So, I'm In A Meeting, But

Though the subject matters grab me as any job-related subjects should, it's kind of hard to stay engaged. With the meeting in my one-ear bluetooth headset and nothing appearing on Live Meeting it's hard to stay engaged yet impossible to disengage enough to focus on any actual work, because of the need for constant vigilance and subsequent interruption. This means what?

Yes! Web surfing! What catches my eye?

Houses I could pay cash for?

The housing bust has made it possible to buy a home in Sacramento -- albeit a shabby, small, old one -- for roughly the price of a new Toyota Prius.

Other than the shitty neighborhoods, they don't look bad to me. If I ever evolve into a cranky old man with nothing worth stealing outside his trusty old computer and trustier older shotgun, I could see settling into such a shack. Live cheaply, curse the gangsters pissing on the lawn, and take fabulous luxury vacations.

A child recently kidnapped by his mother's boyfriend is feared to be in this infamous watery graveyard, where items from refrigerators to a helicopter have been found by divers. This is the canal you see along part of that long stretch of I-5 linking CA's two halves. I don't know exactly where the best dump spot is but if everyone behaves I won't need to.

Molina said he understood that the last time the canal was emptied in the mid- 1990s, 200 cars and 11 bodies were discovered.

A Facebook friend points me to The Agonizing Last Words of Programmer Bill Zeller, where he eloquently describes the lifelong effects of sexual abuse before ending his own life. His hopelessness is truly tragic, because it's evident he was not able to exhaust every possible avenue for help. Somehow he lost all trust in the professional community, just as he had lost it in other people as well as in himself.

On a related note, I was home Saturday night with the radio on, and in This American Life, Act One, a reporter described his lifelong journey from a similar experience. It ended differently: His solution was not to kill himself, but to plot the murder of his abuser. It's a hell of a story.

Shuffled off this mortal coil: Jack LaLanne, San Fran native, Berkeley High graduate, no-nonsense fitness guru, inventor of today's standard equipment, and irrepressible optimist. Reading a sketch of his biography, I get the sense he was seriously ADHD and possibly OCD as well, for how else does a 15-year-old kid get so completely turned around by a single visit with his mentor? That he had no television or computer games to distract him at the time may have helped. Anyway, my mom wore a bikini to assist him in a demo once in 1946, which I only learned about a year or two ago so I mention it every time I can cause it's cool somehow. I vaguely remember his show in black and white, but I don't know why I would. I am not emulating him currently: Near-daily noontime meetings and this relentless cold have undermined my resolve. But I see winter's waning and I think Jack's spirit, which will never really die, is poised to re-emerge.

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Postscript! From the article, a trip through the Sac Bee Homes Sales Database reveals a surprising number of properties one could pay cash for, if sufficiently motivated. The cheapest in my zip code that is a real live house, not a condo, but has an outdoors and a garage and everything, sold for $65k. We paid that for our vacant lot in 1993. She paid that for her duplex in 1986. And it's not in a bad neighborhood at all. Weird.