Writing in the Corner

At the beginning of the year, I thought I might like to try out some new blogging software. I set up a blog over on Wordpress, where I blogged about Mormon stuff. I’ve decided that keeping two blogs is just not how I want to approach my writing. I’ve deleted the Wordpress blog, but I’ve pulled over all my posts from there (16 of them) and inserted them into this blog in proper chronological order.

These posts differ in that they are about Mormon stuff, and I’ve disabled comments. I don’t know if I will continue writing about Mormon stuff here; I don’t particular want my personal feelings and difficulties to become fodder for either pro- or anti-Mormon commentary. This stuff isn’t insignificant to me.

Feel free to poke around in the January and February archives if you’d like to read what I wrote over there. But I’m not really interested in feedback.

I happened across a news story about someone I once knew from church being sent to federal prison for income tax fraud (after defrauding about 60,000 people out of their money in a pyramid scheme; nice guy). This person was barely an acquaintance. But I started googling, and found a reference or two in some of the stories to people I did know well. That led me to google for a member of their family I had considered a good friend.

Yikes. After he and his wife divorced, in a sloppy agreement in Nevada based on false representations of residence, he took the children at the beginning of what he had determined was his custody year. She was a citizen of another country, and had returned there after the divorce with the children. The incident was eventually ruled a violation of an international child abduction treaty established by the Hague Convention, and within hours of that ruling she was back on a flight to her native country with the children. Aside from the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an appeal, the story disappears.

I usually like looking up old buddies and reading about them. However, my memories of my friendship with about this guy are certainly colored by this incident. What was he thinking? Probably not about the children: their mother was devoted and loving, and I have no doubt she was an excellent mother. This was about him, and his rights. I understand wanting what you think you’re entitled to - but not at the expense of your children’s stability.

Weird stuff.

I have hung out for almost four years on the New Order Mormons discussion board. It’s had its ups and downs, but things have been cruising along quite nicely for the past few months. Lots of new people, lots of good discussion.

There have always been a wide range of beliefs among NOMs. We haven’t ever had a measuring stick; if you call yourself a NOM, then you are one.

Then, the believer came.

A believing spouse referred her husband to NOM. She participates on Faces East, another board for believing spouses of unbelieving LDS or neverMo’s. She decided to stick around and supervise.

Her participation entirely blows out of the water what we’re at NOM to accomplish. How open can you be in a conversation with someone who asks, “I don’t want to go to the temple and my wife is upset about it” when said wife is participating in the discussion? If you give him good advice, and he follows it, she’ll question his motives. If you give him lousy advice and he follows it, she’ll blast you.

I don’t have a good opinion of believer/non-believer interactions. My experience has been that NOTHING GOOD comes of interacting with unrelated believers from a skeptical/NOM/faithless POV. Apparently, however, my almost-four-years of experience with this is apparently not as valid as a bunch of newbies squishily deciding that we should all just be able to get along. Kum-bah-yah. Right.

So, I’ve lost my safe space.

I don’t remember when I’ve felt so alone.

My cable went out today. This meant that I was unable to access the internet. Fortunately, I had some things I could work on (training, proposals) that did not require internet access. But it was very frustrating.

On the up side, the cable was out, not just the internet. That meant all I had to do was turn on the TV in the other room to see when it was repaired. When the static changed to voices, I was good to go.

VegasJoe’s enthusiastic response to my “Crystal Reports” blurb yesterday has encouraged me to wax rhapsodic about my job. I write reports. I am learning new software. I LOVE Crystal Reports. It does so many things, and it is all self-contained. Of course, if I wanted things to be really fast I could write stored procedures to generate the table and then pull the data out, but most of the time it works just fine to have the report do the query, with the grouping pushed down to the server if at all possible, and then I get to write formulae and make them look all pretty and make charts.

I am creating a billing productivity report that shows how many invoices each biller/collector created during a given week, with a % for the month and a total. The idea is that even though the service date ends on 2/3, they don’t bill until 2/28 because…well, they don’t want to work all month when they could just goof off for three weeks and work hard for one. I’m not saying this is what happens, just that if it does, my report will show that.

It has taken a long time, mostly because it has lots of little formulae, and also because I had to figure out a way to determine what week a particular day falls in. And then I decided that I don’t like my date selection parameters (because if they select a date range longer than a month, they’ll get garbage). So, I am fixing that, and trying to figure out how to get the description of a parameter (vs. the parameter itself) into a variable for the subtitle.

Oodles of fun. I have high expectations of doing ever more interesting things with linked subreports, etc. Maybe I can even learn to do stuff on the web.