I grew up in a quasi-rural area of Washington State. It was one of those places where it isn’t uncommon for someone to have an acre or two upon which a horse, some sheep or maybe a cow or two grazed. To get to the road you’d usually have to walk up a gravel road, and once you got there you had to watch out lest you get squished by a potato truck coming down from someone’s farm up in the hills.

Most people weren’t farmers, though. Most just liked the slower pace of life, or couldn’t afford a place closer to town. Think mobile homes, cars on blocks, gun racks, chewing tobacco, etc.

Thankfully, I was lucky to grow up pretty firmly entrenched in the middle class, and never really understood why my parents chose to live so far away from civilization. I guess you could say that I never took to the whole rural thing. I wasn’t happy waking up one morning to the not-so-pleasant sounds of a neighbor slaughtering a cow, and I’ve never really understood the appeal of hunting (I’m the type of guy who captures house spiders so that they can be turned loose outside). As soon as I could, I got out.

One thing I did appreciate, though, was the quietness of life in The Middle of Nowhere™. I would often sit outside on warm summer nights, reading and occasionally listening to the distant howling of coyotes (and trying not to contemplate the fate of whatever small animal they had just taken). While I now live in a relatively quiet cul de sac in suburban California, there’s always the sound of traffic or neighbors nearby. You’re never far from somebody. A lot of somebodies.

When my mom’s house was originally built, there was almost nobody for miles. You could literally look down toward the banks of the Columbia river - about a mile away - and see nothing but poplar trees and a few cows in between. Now, single family homes are popping up all over the place, and the cows are mostly gone now. Granted, they are on acre sized parcels, but it’s only a matter of time before the area is fully developed. I’m not really sure how I feel about that.

As time goes on and humanity stretches out across the globe, though, it seems that many of these lonely places are disappearing, replaced by the products of human development. A byproduct of progress, I suppose, but I still wonder how our feelings will change when all such places are gone.

I was out of town when this came down, so it’s kind of old news, but still very significant.

Some time back I posted an entry about the NSA engaging in warrantless wiretapping at the behest of the Bush Administration. This involved the tapping of communications (phone and email) to or from the United States between one or more parties suspected of having ties to terrorism - and to do so without obtaining a warrant from the FISA court set up to facilitate such wiretaps. Until late last year, the existence of this program was hidden from the American public and even most of Congress.

Upon hearing about the program, my belief was that this was a clear violation of existing Constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure.

Apparently, this opinion is shared by Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor who recently ruled against the wiretapping, arguing that the practice is in violation of not only a 1978 law against warrant-less wiretapping, but also the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution.

In response, the Administration has come back with all-too-predictable talking points about “protecting America” and “fighting terrorism”, but as far as I can tell has not put forth a coherent response to the Constitutional issues brought up in the ruling. Their claim is that these rules all went out the window after the September 11th attacks in 2001, when the President was granted additional powers to fight terrorism.

In any case, it’s unlikely that this will be the end of the matter. This case is not only grounded in very important Constitutional matters, but it also has strong ramifications involving those powers granted to the Executive branch of our government.

If you support the idea of spying on Americans as a necessary part of dealing with terrorism - even if you agree with the methods, tactics and judgement of this particular President - the idea of this being done without any oversight at all from the Judicial branch should give you pause. Our system of government was designed to ensure that no single branch had too much authority or discretion on such matters. While I’ve long found statements that we live in a dictatorship a bit histrionic, this is the path upon which such governments tread.

It remains to be seen if our Supreme Court - who will surely hear the case - will find this activity as appalling as Judge Taylor did. If they don’t, they may very well be tossing away their own authority with their ruling. While the ideological gravity of the court has shifted to the right in recent years, I can’t imagine that the Court would be quick to cede its Constitutionally-mandated oversight powers to a lame-duck President.

We shall see.

We’re back.

While the trip up pretty much went as described in my previous entry, at some point during the drive back we decided to just head on through without stopping. This entailed 16 and a half hours of non-stop driving split between the two of us.

A good time was had - much better than our previous trip last fall, to be sure. It was nice hanging out and seeing our respective families, and the Tri-Cities didn’t have quite as thick “ghetto veneer” that it so often seems to have. Maybe it’s on the economic rebound? Hard to say.

Beyond that, not a whole lot is new. I’m back at work for the first time in a week and a half and have a mountain of spam to sort through. About 1,800 total, with maybe 15-20 legitimate personal emails scattered within. It’s good that I don’t take spam content very seriously, or I might end up conversing with a deposed Nigerian prince about rapidly rising mortgage rates and how incredibly self conscious I am about the size of my penis.

Anyhow, it’s good to be back.

We’re on our way up north for our (roughly) biannual trip back to The Home Land™, something which simultaneously A) reconnects us with our beloved family, and B) reminds us of why we love living in southern California.

This is the route we sometimes take, though we usually cut across Oregon rather than continue up the 5 and pass through Portland (with its associated traffic). This shaves 100 miles or so off of the trip. Whether you take the 5 or cut across using the 97, Oregon is absolutely beautiful this time of year - or pretty much any time of year, for that matter.

It’s a roughly 19 hour trip, and an insanely boring one up the 5 until you get into Northern California. It’s even more dull this time around as we took the same route to go to a wedding in San Francisco just last weekend.

I’ve done it all in one long drive before, but this time around we’ll probably stop off near the CA/OR border. Wish us luck.