There’s no further information on the Census issue and I expect that I’ll not hear anything definitive. I’d originally planned to use this beautiful Saturday to do call backs and follow ups. Instead, Nina and I drove (she drove, I snoozed) up to Rexburg, Idaho for the BYU-Idaho graduation ceremonies. Nina’s niece and her husband were both graduating. Further, Nina’s sister Pamela along with Pamela’s oldest daughter Vanessa had flown out for the Big Event. That meant a fairly large group of Nettletons all together in the same place.
Like most Universities, there’s a main convocation and then all the graduates split up into their individual colleges to walk across the stage and pick up their “official diploma holder”. The actual diploma comes in the mail in a few weeks after it’s been verified that all necessary work has indeed been completed with satisfactory outcomes.
Today was the nicest day so far this year. The temperatures were up around 60° with light winds and fairly clear skies. Tomorrow is supposed to be even better. Maybe getting the snow tires off the car helped bring in the real Spring (one can only hope!).
Tonight was an Ice Cream Social for our Stake (the LDS equivalent of a Catholic Diocese). I talked Nina into going, fearing that not many would be there. This is not necessarily the time of year when on thinks of ice cream. Further, we didn’t have any meetings of our local congregations last Sunday because of the Church’s General Conference, so no reminders were given out. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the 75 or so people who were there. The Century High School Singers provided some very nice musical renditions for us. They sounded really nice.
So the day is done. I’m feeling like I’m catching something.
Nina and I go to the Idaho Falls LDS Temple every Friday morning to work as Ordinance Workers. Last night our Shift Coordinator called and asked if I could be there a half-hour earlier than usual. That meant getting up at 3:30 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. That further meant a very poor night’s sleep! I did get in a short nap, but way too short!
On the Census front, my supervisor feels that our work on the Reservation is done. If it goes any further, someone else will do the work. That’s a bummer for sure! Meanwhile, starting on Monday we’re meeting in a conference room out at the Airport that I arranged for (I’m on the Airport Commission, so have a bit of an “in” out there) wrapping up what’s been done and getting everything ready to turn back in. There’s another area we can work, but there’s not a whole bunch of work available there, he told me. But, so far they’ve paid me close to a thousand dollars (gross, before taxes and such), and that’s all goodness.
This afternoon the snow tires came off the Avalon and new tires went on. I called all the tire places around town and got quotes ranging from $890 down to $425. Most were in the $500 range. All were for comparable tires. Of course, the $425 tires were the most appealing. The snow tires are now stored in the garage waiting for next winter. Nina says the car is much quieter.
But, with all that, I didn’t take a single picture today. Consequently, for the second time since January 21st, I’ve no daily photo. Dang!
Each day I meet with my supervisor or one of his designated assistants to turn in the completed Enumerator Questionnaires and my daily time sheet for the previous working day. The meeting times are between 8 am and 10 am on one end of the reservation or between 11 am and 1 pm on the other end of the reservation.
Since working out on the Reservation during the day has been very non-productive, and being a bit cognizant that tax dollars are paying my meager $10.50 per hour wage, I’ve been shifting my hours more towards the evenings.
On the 7th I was out on the Reservation until it was getting dark (I’m supposed to leave at sundown) and in the time from 6 pm until 8:30 pm I was getting 3 out of 4 houses with someone home. During the day, however, it was running about 1 out of 6 homes had someone home. So, my plan for today (the 8th) was to meet with my supervisor about 12:30 p.m., go back home until about 5, and work again until about 8:30 pm. I’ve completed the initial canvassing of my assigned areas, meaning that I’ve stopped at every house and at most of them left a “Notice of Visit” because no one was home. So now my task was to complete the call-backs.
As I was meeting with the assistant person, a next-level supervisor came driving up with the instruction that all the Census workers were to leave the Reservation immediately. So, I was done for the day!
With that I decided to go over to Soda Springs and see what was the matter with mother’s new phone. It had suddenly stopped working and she couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I drove over and found that the phone was definitely broken. Pushing the little “talk” button did nothing. I talked with customer service and tried the few suggestions they had to no avail. The solution was to send the phone back and get a replacement.
This phone is a special cordless phone with volume and amplification features designed for people who are hard of hearing. The phone had been working very well for mother, but in the meantime she has to fall back to the old phone in the house. Most people she can’t hear on that phone. I talked with the audiologist in Pocatello where she had bought the phone and they said they’d expedite the process. Hopefully mid-week next week she’ll have a replacement phone. She gets two or three phone calls a day that are very important to her from different family members.
The second Thursday of each month is the Pocatello Amateur Radio Club meeting. Because Census was on hiatus, I went to the meeting. The discussion was about the various digital modes available to ham radio operators. These provide a way to connect a computer to the radio and transmit digital data. This seems very interesting to me and now it’s time to do some experimentation.
I did my first interview for the Census in Spanish. Two fellows were living in a trailer (there are hundreds of trailers on the Reservation being lived in with perhaps that many more abandoned) and when they answered the door, they told me in Spanish that they didn’t speak English.
No problem. With my handy-dandy Spanish cue card and my limited Spanish ability, we got through the interview. In a couple of cases, though, they’d get into quite the discussion with each other about what the question actually meant. Then they’d be speaking so fast (literally machine-gun-Spanish) that I couldn’t understand a bit of what they were discussing. Never-the-less, we got through the process and they are now counted in the 2010 census.
The question that always gets the most discussion is the question about race. In training we got a lot of instruction about how to handle questions about that question. Interestingly enough, none of the situations covered in training have come up. Most of the comments are,
Why is it “white” and not “caucasian”?
I’m just “American”. Why isn’t that listed as a race?
Can I list any race I want? If they can be African-American, can I be (English-American, White-American, German-American, …)?
Our instructions are to list whatever they say and to make no assumptions. I’ve had one person test me on that and had me mark “Other” and put in the comments “Albanian”. He was surprised when I did that and continued on with the interview. At the end of the interview he had me erase his flippant response and mark “white”.
The 7th was the first nice weather day in about a week and I took advantage of it. Today looks nice, but a cold front will literally blow through here this afternoon with high winds. That’s not a lot of fun.
The big event yesterday was a ruined tire. I turned around in a driveway at a house where no one answered the door and by the time I got turned around, I had a flat tire. I changed the tire with a great deal of effort. I’ve never had to change a tire on this Chevy Tracker I’m driving. The jack wouldn’t lift the car high enough to get an inflated tire onto the car. I had to find a large, flat rock to put under the jack. Of course, I discovered the problem after I already had the flat tire off the car.
The tire shop found that the tire was ruined. It’d been cut through the sidewall on something as I was turning around. So, all my earnings on Monday and Tuesday went into a new tire for the car. That plus spending almost 3 hours at the tire store while all this happened made for a somewhat frustrating middle-of-the-day.
The irony of this was that while I sat in this tire store, I was making arrangements with another tire store at the other end of town to put four new tires on the Avalon to replace the snow tires that are on the car now. The price for four tires at the store fixing my ruined tire was almost double the price at the other store.
The past two days haven’t been very conducive for me to be working on the Census! However, tomorrow is forecast to be the first day of a warming and fair weather trend. I’m looking forward to that trend with a lot of enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, I need a way to be able to see what’s happening with things over at mother’s house in Soda Springs. Maybe I need to take a webcam over and set it up. I think I could control it remotely as I have remote access to her computer. Today her phone stopped working, but helping her get it reset without being actually able to see what’s going on with the phone was impossible. That’s rather frustrating!
Today’s program at my Rotary Club had to do with our drinking water which all comes from an aquifer under the city. The aquifer is apparently quite unique and was formed when Lake Bonneville broke out, leaving the Great Salt Lake behind. I really learned a lot and understand our water resource much better. This is information that needs somehow to be available to the folks who live here. I’m not sure how that would happen. The presenter has given this presentation to the County Commissioners, the Pocatello City Council, and the Chubbuck City Council and all three were very pleased to have the education. There’s way too much of this kind of interesting stuff that needs to become much more accessible.
There’s a Japanese astronaut on the International Space Station who, using the Twitter name of Astro_Soichi, is sending out tweets from the Space Station with pictures he’s taken out the new view port that was recently installed on the station. These pictures are quite amazing. Twitter continues to be a significant source of news and information for me.
Finally caught up! This picture and post every day thing gets somewhat pressure packed. I need to be taking more pictures during the day!
Today was supposed to be mixed rain and snow with a high temperature of 39°. By 8:30 am it was already past the forecast high and they skies were partly cloudy. Good enough for me … and off to the reservation I went. I had a new area available to work on (giving me three assigned areas) so I went there first. I found most people home and was able to call on every house and only have a few callbacks to do in that area. Tomorrow I’ll be working in a different part of the reservation in an area where I’ve just started canvassing.
The Census process is actually rather laborious. I spend about three times as much time on paperwork as I do actually doing the canvassing and filling out the Enumerator Questionnaire (EQ). When I’m assigned an area, I’m given a binder with the information about the area to be canvassed. The binder contains maps (which aren’t very accurate) of the area so I can find where I’m supposed to be working. Some time last year someone else went through the area with a handheld computer and logged the coordinates of each residence. Those became spots on my map with each spot numbered. In the binder is are pages with one line for each map spot with an address (if known … most places on the reservation don’t have an address) and a physical description of the house. Most descriptions are fairly terse, so the computer must not allow much space. They are something like “gray double-wide blue trim”.
Also in the binder is an EQ for each map spot. The label on the EQ identifies the area, the census block, the house identifier and the map spot.
So, my job is to efficiently travel around the area I’m assigned, stop at each house, identify the house to the physical description, match up the map spot, pull out the proper EQ, and then interview someone 15 years of age or older in the house to fill out the EQ.
The EQ is a tri-fold front and back questionnaire, completely scripted. I’m supposed to exactly follow the script which starts as,
“Hello, my name is <insert your name> from the U.S. Census Bureau. Is this <read address from the EQ>?”
And here comes the first problem. Most places on the Reservation have no address, so the first question doesn’t work.
After filling out the questionnaire part of the EQ, then back in the car I fill out additional information on the EQ and make sure that my writing on the EQ conforms to the standard so that the EQ can be optically scanned. Then in the binder I correct any information on the map spot line, and fill out additional information about the house. Then that particular house is complete.
If no one is home, I log on the EQ the date and time I was there. I fill out a “Notice of Visit” form and put it in the door in a way that it can’t be readily seen from the street. We don’t want to tip off any bad guys that the house is unoccupied. There is space on the EQ to log six callbacks. I’m supposed to come back on different days and different times of the day in hopes of finding someone home.
If I can’t get someone home in the six callbacks then I’m supposed to gather as much information about the household from a neighbor. I’ve needed to do that twice so far, but I haven’t been able to get much information from the neighbor other than a couple of names and how many people might be living there.
The work is actually quite interesting. I’ve met a lot of very nice people, most of whom are ready and willing to give me the answers to this very benign questionnaire. This is the data gathered:
First name, middle initial, and last name of everyone living there
Relationship of each person to the first person listed
Sex of each person
Age and birthdate of each person
Whether or not each person considers themselves to be Hispanic
What is each person’s race
Is the house owned with a mortgage, owned free and clear, rented, or occupied without paying rent
Telephone number in case followup is needed
The specific data for each household is confidential and will not be released for 72 years. I get reminded often that I’ve also sworn an oath (punishable by a fine up to $240,000 and imprisonment) to keep the information confidential as well and the oath goes for a lifetime.
So, that’s what I’m doing out there on the Reservation!
An Easter Basket for NinaNow that I’m working most days gathering Census information, it’s been quite some time since I’d been to Soda Springs to spend some time with mother. We determined to watch the first session of LDS General Conference at home and then drive over to Soda Springs. We’d watch the afternoon session there and then have Easter dinner there.
Everything worked as planned. The conference sessions were delightful. Nina brought over china from her mother and grandmother along with silverware and set a beautiful table. We had a delightful visit on a very nice Easter Sunday.
Easter is the day we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is a most special day.
Watching General ConferenceApril General Conference almost always means that winter returns making it mighty comfortable to stay inside and watch the proceedings from Salt Lake. We woke up on the 2nd to four inches of snow on the ground and had more overnight. Most of it is now gone with the rain that’s fallen in the meantime.
The Saturday sessions of conference were excellent. It was time very well spent. TTFN!
