My mother and father-in-law are in town for a few days. They arrived last night while I was pulling my shift at the Temple, and will be here until sometime Sunday. It’s kind of nice having company over, and the kids love having Grandma and Grandpa around.

Every so often it reminds me of the fact that my kids didn’t get a Grandma or Grandpa from my side of the family. They got some uncles and aunts, some cousins, and some “fake” relatives like Uncle Dave (chalain), but my Mom and Dad are a single wedding portrait on the wall, taken back in the late 60’s. I wonder whether they would have been good grandparents. They divorced shortly before their deaths (Mom in a car accident two years following the divorce, and Dad had a heart attack two years after that), so if they’d lived and remarried, maybe I’d have been stuck trying to explain why there were four grandparents on my side of the clan. Maybe I’d have a step-mom and a step-dad I could irrationally resent, so visits from paternal grandparents could be poisoned by my own bitterness. Or maybe everything would have been wonderful, and there would be an additional source of Christmas presents for the children of the perpetually impoverished cartoonist.

No, I’m pretty sure that if my parents had lived, I would NOT have become a cartoonist. Things would have been different enough that pretty much everything I’ve done in the last 20 years would have been done a little differently, with the cumulative effect being dramatic. I don’t believe in the butterfly effect on the scale of butterfly->hurricane, but the life or death of a relative would certainly cascade powerfully through several generations of human events. It’s remotely possible that I would have gone to law school, inherited my father’s practice in Florida, and ended up today as a dumpy, balding, middle-aged attorney.

Okay, take another look at the LJ icon for this post… see? It could have happened. The smile would have been different, though.

I’m glad my kids have grandparents on Sandra’s side. I miss my own parents, but I’m happy with the way things are today. Any changes I need to make are changes I’ll make in my present, and my future.

–Howard

I’ve been doing some reading up on recycling, and it’s kind of distressing. It turns out the whole thing is mostly bogus.

1) It doesn’t save money. Only recycled aluminum saves anybody any money. The rest of it — paper, plastic, “green”, whatever — is all subsidized by local, state, and in some cases federal money.

2) It doesn’t help the environment. In most cases more energy is spent creating new stuff from old stuff than creating new stuff from raw stuff. Paper comes from tree-farm trees, not old-growth forests, so you’ve got a renewable resource right there. I’m not sure what the energy I/O is for plastics, but since you’ve usually got oil-fired equipment making your oil-based goods, burning more fuel oil in order to save a bit on the longer-chain polymers is likely a wash. Again, aluminum is the notable exception. This is why aluminum recyclers and junkyards full of metal don’t need government subsidies.

3) Landfills are good things. With current technology and “green” legislation surrounding them, they don’t stink, and they end up as beautiful parks, wildlife preserves, and golf courses when they’re filled up. We’re not running out of space for them, either. Note also that landfills end up as very, very deep carbon sinks for those of you worried about greenhouse gases. Tree-farm trees soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that carbon stays in the paper they get turned into, and then we BURY IT FOREVER. Oh, and then we plant MORE TREES.

4) It makes us feel good. Um… so what? I’d rather learn to feel good planting trees than sorting my plastic wastes.

I got onto this anti-recycling kick after watching a very entertaining episode of “Penn & Teller: Bullshit” on DVD. But that was just entertainment (and rather foul-mouthed entertainment at that), right? I decided to do some reading up, to see how much of what they were saying actually held water.

It turns out it all did. Recycling is a Big Lie, perpetrated by misguided, uneducated idealists, and funded by People In Favor of Big Government.

Okay, before you flame me, read up a bit.
Link, Link, Link. From those articles you should be able to Google your way into all kinds of additional information.

All that said, we have a recycling bin here at home and we’re keeping it. Why? Because the taxpayers here in Orem, UT are subsidizing it. I can get a recycling bin for $3.00 a month, or another garbage can for $6.00 a month. I no longer harbor any illusion about the recycling being “good.” It’s just a trash can I don’t mind keeping in the garage because what goes into it isn’t smelly.

–Howard

I’m missing out.

There are TWO 20-year reunions happening this month, both in Florida, and both for High Schools I attended.

The Riverview High reunion is less interesting to me. I spent three years there, graduated, and moved on. It was a fairly large high school, with a graduating class of over 600.

The Pine View School reunion looks to be wonderful. I spent 5th through 9th grades there at a school where I COULD have gone on to do the High School thing, but at the time I wanted the “big school” experience. Still, they invited me, because this same crowd of 80 or so students in the class of ’85 pretty much grew up together.

Pine View was the gifted program in Sarasota, and was fairly unique at the time. Nowadays you can find gifted, accelerated, or other no-stigma-short-bus schools all over. Pine View’s admission requirement was an IQ test, which meant that the school was full of kids who did well on IQ tests, tended to be quite a bit brighter than the average bulb (the requirement, if I recall correctly, was that you score over 125), but were NOT necessarily overachievers. It catered well to what we later called “the Pine View Shuffle” style of studying — sleep in class, play with friends, shuffle through the stack of stuff for the test, and then get a B without really trying. Our teachers understood us, bless their hearts.

Anyway, I’m not going to either reunion because although I COULD burn the last of my frequent flyer miles on it, and I COULD afford to blow a couple hundred bucks on a motel, there’s a huge opportunity cost associated with it. If I’m going to kill a weekend that way, I ought to kill it at the San Diego Comic Con getting some schmoozing in. Better yet, I ought to stay home and get some actual WORK done. So that’s what I’m doing.

But the Pine View Reunion has this yahoogroup discussion going, and I’m being dragged through memory after memory of my gradeschool and junior high school years by some of the brightest people I ever did know. They’re mostly all lawyers and doctors, but there’s a nun and a mother of six in there, too. Oh, and the mother of six was one of my HUGE junior-high crushes. Interestingly, so was the nun, and at least one of the lawyers.

Mostly, though, I’m reminded of what a jerk I was. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, but that didn’t stop me from being as prideful, spiteful, petty, gossippy, and generally mean-spirited as any of the rest of them could be on their worst days. The good news is that those memories are not what are being recounted by people. Maybe we ALL know how awful we were to each other, and this is an opportunity to finally forgive not just each other but ourselves.

I’m not sorry I’m not going. I’m sorry that circumstances are such that it’s not pragmatic for me to take ANOTHER spiritual pilgrimage just now. Between leaving Novell, moving back in with my family (figuratively speaking), and accepting a triple-load of church work I think I’m already on at least two. I need to pull my head out and get some work done.

–Howard

I wandered outside to check on the hornet trap (1 occupant, I’ll get to that in a minute), and when I returned to the kitchen Patches was explaining that there were monsters outside.

I came in during the middle of the conversation at a point which he was explaining to Sandra “No, DADDY kill them with a sword.” Well, good. It’s nice that my kids have such faith in me. Like any good monster-slaying hero (or at least any hero with an eye towards longevity), I asked him for some details. Apparently these beasts make a fearsome noise (GRRKKKKH!) and hide in trees with flashlights. Hmmm…

I was ready to dismiss this as a flight of fancy that just happened to feature me as the hero, until Sandra realized what Patches was talking about. “It’s not flashlights. It’s LIGHTNING. He’s talking about thunder and lightning.”

Oh-HO! I’ve got news for you, kid. Your daddy, brave though you may think him to be, just found that a spider had moved into the hornet trap and laid an egg sac, and that tiny little beast gave him a case of the willies that will likely render him unable to APPROACH the trap, much less open and clean it. Don’t think for a minute that I’m going to head out into the next thunderstorm and wave a four-foot length of high-tempered carbon steel around under the trees. Sure, I’ve got a sword. I’ve got three or four that would make very servicable weapons. But these thunder and lightning monsters, like the spiders I’m mortally afraid of, don’t fight fair. If I succeed in engaging one with my blade, that won’t be the “thrill of victory” coursing through my veins.

The next time these monsters make themselves heard, son, your lily-livered Dad will sit quietly with you in the family room and hope they go away. Maybe if we get lucky lightning will strike the hornet trap.

–Howard