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Tuesday: walks, phone call
May. 14th, 2024 11:10 pmTuesdays and Thursdays are A.’s long days at school. Also, traffic was pretty bad both ways. Oh well! We got her through the homework that she did not finish at school. So that’s good. She’s been failing to finish because she’s socializing, and I feel like that’s a really good tradeoff. I’m fine with 15 minutes or so of homework if it means she gets social time during the school day. If it’s much more than that, we’ll do the 15 or so, and then leave it unfinished so the teachers get a clear picture of how things are going for her. Usually if it is taking us awhile to get through it, it’s either a big area of difficulty for her (like the character analysis assignment) or it’s an area where there’s quite a lot of room for exploration, like today’s assignment. It was a really interesting assignment about propaganda and racism and WW2, and the use of nuclear weapons, altho neither one of us particularly agreed with the thrust of it (which was that the bomb would probably not have been used as readily against a European country — I mean, the plan had been to use it against Germany, so).
We found an interesting BBC article about Secretary of War Stinson was the one to nix Kyoto as a potential target.
The whole thing reminded me that I’d recently learned about the widespread use of amphetamines in that time frame by the Germans and the Japanese. Yes, yes, everyone, I get it, but also, the scale was totally different, and honestly goes a long ways to explaining a lot of things (what the Japanese did to Nanjing, for starters).
Obviously, it’s really good to rethink past conflicts and how and why they happened and so forth. And also, flipping the script only gets you so far. I don’t think anyone gets out of a war with their pre-war morals intact. Further, sometimes when you’re out there doing very bad things to someone, the goal is to get them to stop doing very bad things. This creates horrifying moral quandaries. I mean, should you have just let keep being awful, so as to avoid doing awful yourself? Is that even really a choice, in any given situation? And just to make it worse: what if you did something really bad to them before, and now they are really being extra awful — does that mean you don’t have any right to defend yourself? Obviously, we want to keep finding and implementing solutions that let us have longer and longer periods of times where things are calm and where people can mostly get their needs met and mostly get along.
I have no idea why, but it occurred to me that even tho I was alive in 1983, and I remember the invasion of Grenada, I had no idea what happened or why. So I read the wikipedia entry. I can’t say I really understand it now, altho I’m reasonably certain that at some point I read a JAK novel that may have been loosely inspired/influenced by some of those events, which is all kinds of weird. The Andropov connection was legit surprising.
I did a 1 mile loop with R.
I walked with M.
Kinda weird not having an MEPFP meeting. No complaints! I got some phone calls, tho. I chatted with A., which was fun. I talked to the site guy for a bit; there’s a culvert that needs to be rebuilt, and the concrete folks are on site so, you know, why not seems to be the spirit of the thing. I also talked to the architect for a bit, because that louver question just keeps not being answered and given that the wall in question is about to be created by the concrete folks, it really needs to get figured out before it stops being a drawing and starts being concrete.
I got a bill for the EEG — $200. Remarkably small dollar amount. Presumably more will trickle in eventually. Altho who knows, maybe the insurance will cover a bunch of it. *shrug*
I did a little travel planning. That was fun.
I also called Orlando Sentinel, because apparently they haven’t successfully billed me since December (I think this has to do with a credit card expiration date change, altho I could be wrong) so they turned off my subscription which means I can’t fix it on the website. And this is the first I heard of the problem — no previous email from them. I suppose I should have noticed the lapse in the charge? That is exactly the kind of thing I can miss, tho. I’m paid up to date, but it is still showing stopped; I’ll give it a day or so and see if it is fixed before I call back again.
Apparently today was phone calls. Lots and lots of phone calls.
We found an interesting BBC article about Secretary of War Stinson was the one to nix Kyoto as a potential target.
The whole thing reminded me that I’d recently learned about the widespread use of amphetamines in that time frame by the Germans and the Japanese. Yes, yes, everyone, I get it, but also, the scale was totally different, and honestly goes a long ways to explaining a lot of things (what the Japanese did to Nanjing, for starters).
Obviously, it’s really good to rethink past conflicts and how and why they happened and so forth. And also, flipping the script only gets you so far. I don’t think anyone gets out of a war with their pre-war morals intact. Further, sometimes when you’re out there doing very bad things to someone, the goal is to get them to stop doing very bad things. This creates horrifying moral quandaries. I mean, should you have just let keep being awful, so as to avoid doing awful yourself? Is that even really a choice, in any given situation? And just to make it worse: what if you did something really bad to them before, and now they are really being extra awful — does that mean you don’t have any right to defend yourself? Obviously, we want to keep finding and implementing solutions that let us have longer and longer periods of times where things are calm and where people can mostly get their needs met and mostly get along.
I have no idea why, but it occurred to me that even tho I was alive in 1983, and I remember the invasion of Grenada, I had no idea what happened or why. So I read the wikipedia entry. I can’t say I really understand it now, altho I’m reasonably certain that at some point I read a JAK novel that may have been loosely inspired/influenced by some of those events, which is all kinds of weird. The Andropov connection was legit surprising.
I did a 1 mile loop with R.
I walked with M.
Kinda weird not having an MEPFP meeting. No complaints! I got some phone calls, tho. I chatted with A., which was fun. I talked to the site guy for a bit; there’s a culvert that needs to be rebuilt, and the concrete folks are on site so, you know, why not seems to be the spirit of the thing. I also talked to the architect for a bit, because that louver question just keeps not being answered and given that the wall in question is about to be created by the concrete folks, it really needs to get figured out before it stops being a drawing and starts being concrete.
I got a bill for the EEG — $200. Remarkably small dollar amount. Presumably more will trickle in eventually. Altho who knows, maybe the insurance will cover a bunch of it. *shrug*
I did a little travel planning. That was fun.
I also called Orlando Sentinel, because apparently they haven’t successfully billed me since December (I think this has to do with a credit card expiration date change, altho I could be wrong) so they turned off my subscription which means I can’t fix it on the website. And this is the first I heard of the problem — no previous email from them. I suppose I should have noticed the lapse in the charge? That is exactly the kind of thing I can miss, tho. I’m paid up to date, but it is still showing stopped; I’ll give it a day or so and see if it is fixed before I call back again.
Apparently today was phone calls. Lots and lots of phone calls.