Keeping House

I have to set something straight first.

Mom, we had a great time in Chicago for Thanksgiving. Sorry I didn't say it in too many words, but when I wrote in my blog when I came home, I was more stunned about the nasty dream I had more than jet travel, the continuous stream of Thanksgiving trip food, the parade of family and much more.

And I like the shoes you got me. I told my coworkers about them and they, looking at my feet clad in the shoddy boots I always wear, wondered just where these boss sneakers were.

Anyway, we love you and wish you guys can come out here sometime. After all, you haven't seen our new place yet and your grandkitties miss you. Or at least the chance to sleep on your head.

Whew.

The wife is gone to her horse lessons, but before she left, she was upset that I hadn’t written the check to the mortgage company yet. In the tango of our marriage, I handle the day-to-day financial stuff, including writing bills and keeping track of the forest of ATM and debit card receipts. Anyway, I write the mortgage bill (due the first, but you get a lax period until the 15th before the penalties kick in), but I wanted to wait until today because I get paid and the extra cash makes the mortgage payment a bit easier to swallow. Sometimes, I have to juggle the savings and checking accounts to make sure we can cover the balance due in the beginning of the month, but as long as I slip more cash into savings than we take out every month, it's okay to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Yawn. I know, money stuff isn't a thrilling read. Let's see what else I got.

Oh yeah. Currently playing "Jedi Outcast," one of the new "Star Wars" games for Gamecube. Fun game, but graphically its a bit clunky and fuzzy. It's also dark visually. I mean, shades of black here found only at Cure concerts and opium dens. It's as if in a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, no one paid their power bill.

There's also no concept of personal safety or even guardrails on the walkways that are above zillion-foot high drop offs. Add in the lack of light and you could easily find yourself plummeting to your doom just by making a quick jaunt across a skybridge. Not very action hero-cool at all, I say.

Still, it's nifty to pack a lightsaber and take on a room full of storm troopers either by slicing them like deli meat or pushing them over from across the room or flicking your lightsaber at them or zapping them with purple lightning (ooo, pretty colors). The strange thing is, you can be just downright evil with your powers and suffer no Dark Side penalties for it, a strange divergence from the philosophy found in the original trilogy we grew up with (you know, the good one). It's also odd because the predecessor for the game, "Jedi Knight," did keep track of how you used your powers. You could slaughter everyone and slowly become evil or you could pick your fights and powers with care and remain in the light side. In "Jedi Outcast," you get to be nasty as you want. Toss a guy into a zillion-foot chasm? Sure. Choke a lowly evil peon? Have at it. Fry people with lightning? Why not?

The best part, though, is a neat power called "Pull." While it doesn't have the flash and slickness of the aforementioned powers, once you get strong with "Pull" you can do one of the funniest game tricks I've ever seen in video games. Once you get "Pull" all tricked out, run up to some lowly trooper about to shoot you. Target him (or her...I mean, let's be equal here) and use "Pull." In a split-second, the gun vanishes out of his/her hands. The trooper looks down into his/her empty hands, looks at you, turns and runs away, screaming and arms waving in utter fear, like the knights running away from the killer bunny in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Overall, it’s a fun game. It’s worth at least a rental, even if just for the boyhood fantasy of firing up a lightsaber and reliving your favorite “Star Wars” fight scenes.

And let’s face it, isn’t that the dream of every video gamer?

Sign of the times

Now, like the digital lounge singer that I am, I’m gonna take the room down a notch: Lower the mood, as it were, and chat about something more important. You didn’t think I was just going to gleeful ramble about something as trivial as a video game, did you? It may be the season for toys and bright shiny things, for Santa and gift catalogs, but this holiday season, there are a couple lumps of coal coming.

Item one: As a preface, I lived in Chicago for 20 years and spent at least two-dozen Christmases there. It can get very, very cold in the winter. That said, this is not good news. Snip below. (Note: Use "salon" for username, "tabletalk" for password)

CHICAGO, Dec. 4 - The living room of Anna Brown's wood-frame house on the city's West Side is toasty these days. The rest of the house is cold.

Mrs. Brown, 75, keeps two electric space heaters in her living room during the day. Her natural gas was disconnected two years ago when prices soared and she fell behind in her payments. So she has erected the seasonal curtain of thick plastic that seals off the living room from the rest of the house, and has resigned to settle in for another long Chicago winter warmed by the red glow of space heaters.

In Chicago alone, the number of customers without natural gas service is 10,000, according to People's Energy, the utility company that supplies natural gas to nearly one million customers in the Chicago area.

With the economy stagnant, social service agencies say people are seeking help in paying their heating bills earlier this year and the coming winter is likely to pose a chilling bind. It is expected to be colder than last winter, the price of gas is rising and the Bush administration has proposed cutting $300 million from the $1.7 billion federal program that provided energy subsidies for needy families in the last fiscal year.

Such a cut would mean that 438,000 fewer families received aid from the program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped 4.5 million families last year, said Mark Wolfe, spokesman for the National Energy Assistance Director's Association, an education and policy group for directors of the program in states and on Indian reservations.

Item two: It’s probably going to tough to enjoy Christmas when you are staring at being without a major safety net three days later. Story here. Snip below.

WASHINGTON - Jo-Anne Hurlston cannot find a job after nearly six months of searching, even with her master's degree and experience in education, human resources, and the hospitality industry.

She's one of nearly 1 million unemployed workers across the country who will start losing jobless benefits three days after Christmas because Congress failed to grant an extension before leaving for the year.

''All the money that's being spent on homeland security and we're left stranded,'' said Hurlston, 47, a single mother with a 12-year-old daughter. ''If they want more money for homeland security, we have to be able to work to pay taxes.''

Congress passed a 13-week extension in federal benefits in March, on top of the maximum 26 weeks that laid-off workers usually can receive through states. But the extension benefits start expiring Dec. 28.

As I said a few entries back, I’m very blessed to still have a job, health coverage and a place over my head. Every so often, I think about what would happen if I where I was a couple years ago: let go and in a competitive job market. Contrary to what you may have heard, 1999 was a hard year in the Seattle tech market. Even though the crowds were still screaming in dotcom mania, the cracks in the veneer were becoming too apparent and irreversible. The New Economy was revealing its invisible new clothes and, for the first time, people where seeing nothing was there. The divesting was underway, funding for vaporware was vanishing, and the firings were beginning. Even at tech companies that actually made things and had real clients that they sold widgets to were cutting off so-called “redundant personnel.” In my case, I was part of an entire documentation section that got liquidated, as if the company believed they could get by with engineers actually writing the manuals themselves.

Even though I didn’t really like the job, I was shocked and adrift. I had gotten married about a few months previous and the next five months were gut-wrenching as I raced to find a job at a tech company that didn’t have its long-term plan written on an Etch-a-Sketch or magnetic poetry.

Thankfully, I ended up at the newspaper I work at now. It’s a stable, safe haven and I’m sure I could stay there as long as the doors remain open. But having a job meant more than a paycheck. It meant you could think about a future, think about a house, think about going to the doctor and not have to lay awake at night think about how long your savings will last.

My brief run-in with being cut adrift in the workforce was a terrifying sensation that I never want to experience again. I can’t imagine (or again want to imagine) having to worry about benefits or how I’m going to get by.

I guess that’s why I’m always a pain in the ass when it comes to Christmas. Whenever someone asks me what I want, I feel embarrassed. I have a gluttony of distractions, clothes, CDs and more already cluttering my clean and warm condo. I don’t need more…things. I suppose I’d want to clone what I have now to give it to the homeless guy begging for change today on Mercer Street. Today, I gave him a dollar. It’s kind of pathetic, considering I waste so much time playing a $50 game on a $200 system on a $1,000 TV. One less game could pay, what, at least a dozen meals at a local homeless shelter?

A subversive idea: A bunch of rich kids get enlightened to the poor, hit their folks up for clothes for Christmas. Lots of clothes…jackets, shoes, sweaters. Designer stuff. Christmas Day, the kids get their swag and give them to homeless folks, decking out the destitute in GAP and Abercrombie and Fitch. The rich kids do something good and the homeless get clothes. The youth become a national Secret Santa for the down and out. It’s guerilla warfare with fashion, breaking down class and color and economic strata.

Of course, one can extend this to terrible results. The homeless will be hard up for sympathy with nice threads. Second, the designers will be in fits over the downtrodden being walking billboards for their clothes.

And then there’s this horrible image of rich kids doing a celebrity makeover of a homeless person. Or treating the homeless guy like some sort of pet.

Oh well, better than being laid off, running out of benefits and freezing to death, I guess.