January 9, 2018 · 20:31

That Feeling When – January 9th

TFW the universe reminds you why you must ALWAYS wear your glasses when reading the cooking (well, okay, maybe not “cooking,” more like “re-heating” or “preparation” at best) instructions on your Marie Callendar’s garlic roasted chicken with penne pasta dinner.

Pop a hole in the film – check.

Microwave for four minutes – check.

Open, stir, replace film – check.

Microwave for four and a half minutes – oops.

What’s the difference between 2½ minutes and 4½ minutes?

It’s realizing that it might be February before that sucker cools off enough to eat.

It’s wondering if you could do the entire Eastern seaboard a huge favor by thawing them overnight using this now glowing in the dark TV dinner.

It’s thinking about actually just heating up another one (correctly this time) because it would be faster than waiting for this one to get back down into triple digits.

It’s wondering if you’ve invented a whole new field of physics when you start speculating about things being hot enough to rip a hole in the spacetime continuum the same way that black holes get massive enough to do that.

Lesson learned.

(Narrator voice: “The lesson was… not… learned.”)

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January 8, 2018 · 22:58

No Context For You – January 08th

I did not come down with a cold – yet. Or the flu, which has rampaged through our small office – yet.

Thought #1 re: that – Let’s assume my guardian angel is doing a good job of prioritizing and protecting me from the biggest threats so I’m staying healthy while all about me are spending days and weeks in misery. How bad must that flu be so that I need that sort of angelic protection instead of some divine intervention with Lottery numbers or something useful? Hey, I’ll take a week of the flu if I can get about $50M cash after taxes, thanks! Just an FYI…

Thought #2 re: that – How freakin’ EGOMANIACAL do humans have to be to believe that the Lord Supreme God of the Entire Universe would create an entire race of divine beings for no purpose other than to follow us around (invisibly, mind you) and protect us from evil and guide us toward being good people. We, the psychotic and only semi-intelligent meat puppets of planet Earth, working hard to annihilate ourselves and take the rest of the planet and the biosphere down with us, **WE** get our own personal set of divine slaves!

Thought #3 – wow, that got dark and escalated quickly!

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January 7, 2018 · 23:40

Make Believe

I am a HUGE fan of “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. (If you don’t like “Calvin and Hobbes,” the door is over there, don’t let it hit you in the ass on the way out. I have standards.)

To me one of the most endearing aspects of the comic is the way Calvin creates massive chunks of his universe with his imagination. Whether he’s Spaceman Spiff or a Tyrannosaurus Rex or turning a box into a replicator machine, Calvin can always deal with a sucky reality by applying a healthy dose of make believe.

The lack of make believe in our modern adult lives was brought into sharp focus for me tonight. (I’m not, of course, counting that “make believe” with the Lucha Libre mask, the maid’s dress, the ukulele, the handcuffs, and the bucket of whip cream.)

I spent hours today taking down this year’s Christmas lights. I spent long enough so that I ran out of time with a large batch of lights still up. These lights:

The top lights here are twenty feet or so in the air. There are steps on the one side which makes getting to them a bit trickier. It took several hours to get all of these lights up, using two different ladders, with a fair amount of time at the top of a sixteen-foot ladder.

Did I want to tackle that in the dark? Well – probably. These are newer lights, they’re the better, more expensive ones, it’s going to be a busy, tough week at work, and there’s rain coming tonight so I would prefer not to leave them up for a week.

On the other hand, it’s not high enough (probably) to kill me if something happened and I fell. Just high enough to break a whole bunch of things that I would prefer to remain unbroken, things which would probably take a while to heal since I’m no spring chicken.

More importantly, how does one explain dying like that to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates? Or, more importantly, to my boss when I can’t come in to work in a full-body cast? “You were doing what? In the dark? YOU go to Hell!”

So I went and got a forehead mounted flashlight that I find very useful. (It also makes me almost unbelievably attractive…) I got my big, long stick with a hook, also very useful.

I got the ladder and stared down my opponent.

Climbing the ladder, balancing in the dark, reaching with the long stick with a hook for a string of lights that was about five feet out, swaying with the breeze, I had my epiphany about make believe and Calvin. (This might not be the Calvinistic epiphany that is generally associated with that term.)

As adults, we’ve forgotten how much fun “make believe” can be!

The spirit of Calvin took over my brain. I wasn’t 90% blind in the dark with a flashlight on my forehead standing fifteen feet up in a tree precariously balanced while wielding a long stick with a hook in order to take down Christmas lights! NO!

I was on an emergency spacewalk in zero G in the dark depths of interstellar space to fix my broken space ship!!

And that quickly – I was.

Oh, sure, there was some part of my brain that kept me functioning and getting the job done in the reality where I could break every bone in my body and impale myself on a long stick with a hook – but the higher level conscious functions were halfway to Alpha Centauri with a broken motivator module just out of reach!

Suddenly something that was an “adult” thing, a pain in the ass job at the end of a long day when I would much rather have been sitting on my butt and getting some down time before the upcoming week, this “adult” thing was now a game! It was fun! It was an adventure!

The change in my mood and the lifting of my spirits was palpable. It was stunning. It was as close to a magic spell as I’ve seen in a while.

The lights all got taken down, I didn’t fall, I didn’t get impaled, the bittersweet job got done. That probably would have happened anyway. But in addition to all of that, something really critical happened.

I. Had. Fun. I was a little kid again. I was Spaceman Spiff.

Thank you whatever part of my brain made that happen. Thank you, Bill Watterson. Thank you, Calvin.

We don’t have to adult 24/7/365, even when we have a job to get done.

Whip cream is optional.

 

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January 6, 2018 · 23:22

Fading Of The Lights

This is the weekend that the Christmas lights come down, so tonight’s the last chance to see them. As has been true for the last couple of years, it means that this might be the last night of the last big Christmas light display for us in quite a while.

In the end, we were able to put up about 65% to 70% of our “peak” displays of past years.

For example, the birch tree with the two strings of white stars in them would normally have those plus at least two or three strings of plain white lights and white icicle lights.

The bushes below the white stars would normally have at least one more set of lights and the big berry tree to the left of the white stars would have at least a couple of strings up high in the branches.

But in the years we did those displays I was also either working far fewer hours or, for a couple of years, not working at all. In many of those years I also wasn’t in my current position at the CAF SoCal Wing, which is almost another full-time job. Priorities, man – this adulting thing can really suck.

This view usually has a nice image of Orion rising above the house, but the clouds tonight ruined that.

We we can see at the top center (red & green stripes) is a trans-Pacific jet of some sort climbing out of LAX.

We joke that there’s a danger of one of the jets coming into Burbank (we’re right under one of the main approach corridors) mistaking us for the airport.

Tonight’s threat was more of an Earthbound sort.

As I was taking these final pictures, standing right next to the street, I heard something on the sidewalk behind me. Nails or claws clicking on the concrete as something trotted along.

Fortunately, I froze instead of abruptly turning around.

One of the neighborhood skunks, about the size of a Maine coon cat (i.e., pretty good sized), was not more than four or five feet away, oblivious to my presence. I wanted to keep it that way, so I stayed “vewwy, vewwy quiet.”

Our bold-as-brass visitor turned into the neighbor’s yard and disappeared underneath their fence gate into their back yard. About then the neighbors drove up and started to pull their trash cans up from the curb to put them into the back yard. I quickly suggested they might want to leave them out in the front until morning.

With that, we bid a fond adieu to the 2017 Christmas lights. Who knows what Thanksgiving weekend 2018 holds?

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January 5, 2018 · 22:17

Make Art – January 05th

Things to remember:

Big things come from little things.

Compression levels matter.

A hundred years from now, no one will know, no one will care.

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January 4, 2018 · 22:59

Someplace Special – January 04th

Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC

Main gallery, clockwise from upper left: Apollo 11 CSM, Spirit of St Louis, Spaceship One, Viking proof test article.

(One can feel a twinge of pity for those who are so simple minded, mentally ill, or willfully ignorant that they believe absurd things. Flat earthers. Anti-vaxxers. Moon hoaxers. Alien conspiracy believers. Climate change deniers. But feeling pity for them doesn’t mean that we should let them be in charge in any way, shape, or form. It doesn’t matter how I feel about a blind person – I don’t want them driving a bus or a gasoline tanker truck!)

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January 3, 2018 · 22:17

Thoughts On Running – January 3rd

As always, it is much, MUCH better to have run than to be going to run.

High school kids are idiots. Or maybe it’s stoners who are idiots. (Do they still call them “stoners?” How about “potheads?” I might be dating myself, but that ship has no doubt sailed so many times before it looks like a damn ferry.)

Coming past the Catholic high school with the football field lit up so you can see it from space. The baseball field is between the street and the football field. Between the baseball field and the sidewalk is a dark pool, the blinding lights blocked by the third base dugout. In that spot, hidden only by shadows but otherwise clearly visible to the street and sidewalk traffic, sit a half dozen kids, lighting up.

Do they really, REALLY think that no one sees them? That no one sees the glowing embers being passed from person to person, even though they’re trying to cup their hands around them? Do they really, REALLY think that no one can smell it? Hell, I smelled them all the way down turning the corner from Woodlake, two blocks away! Finally, if I can see and smell them, do they think that no one in the rectory house at their Catholic high school can smell them, FIFTY FREAKIN’ YARDS AWAY next to the first base dugout?

It was a mystery to me as I jogged past, but I decided not to call them out or wave at them as I went by. Mainly because the best explanation that I had for the data was that it wasn’t just high school kids, but the priests out there too.

2.69 miles in 40:34 is a decent 15:04 pace for a first outing in months and months and months.

I’m just now getting to the 24-hour mark where my thighs and ankles have recovered from the shock and have joined forces to make every act of cellular mitosis a little slice of hell. It will be better tomorrow, and vital that I get at least some running in again tomorrow or Friday, but for now, going down a flight of stairs in hard-soled dress shoes is on a par with waterboarding.

You have a lot of time to think about things while running, and I did. But I just realized that not once in that 40:34 did I think about national politics. If that’s not an incentive to lace up the shoes again on a regular basis, I don’t know what is.

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January 2, 2018 · 22:39

Woodpecker

I could hear it, but couldn’t see it. But the sound was unmistakable to someone who knows it.

Being way up top in the tree made it tough to focus the camera. (Different kind of focus than what I ranted about on Sunday.)

There it is! No sign of a red patch on the head, so it must be the female. I’ve seen the male around from time to time and they form monogamous pairs, so it makes sense.

This tree’s started to die off in the last six months or so, just like the matching one did about ten years ago and the birch tree did three or four years ago. In each case, I always saw the woodpeckers pounding away as the trees turned brown. I don’t know if the trees get sick and the bugs move in on the weakened tree, or if the bugs move in and are the primary cause in making the trees get sick and die. Either way, it’s a meal for the woodpeckers.

What, better hunting up there? Okay!

Even though it’s fall, much of this tree is still covered in leaves. Except for the parts that have turned brown and brittle. The sound from her hunting and feeding wasn’t tremendously loud – I only heard it because I was standing under the tree. I’ve heard woodpeckers in the neighborhood “drumming” in the spring (I’m guessing it’s these two, they’re not that common here) and they can be quite loud, heard from a couple blocks away.

Hunting for dinner at the very top, just before she flew off. As you can see, this tree might not make it to the end of the year. It’s a “city street tree,” planted by the city in the median strip between the sidewalk and the curb back when the houses were built. I suspect this whole housing tract had the same species of tree used everywhere, but now about 2/3 of them are missing. Instead we have quite a variety of trees that have been chosen to replace them.

The woodpeckers don’t care. They’re just here for the bugs.

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January 1, 2018 · 22:53

New York, New York (Pictures Day 18)

In summary: New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August 2016, I visited there for the first time. On the first afternoon we visited Central Park and were there for hours, despite the jet lag. Day One started with a tour of the Intrepid and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, followed by the full two and a half hour cruise around Manhattan – south down the Hudson River into the Upper Harbor, up the East River under the “BMW” bridges, past Midtown and the UN, into the Harlem River, back south into the Hudson River, underneath the George Washington Bridge, past Grant’s Tomb, and finally back into port. To finish Day Two we had a death march to find a cab, went to the Mets game, left early only to miss the best part, and inadvertently stiffed a nice cab driver. Bright & early on Day Three we headed out toward Liberty Island – it’s hard to take a bad picture there, then went to Ellis Island. Bank on Manhattan, we went to World Trade Center Museum, which was emotional & grueling.

Day Four of our New York adventure started out with a visit to Times Square.

There was a lot of construction going on.

It was crowded, but not “New Year’s Eve crowded.” We managed to keep our distance from the street performers and odd folk in costumes. If I wanted to see a fake, second-rate Batman or Hulk I can just go down to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The Empire State Building was our next stop, one of those “must see” spots for my first trip to New York City.

It’s fancy inside the front doors, very rococo – and then you go around the corner and it’s one of those Disneyland-like snakey lines that keeps twisting from room to room so that you never really know how much longer you’ll be stuck there. On the other hand, the sign at the beginning of the line that said wait times were currently 45 minutes was pretty accurate, so they’ve got that over most amusement parks.

Once at the top, off in the distance through the haze, we could see Liberty Island and Ellis Island, the sites of Day Three’s adventures.

You can also see just about everything else. Looking to the northeast toward the Bronx, the Chrysler Building, United Nations, and Roosevelt Island can be seen.

To the east, Queens is laid out in all its glory on the far side of the East River (which we’ll recall isn’t really a river).

To the southeast, the Williamsburg Bridge crosses the East River with Brooklyn beyond.

And looking through the haze due south, all of the southern end of Manhattan is studded with skyscrapers.

 

 

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December 31, 2017 · 20:04

A Thousand Stories

Well, here we are at the end of 2017. In a year where it felt like my head was spinning 24/7, my year-end thoughts aren’t any more organized, but I would like to take the opportunity to throw out a semi-organized rant. With that in mind:

2017 – what a cluster fuck!

It’s not that there weren’t any good things at all. To me it seems that it’s the contrast between the highs and lows that was the killer. The highs were higher but fewer and further between. (The August total solar eclipse, “Hamilton,” seeing Depeche Mode at the Hollywood Bowl, to name a few.)

Meanwhile, the lows were just unrelenting and grim on several fronts. Both my day job and my volunteer job at the CAF had time and workload pressures all year that were like trying to stuff ten pounds of pickles into a five-pound pickle bag.

Over everything was the current US political and social crises. Looking back at the year in that light, the “good” news is that the economy hasn’t collapsed and we haven’t gotten involved in a nuclear war. But on both topics there’s a feeling of impending doom and the fear that the next word in the conversation is “yet!”

When that’s your standard for “good,” i.e., not having thirty or forty million people unemployed or not having three hundred or four hundred million people dead, it’s hard to feel giddy about the accomplishment.

Personally, one comment stood out and has stuck with me as I’ve been spinning and trying to juggle priorities with too little time, too little sleep, too little money, and too much stress. At one point this year, while trying to sort through priorities at work, my boss commented something to the effect of, “You probably have a thousand stories written, but none of them have a final chapter.”

That stung – particularly because it hit so close to home. She was offering an honest, constructive criticism and I never thought that she meant it literally. (I don’t even know if she knows that I write or have written.) But in the broader sense she’s absolutely correct – at home, at work, and at the CAF I do have dozens and dozens of various ongoing tasks at any given point and it often takes forever to actually get them finished. Some never get finished, just dropped to the wayside, with the intent to get back to them “soon.”

So while I won’t be making any New Year’s resolutions (for all the reasons that make them artificial and useless and a waste of time) I will be trying to remember to be more focused and to always be more conscious of the “finish line” in any project.

For example, largely due to time pressure, there are a dozens of “loose threads” with articles I’ve written here. Have I shown any more of my series of travel pictures lately? A quick search shows that my New York pictures had parts #14 and #15 posted in April, part #16 posted in May, and part #17 posted in July. Since then…crickets.

What’s up with that?

Did I ever share the full stories and pictures and video from the eclipse in August? That would be a big, fat “no!”

Focus.

I’ve written about running marathons and how I’ve found it to be about 33% physical and 66% mental. If you do the training, you know that you can run that far and you have a decent idea of what sort of time you can accomplish, along with a goal that you would like to push yourself to. Despite that, there will be a dozen times (or a hundred) along the course where your body just wants to quit. Your brain is being assaulted by stimuli and pain and it would be just a short jog along the path of least resistance to simply pull over and get on one of those buses that will take you back to the finish line.

But mentally, you have to have trained yourself to Keep. Going. Anyway.

You know that the finish line is out there and until you reach it, you Will. Not. Stop.

One of the things I found after starting to run was that I could use that same mental ability in other, non-physical aspects of life. Such as handling an overwhelming work load or an impossible deadline.

I’m not doing that now.

In both the physical (running) and the non-physical (getting a project done) worlds, it’s a pain in the ass, a full on horrible bitch of a time when you’re in it. You HATE it. But it is so incredibly satisfying when you hit that finish line, even more so if you’re able to meet or exceed your goals. So while you swear during the process that you will NEVER do this again, that sense of accomplishment will call you back. Especially if it’s something like work or something you’re passionate about. You’re going to be doing it (or have to be doing it) anyway, so why not set a goal, hit it, and get the self-satisfaction of the accomplishment?

I haven’t run in a while. I’ve lost that discipline, and it shows in several ways, most of which I’m not satisfied or happy with. I need to get it back.

Focus. Regain that “runner’s mentality.” Reach those finish lines.

Write those final chapters.

Even if that doesn’t help get rid of the festering cancers we have in Washington and their legions of vile sycophants that are now crawling out from under the rocks where they’ve been hiding, at least I’ll be in better shape to fight them, both mentally, physically, and financially.

Kick 2018’s ass!

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