How not to spend a three-day weekend

Summer flu, sneezing, sweating, sleeping and coughing futilely. I don’t recommend it. The TiVo is all but empty now, at least.

Cat Friday

Ellis Truss has two yard cats to keep mice away — apparently sawdust is like a magnet for mice — Patch and Penny. Penny has gone walkabout, as cats are wont to do, and has been gone several weeks. She’s always had a habit of staying out overnight or longer at a stretch and often just coming back to tag in, grab a bite to eat, and head out again. Motley, who was a total homebody much of her 20 years, once spent a month living in a national forest when I had an apartment in Blacksburg before showing up one day on the back porch, waiting to be let in for dinner and acting as though nothing had happened.

In any case, the Ellises have decided to get two more kittens to fill the void and when their cousins’ cat had kittens, Britt drove off to pick them up and bring them back. They’re both right at six weeks old, tiny as can be, but fearless. Both are tabby mixes (the brownish tabby has an orange stripe on her head) and, as they jump and race around like kittens their age will, getting a good photograph of them is as tricky as getting a good shot of Bigfoot.

Here the two as-yet-unnamed kittens are, during a nighttime visit to see if they were doing OK and if Patch was still hissing at them and avoiding them. (She was.) They’re playing with Kasey’s toy cars in the plans room.

The camera on my Treo is also partially to blame, of course.

SLHS reunion

South Lakes’ Class of 1987 will be holding their 20th reunion on the weekend of October 26 – 28. Good lord, we’re old.

Three thousand miles, a baby and other commitments will keep me from attending. Maybe for the 25th.

Jessica in The Nation

As I mentioned the other day, at least two of my high school classmates are now lobbyists/think tank … thinkers. (I have no idea what the generic job description for a think tank would be.)

Jessica has, in fact, just gotten a piece published in the online version of The Nation:

There are many things I think women will come to regret, but not the ones Justice Kennedy fears. They will regret that their doctors are no longer allowed to use an abortion method that can reduce the risks of hemorrhaging, uterine perforation, infection and infertility; that women carrying malformed fetuses will no longer be able to have an abortion procedure that lets them hold their child and mourn it; that doctors will no longer feel free to develop new techniques that might be even safer for women; that doctors will have to modify the techniques that aren’t banned to ensure they won’t be prosecuted; that women whose health is endangered by new abortion restrictions will have to fight them on a case-by-case basis, when a remedy will likely come too late.

But most of all, I think women will regret that a paternalistic government has taken away their right to make their own decisions about their family composition and their medical care. Because ultimately, isn’t freedom the right to make decisions for yourself–good or bad? Wouldn’t you prefer to regret your own mistakes rather than those of the government?

See, when you’re a think tank deep thought-production specialist, they’re not paying you to write knock-knock jokes.

High school classmates turn political activists

So, I was innocently listening to Marketplace on my iPod when I heard Deron Lovaas speaking on the air, although Marketplace spelled his name wrong in the transcript. Despite the spelling issue, I figured it was him: How many people could there be with that name?

And, indeed, Deron works for the National Resources Defense Council:

DERON LOVAAS is vehicles campaign director and deputy director of the smart growth and transportation program. He currently directs NRDC’s oil security issue campaign and served as chief lobbyist on the federal transportation bill. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Deron coordinated Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl campaign and managed Zero Population Growth’s sprawl educational outreach program. He also worked on transportation and air-quality planning at Maryland’s Department of the Environment.

See, I might be a journalist, but he’s a lobbyist.

He’s not the only one who’s making waves in Washington. Our mutual friend and classmate Jessica Arons is Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress (a leftie think tank that’s a counterpart to the Cato Institute). I haven’t caught her on the radio, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

Given how many fellow South Lakes graduates stayed in the Washington area, I suppose the real surprise is that more of them haven’t yet shown up in visible positions in the world of politics and policy.