And the mountain farted, and it was good
So Mt. St. Helens erupted, finally, resulting in a giant let-down for many a Northwesterner.
Don't get me wrong. It's all well and good that no one died or anything. People dying is, generally, a bad thing.
But as I sat through a meeting all Friday morning, I kept thinking about the impending eruption of Mt. St. Helens with a mixture of curiosity, anticipation, and morbid fear of the unknown. "What if all the scientists are wrong in their low-ball estimate of the coming eruption?" I thought. Perhaps we'd be lucky and be able to view another debacle akin to the 1980 ash-spewing good time that got me out of school for a few days and allowed me to make dust-angels in my yard (except that mom wouldn't let me).
I swear to you that at 11:15-ish in the morning, I felt my chair move. And the table I was sitting at. And I thought "ah, there it is." I eagerly awaited the more pronounced tremor (I remember our china cabinet rattling in the dining room back on May 18th, 24 years ago). It didn't come. "Was that it? Was that the eruption?"
I couldn't wait for the meeting to end. C-Mac left early (no doubt to go golfing) and I text-messaged him to check for news of the eruption. He got bupkus, and there was still hope.
Except that I knew I'd be spending the majority of the rest of my day in the Multnomah County Courthouse.
I keep intentionally mum on most of the details of my job, because I don't think my job is very interesting unless you know me. If you want to learn about being a prosecutor, you're far more likely to be satisfied reading Mister DA's page.
However, I'll throw you this little scrap. The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office, based in beautiful Portland, Oregon, is an organization which employees a little over 90 attorneys based in 13 different units, each of which addresses various types of felony or misdemeanor crimes, juvenile crimes, and child support enforcement. The office has had more deputies, and has had less deputies, and has suffered (along with other county functions) at the hands of a savage economy which has caused the local government to make cuts in all sorts of programs.
As an aside, many of the positions in our office are currently funded by Multnomah County's personal income tax, which is currently up for repeal. If, as a citizen of Multnomah County, you value having jails to hold criminals and DA's to prosecute them for their offenses, you should vote against the repeal.
Anyway, one of the units in our office is the Neighborhood Prosecution Unit. The Neighborhood Prosecution Unit is set-up so that Deputy DA's are posted in each of Portland Police Bureau's precincts, as well as having a DDA posted with the Gresham Police Department. The roles of the Neighborhood DA's are: to assist the agency their posted with by aiding in resolution of legal issues with an eye towards increasing the prosecutabilty of cases; to assist the community in dealing with low-level criminal crimes affecting livability by increasing opportunities for the community members (individually or in groups) to interact with law enforcement or through other means to address criminal conduct; and to create a conduit by which the community can communicate with the entity responsible for prosecuting the cases that occur in the community. This amounts, in real terms, to reviewing a lot of police cases, talking to a lot of concerned citizens, going to a lot of neighborhood meetings, and drinking a lot of coffee.
In that role, these deputies don't end up in the Multnomah County Courthouse all that much.
Which is, I think, a good thing. The Multnomah County Courthouse is an aging structure that is oft-cited as one of Portland's most dangerous buildings. This is the result of the the method of construction, the age of materials, and the lack of attention to seismic needs. It is not where you want to be in an earthquake. It is often not where you want to be when a bus goes by, as I often recall standing in courtrooms and feeling the floor shake as the buses passed busily down below. The DA's office occupies much of the sixth floor of the courthouse, and all of the 8th floor. The 7th floor of the courthouse is occupied by a few courtrooms and a jail facility. I often used to joke that I didn't know if I'd rather have a 6th- or 8th-floor office. It depended on whether I wanted to be smothered by the people I was prosecuting me as they fell atop me, or impaled by their jail bars as I fell upon them. Either way, some would see it as poetic justice. As I've said before, in the words of The Tick, "Gravity is a harsh mistress."
So, back more on point, it was with fear and loathing that I drove downtown for a noon-o'clock meeting to learn about the impending (possible) budget cuts to see if I should start looking for a job as a Cutco salesman.
There was a guy in my fraternity who was a Cutco salesman. Don't remember if I mentioned this in a prior post. This guy, who was entirely on scholarship, wasted what little money he had trying to start his career of the future, and figured the fraternity would be happy to let him skate by on his rent and food bills (he was wrong, by the way). The single worst memory I have from college is the speech class where, for a persuasive speech assignment, this guy gave his Cutco sales pitch to our class. The professor was not amused.
Back to the fear and loathing and loathing I felt heading to the courthouse for that meeting. It was a fantastic level of fear and loathing I felt. The fear and loathing of impending financial doom and gloom was heightened by the fear and loathing of being smothered by jurors, judges, prisoners, and other DA's. It was a dark, dark hour.
Anyway, apparently the eruption occurred while I was in the courthouse. How anti-climactic. Although I felt a dog being walked on the street outside, I didn't feel any sort of tremors in the earth.
Go figgur.
So, my fear of the eruption was not vindicated. I lost the office pool on when the eruption would happen, and I've still not decided whether I should apply to become a greeter at Walmart or a waste disposal technician. Both seem like viable career choices should the voters give me the axe.
It is with great pleasure that I hear another eruption might be in the works. Perhaps, finally, I can have some closure to my Friday which never reached fruition. Otherwise, I'll spend the rest of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And that just won't do.
So, I start moving on Monday. Earthlink, my current internet service provider, doesn't appear to have DSL service to my new home, and so I'm probably forced to switch to something else. I expect, therefore, that my freetime web access will be curtailed to some extent, so this'll be a slow blog for the next couple of weeks while things get sorted out. I figure there'll be a couple of funny links in here from time to time, but nothing that'll take too long to post.
Until the next eruption (of the mountain or ideas),
Catch ya later.
Don't get me wrong. It's all well and good that no one died or anything. People dying is, generally, a bad thing.
But as I sat through a meeting all Friday morning, I kept thinking about the impending eruption of Mt. St. Helens with a mixture of curiosity, anticipation, and morbid fear of the unknown. "What if all the scientists are wrong in their low-ball estimate of the coming eruption?" I thought. Perhaps we'd be lucky and be able to view another debacle akin to the 1980 ash-spewing good time that got me out of school for a few days and allowed me to make dust-angels in my yard (except that mom wouldn't let me).
I swear to you that at 11:15-ish in the morning, I felt my chair move. And the table I was sitting at. And I thought "ah, there it is." I eagerly awaited the more pronounced tremor (I remember our china cabinet rattling in the dining room back on May 18th, 24 years ago). It didn't come. "Was that it? Was that the eruption?"
I couldn't wait for the meeting to end. C-Mac left early (no doubt to go golfing) and I text-messaged him to check for news of the eruption. He got bupkus, and there was still hope.
Except that I knew I'd be spending the majority of the rest of my day in the Multnomah County Courthouse.
I keep intentionally mum on most of the details of my job, because I don't think my job is very interesting unless you know me. If you want to learn about being a prosecutor, you're far more likely to be satisfied reading Mister DA's page.
However, I'll throw you this little scrap. The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office, based in beautiful Portland, Oregon, is an organization which employees a little over 90 attorneys based in 13 different units, each of which addresses various types of felony or misdemeanor crimes, juvenile crimes, and child support enforcement. The office has had more deputies, and has had less deputies, and has suffered (along with other county functions) at the hands of a savage economy which has caused the local government to make cuts in all sorts of programs.
As an aside, many of the positions in our office are currently funded by Multnomah County's personal income tax, which is currently up for repeal. If, as a citizen of Multnomah County, you value having jails to hold criminals and DA's to prosecute them for their offenses, you should vote against the repeal.
Anyway, one of the units in our office is the Neighborhood Prosecution Unit. The Neighborhood Prosecution Unit is set-up so that Deputy DA's are posted in each of Portland Police Bureau's precincts, as well as having a DDA posted with the Gresham Police Department. The roles of the Neighborhood DA's are: to assist the agency their posted with by aiding in resolution of legal issues with an eye towards increasing the prosecutabilty of cases; to assist the community in dealing with low-level criminal crimes affecting livability by increasing opportunities for the community members (individually or in groups) to interact with law enforcement or through other means to address criminal conduct; and to create a conduit by which the community can communicate with the entity responsible for prosecuting the cases that occur in the community. This amounts, in real terms, to reviewing a lot of police cases, talking to a lot of concerned citizens, going to a lot of neighborhood meetings, and drinking a lot of coffee.
In that role, these deputies don't end up in the Multnomah County Courthouse all that much.
Which is, I think, a good thing. The Multnomah County Courthouse is an aging structure that is oft-cited as one of Portland's most dangerous buildings. This is the result of the the method of construction, the age of materials, and the lack of attention to seismic needs. It is not where you want to be in an earthquake. It is often not where you want to be when a bus goes by, as I often recall standing in courtrooms and feeling the floor shake as the buses passed busily down below. The DA's office occupies much of the sixth floor of the courthouse, and all of the 8th floor. The 7th floor of the courthouse is occupied by a few courtrooms and a jail facility. I often used to joke that I didn't know if I'd rather have a 6th- or 8th-floor office. It depended on whether I wanted to be smothered by the people I was prosecuting me as they fell atop me, or impaled by their jail bars as I fell upon them. Either way, some would see it as poetic justice. As I've said before, in the words of The Tick, "Gravity is a harsh mistress."
So, back more on point, it was with fear and loathing that I drove downtown for a noon-o'clock meeting to learn about the impending (possible) budget cuts to see if I should start looking for a job as a Cutco salesman.
There was a guy in my fraternity who was a Cutco salesman. Don't remember if I mentioned this in a prior post. This guy, who was entirely on scholarship, wasted what little money he had trying to start his career of the future, and figured the fraternity would be happy to let him skate by on his rent and food bills (he was wrong, by the way). The single worst memory I have from college is the speech class where, for a persuasive speech assignment, this guy gave his Cutco sales pitch to our class. The professor was not amused.
Back to the fear and loathing and loathing I felt heading to the courthouse for that meeting. It was a fantastic level of fear and loathing I felt. The fear and loathing of impending financial doom and gloom was heightened by the fear and loathing of being smothered by jurors, judges, prisoners, and other DA's. It was a dark, dark hour.
Anyway, apparently the eruption occurred while I was in the courthouse. How anti-climactic. Although I felt a dog being walked on the street outside, I didn't feel any sort of tremors in the earth.
Go figgur.
So, my fear of the eruption was not vindicated. I lost the office pool on when the eruption would happen, and I've still not decided whether I should apply to become a greeter at Walmart or a waste disposal technician. Both seem like viable career choices should the voters give me the axe.
It is with great pleasure that I hear another eruption might be in the works. Perhaps, finally, I can have some closure to my Friday which never reached fruition. Otherwise, I'll spend the rest of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And that just won't do.
So, I start moving on Monday. Earthlink, my current internet service provider, doesn't appear to have DSL service to my new home, and so I'm probably forced to switch to something else. I expect, therefore, that my freetime web access will be curtailed to some extent, so this'll be a slow blog for the next couple of weeks while things get sorted out. I figure there'll be a couple of funny links in here from time to time, but nothing that'll take too long to post.
Until the next eruption (of the mountain or ideas),
Catch ya later.
posted by Rusty at 1:24 PM
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