Ahrg. Need to do 2 loads of laundry. Only one machine working. Currently in use. Can't tell when it is not in use from 3 floors up. Lots of tromping up and down the stairs with dirty laundry and stuff. And my knee is being stupid, so this is a tricky endeavor.

Nilly's yearly posts always reminds me of a friend's tradition of sending out silly cards with appreciative wordsto her friends inside for her birthday every year. It is a gesture that always makes me smile, and every year, I think I ought to do that for my birthday. And every year, I forget or get lazy.

Allyson, you haven't offended me. I mean, I'm really trying to think, and I can't come up with anything. As for Sheryl and amych (and the aforestated Nilly), nope, you're clear!

Sorry, Kat -- I left for krav (which is open, no matter the Jewish holiday) -- I have no plans, other than a vague one about a movie.

And the hypocrisy post upthread wasn't to anyone. I meant to type more (it was something my mother had just said) but then I got distracted and hit post.

Need to do 2 loads of laundry. Only one machine working. Currently in use. Can't tell when it is not in use from 3 floors up. Lots of tromping up and down the stairs with dirty laundry and stuff. And my knee is being stupid, so this is a tricky endeavor.

You're living my life three hours ago. How odd. Except I'm only two floors up. And I've taken ibuprofen for the knee, and a cup of tea for the annoyance.

OK, is Rocco Dispirito gay or not? He was just commentating on the Bravo Great Things About Being Queer.

Oddly, on one of the trips down, the knee twisted funny and now it is mostly fine. I swear, sometimes I think a tendon or something just slides a little the wrong way and if I can tweak it back, it's fine. I'm genetically predisposed to bad knees. My dad's had multiple roto-rooter jobs on his (but he's a runner, so I expect mine will have a little more longevity before that point) and my maternal grandfather's bad knees ended his olympic wrestling hopes and, according to rumor, kept him out of the army. Though he may have started farming by that point, which might also have played into it. The Army declared my brother's knees "bad" at 23, long before he got out (but he had to fight so that the VA will continue to cover that.)

But anyway, bad knees.

I have archaeology knees. One of them has a 'bony callous' which sticks out when it bends. Doesn't hurt though. The other has what I think is a cartilage problem, because it sort of bubbles and pops when I bend and straighten it. That one hurts like the dickens, especially when I leave it bent for too long and straighten it.

We should form a club.

I do not know about Rocco, but there are a lot of those "Great Things About..." Shows. I think they sit a dude down, and then throw him easy questions on every topic they can think of. He will show up in "being 30" and "having luxuriant hair" and whatever other topics they have lined up, whether or not he is actually a 12 year old cue-ball.

One of the reasons, I think, that the earliest 20th is so muddled/amnesiac in our history is that it was so very messy, and not (as with the 50s) in ways that can be altogether taken as flattering our modern sensibilities. Huge anti-immigrant discrimination, at a time when immigration soared; the KKK ascendant; violent clashes between businessmen and union efforts; rampant political corruption and chockablock reform movements; muckraking journalism and federal government involvement (like the regulation of meat-packing, thanks to Upton Sinclair); nativism and the financial interest in foreign policy; women getting the vote. The car, the elevator, electric lights, instant national news -- it was bewildering. It's not like World War II, where you can trot out some Churchillian rhetoric and get into the fun tactical stuff. It's all still live issues, or sore spots, or unresolved questions.

Actually, I'd posit that the whole period between 1876 and 1917 is given short shrift, if my seventh grade US history class is any indicator. Too messy, too hard to fit into nice subheads.

Yeah, I actually took a college course on Reconstruction, and it was hellishly organized (the course, as well as the era). Lots of unmemorable presidents.

I learned more about that time from my "Anarchy and Anarchists" class.

The landlord's DVD menu has been looping for two hours now. I'm close to having a psychotic episode. I wonder if they're all dead in there? Or they went out for dinner and left it playing.

Seattle had its share of the action too, with the labor demonstrations in 1919.

The only general strike in American history, in fact.

Seattle was a very red city back then. It was during this period that the first health coop was founded (Group Health).

And most of what I learned about the post-WWI racial tensions I got from one class in college -- Black Protest Movements.

And the more I've learned about pre-WWII Seattle the more it seems like a completely different city from what's here now, like we have nothing but ruins of an ancient city sticking up amidst the 1980s glass and steel buildings.

We live less than a block from what was once a train platform. No train has run through here in 65 years, and the track's been pulled up for more than 50.