Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Drove to Terre Haute with spouse Thursday before flying to CA to have new author shots done by our favorite local photog there (very nice lady who has studio in her vintage home).

So had a baker's dozen ordered in order to generate the CD for Putnam, giving them plenty to use/choose from.

I think I'll have Sean create a page here with downloadables for future use. Believe I have the one that I will use to finally replace my dimpled shot from the WSJ, which I still love, but that guy doesn't live here any more.

Suffering a sinus infection onset today. Big hint was going back to sleep for four hours after morning Enterra phone conference call. My dream said it all: Vonne and I had moved into an apartment in Maine with our kids on the way, and the dream consisted of me finding all these weird things out about the apartment but not really caring because I felt so much better for having left Indiana.

This is one great strategic life call that I truly regret: moving everybody back to the Midwest. I simply had no idea how bad the combo of allergens and air pollution (not good here) would be. I actually feel like I'm sick every first day back from travel, and way too often, I actually am. I have never gotten so many infections in my life. After the multiple surgeries in RI, I was pretty clean, but here it seems to make no difference. Ditto with my kids. It is a real nightmare that I would trade away in a heartbeat, but that's not an easy thing to pull off right now, so I feel the financial crisis plenty in the sense that it's this huge roadblock in my perceived freedom.

When I was at spiritual conference, there was this email that everyone was talking about where somebody suggested the USG take $700B and distribute to every American, something that would give the average household several hundred thousand, with the stipulation that it could only be used on mortgages. I don't know how you'd pull something like that off, but it struck me as sheer brilliance (perhaps that's the sinus infection talking) because, addressing that issue is the one thing I would gladly do with any monetary windfall right now. It would eliminate most of my financial worries and make me feel much more confident and free in my economic dealings with the world.

Again, don't know how you'd ever do that, but man, would that ever be politically popular! And wouldn't it still work as a financial injection of capital into the system?

Anyway, need to review book cover text, sent by Neil late last week.

Think I'll wait until tomorrow when my head should clear some.

I also need to have Sean organize a master file of any typos/corrections that readers of the advance uncorrected proofs generate. I have my mother-in-law (who's retired now but has taught K, grade, high, college and post-grad) reading the text carefully, generating the first great list, most of which Mark and I hopefully caught--but you never know.

I expect the next and basically final pass fully-typeset manuscript within a week or so.

Oh, almost forgot. My mother-in-law (saw her Sunday after WWII show), without prompting, told me how much she liked the big part in the book about the algorithms and my work with my partner, as she put it. She said it was fascinating and really exciting to read.

That made me feel very good, because that's a complex section and if my mother-in-law, who's not very technical, got it with ease and really liked it, then it means we pitched the level correctly for mass audience acceptance.

Small notation, but a big achievement nonetheless: literally passing the "mother-in-law test"!