Round Robin: Without Borders

I tried to think of something uplifting and cheerful for the Round Robin Photo Challenge: Gone, and actually took some pictures to show tonight's sunset fading from the sky. But I didn't catch the sky with the colors of sunset completely gone, so I've reverted to my original concept.

From Round Robin Photo Challenges

Two weeks ago when I went for a drive with some friends on the western edge of Tucson, down Gates Pass and into Avra Valley, I took a few minutes to look for a restaurant I used to eat at when I was in travel agent school in 1987. Right at the end of Anklam where it merges with Speedway to become Gates Pass Boulevard, we came upon this Greek restaurant. This would have been handy had it been open, because we had a hungry vegetarian of Greek ancestry in the car. But alas, the restaurant was gone: derelict, empty. There was even a fallen tree in front of the place. I think this was the site of Daisy Mae's Steakhouse back in the 1980s. A very good restaurant it was, too!



You know about this place. This particular Borders was in Park Place Mall, a very busy and successful shopping mall since it was renovated in 1999. Strangely, however, the area immediately around Park Place, particularly on Wilmot Road just south of Broadway, is a hot spot for gone-away businesses.



This one is particularly notable. Immediately adjacent to Park Place in the days when it was called Park Mall, this was a Silo store. You can still see the remains of the lettering that advertised the electronics that were sold there. Silo has been gone for probably 20 years, but you can still tell what the place used to be. Since then it's been a warehouse for World Care (a charity, I think), the temporary home of Wilmot Library, and, most recently, one of those discount Halloween shops that pop up for a month each year. And yet it still looks like a dead Silo store.



The other weird thing about this building is that at one end you can see the remains of another business that was there in the 1980s: a surf shop. In landlocked, desert Tucson. Is it any wonder that's long gone?



Across the street and a few doors down is this place, which has only been gone since June. Do you recognize it?



I could show you several more closed businesses within a block or two of these others, ranging from a family-owned ice cream parlor to a building that was most recently a charter school. But let's finish up with this former Hometown Buffet, which closed around the same time as the restaurant across the street from it. The nice surprise today was seeing the Opening Soon sign out front for U Like Buffet. Okay, it's a terrible name, but I wish them well. I don't want them to be here today, gone tomorrow.

Karen

Now let's see what else is gone!

Linking List
As of Sunday

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Terri ** Welcome back!** - Posted!
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com

Sherrie
Food for Thought
http://100sweets.blogspot.com/

Dave ** Welcome, new participant!** - Posted!
Dave's(old short legs) photo blog
http://davesoldshortlegsphotoblog.blogspot.com/

Georgia ** Welcome, new participant!**
Mimi's Place
http://georgiamacdonald.blogspot.com

Tina - Posted!
Tina's PicStory
http://tinaspicstory.blogspot.com/

Weekend Assignment #330: Greed - A Rant

This is the rant that's been building up in me for weeks. I was going to cover it in a two-paragraph aside in the entry below this one, but, in true rant fashion, I've gone on about it quite a bit longer than intended.; So a quick copy-paste, a few edits and expansions, and here we are:

Weekend Assignment #330: Op-Ed

Time to flex your writing muscle again, because for this week only, the Weekend Assignment blog is being changed to The Weekend Assignment Chronicle! Now, we need some Op-Eds to make things a little more interesting around here. Your assignment is to pick a current event and write your opinion regarding it. Anything goes. Write about politics, the economy, or maybe even your opinion about an incident in pop culture. It's all good. It's good to exchange opinions, especially when it's done with respect. So, feel free to speak up here!

Extra Credit: Do you read the Op-Eds? Yes? No? Tell us about it!

August 2007 - my personal economic crash as my employer went bankrupt.

As someone who has been unable to find full-time, permanent work as an accountant since the third economy-devastated industry I worked in laid me off over two years ago, and as someone who manages the finances of a disabled woman who lives on Social Security and food stamps, I'm frustrated with pretty much all levels of government right now. Congress is reducing food stamps, squeezing our poorest people on the grounds that the government can't afford to help them, and besides, maybe they're just lazy and don't deserve our help.  They also spent months refusing to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, people made chronically jobless by our faltering economy. (They finally got the bill to go through when the late Senator Byrd's replacement was appointed.) Even when this bill was passed and signed into law, it only extended unemployment for people like me, who are not past the 99 week mark in their unemployment benefits;. It does not help my brother, or any of the other "99ers."

What Republicans and deficit-hawk Democrats don't tell you is that benefits for the poor and the unemployed are generally accepted by economists of all ideologies as the most economy-stimulating spending there is. Money paid to such people is likely to be spent immediately on food and other necessities, which helps to keep people employed who sell the food and necessities. The poor and unemployed also pay sales tax, putting money into the empty coffers of financially-strapped states and communities so they don't have to lay off teachers and police and firefighters. Republicans insist that we can't afford to help these people, and anyway they're just lazy bums who don't want to work; never mind that they represent about 10% of the nations workforce and that there are, on average, 5 unemployed for every job. An unemployed teacher or, ahem, accountant, isn't a great match for a job making submarine sandwiches anyway. Most job openings I personally see are for selling insurance, a task I'd be truly abysmal at, or for accepting payments on a home computer on behalf of an overseas company I've never heard of, in return for a commission. It sounds uncomfortably like what's known as a "Nigerian scam." My friend S. talks about trying to find a job online; I shudder to think what she'll come up with, if anything.

So, yeah, Republicans and some Democrats think it's a fine idea to reduce the deficit by paying as little as possible to people like me, underemployed for three years this month; my brother, unemployed for over 99 weeks and therefore getting no unemployment at all, and incidentally with significant medical problems; and my friend S., living on Social Security and with physical and mental health disabilities. Her food stamps were recently reduced on an individual basis, and the only explanation given was that it was because her Social Security benefit went up, which it didn't. (I think they used a small, one-time extra SS payment all recipients got earlier this year as an excuse to artificially recalculate everyone's income as higher than it is, so the state doesn't have to pay out as much in food stamps.) I've seldom seen S. buy much more by way of groceries than bottled water, organic milk and cola, and maybe a loaf of french bread. At the end of July she ran out of food stamps and was unable to even buy that much. Her medical coverage is from state-run AHCCCS, which doesn't cover dental or vision or hearing. (S. has teeth missing, with no prospect of dentures or other treatment.) She is consistently treated rather badly by social workers and medical professionals. Most recently, the agency that pays part of her rent started sending $59 less than before, with no explanation, and no returning of phone calls. I as her representative payee have to make up the difference from her same unchanged Social Security check. How am I meant to do that?

But no, according to Republicans we can't afford to help people like S., because of the deficit, don't you know (deficit price tag for the extension of unemployment benefits: $33 billion), and because my mentally ill, arthritic friend in the scooter, a fibromyalgia sufferer, is somehow a lazy bum, the undeserving poor. Those same people insist that we must extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans, which, if made permanent, would add over $1 trillion to the deficit over a 10-year period. Yeah, that'll help. Such trickle-down, voodoo economics have been in place since 2001, and look where we are now.

On the extra credit question, I admit that I don't typically read newspapers, except sometimes the online versions. My op-ed pages are mostly two tv shows, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, and sometimes The Huffington Post. I feel a little guilty about not supporting Tucson's sole surviving daily newspaper, but I tended to spend the money without ever reading past page one. Sorry, TNI.

Karen

A Break in the Routine

Today (by which of course I mean yesterday; my days run from afternoon to the following early morning) hasn't exactly been filled with "adventure, excitement and really wild things;" but it has been a bit of a rutbreaker. Just for starters, I was interviewed today by a reporter for the Tucson Citizen. It would be nice if the interview were about my wild success instead of dismal failure, but that's how it is. The reporter was looking for a story on how the recession was affecting people who recently became unemployed here in Tucson, so I emailed and told him. It seems to me that my particular story is kind of noteworthy, not because of me but because of the way it illustrates the larger problem. Every "permanent" job I've had in the past 15 years was with a company that has now gone bankrupt, closed its doors or both. I went back to school to get a degree in a high-paying, high-demand field, and it's currently doing me no discernible good. And I didn't even mention the whole health insurance issue. The article is supposed to run on Friday. I'll link to it when it comes out.


The other thing I did today, besides the dog park and watching Doctor Who, was follow through on the second email from AOL about AOL Pictures shutting down. As with AOL Journals, American Online has made arrangements for a simple conversion process to another service. This one is called PhotoWorks, and it's free. Well, sort of. I read part of the new member FAQ, and there's a catch. The site is run by American Greetings, and they want you to buy something, at least once a year - prints, calendars, custom greeting cards, something. If you don't, your free storage goes away. After that, you would presumably see the image on the left instead of your lovely pictures. I got this result tonight one one of my entries, and I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I had accidentally deleted a couple of images, and copying them back into that album didn't restore the link.

I had already saved everything stored in AOL Hometown (which is also gone now), but had not grabbed this stuff. Fortunately it was extremely simple and quick, at least for the relative handful of pictures I had on YGP/AOL Pictures. I logged in from my Mavarin screen name, which isn't even my main email account, although I treat it as such. It didn't matter. It grabbed everything I had stored from any screen name, including the images that used to grace my earliest entries from my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin. I had already gone through the Blogger versions of most of those entries and relinked to the same images as stored on mavarin.com, but it was still good to grab what was there.

For one thing, I rediscovered some 2004 Tuffy pictures that I didn't seem to have on my hard drive. They were taken with the old Mavica, an early, bulky digital camera with such low-res photos that we used to get twenty of them on each floppy disk, which is what the camera used for storage. Unsurprisingly, they're not great pictures, but I'm fond of them. I still remember the day I took some of them. One thing I did tonight was save them back to my hard drive and clean them up with PhotoStudio. It helped a lot.

My PhotoWorks albums were kind of an odd lot. There was an entire album of someone else's fall foliage shots, and another one of somebody's messes from a discussion I had with other journalers back in 2004. I also had a "scratchpad" album with one photo, a "shoebox" album with 51 photos, a few albums I put together on purpose for various incarnations of AOL profiles and AIM pages, and a bunch of albums named after individual Musings entries. Most of the latter had one or two photos each. Surprisingly, there were also a number of journal-based albums with zero photos each! I'm not quite sure what happened there, but nothing seems to be missing. I deleted the empty albums and consolidated the onesies. From here they could be re-linked to the relevant entries on the Blogger version of the old journal, but as I say, I'd already relinked to most of the same images as stored elsewhere. Just as well, really.

The most annoying part of the process was dealing with a few old Woohoo slideshows. These were the cool AOL Pictures slideshows that had various effects available for the transition from one image to the next. My favorite by far was the "Ken Burns" style, named for the documentary director's technique of panning across still photos while zooming in and out on them. I had one of those set up for a slide show of a 2004 trip to Las Vegas, and another one was on the main page of the St. Michael's website. With the transfer to PhotoWorks, those Woohoos were gone. I had to fuss with the St Michael's page for a while to get the more boring Picasa version of the slide show in place, realign the table it was in, and fix some text that the site's host service, GoDaddy, kept resizing as tiny.

While I was at it, I also put in a bit of time tagging a bunch of the Musings entries. There are over 600 entries, so it's way too tedious a job to do all at once. Another problem with some of the old entries is that spaces between words went missing in a number of places. This used to be an ongoing glitch in the early days of AOL Journals, and the transfer to Blogger seems to have exacerbated the problem.

You may have noticed that I've been fussing with the sidebar for the Outpost in recent days. Blogger recently introduced much better sidebar widgets, now called gadgets. My favorite is the blogroll-style linking lists, one which you can display the most recent entry of each blog and the first image in that entry. I found that very handy last weekend in keeping track of who has posted their Round Robin entries. It's also a very fast way to see what interesting things people are up to generally.

Anyway, I've set up a more exclusive "Recent Robins" list in place of the old static one, listing only the people who played last weekend. If you play along with the next one, "On My Table,", your blog will be added to the list. A second sidebar gadget section, titled "Weekenders," will similarly link to everyone who does one or more Weekend Assignments. Everyone else whose blog I visit with any frequency (or feel that I should) is on one or more of the other sidebar lists. If you're a regular reader and I'm not linking to your blog, let me know and I'll probably add it. I purged quite a few inactive or defunct blogs with my recent update.

Karen

The Man Who Bought the MotW (and other stories)

What did I promise to write about tonight? Ah, yes:

Tomorrow: my entry for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, the man who bought the Museum, and St. Michael's ride.

Okay, the first part of that is done. Time to do the second and third parts. And I should probably say something about today's news, given that I spent almost five hours this afternoon following Twitter links to all the stories breaking on NPR and TPM and elsewhere.

The Man Who Bought the Museum of the Weird

...is a liar. At the very least.

The way home.

When the dogs and I got home from the dog park just before dusk yesterday, my neighbor across the street came out and waved me over. We crossed the street, and there was much barking and carrying on as my dogs and hers exchanged credentials.

Once that subsided, M. asked me whether we were moving out. What an odd question! I said no, we aren't. Then she explained why she'd asked:

It seems that there was a man on a bicycle in the neighborhood yesterday, "going up the street and knocking on windows," she said. My next door neighbor, D., came out to talk to the guy. Bicycle Man claimed that he "picked up" our house "in a foreclosure deal," and had come over to see it! D. subsequently asked M. whether we were moving, as far as she knew. She told him that she didn't think so, because we "just got two new dogs," and because I had mentioned no such thing in a recent conversation with her.

Now, understand, I've been out of work for three weeks, and money is very tight. But our mortgage is up to date, and always has been. I just checked, and the September payment went through as usual. We're not delinquent, let alone in foreclosure.

The man was lying.

We're a little freaked out about this. More than a little, really. I can't imagine what sort of scam Bicycle Man was pulling, unless he was trying to establish with the neighbors that our house is his house now, and that they shouldn't call the police if he shows up with a van and starts packing all our valuables into it. Pepper and Cayenne are good watch dogs (especially Pepper), but that doesn't help if they're at the dog park with me. D. and M. have an informal neighborhood watch going, but M. has cancer and could be off getting a radiation treatment or something the next time this guy turns up.

John went around and locked all the doors and gates last night, to the point where I had to unlock the laundry room inner door so the dogs could get out into the yard. I told a friend at Safeway about the incident last night, and the customers behind me said I needed to tell the police. So I called today. The officer asked why D. didn't call the police at the time, and I explained that he didn't know for sure that anything was wrong. She told me to call back if the guy came around again. Right, fine. But only if I know he's there. I haven't even seen the man!

Tonight, Miko's Corner photographed as Fairyland.

So today I was cooped up all day at the computer, unwilling to leave the house unguarded. I didn't take the dogs to the park until after John got home, and John was late. We arrived in full dark. Miko's Corner is only lit at the edges, which lent a surreal quality to the visit.

An experiment in not using flash.

My theory, such as it is: Bicycle Man was probably looking in windows of various houses, "casing the joint," looking for stuff to steal. Tucson has been badly hit in the mortgage meltdown, and foreclosed homes are common enough to give his cover story a bit of plausibility. If I were D., though, I'd have been highly suspicious. Anyway, when confronted by D., Bicycle Man probably thought our house was a likely target, because John is a little behind on mowing the lawn so it sorta kinda looked the part.

Fortunately, there are only a few windows accessible from the front of the house, and they're heavily curtained against the sun and prying eyes. The back is fenced, so nobody can see into the bedrooms, the den or my office. Even if he could make out anything through the curtains, Bicycle Man cannot possibly have seen anything but a few unremarkable exhibits at the Museum of the Weird - a few couches, a shelving unit, cheap bookcases, no-name art and some lamps. With any luck, the combination of nosy neighbors, barking dogs and the lack of anything visibly worth stealing should protect us.

But I'm not counting on it.

UPDATE: John and I have talked about this further in response to Paul and Kiva's comments below. I am going to talk to my neighbors this afternoon, but will not leave the house unguarded until John has done some further work tomorrow morning on the locks and otherwise securing the house.

St. Michael Goes For a Ride

Pre-Mass prep. That gold banner is awkward to carry.

Sunday was Michaelmas, the annual patronal feast day at St. Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church. Choir directior and organist Jane Haman composed new music for the occasion. When I turned up before Mass, there was some question what, if anything, I would do as an acolyte. There were enough torch (candle) bearers, and Alex turned up right behind me to act as crucifer. Jo was already suited up as verger. But I ended up carrying the big gold banner on a pole. It's not heavy, but it's exceedingly awkward - it's almost as wide as the church's center aisle, and you can't see past it at all. As slowly as I walked, I kept bumping into the thurifer (incense bearer) whenever she had to stop for one reason or another. Fortunately, I didn't cause a fire.

There is an icon of St. Michael the Archangel that normally resides on a table behind the altar at the very front of the church. To be honest, it's about the least attractive, evocative or even realistic depiction of him I've ever seen, but that's not important right now. On Michaelmas this year, the statue was carried on a litter (or portable shrine) up the aisle by four parishioners and placed in front of the altar. The icon was surrounded by votive candles in red jars.

After Mass, we processed out of the church...

Fifth and Wilmot. That's the former First Magnus
building on the left, where I worked from 2005-2007.

...and all the way out to the street. There I was with this huge awkward banner half-furled in one hand, my camera in the other, about 50 feet from the old Crosswalk of Death at Fifth and Wilmot.


We went out to the sign, a new one with movable lettering which replaced the painted one that the city zoning people objected to on specious grounds. Father Smith said a prayer for the cuty, and we said the Lord's Prayer, and that was it.


And St. Michael? He didn't say much. Not that I heard, anyway.

The Botched Bailout and the Blame Game

As noted earlier, I spent the entire afternoon reading about the bailout package, McCain's alleged role in getting the deal, its failure to pass and the subsequent scramble to place blame. I wrote a rather good comment about all this for the NPR site, which just started allowing comments from registered users only. Either the site was overloaded by the day's news, or there were glitches in the user registration process, or my script blocker messed me up, or a combination thereof. My comment was lost in the ether. When will I learn to copy text before I hit "post?"

Here's my take on it all, probably less cleverly stated because I'm tired now. I shouldn't laugh at the comedy of errors that unfolded today, because the situation is a disaster for the world economy, the country and my personal chances of getting a job. But it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity that kept building with each new link from Twitter. McCain's taking credit - no he's not - yes he is. But wait! It didn't pass! Why not? Because (or so it was claimed) Nancy Pelosi mentioned in a speech that the Bush White House presided over the the buildup to this financial disaster. How dare she! Therefore only 30-something percent of Republicans voted for the bill, while about 60% of Democrats did. Clearly it's Obama's fault! Him and those Democrats! (Say what?) McCain says so, and in the very next sentence, says that now is not the time to place blame!

So what do we have? A shambles. After a week of work on turning a bailout package that everyone hated intensely into one that people hated somewhat less and could actually vote for, conservative Republicans bailed on it because they still hated it too much. Rather that admit this, they blamed their defection on a Democrat's speech, thus making themselves look like venal idiots who would rather see the country go down in flames than let the Speaker of the House blame the economy on a President that they no longer like very much, either, and on themselves and their peers. Barney Frank had a good time ragging on them for their alleged hurt feelings, and justifiably so.

Meanwhile, some liberal Democrats (including Gabrielle Giffords) didn't vote for the thing either, because they had major reservations about the bill as it stands. Um, what's your alternative?

So the bill is dead, at least for the moment, everyone is blaming everyone but themselves, and the Dow drops 777 points. So what do they do, these fine men and women who dropped the ball at the last moment with disastrous results? Why, they went home for Rosh Hashanah, of course! I can understand that for the Congress members who are actually Jewish, and maybe everyone needs a little break after working through the weekend, a chance to rethink. But it doesn't send the message that Congress is really committed to staving off further disaster.

More important, where will they go from here? Nearly everyone agrees it's a terrible bill, even as amended. But they're profound disagreement on how to fix it, whether it can be fixed, and even whether it's needed. Some people would just as soon skip the whole thing, on the theory that it's using taxpayer money to bail out the rich. Let the Dow go down! Let the irresponsible banks fail, and irresponsible borrowers lose their homes! Except that's not where it all ends. Responsible people who did their best to invest wisely now see their retirement nest eggs being sucked dry. Homeowners who did nothing wrong now have homes worth some unknown but rapidly falling amount of money, and will be "upside down" on their mortgages. Companies will have trouble getting credit, and will lay off more employees. Cities that rely on property taxes will see a big cut in revenue. And the whole mess adds up to a huge problem that no grandstanding or earmark-defying is ever going to fix.

Get this done, Congress. Tweak this bill enough that you can hold your nose and vote for it, or start over and get a genuine consensus on something that will work better to rescue the economy, protect homeowners, provide for decent oversight, avoid rewarding the guilty, and keep taxpayers from getting ripped off. Barack Obama laid out the principles of what needs to be in there, and John McCain belatedly called for most of the same stuff. Put something together, tweak it as best you can and pass it. Now.

Karen