Layabouting

“Over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” – Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, May 9, 2012

I read this morning that a number of students at BYU have created You Tube videos for the “It Gets Better” project.

I took a look at four or five of the videos. I found this video particularly moving. I don’t know what this kid’s future might be, but I hope that it is bright one.

I think that the “It Gets Better” project is one of the most hopeful things I’ve seen in this country in a long time.

… is doing the same thing over and over again, this time expecting a different result.

We’ve got an insane house finch. He likes to fly into the garage when I open the garage door, and then finds himself trapped when I close it.

I’m talking daily, sometimes several times a day.

Michael spent the week in Texas, visiting his family, and I’ve had a quiet week, clearing brush around here, working at the railroad and enjoying the weather, which has been in the 60′s and sunny all week.

Most of my time at the railroad was spent with Gil on reworking the water tower. Gil did the innards, replacing the flush valve, sealing the lower perimeter, and cleaning out the tank. I did the outside, repairing the support frame, priming and painting, and fixing up the roof hatch.

Between us, the tower has a new lease on life, at least for a few years, or so we claim. The acid test will come in a few weeks, when we fill it up.

Gil and I were both surprised about how well the tower has survived the years. We don’t know how old it is — we think that it is the “second tower”, but it is almost certainly thirty or forty years old at this point, and it has survived a lot of use.

I’ve still got some minor work to do when I get around to it, but none of it urgent or needed to put the tower into service in a couple of weeks.

The interesting thing about the tower, to me anyway, is that it is, essentially, a big barrel. The barrel part of the tower consists of staves, carefully fitted together, and it holds water without an inner lining. I don’t know who did the work, but it was carefully done.

After I got the bottom structure repaired, I painted.

Painting the barrel was easy — prime the first day, first coat the second, and second and final coat the third. Straightforward.

The bottom structure was anything but straightforward.

It is a tangle of posts and braces, tightly fitted together, requiring a contortionist to paint. Painting it was maddening. No matter how carefully I worked, I always missed some surface or other, and I ended each painting session walking around, staring, looking for what I missed.

I think that everything is primed, with two good coats, but I know perfectly well that I’ll look at it in July and see something. By then, I hope, I’ll have lost track of the paint.

The weirdest part of the repair work was the finial, the ornament at the top of the tower’s roof. The tower’s old finial was rotted out, and Gil, Gary, Jim and I did a lot of butt-scratching trying to figure out how to easily fabricate a new finial.

Jim had the winning idea — get a used bowling pin and use a lathe to reduce the outside dimension to 3 5/8″ so that it would fit into the hole at the top of the tower. Gary got Chalet Lanes to contribute a pin, and Gil and I spent an hour on the lathe getting it shaped.

The bottom structure on the tower is now black rather than red. I decided to use black to make the jerry-rigging I did on the structure less obvious, but it turns out to be attractive. The water tower looks more like a water tower than it did before.

Odd, isn’t it, how function sometimes enhances form?

The little white truck is now over 500 miles, and done with its break in.

I celebrated by driving back from Home Depot to the railroad on I-90/94, instead of Clara Avenue, taking the little white truck all the way up to 65 mph.

The little white truck went “Wheeeeee!”

I’m almost through my break in, too. I do the clutch/stick routine only about one in ten times now. Progress!

Driving an automatic isn’t as much fun as a stick, but it is a lot easier on my knee. I’m reconciled, eased by the knowledge that the little white truck is a “work truck”, as utilitarian as trucks come.

Now, if only the bugs would stop committing mass suicide on the white grill …

Gil and I spent the better part of the day drilling 12 1 1/16th inch holes through 1 inch hardened steel.

It astounded me how long it took to actually do it. Hardened steel doesn’t give up easily, and that’s a fact.

We were drilling the base plate for the new turntable we’ll be installing at Western Springs in a few weeks. The base plate is welded to a 300+ pound pin, about 18 inches high, on which the entire 3-ton turntable will spin, so strength is critical.

The base plate will be anchored into a 36×48 inch reinforced concrete foundation, and is designed so that we can level it perfectly. Because the turntable will weigh roughly 4 tons loaded with an engine and tender, perfect balance is everything.

So drill we did. Necessary, but tedious.

While we were between holes, I fashioned a proper base for our track department mascot, so that he could ride around on Speedy 1, the track department’s scooter, with suitable dignity.

Laugh all you want, but the pink flamingo is Wisconsin’s official plastic bird, an honor earned in 1979, when the students at the University of Wisconsin installed 1,008 pink flamingos on the Bascom Hill lawn.

The pink flamingo is every bit as much a part of Wisconsin’s weird history as our spotted cows, and a lot easier to feed. If the Wisconsin Historical Society can display a pink flamingo in its permanent collection, so can the railroad’s track department.

That’s the way John and I look at it, anyway.

Utilities are an item of late, in two directions.

First, ATC is seeking permission to run a mega-watt power line through the Dells area, as part of a corridor from LaCrosse to Madison.

The utility has been considering “potential” routes for the last year, two of which (orange), one along County P and the other through a gas pipeline ROW, ran close enough to the house that we’d probably be able to see the towers, which are as high as water towers.

ATC announced the two “preliminary” (blue) routes — the two that the utility has settled upon — this week, and both, thankfully, are farther afield. One runs down the I-90/94 corridor and the other along US Highway 16 east of the river. of the two, the I-90/94 corridor would have less impact on the Dells of the Wisconsin River State Natural Area, so I hope that ATC eventually decides on that route.

Second, Reedsburg Utility obtained a federal grant for a “high speed rural internet” project, and we are at the east end of the impacted area. We got a letter telling us that the utility would run a fiber optic cable along Berry Road, and asking us to sign up.

It took a nanosecond to make that decision — we’ll move from 130KB-784KB DSL to 5MB-5MB fiber optic. Although I shouldn’t complain, I suppose, since 130-784 is fast by rural standards, where dial-up remains the only option for most people, our internet is painfully slow, and I’m looking forward to hooking up later this summer or fall, when the fiber optic line is activated.

Hooking up, though, is likely to be a problem. The electric and telephone utilities didn’t manage to connect up with each other when the house was built, and, as a result, the telephone line runs in a shallow slit — I’d guess between 12-18 inches deep, having watched them put it in — along the ditch from the service box at my neighbor’s and down the driveway instead of being properly buried deep down with the electric line. I can’t figure out how Reedsburg Utility is going to make it to the house without hitting the telephone cable.

It is for them to work out with Frontier, I guess, but I’m going to make sure that I have enough cell phone minutes to live without a land line for a while.

At a campaign event at a bowling alley in Wisconsin this week, Rick Santorum told a boy who reached for a pink bowling ball: “You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera.”  Santorum went on to say “Friends don’t let friends use pink balls.” The comments were tweeted by Reuters reporter Sam Youngman.

I beg to differ. Tough guys don’t have a problem with pink balls. Only morons like Santorum do.

And what’s with this “not on camera” nonsense? Does Santorum’s public aversion to pink balls take on a different cast in private, perhaps?  Or maybe he just gets a case of blue balls around guys bowling with pink balls. Who knows?

Santorum went on to another bowling alley, where he bowled a “turkey”. Fitting.

Looking forward to writing an $1,800 check for health insurance again next month, getting out the checkbook to pay a $1,000 bill from UW Health Services, and having spent some time in the past few days learning about Medicare options, I’m reminded yet again how grateful I am that I’ll be on Medicare in a few months.

I’m watching television as I write, absorbing a discussion about the future of ObamaCare if the Supreme Court decides that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. It seems clear to me that if the mandate goes, the rest of ObamaCare has to go, too. Without the mandate, the rest of the law doesn’t make economic sense.

That’s going to hurt a lot of people, and hurt a lot. Our national health care system — great medical care for people like me, who can afford it at any cost, and no real access to good medical care for those who can’t — is a disgrace, and a tragedy. Maybe the good news in all this is that the end of ObamaCare will get people off the dime and working for a rational health care system, like Canada’s.

The political fight for marriage equality in Wisconsin will begin this year, working toward marriage equality in six to eight years.

A few years ago, in 2009, I predicted that marriage equality would come to Wisconsin in ten years, and I think that the timetable will hold.

Recent polling suggests that Nate Silverman’s projections about acceptance of marriage equality are on track in Wisconsin, and that a slight majority would vote in favor of marriage equality this year.

The pro-marriage vote would be tight, and concentrated in the state’s more heavily populated southern counties, but it would likely prevail, and the state’s anti-marriage amendment narrowly repealed if a vote were held in November:

In my view, this opens the door to begin fighting anew to repeal the anti-marriage amendment and working toward marriage equality once again.

The process will not be easy or short. Julaine Appling’s anti-marriage amendment must be repealed before we can move forward to equality, and the repeal process is identical to the enactment process we suffered through in 2004 through 2006. The repeal referendum must pass through two legislative sessions, and then be put to a vote by the people. As a practical matter, it will take six years to repeal the amendment.

The repeal process begins, in my view, with renewing the political debate over marriage equality.

I expect the debate to be quiet this year, but nonetheless begin.

Marriage equality is now the law in eight states, President Obama is “evolving”, the Republican presidential candidates seem determined to keep the debate alive (for the purpose, truth be told, of stirring up the far-right to turn them out in November, but any discussion is a win for the side of equality), a movement is afoot to put both the national Democratic party and a number of state Democratic parties (including Wisconsin) on record in favor of marriage equality this year, and, in Wisconsin, and Democratic politicians in Wisconsin running for office are no longer keeping mum on the issue.

In Wisconsin, as has been the case nationally, it is unlikely that a vote to repeal the anti-marriage amendment will be successful if Republicans hold the Governor’s office or a large majority in either the Assembly or the Senate, but it is entirely possible that Wisconsin will “turn” in the June recall and November general elections.

If that happens, it is possible that we might bring a repeal vote to the people as soon as 2015 or 2016, but more likely in 2018 or 2019.

A caution: It is not time to declare victory. Wisconsin has one of the worst anti-marriage amendments in the country — banning both marriage equality and marriage-equivalent civil unions, a more restrictive anti-marriage amendment that Alabama, for God’s sake — and the anti-marriage forces are entrenched, politically experienced and closely allied with NOM.

Julaine Appling and Wisconsin Family Action will fight hard to keep marriage equality at bay as long as possible, using every trick in the book. The anti-marriage movement has a history of deception, division and dirty politics — the most recent evidence of which is the disclosure of NOM’s confidential “strategy memos” — and we have no reason to expect anything else in the coming fight. Repeal will be an uphill battle, fought against strong opposition.

But equality has an odd way of prevailing, in time, the forces of darkness notwithstanding.