Mirror, Mirror- Contemplations on Qualitative Market Research

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Peering intently at the you from this side of the 2-way mirror, I am Id staring down Ego. It never ceases to amaze how quickly you forget, despite frequent reminders, that the barrier between us is a window and not a wall.  A thin reflective surface is all it takes, and the only thing you see is yourself, out of the corner of your eye.  I’m intrigued, suspicious of the illusion,when you stare directly back at me; but within seconds, with a twitch, a tilt of the head, you betray that you were looking at your own image all along. 

Angel or demon, I hover behind the interviewer, sifting every nuance, noting responses and lines of inquiry, willing this or that to change to shift, all to make you comfortable, to establish rapport, to elicit your response in this artificial environment.  It delights and frightens me that we can create friends out of strangers just by setting them opposite an interviewer at a table, that given the right questions and a few common experiences, alliances and enmity can develop so quickly and then  scatter like quicksilver when the conditions behind the glass are broken.  This could be a good dinner conversation, a cocktail party, a bad argument between a married couple- except that the people in this room have known each other for only twenty minutes, and in another twenty they will slip out of this room and into the world, and they may never speak again of this to anyone.  It undermines my faith in the strength of human bonds and ties, as slippery as an image sliding over glass.

You have no idea what I look like, but I’ve stared at you intently enough to fall in love with you, a little.  It’s funny what happens when you train yourself to listen with no judgements, soaking up the messages of the body and intonation.  All the little worries and endearing fallibilities, the thread of the divine, and seeping patches of evil come through that image of yourself that you see on the mirror.  I’ve known qualitative researchers who were so practiced at their art that they could tell you how your grandmother died, the name of your daughter’s barge, the reasons you lived in Siberia, and delve right into the one soul-wrenching experience you had in common, just by exploring the frequencies of pitch and tone for 5 minutes in a telephone conversation.  And when we look into your irises? We can see through your own two way mirror, right through the crystal lenses you carry with you in your head, to the other side of that miniscule glass and the inverted image of the world it carries..

I’ve sent the interviewer in to take you through the forest of your doubts, to steal your heart and bring it back for my inspection.  What are your motivations?  Your needs, wants, dreams and disappointments? It feels like stealing, as careless as murder. I’d like to stay on this side of your mind’s eye for longer, see what you do with this conversation, whether you take anything out of this room with you, or whether the reason you came here was to leave it all here, a burden shed.  In the meantime, I will hoard every word, and serve it on a plate to be savored or devoured.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

You Are….

10:05:03 PM    

Pieces of Paris

You've asked me what you should do to see Paris.  It's your first visit, you have an extra day and you want to know what to see, where to go, with that "conquer-the-mountain" enthusiasm and confidence that you can do anything if you set your mind to it.  I don't know what to tell you- it's been a long time, and what I remember is a mosaic- bits of memory studding the city, traces of my life there embedded in everything of me.

The task is a little daunting, and a little too personal; but I guess I can take off my armor and direct you towards a few highlights.

Go on the cusp of twenty years of age.  Study French language, literature and philosophy  for 8 years, and then forget everything you know.  Almost miss your chance. Hurl away your pride, and beg, threaten and cajole to get there.

Go with a grand total of forty dollars to spend, month to month, in the most expensive city in Europe. Go the year your parents separate. Forge your own identity, and learn to walk away.  Have a wonderful time.

Walk across Paris, at least twice- once because there's a transportation strike and you have a thesis to type; once in the middle of the night because you miss the last train. Get gassed in a metro north of the city at Passover; get mugged and get lucky because there is nothing in your pockets to steal.

Get lost. Get fed by a muslim woman selling crepes who takes seriously the Koran's commandment to be kind to travellers.  Find things you'd never imagined, closer than you thought possible- bird markets, grocery stores that smell like your mother's kitchen cabinets, mongoose.

Feel bad because you are an American in Paris. Feel large, graceless, linguistically hopeless.  Get used to being embarrassed, start looking for opportunities to help American tourists, enjoy arguing, learning new words, new and vicious ways of dealing with random molestation on the metro. Have a bad day and flash your "Art History" student card at the entry of the Louvre, the Musee Dorsay, Musee Marmatton, just to watch stone cold distaste melt to deference at your approach.  Not rail-thin in a city full of x-rays? Throw your generous proportions around the north of the city, the left bank, sections of the city where your embonpoint will represent a sort of oasis of feminity in a desert of cigarette-thin Parisiennes.  Buy your friends dinner on the basis of the fascination you command in the son of the maitre de of the Greek place in the Latin Quarter.

Sit at a cafe and do nothing.  Write on the metro.  Notice everything beautiful, and everything cruel, while attempting to be kind.  Pass through like smoke from a cigarette, suffuse the city the same way the city suffuses you. 

Visit the dead. Realize that someday, someone else will have to artfully deal with the annoying question of what to do with your bones, your sewage, and that someday someone may need to drive through the layer of earth that was once your home. 

Celebrate the living.  Climb the dirty hill below the white domes of Sacre-Coeur, surrounded by markets and turbans and burkas and roasting chestnuts, the bright colors of a harsher, more vibrant world, rats and rags and smoke ascending to the incorruptable.  Descend again.

Look so hard in the museums that you fall down.  Fall down, fall over, fall into a lot of things.  Fall down the morning your favorite view of the Eiffel Tower, the one from your window, disappears. Watch, open mouthed, as the fog dissapates, and she emerges, slowly disrobing from the haze.  Watch her stride across the park, wearing a crown of lightning.

Get engaged in a tiny pensione in the Bastille. Hold your first dinner party. Be a guest at someone else's. Sleep in a bedroom full of recipes. Sleep in a bedroom full of friends. Study hard and ditch class, attend exams, have patience and figure out how to get a book from a library, and how to send a postcard.  No matter how many times it takes.  Find something your friends hunger for- girl scout cookies, or bagels- and surprise them.  Be surprised.

Sob until a stranger gives you a handkerchief.  Laugh at yourself until a bus full of Parisians laughs with you. Learn to drink wine, and coffee, and how to serve a seven-course meal. Make someone fall in love with you. Be ridiculous. Come back with one good story, and a pan from the restaurant supply store near the stock exchange. Use them both for the rest of your life. 

That's all.  Bon voyage, say hello to me when you get there,  I miss me, and I'd like the two of you to meet.

9:31:19 PM    

The Green Man

There was an empty panel above the window in the kitchen, and it needed to be filled.  White molding framed a 1 foot by 4.5 foot space of white, and it was waiting for something to happen, for a different picture of existence, just like Ivan and I.

We were trying to be patient, waiting for our family to happen, and I thought I'd fill the time with a sort of mandela to seasons, and creation, and an homage to the places we'd been and the place we were.  Ivan bought the wood and I painted it, over the course of a year or two.  Geraniums and gargoyles were mandatory. Flowerpots for family and memories- seasons changing from winter to Summer, from grim to lush, from Russia to Paris.  A rosebush for Grace and the three sisters, then, a rose, with a bas-relief a batwinged Mimi the angel dog; a rosemary pot with a green eyed seraphim.  A cat-turned-dragon, blue curmudgeon gargoyle for Ivan on one side of the cauldron of geraniums, and a grinning gargoyle with books in either claw for me.  Balloons, and cathedrals in the clouds, and the river flowing  through it all.  Three coats of varnish.Then we hung it in its pre-existent frame above the kitchen sink and our view of the river. The pot was decorated with a Green Man, a sort of appeal to nature and creation and Life.  Painting the panel made me think of hungry shaman hoping for bison and successful hunts, making them happen by painting them in caves and secret, sacred places.  It was a way of communicating wishes and biding time and taking action when none would help.

The painting was finished; but our family wasn't. When we moved, we took it down and brought it with us to our new home, six houses down the same river.  The new house was and is perfect, but it had no empty frame, waiting.  By that time neither did we, The Boy had done a good job of filling absolutely every empty space in our lives, and when he didn't, within a day or two, he'd grow a little, invite some friends over, and leave no room for blank white spaces in our hearts.  Trips to the woods and the river and the garden were mandatory.  He needs the woods like water or oxygen, it's a place to breathe, and a place to feel alive and come back muddy and completely engaged and happy.  When things are not good, we hike. We fish, we get messy and the garden gets tidy. His hair smells like leaves in October, and his clothes smell like rocks in the river, and his favorite color is green, as is right and just for a Boy with an Irish name born on the day of an Irish saint.  He's larger than life, and when he's amused by us, and he loves us, the corner of his mouth twists a little;  it looks like he's put something over on us, or like maybe we've put something over on him.

We'd been in the house a year before I decided to put up the panel in the living room.  I found a place above the piano where the light and shadows fall correctly and the perspective works.  It was a perfect place, but it was marred by something.  I hadn't painted the Boy into the panel.  He was the most important part of our lives, and he was Missing, and I didn't even want to look at the panel because it made me sad to think of the way life had been with all those empty spaces.  Ivan hung the panel when I was out.

I walked in, walked up to it; I leaned over the piano, traced all the images and symbols I'd folded into the images,  narcissistically admired the things I'd forgotten, smiled at things that had gone well, forgave things tha things that had gone badly. Left to right. knowing that the Boy was missing, and there was no place left  to put him. Past the Ivan-Gargoyle, the pot of geraniums, the me-gargoyle, the column...snap back.

The Boy was there, grinning at me, right between us, smack dab in the middle of the biggest thing on the panel.With that twist in the corner of his smile, just like he'd put something past us. 

9:49:24 AM    

Persephone

Persephone stares out of the blank look of February that flashes across my mother’s face; and in the excitement of a friend’s voice as she describes her latest medication, the triumph of her latest breakthrough, the despair of the latest setback.  Persephone is both beautiful heartbreak and ugly truth, and her fingers stretch toward me through the bare trees of late Fall and early dead-grass Spring.

She descends and resurfaces, and the joy of her return is tainted with the certain knowledge of her eventual departure. Like the bulbs that are also emerging from the soil, she’s feeding on the bones of the past, trying to make something beautiful from the dry dust of death and winter. Some years are more successful than others, but in the end, the bones will win.

I’ve seen Persephone consume the women she inhabits-She waxes and wanes like the moon, trying alternately to become large enough to encompass the pain and small or light enough to escape it.  Some days all the grains in the world are not enough to make her feel comforted by her mother’s distant harvest: other days, a pomegranate seed is too much, and a light snack is all that was necessary to trade half a lifetime of misery. These consequences, which seem so simple for others to assess, are impossible for her to predict.

Persephone’s tongue rolls the pomegranate seed along the roof of her mouth contemplatively. With its smooth surface and beveled sides, it is less like food than like the jewels embedded in her abductor’s kingdom, rubies and garnets that stud the darkness like drops of blood.  She bites, decisively, and the seed bursts, leaving stains she cannot hide on her lips and teeth.  The juice is sweet and sharp, and utterly unsatisfying. 

There is no happy medium, no still point of peace: just the unending pendulum from one extreme state of existence to the next, driven inexorably by the weight and gravity of fear and anger she can no longer express. There is sleep and despair, and there is desperate action and limited escape. There is the memory of rape, a regretful, neglectful mother, and a husband afflicted with the queer emotional distance of the dead. 

I blame Persephone for things that are not her fault, for the swing of the pendulum she rides, for ugly seasons, for the intense necessity of Spring cleaning, for the interesting, dark, and damaged men my mother dated.  Men who adored bugs and dirty layers of Earth; men who loved slithering in caves and sold shit for a living; men who brought her snakes and damage. Through her, these men taught me ways to capture serpents and charm lizards, how to escape the subterranean, how to immobilize the creepy crawley things of the earth.  Because my mother spent time ruled by plutonian seductors, I didn’t have to.

But I have to watch.  And listen. 

I’ve been trying my whole life to make it easier for Persephone, but all of the welcome back and bon voyage conversations are just a way of declaring that I am not occupying the same space, that she is different from me, that I will not let her in the way so many women I know have done, that the dark man I married is a living hope, and not a dead one.  I am not the victim she needs us to be, and I can move between these worlds at will- follow my friends, family, or leave them there, take comfort in both dark spaces and light ones in whatever season pleases me. 

I slice the leathery hide of a pomegranate, and find a studded section of skin, invert it, and stain my hands with the wine-sweet juice, bursting, like life, at the seams.  I take an unbroken berry and roll it around on my tongue- it tastes like a stone, the first jewel Ivan ever gave me, a garnet in a ring, that would not stay in its setting but fell and skittered across the floor until I found it. I bite down hard, and it is as sweet and fleeting as summer.  I peel a few more- maybe six, maybe seven, a dozen or more and I feed them to the Boy. 

You, I’m keeping.  You get to stay in the light.   You need no more dark, subterranean seasons.  You eat these- and all the other things I’ve fed you, ideas, belief, strange unfathomable laws- from my hand, and you’ve chosen.  That’s the rule.  It’s not fair, but there it is, and I can’t worry about how your mother remembers the story, or how many years she mourns your loss. 

9:50:59 PM    

Seasons of Light and Dark

Sanatorium, Glen Gardner

It's just past the turn of the year, and the world is grey skies and bright windows.  We still need Christmas lights to illuminate the darkness of the walk from the car to the front porch, something to cheer up all those bare tree trunks and stark porches, but the holiday is over, and the lights themselves have become a sort of wistful testimony of neglect, dangling in the chilly air on the deck.

I'm not bouncing back from the hectic holiday season as quickly this year; the world feels darker and colder, I feel more needy. I've been wringing a lot of emotions and experiences onto a slice of time, and I am curled into the spaces in between.  The year is reeling on its edge, and dawn's light is creeping back out from under the grey rock of winter mornings, pale and wan.  During the holiday season, light glimmers, shines, twinkles, forms beacons in the cold inksea of an early December night;  Now it just seems to highlight the dust on the glass.

Older traditions, more sinister and beautiful, used to ache for the change. Beautiful serious star-boys trudging through snow, and girls in red sashes and bearing greenery-bound pyres above their tresses, beckoning the shift towards Spring belong to harsher northern climes, where winter is the guest that may not leave without sacrifices.  We all make sacrifices for the season, whether is cutting cookies til midnight three nights in a row, streams of crushed ribbon listing in every room, exhaustion. 

As manic joy slides to "Watch and Wait for Spring" this year, we crept through the snow to visit the Boy's mother: she feels safer in hospitals, this season, flavorless white halls, quiet listless people with quiet listless relatives, hallways of assurances. A place to blend the joy and black pain of the year to a grey light enough to swallow.  In the fluorescent hallways, glowing against windows of slate January, the contrasting emotions on the Boy's face are highlighted, a chiarascuro of hope and concern, a brief flicker of resentment flashing on the side of his face she can't see.

And then we drive through the rain, headlights cruising disembodied through slashed reflections, toward loud families and roast pig, and shiny dimes cascading,flash of white teeth and laughter, percolating Tagalog.  The Boy feels at home here, a tall pale Boy included in a small, dark tribe of fierce and happy people.  Little old ladies wield machetes and give him the crispy skin and the best rice in banana leaves, and sniff his head and offer him up as a jungle gym for their grandsons.  I wander between the gossiping girls, and fussy gorgious babies, the gambling matriarchs, and fail to feel at home, even with the old soldiers frying lumpia in the kitchen testing home-brewed beer. The afternoon shadows and glistening phragmite stalks, the next day, set against a slowly shifting sky, is almost right, though, even if it's cold enough to be impersonal.

A year ago, on a day like this, Ivan and the Boy and I crept up the cleft between two hills, in a town once named "Sodom", towards an insane asylum.  It was the last thing we had to do before officially becoming the Boy's guardians, and the only place that would take the correct acceptable biometrics to declare our substance and intentions.  We crept up a stairway in the cleft between two buildings, on a frigid day, and held out our hands.  Smudged and marked, we fingerprinted everything that day- letters from the post office, doorhandles, our foreheads.  Marked like criminals and registered at a mental institution, we embarked on parenthood.  

A year once, on a day like this, a Boy arrived in darkness on a doorstep, just before dawn came to investigate.  Some days I can't even remember what the darkness was like, and sometimes I even miss it;  That darkness was sometimes the very realest part of me, whether it started in the stark white walls of another hospital, or in crisp snow of Russia, or bleached rock in the Southwest, or even earlier. 

This past year has been bright; it's been easier to see farther, and more clearly.  I can see a shift in the wind, some oncoming preciptation, the little nervous charge of scudding clouds, as the days unfurl, ever so slightly.  There are a few more shadows, a little more contrast, a little more drama, a lot more balance and depth. I'm glad to be here for it, I like to see the storms approach, and an oncoming front means change.  Peeling a pomegranat for the Boy, tasting the sweet juice of dark and light, I wonder if he misses the darkness like I do, whether it makes him feel like he belongs, whether the memory of that velvet pain ever makes him feel real;  and which of his two worlds, the world of light or the world of darkness, is the one he greets as home.

11:02:10 PM    

Harvest, Part III

Autumn Morning- Dugaev

Fear and I glimpsed each other when I went to pick my boss up from the airport and I saw that five flights from three regional airlines had been delayed indefinitely due to lack of fuel.  Fear and I were formally introduced when I asked the medical rep if worries about a shortage were normal "winter is coming" paranoia, of whether there was a real problem.  He replied, carefully, " I hope that it is not real.  But...if it is real, I feel Yekaterinburg has a lot of trees.  The wood stove at my parent's dacha works quite well, and the second floor I feel will be completed.  You and your husband can join us."

He had been thinking about the possibility of freezing to death when the temperature was still 70 degrees Farenheit.

By the time I attended a banquet dinner with my boss and the chief of the local hospital, Fear and I were chatting comfortably.    It was interesting to note that Dr. Takchidi happened to mention in the middle of dinner that the heating supply for his 300-bed clinic and its adjacent hotel was now renovated and completely independent from the city.  Next year he plans to liberate his water supply.

Russians live in the constant company of Fear and its consort, Disaster.  Whereas, in the US, we assume despite past experience that in the face of calamity, each family will strike out for itself, deny fortune's favors to the less prepared, and barricade themselves into lonely isolated fortresses, Russians look to the unthinkable as a way of breaking down the walls that divide the individual from the community, the stranger from the status of guest.  Just as the American assumption is often erroneous, so is the Russian; but since Disaster will always be mostly an exercise in anticipation, its contemplation gives Russians the rarely afforded opportunity to be generous.

Just as one American will reassure another in the face of tragedy by saying, heartlessly, "It will be ok, everything always turns out for the best", the Russian knows that the worst will happen. The future is uncertain, and it has the ability to consume you whole.  You don't congratulate a pregnant woman until her child is born living, healthy, and has a name.  You don't congratulate someone on a vacation until they've returned.  If destiny has dealt an evil blow, the American will try to cheer you up; the Russian will commiserate, and tell you exactly how much worse it's going to get.  Then they'll give you enough alcohol and trips to the halls of gratuitous praise that you'll feel like you can handle it.

On the other hand, Russians have a veneration for accomplishment that could only be achieved in a country where everything is so hard to accomplish.  Every crop and every child that grows to maturity is a miracle, albeit a miracle wrought with prayer and heralded by numerous stigmata.

Even though cold weather threatens, along with another devaluation, another confirmation that the country's administration has plundered and pillaged its populace once more, the joy and pride of the harvest is piled on cartons and crates at every street corner.  Melons and berries and garlic and peppers and tomatoes and plums and apples so sweet they brown in their skins tumble in green and rosy heaps around their cultivators.  A line of women chat, toothless and rish in the treasures coaxed and teased and torn from the earth by their own hands.

I buy red peppers and garlic from the Georgian family- their daughter is round and cheerful and openly curious about Americans, and she always picks the best tomatoes from the pile for me.  I buy sweet white strawberries from one babushka, flowers in season from the next.  There is a man on whom the dirt is pressed and creased into every wrinkle, from whom I buy gooseberries and currents, in Mason jar measures.  One family has a talent for growing brown, yellow and red potatoes, and they burnish them clean until they glow like gold and copper; others' potatoes lie in muddy unbought heaps to the side of them.

There is an Armenian couple that can sell me anything- dozen's of cucumbers I didn't want, slices of a melon I couldn't even name; they introduced me to a melon that tasted like cool tranches of honey sherbet, all twenty kilos of it.  The wife has the marketing skills of a professional, her powers of persuasion and ability to incite cravings defies description.  Meanwhile, her handsome husband lays on the guilt.  Now why did you buy flowers and tomatoes over there? Aren't ours more beautiful? Don't we always treat you right?  Doesn't your husband always love whatever we send home with you?

Among the women gossiping, the summer lovers enjoying their last desperate kisses, twilight sweeps, stretching its blue skin and shadows over the street.  Women yawn, men get restless, the cash is counted, produce bundled, deep discounts offered to the hungry schoolboys hanging around the carts.  Cars are loaded, and by the last light, the streets are deserted.

Once that Autumn, I saw the women stay deep into the dark.  It was almost midnight: Ivan and I were in a gypsy cab driving past Lunacharskova street, and there they were.  Ten women, all ages, were sitting still at their tables, which were heaped high with harvest.  The night wa a cold black sea swimming with an enormous golden moon.  In the center of each table, a candle flickered in a jar, highlighting the face of each woman.  The women sat silently, facing the night with both the fear of a coming battle and the peace that comes with knowing that you've done everything that could be done.  They were as old as death and as new as creation and as beautiful as faith, priestesses presidng at Harvest's altar.

8:42:23 PM    

Harvest, Part II

Fairytale Siberian Woods- Dagaev

Fall in Russia, Osyen, is the time of year fro regrets and revolutions and regressions, the execution of the temporal, the flood of bittersweet nostalgiawelling up and spilling onto everything.  The leaves change and each womnan's heart is pierced by a little stab of resentment as she exchanges gloriously short skirts and brilliant spandex for for autumn coats and bulky sweaters, and changes strapless heels for her boots.  The dachas are closed, the potatoes are dug, the gardens gleaned.  Now is the time for fruit compote and vitamin C for colds and hot red peppers crammed into vodka.  Now is the time for orange chanterelles and brown puffballs and the shimmering green and purple caps of podbiryozi.  Now is the time for fish and smoke and salt and roe slit from the bellies of sturgeon.

Now is the time for endless rain and scudding clouds.  A fellow expatriot here for last year's Fall said that he stood on the main street, Leninski Prospyekt, in October and watched winter hurtle from the the North.  A solid wall of heavy air and icy wind barreled from the Artic along the Ural foothills and down the streeet until it hit him broadside with the force of a punch to the face and gut.

Right now the crisp clean cold is only kissing us at night and in the morning, chilling us with playful gusts and tickling us with shivers in the evening. The light is still golden, it's still pinning the edges of the day from 6:30 in the morning to 9:30 in the evening, but any minute now those edges will give and the day will snap shut to winter's dim four hours, like a rolled parchment.  The shadows reach and follow us, stalking us like a mugger.

Fear is the perennial guest at Autumn's table.  Last year, when the ruble fell on August 16th, the start of Russian Fall, and the fuel stores were low and the harvest was horrible, Fear was a grimacing skull of panic, a rattle and flurry of buying and selling and holding one's breath and tightening one's belt.  Last year's panic was starvation; Maksim's mother staves off the fear by blistering her surgeon son's hands with 1000 square meters of potato fields every Spring.  A product manager in Moscow used her sample cabinets at work to store cooking oil and rice she'd hoarded.

This year's name for Fear is Cold.  It scampers like a shiver down the backbone of every city resident.  It grins between the lines of every conversation, and huddles in the corner of every apartment.  This is why.

Just as every Regional government in Russia has been unable to pay it's pensioners, it's soldiers, and its construction workers, every Regional government has been unable to pay its gas, oil, and electricity bills.  This is not surprising, considering that 70% of the nation's fiscal resources originate in the regions, but only 20% are spent outside of Moscow- and of those funds, half of them are spent in St. Petersburg.

Until this year, the State Gas company, Gazprom, has extended unlimited forbearance on those debts.  However, this year Gazprom is privatizing a large chunk of its operatiuons in order to generate operating revenue.  In order to generate more revenue and to support the price of its stock, Gazprom has decided to collect on its debts.  It is no longer delivering oil to organization until they clear their debts.  In some case's, this is 10 years' worth of arrears.

In addition, Russia has been dumping oil on the world market in an effort to keep up withthe interest payments on its external debt.  This means that the oil reserves of one of the world's largest producers are at an all time low.  Add rising domestic oil prices and inefficient airplanes, factories, and cars that guzzle gas as voraciously as Koshei the Deathless, and you have the makings of some serious concerns.

Now consider that the major cities are heated by a central system operated by the city and regional administration.  So is the electricity; so is the gas.  Cities such as Perm and Chelyabinsk have been conserving fuel by shutting off all heat and hot water since June.  They are considering reducing the supply throughout the winter.

Yekaterinburg has had hot water all summer.  In fact, there was more hot water this summer than there was last January.  We have also had road repairs, building renovations, and the regional medical insurance has been supplying "essential drugs" again after a 12 month hiatus.  Our city day celebration this August had two fireworks displays and 3 sound stages.  This is not a good sign.

It doesn't mean recovery, it means that there is an upcoming gubernatorial election and our mayor wants to be the next governor.  The worst of it is that elections were held this Sunday.  No matter who wins or loses the election, the next governor is inheriting a bankrupt legacy.  Fall has just begun, to be followed by a long frigid winter and an icy Spring.  Essentially, we have seven months of bone-chewing cold to go- and the city hasn't been conserving money or fuel.

3:32:39 PM