antiviral, although it can be helpful if you know you've been exposed. There is never any guarantee that a developed antiviral will be effective on a particular strain, and flu strains especially mutate incredibly fast. Also the antivirals are just as expensive as many other antibiotics here in the US - a little bottle of 10 doses can cost USD 50 to 60 or even more and most medical insurance is unlikely to cover the cost (my insurance didn't cover regular antibiotics significantly, and I ended up paying more than USD 400 just for the antibiotics to knock out a UTI). So they are something to beused sparingly, both because of the cost and because resistance to them willincrease as they become more commonly used.
Best to keep up your immune system in other ways, since that's a much more multipurpose approach. Besides, even the most powerful antibiotic won't helpif your immune system doesn't eventually kick in - they just reduce thenumbers of the pathogens enough to give your body a fighting chance.
Anyway - although the quoted article mentions the problem of antibiotic resistance spreading in the crowded conditions of factory farms (even worse than human hospitals...) and that is generally associated with bacterial pathogens, the problem of incubation of viruses is also definitely a problemin such conditions. The animals have poorer immune system functions because of all the stress. If you look at the bird flu problem - once it got past the original cases where farmers were living too close to the birds with inadequate sanitary provisions, I think that the outbreaks (in Europe, for instance) were not coming from the small family farms but rather from thefactory farms. The small flocks typically included healthy unstressed birdswho were much more likely to be resilient enough to deal with any stray virus that they might have encountered from wild birds.
So it's the weakened immune systems of the animals raised under factory farming conditions that are the problem, and that would be true for viral illnesses as well as bacterial illnesses.
Pigs are especially a problem because they seem to be more similar to humans in certain key ways. This is why the poor things (especially the babies and the miniature variety) are often tortured for human medical purposes andeven used for organ transplants. This would suggest more opportunities for cross-species jumping of various illnesses and parasites. The religious prohibitions against eating pigs make a lot of sense on that basis. It may have been noticed that people got sick more often from eating pigs than other animals.
Peace (RantScientist)
Ph.D. Chemical Physics/M.A. Physics/B.S. ChemistryScientific Translator since 1978Russian/French/German/Spanish/Italian into US English
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The news will emerge on Sunday that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and his wife are quarantined in Shanghai because someone on the mayor's flight for his trade mission was showing flulike symptoms.
RantWoman has not poked at WHO stats this week. Last time she did, whatever one thinks of the numbers and countries' capacity to detect cases, one could understand other countries' urge to disinfect and scrutinize anything arriving from the US. Would this slack off if suddenly proportionately much larger number of cases started getting detected somewhere else? Perhaps best not to have to find out and just live with the sanitizing.
The volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing who pointed out the relevance of hand sanitizer has taken to doing lots of things in rubber gloves. He is a wheelchair user and RantWoman found herself thinking of the multicultural masculine habit of spitting in the street. RantWoman knows of nothing associated with the Y chromosome that would require frequent spitting, but RantWoman can attest that the revolting practice is multinational. Mercifully it is not universal.
If RantWoman needed a manual wheelchair, she would use good gloves just on the grounds of ordinary disgustingness. RantWoman is not sure she wants to think about the matter of wearing the same gloves one goes tooling around the slime-covered byways in to poke and point at things in the Friendly Neighborhood center. Probably another reason hand sanitizer is topical.
A doctor was on the radio yesterday talking about some of the intransigent people who came into her clinic without any of the worst telltale symptoms and WOULD NOT LEAVE until the clinic did blood tests. RantWoman thinks that is NUTS: why spend a second longer than you have to in a doctor's waiting room full of germs, germ vectors, and multiple options for mutant germ conventions?
RantWoman emailed her friend the STD doctor about something else and asked what was likely to be the theme issue at an annual professional meeting. Swine flu did not even register.
RantWoman emailed her friend the chemical physicist turned translator. Chemical physicist, aka RantScientist, most certainly concurs with RantWoman that the word "quantum" should not be seen in public with sentences about housing construction.
RantScientist is already an ardent germ-phobe and militant handwasher for multiple reasons of her own. RantScientist's capacity to rant at formidable length so vastly exceeds that of RantWoman that sometimes RantWoman just has to stand by in awe, even if not necessarily in complete accord:
RantScientist writes
Going back to the house calls of my childhood would go a long way toward slowing down infections and would make life much easier for many of us. The last place I want to be when I'm sick is in a waiting room full of sick people, and just traveling is hard to do when really sick. (Don't even get me started about what dangerous places hospitals are for sick people...) Why not a van with essential devices in it for any routine testing, a mobile lab as is used in many other contexts?
All of these problems really go back to the basic problem of our predatory approach to health care costs. A real national health care system like what other people in the world enjoy would make a huge difference. For instance,the Australians only pay 2% of their income to support their system (4% ifthey're rich), and it works. When I was sick for several months (with acompletely treatable, non-chronic, common disease that should have been under control in a couple of weeks if the original doctor hadn't been such a greedy idiot) thanks to the incompetence and insanity of the American WeDon't Care system, meaning several months with no income, I still had to paythe outrageous medical premiums and all that the insurance company didn'tfeel like paying for. Guess who had to go into big debt again after a delightful period of owing nothing to the credit card banker vultures? Ifigured that in the aftermath, 40% of my taxable income was going to the insurance vultures just for premiums.... I would need to make over $150,000per year for my insurance premiums to even be just 5% of my income (and that will undoubtedly change upward in July, when the vultures will inevitably decide to up my premiums again - 24% last year, they tried for 38% the previous year since I had the audacity to actually get sick the year before, so I had to go to a $5000 deductible which I don't really have).
Anyway - if we had a rational system, preventive measures (which are cheaper than dealing with the inevitable disease) would be so much easier to deal with. But what can we expect from a system that doesn't cover blood glucose testing kits for diabetics but does cover amputations when they can't control their glucose?!? (RantScientist lives in a different state; RantWoman thinks some WA healthcare providers do a better job in this area.) So we're hardly going to do the obvious thing and provide free supplements of things that are proven to help boost the immune system, such as Vitamin C or Shaklee's Nutriferon (an herbal supplement concocted after years of research by the Japanese scientist who discovered human interferon). Or a systemt that won't provide ways for the schools to quickly isolate sick children (without forcing their parents to lose workdays) and treat them properly immediately, instead of waiting until theinfection spreads to half the class. And of course just providing governmental financial support for extra sick days when facing the prospectsof a pandemic might make restaurants and workplaces a lot safer. Too simple?Or too sensible?
...
>from OCA's Weekly Newsletter> <http://www.organicconsumers.org/>> > "Despite years of warnings by public interest organizations, such as the> Organic Consumers Association and the Humane Society of the U.S., intensive> confinement factory farms are incubating deadly viruses that could set off a> deadly epidemic....> > A dangerous and rapidly spreading strain of influenza, which combines> genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not> seen before...
I suppose it could also be an escapee from a lab... But pigs can definitely harbor human, bird, and pig viruses - so if domestic birds can get "birdflu" from wild birds, I imagine a pig could do the same (even if humans arethe immediate vectors from the pig's point of view rather than directcontact with birds). So it could be a "natural" brew.
But I worried about that possibility of "lab escapees" when the killer E.coli bacterial strain came out a while back - a biologist friend had expressed concern years before about E. coli (ubiquitous in mammalianintestinal tracts, including humans) being used for genetic engineeringpurposes. When I did translation work later on genetic engineering, Irealized why he was worried. E. coli, for instance, which is well characterized genetically and easy to grow, is used as a little factory for making large amounts of genetic material from foreign sources (with desirable properties) that can be injected into other organisms (including higher organisms such as plants, where they are transferred typically through a pathogen).
One-celled organisms include circular bits of DNA called plasmids in thecytoplasm (besides the chromosomal DNA in the cell's nucleus). Specificgenes with specific properties can be inserted into these plasmids (called vectors). A typical procedure is to use vector plasmids already carrying antibiotic resistance to also carry the gene of interest: the vector plasmid enters the E. coli, which are then grown in media containing the antibiotic so that only those which harbor the plasmid of interest (containing the new gene plus the antibiotic resistant gene) will be resistant to the antibiotic and thus will be fruitful and multiply. Then these plasmids can be transferred to other types of cells relevant to the final goal, e.g., a plant pathogen to eventually impart the desired property to the plant. Desirable properties can include such things as resistance to common pesticides (so the pesticide will kill weeds but not the crop) or increased production of something valuable by the plant (e.g., a particular vitamin).
These plasmids are easily shared outside the lab with other microorganisms(even of different species) as well. This is why antibiotic resistance(carried by the plasmids) easily crosses species barriers amongst the one-celled crowd, and hospitals are like country clubs for the microbeasties(bringing diverse populations into contact that would rarely meet in the wild). For instance, if a particular antibiotic targets a particular component of the bacterial cell membrane to make it leaky - an antibiotic resistance gene might alter the component enough to make the antibiotic ineffective. Another antibiotic is needed with a new target. Until themicrobeastie develops another gene to block the new antibiotic, of course.
Viruses are much simpler entities than bacteria and take over the reproductive apparatus of a cell, churning out copies of themselves. The antiviral tamiflu seems to inhibit production of a particular membrane protein in cells targeted by the bird flu virus. The virus can get in, but its viral copies can't easily break out to infect other cells if that virus needs that protein for escape. Of course, this only works with the right virus that uses the right escape mechanism.
Generally the antivirals are effective only very early in the infection(within the first 48 hours), when they can seriously inhibit reproduction of the virus. Many people don't know they are infected until too late for the antiviral, although it can be helpful if you know you've been exposed. There is never any guarantee that a developed antiviral will be effective on a particular strain, and flu strains especially mutate incredibly fast. Also the antivirals are just as expensive as many other antibiotics here in the US - a little bottle of 10 doses can cost USD 50 to 60 or even more and most medical insurance is unlikely to cover the cost (my insurance didn't cover regular antibiotics significantly, and I ended up paying more than USD 400 just for the antibiotics to knock out a UTI). So they are something to beused sparingly, both because of the cost and because resistance to them willincrease as they become more commonly used.
Best to keep up your immune system in other ways, since that's a much more multipurpose approach. Besides, even the most powerful antibiotic won't helpif your immune system doesn't eventually kick in - they just reduce thenumbers of the pathogens enough to give your body a fighting chance.
Anyway - although the quoted article mentions the problem of antibiotic resistance spreading in the crowded conditions of factory farms (even worse than human hospitals...) and that is generally associated with bacterial pathogens, the problem of incubation of viruses is also definitely a problemin such conditions. The animals have poorer immune system functions because of all the stress. If you look at the bird flu problem - once it got past the original cases where farmers were living too close to the birds with inadequate sanitary provisions, I think that the outbreaks (in Europe, for instance) were not coming from the small family farms but rather from thefactory farms. The small flocks typically included healthy unstressed birdswho were much more likely to be resilient enough to deal with any stray virus that they might have encountered from wild birds.
So it's the weakened immune systems of the animals raised under factory farming conditions that are the problem, and that would be true for viral illnesses as well as bacterial illnesses.
Pigs are especially a problem because they seem to be more similar to humans in certain key ways. This is why the poor things (especially the babies and the miniature variety) are often tortured for human medical purposes andeven used for organ transplants. This would suggest more opportunities for cross-species jumping of various illnesses and parasites. The religious prohibitions against eating pigs make a lot of sense on that basis. It may have been noticed that people got sick more often from eating pigs than other animals.
Peace (RantScientist)
Ph.D. Chemical Physics/M.A. Physics/B.S. ChemistryScientific Translator since 1978Russian/French/German/Spanish/Italian into US English
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Tetris on D-day
RantWoman thanks the Google home page for this excursion. Most of the time the Google home page has a large G o o gle in the middle of the screen with a search bar and then assorted links above and below. Now and again the G o o g l e part of the page gets replaced by various alternatives: the winners of their children's drawing contest, something topical for Valentine's or St Patrick's Day, or today a G o o g l e spelled out in small pixel-sized blocks colored in a way that ads up to the way the regular letters sometimes look when RantWoman is not wearing her glasses or during some other visual moments.
RantWoman thanks Google very much for frequently putting a description of these special graphics in the text read by RantWoman's screen reader. Well, RantWoman sometimes is in a hurry and gets annoyed by ad texts in her sign-in screen, but RantWoman is grateful for the entry of this day calling to mind the 25th anniversary of the video game Tetris, a lovely play of colored blocks and geometry that RantWoman really used to be addicted to.
RantWoman feels duly obliged to note that today is also the 65th anniversary of D-day. The makers of Tetris, two guys from Russia, may be forgiven due to their nation's war experiences for holding the holiday in less esteem than the Western allies. RantWoman is herself amused if only on design grounds by the Tetris evocation
RantWoman thanks Google very much for frequently putting a description of these special graphics in the text read by RantWoman's screen reader. Well, RantWoman sometimes is in a hurry and gets annoyed by ad texts in her sign-in screen, but RantWoman is grateful for the entry of this day calling to mind the 25th anniversary of the video game Tetris, a lovely play of colored blocks and geometry that RantWoman really used to be addicted to.
RantWoman feels duly obliged to note that today is also the 65th anniversary of D-day. The makers of Tetris, two guys from Russia, may be forgiven due to their nation's war experiences for holding the holiday in less esteem than the Western allies. RantWoman is herself amused if only on design grounds by the Tetris evocation
Free foot massages
Here RantWoman just needs to collect a few items from recent experience pedestriating with visual wackiness.
First, thank you very much to whoever was doing whatever along Roosevelt way in the U-district today. There was something involving what RantWoman thinks was a long blue crane and a lot of orange traffic cones. The really miraculous noteworthy point is that the people working with the crane posted very sensible "Sidewalk closed" signs at crosswalks, and not only at crosswalks, but at crosswalks with traffic lights so that a person could figure out to avoid the problem far enough away to take sensible rather than desparate action! RantWoman is sorry that the entirely appropriate practice about stationing "sidewalk closed" signs to allow pedestrians to make sensible detours which SHOULD BE STANDARD PROCEDURE is erratic enough to merit enthusiastic acclaim when it occurs, but RantWoman does enthusiastically note it.
Now on to some other comments.
If RantWoman were a really disciplined researcher, she would include in this entry some links to ACB, NFB or Access Board information about pedestrian accessibility and traffic signals. For the moment, seeding the conversation with search terms will have to suffice.
The other caution: for some reason audible pedestrian signals and attempts at pedestrian accommodations are one of the topics about which members of the two main national blind organizations, http://www.acb.org/ and http://www.nfb.org/ become most ballistically divergent in approach. Both organizations lobby actively about pedestrian issues. Some of the approaches overlap significantly. However, RantWoman has detected a range of views ranging from "what's the point because nothing can be relied on 100% of the time?" to "well look at all the other people who benefit, for example from curb cuts."
RantWoman MAY be generalizing inappropriately from local samples. Suffice it to say, caution is always in order: if you are recruiting a blind person to offer perspectives on some or another policy or infrastructure, do your best to recruit one who is able and willing to speak carefully about multiple perspectives including the one(s) he or she is most ardent about.
Take audible traffic signals. Every once in awhile RantWoman will be out walking with one of her groupies. We will come upon a crosswalk with an audible traffic signal and RantWoman's companion will say something like "what does that signal mean?" RantWoman typically has no freaking idea at first, though RantWoman does know that the onset of a beeping traffic signal most assuredly is not a guarantee that it is safe to cross the street; sometimes she simply says "It means there is a beeping signal."
Typically these signals have two tones for the average orthogonal crosswalk. Simply by listening, RantWoman may or may not be able immediately to tell which direction the traffic is moving with each kind of tone. This being Seattle, this problem may obtain even if one naively thinks one side of the grid SHOULD be stopped.
Perhaps there is a left turn signal. Perhaps someone(s) are into "California stops" before going right on red. Perhaps someone just has a hormonal urge to pull their large metal carcass into the crosswalk in anticipation of the light change. Or perhaps the audible signal is located at an impossible intersection where at certain times of the day, the traffic can be guaranteed not to clear the intersection during the signal, perhaps due to traffic, due to backups behind a bus or a jaywalking pedestrian or a cop trying to ticket a jaywalking pedestrian or just sunspots.
There is one signal near RantWoman's house which definitely falls into the last category above. There is audible signal on only one side of the intersection, an impossible 5-way mess that MIGHT need an audible signal on one other leg. Even so, the onset of the beeping is most certainly NOT a guarantee that it is safe to cross the street.
First, thank you very much to whoever was doing whatever along Roosevelt way in the U-district today. There was something involving what RantWoman thinks was a long blue crane and a lot of orange traffic cones. The really miraculous noteworthy point is that the people working with the crane posted very sensible "Sidewalk closed" signs at crosswalks, and not only at crosswalks, but at crosswalks with traffic lights so that a person could figure out to avoid the problem far enough away to take sensible rather than desparate action! RantWoman is sorry that the entirely appropriate practice about stationing "sidewalk closed" signs to allow pedestrians to make sensible detours which SHOULD BE STANDARD PROCEDURE is erratic enough to merit enthusiastic acclaim when it occurs, but RantWoman does enthusiastically note it.
Now on to some other comments.
If RantWoman were a really disciplined researcher, she would include in this entry some links to ACB, NFB or Access Board information about pedestrian accessibility and traffic signals. For the moment, seeding the conversation with search terms will have to suffice.
The other caution: for some reason audible pedestrian signals and attempts at pedestrian accommodations are one of the topics about which members of the two main national blind organizations, http://www.acb.org/ and http://www.nfb.org/ become most ballistically divergent in approach. Both organizations lobby actively about pedestrian issues. Some of the approaches overlap significantly. However, RantWoman has detected a range of views ranging from "what's the point because nothing can be relied on 100% of the time?" to "well look at all the other people who benefit, for example from curb cuts."
RantWoman MAY be generalizing inappropriately from local samples. Suffice it to say, caution is always in order: if you are recruiting a blind person to offer perspectives on some or another policy or infrastructure, do your best to recruit one who is able and willing to speak carefully about multiple perspectives including the one(s) he or she is most ardent about.
Take audible traffic signals. Every once in awhile RantWoman will be out walking with one of her groupies. We will come upon a crosswalk with an audible traffic signal and RantWoman's companion will say something like "what does that signal mean?" RantWoman typically has no freaking idea at first, though RantWoman does know that the onset of a beeping traffic signal most assuredly is not a guarantee that it is safe to cross the street; sometimes she simply says "It means there is a beeping signal."
Typically these signals have two tones for the average orthogonal crosswalk. Simply by listening, RantWoman may or may not be able immediately to tell which direction the traffic is moving with each kind of tone. This being Seattle, this problem may obtain even if one naively thinks one side of the grid SHOULD be stopped.
Perhaps there is a left turn signal. Perhaps someone(s) are into "California stops" before going right on red. Perhaps someone just has a hormonal urge to pull their large metal carcass into the crosswalk in anticipation of the light change. Or perhaps the audible signal is located at an impossible intersection where at certain times of the day, the traffic can be guaranteed not to clear the intersection during the signal, perhaps due to traffic, due to backups behind a bus or a jaywalking pedestrian or a cop trying to ticket a jaywalking pedestrian or just sunspots.
There is one signal near RantWoman's house which definitely falls into the last category above. There is audible signal on only one side of the intersection, an impossible 5-way mess that MIGHT need an audible signal on one other leg. Even so, the onset of the beeping is most certainly NOT a guarantee that it is safe to cross the street.
Here we come to another feature guaranteed to make crossing the street entertaining, curb cuts and the textured strips that often accompany them.
RantWoman generally thinks curb cuts are a great good thing, not only for wheelchair users, but for shopping carts, strollers, wheeled luggage, seniors who do not want to climb giant curbs, blobs emerging from the sewer.... RantWoman does acknowledge some downsides: if drainage is not done correctly, curb cuts can quickly become grease-covered, leaf-choked swimming pools during inclement weather. Curb cuts also may lack a sharp distinction between street and sidewalk; this makes it difficult for SOME blind people as well as cars to avoid going places they do not intend. Sometimes, despite the prescriptions of the ADA and whatever is on the blueprint, what gets built winds up being too narrow or situated in a way that makes it really difficult for a wheelchair user to turn from curb cut to sidewalk or vice versa. Finally, curb cuts get built at all sorts of angles to the intersection, the crosswalk, oncoming traffic, arrive space ships and foot traffic.
The inconsistent location and unpredictable variations in grade are one reason that many newer curb cuts get a wide yellow or whiite bumpy rubber strip imbedded in them. Some blind people, conscious of the "can never be relied on 100% of the time" issue think these are silly and counterproductive. RantWoman by contrast really loves them, for two good reasons. First RantWoman is cheap and she will take a free foot massage anyway she can get it.
Second, RantWoman walks a lot with RantMom. RantMom uses a walking cane and always makes a beeline for the curb cut at any intersection. The bright color distinctions really help her find the curb cut faster.
Unfortunately RantMom is always zigzagging around trying to use curb cuts that face a bunch of different directions. Sometimes she is on RantWoman's right. Sometimes she is on RantWoman's left. Sometimes she is just weaving in and out. Maybe RantWoman will just ask RantMom to wear a nice bell so RantWoman can keep track. Or maybe that would just get lost in all the traffic noise too.
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