I have occasionally pondered whether I’m too connected. My iPhone is on my hip practically all my waking hours, giving me instant access to my e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and the web in general — not to mention, of course, the simple fact of having a phone of any kind on me at all times. It’s more difficult, honestly, to fail to reach me than it is to succeed. As long as I’ve got cell signal, I’m plugged in.

Is it too much? Do I really need that kind of accessibility? Does it contribute to my stress levels by making me feel like any situation should be responded to immediately — because after all, I’ve got access? Is it possible I’m becoming addicted to connectivity?

These are all questions I’ve thought seriously about in the past. Then I read this article, shared by Tim on Google Reader:
Email Driving Becomes Thrill Seeker Sport For One

“I work out of my rig for hours on end doing repos,” Lane revealed in a brief phone interview, “If I can’t email and drive or send an occasional text I would get absolutely nothing done. My wife thinks I’m mental but that’s how I roll Paco.”

I suddenly feel much better about my own habits.

If you honestly can’t get your job done without e-mailing while driving, something. Is. Wrong. It’s time to get a new job, time to start telling clients “no” because your workload is too heavy, time to consider where else you can carve out a few minutes, maybe consider hiring someone to do the driving while you do the e-mailing from the passenger seat. (Which is cheaper, paying for the accidents he’s caused or hiring a driver?) It’s time to change somehow, but the solution is not to start e-mailing while you’re behind the wheel. There is a line, and this guy has crossed it.

Bad enough that he simply doesn’t see the problem with what he’s doing. Worse, though, that he’s all, “that’s how I roll” and “email driving is a real rush”. It’s one thing to get your kicks endangering your own life. It’s another thing entirely to force other people to share your danger. Call me repressed, but I don’t pull out of my driveway every morning — any morning! — hoping to have a near-miss accident. (Much less a fender-bender, which this guy seems utterly unconcerned about since obviously a little cash solves all problems.) Nor, I suspect, do most people. You want to go find an abandoned air strip somewhere and drive around e-mailing, you do that. Keep it off the public streets. There is a line. You’ve crossed it.

And god help you if you hit me, because I am sure as hell not going to accept a few “good ol’ American greenbacks” and be on my way. You are giving me your insurance information and I am turning the claim in, on sheer principle if nothing else. We are going to stay there and call the police to come out and take a peek, even if it’s a minor accident, and you’re going to find your delay much longer than if you’d just pulled over to send your e-mail in the first place. (Don’t like it? Go ahead. Drive off. I’ve already got your plates, and I’m betting a hit-and-run will get you in a lot more trouble than causing a fender bender.) You are not buying me off. You are not bribing me to enable your little addiction to endangering other people’s lives.

And you had better not have hit my car anywhere near the left rear door, because if you so much as bruise my daughter, there will be hell to pay.

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Last Tuesday (I’m slow on the photo processing and blogging lately), I got a call from daycare at 9:15am. Natalie’s temperature was 101.2, they said, and she needed to come home. I had a sneaking suspicion of what was wrong, and when I picked her up I became convinced that I was correct. She wasn’t really ill as such; she was just teething. I’d spotted her two final molars coming in a few days previous, and honestly I’d been half-expecting that phone call at some point.

I felt kind of sorry for her, and knew she wasn’t sick-sick, so I thought I’d make her a treat for snack. I used her naptime to bake up a batch of cookies according to the following recipe (from 1001 Cookie Recipes):

Sugar Cookies IV

Makes 3-4 dozen. (I got 3 dozen with a little dough leftover.)

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
additional sugar for rolling

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Lightly grease 2 baking sheets, or line them with parchment paper. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the shortening and the sugar. Beat in the milk and vanilla extract. Gradually blend in the flour mixture.

Pinch off walnut-sized pieces of dough and roll into balls. Roll the balls in granulated sugar and place 1 1/2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Flatten each ball with the bottom of a glass dipped in water and then in granulated sugar. (I omitted the initial roll in sugar with some success, but you do need the sugar on the glass to keep the dough from sticking. I found that if you had a full tray full of balls shaped and ready to go, you could just dip the glass in water once and then dip in in sugar before flattening each ball. Keeps the sugar drier and therefore makes it last longer.)

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until lightly colored. (And they really do mean very lightly. I suggest taking them out of the oven to check at 10 minutes rather than relying on the oven light. I overcooked the first dozen or so because I thought they weren’t getting any color when in fact they should’ve come out at the 10 minute mark.) Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Once they were cool, I made half a batch of buttercream frosting using the method described in the same cookbook: Cream together half a stick of butter and 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar. (Yes, you really can do it.) Then add enough milk to make it spreadable (it doesn’t take much), half a teaspoon of the flavoring of your choice, and any coloring you want. (The icing is naturally yellow; I used a little blue food color to make it green.) You may need more like a full batch (double all ingredients listed above) in order to ice all the cookies; I cut it in half because I was never planning to do all of them.

Spread on the cookies and enjoy.

Natalie, naturally, focused on the frosting and didn’t really eat much of the cookies themselves at all. Oh, well. At least I had fun baking them. And got to mess with the camera in my new iPhone 3GS.

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I know, I know. They’re only, what, two weeks after the fact. And this still isn’t a proper blog post, is it? Butanyway…

Having not really done any kind of photography since vacation, I thought Mom and Dad’s Fourth of July cookout would be a good opportunity. So I brought the camera along, and even managed to take pictures of people other than Natalie.
Private Gallery
Public Gallery

I remember back when I started actively trying to “do photography” more, one of the first sessions I did was out at Mom and Dad’s house (and around our own house) after a storm cancelled my previous plans. I had a lot of trouble, then, figuring out what to take pictures of. It’s not that their house isn’t gorgeous, you know, but I just wasn’t picking up on what would make good photos. This time I didn’t have that problem — not even if you take out the people-factor of documenting the cookout. It seems like I’m getting better at seeing the opportunities. Which makes me happy; it’s noticable progress.

Coming up as soon as I remember to process the photos: Documenting cookie-making, and taking the opportunity to show off what my new iPhone 3GS’s camera can do. And maybe I’ll remember to actually do a real blog entry, too.

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(A poor excuse for a blog entry, but this is what I have right now.)

“You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just ’cause you understand the mechanics of how something works doesn’t make it any less of a miracle. Which is just another word for magic.”
–Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), True Blood, “Mine”
(And I wish I could remember, but I can’t, whether that’s a line lifted from Dead Until Dark.)

“I remember wondering aloud after we had our first garden out here about whether the church had missed a sin. The pleasure of cupping ones hand around the smooth underbelly of a vine-ripened tomato is about as blood red sensual as it gets. Yep, they might have forgotten to forbid that one.”
–Linford Detweiler

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I thought about linking back to some posts I’ve done on the subject of patriotism for today’s entry. It seemed appropriate for this, the celebration of our country’s independence. What better subject than the ways in which we honor our country?

I’m not going to do that, though, because of the tone of those previous posts. They were written years ago, in the height of post-9/11 patriotic fever… and I use “fever” here in the sense of being a symptom of illness. I wrote them at a time when I felt threatened, endangered, because my patriotism was not the raging jingoism that the culture of the time seemed to demand. I felt, at the time, that I was in danger of considered “unAmerican” — with all the implications of McCarthyism that word carries — simply because I didn’t choose to put my love and appreciation for this country on public display and because I dared to disagree with the actions of my government.

I no longer feel that threat.

And reveling in that discovery, that I again feel free to exercise my freedom of speech — of thought, even — without fear of being pronounced treasonous… That seems like a really good way to celebrate this holiday.

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