Thoughts on a Warm Day

Its about sixty degrees out, which is roughly a quarter warmer than normal. It'll be dropping for the remainder of the week, so that by Easter it'll be in the mid forties. Still, it's nice to see. Already, the first weeds are sprouting, and the first flies have shown up.

I've been reading several books at once, according to how challenged I feel like being -- The Number, and Executive Orders, and The Man in the Arena -- and today, I picked up another, from my daughter. Its one of hers, a novel about a girl in ancient China who discovers a surprising affinity between herself and dragons. I'll read it, partially out of curiosity, and partially as a compliment to her, for having picked it.

Listening to the dialogue between the president and the democrats is a little sad. It certainly doesn't sound like anything good will come out of this. I had said a few days ago that the Congress didn't have the right to manage, let alone micromanage, things that the president was doing, but now I'm having second thoughts about that. If funded, he's going to keep pressing a war that people don't want to be in, by and large, and that's not right. So, if he's not willing to listen, let alone negotiate, don't they have the responsibility to reflect what people want? Barring them knowing something that, if widely known and understood, would make the people feel differently, I think they do. Still don't like seeing it, though. Listening to one senator today, he usually sounded as if he was making sense, but then every so often he'd toss in a phrase about 'it'll be the presidents fault if the military's not funded', and I don't think thats true -- at least, not in a black and white sense. Or he's say things that sounded like the congress was simply reflecting the will of the people, as demonstrated in the last election, and I thought 'well, no, the election was not just about the war'. The president's no better, saying that the congress is playing politics with soldiers who are in harm's way (they like that phrase on both sides of the argument, I notice); when what you do is politics, its kind of hard to not play politics full time. He did say one thing, about 'the plan is starting to work', and I wished I could believe him -- but I can't, because I think he's not believable. I want to say 'not trustworthy', but I don't think thats true. I think that personally, he probably is. But not this time.

Things are as strange as ever at my job. The current audit is just about over, and we're probably not going to do too well. My group's manager is huffing and puffing about how that seems to say that we're 'not as tight as we should be'; he's right, but I don't think its entirely our fault. I think that the organization as a whole tends to have a skewed attitude toward these things. That said, not doing well in one isn't a pleasant experience, and we'll probably have to grovel and cover ourselves in ashes for a while -- until the press of events speeds up, and we turn focus to something else. Its then that a stable process would save us -- but we don't have one. We're going to try to come up with one, but I don't have high hopes. I've known that I'm naive about this kind of thing for years.