Sam-a-lot
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa
The Photo
This is a somewhat blurry photo of Sam, Leah's dog, who I took care of while Leah was in Mexico. Sam is a very attentive--here, extra snack-motivated attentive--yellow lab.
Netflicking
Today's movies were Futurama: Bender's Big Score and Everest, the IMAX film about climbing the mountain.
Yes, I'm still on an Everest kick.
I'm also a bit fascinated by Anatoli Boukreev. During a 1996 storm on Everest, he risked his own life to save several other climbers and later climbed back up Everest to bury two of the climbers he tried to save and couldn't. He took a drubbing in Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air for it and later wrote his own account of the experience in The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest. Eleven years after the event--and ten years after Boukreev died on another mountain---people are still second guessing Boukreev's actions. They mostly do it like I do, from the warmth of their own living rooms and not from the top of the world's highest mountain. But such are the ways of cowards, I guess.
Here's video promoting the Anatoli Boukreev Memorial Fund:
Here's a quote from Ernest Hemingway's Novel A Farewell to Arms
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
And here's a quote about climbing Mt.Everest from Everest, the IMAX movie:
"It’s not that dangerous. It all depends on your karma."--Jamling Norgay Sherpa
Jamling Norgay, in case you don't know, was Tenzing Norgay's son. And Tenzing Norgay, in case you don't know, was, along with Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Everest. (If you didn't click on the Tenzing Norgay link, you only missed seeing the online TIME magazine article that places Norgay and Hillary, as a team, among the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. They are in the "Heroes & Icons" section along with Anne Frank, Charles Lindbergh, and Rosa Parks.)
The Day
I spent the day waiting for snow and shoveling my way out of a different kind of snow job by sorting through the pile of mail that's collected on Dave's computer desk. Sorting through the mail sounds like a definite non-task, but it took hours and there were several piles of legitimate mail and two full trash bags of junk mail when I was finished.
The junk mail is mainly of the credit card variety. Because David and I have a very modest amount of credit card debt, we are prime targets for credit card companies. We receive dozens of credit card offers each week. I've never counted, but I'd guess we get about forty or fifty of them a month. Since I'm always interested in seeing how badly the company would screw me if I were to sign my name to one of their hyper-friendly, pre-approved entreatments, I usually open them up and at least skim the fine print. My favorite, from either Citi bank or Bank of America, offers a beneficent zero percent interest rate--until you have a single late payment, then the interest rate rockets up to thirty-three percent. Seriously. It's almost like meeting one of those sweet, romantic guys who turns out to have a violent jealous streak.
My other favorite thing that the credit card companies do is this: I have a single credit card in my name, which makes the credit card companies crazy I think. How dare I only have a single credit card, right? So for a couple of months after I got back from Japan, they sent me scads of offers. When I didn't respond to the offers they sent in English, they began to send them in Spanish. Makes sense, right? I live in the Valley and my last name suggests I'm Hispanic. I must not be able to read English, right? Right. Oddly enough, Dave never gets these Spanish offers though he receives almost daily offers from the same companies at the very same address. Ah, the benefits of having a whitey surname. Those clever credit card companies! I mean, they've figured out that I could be in Dave's employ--his non-English speaking maid perhaps--given my brown and his non-brown surname. Needless to say, it amuses me to no end to rip up credit card offers in Spanish.
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