kirsten's blog
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Wednesday, May 23, 2001
From: http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorb.htm

The phrase "get down to brass tacks" is of uncertain etymology. No one knows why it was originally coined, but there are several explanations. What we do know is that the phrase dates to at least the 1890s and that it is American in origin. Beyond that, there is only speculation. The earliest citation in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang is from an 1895 letter by Frederick Remington: How little I know ... when you get down to brass-tacks. The OED2 dates it to 1897.

Morris postulates two explanations. The first was that general stores used to mark out a yard on the counter with brass tacks so that customers buying cloth could "get down to brass tacks" and ensure they weren't being cheated. The second is that brass tacks were used as a foundation for upholstery. So "getting down to brass tacks" meant getting down to basics.

More likely is the explanation in Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and in Brewer's, which hold that "brass tacks" is rhyming slang for "facts."
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whoever decided to create a gap fragrance for grass must be from l.a.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2001

it's 11.41pm. sean is doing dishes, the dishwasher is running, the dogs are sleeping, the kids are in bed.

my head is pounding from too much tangueray and tears. there's always an excuse -- pms, the weather, my general proclivities towards misery.... maybe i just feel sad, and i should be entitled to that on occassion....
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Tuesday, April 10, 2001

it has been a very stressful couple of weeks, and i have neglected to post. i was on a roll for a while, and then kind of got distracted. here i am again, writing some more...

someone i'm very close to is in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend of two years. it's very painful for him (and for her), but i have a feeling that it's the best thing for both of them. neither of them seem particularly happy, and there are definate dynamics that aren't the healthiest. it's sad to see people go through these types of things.

my birthday was last week. i turned 31. it was a lovely birthday -- i felt very loved and appreciated. we had a big party with a lot of friends, former and current cow-orkers, etc. etc. i think everyone had a good time and i didn't fret too much about bringing the various and sundry parts of my life together.
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Wednesday, March 28, 2001

i start a new job next week, so this week i'm cleaning out desks, virtual and otherwise. here are a bunch of links in my "funny" mailbox.

rolling blackouts
physics today
action item
404
language
cement
user friendly
deadlines
mp3 tape player
zoo flash
things that make you go hmmmm
gothic martha
maps
nielsen
election 2000
the onion re election 2000
bullshit
post modern translator
have no idea-- but it says "warp"
bushisms
youth
barbie
more barbie (this is a frame page)
ad critic
don't let this happen to you
best fucking thing ever
web design
dialectorizor
if Lincoln had powerpoint
more barbie
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Thursday, March 08, 2001

okay, this is the most annoying thing i've seen in awhile:
--muffins
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Monday, March 05, 2001

so, saturday i had a dinner party to celebrate my mom's visit from massachusetts. we had a sit down dinner for 19 guests. i made salmon with cilantro sauce, mashed potatos, salad and bread. we had carrot cake and chocolate cake for dessert. it was a really amazing experience for me. the food seemed to turn out perfectly in terms of quality and quantity. everyone talked with each other, played ping pong and atari. something about getting a bunch of people in the 30s together and putting them in front of retro video games....

the excitement for the evening was early on. a couple of local kids came and took our lawn penguins and hot-footed it away. my husband took off after them in the car and managed to get a license plate number. they must have figured that out because the penguins returned to our driveway 15 minutes later.

by the end of the evening another penguin was missing. when i went into work today, he was sitting in my chair.

it was a pen-ultimate thrill to be able to pull off such a dinner. i was even surprised with myself. i think i need to find more things to celebrate.

the other really cool thing that happened last week was when we were driving home from dinner out with my mom and the kids. i was talking about rick and my memories of him. after i was close to finished, kelsey remarked that i should really write an auto-biography. it was one of the nicest compliments i've received in a long time.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2001

this is the most amazing marketing coincidence ever:
--cNet
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there was an earthquake in seattle that we felt here as well. we're all okay, but i don't like earthquakes. they are kind of freaky. maybe one is accustomed to the type of weather you grow up with. people out here can't handle thunder storms or any kind of snow at all. i can't deal with earthquakes.

my mom arrived for a visit yesterday. she's here till next monday. i wonder if the two events are connected in some sort of more ethereal sense.


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Sunday, February 25, 2001

it's been a very relaxing weekend. i've been pretty sick, but yesterday i got some exercize and walked down the mountain to catch the bus. my muscles ache today, but it was a good thing for me to do. the weather has been absolutely wonderful.

i went out hottubbing this evening and my wonderful, amazing husband cleaned the house. we now have steam-cleaned carpeting.

here are some links
--dancing pussies
--last pancake breakfast
--men who look like kenny rogers
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Friday, February 23, 2001

a couple more links that i just need to chronicle.....
--army
--semiconductor physics
--operating systems


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Thursday, February 22, 2001

well, i'm having a productive day. i burned two cds and ripped a third. i've sold about 15 boxes of girl scout cookies. no real work yet though. later i'm taking my poor kitty, Okay, to the vet. she has gotten a referral to a dermatologist because she has failed to respond to treatment. there are lesions all over her face and she sneezes a lot. the vets think she may be allergic to her face, or something else. i have a sneaking suspicion she might be allergic to our birds, but that's just a gut feeling. i'm very concerned about having to put her down. okay has always been there for me. i've had her for about 11 years and there have been times that the only reason i've gotten out of bed was to feed her, so she has really helped me through some very rough times.

i have been quite surprised by how attached i am to okay, but i suppose it makes sense. when i go to bed, i usually sleep on my tummy and wrap my arm around her. she purrs me to sleep. okay's a living, breathing (and now sputtering and wheezing) teddy bear.

i don't think i've posted about how okay and i found each other. it was my last year of college and i really wanted a pet. i was looking for a kitten and somhow i got the name of judy who knew all the local cats (judy weighed about 350 lbs and had about 30 cats -- she was the pen-ultimate cat person). she told me that she didn't have any kittens, but that she had rescued a very young female calico/tabby cat from a barn. the cat had been fixed and was extremely shy. judy named her "okay" because she figured that a common word might help okay get used to people. judy opined that okay was abandoned at a young age by a college student who figured out that she/he couldn't keep cats in the dorm, which would explain why she was somewhat feral.

i instantly fell in love with okay. okay, on the other hand, ran into the closet and stayed there for about six weeks. she was introduced to me in the room that was my study and so she stayed there. i remember crashing out on the floor with a pillow and reading Dora : An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud to her. maybe that's why she's such a nutty cat.

Okay is a completely different cat now. She will snuggle up to anyone who wants to pet her, though she doesn't like to be forced into an introduction.

Anyway, I hope today goes well. I'm a little scared.
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Wednesday, February 21, 2001

work is completely miserable. we have no work in-house, so i'm reading tech specs and trying to keep busy. i'm not a person who does well with time on her hands. i just need to be doing something....

to that end, i picked up a new cookbook to read. it's The Working Stiff Cookbook. it's a very aesthetically appealing book -- wirebound and such. it starts out nicely too:

Chopping is foreplay
Chopping is like the time you would spend at the travel agent's buying your tickets to Italy
Chopping is like the overture to your favorite opera
Chopping is like standing on line to buy tickets to a Tony Bennett concert
Chopping is like having a winning bet on a horse and waiting to find out how much it's going to pay

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Tuesday, February 20, 2001

total gallows humor, but it made me laugh:
--Dot Com Refugee


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well, it was a fabulous weekend. i ended up going to a party on saturday that was intensely wonderful. i had a great time and received a lot of good lovin'.

the rest of the weekend was recovery, hanging with friends and cleaning. now, i'm back at work where things are very quiet. it's actually quite sad.

an amusing link, though:
--dating


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Friday, February 16, 2001

two links for you:
--manchowder
--this is just too weird for words

it's been a nutty day. 15 of the 39 people i work with were laid off. it's extremely distressing. thankfully i wasn't one of them, but one has to wonder if the writing is on the wall.
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as i mentioned earlier, tom was extremely reticent about my delving into his past. he didn't see how it was relevant and, even moreso, he didn't want to relive the past. there was no debating that i needed to investigate his life history. we had no choice and we would have done it with or without him. however, doing it with his support is a hell of a lot easier that proceeding without it. so, i spent a lot of time with tom trying to build his trust and obtain his consent.

tom was a painter and i learned this a couple of months into going to visit him. he brought down some pictures of his work for me to look at one time, and i asked him to paint something for me if he had the inclination. he asked what i was interested in, and i said i wanted something colorful and maybe with a political bent.

a couple of weeks later he came back with the idea of painting whales. i intimated that whales weren't quite what i had in mind... at our next visit he told me that he had decided to paint a portrait of sinead o'connor because she was abused as a child and child abuse is political. i nearly fell over.

after that, tom and i could talk about his childhood and what he went through. i got the feeling that he never quite told me the whole story, but he did open up a lot. that painting was his way of telling me that he trusted me to do my job. he never succumbed to the pressure his mother put on him to close the investigation and that took an incredible amount of fortitude on his part.

in the weeks that followed, tom and i talked about a lot of difficult stuff. there were times he cried, and there were many times when i cried on the way home from the prison. finally the day came for me to pick up the painting. it completely startled me because it really wasn't a painting of sinead o'conner. it was a self-portrait. the look on the subject's face was the expression on tom's face when he was at his deepest, darkest moment with me.
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Thursday, February 15, 2001

today's headlines:
--Amusement park
--Microsoft amusement


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so, people are often curious about what it's like to work with death row inmates. most comment that it must be depressing. at times, it definately was. it was a job where "deadline" really meant death. it wasn't fun hearing about the intense pain and anguish that people you grow to care about go through. and then, when all is said and done they are killed anyway. when i started working on these cases, i had the lofty goal of trying to save people's lives. i never lost sight of that goal, but learned to have smaller goals along the way. i learned that it was important to try to do what i could to enhance the quality of the spiritual lives of my clients and their loved ones.

the greatest loss for me was when tom thompson was executed. my job in relation to his case was to work up mitigation. he did not understand how this was relevant given that he maintained his innocence. i repeatedly told him that it was just as important that we show on a deep level how he was a person that was incapable of committing the crime he was accused of as it was that we explain why someone who is guilty commits the acts he commits. tom reluctantly let me delve into his life. he had seen how robert alton harris' family had been torn apart and humiliated by what was revealed (he was severely abused and suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome) and didn't want his own family to go through the same thing. despite this, tom was incredibly courageous to let me do my job. i would write about tom's past, but it's not something i think he would have approved of and i don't remember a lot of the details anyway. i think i've forgotten a lot because it's just so painful to remember. however, i do remember that tom taught me that while you may have a higher goal to achieve, that it's possible to have victories along the way.

tom used to go through periods when things were stressful with his case, or he just had enough with the noise and frustrations of being in the main death row area and he'd throw a punch and end up in the hole for a few months. that was his coping mechanism.

things were heating up in tom's case. we had conducted interviews of all his family and a social worker was due to come visit him. he wasn't looking forward to it. at the same time, there was a guard who was inappropriately touching inmates. when death row inmates pass from one part of the prison to another, they usually are clad in their underwear and carry their clothes (handcuffed behind their backs). this makes things go faster because they need to do full searches upon arrival and departure. prison issue underwear does not have a flap, so frequently privates hang out. this guard was taking inmate's privates and putting them back in their underwear (while they were cuffed behind their backs, of course) and making crass comments. one time he made a move for tom, and tom jumped out of his way.

rather than talking back to the guard or getting physical, tom organized a couple of inmates and they all filed a complaint against the guard. there are repercussions for doing this kind of thing.

they chose to screw with tom by screwing with my visits with him. there were a couple of visiting rooms and we usually visited in the main area, but sometimes that got too noisy to have real conversations. tom gave me some papers, which were copies of the complaint, in an envelope to take back to the lawyer and when i went to exit i was told by the guard that i couldn't remove paper from the visiting area in an envelope. i took the papers out, gave them the envelope and thanked them for the clarification. i had been making visits up to the row for three years and had never heard of such a rule, but one does not argue with the San Quentin guards.

a week or so later, tom and i were visiting in the quieter visiting room. he gave me another set of papers -- this time not in an envelope. the forms that inmates use to file complaints are green. he had a couple of them to give to me in relation to the guard that was harassing inmates and they are easy to see. i put them in my notebook and when i left, i was stopped. the guards maintained that i was smuggling out contraband and that i had been warned. since he had been previously warned, he was written up and dumped into the hole. all of his visits were to be behind glass (and we had scheduled the social worker to evaluate tom the next week -- it's virtually impossible to do psych testing behind glass and mesh wire). the "glass" at San Quentin isn't like it is in the movies. there is a little, tiny window with glass, and then two or three sets of screens over each other, so you can't really see who you are talking to. it's awful.

i did stand my ground and said that i was told that there were to be no envelopes. there were none. i had been visiting inmates for three years and it's in the rule book that they can give their legal representatives legal materials. they asked to see the paper to determine whether or not it was of a legal nature. i told them it was confidential. we reached an impasse, so they conviscated the paperwork into a signed and sealed envelope and the lawyers took it up.

the story does have a good ending. tom's 115 (that is the number for the form that's filled out when there's a disciplinary action) was overturned and the guard ended up being transferred off the row. tom was a hero.

it was really awesome to see him grow through the experience and deal with things in a different way than he was accustomed to. it seemed that the support we were able to give him helped him to become more of the person he wanted to be. that's the part of the job that i miss the most.

so, when people tell me that murderers on death row are evil and will stay that way forever, i tell them this story.
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a link to start the day: emulator.
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Wednesday, February 14, 2001

i starting thinking about the days i used to work on death row cases. i was a legal investigator and worked the defense side in the appeals process. there were two cases in particular that i worked on. both were based out of orange county, california.

the first was thomas francis edwards. he's still on death row and is convicted of killing a 12 year old girl. he shot her once in the head at point-blank range. he shot another girl as well, who survived. after a tedious investigation into his past, and a lot of neurological testing, it was determined that tom most likely suffers from temporal lobe syndrome. it's very difficult to find a sensical explanation for why someone would shoot two twelve year-old girls at point blank range, on a saturday afternoon in a park. as can be imagined, there's a lot more to the story and at some point, i'll go into some of the details....

the second was thomas m. thompson. tom was executed july 14th, 1998. he very well might have been innocent. there is some information here and here.


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valentine's day is such a wretched holiday. it really is. there is so much pressure to do the right thing. i've had a pretty good day. lots of attention and affection.

the worst valentine's day for me was when i was 16. i was in love with my friend dave, who lived in new jersey. we talked on the phone pretty much every day for months and months. i finally got up the gumption and typed up about 12 love poems, songs, etc. with a pretty frilly font and mailed them off. while they were in transit, we spoke on the phone. he informed me that he and sharon where going out. i asked him to tear up the next piece of mail he received from me and he did.

several years later we were both living in california he called me up on valentine's day and asked what i was up to. i wasn't doing anything so we went to dinner. i wore a short skirt, flirted with him and then went home. he had forgotten the incident (so he claimed), but upon remembering confessed that he wanted to read the letter but his sister made him throw it out.

the next year, dave sent me a dozen red roses. 1-800-flowers sent them, but one of the stems was missing the bud. . . . it was kind of poetic.
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uck. i'm trying to redo some of the navigation here and it's not posting stuff up right.... *grrr*
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my friends aaron and judith had a baby. here are some pictures. the page is slightly minimalist, but i think it's cool that their kid has a domain name. can you tell that they live in san francisco?
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did i mention that chris is M. Scott Peck's son? he wrote the road less travelled. maybe i'll put up some incriminating photos....
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here are a couple more:
--the adventures of...
--Pete Townshend on Napster


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happy valentine's day, all! it's a gorgeous day here in portland, and i'm in a gooood mood.

i tried to update my blog again last night, but it would seem that blogger.com's servers were incapacitated by the load. 'tis a shame they are using IIS..

anyway, for your amusement and edification:
--Rolling Blackouts
--physics


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