not too tired to drink beer

This was a nice weekend, but defintely not the restful one I needed. Last week was extremely tiring; my department had our quarterly (almost) meeting here. We’re located all over the world, but we need to work as a team so we meet in person about 3 times a year. So last week was pretty much like being on travel, except for getting to sleep in my own bed when I finally got home every night. Monday we had an offsite meeting followed by dinner and I go home at nine. Since I didn’t have to meet people to carpool until 8:15, I got in a short erg piece before work. Tuesday we had scheduled drinks after work, and I got home at maybe 8:30-9 and then still had to find some dinner. Wednesday I had meetings until 6:30, got home around 7 and then had dinner with Ted. Thursday we had meetings, then went canoeing as a team-building activity, then had a barbeque, and I got home at 10:30. So it was a fun week, but very tiring. On Friday we had meetings only in the morning; I managed to leave by 2, took the bus home, walked a fair way with my work backpack to the pharmacy to pick up a refill, back home, to the supermarket and back, and then erged 12km.

That all wrecked me for Saturday. Ted had a 1000m race in Rotterdam, the first race on a new course at that distance. Regattas are already tiring, because you end up running back and forth from the boats to the docks to the area where food is sold all day. And, of course, you normally have races on top of that. Ted and his partner had two races, so it’s a bit ridiculous that I was more tired than either of them at the end of the day.

I was afraid Sunday was going to be worse because we went to Groningen to meet the Hudson dealer there and try his new boat (a single with bow-rigger), and afterwards walk around the city a bit. Luckily it wasn’t as exhausting as I feared, mostly due to the 3 hours ont he train either way. We did short rows to test the boat, had some food outside the spectacular building of the Groninger Museum, walked around the city centrum a bit, and then went home.

Monday I did a short erg piece at a decent rate; today I wanted to row but all the boats were already reserved, so I’ll try for a longer piece on the erg. Hopefully it won’t be too much; last week I was so exhausted that tomorrow’s outing was soujnding like too much to do, but it’s looking more appealing now.

This is good, because my plans for tomorrow can be summarized as “travel around and drink beer”. There is a beer tour only for women (link is in Dutch; they’re also on Facebook), and it is, unaccountably, free. (Even more unaccountably, only 16 women have signed up to go.) I’ll take the train to den Bosch, half an hour away, whence a bus will pick us up and take us to tours and tastings in two Belgian and one Dutch brewery. I have no idea how this all is being funded, but when a woman at my company told me about it, it sounded like an opportunity I’d kick myself for missing. I think the idea is to develop beer consumership aming women. I promise to take pictures.

And look, they made me a word cloud!

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

warning: politics ahead

The previous post covers my actual life, but I also wanted to write about the latest Romney gaffe. I really, really have trouble believing that 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes. A high percentage of retired people, certainly – but surely they’ve paid their dues. And the poorest people, yes – personally I’d sort of rather see people having enough to eat before I worry about collecting taxes from them. ANd then there are the ultrarich with tax shelters – pretty sure those aren’t the ones Romney is complaining about, and there aren’t all that many of those, that being sort of the point of the whole 99% thing.

Anyway, maybe it’s not safe to say who I’ll vote for, this far ahead of elections, because aliens could always infiltrate and completely change the candidates’ policies. Barring that, however, it’s pretty safe to say it won’t be Romney. So I would just like to mention a few things: this year and for the last several, we’ve been in pretty good financial shape – even Mitt might not scorn us. We pay taxes.

And yet we still depend on government “hand-outs”. They are a main reason we got to this point: both of us attended public schools for all twelve grades. I had some Federally-funded loans and scholarships, whithout which I could not have completed my BS at a private college. We both had salaries and MS programs funded by a government jobs program (that one run by NASA) in our first several years at work. I collected unemployment from the state of Arizona once, for six months, and benefited from unemployment as a kid, too, when Dad was laid off for a bit. (I don’t know whether his was adequate, but I sure was glad I had savings – I’m here to tell you that no one is depending on the state of Arizona to keep them in – traveling gets difficult without them – and of the US’s superb (and often underfunded) National Parks. Local government wouldn’t work without a (mostly) stable Federal government, and I benefit from it too, all those nifty things like clean water supply, trash collection, libraries….

So yup, I do want my next President to lead a Federal government that keeps those handouts comin’. And in return, I’ll pay my taxes.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.