Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

November 10, 2024 · 23:33

Front Yard Mystery & Solution

Yesterday while taking down the Halloween decorations, I found an odd little lump or pod in the front yard.

Hand for scale.

It stood out and I’ve never seen one like it before, so I was curious. Was it some sort of larva or bug? Some piece of scat or critter poop? No clue! It seemed to be dry and light, but that’s about all I could tell.

Then today when I was bringing in the weekly groceries, I found another.

Now that I was alert to their existence, I found a third one.

And a fourth on the driveway.

This one has some sort of a stem on the left side, and it’s in a huge pile of debris from the Italian cypress trees along the side of the garage, needles and small branches blown down by that tremendous wind storm here earlier in the week. And there’s the clue that solved the mystery!

I did a Google search for “Italian Cypress seed pods” and got this:

I don’t see any on the eight or ten trees we have growing there, but it’s obvious that’s what they are and where they come from. Mystery solved!

Next question – can I grow new trees from these seeds? One thing about many of the houses we’re looking at in the High Desert is that they’re a bit on the barren side from a landscaping perspective. Almost all have fencing, mostly chain link, but it would be really nice to line those long fences with Italian Cypresses eventually, both for privacy reasons and for esthetic reasons. If these four seed pods or pine cones are full of viable seeds, can I get a stack of small pots and potting soil and start my own personal forest now, then have them ready to go (albeit small) for transplant when the Willett Forever Home is secured?

Why, yes, I can!

My own little minion/Ent legion! It might not be as straightforward as winning the lottery and paying a gardener or landscape designer to buy them from a nursery and plant them for me, but it will probably be more interesting.

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November 4, 2024 · 23:54

At The Edge Of The Abyss

When bored, I will sometimes flip through videos on Instagram and the other social media sites, and since the algorithms will feed you more of what you have already liked, I tend to get a lot of videos of roller coasters, bunjee jumpers, skydivers, BASE jumpers, and so on.

That’s the feeling tonight. Or, as the meme my daughter shared said, “Srong night-before-Helm’s-Deep vibes today.”

Fledgeling birds learn to fly by leaping and having faith that they’ll figure out the flying thing before they get killed. I’m optomistic by nature. I want to believe that we’re not staring into THE abyss, just maybe AN abyss. Maybe this time we’ll learn to fly before we crash and burn and die.

But I remember 2016. I remember after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape and the mocking the handicapped video and the porn star payoff and all of the THOUSANDS of other offensive, disgusting, ignorant things that TFG did, any one of which would have permaently eliminated him from the possibility of public office, and then after he left office in 2020 the top secret documents and all of the illegal activities he’s been caught doing and the coup on January 6th, my god, THE COUP! And yet he’s still here and there are ways for him to win and I never, EVER thought that he could win to begin with and now I swear I’ve got PTSD from being exposed to him for all of these years.

And just about when I’m about to have another panic attack thinking about another 4 years of him, or more likely 4 weeks of him and then who know how many years with Vance and all of the Nazis behind Project 2025 and the horrors that are lurking, I think about how incredibly ANGRY women seem to be now. And kids, the generation that are voting for President for the first time, who grew up with active shooter drills every month the same way we used to have tornado drills in Kansas City.

Back on August 18th, when the Democratic campaign was energized and reinvigorated by Harris’s entry, I went on http://www.270towin.com and created my “aggressive & hopeful” map.

If I’m in my good head, if I’m not listening to the demons of my TFG PTSD, the only thing I would change tonight is that I think Iowa will turn blue. I think it will be something like 456-82 to Harris. But I’m mentally prepared (I hope) to be more disappointed than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

Get out there and vote tomorrow if you haven’t voted early. In so many ways, this truly could be the end of the world as we know it.

I’m really not feeling so fine.

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September 2, 2024 · 23:35

One Foot In Front Of The Other

And on into September…

Sometimes your phone will even take pictures of that next step, without telling you or without being asked to. Not sure why Skynet became aware at that moment or needed that picture, but something triggered it. Perhaps it was just a random static electrical charge triggering the phone accidentally, caused in turn by cosmic rays entering the atmosphere high over Los Angeles and impacting a memory chip in my phone after first going through my skull and killing the neuron that held the memory of my 3rd grade best friend’s name.

Perhaps.

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August 28, 2024 · 23:46

Proof Of Life – August 28th

Two weeks ago I “glitched” and missed posting because I was working late to hit my payroll deadline. Tonight is more of the same, with a re-listen for the 9,831,573th time to “Hamilton.”

And suddenly it’s 23:35. Isn’t there something else I need to get done?

And, of course, let’s not forget the emergency return visit to the dentist because a big chunk of the temporary crown I have (following three root canals and oral surgery) decided today was the day to fall off, snap in two, and leave a gaping hole in my head.

It fell off when I was eating a freaking banana! Nuts? Cereal? Caramel? Steak? All of the things I’ve been told not to eat with a temporary crown for weeks and weeks? None of them were my downfall, but a freaking banana caused a warp core breach in my mouth.

I figured Karma owed me one, so I bought lottery tickets from the liquor store next to the dentist’s office. We’ll see how that works out.

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August 27, 2024 · 22:50

Box Canyon

It’s dangerous and quite possible lethal to fly into a box canyon. The terrain rises and the canyon narrows and the altitude climbs so your plane’s performance suffers and suddenly you find that you can’t turn around, you can’t climb over the top, and your only choice is where you want to slam into the mountain.

So when you see the box canyon coming and you turn away, it’s the right decision. You’ll know that. But if you had reasons for going in there and had put in a ton of work to make it happen, it’s a mixed blessing, at best. Disappointing. What could I have done better?

Yeah, lots of allegories here, and no details, sorry. Have a meme…

"Have a panic attack. You've earned it."

This too shall pass. Even if it is just like a kidney stone does. I’ve had those multiple times over the last 40+ years and they haven’t killed me yet.

One step in front of another.

The juxtoposition! Damn!!

 

 

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August 20, 2024 · 23:09

The Bluest Of Blue Skies…

…and a hovering hummer.

The second backyard feeder’s on the left, and in front of the most bluest of deep blue, cloudless skies, there’s a single hummingbird, hovering as it just chased off another hummingbird that was trying to eat at “its” feeder. This isn’t Little Bastard – it has laid claim to the first backyard feeder over on the other side. In the past, this second feeder has been a free-for-all with no dominant hummer trying to control it, but that might have changed.

The blue skies, warm afternoon, slight breeze, and sound of hummers zipping by got me to thinking about the skies and environment on other worlds that I’ve fantasized about since I was five years old. To be on the Moon, or on Mars, with no blue skies, no breeze, no critters, instant death on the other side of a thin spacesuit… Yeah, I would take it in an instant, but I would miss “the Green Hills of Earth.” That’s a price I would be willing to pay, but I acknowledge that the price exists.

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August 17, 2024 · 23:04

Glitch Day #15

Payroll preperation was the cause. In my job there aren’t many priorities higher than that, not too many deadlines that are more important. We take care of our employees and that means that we get paid on time. Those deadlines are solid – miss them by 3 seconds and folks get paid on Monday instead of Friday and that’s a major failure mode.

So it was about 01:15 on Thursday AM when I hit the “send” button and wrapped it up, and about 01:16 when my brain unfocused from payroll processing enough to go, “Oh, crap!” For the 15th time in over ten years of daily posts on this site, there was no daily post. “C’est la vie,”  as the sophisticated French say, or “Shit happens!” as the somewhat more vulgar Americans would say.

A quick check shows it had been about 1586 days since the last time that happened, back on April 10, 2020. Oddly, while I do get anal about my “atta boy!” posts showing how many days in a row I’ve posted, and I didn’t get one of course on Thursday and am now starting over, I did get one at random from WordPress saying that (coincidentally!) someone looked at something on the site that day and it was the 100,000th “view” of one of my website pages.

Cool! If just a bit odd that it happened to occur on the day I broke that 1,586 day posting streak. Weird little Universe we got going here, but anyone watching politics for the past few years probably had noticed that.

Perspective is important. Not just the relative priority of keeping my little daily posting streak going vs getting everyone in the company paid on time, I was thinking more globally or cosmically as in the terrible news we got on Friday and everything going on with COVID and politics in the big, bad world and more personally the pain levels from my teeth and knee. (Both are getting better, but are very annoying.)

On so many different levels of our existance and life experiences, the common thread is that we’re going to get knocked down (or trip on a treadmill) and the only real option is to laugh, get up, and start over. Here’s to Day Three of the current streak.

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August 15, 2024 · 22:25

Life’s Too Short To Drink Cheap Wine

Some days the Universe just slaps you upside the head to remind you of that.

Don’t assume you’ve got tomorrow. Live big today. Don’t live in fear. Take that chance, revel in that experience.

Take that trip. See that show. Tell those close to you that you love them. Mean it!

It will all be over way too soon and you don’t want to leave any unplayed cards in your hand.

Enjoy the journey, no matter the path, no matter who you’re traveling it with.

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August 6, 2024 · 23:35

Earthquake Alert

In parts of the world (think, Japan, other parts of Asia) where they have even more dangerous earthquakes than we do, they’ve for years had warning systems that detected earthquakes starting and send out alerts to peoples’ phones and computers. While the energy from an earthquake spreads out from the epicenter quickly, communications systems are even faster. If you’re on the epicenter or just a couple miles away, you’re screwed. But if you’re twenty miles away and it takes a minute or two for the shaking to start and the system can trigger your phone in ten seconds, then you have fifty seconds to pull your car over to the side of the road, to get away from the windows and under the desk in your office, to have surgeons pause their operations, to have elevators stop and let people off.

We’re starting to implement those systems here in the US, but in all of the five or six years that I remember them being active here in SoCal, I don’t recall them ever going off before the shaking starts for me, or if they do go off, it’s been for a false alarm, telling me about something too small and/or too far away to be felt by me.

Until tonight.

Buzzing, shaking, that’s an alert that I hadn’t seen before and it definitely got my immediate attention! But there was no shaking. I had enough time to think, “Another false alarm?”

The watch went off a few seconds later, but still no shaking. I figured it’s different alert systems all tied into the same network. False alarm? By now it’s been maybe thirty seconds and my brain is thinking through the “how big?” and “how far away?” math…

And then the shaking started. The quake was 100 miles away or so, so by the time the energy got here we were swaying back and forth like being in a boat when a barge had gone by and the wake was making us bob around. That’s actually an excellent analogy, except instead of water it’s rock that’s transmitting the waves and energy.

While things were swaying around, multiple more alerts came in. Our shaking lasted for 20-30 seconds and never got particularly violent or energetic, but it was very, VERY noticeable. Even if we hadn’t gotten an alert it wasn’t like we would have overlooked it. If it’s small enough and/or far enough away, you only know there was an earthquake when you see a news report about it. This would not have been one of those.

So, the system worked! I’m sure they got a lot of good data on how to make it better for the next time, but I sure felt better given that 30-second warning. Especially if we have some higher confidence that the system works, when it goes off next time (and there will always be a next time) I’ll pay attention immediately. It’s not like hurricane warnings that are out there a week before the storm hits, or even tornado alerts that go out a few hours early. If sixty seconds is possible, I’ll take it!

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August 4, 2024 · 23:42

Take Advantage Of Your Opportunities When You Get Them

My philosphiphical advice for the day is to always be on the lookout for opportunities and to take advantage of them when they arise. In particular, I’m thinking about this in terms of the simple things, especially the ones that you just assume that will ALWAYS be there tomorrow if you pass them up today.

My example that got me thinking about this is the classic ice cream truck. You know, big and boxy, covered with stickers advertising ice cream sandwiches, creamcicles, bomb pops, and frozen Snickers, window on the side, usually with a cheesy, awful tune playing over a loud speaker system so that you could hear them coming from blocks away. When we were kids, that cheesy, tinkly, annoying music gave us time to go harass our parents for a couple of dollars and still have time to go running out into traffic to get run over trying to catch up to the truck. If we were particularly industrious, during the summer we would go walking along 72nd Street, scouring the weeds along the road for discarded Coke bottles that we could redeem for nickles at Pitko’s General Store, saving that change so that we could have our own money for the ice cream truck.

At our old house on Pomelo, the streets were flat and we were about five houses down the street from the elementary school, so we would have the ice cream truck by almost daily during the summer, every year. I would always hear it and always be busy, so I always figured that I would go out and catch the truck and get a random, spontaneous ice cream treat some other time in the future. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Next week, maybe. Next month…

Six years ago we moved to this house, which is at the top of a really long, steep hill that the ice cream truck might or might not be able to actually get up, and we’re nowhere near a school. Thus, NO ice cream trucks here. EVER.

And something made me think about that and realize that I had the opportunity almost daily for DECADES and I almost never took advantage of those opportunities. And now I’m out of luck.

Something else to check out when we’re shopping for the Forever Home. And you can bet if I find out that we’re on a regular path for an ice cream truck, I’ll be dropping everything and sprinting out for an ice cream sandwich when I hear that tinny, electronic circus tune. If I happen to be in the middle of a work Zoom meeting? C’est la vie! A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do! I’ll be older and wiser the next time.

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