Over a Candle

I am hoping, beyond hope, that the tag for this post will not be used much. But it could. We have so much snow, that it’s hard to look at it and not think about the “f” word.

As I spent an hour shoveling out the drive way and sidewalk this morning, I noticed that the pile on the corner had gotten almost to the stop sign.

There is still a chance for a slow melt which will keep the river down. And if we don’t get a big early spring rain, that will help immensely. It is too early to really start worrying, I know. But every new snow storm just adds to my anxiety. Last year was so traumatizing, it’s hard not to think about the potential.

My car was plowed in a bit, and it’s hard to really see how high the snow is, but this photo gives another view of the street.

I would guess that there’s about three feet of snow in our yard, and the banks at the side of the road are at least four.

Moorhead has made improvements to its infrastructure. And we know what to expect this time around, so we can prepare more readily.

I’m really trying not to worry about all of this yet. There’s nothing I can do about it. And it may melt slowly away threatening no one.

We can only hope.

Tags: Flood 2010

Just a quick follow up to my previous post about the Baptist missionaries who were arrested in Haiti. It seems that they have been charged and a judge will hear evidence in the case. A verdict is expected sometime in the next three months.

Much has come to light since all of this has happened. It appears that the leader of the group, Laura Silsby, knew that what she was proposing to do - take Haitian children across international boundaries - was wrong. It also seems that there are questions back in the States about some of her financial dealings (which raise frightening questions about her motives in this child trafficking).

Various people (from their lawyer to American pundits) have been claiming that the other nine involved were ignorant that what they were doing was wrong, that they were trying to help, and that the meant well.

None of which means that they aren’t guilty.

First, ignorance of the law is no defense. This is well-known. Even if these nine other people were ignorant of the law, they still proposed to break it. And that makes them guilty. Maybe, if there is evidence they were ignorant, it would suggest leniency in the sentencing, but it doesn’t make them innocent. And they should be punished for their crimes.

Second, they should have known better. Independent of the legality, how is taking children out of their home country, children that by all reports were NOT from Port-Au-Prince, a good idea? How is that the moral thing to do? Why not make sure they are orphans? Why not try to find ways to help them stay in their country, rather than finding the fastest way to spirit them out of the country, and into adoption?

Of course there may yet be some diplomatic escape hatch for these people, but I think it would be good for their moral education of they suffered the consequences of their willful ignorance.

Here’s the latest report from the AP: No early release for US missionaries in Haiti

Tags: adoption

I know I have generally tried to keep adoption off of this blog. But events in Haiti have me a bit out of sorts, and I can’t not say anything.

Here’s the latest news story: Parents willingly gave children to US Baptists

The missionaries went to Haiti to set up an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. They tried to take children out of the country without proper documentation to the hotel building they arranged to use as an orphanage. There, apparently, they planned to offer the children for adoption.

The problem is that many of these children actually had parents, who were promised they could come and visit the children in the orphanage. This is a fact of life in Haiti: completely impoverished parents will sometimes give their children to orphanages in order to see their needs are met. In other words, many “orphans” in Haiti aren’t orphans.

And the Baptists knew it.

These people belong in jail. I know, I know… Innocent until proven guilty. I’m not saying they don’t deserve their day in court. But if the story we’ve gotten so far turns out to be true, these people are no better than child-traffickers.

Instead of ramping up adoptions in Haiti, we ought to be working towards more comprehensive solutions for the entire population.

On a related note, a few online friends pointed me to an organization that is doing something to help the children in Haiti, including the 33 children taken by the Baptist Missionaries: SOS Children’s Villages. They have written a good piece about the problems inherent in the increased interest in Haitian adoptions: Earthquake orphan appeal: Do not adopt earthquake orphans - Children Charity.

Well-intentioned or not, these missionaries behaved badly. They ought to have remembered that old adage: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Tags: adoption

Things that make me go “hmmm”…

* Getting a birthday card from my orthodontist.

* Present causing the most excitement: a new pillow.

* My favorite tradition: that glass of Bushmills Black Bush.

* Eating a third of my birthday cake, by myself. (Admittedly, only 9″ square cake, but still.)

* NPR running a story about why time seems to go faster as you get older and playing the song “Happy Birthday” over and over again. On my birthday.

* My niece informing her mother (my sister) that while she (my sister) was old, at least she wasn’t as old as Uncle Phil.

* Thrilled to have a gift certificate to my local coffee shop: Now I can make it through the first few months of my sabbatical without going broke!

* Wondering if I will ever get tired of new Star Wars stuff.

It was an interesting day. I’m sure I’m missing things, but this covers the bulk of what I needed to get out there.

Music does weird things to me. It acts in synergistic ways with my mind and produces “fancies… which are not thoughts, and to which as yet I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language.”*

So I can’t explain them, at least not very well. But so much of what I think, what I write, what is important to me seems echoed in, or drawn from, music.

We fell asleep and began to dream when something broke the night
Memories stirred inside of us - the struggle and the fight
And we could feel the heat of a thousand voices telling us which way to go
And we cried out “Is there no escape from the words that plague me so?”**

Those thoughts that plague us, words that others have used to chastise us, or that we think they would use, if we spoke with them again. Words we use to chastise ourselves. The various influences over who we are and who someone wants us to be. The push and pull of expectations that threatens to rip us asunder unless we find a way to say “Enough!” and find our own path.

In the still and the silent dawn another day is born
Washed up by the tireless waves, the body bent and torn
In the face of the blinding sun, awake only to find
That heaven is a stranger place than what I’ve left behind**

And if we survive that push and pull… If we manage to find our path, beaten and bloody, we may face it, and find that it is nothing like what we expected. We can only hope that it is a better fate than the one we would have had without overcoming what others want from us, for us.

* “A Dream within a Dream” by The Alan Parsons Project

** “Drawn to the Rhythm” by Sarah McLachlan

It’s been a busy couple of days. Watching live blog updates on Apple’s announcement of the new iPad, blatantly ignoring the political theatre that is the State of the Union, and then making a decision to not wait for an iPhone any longer. So much to do, so little time.

Yes, I’m interested in the iPad. I can already think of certain uses for it. For instance, the iPod Touch I took to Ireland last summer was perfect for many things. It’s the perfect size for a pocket. It allowed me to check the web, email, and get a currency converter (among other things). But the one thing where it fell flat was text entry.

I didn’t mind the onscreen keyboard for emails and the like, but trying to type an entire blog post on it was usually more time consuming than I liked. I could do it, mind you, and I got really accustomed to the on-screen keyboard. But pecking out an entire post with just my thumbs got to be too much, and I gave up.

The iPad helps that problem immensely. With both a bigger on-screen keyboard and a keyboard doc option, it would make text entry a lot easier. I can certainly see other uses for it, and I am very likely to get one after they are released.

I do feel badly for Apple. With the hype and anticipation leading up to this announcement, I can’t imagine what they could have released that would have lived up to it. (Well, maybe if they had announced a cure for cancer. )

Still, what I really wanted from that announcement was some indication that I could get an iPhone this year. Had the iPad come out for Verizon as well as AT&T, for instance, I might have had some hope that I could get an iPhone in this coverage wasteland that is the upper midwest.

But those hopes were dashed. So yesterday I went out and finally bought an HTC Hero, which runs on Google’s Android OS. I felt a little guilty doing it, but I was getting desperate for a new phone.

Now that I’ve had the Hero for a little over 24 hours, I think I’m ready to share my initial impression of it.

It took a bit of getting used to, after using the iPod Touch, but I’m really liking the Hero. One nice feature are the widgets. Widgets allow you to access the functionality of apps without having to actually start the app itself. They run in windows on the screen of the phone, giving you instant access to weather, music, calendars, Twitter, Facebook, and more. The widget scheme is handy, though I’m worried about battery usage, so I don’t leave too many of them up and running.

Apps are accessed through the menu at the bottom of the screen. You can put a shortcut to an app you use a lot on the screen itself. This is a shift for me from the iPod, as I’ve gotten used to all the apps being on the iPod screens. But it’s handy, as I only need shortcuts for those apps I use often.

Also, there is a notification scheme that tells you when you’ve gotten an email, a text, or a voice-mail. A small icon at the top of the screen shows you that something has happened, and a quick swipe down pulls down a menu showing you the different things that have happened. A quick touch takes you to the right program.

I’ve only had one phone call so far, but the quality was very good. The on-screen keyboard has physical feedback to help simulate the feel an actual keyboard. It’s not the same thing, mind you, but it’s a nice touch (no pun intended).

So far the only thing that really annoys me is that the touch screen is not quite as sensitive as I’d like. Sometimes I find myself having to tap several times to get the input recognized. This is something the iPod Touch does very well, so maybe I’m spoiled.

I also wish that the phone would sync with a Mac out of the box. Getting my contacts and calendars into the phone is the one thing I really was getting frustrated about with my Palm Centro. (The close connection between Palm and Macs was what had kept me buying Palm products for so long. With that gone, there was no real reason to stay with them.)

Missing Sync, a good third-party app, gives me this functionality (available for both Android, Palm, and many others). Except for my calendars.

Missing Sync is in beta for Android, and it won’t sync repeating events with exceptions (like all my classes that meet for sixteen weeks, with the exception of Spring Break). So most of my events didn’t sync. Then I noticed that none of my nonrepeating events synced either. I’m still trouble-shooting that. A friend of mine has suggested he might have a solution, and I’m hoping he does.

Still, the struggle over the calendar is something I was already having with my phone, so it’s not really a loss. And if I can get it working, then I’ve already got a vast improvement over my previous phone.

I’ll be curious to see what I think about the phone after the next week or month or year, but after the first day, I’m very happy with my purchase.

I can almost forget that it isn’t an iPhone. Almost.

Tags: Apple, iPad

Always tell the truth.

You know, unless it’s a little white lie. A white lie doesn’t hurt anyone, so it’s okay.

Teaching ethics, I hear things like this on something of a regular basis.

But this semester, when I heard someone say something along these lines, it clicked with something else I have been thinking about. White lies can hurt.

You see, years ago, a friend told me that she could never tell me if something I had written wasn’t any good. She was worried that my self-esteem couldn’t take it. As a result of finding this out, I could never trust any compliment from her.

And that has had a carry-over effect. If my self-esteem is so obviously fragile, maybe other friends treat me the same way. How could I ever know whether people actually like things I write, or were just too afraid to tell me that my writing was awful? Maybe they were just trying to protect my feelings. As a result, how could I really rely on a compliment?

I suppose someone could argue that it was being told that I was being lied to that caused the harm, rather than the lie itself. But there’s a deeper issue. If we cannot get honest feedback from our closest friends, from the people we ought to be able to trust to be sympathetic even while offering criticism, where can we get it? If we are deprived from an honest and compassionate evaluation, even if it isn’t what we hoped for, aren’t we missing out on something?

I was never good with compliments. But knowing that someone I trusted withheld the truth from me makes it even harder to trust them today. Even if I didn’t know it, I would have hoped I could get some honesty from a friend.

Today, as I was driving into school, two things happened.

The first was that, as I was driving, a gust of wind kicked up, bringing a lot of snow, making what was already lousy visibility much worse. So bad that I could not see the front of my car. All I could do was stop and hope that no one was behind me. If someone had been behind me, they wouldn’t have seen my car until they were on top of it, literally. Maybe not even then.

After a minute, the gust died down and I could see again. As I continued driving, the second thing happened: I heard the text message alert on my phone. When I could stop to check, I was unsurprised to find that classes had been cancelled. I wish they had been cancelled before I left home, but I was glad that no more students would try to drive in. I really wish, though, they had been cancelled before Ronni (and others) had driven into work.

Ah well, I returned home and got to work. Ronni made it back safely, too.

I did some school work and then got busy making another batch of pasties. These would be for lunches this week, rather than dinner tonight. I liked the idea of keeping them around for lunches so much, and had the ingredients for another batch, so I made them again. This time, I took pictures:

I made a couple of alterations. First, instead of trying to cut out the dough, I simply divided it into eights and rolled out each into roughly a circular shape. That accomplished two things. First, the size was closer to what I wanted for a lunch meal. Second, the dough gets stiffer every time you have to reroll it, so this way I only had to roll out each bit of dough once. Also, I don’t have anything about 6-8 inches to use to cut out the dough, anyway.

The other alteration was to use some of Ronni’s soy milk in place of the egg wash. I didn’t use an egg wash the first time I made the recipe. I think they turned out a little dry and didn’t brown up much. You can see that they browned nicely this time. Also, using a little soy milk on the edge of the circle, before crimping it closed, helps seal the pastry a bit better.

I haven’t tried them yet, but they look and smell delicious. Now I can’t wait for lunch tomorrow.

And now for the “random” part of the post… Last Tuesday, I took a picture of the hoar frost that covered the trees that day. I wish I had gotten a picture later in the day when the sky turned blue. The frost looks even better against the blue sky. This is still pretty, though. Enjoy!

My Twitter update yesterday about putting pasties in the oven seem to cause a bit of an uproar on Facebook yesterday. I don’t know where I first heard about pasties, but I’ve known about them for a long time. These are a food item that apparently originated in Cornwall, England. I have come to think of them as the original Hot Pocket. They have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with strippers. Honest. The things I made yesterday are pronounced with a short “a,” not a long “a.” (So, something like “pass-tee.”)

I saw the recipe in our newspaper a week or so ago, and I thought I’d try it. Let me be completely clear… This is NOT an authentic Cornish pasty recipe. The crust is probably flakier than it should be. And I put carrots in the filling. Those two things along make it not terribly authentic.

But they were very, very tasty. Since several people have indicated an interest in the recipe, I figured I’d post it here.

The pastry dough is pretty straightforward, though I’ve never made pastry dough before, so I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. (I’m not counting the rugelach dough.)

For the pastry:

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
2/3 cup butter, cut into small pieces
5-6 tablespoons ice water

Blend the flour and the salt together, then cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs. Put in a tablespoon of water and toss gently with a fork. Repeat until the dough begins to come together. Shape the dough into a ball, then wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

For the filling, I used a variation of the shepherd’s pie filling I make. (My shepherd’s pie recipe is taken from The Joy of Cooking. That book has a very different pastry recipe for pasties. You might want to check it out, if you have it. It seems likely to be less flaky and closer to the authentic Cornish pasties.)

For the filling:

I cut up a couple of potatoes into small cubes. I boiled the cubes for about five minutes, just to make sure they were well cooked.

Then I sauteed the potatoes in 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil along with:

1 medium carrot (cut up into small pieces)
1 onion, diced
1 stalk of celery (cut up into small pieces)

Saute over a medium (or a little lower) heat for about 15 minutes.

Then I add one package of the Yves ground beef substitute to the pan and let it cook for a couple of minutes just to warm up. (Using ground meat makes this really a cottage pie, rather than a shepherd’s pie, if that’s what I was making. For my non-vegetarian friends, you can use a pound of ground beef. Or cubed meat, if you prefer. Obviously, if you are using real meat, you want to make sure it’s cooked through. Probably best to pre-brown it before adding it to the veggies.)

Add a heaping tablespoon of flour and let the mixture cook for a couple of minutes to let it soak up the oil. Then up the heat a bit and add

3/4 cup vegetable broth
1 teaspoon of thyme
1 teaspoon dried rosemary leaves
dash of nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste

Let it cook and thicken.

You want to let the filling cool to room temperature (or refrigerate it) before putting it in the pastry dough.

Once the dough has sit in the refrigerator long enough, take half and roll it to about 1/8 inch thickness. Use a plate or a bowl to cut out two 6-inch circles. Put filling in the middle, fold up the dough and crimp it shut. (The recipe calls for coating the outside of the dough with a beaten egg, but I didn’t, and it came out just fine. If you don’t have anyone in your house who objects to eggs, you can try it.) Then cut out the other two circles from the other half. Take the scraps from both cuttings to get two more circles. You should be able to get six pasties from the dough. (And, if you use way too many veggies, like I do, you’ll probably have a little filling left over.) Cut a slit into the top of each pasty.

Bake on 375 for about half an hour.

You can eat them hot, let them cool, refrigerator or freeze them. Ours didn’t last long enough to try those last few ideas. Given the prep time, though, I can see the advantage of making these ahead.

Enjoy! Let me know if you try any variations that you like and want to suggest.

The Supreme Court has declared that campaign finance regulations restricting the ability of corporations and unions to donate to political campaigns violates free speech. On this ruling, corporations are treated equivalent to a person, with all the same constitutional protections.

With all the handwringing over the Massachusetts election, this decision seems much more dangerous to me. Political power ebbs and flows from one party to the other. I try not to get overly wrapped up in the yearly fluctuations in power. This decision, on the other hand, has the potential to completely upset the nature of elections in this country.

Treating corporations like people and defending their right to free speech warps our constitution. Corporations can clearly outspend most individuals, thus skewing political speech in their favor. Given the current trend in favor of short-term outcomes (rather than long-term concerns) that is so prevalent in the corporate world, this could have devastating effects on public policy, which needs to take the long-view into account.

What seems bizarre about this is that that traditional free-market defenders are lauding this decision. Milton Friedman, perhaps the greatest contemporary defender of the free-market, argued that corporations are to make money, not spend their money on behalf of social causes. His argument, in effect, was that corporations are in the business of making money. They should not spend their owners’ money on behalf of causes. While Friedman was concerned with keeping corporations out of the business of social responsibility, the reasoning seems to apply equally well to political spending. Corporations have no business spending the money of their stock-holders to support political candidates. If they have spare money lying around, it should be returned to the stock holders who are better positioned to decide how it should be spent, whether on elections or not, and if so, on what side of the election.

This whole discussion suggests, to me, a path forward. If corporations begin spending on elections, I would love to see a stockholder sue on the grounds that the corporation is betraying its fiduciary responsibility to its investors. I cannot say whether such a lawsuit would have any chance. There is quite a bit of leeway for business decisions. I imagine corporate officers could argue that their use of corporate funds on behalf of elections has a positive effect on the financials of the company. But it would be interesting to watch such a drama play out.

In any event, Friedman’s reasoning on the purpose of the corporation throws into doubt the free-market defense of corporate spending on elections. Indeed, it suggests that those lauding this decision are not really free-market proponents: they are merely self-serving proponents of flooding more private money into our already flooded elections. I’m not surprised by self-serving politicians. However, I’m very disappointed in the Supreme Court deciding corporations are deserving of the same protections as actual citizens. What’s next? Will corporations be allowed to vote?