So much to blog, so little time!

Working backwards from today: WAY TO GO CALIFORNIA! I promise not to say anything bad about you ever again. Even if I do feel fat every time I visit. (Ok, really, thats about Southern California. But I’ll still quit talking trash about you, California.)

About 5 minutes after hearing the news that their State Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, in a really strong and fantastic opinion, I started wondering when we could go to California to get married.

A few seconds later, I had a brilliant idea: BLOGHER is in San Francisco this summer. I wasn’t going to go, because I’m going to be ~7 weeks shy of my due date and traveling that far that pregnant kinda sucks. Plus flying cross-country is expensive.

But I had a great time last year, and even though my posse the LadyBlogs won’t be going, I would still have a good time.

The idea of going AND GETTING LEGALLY MARRIED became irresistible in about 4 seconds. My fantasy caught fire and all I could think about for the next 5 or 10 minutes was how to convince Jill.

Then I looked at a calendar.

My cousin Kirsten, the last unmarried cousin in my family, is getting married the same weekend. In Milwaukee.

I’m not skipping a family wedding to go to a conference, no matter how cool the conference is. And I’m not skipping a family wedding for what is a super exciting piece of paper, but not for us a “real wedding.”

Our real wedding was February 22, 2003. 

Our immediate families and many of our friends and extended family were there. The only thing missing from that wedding was acknowledgment under the law — and while I certainly want that, exactly when I get it is not that important to me.

We ratified that wedding once through a Vermont Civil Union when we were in New England for Dave & Lizzie’s wedding, but only because we could easily get the exciting piece of paper on Friday and drive to the wedding on Saturday.

So yeah, no BlogHer wedding for us.

Now I’m fantasizing about the 4th of July. Wouldn’t that be cool and symbolic?

(Thought: Is there any chance that being legally married in California would annoy a Georgia court sufficiently to interfere with Jill legally adopting Esmerelda Freugenspeigal? Our civil union was viewed as a good thing, but The M Word sometimes causes strange reactions. Check with the lawyer here before actually doing it.)

YESTERDAY:

Last night, our dear friend Peter Mulvey was in town for a gig. He came over for an early dinner, and stayed at our place after the show.

Noah cracked us all up throughout dinner, and again this morning, with his constant refrain of, “Man? Man? Man!!!” to get Peter’s attention. (Neither “Mr. Peter” nor “Peter” seemed to stick.)

We tried to get Noah to tell his knock-knock joke, and to those of you who know Peter and our mutual friends…I’m afraid Noah’s joke telling ability may rival Scott’s.

Even more exciting than Peter himself, was Peter’s Big Bicycle which parked in our front hall overnight. Noah was beside himself with glee that Peter let him “fix” the bicycle with his yellow plastic hammer and orange plastic wrench.

I got to go to the show, which was fantastic. It’s fun to see how his performance has evolved, and I loved the some of the stories he told. Especially the story about his Dad emailing him stories about a character named Dynamite Bill, and the story about his wife Meredith.

I won’t give away the plot of the Meredith story, except to say that never in the history of the universe has it been funnier to imagine offering someone a sandwich.

The other thing I came to realize in the course of the evening is that I think Peter has the most well-rounded education of anyone I know. I want to be in a book group with him. I don’t know anyone else who reads history, biography, religion, poetry, and apparently astrophysics.

LAST WEEKEND:

Grandma was here! And Noah had a great time. Some combination of Noah and the rest of us went out for dinner, and to music class, and for tricycle rides, and to the zoo, and to see trains.

Noah hasn’t stopped talking about Grandma and her visit since she left. Especially the part about the trip to the zoo, and seeing the elephant pooping. But he loves the toys and books she brought, and he asks about her now that she’s gone.

And Jill and I got to have a much needed date night. We had a nice dinner and saw the movie Baby Mama. It had cute moments, but didn’t live up to the comic potential of the awesome cast. We didn’t really care.

TOMORROW:

Tomorrow is Noah’s last day at Miss Heather’s for day care. He likes it a lot, and we will totally try to use her for backup and/or if there is no space at the church day care when I go back to work after Esmerelda Freugenspeigal is born.

Another awesome Badger, Mel, and some of her Internet friends, came up with a brilliant idea to help one of my favorite bloggers achieve a big dream of hers.

Cali, the blogger we’re helping right now, is an inspiration and the embodiment of commitment to and compassion for family. She left her left her job and friends, the life she’d built for herself as an adult, and moved back home to be a full-time care giver for her grandmother, who is crippled by Alzheimer’s.

Through all of this, she’s spent her savings and everything she’s been able to pull together towards her dream of becoming a mother herself. After more than a dozen IUI cycles, she was accepted into a shared-benefit egg donation IVF program. At the last minute, a false positive on a nasty medical test forced her to withdraw from the program.

A few weeks later, with a clean bill of health and deep discount from the clinic, she pushed ahead with an IVF cycle. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn into a full blown pregnancy or baby. However, it did end with enough frozen embryos that as soon as she can afford a frozen embryo IVF cycle, she can try again.

Friends of Cali’s from all over the blogosphere have joined Mel and others to help Cali have that opportunity. Behold:

What UTERUS is doing is donating items to an eBay auction, from which the profits will benefit Cali.

I’ve donated a First Edition paperback copy of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003, and also an autographed copy of my book. (Hey, librarians! You could score a copy of the book cheap! Hey, everybody else! You don’t have to actually read it if you buy it.)

I’d like to get organized and donate some of the other random stuff filling our house, but since we leave for Tampa in the morning, I just don’t see that happening in time. But Mel, if we’re still adding stuff to the auction next week, we might have more!

Yes, there were amazingly scary tornadoes or hail or dramatic high wind or some sort of extreme weather events in Atlanta late tonight. We are ok. We even still have power. Noah didn’t even wake up.

We hope and pray that the many people who were down at the Georgia Dome and Centennial Olympic Park, and others who have been impacted, are ok.

The pictures of bent steel beams from billboards and sheet metal flying from parking decks are scary, as is the fact that very limited video coverage seems to be available — reports are saying that the CNN Center is damaged.

Ok, I don’t blog a lot about my job. For that matter, I don’t blog a LOT about politics. But on my drive home today, I heard a quote from President Bush that was so outrageous that I have to blog about it, and to do so meaningfully, I have to also blog about my job.

Please note that these are my personal opinion, in no way authorized or made official by my employer. I do not speak for my employer; I am only speaking for myself.

You may be aware that the President is in a huge fight right now with the House of Representatives about a particular, narrow expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That’s the law that authorizes the government to conduct surveillance of people who are suspected of being agents of foreign powers, who are within the United States.

FISA has been around since 1978, but it got expanded considerably shortly after September 11. In fact, the federal government got a lot of additional power to investigate “foreign intelligence” — far beyond what they could do when they had to demonstrate that the standards for criminal investigations were being met.

Right now, the biggest issue that the President has drawn a line in the sand over, is whether or not companies that provided the government with surveillance over their customers WITHOUT AN ORDER FROM THE FISA COURT OR ANY OTHER SEARCH WARRANT OR SURVEILLANCE ORDER should be immune from being sued for handing over all that personal information about their customers with no legal authority requiring them to do so.

The President says that companies should be immune from being sued for violating their privacy policies and customer agreements, which generally state that they’ll only give over such information and access with a legally valid and binding request. (The exact language varies from company to company.)

My friends, that is a crock.

I cannot tell you whether or not my company ever received a request like this, or a national security related court order. For good reasons, the law prohibits companies from discussing such orders, even to the point of acknowledging whether or not they have been served on a particular company.

But I can tell you this: It is my job to process all requests for information about our customers from law enforcement agencies.

The vast majority of the requests I get are involving either investigations of identity theft, stolen laptops, or the sexual exploitation of minors.

Most of them come from local police departments and sheriff’s offices, although many come from the FBI and from Immigration & Customs Enforcement (they do a lot of the Internet sexual exploitation cases, I don’t know why). A handful come from other random federal agencies that I never even imagined dealing with, like the Forest Service.

In that role, I have implemented surveillance orders. They are expensive and time consuming, and they involve deploying computer hardware that isn’t normally part of our network.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to implement them often; usually the requests are just for identification of the owner of an email address or phone number, or identification of who was logged into a particular IP address at a given point in time.

I have never implemented a surveillance order without first reviewing the court order instructing us to do so. On the corporate side, it isn’t very hard to figure out whether or not this kind of paperwork is at least facially valid.

Now, I don’t doubt that it is a pain in the ass to do all the paperwork necessary to get a surveillance order. I’m even willing to imagine that it might be more of a pain than usual to get one from the secret FISA court.

In my opinion, that’s why we have the Constitution of the United States of America, especially the Fourth Amendment. It should be difficult for our government to spy on us.

But remember — surveillance isn’t necessarily about an imminent threat. Who sent this threatening email, or who posted a threat from this IP address, those are questions that could be answered with an administrative subpoena — much less paperwork intensive.

Surveillance is “we think this is a bad person planning something bad.” Why? If you think so, explain why to a court, and get them to issue a surveillance order.

Apparently it isn’t very hard, at least with the FISA court. According to Wired magazine (in a very poorly worded article):

Through the end of 2004, the court approved 18,761 warrants, and rejected only five. It approved 2,072, in 2005, and 2,181 in 2006, rejecting none. Five were withdrawn before a ruling.

PBS says that they’ve never rejected an application.

Anyway, I’m going to quit ranting about this. But if you’re also annoyed, contact your Senator or House member and tell them to support the House version of the bill.

Here’s how to find them if you don’t know who they are. And here’s a less ranting, shorter explanation of the issue.

I have the worst cold & cough I can remember having in ages. It hit it’s worst Saturday night, when I actually lost my voice. I still sound vaguely Lauren Bacallesque, but I’m 80-90% better today.

Inconveniently, I was visiting my parents in Wisconsin on Saturday night. It’s always better to be sick at home.

The trip was still great, at least between the coughing!

I got in Saturday morning, had fabulous pizza for lunch with my family and a family friend. Then I walked from the pizza place to a nearby coffeeshop and hung out with my dear friends Peter & Meredith. (For those who care, they are in for the big 4-0 celebration next year, and vote for during spring break.)

Saturday night was the whole point of the trip.

My Dad was given a Lifetime Achievement award by the ACLU of Wisconsin.

It was given as part of their big annual fundraising dinner, which was scheduled long before anyone imagined that today would be the most exciting presidential primary election in the state in a generation. The dinner was unfortunately scheduled for the exact same time as the State Democratic Party’s big annual fundraising dinner, to which both Senators Clinton and Obama accepted invitations. So the ACLU dinner wasn’t quite as well attended as we might have hoped.

Also, the keynote speaker was supposed to have been cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, but his last-minute flight was canceled. Luckily a local progressive academic was available to talk about civil liberties and the war on terrorism.

ANYWAY, the dinner was fabulous, even with all of that. It was fun to see people like my dad’s college roommate, mom’s law school roommate, political and organizing friends from various efforts over the past almost-50 years, and close and long-term family friends. I got a chance to see some law school friends, too, which was nice. (More were at the Dem dinner, including the husband of the lovely woman who nominated my dad for the award, and introduced him at the dinner. And BTW, she looked amazing for a woman who was a month post-partum!)

Sunday morning, still croaky, I went with dad to an event for Senator Clinton. As I’ve mentioned, I voted for the other candidate, but I think either of them would be great, and I have a lot of admiration for Senator Clinton. I do think it would be amazing to have a woman President. But I mostly went to hang out with dad, and also to see other friends whom I suspected would be there.

That part was great! It was mostly family friends, but some fun catching up took place. Congresswoman Baldwin was lovely, and it was exciting to hear that her partner Lauren has a fabulous new job. (Lauren was a friend during law school, before she ever met Tammy.) It was also good to hear from Maria that Madelaine and Eric weren’t ignoring me, they were celebrating Eric’s 40th in Vegas. Happy Birthday, Eric!!!

The photo ops turned out better than the one of Mrs. Clinton, Mom, and me in 1996, but since that still rates as one of the 10 worst pictures ever taken of me (or mom!), this is faint praise indeed. At least, in addition to looking fat and pasty, I look happy.

I spent Sunday afternoon in the airport, hearing that my flight was delayed in 15 minute increments, until the one they gave us an hour delay. After we got on the plane, 3 hours late, something went wrong with the baggage loading. So we missed our window to leave, and had to get back at the end of the line. Another 1.5 hours later.

Did I mention I was sick? And that I would have then gotten home about 4 MORE hours later?

I got off the plane and begged my parents to leave the theater and come take me back to their house to sleep. Fortunately, Dad was hating the play.

I crashed and tried again at 7:15 am with much better results. Except that I was still sick. I called in sick to work yesterday, but went in today. Until my boss said, “You look terrible. Go home.”

Now Jill is sick. She moved from the couch briefly, for about an hour after dinner. Noah was happy about that part!

Now I’m eagerly and facinatedly watching the Wisconsin primary results and listening to the Obama speech about grants for students in exchange for community service. Is that like the National Service Corp on steroids?

Also? Today is the first time I’ve noticed technical difficulties when I go to bend over. Not major difficulties, but that belly bulge is … becoming more real. And more solid. I think I might be having a baby.

I think it’s bedtime.

This week is the third annual Freedom to Marry Week, and when better to discuss that than Valentine’s Day?

Yesterday, I posted about all the boringly practical things I’m planning to spend my 2007 bonus purchasing or fixing. What I didn’t say is how lucky I feel — the original plan for this bonus was that it would go straight into savings in order to pay for the roughly $3000 that it will cost my family for Jill to become Blur’s legal parent.

And that’s assuming that we don’t get assigned to the homophobic judge in our county and have to move. Again.

The only reason we can afford to do such scandalously frivolous things as garbage disposals and storage bins with that bonus check is because my company announced last week that they’re moving from annual bonuses to twice/year bonuses this year, and also giving retention bonuses. Both of those will be paid out much closer to the time that little Blur is due.

There will be no new tires with that money. That will be all about the lawyers.

When a couple is legally married, they are both automatically the legal parents of any child born during the marriage. They don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on legal fees, creating a legally binding relationship between the child and the parent who didn’t gestate the child.

And if that legally married family suffers a tragic accident, such as the death of that non-gestating parent, even a bran-new newborn will at least have the financial safety net of survivorship benefits from the deceased parent’s Social Security.

We spent nearly all of our savings on expenses related to Noah’s adoption, particularly with the unexpected fact of having to move to a new county after being assigned to the one judge in our county who flat out refuses to grant same sex couples second parent adoptions.

But it was worth it to have the security that provides.

I am by no means saying that Noah and I won’t be a serious mess if something were to happen to Jill. We would be!

But it helps a tiny bit to know that at least there would be a modest ongoing income for Noah’s support, through to his adulthood.

Can you imagine how unfair it would be for Noah to have that, but his equally loved and planned for future sibling to be left high and dry?

There are a myriad of other reasons why families like mine need to be free to legally marry, why civil unions, partnership agreements, registered domestic partnerships, and insurance benefits for domestic partners are not enough. For more personal stories about how important this is, check out Robin’s blog, The OTHER Mother, for bloggers participating in a cool week-long meme about it.

All those reasons are compelling and important too. But right now, as a mother who is pregnant with a so very wanted and planned for child, fear of the worst case scenario is the reason that wakes me up at night.

I’m a longtime election geek. You can blame my dad, especially, for that. I don’t remember when he started taking me with him to go vote, but I do remember that I never rode the school bus on an election day.

Back then, voting was a different experience. You walked into a tall curtained closet thing, and pulled a big lever to close the curtains behind you. Dad would lift me up and point to the smaller levers indicating the candidates for whom “we” were voting, then I would push the levers down. I remember at least 2 elections worth of trying unsuccessfully to pull the big lever that actually cast the votes and re-opened the curtains, and being SO EXCITED when I was finally big and strong enough to pull that lever. (I hear it still works like that in New York.)

Now, there isn’t even as much privacy as I get paying the bill at the Reproductive Endocrinologists. Or as there is in a study carrel at the library. And don’t even get me started on the hackability/insecurity of electronic voting.

But that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about how awesome this election season has been for democracy.

Can you even remember another election where practically every story in the early primaries talked about voter turnout? Or when you really couldn’t tell who the nominees were going to be even after Super Tuesday? In EITHER party???

I voted for Obama.

I originally decided that I was going to vote for him back in July or August, but since then, I’ve become more and more excited about him. Not that I dislike Clinton — if she wins the nomination, of course I’ll support her. But Obama is inspiring.

And even more inspiring? ALL YOU OTHER VOTERS!

I just love that so many people are caring, are participating in the democratic process, are talking to their friends and colleagues about the candidates and the issues that are important to them.

In 1980, a Carter campaign staffer stayed in our guest bedroom for the last few weeks of the campaign. He had a daughter who was a couple of years younger than me — I was 11. She came out for the final long weekend.

As a mature, knowledgeable sixth grader, I took the city bus everywhere. Including with my new 4th grade houseguest, to the Carter campaign headquarters.

Late Saturday afternoon, we headed back to my house on the bus. On our way out, we had the brilliant idea that we should take a bunch of bumper stickers with us, to pass out on the bus.

Really.

We gave out about half of them before we got off the bus.

When we arrived at our stop, there were 3 college students talking near the bus stop, a man and two women. We offered them bumper stickers.

The guy went crazy. He was outraged that we were trying to influence the political process. He snatched the stickers from my hands.

That pissed off the women, who had been sympathetic to his argument until then.

It also made me cry, and it made me truly get how young and powerless I was.

I ran the entire 3.5 blocks back to my house, and breathlessly told my dad what happened.

Did I mention that my dad was a judge at the time?

Dad flew back to the bus stop with us, where, miraculously, all three of the students were still arguing.

My bumper stickers were in the sewer.

I don’t remember anything else about what happened, except that it took a long time with my dad talking to the guy, and my being upset that I didn’t have my own bumper sticker, even. I have no idea what the other girl might have been thinking.

I don’t think that the upsurge in participation in the democratic process means that doesn’t happen any more. (Well, probably no one would now let 2 children walk out of a campaign office with 200 bumper stickers, especially with the intent of distributing them on public transportation.)

But I do think it means that more people have the experience that they, little old them, might be able to make a difference.

And THAT is an amazing feeling. Which I am happy to report I have had in several subsequent elections, even at least 3 where my candidate actually won. (Dad, 1986. Tammy Baldwin, 1998. Mom, 2004.)