So it has recently come to my attention via shared post on Facebook that my local school district's school board has made some questionable decisions about how to spend a proposed budget increase that apparently does not involve hiring back any of the 400-odd teachers they'd laid off this year. So I did what any internet-savvy and curious person would do; I searched the internet to find confirmation of this somewhere that counts as a "news source" and not someone's personal blog.

I got one news hit related to this, from a local weekly free periodical. Trying to find information about what had actually happened at the board meeting in question even on the school district's web site seems nearly impossible without actually sitting down and watching the recorded session. The minutes are in PDF form, making them difficult to sift through. None of the local television networks or the local daily paper seem to take an interest in what's happening at these meetings in general; searching the respective websites for the school district's name brought up very little outside of a closure due to finding asbestos in one of the schools earlier this year.

I admit that most of the time, I don't really think about it either. I'm not a parent. I don't plan on becoming a parent. I will never be sending my children to these schools. I have several friends and relatives who are teachers (and one who works at a school in an administrative position), but only one of them (that I'm aware of) even works in this district. I know very few people who are even sending their children to these schools, and they aren't the schools I went to myself when I was a child. So why do I even care?

Well, I care because, in general, I care about the education of children. I care that they are getting the resources they need to reach their potential. I care that they are kept off the streets and given access to adults in their lives who are not their parents. Quite frankly, the current state of public education is really hurting, but it's still a better alternative to no public education system.

This got me thinking about a larger issue: In general, I am very poorly informed about what is going on at the local level, and this is arguably the level at which I am most directly impacted. At election time, I am always faced with a list of names for local elected offices (the school board among them), none of whom I'd ever heard of, and can find very little about when I look around online. I can find plenty of news about our mayor, but that's partly because he used to be in the NBA, and partly because there has been a history of accusations of inappropriate behavior towards teen girls (which I am fairly certain are not related to the current issues with the school district).

Who are these people? How can I find out more about them? What are they doing with my city that doesn't show up on my news feeds?

What can I do to stay better informed at a local level?

Tags: education, local, politics, sacramento

I went walking in the park today after work and took a bunch of pictures of the flowers. I really like how this one in particular came out, and had a hard time deciding which to post to the art blog.

Tags: flora, macro, photography, photos
frame of mind: artistic
listening to: Marilyn Manson - The Nobodies | Powered by Last.fm

This may well be the best picture of Kira I've taken to date:

Tags: keetan, kira, photos
frame of mind: artistic
listening to: Cyndi Lauper - True Colors | Powered by Last.fm

Well, I suppose one way to get me to actually take pictures of an event is to have a new camera arrive the day before. ;)

The camera in question is a bright green Pentax K-X. Back in April my mom gave me $400 for my birthday with the instructions to use it to buy a camera. Well, the Canon point-and-shoot I already had was about $350 worth of camera, so I figured I'd do some shopping to see if I could afford a DSLR for a bit more than that. The green K-X cameras came out about a month later, and recently came down to about $470 online. Sold.

Our recursive meta ritual went off smoothly on Friday night, and we randomly generated a symbol and numerical representation of same, created an arbitrary chant to imbue it with intent, and randomly selected a representational color. We had about the right number of people (30ish) and a good time was had by all.

Other than our own ritual, I went to one other event: a panel discussing similarities between Paganism and Hinduism, and suggesting followers of such polytheistic paths support one another against discrimination and prosecution. The rest of the time was spend socializing, socializing, and more socializing. Considering PCon is generally more useful to me as a networking event than anything else, I consider this a success. :)

Tags: events, pantheacon, photos
frame of mind: pleased
listening to: Styx - Suite Madame Blue | Powered by Last.fm

Why yes, I did just happen to have my vampire teeth with me when we were at IKEA, why do you ask?

Tags: ikea, metaphorge, out and about, photos, vampire

Original intent was not to illustrate this with an actual snapshot, but I realized such a thing wasn't a bad idea.

If you've known me for a fair amount of time, you'll know that I have a bit of an obsession with socks. I am a huge fan of capri-length pants just so I can show off my knee socks. I kid you not. They overfill my sock drawer when I actually manage to do all of my laundry. Because I had so many socks, I had to start keeping the tights/nylons type of hosiery in my underwear drawer just to keep track of it.

Until recently, anyway. I realized that the brightly-colored fishnets and striped thigh-highs were also getting out of control, and I was having difficulty finding my underwear. I usurped a drawer previously reserved for shirts so I could separate them out (though I admit I still haven't figured out what to do with the displaced shirts, other than "store them somewhere," so I haven't been wearing them since then).*



As if that weren't descriptive of my personality enough, tonight while searching through the above hosiery drawer for something appropriate for a wedding,** I found a pair of underwear in there, camouflaged.

That's right. I own a pair of underwear that's not only black & white striped, it's also made out of the same material as the tights are.





In fact, I own four of them.

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* I also have way too many shirts, and cutting the available number in half still lets me go 3-4 weeks before needing to do laundry
** It's a damn good thing it's the sort of wedding it's appropriate to wear purple tights to, or I would have had to have gone shopping, since nothing in there is what one would normally wear with a light-colored dress to a wedding

Tags: photos, socks

Broadcasting with the lemurs!

I'm such a dork that since the webcam was in use broadcasting to ustream, I used its monitor to line up this picture on the iPhone instead.

Tags: photos

I've been kind of in Alice Overload mode the past few weeks, and only partly because of the recent movie release.

Got this for my phone, which prompted me to start making Alice-related ringtones (mostly samples from the American McGee's soundtrack). I've also been making audio recordings from the book over at the Daily Wombat, and so far have one inspired drawing as well (and I expect there will be more at that tag in days to come).

Tags: alice, artwork, creativity, geek, links
frame of mind: creative

yay for fresh hair dye!

Tags: photos

I drew a wombatilim!

I bet you were always wondering what one of those looks like.

Tags: creativity, links
frame of mind: silly
listening to: Delerium - Fallen Icons | Powered by Last.fm