Bush says the war with Iraq will cost $75 billion dollars. $75 billion.

I wonder if they considered just paying Saddam $30 billion to leave. I mean, think of the savings!

I’ve had my years of being broke and massively in debt. But, thanks to some combination of luck, hard work and persistence, I’m happy to be financially stable today and able to make a certain amount of charitable contributions the last few years.

And no one who knows me will be surprised to find I handle my charitable contributions in a fairly regular and anal-retentive fashion. Every December (the end of the tax year) I look at my total income for the year and decide how much I can afford to give. Then I spend some time researching various organizations and causes that are near and dear to my heart, investigating how much of the money goes to paying staff salaries and overhead. After making final selections, I write the checks, mail them off and save a note in my tax folder for the coming year. Easy.

What seems to inevitably follow over the coming year is that I get bombarded with snailmail on the order of two a week. “We appreciated your contribution to our hospital. Now we’ve lost our lease and need an another $220,000 from our contributors to get a new location.” “We’re using your contribution to fight those rascals in congress, but have you seen this latest bill in committee? We need your help now more than ever.” “Thank you for donating so generously to the Humane Society in December. Now give us more money or we’ll shoot this dog.” I can’t help but feel resentful as I get repeatedly panhandled by these groups throughout the following year. It’s like I once bought a beer for a guy in a bar and now every time he sees me I get hit up again.

Next year, every check I send will be accompanied by the following letter:

Please find enclosed a check for $XXX, my charitable contribution to your organization for 2003.

Please note: if I get a single solicitation for additional contributions over the next 11 months, this will be the last check you’ll ever get from me.

Regards,

What do you think? Am I becoming a curmudgeon in my old age?

This weekend I went to the grand opening of a coffeeshop in San Leandro. The proprietor of the shop is a dear friend of mine, and a former co-worker. He had pretty much everything you might want from a career in the Silicon Valley. He worked for a company he loves, on technology he cares about deeply. He has an extraordinary reach of influence in the industry, and the respect of his peers and co-workers. He also made a fairly impressive salary. And he walked away from all of that to open a coffeeshop.

I don’t think I can fairly represent all of his reasons for making this change, but I know at least some of them. He decided that having an improved quality of life is worth more than the demands of the High Tech industry. He decided walking to work is more important to him than driving two hours each day. He decided that working in his neighborhood and attempting to grow a sense of community is more important to him than arriving home at 8:00 each night (or later) and never knowing his neighbors.

Tim is my hero. I hope he achieves everything he could hope for with his new venture. If you’re in the San Leandro area, stop by for a cuppa.

Zocalo Coffeehouse
http://www.zocalocoffeehouse.com/ has been registered but does not yet have content. Check again in a few weeks.
645 Bancroft Avenue
San Leandro, CA
510-569-0102

The last three weeks at work have been alternately hellish and amusing.

About three weeks ago, I found out that I was being invited to an offsite hosted by my VP at work. This was the first time I had even been invited to attend, and so I was pretty flattered to be included. Yay, me! At the same time, it was a bad time in the project to miss two days out of the office. And, worse yet, I found out I was expected to do a presentation at the offsite, 30 minutes on a feature under development. Suddenly, this is looking like a huge amount of work. Boo, work!

A few days before the offsite, I did a dry-run of the presentation with the two levels of management immediately above me. The feedback was very positive. I got lots of praise for having good data, a polished set of slides, and solid answers to the appropriate questions. Yay, me! Then the date of the offsite came and I delivered the real thing. Everything went well, until the very end. My VP took a deep breath and said “I just don’t see the value of this feature at all,” and everything went to hell. Not only was it harsh to be deflated like that, but to have it happen in a room of 50 very senior managers and directors at the company… Boo, work!

This week, I had two days in a management training class. On the second day, a group of seven managers in the class had to deliver a presentation to three VPs at the company. We had been putting in a ton of extra hours on this over the past month. If you asked me a week ago, I would have described the results as a total trainwreck. Unfocused, unproductive, a huge waste of time, and precious little to show for it. Boo, work! However, the team did a fantastic job of coming together over the last two meetings and we managed to put together a fairly solid proposal. We did the presentation, and the feedback was outstanding. We were cited as the best presentation of any they had seen so far (a collection of about 20) and they seemed really taken with our work, the data we had, and the way it was presented. Yay, me (us)!

In fact, they liked it so much we’re supposed to flesh it out with more details in a variety of areas, and present it to the staff of one of the VPs in 30 days. Boo, work!

I find myself craving a weekend away with you; away from the stresses of work and home, an opportunity to wallow in my senses. I want the time and leisure to saturate your senses and immerse you in a lazy, languid, wanton state. I want to spend a couple of hours in a hot tub, letting the stresses of the week melt out of the muscles of my shoulders. I need the stillness of a steam room, anonymous in the dense fog, listening to the condensation drip from the tile. I want to stand in a cold plunge until my bones ache, and then lower back into the hot tub and feel the burning pins and needles of my skin adjusting to the heat.

I want to lie in a darkened room with you, and listen to the waves crash outside. I want sufficient time and leisure to lie curled with you in a dozen different positions, pressing close and enjoying simply being with you. I want to spoon against your back, wrapping my arms around your chest and pulling you close in to me, burying my face in your hair, nuzzling your neck and shoulders, kissing just below your ear.

I want to lie out in the sun with you, lazy, languid. I want to rub oil over your body until you purr, making you slick and slippery, feeling my skin slide against yours. I want to share a plate of fruit with you, the cool, tart taste of sliced apples, the earthy flesh of ripe figs. I want to float on my back in a warm blue pool, drifting slowly across the surface.

I want to sprawl across clean white sheets with you, watching the noon shadows crawl along the walls towards afternoon. I want to read quietly with each other, the whisper of pages turning, stretching a leg out to rub against your leg.

I want to knead away your tension, untying the knots in your muscles. I want to walk that fine line, pressing and squeezing hard enough to elicit a gasp and moan, but just short of making you cry for mercy. I want to stretch your joints open, making you unfold like the petals of a flower, loose, yielding.

I want to shower with you in the darkness, feeling the hot water pelt our bodies and filling the room with steam. I want to massage shampoo into your hair and scalp with arched, rigid fingers, making your eyes roll back and your body slump against me in release. I want to lather you from head to toe, sliding our soapy bodies against each other, making the most of the minimal friction. I want to scrub your back until it’s pink and exposed.

I want to explore you, finding your buttons, trying to exceed your capacity for pleasure. I want to whet your craving into a sharp and vivid need, and then overwhelm you with a release that seems to have no end.

Over the course of Christmas and my birthday, I have received:

• “Best Recipes” cookbook from those fine folks at Cooks Illustrated
• “Cordon Bleu” cookbook
• A subscription to Cooks Illustrated
• Two new chef’s knives (6″ and 8″)
• Copper mixing bowls (great for making a meringue)
• A reversible electric grill / griddle
• A mandoline

Think someone is trying to tell me something?

Sigh. My nephew sent me one of those “Buy magazines through my school so we get money.” Which I would love to support, but… their list is such weak-ass magazines. I need to write back and say “How come you don’t have Cooks Illustrated on this list? Or Playboy? Or Utne Reader? Or at least Barely Legal, you know? For god’s sake, won’t someone please think of the children?!?”

Today I heard two women deriding some poor guy for going through a “mid-life crisis”. I took the opportunity to offer them both some (unsolicited) insight into this phenomenon. Let’s be absolutely clear about this, it has nothing to do with being middle aged. Men always want a hot little red sports car. They wanted it as a young lad, they wanted in as a young man, and they want it in middle age. That just happens to be when they can actually afford it! It should be called a “positive cash flow crisis”. If we could have gotten the cute little blond trophy wife at age 20, we would have, honest.

Hmm, “hot little red sports car”. “cute little blond trophy wife”. I suppose the ideal would be a hot little sports car with breasts. On the other hand, I’ve tried a cute little girlfriend who had twin exhausts, and that didn’t work out at all. *cough*

… but it’s from something that I cooked, so I guess that’s self love.

Tonight was my first attempt at making eggplant parmesan from scratch, and it was splendiferous, even if I do say so myself. Of course, once you commit to blanching something, breading it, frying it, smothering it in tomato sauce, topping with cheese and baking it, well hell, even cat turds would be yummy.

Or so one imagines. I’m not planning on testing this theory. I’m not that weird.

Remind me who won in the election, the Republicrats or the Democans?

I think the most insidious thing about the last fifty years of American politics is the pretense that there is any significant difference between the two major political parties.

Let’s play Name the President:
– Pre-appointment, his 11 cabinet officers averaged a yearly income of $211K.
– His formulated tax cuts dropped the effective corporate tax rate to 13%. Eighty-five percent of his tax breaks accrued to the upper half of the income scale. Ninety percent of a capital gains tax cut benefited the top 1% of the nation.
– New York Times quote, “No president in living memory has courted big business as ardently…”

Who did you guess? Reagan? Bush (the Elder)? Dubya? Try Jimmy Carter.

I’m sorry, I just can’t work up a belief that the country would be significantly different if Gore was in the Oval Office today. I think we’ve been suckered into picking between the political equivalents of Coke and Pepsi as if we were making some meaningful choice. There’s just no room afforded in the political forums for discussion of legitimate alternatives.