Planted This Week / Harvested This Week: Huckleberries / Salad

This week we planted

• a couple of huckleberries in the shade of the fence where formerly we had sword fern
• a chocolate mint in the mint patch on the north side.

This week we harvested our first cherry tomatoes (illustrated) and about half a bowl of salad greens. Our salad green system is now up and running, with a variety of pots at different stages of the greens lifecycle. I'm gradually moving the pots to the shadier areas as even this cold autumn is scortching them somewhat. We probably won't group enough this year to displace a whole lot of shopping but it's a very nice supplement to the farmer's markets and Samway. 

We also have hope of a lot of tomatos cycling in; they're at all stage from bud to flower to early fruit and ... now ... to ready to drop off. I'm experimenting with various ways to tie them up as they seem to want more sun; perhaps next year I'll install some sort of grid on the south wall to help them out.

Our ground vine veggies (1 zuchinni, 1 squash, 1 pumpkin) are also starting to produce and demanding more room. Next year we'll start them a lot earlier and a lot farther apart; let them take over the front yard if they want; they have very nice flowers and so far we're not tired of fresh zuchinni!

Our ROI on these is not great, especially considering the labor, but we're learning a lot and most of our investments are for the longterm, e.g. dirt, so I suppose we should consider them capital investments.

The Gift of a Car Prowl

You never now when you're going to get a blessing. Sometimes, it's from someone who is doing you wrong!

 This morning, The Lovely Wife noticed the trunk of our car was open. Sure enough, we'd been car-prowled. Both front doors were slightly open (that is, closed but not latched); the glove box and front- and back-ashtrays were open.

They didn't get much. The cellphone charger that I kept it between the front seats was gone, as was the hand-sanitizer in the door pocket, and the auto book in the glovebox.The registration and proof of insurance are still in the driver's-side visor and, although the trunk had been popped, the jumper cables were still there along with the little folding shovel I always keep for good luck (I've never gotten stuck in snow if I have a shovel!)

Annoyed but not terribly sad I filled out a police report online. It was a lengthy process, but seemed well-designed except for a bit of clumsiness in the way you specify what kind(s) of items were taken (a two-level set of choice boxes; generating well-structured data but not the easiest to use - for example, is a book personal or business property?)  In the process of puzzling this out, I noticed that one of the things that might have been stolenwere license plate tabs. I went and checked and ... sure enough ... I had expired tabs!

Now, were mine stolen, or had I forgotten to renew? I checked my records and found that notices to renew both my personal driver's license and my car tabs came the same month, using the same graphics and layout;  I must have assumed one was a reminder for the other and filled out only one. (That's a practice point in message design - give reminders for different things some clear point of difference!)

I immediately renewed my tabs online. There was a delay while I got an emissions inspection, which we passed easily (Superior Automotive really does keep the car running well!) Otherwise, the story ended happily: no ticket!

I should be grateful to the thief. Had it not been for the car prowl, I'd still be driving with expired tabs and sooner or later I'd have gotten a $250 ticket!

Life is strange!

P.S. Learn from my mistakes! Keep stuff out of your car, and renew your tabs, or be prepared to write your own "Don't Be That Guy"!

Foreign Assistance Act Reform/Rewrite ?

The 1961 Foreign Assistance Act is getting more than a little creaky. Maybe it's time to re-write it for the current era?

According to Sarah Jane Staats

"House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and his staff released the first 55 pages of a new Global Partnership Act of 2010 discussion draft, aiming to replace the outdatedand unwieldy Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. It’s a first step towards clarifying the mission, mandate and structure of U.S. foreign assistance programs, but also an opportunity to strengthen the draft before it is introduced as legislation...."

I'm not an expert on this subject at all, but two points stand out immediately:

• It's remarkable that Representative Berman is doing his job in a responsible way that is garaunteed not to earn him any votes. I mean, seriously: our current politics have sunk so low that associating himself with Foreign Aid in any way has got to poll negative, but reforming it has got to be a high priority. Kudos on courage sir!
• It seems likely that any program that old and with that many conflicting interests could do with a re-write.

Here's a discussion draft. Let's do that citizenship thing and try to figure it all out!

Congratulations and Thanks to Big Al Brewery

This weekend we stopped by Big Al's Brewery ("Live Your Dreams, Drive Ours") about eight blocks away, to help celebrate its 2nd Anniversary. That's Big Al himself, both in the flesh and, if you look closely, sitting on the taps!

This is a working brewery; it has a nice party room upstairs but mostly there's the brewery out back (where we never go), a tap room out front (comfortable but not over done) and the lot out in front, with chairs and wooden wire spools for tables. Bring your dog if you want, it's relaxed and friendly!

I used to never drank beer, probably because I kept trying the cheap stuff you get at parties and my entire being said "No!"  Then I got a little bit of the good stuff and, thanks to a helpful metabolism, the rest is history. (What's helpful about my metabolism is that it likes 1 beer but not 2; the 2nd beer just doesn't taste good. But the first beer: ah, wonderful!  So I am both a cheap date, and awake at the end of the night to drive home or clean up.

Recently we discovered we don't even have to drive; we can just walk down there to fill up our growler (a half-gallon reusable bottle) from their taps. What a convenience! And all of a sudden, bottled beer no matter how hoity-toity, just isn't all that great anymore; nothing is like beer out of a tap, and now we can get it any time we want! The price is close enough to the cheap stuff at the package store as makes no difference.

So thanks, Big Al's Brewery, for being a part of our community! Brew long and prosper!

Kindling Interest In an Historical Book

A while back, I got interested in an 1817 memoir of William Sampson, an Irish Protestant lawyer exiled to America for his support of Irish Catholics. I bought a copy and carefully typed it up, but then what? Publishing is expensive and time-consuming, and this was never going to be a best seller.

Now, however, eBooks makes it pretty easy to give this into "print". I am experimenting with making it available for Kindle downloads, and if this works, I may try some other formats. I don't know whether this will actually sell any copies, but it's an interesting experiment!

Proposition Eight: Equality And Rationality Win

The Prop 8 ruling is much more than merely a victory for equal rights (although it certainly is that ...)

I don't want to merely echo the praise it deserves for making our great nation just that much greater ... although it does. I want to go farther, and point out that it is a reassuringly fact-based decision, hinging upon whether the State had enacted a private moral view without advancing a "legitimate government interest". The key issue became whether there was or was not a legitimate government interest, and it is very telling as to the methods each side used to "prove" that fact.

Really. The methods each side used to prove a fact says a lot.

(You don't have to trust what I say about it: read the Prop 8 ruling yourself!)

When you read the case, you see that one side introduced 17 witnesses, whose expertise the other side did not challenge (...perhaps realizing they would have lost the challenge due to the experts' qualifications.) The judge nevertheless carefully documented the basis for each witness' expertise (starting around page 25 of the decision) and concluded each was credible and their testimony relevant.

The other side had had a reasonably long list of witness, but at trial decided not to present most of them!!! It offered no witnesses at all on some of the issues, and only two witnesses total on any of the issues. On matters where one side presents some evidence and the other side presents no evidence except its naked assertions, judges have little choice but to make a factual determination in favor of the former.

Part of the problem may have been that, as is normal, the expert witness got deposed well ahead of trial and, as is not normal, was more helpful to the opposing side with their admissions.

But it gets more interesting. Both of the witnesses were challenged by the other side, which is just good strategy. The judge meticulously analyzed the qualifications for each witness and the testimony they gave. The grounds each of the two gave for their claims of expertise is almost comical, and the evidentiary support for their opinions was riddled with non sequiturs. Their cross-examinations are comedy material!

Regardless of one's attitude toward the disposition of the case (naturallly I think it was correctly decided) is it not noteworthy that one side brought a gun to a knife fight and the other side brought only the fact that they feel gays are icky?

Did they seriously expect to win? Were they so arrogant as to think that they could send two guys, one of whom admitted that he hadn't actually read all the material he cited in his expert report, up against two of the top legal gunslingers of our era ... and win?

Whether this matters to our current Supreme Court is a whole 'nother matter (the law and the facts have never mattered to the Rehnquist/Roberts Court; whatever decision better serves their corporate owners is always the one for which they selectively pick, overturn or invent precedent. Let us hope that corporations simply don't care one way or another in this case ...) For the moment let us celebrate a victory not only for equality of our gay and lesbian friends, but also for reason itself.

Washington State Bar Association Votes to Support Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

From my pal Marti Schmidt:

"On July 24, 2010, at its meeting in Leavenworth, the Board of Governors (BOG) of the Washington State Bar Association voted to adopt the resolution proposed by the World Peace Through Law Section to support U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and to educate on the importance of ratification and the articles and goals of the treaty. The WPTL resolution was endorsed by the International Practice and Juvenile Law Sections and opposed by the Executive Committee of the Family Law Section. Letters in support of the resolution were sent by Steven Reisler, president of the Washington Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and by attorney Rita Bender of Seattle.

The proposal to adopt the WPTL resolution was made by Marc Silverman (Dist. 1). Present and voting for the resolution were governors Brian Comstock (Dist.8), Loren Etengoff (Dist. 3), Anthony Gipe (At Large), Leland Kerr (Dist. 4), Roger Leishman (Dist. 7 West), Catherine Moore (Dist. 7 East), and Marc Silverman. Opposing the resolution were governors Gibbs (2), Haskell (7 Central) and Heller (9).    

The Washington State Bar Association is the first state bar association in the U.S. to adopt a resolution endorsing ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In doing so, it joins other prominent legal organizations already supporting ratification such as the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the American Bar Association, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, as well as hundreds of other groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

For more information, contact Martha L. Schmidt, Chair of the World Peace Through Law Section, 206.382.6600"

=======

I had a small part to play in this process, mostly formatting the newsletter explaining CRC to our Section's membership, and also writing to my BOG representatives. Frankly, I had not expected this to pass on the first go; there's a lot of misunderstanding of how treaties work, and from that comes a lot of worries that don't really apply. I'd thought it would be a long process taking years to get this endorsement. However, sometimes calm discussion wins out - let that be a lesson to me!


And congrats to Marti and Jana Heyd and all the other people who worked hard on this resolution. On the evidence, they are good leaders for WPTL!
More information on the CRC: http://www.unicef.org/crc/ 

Fern Migration Today!

Our lovely house came with about a dozen sword ferns, a hardy native pernennial that unfortunately competes for prime garden space. We want to convert our yard into working gardens, emphasizing local edibles, but we don't to waste these ferns. What to do?
A chance comment with a neighbor connected us with the Nature Consortium. Their mission is to connect people and nature, and they have a very solid Urban Reforestation Program that eagerly snapped at the offer. The project's Coordinator Buphalo Tomkiewicz came by and took the ferns to a new home (see photo). Technically, they will sit in pots until the ideal time for replanting comes along, but the important point is, they will go into the ground where they belong so everyone's happy!
This is a pretty inspiring experience; instead of wasting the vegitation, we were able to re-purpose it. And we met a nice guy and a very interesting organization in the process. We'll be sure to stop by the Consortium events in the near future!
Here's a video from their site that amused me:



Learn more at their Forest Restoration Project!

Bag Of Oranges: Easy Health and Charity

Who doesn't love those little oranges hitting the stores in mesh bags?

I found out by accident that are also very helpful for everyday charity and personal health. I put bought a bag the other day and left it in the car. As I drove about this week doing my chores, I encountered many beggers on the streetcorner. I prefer to give my money to organized charities, to ensure it is used wisely and effectively, but it's hard to look away from people in need.

Now with the oranges, instead of looking away, I handed each an orange. So far, each seemed surprised but happy. I can't read their mind; maybe they'd have preferred cash but not one looked disappointed and each took the orange, so I'm going to keep this up.

In addition, now that I have the bag of oranges in the car, I snack on them instead of some god-aweful stuff from Micky D's. That's a nice contribution to my health!