Livingston, I Presume

Goodbye, for now

I really apologize to the few of you who still check in here. I never meant for my dad's obituary to be the last post of my blog. Somehow, though, I lost my blogging feeling after he died, and just about the time it was coming back, 2010 came along to smack us down some more. Head injury for Connery, serious illness for my mother-in-law, typical fall spate of colds and flu...well, let's just leave it at 2010 having been pretty crappy.

Beyond that, we've been trying to sell our house in Livingston with little success. It seems weird to post to "Livingston, I Presume" when we're doing everything we can to leave here. I have been trying to think of a way to transition the blog into something else, but nothing is inspiring me just yet. I may remove it or just give it a new identity when I feel ready.

I thank you for visiting. I hope to be back someday.

Carl Albert Rosenleaf (1946-2010)

Beloved husband, father, and papa Carl Albert Rosenleaf passed away at Benefis Hospital on July 7, 2010 following a stroke. He was 64, taken from his family far too soon.

Born on February 6, 1946 in Anaconda to Roy and Martha Rosenleaf, Carl was the third of five siblings. From an early age, he bedeviled his mother with his precocious manual dexterity, at one point dismantling all the doorknobs in the house. Later he would put those skills to better use, learning all facets of carpentry and home improvement from his father, a longtime member of the Carpenters Union.  

He was just 16 when he started dating Patricia Ann Malcolm, the love of his life. The two of them married in 1967 while they were studying at Western Montana College to become teachers. They would have celebrated their 43rd anniversary this year.  

They left Dillon after graduation for positions with the Great Falls Public Schools, with Carl starting his career as an industrial arts teacher at the old Paris Gibson School and eventually teaching at West and North Junior High Schools and the new Paris Gibson Middle School. He earned a Master’s degree from Northern Montana College in 1976. In the classroom, he was instrumental in creating a new home maintenance curriculum that taught all middle schoolers how to accomplish basic tasks such as fixing a faucet and building a wall. In response to heavy demand, he went on to teach that course to many local adults as well. He retired from the Great Falls Public Schools in 2003, but he was a lifelong teacher to friends, children, and grandchildren in his home shop.  

While work was always important to Carl, his real passion was for his family. His two children, Nicole and Alex, were a constant source of pride and joy, and he would brag about them to anyone who would listen. He delighted in being a family man, keeping Patricia, Nicole, and Alex at the center of his life. That joy was multiplied when Nicole married Chip Ritter and Alex married Kari Duffner, adding a son and daughter-in-law and, eventually, four grandchildren to the family.  

Carl is survived by his wife, Patricia Rosenleaf, of Great Falls, his daughter Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter and son-in-law Chip Ritter of Livingston, and his son Alex Rosenleaf and daughter-in-law Kari Rosenleaf of Black Eagle. He also leaves four grandchildren, Connery and Emerson Ritter of Livingston, and Hannah and Kennedy Rosenleaf of Black Eagle, his sister, Ellen (Ron) Holten of Hamilton and two brothers, Howie (Bea) Rosenleaf of Anaconda and Dick (Julie) Rosenleaf of Butte, as well as numerous nephews and nieces. MaryPat and Jerry Smith of Great Falls were lifelong special friends.  

He was preceded in death by his parents Roy and Martha Rosenleaf, his parents-in-law Stan and Doris Malcolm, and his younger brother, James Rosenleaf.

Funeral services will be held at 1:00 p.m. on Monday, July 12th, at First Presbyterian Church of Great Falls. Memorials may be directed to the Swan Ecosystem Center, the Great Falls Pet Paw-see, or the Great Falls Symphonic Choir (please specify the choir!).

A shaker, not a mover

I hate change. I guess that’s why when there are changes to be made, I try to do them all at once. It’s kind of like ripping off a bandage—better to do it quick than to slowly peel it off. In the spirit of fast pain, I have decided to leave the Chronicle, take a new job at a Bozeman nonprofit, sell our house and leave Livingston for Bozeman. With any luck it will all be effective by the end of the summer. Nothing like shaking things up as much as possible, right?

In my first 18 years of life, I moved once—and even that was so early that I don’t remember it. My parents still live in the house where they moved when I was 18 months old. From 18 to 32, I made up for it, moving more than 10 times in the young adult shuffle that most of us know. For all that later-in-life experience, you’d think I’d be good at packing things up and transporting them. You would be wrong.

I am possibly the worst mover ever. It takes me weeks to moon over closets full of unused baby clothes and shelves full of books, and even then I end up packing things for which I have no real use—things that will ultimately sit in a box in the new place and mock me.

When we moved to Prague from Massachusetts, a Montana friend of mine came up from New York, where she was living, to help us sort and pack. As a kid, she had moved with her family about once a year, and she claims that she and her mom could pack their house in 12 hours. After seeing her in action, I believe it. She was ruthless, packing five boxes in the time it took me to stop weeping over one.

Ultimately, when I was unpacking those same boxes from storage five years later, I would curse myself for not having listened to her. Her boxes were neat, full of exactly the sort of things that one would want to pay to store—art, irreplaceable souvenirs, pictures. Mine held such gems as half-burned candles, obsolete electronics cords and pants that didn’t fit when I packed them and certainly wouldn’t five years on. Sentimentality has its costs—approximately $40 per month, plus the cost of moving all that crap again.

I asked my moving whiz friend, only half joking, if she would fly down from Alaska, where she lives now, and help us move this time. If Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house, I could see my friend’s eyes rolling back in her head from mine. I think we’re on our own this time.

As I ponder getting the house ready to sell and the family ready to pack up, I am also reflecting the end of my six years as a freelance writer and editor. Four of those years have included managing Business to Business for the Chronicle—and writing this column. In this space I have had the opportunity to rant about everything from voicemail phone trees to parental leave to taxation. I have shared enough of my personal life to be a little surprised about how much people know about me when I meet them for the first time. Of all the things I’ve written since moving back to the United States, these columns have prompted by far the most feedback. I’ll miss that.

I’ll also miss the business owners and others that I got to talk to month after month. There are few things as exciting as talking to someone who is getting ready to launch a new business, and fewer things sadder than talking to an owner whose business is closing. I’m glad to have had more of the former. I sincerely hope that my successor will be able to report on brighter days for everyone.

As for me, I’ll be dividing my time between the new job and the regular old responsibilities of family and home, while adding in some time for packing—and, of course, crying. Because what’s a big lot of changes without some tears?

Tax attacks

At the risk of sounding like a hopeless utopian, I will confess that I actually don’t mind paying my taxes. April 15th is not a day of horror for me, and any contact that I’ve had with the IRS has been professional and relatively painless. And now that the taxman has cometh (and gone) for another year, I find myself taken aback at what I hear from my fellow citizens about the odious burdens of taxation that we endure in these United States.

Nearly a month after Tax Day, we’re still hearing about how abused we all are by the various departments of revenue that collect our tax dollars. These agencies, we hear again and again, take our hard-earned money and run, presumably funneling it into tiny quilts for spotted owls and black helicopter paint.

In tandem with the righteous anger over these “vanishing” tax dollars come ideas like “Tax Freedom Day”—supposedly the day when Americans will have “earned enough money to pay this year’s tax obligations at the federal, state and local levels.” Reports on Tax Freedom Day tend to present it as accepted fact, while in actuality the group that prepares and disseminates the report, the Tax Foundation, is far from unbiased.

Founded in 1937 by some of that era’s titans of industry, the Tax Foundation even releases its reports with a methodology paper that makes clear that the estimates refer to the average tax burden for the whole economy rather than for sub-sections of taxpayers. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, “Journalists and others who report on ‘Tax Freedom Day’ as if it represented the day until which the typical or average American must work to pay his or her taxes are misusing these figures and fostering serious misimpressions about the level of taxes most Americans pay.”

The fact is that Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pegs U.S. tax rates, as measured by total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, as the third lowest in the developed world as of the available 2007 data. (I am sorry to report that Mexico and Turkey—both of which are well known for their transparent public sectors—smoked us on this score.) That says to me that our government is doing quite a lot with what it has. Moreover, in 2009, taxes fell for most U.S. taxpayers, making the hullabaloo over burdensome taxation that much less understandable.

I have a hard time working up much rage over spending a certain amount of my working time making a contribution to society. The way I figure it, it would probably take a lot more than 99 days—the purported 2010 number—for me to earn enough to fund my own private fire and police departments, water treatment plant and school system. And that’s just the local stuff! I am certain that I cannot afford even one fighter jet, tank or infantry battalion for my own private army, and how can I be sure I am protected from Canada without those? Don’t get me started on the difficulties of blazing and paving my own coast-to-coast highway system. I really hate the smell of asphalt, and I wilt in the sun.

Guess I’d be sticking close to home in a Brave New Tax-Free World. How far would you get?

NB: This column first appeared in yesterday's Business to Business.

 

Just call her Julia

The last time I attempted to make a fruity, chocolaty quick bread, it didn't go so well. Apparently all I needed was a little help from my girl and the recipe from Dan and Audrey at Uncornered Market. Emerson demonstrates the process:

Step 1: Obliterate some ripe bananas, preferably with an old-timey potato masher.

Step 2: Abscond with as many chocolate chips as possible.

Step 3: More chocolate chips, of course.

Step 4: Batter down the hatches!

Step 5: Engulf your whole arm in oven mitt.

Step 6: Beam with delight over your creation!

"These f**&!in' guys!"

Have seven minutes? Want to get really pissed off? Watch this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
These F@#king Guys - Goldman Sachs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Who's afraid of screen-free?

Yeah, that'd be me.

In the not-so-distant past, I had an article published in a major women's magazine about the virtues of TV Turnoff week (which is now Screen-Free Week to make sure that we can't cheat and stream Glee on our computers). What's more, I actually followed the AAP guidelines of "No TV under two". We kept our television in a cabinet with doors, and when Connery was awake, the cabinet was closed and that was that. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Second children will do that to you (as will four-times-daily nebulizer treatments for a three-year-old kid).

Now it is Connery--brainwashed by his teachers and peers--who is trying to enforce this no-screen week. I made him no promises, particularly since I am playing single parent at the moment with Chip out of town most of the week, but I feel strangely guilty about turning on the TV. Hence the blogging. It's work, right? Not entertainment screen!

The resolve was weakened further by Emerson's diagnosis today with rotavirus. Joy! She was so uncomfortable today that the best I could do for her was to hold her on my lap while she watched Sesame Street. All the while I was thinking back on that research that showed that TV was more effective for managing pain in small children than mother's kisses are. Don't judge me. There was plenty of kissing, too.

Maybe tomorrow will be the day I can unplug everything. Or not. I'm keeping my options open.