Stream of Consciousness

A fellow alumnus of mine, George Lakoff argues that the Republican choice of Palin makes total sense if you truly understand the strategy of the Republicans in this election.

Found on http://mamasforobama.net/democrats-and-reality-political-mind

The Palin Choice and the Reality of the Political Mind
by George Lakoff

This election matters because of realities-the realities of global warming, the economy, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, civil liberties, species extinction, poverty here and around the world, and on and on. Such realities are what make this election so very crucial, and how to deal with them is the substance of the Democratic platform (PDF).

Election campaigns matter because who gets elected can change reality. But election campaigns are primarily about the realities of voters’ minds, which depend on how the candidates and the external realities are cognitively framed. They can be framed honestly or deceptively, effectively or clumsily. And they are always framed from the perspective of a worldview.

The Obama campaign has learned this. The Republicans have long known it, and the choice of Sarah Palin as their Vice-Presidential candidate reflects their expert understanding of the political mind and political marketing. Democrats who simply belittle the Palin choice are courting disaster. It must be t aken with the utmost seriousness.

The Democratic responses so far reflect external realities: she is inexperienced, knowing little or nothing about foreign policy or national issues; she is really an anti-feminist, wanting the government to enter women’s lives to block abortion, but not wanting the government to guarantee equal pay for equal work, or provide adequate child health coverage, or child care, or early childhood education; she shills for the oil and gas industry on drilling; she denies the scientific truths of global warming and evolution; she misuses her political authority; she opposes sex education and her daughter is pregnant; and, rather than being a maverick, she is on the whole a radical right-wing ideologue.

All true, so far as we can tell.

But such truths may nonetheless be largely irrelevant to this campaign. That is the lesson Democrats must learn. They must learn the reality of the political mind.

The Obama campaign has done this very well so far. The convention events and speeches were orchestrated both to cast light on external realities, traditional political themes, and to focus on values at once classically American and progressive: empathy, responsibility both for oneself and others, and aspiration to make things better both for oneself and the world. Obama did all this masterfully in his nomination speech, while replying to, and undercutting, the main Republican attacks.

But the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been to try to keep the focus on external realities, the “issues,” and differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call “issues,” but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind-the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Republicans can’t win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism, activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that conservatives have in dominating political discourse.

Our national political dialogue is fundamentally metaphorical, with family values at the center of our discourse. There is a reason why Obama and Biden spoke so much about the family, the nurturant family, with caring fathers and the family values that Obama put front and center in his Father’s day speech: empathy, responsibility and aspiration. Obama’s reference in the nomination speech to “The American Family” was hardly accidental, nor were the references to the Obama and Biden families as living and fulfilling the American Dream. Real nurturance requires strength and toughness, which Obama displayed in body language and voice in his responses to McCain. The strength of the Obama campaign has been the seamless marriage of reality and symbolic thought.

The Republican strength has been mostly symbolic. The McCain campaign is well aware of how Reagan and W won-running on character: values, communicatio n, (apparent) authenticity, trust, and identity - not issues and policies. That is how campaigns work, and symbolism is central.

Conservative family values are strict and apply via metaphorical thought to the nation: good vs. evil, authority, the use of force, toughness and discipline, individual (versus social) responsibility, and tough love. Hence, social programs are immoral because they violate discipline and individual responsibility. Guns and the military show force and discipline. Man is above nature; hence no serious environmentalism. The market is the ultimate financial authority, requiring market discipline. In foreign policy, strength is use of the force. In fundamentalist religion, the Bible is the ultimate authority; hence no gay marriage. Such values are at the heart of radical conservatism. This is how John McCain was raised and how he plans to govern. And it is what he shares with Sarah Palin.

Palin is the mom in the strict father family, upholding conservative values. Palin is tough: she shoots, skins, and eats caribou. She is disciplined: raising five kids with a major career. She lives her values: she has a Downs-syndrome baby that she refused to abort. She has the image of the ideal conservative mom: pretty, perky, feminine, Bible-toting, and fitting into the ideal conservative family. And she fits the stereotype of America as small-town America. It is Reagan’s morning-in-America image. Where Obama thought of capturing the West, she is running for Sweetheart of the West.

And Palin, a member of Feminists For Life, is at the heart of the conservative feminist movement, which Ronee Schreiber has written about in her recent book, Righting Feminism. It is a powerful and growing movement that Democrats have barely paid attention to.

At the same time, Palin is masterful at the Republican game of taking the Democrats’ language and reframing it-putting conservative frames to progressive words: Reform, prosperity, peace. She is also masterful at using the progressive narratives: she’s from the working class, working her way up from hockey mom and the PTA to Mayor, Governor, and VP candidate. Her husband is a union member. She can say to the conservative populists that she is one of them-all the things that Obama and Biden have been saying. Bottom-up, not top-down.

Yes, the McCain-Palin ticket is weak on the major realities. But it is strong on the symbolic dimension of politics that Republicans are so good at marketing. Just arguing the realities, the issues, the hard truths should be enough in times this bad, but the political mind and its response to symbolism cannot be ignored. The initial Democratic response to Palin - the response based on realities alone - indicates that many Democrats have not learned the lessons of the Reagan and Bush years.

They have not learned the nature of conservative populism. A great many working-class folks are what I call “bi-conceptual,” that is, they are split between conservative and progressive modes of thought. Conservative on patriotism and certain social and family issues, which they have been led to see as “moral”, progressive in loving the land, living in communities of care, and practical kitchen table issues like mortgages, health care, wages, retirement, and so on.

Conservative theorists won them over in two ways: Inventing and promulgating the idea of “liberal elite” and focusing campaigns on social and family issues. They have been doing this for many years and have changed a lot of brains through repetition. Palin will appeal strongly to conservative populists, attacking Obama and Biden as pointy-headed, tax-and-spend, latte liberals. The tactic is to divert attention from difficult realities to powerful symbolism.

What Democrats have shied away from is a frontal attack on radical conservatism itself as an un-American and harmful ideology. I think Obama is right when he says that America is based on people caring about each other and working together for a better future-empathy, responsibility (both personal and social), and aspiration. These lead to a concept of government based on protection (environmental, consumer, worker, health care, and retirement protection) and empowerment (through infrastructure, public education, the banking system, the stock market, and the courts). Nobody can achieve the American Dream or live an American lifestyle without protection and empowerment by the government.20The alternative, as Obama said in his nomination speech, is being on your own, with no one caring for anybody else, with force as a first resort in foreign affairs, with threatened civil liberties and a right-wing government making your most important decisions for you. That is not what American democracy has ever been about.

What is at stake in this election are our ideals and our view of the future, as well as current realities. The Palin choice brings both front and center. Democrats, being Democrats, will mostly talk about the realities nonstop without paying attention to the dimensions of values and symbolism. Democrats, in addition, need to call an extremist an extremist: to shine a light on the shared anti-democratic ideology of McCain and Palin, the same ideology shared by Bush and Cheney. They share values antithetical to our democracy. That needs to be said loud and clear, if not by the Obama campaign itself, then by the rest of us who share democratic American values.

Our job is to bring external realities together with the reality of the political mind. Don’t ignore the cognitive dimension. It is through cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and express our ideals.

George Lakoff is the author of The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 20th Century Politics With an 18th Century Brain

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to “help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.” Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

Google is a member of the Data Portability Working Group which is working on open standards that tackle difficult issues such as privacy, control and data exposure. Unfortunately, while Google is thus aware of the issues, it has instead chosen to create yet another closed system where the social graph and all of the key connections people make is contained on Google’s servers. Friend Connect provides its services in an iframe that makes integration simple - and thus will speed deployment - but limits flexibility. While undeniably powerful given Google’s ability to datamine net connections, this is neither open nor user-centric.

In creating Friend Connect Google seems to by throwing its weight around in the social network sphere in much the same way Microsoft does regarding web interface standards. In the latter case, Microsoft - knowing it owns nearly 90% (and shrinking) of the browser market - has the power to disregard internationally accepted web standards with respect to how elements are displayed on the page, causing headaches for web developers building to the standards. Similarly, Google - knowing it owns a huge (and increasing) amount of link data - has the power to create seductive services that sites will use while disregarding community-developed best practices that support full user control over how, when and with whom data is shared.

I have to close with a disclaimer that all this is speculation upon what I’ve been able to discover so far with respect to Friend Connect which, as of this posting, has not yet been released and thus not reviewed. One can hope that they listen to the organizations of the Data Portability Working Group and the privacy concerns they are working to address.

I just read an excellent article from the New York Times that a colleague sent me (have I mentioned recently that I love working for CivicActions?) that has me once again thinking that I want to grow some vegetables. This simple act not only will provide me with excellent, organic food at (once installed) near zero cost, but will also help my mind, body, spirit and community ties, not to mention fixing the tiniest dent in the global warming train wreck. But I have a problem: besides being strongly acidic, my back yard is sloped and heavily shaded, and thus would require a good deal of work to support even a small bio (or french) intensive plot.

So my next step will be to poll my community to see if there is shared interest in creating a community garden. What a wonderful project for the high school, though I’d rather it near Foster Elementary - my son’s school - so I can easily walk to it This makes sense to me, as there are seven elementary schools in Mt Lebanon, so there should be (ultimately) at least five community garden plots.

I have many other home projects on my plate right now, too, but I’m pretty jazzed about this, and I look forward to following up with more specifics.

Mmmm… I can already taste the tomatoes and zucchini. (We’ll just have to make sure the deer don’t feel the same way!)

Update 2008-05-08: Since adding this entry, I’ve received some interesting and useful links that I’ll list here:

• The Edible Schoolyard, a non-profit program located on the campus of Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, California. I was also pointed to the section in Hope’s Edge about the same project.
• Jane Goodall operates a program called Roots to Shoots, which helps start community gardens.
• And in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this article was on the front page of the “Local News” section: Amid soaring food prices, urban farms are sprouting across the city

By Rob Papke, Mt. Lebanon Council PTA Environmental Chair

5. A “Green” School = Healthy Students. The American Lung Association has found that American school children miss more than 14 million school days a year because of asthma exacerbated by poor indoor air quality. It costs nearly three times more to provide health care for a child with asthma than a child without asthma. In 2006 dollars this amounts equals $1,650 per child-costs borne not by the schools but by the students but by the student’s family. A recent Carnegie Mellon review of five separate studies found an average reduction of 38.5% in asthma in buildings with improved air quality.*
4. Mt. Lebanon as a Visionary Leader. Even though Pittsburgh is
   ranked #4 in the country for the number of L.E.E.D. certified buildings located here, there are no L.E.E.D. certified schools in South-Western PA. Just as the Fine Arts Building and our astro-turf field set the standard many years ago, a L.E.E.D. certified building will give Mt. Lebanon something that no other school district has had the vision to build.
3. State Reimbursement Incentives. The state offers reimbursement incentives to help defray the extra costs associated with L.E.E.D. certification.
2. The extra costs are much lower than one would assume. According to the Green Building Alliance, green school construction costs less than 2 percent more than a conventional school, about $3 per square foot.

…And the #1 reason to construct an L.E.E.D. certified High School is? the drum roll please?

1. There would be substantial savings to the taxpayers. On an average, green schools use 33 percent less energy than conventional schools. Lower energy and water costs, improved teacher retention and lower health costs directly save green schools about $12 per square foot, four times the additional cost of going green.*

If any one of these reasons is important to you, please email our school board members. More than ever, we need to let our school board members know that L.E.E.D. Certification is an important component to the up coming High School construction project. Thank you.

* For further information on Green School Design, check out Gregory Kats’ article Green School Design: Cost-Effective, Healthy and Better for Education. More information on green building in general can be found at the Western Pennsylvania Green Building Alliance.

Chances are that if you live in the US, you might be voting February 5th. If you are undecided, or if you are leaning toward a candidate who is not Barack Obama, please read the following.

For those of you leaning toward Hillary Clinton: She is completely disqualified for so many reasons that I will have to give just the highlights here. I’ll start with a practical, tactical and strategic argument for my fellow Democrats and independents. All due respect to Senator Clinton, but please understand the extent to which a nominee who is so bitterly polarizing and divisive will put us at a disadvantage in the general election. There are two reasons for this. First, as Richard Bond, former chair of the RNC indicated in the NYTimes last week, nothing will unite a currently disjointed Republican party and inspire Republicans to take up arms like having Hillary Clinton as an opponent. Let’s not unite their party for them. Obama had four times as many Republicans caucusing for him in Iowa. Read Peter Wehner’s article Why Republicans Like Obama, Washington Post 2/3.

Second, remember how close Florida was in 2000 and Ohio in 2004? It will be that close again, especially if John McCain is the man to beat. We will need votes from Republicans and independents if we want a Democrat in the oval office. Barack has BY FAR the best shot to get their votes. In a November Gallup poll, with a strong lead nationally, Senator Clinton’s net favorability among independents was -9%. Senator Obama’s was +24%. Her net favorability among Republicans was -64% versus -24% for Obama. This should give you great pause. Their policies are so similar and they are both highly capable and intelligent. Vote wisely.

We need someone who will be able to unite this country and move us forward to a common purpose - Senator Clinton cannot do this. She is far too polarizing and will divide our country further.

She’s disqualified for me because she voted for the Iraq war (Obama is the only leading candidate who opposed it). She has been a hawk on Iran (see her yes vote on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard resolution). I will not compromise my commitment to peace by voting for a candidate who voted for war. Are you ready to compromise your commitment to peace?

She is so out of touch with what true change for the country would mean: she has taken more money from federal lobbyists than any other candidate (Obama has taken nothing from federal lobbyists). Also, just one quick case study: the Clintons’ backers tried to sue to disenfranchise casino and hotel workers in the NV caucus - it was luckily denied by a judge (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/us/politics/17cnd-campaign.html). How GROSS!!!

Also, check out this video. Fired Up and Ready to Go has been a Barack Obama slogan for some time - it was said spontaneously by an older woman in the audience at a campaign event and it caught on. How embarrassing for Senator Clinton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweVOO-fhug. This kind of thing illustrates a lack of genuine inspiration and authenticity. And that says something very important about her as a candidate.

Also, Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton? America was founded in part on the rejection of dynastic rule. So, what, all of Bill’s old cronies are going to have the same kind of access to Hillary? The same old favors and back scratching? No! IF WE WANT TRUE CHANGE, THE NAME CLINTON CANNOT BE IN THE EQUATION.

With Barack, we have a shot to show the world a new face of America and to re-engage with our neighbors in a respectful way behind a leader who is the embodiment of what the US should be in the 21st century: honest, humble, respectful, worldly, genuine, courageous, brilliant. This is our have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too moment! A super-progressive, decent, young statesman with a diverse background who can actually win!

I’m for Barack because with him, I don’t have to compromise any of my progressive values (he has a much more liberal voting record than Hillary - to check, see the National Journal’s rankings). For example, I won’t compromise my commitment to peace, so I can’t vote for somebody who voted for war. And he seems genuine and authentic to me - seems like a regular person. His vision of where this country needs to go meets up with mine very well: universal health care, heavy government-led effort to reverse climate change, serious re-engagement with our world institutions and neighbors, heavy efforts to shore up American education, insistence on peace and diplomacy and good science.

Congressman Abercrombie of Hawaii recently said that Barack is the first citizen of the world to run for president of the United States. That’s the kind of leader we need. Heaven for bid we might have someone in the White House with a father from Kenya and who lived in Indonesia as a child. Whose Dad split early and who grew up poor and worked his ass off to get through school. He just paid back his student loans. He still lives in a regular neighborhood in Chicago. He was a civil rights lawyer. Got his start as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. He was a lecturer of constitutional law for 11 years. And on and on…

JFK’s daughter made Barack her first ever endorsement. Ted Kennedy endorsed him. MoveOn.org endorsed him.

Our moment is now.

No, it really is. If you are voting Barack and know someone who WOULD but are not planning on voting, BRING THEM WITH YOU TO VOTE!!!!! It’s going to be close.

For inspiration, watch this speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tydfsfSQiYc

written by lila sklar, from the soup list

Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, Bob Dylan’s son created this “song” - essentially written by Barack Obama. The lyrics are adapted from his “Yes We Can” speech after the New Hampshire primary. “Yes We Can” was inspired by Cesar Chavez’s motto for a United Farm Workers hunger strike in 1972.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

I remember back to when I was five - starting to become aware of the world around me - and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president. My father had great respect for this man who was President of the United States. I did, too, and I cried a year later when he was assassinated.

My son - now six - has become aware of the world with a President he thinks of a stupid (a bad word), corrupt and mean. This saddens me greatly.

Barack Obama is the first presidential hopeful that truly inspires me. I say it that way, as Dennis Kucinich also inspires me, but the U.S. is just not ready for a vegan president. Yes, I thought Bill Clinton was a great statesman and capable leader, but I was not inspired. His wife, unfortunately, I fear is the ultimate politician, with every word coming out of her mouth calculated to land with maximum effect to whoever her current audience is. I don’t trust her a bit. Nor do I trust McCain, who though centrist, has only one strong position in his platform: war is good.

But Barack Obama speaks like a man who not only believes (Bush’s only quality) but also thinks and is aware of the world around him. He seems capable, and while he may make some mistakes (heck, even JFK made some pretty serious mistakes) he will strive to do the right thing by the people of the United States and the world. And where people on all sides of the aisle are saying they want change, he’s - in my opinion - the only viable candidate that represents a hope for change.

I want my son to grow up with a President we can all believe in. A President who will work to right the wrongs that have been committed in recent years, and a President who has a dream - a good dream - for where we can be in the future.

I hope we can.

It is troubling that the growing theocracy in this country and connections between church and state has increased in me a distrust of religion - and thus religious people - when the fact is that there are many good religious people and most religions are built upon good ideals such as peace, justice and harmony with each other and with nature. I was delighted to be reminded of this when a friend pointed me to an audiocast by Father John Rausch, Glenmary priest and missionary, coordinator for peace and justice for the diocese of Lexington, Kentucky and Director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia. Please listen and perhaps look at some of the associated links:

• ProvokeRadio Archives or
  http://76.12.87.139/shows/Provoke_68_Appalachia_WEB.mp3 (direct link)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
• http://www.appalachian-center.org/

Peace,
=Fen

Mt Lebanon and the whole South Hills is about to lose (IMO) one of its most valuable assets - Great Harvest Bakery located directly across from the Lebanon shops. Tomorrow, Friday the 30th of November, 2007 will be the last day this fine bakery will offer its unique-to-this-area mix of whole-wheat and cracked-grain breads, muffins and other delectable delights. Nowhere else in this area (that I know of, anyway) can one escape the bland, unhealthy white-flour breads and muffins, and as of Saturday, well, I guess we’ll just have to bake our own. Even the Giant Eagle Market District only bakes with white flour.

I understand the reason for the closure: owner/baker/proprietor Jen - a wonderful and friendly woman - is just plain tired of waking up at 4am to get the ovens going for the morning rush. I know I couldn’t do that, so no hard feelings. But she and her cranberry-raisin, apple and chocolate-chocolate chip muffins will be sorely missed.

Just finished installing OpenID into the IIW MediaWiki - please see http://iiw.idcommons.net/

This was much harder than it should have been, as there are multiple OpenID plugins that claim to work with MediaWiki, and several of these claim to work with the latest OpenID-2.0.0-rc5 but finally the new version 0.7.0 of the standard MediaWiki OpenID extension fit the bill perfectly after dropping back to the v1.2.3 library. A million thanks to evanpro and, of course, JanRain.

All that tech stuff aside, I’m excited to have the opportunity to attend the first day of the Workshop (I have other commitments for the the other two days. which I am actually happy for as they are paying my fare across the country). In particular, I want to explore the use of barx to support alternate XRI/i-name roots so that federations of running proxy resolvers can be upgraded on the fly to include new local roots, simply by distributing a new plugin. The value of this to the many grass-roots organizations I work with at CivicActions can’t be over stated.

I look forward to seeing many of my colleagues next week as they gather to move the state of the art of user-centric digital identity forward another step.

It’s my second week here at our new house in Pittsburgh, PA on Roycroft Avenue, and much has changed. Perhaps the best part (for me) is that I’m no longer sleeping on the floor (as I did the first days here). No, the best part for me is that we’re now cooking and eating at home. No, the best part for me is how much my five-year-old son Steven loves it here.

Well, OK, there are a lot of “best parts for me.” Like the fact that this place is ours, and it’s coming together into a wonderfully livable place. What a house! We’re all so grateful to be here and excited to help make it everything it can be - and that we want it to be.

Watering the lawn first thing every morning is cool. Installing the microwave (hanging from the cupboards since we have so little counter space) and building Ikea furniture is great. Organizing the basement - urg - well, ok - there’s some things that are getting to be tiring about having just too much stuff.

I’ve got my wireless network running through the house so there are no unsightly wires from the downstairs to my office - and the laptop works on the back deck, too. The weather’s cooled down so I can actually do that occasionally now. (I still have to set up the dynamic DNS so that I can address my home machines by name.)

Perhaps this week we’ll re-build our bicycles which had their wheels, pedals and handlebars removed for packing. I can’t wait to start exploring the neighborhood via bike! (So far it seems most of my exploring has been confined to Home Depot and Ikea…)

Today we opened a local bank account and I installed two dimmer switches in the family room, tomorrow my cool desk chair arrives (yea!), Wednesday we apply for new licenses and car registration and (we hope) Gary the painter finishes the indoor trim, Thursday we put out the trash along with all our weeds and yard trimmings and Friday Bill comes to fix the piano leg.

I’ll tell you one thing: after each very full day, we sleep really well! We’ve created a list of about 50 more things we have to do soon - like treat the wood on the back deck before the winter and trim some dangerously long branches from our big Oak & Maple trees - so I think we’ll be sleeping well for some time in the future.

Hope you’re having as much fun as we are.

Update: a bit more on where we are from Elaine, July 24th

we are six miles south of downtown Pittsburgh but it feels like a world away — central Pittsburgh is ringed by countless townships and municipalities, little districts, as it were, that each have their own vibe and character. ours, Mt. Lebanon, is known as the “walking community” because there are sidewalks everywhere, it’s filled with old bricK houses and the schools are great. it’s also very green here — already in our back yard, we’ve seen deer, wild turkey, rabbits and squirrels! probably helps that we have five mature trees in the back yard, among them oak and maple. the yard slopes down from the house to the back yard and is flat at the bottom. Steven goes outside to play, front or back, and it’s a-okay, I don’t need to watch him — we live on a dead-end street with not much traffic (talk about a change from the corner of California and Gough! amazing.).

the neighbors have been great, in the first week they stopped by with pies (really) and potted plants and lists of contractors they use (a lifesaver — we found our lawn guy this way and he’s great). Steven is in his second week of summer camp (AM camp) and loves it, and it gives me some time to do, oh, a million little things. camp runs through next week. we joined the local pool and have swum there several afternoons (the pool is twice the size of Marinwood and half the price, water slide included). if we’re not swimming, I’m dragging Steven around to assorted stores in search of furniture, tho we have found time to visit the children’s museum and science center.

while the move feels oh so right so far, I really miss having friends close at hand. I’ve been too busy to feel too lonely but I look forward to meeting other moms and having gal pals to hang with. it’s an important thing. as to the house, our only complaint, and not a huge one at that, is that it’s not air-conditioned. luckily, it hasn’t been terribly hot so far (but it’s not August yet) so it hasn’t been too bad, and we even need a blanket at night as the temps are in the 50s or 60s. so we may hold off on A/C till next summer. and we may not have time to get a grill and outdoor table for the deck this summer as we’re not sure we’d have time to enjoy it. we’ll see. our interior painter, bless his heart, still has about two more days of work here and then the place will be completely done. can’t wait! a half-done paint job def doesn’t work for the Virgo in me. another fun thing: I seem so energized by the morning light and greenery that I’ve gotten up almost every day at 7 a.m. and gone running! I haven’t run this much in months. it feels great, and many mornings, Steven and Fen are still sleeping when I get back around 8 a.m. feels nice. oh, and I LOVE having my bedroom back after sharing a bedroom with Steven all these years — Steven also took to his bedroom and bunk beds from day one and never took issue with the new world order.