RogerBlogger

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery but today is a gift….that is why it is called the present.

My mom tells me that when I was a baby, she used fabric diapers on me. It appears that cloth reusable diapers are making a comeback. Here’s a brief description from new mom Anne on Bum Genius diapers:

Cloth diapers I guess are making a comeback. We chose to do cloth diapers for several reasons: 1) money - to cloth diaper for the entire length of diapering costs about $700-1000, to disposable diaper for the entire length of diapering will cost about $2000 - use the same cloth diapers for your next children, the money saving is endless; 2) chemicals - have you ever felt one of those nasty disposable diapers? They are gross, when a baby pees they expand as they “capture the wetness”. It’s gross. Those chemicals stink to high heaven when the baby poops or pees. The chemicals have been linked (but not totally 100%) to male infertility, an increase in asthma, and an increase in other health issues; 3) Diaper rash - when you cloth diaper, the rate of diaper rash goes way down. Ben has had diaper rash once since he’s been born, for a total of one day. Why one day you ask? He wore a disposable diaper and it irritated his skin. 4) Environmental issues - I may be using energy washing and drying the diapers in my laundry machines, but you will use and throw away over 2000 diapers in the lifetime of the child. Those diapers don’t break down and are just sitting in a landfill. Gross.

They don’t smell. The perfumes in disposable diapers smell way worse. We have a diaper pail in the bathroom and we just stick them in there until wash day (which is every other day). When a baby is breastfed, their poop is water soluable, so no scraping poop off the diapers until after starting solids. Diaper goes straight off Ben into the pail (we also use cloth wipes) and the pail goes straight into the laundry machine. No big deal.

I love cloth diapers and I wouldn’t do it any other way….I’m going to convert the world!

So I am here in Miami for the week with my parents, and we’ve been going to various touristy spots : Key West, South Beach, an Alligator Farm. One day we are driving down the coast, and along the way we see an pretty beach. It appears to be surrounded by lots of high rise condos, must be a good beach. So we pull into the paid parking lot, and the parking attendant says “hey, you know this is a nude beach right?”. He seemed to be somewhat bored, so I assumed he was just trying to get a laugh from us. He reiterated “really, it’s a nude beach”. Unconvinced I said “sure ok.” So we park, and go through a small tunnel - arrive at the restroom where there are showers, and there is a naked guy just showering… slightly odd, but hey maybe he just wanted to get really clean. Then we keep walking and arrive at the beach and see this.

Somehow we had ended up at Miami’s only nude beach. The sign doesn’t seem to make sense to my dad until he sees about six naked guys playing volley ball. Luckily not everyone was nude, but certainly slightly awkward. We wanted to leave, but we had already paid $5 for parking, and there was only about another hour before sunset so finding another beach would have been difficult. So my parents and I sat there for 40 minutes or so enjoying our time on the nude beach.

Seems at every turn you hear about someone else being laid off. Utah has always had a bit of an insular economy, and currently Salt Lake City is one of the few major cities with decent unemployment numbers (around 3 to 4%). Today I was having lunch with one of my good friends, who just found out in the most unfortunate of times that he was to be laid off beginning in the new year. It’s always tough, never know quite what to say - perhaps that it is never as bad as one thinks.

Many of the clients that I am fortunate enough to work with are human resource managers. Speaking with them often gives me a better grasp of the economic situation than any other economic indicator. Most recently a car dealership HR person spoke of having to reduce sales staff by 10%, but other companies such as tech companies still had a tough time filling engineering roles.

When I was a kid around 1991, I remember sitting around the kitchen table and asking whether the recession would affect us. My Dad said at the time no, because he still had a job. I remember around the 2001 recession, asking my economics professor “do you think things will pick up.” Her response was “most recessions last an average of 11 months, so it should be over soon.” I wonder what I will remember of this time - how will you remember it?

Mental note: called up the local Senator’s office to check on Obama Inauguration tickets, and have not heard anything back. They’re probably giving them to all of the major donors.

Laughed on this while eating breakfast - this was amazingly done at the Alfred Smith Dinner one month before the election.

An interview three years ago - Daily Show November 2005 also hilarious!

PBS Frontline Documentary on both McCain and Obama - 2 hours long - the longest youtube video I’ve seen.

Probably one of the strongest endorsements throughout the campaign - Colin Powell on Meet the Press about a month before the election.

I really wasn’t sure if it was going to happen. I was one of those sideline doubters. Even as Barack edged ahead by double digits, there were plenty of skeptics that thought the numbers may not reflect reality (as it had in New Hampshire).

In Utah, the reddest of all red states a democrat vote matters little. Strangely Utah supported Bush at higher percentages than even Texas. Anyhow, I did register to vote about a week or two before the deadline. The night before election day at 2:00 a.m. was spent trying to find proof of residency (as a new voter within the state). This process was made harder by the fact that I had shredded all of my bills one night before that. The day of the election I hit the polls (at a local middle school) at 8:30 a.m. before work, and there were strangely no lines.

A local Democrat party - crowd hears Obama wins!

Watching the election process has become a sport - the primaries were like Monday night football. Like a football game, as I watched more and more it was tougher not to root for one side or another. By halftime, most people have a vested interest in one team. I tried to remain neutral, but after one night of make a small contribution, I was inundated with Obama e-mails. So I was pulling for him, although I could have seen myself voting for McCain (partly due to his many appearances on the Daily Show).

In general, I appreciated the fact that Obama dealt with difficult topics and spoke to us as adults - on race, talking with foreign countries, and Iraq. There were also moments where he appealed to the lowest common denominator - why should be spending billions in Iraq when we could spend it in the U.S., switching from opposing offshore drilling to mildly favoring it, not adequately addressing how we were going to dig ourselves out of the national debt and what sacrifices that would require. Obama has shown a unique capability to walk a fine tightrope on issues - to the point of not taking a strong or aggressive stance on many issues - his healthcare plan does not go as far as Clintons and his selection of Biden seems “safe”.

It will be interesting to see how the more pro-democrat news sources such as CBS, MSNBC and even the Daily Show cope with a relatively less mockable president. They won’t have Bush to pin the blame, and it appears that Palin has become the newest target.

New York Times look back at the last two years

Riding the tram up and down for free this weekend at Snowbird - just rated the top ski resort in North America. Too bad we don’t ski more.

Christina stealing pumpkin from a local farm.

I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid writing about work for a variety of reasons, mainly because I never want to be fired for blogging. This past week at one of our associate meetings, I realized that I’ve been at the firm now for about two years. A milestone. What was strange was when I looked around the room at the 20+ attorneys who were in the meeting, only seven or eight of them had been at the firm longer than me. I am not sure what this exactly means or says, but it felt weird being more “veteran” than most. Note the meeting did not include the hundred plus shareholders of the firm.

In many ways, I consider myself fortunate to be in the position that I am in. The firm is full of folks that if you saw on the street, you wouldn’t think they are attorneys (in a positive way). The number one reason our clients come to us is because they like us as people. My supervisor is an amazing person, and every time I leave that person’s office I am inspired to do great things. The firm has given me latitude to be involved in the community, and to some extent I have run with it.

This past week the local Asian American group that I am involved in put together a political meet and greet, where we brought together about 130-140 members of the Asian community and eighteen of the top political leaders in the state; everyone ranging from gubernatorial candidates, the state attorney general, the state senate majority leader. To have the top political leaders want to reach out to the Asian American community which is 1-2% of the state’s population and only 40,000 to 50,000 people was amazing. We even received a little press coverage.

Unrelated Picture - Christina looking for beavers on a park ranger led tour at Great Teton National Park, near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

I’ve been reading through Obama’s Audacity of Hope and coincidently came across this timely passage tonight as the Democratic Convention was getting started. Only eight year’s ago this is where Barack found himself:

“I hadn’t planned to attend the (2000) convention; I was just coming off my defeat in the Democratic primary for the Illinois First Congressional District seat, and was determined to spend most of the summer catching up on work at the law practice that I’d left unattended during the campaign (a neglect that had left me more or less broke).”

“At the last minute, though, several friends and supporters who were planning to go insisted that I join them… Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A…. Not being a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the Illinois Party chairman, he was already inundated with requests, and the best he could do was give me a pass that allowed entry only onto the convention site. I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. By Tuesday night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the Democratic party any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight back to Chicago.”

It’s amazing that only eight years ago, Barack was dejected after a state loss, barely could get entry into the convention, and was broke. Now he’s the star of the convention (a show which he describes as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee - as well as a means of rewarding the party faithful and major contributors with four days of food, drink, entertainment, and shoptalk.)

My parents came to visit me this past week. My Mom flew from Dallas, and my Dad from Florida, just to make sure I was eating brown rice, that my apartment was clean, and that I was still alive. Christina had been slightly dreading the visit, but it came and went quickly. Through their time share program, my parents stayed in a place in Park City, a popular resort town that’s beautiful this time of the year. Their appreciation and love for Utah was a bit unexpected - they loved the scenery and my Mom loved the “large trees.”

For me it was a good to see both of my parents who seem to get crazier by the year. Christina’s says jokingly that she knows why I turned out the way that I did after meeting my parents. We took them to the large Kennecott mine which strangely qualifies as a tourist attraction - the largest open pit mine in the world and then took my parents on a walk over to the Univ. of Utah.

It was a bit of nostalgia for my Dad who had attended the U for grad school, and remembered staying in the international graduate student family housing. When our family came from Taiwan 24 or so years ago, this was our first home away from home. I was just three or four at the time. We took him there (or rather he led us there) and tried to find the exact apartment that we had lived in.

The tiny cinderblock apartments, with small window unit air conditioning, and the smells of ethnic food were still there. By all accounts it had not changed, even the pre-school that my brother had attended was still operating. Back then they gave a small plot of land to each of the grad student families to grow their own crops, and those small gardens were still being tended to. Later in the week, we took my parents to one of the local dim sum restaurants and coincidentally my Dad had eaten there twenty years ago with his professor and still remembered it. Hopefully, I’ll go back to Ann Arbor or Houston with that same nostalgia at some point.