Congrats to the San Francisco 49ers for their stunning victory over the Saints today to go on the the NFC Champtionship.
It’s been a long time in the making.
My MVP of the game: Vernon Davis
Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP
Sometimes I wonder how I manage to still be living in California.
Sometimes I wonder how I could ever live anywhere else.
Happy sunny New Years Eve from the coast at Half Moon Bay.
“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” – Mary Schmich
Image Copyright 2011, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s and the Camera+ app.
While we haven’t quite yet passed to the end of 2011, I’m already in progress on what will surely be the biggest change to impact my new year.
You see, the Good Man and I are moving house.
It’s not a big move, just a few miles away. But we are moving to a much larger place with two, count them TWO full bathrooms.
I experience waves of joy at that thought.
As the landlord is completely renovating the place (we get to move in with all new paint and floors and appliances, yay!) we won’t actually move until later in January.
But…
Here’s the thing. I have lived in our current spot for almost eight years. The Good Man moved in almost five years back. But for me, eight long years. That’s a lot of time to accumulate crap.
A lot of crap.
Over the years, I may have been accused by friends and family of having difficulty with throwing things away.
Ahem.
I’m not a hoarder. Much.
I mean my place isn’t floor to ceiling with newspapers I can bear to part with, but the extra large storage space under my current place IS full of all manner of stuff that should have been thrown away or donated long ago.
It’s a lot.
The Good Man is fairly organized and keeps his stuff pretty tidy. He goes through everything about once a year and culls out, cleans out and donates.
Me. Not so much.
So laying ahead of me, I have a fabulous future with a shiny new home. It has a fireplace! And a deck. And an actual living room.
Surrounding me, I have boxes and bags and barrels of crap to sort through.
I pledged this week that I’m off work to clean out everything under the current house. So instead of enjoying my bright future, I am lost in my past.
Today I went through a huge box of papers, bills and receipts. This is my personal weak spot. For some reason I think I need to keep every receipt I ever get. The Good Man has me on a rehab plan so I don’t keep doing this.
But today I shredded the original registration papers on the Jeep I bought in 1995. The State of New Mexico charged me forty-eight dollars to register the first car I bought with my own money. I miss the days of forty-eight dollar car registration.
I traded in that Jeep on a new one in 2001. So I kept an almost seventeen year old document on a Jeep I sold ten years ago from from a state where I no longer live.
It’s like that.
I remember talking to my mom in the year after my dad had passed. She was going through everything they owned with plans to eventually sell their house and move somewhere more manageable.
In the stuff, she found a box of papers that my dad had kept. In this box were bills and receipts that dated back to the first year of their marriage. They were married for forty-five years.
Mom fired up a burn barrel and alternately cried and cursed while disposing of the stack of paper that had (unknown to her) been a part of her life for her entire marriage.
Today, as I shredded, I thought about that. I though about how mad The Good Man would be if I died and left him with all of this crap to sort through.
I have to strive to be better, to get rid of stuff more often, to keep my piles of crap under control.
This move is good. It’s a good idea to force myself to clean out my mess. It’s a good idea to have a new start.
My future is bright. But I gotta sort through my past first.
Image from The Magic Forest.
This is an early entry for this week’s Theme Thursday fun. This week’s theme = future.
Our poor beleaguered Candlestick Park. The windy old jewel is really starting to show her age.
Well, not starting, really. Rapidly declining is more like it.
Last night she had a show to deliver: A contending team vs a contending team and an audience on the big stage of Monday Night Football.
Then this happened:
That blue light you see off to the left is a power transformer blowing up.
In a packed stadium in a hotly contested game with rafters full of fans from the opposing team out at Candlestick point…that’s not exactly where you want to be when the lights go out.
After some waiting around, the lights did come back on and the 49ers did prevail over the Pittsburgh Steelers, so all’s well that ends well, I suppose.
But what a sad state of affairs for the ‘Stick.
Transformer blowin’ gif found here.
It’s so rare that I express any sort of kindness for ANY California politician from either side of the political spectrum, but today I am feeling a small bit of fondness for one Mz Anna Eschoo.
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Loud TV commercials to leave quietly, thanks to FCC
The Federal Communications Commission today is expected to pass regulations requiring broadcasters and cable and satellite TV systems to maintain constant volume levels. The order, which goes into effect one year from today, “says commercials must have the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” says FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Last year, President Obama signed into law a measure that Congress passed giving the FCC authority to address the problem. A Harris poll taken around that time found that 86% of people surveyed said TV commercials were louder than the shows themselves — and, in many cases, much louder. “It is a problem that thousands of viewers have complained about, and we are doing something about it,” Genachowski says.
While normal listening levels average about 70 decibels for a typical TV broadcast — 60 is equivalent to a restaurant conversation; 80 to a garbage disposal — levels on a TV channel can vary by as much as 20 decibels.
To comply with the new law, broadcasters can use audio processors to measure the loudness of a program over its entirety and adjust the volume of commercials accordingly, says Joe Snelson, vice president of the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He said the goal is to avoid an abrupt change in volume when a show goes to commercial break.
Some broadcasters and pay-TV providers already have begun implementing the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM). DirecTV spokesman Robert Mercer says the satellite provider is “ensuring that our commercial inserts are at the proper volume level and … (we) are working with our programmers to be in compliance with the rules the FCC adopts.”
Similarly, Cox Communications plans to make sure that local ads and commercials on national networks “are compliant,” says Cox spokesman Todd Smith.
“Slowly but surely, consumers are going to get something they have been wanting,” says David Butler of the Consumers Union.
“I never characterized this as saving the Union,” says Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., the original sponsor of the bill. “But consumers have been asking for it. We may not have peace in the world, but we may have more peaceful homes.”
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All that said, one *might* ask why, exactly, this issue had to pass through legislature.
I mean really, people.
Original link found on Shoeboxblog.com