tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5493116115430234292024-03-12T22:06:10.499-04:00The Books that Wrote MePaul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.comBlogger134125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-26990379398308026572019-04-03T19:00:00.000-04:002019-04-03T19:00:15.878-04:00Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019<h1 id="wednesday-april-3rd-2019">Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019</h1>
<p>This post was originally dated March 5th. I’ve gotten sidetracked several times! I’ve got to update everything, and I’ve got to get this done. I get a sort of mental “itch” when I haven’t written anything in a long time. It feels like I’m carrying too many incompletely-formed thoughts around, and need to get them into written form, and then they’ll be “formed.” Maybe I also fear that I’ll forget things if I don’t write them down.</p>
<p>A lot has been going on. We still have only one working car. A few weeks ago Grace noticed that at the end of a drive home, it smelled a little bit like burning oil. So I opened up the hood, and saw what I thought were some small oil drips. I got it to the dealer, and they replaced some leaking seals. I also had them replace some sway bar links. The car has taken a real beating on Michigan potholes. Living on a dirt road doesn’t help matters. It still needs more work, but I had to make the call as to which thing seemed critical to keeping it running, and what I could afford.</p>
<p>Our housemate had her dental surgery. She never could get an appointment with the clinic that would accept Medicaid. That’s a long and frustrating story, but at least she’s now free of those teeth and the painful and dangerous infections that came along with them.</p>
<p>Elanor climbed up onto our kitchen counter, lay flat on her chest to extend her reach, and pulled over a press pot which was sitting at the back of the counter. Grace had just filled it with boiling water and was still nearby. She managed to get Elanor into the sink immediately and run cool water over her body, but Elanor still had burns all over her chest and forearms. Her diaper caught some of the hot water and probably resulted in a worse burn on her lower abdomen, but served to keep her from getting burns on her genitals (I shudder at the thought).</p>
<p>Grace wound up with some nasty burns on her knee, too, where the near-boiling water ran over the edge of the counter. After cooling her down in the sink, Grace then brought her to me in the bathtub and we got her diaper off and into the tub with me to cool her down some more. We judged that she needed to go the St. Joe’s emergency room, but not in an ambulance. So we wrapped her in a loose t-shirt and drove her ourselves. She was definitely not a happy baby, and was screaming the whole way, but we did not have any pain medication on hand that was suitable for a two-year-old.</p>
<p>That led to a whole day spent in two ERs. Because the burned area was large, St. Joe’s gave her some pain medication, wrapped her loosely in gauze, and had us take her to the University of Michigan, which has a specialty burn clinic. We had to wait a number of hours there before they actually treated her and sent us home. I took this as a good sign, actually, because it meant that while her injuries were painful, but not really that severe.</p>
<p>Her burns looked pretty horrible, and covered about thirteen percent of her body. There were some patches that were superficial (previously called “first degree,”) and patches that were partial-thickness (damaging the dermis to different degrees of severity). None of the burned patches were full-thickness (previously called “third degree”). Over the course of the afternoon, the burns “developed” like instant camera film. Some reddened areas faded after just a short while. Large blistered areas started to form and patches started oozing. The treatment of her burns, when they treated them, was (according to my later reading) well in keeping with modern recommendations for conservative burn treatment. They did not do a lot of scrubbing or debridement. They washed everything very gently with an antibacterial soap, applied a layer of antimicrobial ointment, and wrapped her up with patches of silver-bearing foam, gauze, and gauze mesh. They sent us home with a big bag containing more of all the supplies, and I picked up ibuprofen and acetaminophen so we could alternate them. She slept in our bed with us. She got extra fluids and extra protein shakes and extra cuddles, and a couple of follow-up appointments.</p>
<p>She healed remarkably fast. I may be mis-remembering the dates, but I think at about the two-week mark, she was cleared to have all the dressings taken off. We were told we could bathe her, and they suggested we rub her down three or four times a day with an appropriate lotion (we used shea butter scented). This helped keep everything moist and control the itching. She gradually stopped needing her pain medication. The jar of shea butter is just about empty. You can still see slight discoloration of the skin in some areas on her chest, and her forearm where the burns were deepest is still a bit rough and red, but the improvement is amazing. The doctor told us there was a good chance that there wouldn’t even be any visible scarring at all, long-term, and it seems like he is right, although we were also told it might take as long as a year for the skin to look completely normal again.</p>
<p>The burns on Grace’s knee will probably leave permanent scarring.</p>
<p>Of course Grace has beat herself up over this. We habitually take the precautions that parents are supposed to take, to prevent burns: we keep pots on the back burner, with the handles out of reach. Grace put the press pot on the back of the counter. I remind her that this actually made the burns less severe: most of the hot coffee flowed across the granite counter, which sucked away some of its heat before it reached Elanor’s body. And Grace was able to immediately get her under cool water, which certainly helped. But one can’t help feeling guilty.</p>
<p>I’m grateful for Elanor’s extraordinary healing ability, and I’m grateful for good health insurance. But I still have a bunch of medical bill co-pays that add up to several hundred dollars. They sometimes show up months after the actual services they are for. Tracking the individual bills can be extremely complicated. Some are probably “balance billing,” and then I have to decide if I am just going to pay them, write letters disputing them, or ignore them. And I hope that none go into collection.</p>
<p>We got our 2018 tax refund. It was quite generous. But, unfortunately, most of it went immediately to pay off some of the aforementioned car repairs, medical bills, and our DTE Energy budget plan annual “settle-up” statement.</p>
<p>We had another strange situation unfold with the old house in Saginaw. We were contacted by a family who was interested in renting the house. They had experienced a house fire, and their insurance company was willing to pay for them to live in a rental house for six months or so, while repairs on their house were completed. They are a large family, and there aren’t a lot of larger homes for rent in the area — hence, they got our name by word-of-mouth.</p>
<p>We were making arrangements for this to happen. Grace and I had a couple of trips up to Saginaw. We did some cleanup, and took inventory of some minor problems, and had some remaining plumbing issues fixed. We thought it was going to happen. But then we abruptly heard that it wasn’t going to happen.</p>
<p>That money would have been a big help.</p>
<p>We still have a guy expressing interest in buying the house, but it isn’t clear if he’s going to get his financing together anytime soon. So we might try again with another realtor. Maybe the third realtor’s the charm. (I think three is my limit; if we can’t sell it with a third realtor, somehow, I think we have to consider more drastic options).</p>
<p>I forgot to mention that we had a viral illness run through our household. It was quite nasty. I wound up missing three days of work. And there’s been more chaos, some of which isn’t mine to write about. But I’m grateful to be healthy again.</p>
<h2 id="nerd-stuff">Nerd Stuff</h2>
<p>I was looking into what it would take to use GNU <strong>make</strong> to help automate my blogging using <strong>pandoc</strong>. I want to have one directory tree for source, and put build products in a a parallel directory. I’m reminded of how much I dislike <strong>make</strong>. It’s surprisingly hard to figure out how to get <strong>make</strong> to track dependencies across directories like this. The standard use case for C programming is to provide a separate <strong>Makefile</strong> in each directory in a source tree and let <strong>make</strong> handle these subdirectories itself. But that seems like a severe over-complication for this use case. I just want my Makefile to apply <strong>pandoc</strong> to all the Markdown files in the source tree, and create a build tree with a parallel structure.</p>
<p>Ideally this would be portable, so that I could build it on MacOS X, Windows, or GNU Linux. I’ve been trying to make it work with PowerShell. There are some portability problems. The <strong>mkdir</strong> command doesn’t support the <strong>-p</strong> switch on Windows, for example. There are workarounds. But this is just one example of the problems. I know this kind of thing can be done, because a lot of open-source projects build into a separate build directory. But their Makefiles tend to be monstrously complicated, and generated by <strong>autoconf</strong>. That seems like an enormous amount of overkill. I may wind up writing Makefiles that just specify each source and destination file. This will result in a long <strong>Makefile</strong> that has to be hand-edited each time I add a file, and that seems stupid, but I keep reminding myself that the purpose of this automation is to save time, not go down endless rabbit holes. Again, I find it so frustrating to realize that the industry-standard tools are so inflexible and user-hostile. This is one of the reasons I started using BBEdit workbooks for everything to do with the podcast: they create a “semi-automated” system, where you can watch each command as it is processed, and see right away what has gone wrong.</p>
<p>We have four Chromebooks that we borrowed from an online charter school that four of the kids were attending. It went out of business over a year ago and we still have them. I decided to try to do something useful with them, so I followed some online tutorials which described how to wipe them of the Chrome operating system and install Linux. This is not for the faint of heart and not without a fair number of problems and bugs. To completely erase the internal memory, you have to open up the laptop and get access to the backside of the motherboard to remove a screw that acts as a jumper. This is not for the faint of heart. I have opened up quite a few laptops over the years so I was comfortable with it, although parts get smaller and smaller and devices are made less and less “repairable.” After removing a lot of screws, you have to use a “spudger” to pry the case open, and it is hard to do this without marring it a bit, and feeling like you are going to crack it. There are a lot of internal ribbon cables and screws to remove as well. It isn’t always obvious how to remove them. Some of the connectors aren’t really made to plug and unplug and plug repeatedly. Tiny plastic tabs can be brittle. Tiny brass threaded inserts set in plastic can strip out if you apply a little bit too much force. I managed to get all four Chromebooks apart and back together with only one minor crack in a case, and one stripped insert, one stripped plastic screw hole, and one broken tab on a battery connector. Not too bad, given that I mistakenly took out the wrong screws on two of them and had to open them up a second time. The whole process was very time-consuming, though: including research and trial and error, I think it took me twelve hours of work to get all four of them completely wiped and booting up the Gallium Linux distribution, with the software all up-to-date and user accounts configured the way I wanted them to be.</p>
<p>There are still lots of gotchas. On one of them, the mouse pointer keeps freezing up. This is apparently a known bug. The initial version of Gallium had a problem where on two of them, the keyboard wouldn’t work. This led me to realize I needed to install the full firmware replacement, which required removing the write protect screws. I had planned to use Firefox, because there is a nice plug-in for Firefox called FoxFilter, which I planned to use for setting them up with unprivileged accounts for the kids, and a password-protected whitelist for accessing web sites. I set up the unprivileged accounts. But Firefox crashes constantly on these boxes, so I had to switch to Chromium. Chromium doesn’t support Fox Filter, and in fact has no plug-in support at all. So I’m still scratching my head wondering just how I’m going to do web filtering. I was experimenting with a separate box configured as a proxy server. That was working, but it seems like overkill, and then I have to change the guest network password and try to keep the password away from the kids as well. This is such a pain.</p>
<p>But, for the moment, the kids have 4 more-or-less working laptops they can use to access Khan Academy, and I’ve been able to assign them lessons and follow their progress with my parent account. Chromium still crashes with annoying frequency. I can’t disable tapping on the trackpads (this worked on two of the four Chromebooks using an older version of Gallium, but that version had the keyboard problem). They keep coming up with Bluetooth turned on. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The hardware was free, and that’s really nice, but it’s 2019 and Linux is still only free as in beer if you are fortunate enough to have a really well-supported hardware configuration. And configuring everything is still a maze of twisty little passages, although I’m impressed that people have gotten these locked-down machines liberated as well as they have.</p>
<h2 id="teckla"><em>Teckla</em></h2>
<p>I picked up Steven Brust’s <em>The Book of Teckla</em> again, having previously read the first two novels in the volume. <em>Teckla</em>, the third, is a more engaging novel than I initially thought. It starts with a literal laundry list — a list of stains to remove and cuts to mend in Vlad’s laundry. The laundry list is actually a sort of summary of the events of the novel. Each chapter features a phrase from the laundry list, and the events that cause the stain or cut happens in that chapter. But that’s just a minor amusement. The real meat of this novel is the way it digs into the character of Vlad and his relationship with his wife, Cawti. Cawti has joined a group of revolutionaries and before the end of the novel they will be setting up barricades in the streets. Vlad starts out by looking upon their idealism and willing to die for their beliefs with a very jaundiced eye. But gradually, as the plot unfolds and the couple’s fight drags on, Vlad seems to do some self-examination, and consider the moral dimension of his career as an assassin and crime boss.</p>
<p>I didn’t really like the previous book, <em>Yendi</em>, all that much. It had its clever moments but I didn’t feel that I could really connect with the elaborate plot involving rival bosses and the complicated back-story. But this story pulled me in, because I can identify with a fight between a couple, and I can identify with the schism that can open up when the members of a couple pursue divergent paths. This novel also gets extra credit for introducing a little more of Vlad’s family’s back-story, as well as some of the religious beliefs of Dragaera.</p>
<p>I might even go so far as to suggest that if you’re reading the Vlad Taltos novels for the first time, you might want to read the first one (<em>Jhereg</em>), then skip the second one (<em>Yendi</em>), then read <em>Teckla</em>. It’s also worth noting that the novels don’t follow events in in-universe chronological order. I really can’t say if it is better to try to read the series in publication order or chronological order. For now I’ll stick with publication order. I’ll probably order a copy of the second omnibus volume, <em>The Book of Taltos</em>, which contains the novels <em>Taltos</em> and <em>Phoenix</em>, and see how I do with those.</p>
<h2 id="a-borrowed-man"><em>A Borrowed Man</em></h2>
<p>While I was rummaging through books in the basement, I realized that I never actually read Gene Wolfe’s novel <em>A Borrowed Man</em>, published in 2015. There are rumors of a sequel, but Wolfe is 87 years old, and I suspect that this will be his last published novel.</p>
<p>When reading Wolfe, I always expect to find something off the beaten path, something that is more than it seems at first, even something deceptive and disturbing. This novel is no exception. On the surface, it presents itself as a relatively short and straightforward dystopian science-fiction novel, in which humans can be brought back to life as “reclones” and become library resources; they literally live on giant library shelves in small apartments and can be interviewed or checked out by patrons. They don’t have rights. If no one borrows them, they’ll eventually be burned. The narrator is such a reclone: he has the memories of a deceased mystery writer. And so of course he becomes embroiled in a detective story featuring a beautiful young lady.</p>
<p>There’s a MacGuffin: a single copy of the mystery writer’s novel <em>Murder on Mars</em>. Our narrator was apparently cloned from the writer after he wrote this novel, and has no memory of it. In fact, it seems like no one knows anything about this novel. And so the conversation turns to how secrets can be hidden in books.</p>
<p>As I was reading this book, I came across some typographical errors that seemed significant (misused homonyms). The recloned writer, who is the in-universe author of this book, it seemed to me, would hardly make such silly mistakes. And so by the middle of the novel I had developed a theory: that our borrowed man himself, playing detective, is a “defective” copy, and the secret he is trying to discover in <em>Murder on Mars</em> really lies in his own altered memories.</p>
<p>It turns out that Wolfe doesn’t actually take that direction with the novel. Sometimes typos are just typos. In many ways, this novel really does follow the detective novel template, despite incorporating some pretty wild science-fictional elements. This novel is not as much of a puzzle box or kaleidoscope as Wolfe’s more complex work; this one is more about mood and tone and dialogue and the unfolding of clues. But that makes it easier to read, and I think it definitely deserves a re-read in the future, too. And it’s a good reminder that there are some more Wolfe books I own but haven’t read yet, including <em>The Sorceror’s House</em> and <em>The Land Across</em>.</p>
<h2 id="more-books-in-progress">More Books in Progress</h2>
<p>I’m reading several other books now. Too many, in fact. Things have been chaotic and I keep picking up books when I have a little bit of quiet time. I started reading the stories from Haruki Murakami’s <em>Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman</em>. I dove into Alfred Döblin’s <em>Berlin Alexanderplatz</em>, translated by Michael Hofmann. I’ve been reading that on the treadmill. It’s slow going, but pretty fascinating.</p>
<p>I also started reading a non-fiction book called <em>The Science of Interstellar</em> by the physicist Kip Thorne. I got this for the kids, because we watched <em>Interstellar</em> and they were fascinated with the physics, as was I. But of course I’m reading it in more detail than they are. <em>Interstellar</em> is a pretty fascinating movie. One could quibble about the degree to which the plot hangs on things that go well past extrapolations from our current understanding of physics, but I think that these are forgivable, for the sake of storytelling. And after all, it’s about the <em>boundaries</em> of our understanding. I think it’s a reasonable artistic choice to moderate the degree to which the universe beyond our own planet is inhospitable to humans (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s <em>Aurora</em> for a work that touches heavily on similar themes). <em>Interstellar</em> also contains many homages to <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>. But how could the director of such a science fiction film <strong>not</strong> acknowledge his debt to Kubrick?</p>
<p>I’ve been fascinated by astrophysics and particle physics for as long as I can remember; I read about them as a child. Reading Kip Thorne’s book has taught me that apparently there have been a lot of developments in the theory of black holes since then. Apparently there are now known to be several kinds of singularity; in the book, Thorne refers to “infalling” and “outflying” singularities, as well as the more well-established “BKL” singularity. I was aware of time dilation in gravity wells, but this fictional black hole known as “Gargantua” has particularly interesting properties. This led me down a rabbit hole, reading about “ergospheres,” caused by frame dragging, and other amazing ideas. And it seems that some black holes in our own galaxy, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRS_1915%2B105">GRS 1915+105</a>, may be rotating near the theoretical upper limit — that is, the speed of light, which is pretty mind-boggling.</p>
<p>I think it’s premature to claim that the movie, or Thorne’s book, can convincingly describe the conditions <strong>inside</strong> an event horizon. What goes on inside them may always remain closed to us, even if we go there in fiction. But the relativistic physics are very well-validated, and really fascinating. So I get to talk with the kids about all kinds of neat things like gravitational lensing and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross">Einstein Crosses</a> — another one was just discovered recently!</p>
<p>After hearing part of an interview with Iain McGilchrist on an <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/02/01/690656459/one-head-two-brains-how-the-brains-hemispheres-shape-the-world-we-see">NPR Show called <em>The Hidden Brain</em></a>, I ordered a copy of McGilchrist’s book, <em>The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World</em>. I’m still in chapter two, but it appears so far that it may become one of my favorite books, winding up on a list that includes <em>Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid</em>, <em>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind</em>, and <em>The Society of Mind</em>. McGilchrist’s book is a pretty massive tome, though, and slow-going, and I’m only in chapter two. I’ve been reading bits of this book to Grace in bed, late, after the kids finally quiet down. It usually puts her to sleep, but that’s because reading her just about anything puts her to sleep. But that said, I do think the book is considerably wordier than it needs to be to get its intriguing points across. I suspect that I will not be able to fully agree with the author’s broader conclusions about how the divided architecture of the human mind has shaped our art, politics, philosophy, and science — initially, this seems like overreach — but I guess I’ll find out if and when I get there.</p>
<p>I’ve started reading at one more book, the short story collection <em>The Wall</em> by Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ve got no real comments about it yet, although the first story is pretty vivid and fascinating.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Teckla</em> by Stephen Brust (in the paperback omnibus edition <em>The Book of Teckla</em>) (completed)</li>
<li><em>A Borrowed Man</em> by Gene Wolfe (completed)</li>
<li><em>Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman</em> (short story collection) by Haruki Murakami (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Berlin Alexanderplatz</em> by Alfred Alfred Döblin, translated by Michael Hofmann (New York Review Books Classics edition)</li>
<li><em>The Science of Interstellar</em> by Kip Thorne</li>
<li><em>The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World</em> by Iain McGilchrist</li>
<li><em>The Wall</em> by Jean-Paul Sartre (translated by Lloyd Alexander) (New Directions paperback 3rd edition)</li>
<li><em>Interstellar</em> (2014 film)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>Monday, March 4th, 2019</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-2718976342011087332019-02-14T18:59:00.000-05:002019-02-14T18:59:52.137-05:00Thursday, February 7th, 2019<p>The scheduled installation date kept changing, due to dangerous weather, but we did in fact have our treadmill delivered and assembled. I’m pretty happy with. So far I’m glad that I bit the bullet and bought a higher-end model, rather than a much cheaper model from Costco. This one seems to be able to handle my running gait without feeling like it is going to come apart. It shakes a bit, but it seems like the shock-absorbing system is doing its job, and it feels pretty solid. Perhaps not quite as solid as the models I used to use at <a href="https://www.libertyathletic.net/">Liberty Athletic Club</a>, back in the nineties, but those probably cost ten grand.</p>
<p>I’ve only got a couple of gripes about the treadmill. The first is that the heart rate sensor function doesn’t work very well. When it locks on and actually calculates a heart rate, it seems to be pretty accurate. But it sometimes takes thirty seconds or more, showing very inaccurate low rates, before it jumps up and shows some accurate numbers. Sometimes it takes much longer and I have to give up and try again in a minute or two. What’s strange about this is that there’s a little heart icon that flashes to indicate the heartbeats it is detecting, and that little icon will be flashing at about 120 (house house speed) or 130 (trance music speed) or 140 (dubstep music speed). Having been a DJ and spent time practicing beat-mixing these kinds of music, I have a feel for counting these beats per minute. But the calculated heart rate will spend tens of seconds showing numbers in the eighties or nineties (chill-out or old-school hip-hop speed). That ain’t right! And having written code that samples data, such as GPS position data and optical brightness data, to present a smooth running average, I know that it really ought to work better than this.</p>
<p>My other gripe is that it wants to be on the WiFi, and I don’t want it on the WiFi. It constantly flashes a little WiFi icon. Apparently the WiFi is configured using an application, or web site, which must mean that out of the box the treadmill’s WiFi is on and listening. I’m not happy about that. I’d like to find a way to disable it, but I’m not sure there is one, at least not a way that doesn’t involve a soldering iron.</p>
<p>It also seems like there may not be a way to update the firmware without setting up an account on the manufacturer’s web site, or via an app, and I’m not happy about that either. I really don’t trust <a href="https://twitter.com/internetofshit">Internet of Things devices</a>, and I don’t want to deliver my personal data to some untrusted company’s servers (and recent events should teach us that they <strong>all</strong> ought to be considered untrustworthy).</p>
<h1 id="kafka-on-the-shore"><em>Kafka on the Shore</em></h1>
<p>I finished <em>Kafka on the Shore</em>. The ending is largely a good ending, tying up pretty much every plot line, but also melancholy, and leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied. This remains one of Murkami’s stranger books. I enjoyed it more the second time. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafka_on_the_Shore#Understanding_the_novel">Murakami himself said</a> that the key to understanding the novel was to read it multiple times. The second time, I feel like I have a better sense for the structure, and all the things Murakami set up, and how they interlocked with each other. Would a third reading make it suddenly seem much better? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I feel up to the experiment.</p>
<h1 id="the-black-corridor"><em>The Black Corridor</em></h1>
<p>This is an odd novel by Moorcock. It partakes of some of the psychedelic nonsense that was commonplace in New Wave science fiction of the era, such as repeating phrases that permute as they go down the page, and typographical layout where words intersect as in crossword puzzles. I find most of this unimpressive and masturbatory in 2019, but the story itself is pretty fascinating, a psychological novel that develops an increasing sense of xenophobia and dread, as the narrator reveals more and more about his history and the failings and crimes he is not yet fully willing to acknowledge.</p>
<p>It’s about, in part, the collapse of civilization, and about people who wind up increasingly isolated and afraid of others. It seems especially relevant given the political realities today, as Trump demands that we build a wall to keep out immigrants. A wealthy businessman takes a small group of friends and family off the Earth to colonize a distant planet, as Earth is falling into barbarism and nuclear war, just in time. He stays awake to manage the ship on the five-year journey down the “black corridor” — that five years alone in interstellar space. We see him write in the official log, and also write in his personal journal. And we see him fall into madness and hallucinations and reveal just what he had to do in order to make the journey happen.</p>
<p>It’s a short novel but it has quite a build-up to its conclusion. The conclusion, though, left me a bit puzzled as to what happened — what was real, and what wasn’t, and whether the protagonist might still be hiding a yet more awful truth from himself. Moorcock has <a href="http://www.multiverse.org/index.php?title=The_Black_Corridor">said</a> that the ending was “deliberately ambiguous.” That was kind of par for the course in some of the more “experimental” science fiction of the New Wave, but in this case I thought it worked pretty well. I might have to read this one again. But not immediately.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Moorcock’s wife at the time, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Bailey">Hilary Bailey</a>, contributed scenes from a work in progress. Her work in progress was a dystopian novel set on Earth, and Moorcock adapted scenes from it to intercut with scenes set in the “the black corridor.” Either story might have been grim and interesting, but the intercutting, and juxtapositions that the intercutting produces, is what makes <em>The Black Corridor</em> stick in my mind. Bailey is not credited as a co-author. Moorcock, in the Multiverse web site, <a href="http://www.multiverse.org/index.php?title=The_Black_Corridor#Mike_Says">says</a> that she didn’t want the book to be presented as a collaboration, but that he “worked in acknowledgements in the dedication.” I didn’t find any mention of Bailey in the edition that I read. However her name happened to vanish, she should be remembered — <a href="https://www.wired.com/2019/02/geeks-guide-history-women-sci-fi/">erasure</a> of women’s contributions to science fiction and fantasy of that era was unfortunately common.</p>
<p>Last night I rearranged some books on my bedroom shelves, carrying an armload of books downstairs to file away in boxes, and moving a bunch of science fiction story collections to a separate shelf for Sam to read. He’s been raiding my shelves a lot recently. I love to see him choosing new things to read, and I don’t have any books on my shelf he’s not allowed to read. But we still have some issues, because he doesn’t always take care of them well, and he sometimes leaves books where his younger siblings can find them and damage them. So I am trying to get serious about some rules, like “you can take any book from this shelf, but at the end of the day, it has to go back on the shelf,” and “leaving these books, some of which are old and fragile and were expensive or hard to find, sprawled on the floor in random parts of the house is not OK with me.”</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure what I’m going to read next. I need to spend some time organizing books downstairs, and looking through the catalog of books in boxes, and maybe the next thing that wants to be read will jump out at me.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Kafka on the Shore</em> by Haruki Murakami (finished in late January)</li>
<li><em>The Black Corridor</em> by Michael Moorcock (finished yesterday) (in the 2014 Gollancz omnibus paperback <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>Thursday, January 17th and Sunday, January 20th, 2019</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-68506690578299755752019-02-14T18:31:00.000-05:002019-02-14T18:31:00.914-05:00Thursday, January 17th, 2019<p>It’s been strange, not writing about each day for a while. I sort of miss it, although towards the end of the year I was feeling less inspired and more burdened.</p>
<p>Since the end of 2018, there have been only a few developments.</p>
<p>Grace has been taking her heavy-duty blood pressure medication. This leaves her very tired and not able to safely drive, at least not until later in the day when some of the sedating effect has worn off. Fortunately our friend Joy has been able to come and stay with us a number of days recently. She’s been driving Grace and our housemate to appointments, and helping a lot with meals.</p>
<p>We really need Grace to be mobile and active again, alongside Joy, but that isn’t happening yet.</p>
<p>Our housemate will be having another baby by C-section shortly, in just under a week. We just heard that her boyfriend’s car was repossessed. So — I’m really not sure what is going to happen on those days. Who will transport her, who will be her support person or support people in the hospital, who will get her home, and meet her immediate needs after surgery? We’ll just have to do our best.</p>
<p>Our housemate has been much more engaged recently in putting meals together, and eating with us. So it’s been good to have her helping as well, and it’s been more pleasant in the evenings. Although it is also very chaotic, with up to ten kids and up to four adults at meals. It’s perhaps no wonder that I need to be on some medications.</p>
<p>Work is starting to pick up again, with some more opportunities to interact with co-workers, and even start the development cycle for a new product that will involve software development, so that seems encouraging. I was somewhat surprised to find myself actually in a good mood one afternoon at work, actually feeling happy. Buried under stressors and worries, I haven’t felt that way in some time.</p>
<p>I went ahead and ordered a treadmill. The installers are supposed to come and install it our basement next Wednesday. I need to check out the wiring — it should be alone or nearly alone on a 15-amp breaker, ideally on a 20-amp breaker. So I have to investigate the wiring and try to figure out what goes where. If it looks like that outlet is wired to a breaker with too many other things on it, I’ll ask my co-worker Patrick if he can come out and help rewire it.</p>
<p>The government shutdown has been going on now for almost 27 days. Commentators in the media are starting to say, truthfully, that the effects of this kind of shutdown don’t grow linearly over time, but exponentially. I don’t think that’s perfectly accurate, but it is definitely true that people who aren’t getting paid face some hard deadlines, and the consequences of not getting paid increase dramatically as those deadlines blow past. I keep asking myself “is this when the wheels really come off?” Not because of the Mueller investigation, not because of impeachment, not because of indictment due to Emoluments violations, or 25th Amendment concerns, but because of a partisan impasse over funding? Maybe, although the idea that exhausted, sick, broke Americans will take to the streets, and engage in a general strike or <em>Gilets Jaunes</em>-style protests on a wide scale, seems hard to believe.</p>
<p>I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor. The news was mostly good. My weight was actually down a couple of pounds, which surprised me. He is very happy with my cholesterol numbers. My blood pressure on the single 25mg daily dose of clorthalidone seems very well-controlled. I’m also happy with the effects of tamsulosin. He had me do some quick screenings for anxiety and depression. My anxiety score has gone down noticeably, on Celexa. My depression score was a bit higher. That wasn’t really a surprise to me given the time of year. He noted that I’ve had a couple of blood sugar readings that are higher than they should be, and wanted to put me on a medication for that. I asked him to let me try using the treadmill regularly for a few months and see if that improves it. He agreed to that. I also want to get back to the bulletproof coffee and, if possible, a weekly 24-hour fast. So we’ll follow up at my next appointment.</p>
<p>I also got a shingles vaccine. They warned me that this one might give me a few days of muscle aches and flu-like symptoms, and it did. I think it peaked yesterday. I had a mild fever and felt nauseated and exhausted, with aches and pains all over. I didn’t feel like eating dinner and went to bed when I got home, although given the number of kids in the house it was quite a while before I could actually get to sleep, and of course I was woken up a few times during the night by baby Chi.</p>
<p>Speaking of baby Chi, he’s doing very well — plumping up, drinking all the breast milk he can possibly slurp down, and impressing everyone with his extremely loud baby farts and belches. (Grace is going to lay off the brassicas for a while and see if that makes him a little less gassy.)</p>
<p>Today, I’m feeling a little better. I took an Aleve to bring down my fever, but I’m still not at 100%. I can feel myself becoming a bit feverish again as the day goes on.</p>
<p>Pippin, age eight, has started reading my copy of <em>Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid</em>, which is an interesting development, and he’s been asking me to read it as a bedtime story. His developing brain seems to have hit some kind of milestone. We haven’t gotten a lot of quiet time for bedtime story reading recently, but I read the kids part of one of the dialoges, called “Little Harmonic Labyrinth.”</p>
<p>There’s a lot going on but I don’t want to start going down rabbit holes, so I’ll just mention what I’ve been reading and viewing.</p>
<h1 id="the-battle-of-ranskoor-av-kolos">“The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos”</h1>
<p>The last regular episode in series 11, this was one of the better of the series 11 <em>Doctor Who</em> episodes. Finally, we get to see a villain again, even if it is only “Tim Shaw” from the beginning of the series. There are a lot of nice moments. Graham has to wrestle with the morality of killing, in a way that feels pretty convincing. The telekinetic aliens seem interesting. But this episode also seems to borrow a lot from “The Stolen Earth,” and not in a good way, and also from the Tom Baker serial “The Pirate Planet.” And it doesn’t really wrap up the season arc — for example, what became of the reference to The Doctor as the “timeless child,” when The Remnants spoke to her in “The Ghost Monument?” That seemed like a bit of setup that would be developed over the arc of this season — but nothing came of that setup.</p>
<h1 id="resolution">“Resolution”</h1>
<p>In the New Year’s Special, we finally got an episode that lives up to some of the best episodes of the rebooted series. “Resolution” is a real banger. In fact, I’ve really got no criticisms of this episode at all. It does go go emotionally over the top quite a few times and require some pretty hard suspension of disbelief, but the rebooted <em>Doctor Who</em> has very often leaned towards the sentimental and fantastic. This episode features a classic enemy, several great scenes, some real watch-it-from-behind-the-couch moments, and some arty cinematography that fits the scenes perfectly.</p>
<p>In fact, the quality of this special makes me mad — if Chibnall’s team could do <strong>this</strong>, why couldn’t they have done better jobs on more of the Series 11 episodes? It makes me feel cheated out of better episodes that could have been.</p>
<p>Now we just have to wait until Series 12 to see if it lives up to “Resolution.” Series 12 is supposed to start… <em>checks notes</em>… in <em>2020</em>. Sigh.</p>
<p>Maybe copies of some of the 97 missing “classic” episodes will be uncovered in 2019. That would be good news! But I’m not holding my breath.</p>
<h1 id="spider-man-into-the-spider-verse"><em>Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse</em></h1>
<p>I took the three older kids — Veronica, Sam, and Joshua — to see this movie in the theater and they enjoyed it a lot. We all enjoyed it. I think it moved a little too quickly for Joshua, who is ten years old, to unpack all the plot elements that are hinted at or suggested in flashback scenes, so he was left unclear on a few plot points. But everyone else figured it out. The animation in this movie is absolutely amazing, and I expect it to sweep all the awards that it is eligible for. Really, I was quite impressed.</p>
<h1 id="kafka-on-the-shore"><em>Kafka on the Shore</em></h1>
<p>Going through my books, for some reason I felt that I wanted to re-read some Murakami, and in particular his novel <em>Kafka on the Shore</em>. I read this years ago, and I enjoyed it, although it always seemed to me like a lesser work than <em>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</em>, which I think is Murakami’s masterpiece. So I wanted to give it another chance. So I’m back in Murakami’s spooky parallel words. I think I’m enjoying this one a little more than I did the first time.</p>
<h1 id="the-labyrinth-index"><em>The Labyrinth Index</em></h1>
<p>A few days ago I stopped into Nicola’s Books for the first time this year, and happened to come across the newest Laundry Files novel. I had not even been aware that it was out. So of course I had to take it home, and I couldn’t do much else in my spare time until I had finished it. I have enjoyed all of the books in this series quite a bit, some a little more than others, and I have eagerly looked forward to each new volume.</p>
<p>This one is told from the perspective of Mhari, a PHANG — a human infected with V-parasites. The mechanism of this vampirism is a little bit complicated, but it means that a person whose blood is drunk by a PHANG inevitably dies. And as Mhari works for a government agency, the agency has to supply the victims, which means that the United Kingdom hs brought back the death penalty. So Mhari and the other PHANGs face a constant moral dilemma — others must die so that they can simply continue to live.</p>
<p>We met Mhari a few books ago, and she’s changed. She’s still full of self-doubt, “impostor syndrome” to go along with her <em>moral</em> doubts, but it’s clear that she’s now actually a supremely competent administrator as well as a terrifyingly dangerous field operative, capable of making optimal and brilliant decisions under extreme stress. There’s an especially grueling moment when one of the Auditors invokes “supervisor mode” to discover what drives Mhari, and learns that she actually gave up all hope some time ago. This is troubling but also feels very convincing in these dark times.</p>
<p>There is a lot going on in this book. The climactic scenes are complex, with many pieces on the chessboard. And so there’s a lot of setup required, and a lot to keep track of. To make this work, Mhari’s chronicle of events jumps around in time an awful lot, jumping between multiple teams and locations. This sounds complex, and it is, but Stross manages to make it work, and I never found myself confused, lost, or disengaged. Stross makes the story so engaging that watching him put all the pieces in place and teach the audience about each one never feels like a chore. Stross really has developed considerable expertise in telling complex stories and writing convincing, morally conflicted characters.</p>
<p>I’m not going to discuss the main driver of the plot of this book, except to say that it’s both superficially funny and <em>also</em> darkly satirical and timely. Stross is really good at these jokes that make you laugh, and then make you think, and then, hours or days later, think a lot more.</p>
<p>We see Mhari’s organization pull out all the stops, and pull off an incredibly daring rescue using a secretly maintained and operated Concorde aircraft. Stross clearly did a lot of research to write these scenes, and I found myself digging into Wikipedia articles to learn more about this incredible plane. From the very first Laundry Files novel, <em>The Atrocity Archive</em>, I’ve always loved the way Stross blends the cosmic horror elements along with extremely realistic portrayal of the experience of working within a bureaucracy, and he makes the impersonal horrors personal; it’s one kind of dread to feel the cold indifference of the Elder Gods scheming to consume our souls from the realms beyond all light, and another to face a zombie actually chewing on your jugular. Stross gives us both!</p>
<p>If there’s one element in these stories that is a little bit too fantastic to find convincing, it’s the way that, to Mhari’s surprise, the people above her in the organization actually pulled off their plan, and the things she thought of as her failures turned out to be pretty much the best possible choices under the circumstances. She’s given reason to hope again. It’s a nice fantasy — that competence might be rewarded, and adults might be in charge, and have a workable plan to get us out of the mess we’re in. Isn’t it pretty to think so?</p>
<p>I highly recommend this whole series and I’m eagerly looking forward to reading Stross’s next installment.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned</h2>
<ul>
<li>“The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11)</li>
<li>“Resolution” (<em>Doctor Who</em> 2019 New Year’s Day Special)</li>
<li><em>Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse</em></li>
<li><em>Kafka on the Shore</em> by Haruki Murakami (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Labyrinth Index</em> by Charles Stross (A Laundry Files novel) (finished)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>Thursday, January 17th and Sunday, January 20th, 2019</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-62425851184695864342019-02-04T19:56:00.001-05:002019-02-04T20:00:39.809-05:002018: The Annual Summary<p>I finished reading (or re-reading) the following books in 2018:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><em>I Shall Wear Midnight</em> by Terry Pratchett</li>
<li><em>The Hobbit</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien</li>
<li><em>Existence</em> by David Brin</li>
<li><em>The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea</em> by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt</li>
<li><em>The Queen of Air and Darkness</em> (the second book of <em>The Once and Future King</em>) by T. H. White</li>
<li><em>The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President</em> by Bandy X. Lee et al.</li>
<li><em>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</em> by Shirley Jackson (read out loud to Grace)</li>
<li><em>Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick</em> by Lawrence Sutin</li>
<li><em>The Benedict Option</em> by Rod Dreher</li>
<li><em>The Wonderful O</em> by James Thurber</li>
<li><em>The 13 Clocks</em> by James Thurber</li>
<li><em>City of Glass</em> by Paul Auster</li>
<li><em>Unspeakable</em> by Chris Hedges with David Talbot</li>
<li><em>Elysium Fire</em> by Alastair Reynolds</li>
<li><em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson</li>
<li><em>Daughter of Dreams</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Sleeping Sorceress</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Revenge of the Rose</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: Stormbringer!</em></li>
<li><em>Jhereg</em> by Stephen Brust</li>
<li><em>Yendi</em> by Stephen Brust</li>
<li><em>Butcher Bird</em> by Richard Kadrey</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em> by Peter Watts</li>
<li><em>Daughter of Dreams</em> by Michael Moorcock (the first of three novels in the 2014 Gollancz omnibus edition <em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em>)</li>
<li><em>The Wrecks of Time</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (Joshua read it to us as a bedtime story)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter</li>
</ol>
<p>That’s 34 books. I actually did a little better, in terms of the number of books completed, than I did in 2017. In 2017 I only finished 26 books, although I also read a whole year of New Yorker magazines.</p>
<p>A few of the books in the list above jump out at me for being particularly memorable. These are:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>The Hobbit</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien</li>
<li><em>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</em> by Shirley Jackson (read out loud to Grace)</li>
<li><em>Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick</em> by Lawrence Sutin</li>
<li><em>The Wonderful O</em> by James Thurber</li>
<li><em>Unspeakable</em> by Chris Hedges with David Talbot</li>
<li><em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em> by Peter Watts</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
</ul>
<p>I’m not going to re-hash my detailed criticism of Moorcock’s Elric stories here, except to say that I wouldn’t recommend reading all those Elric volumes; see my numerous long comments on the Elric stories in blog posts from 2018.</p>
<p>Another thing that jumps out is that I didn’t <strong>finish</strong> a whole lot of non-fiction books this year, although I started reading many more, or dipped into certain chapters, often to discuss them on the podcast. That’s some information for me, although I’m honestly not sure if it tells me more about myself, or about the books I chose to read.</p>
<p>The best movie I saw in 2018 were:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Sylvio</em> (2017 film)</li>
<li><em>Paddington 2</em> (2017 film)</li>
<li><em>Iron Man</em> (2008 film)</li>
</ul>
<p>And… that’s about it, unfortunately. I didn’t see a lot of movies in 2018, so there wasn’t a large field to choose from. Of these, I have to give the nod to <em>Sylvio</em>, for its wonderful surreal silliness presented on a shoestring budget.</p>
<p>As for television shows, well — I’m not going to try to rate a big pile of both old and new <em>Doctor Who</em> shows, especially when I have a number of fan edits mixed in there. I’ll just mention my frustrating with <em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11, and point out that the best episode of Series 11 was actually the not broadcast in 2018, and strictly speaking wasn’t part of the regular series. It was the New Year’s Day special, “Resolution.”</p>
<p>Speaking of resolutions, I have a few. I want to get into an exercise regimen on the treadmill. I want to finish more non-fiction. I want to get engaged in a new writing project, and get the podcast rebooted, at least in some form, for a new season.</p>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>January 20th, 2019</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-31689983787092998462019-02-04T19:31:00.000-05:002019-02-04T19:31:24.262-05:002018: The Third Quarter Summary<p>It wasn’t too bad a quarter, at least not as measured by the number of books completed. I was helped along by the fact that many of them contained Elric stories, and I developed a certain momentum to finish them.</p>
<h2 id="books-completed">Books Completed</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson</li>
<li><em>Daughter of Dreams</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Sleeping Sorceress</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Revenge of the Rose</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Elric: Stormbringer!</em></li>
<li><em>Jhereg</em> by Stephen Brust</li>
<li><em>Yendi</em> by Stephen Brust</li>
<li><em>Butcher Bird</em> by Richard Kadrey</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve written extensively about the Elric books in the blog. Several of these really did not seem to be worth my time, especially <em>Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl</em> and <em>Elric: The Revenge of the Rose</em>. Also, as I have discussed, it did not seem to improve the Elric stories to read them in their in-universe chronological order, the way the Gollancz Michael Moorcock Collections volumes present them.</p>
<p><em>Butcher Bird</em> was unimpressive and is on the giveaway pile. The Stephen Brust novels were not bad, but not really great, either. These are the first two books in a series. Maybe I should jump ahead and try one of the much later books in the series, in the hopes that his chops have improved.</p>
<p><em>Icehenge</em> was a surprise standout — a better book than I expected, and I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work. And <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> is a fascinating classic; it troubles a contemporary reader with some racial and ethnic and misogynist bits and pieces, but it remains an interesting study of the subculture of the underclass, and the author’s insights into poverty and its effects are still very much worth reading.</p>
<h2 id="books-started-or-continued">Books Started or Continued</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction: Arthur Machen</em> by Arthur Machen</li>
<li><em>A Wrinkle in Time</em> by Madeleine L’Engle (bedtime reading; re-reading for me)</li>
<li><em>Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump</em> by Asad Haider</li>
<li><em>The Complete Cosmicomics</em> by Italo Calvino</li>
<li><em>Tekla</em> by Steven Brust</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading; re-reading for me)</li>
<li><em>Dragons at Crumbling Castle and Other Tales</em> by Terry Pratchett</li>
<li><em>The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason</em> by Chapo Trap House</li>
<li><em>Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook</em> by Mark Bray</li>
<li><em>The Conquest of Bread</em> by Peter Kropotkin</li>
<li><em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> by Peter Brown</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>January 2nd, 2019 (yes, very late — I started this summary months ago, but completely forgot to finish it.)</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-1156960455075627522019-01-01T18:18:00.006-05:002019-01-01T18:18:48.406-05:002018: The Fourth Quarter Summary<p>Well, as I expected, my showing in the fourth quarter was pretty weak. And apparently I never got around to finishing a quarter 3 summary. So I’ll write this one, and go back and fill in quarter 3.</p>
<p>I did manage to complete eight books, although some of them were quite short and one was actually a children’s book that my son Joshua read to me.</p>
<h2 id="books-completed">Books Completed</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em> by Peter Watts</li>
<li><em>Daughter of Dreams</em> by Michael Moorcock (the first of three novels in the 2014 Gollancz omnibus edition <em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em>)</li>
<li><em>The Wrecks of Time</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (Joshua read it to us as a bedtime story)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter</li>
</ul>
<p>Of the Moorcock novels, none was really a standout, although <em>The Ice Schooner</em> was the most engaging of this lot. I enjoyed <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em> quite a bit. <em>The Bloody Chamber</em> is the real standout here, although the sexual politics it embodies are not simple, contemporary, or necessarily comfortable. This book of stories could easily be the major text for a seminar class.</p>
<p>I read these additional short stories by Peter Watts:</p>
<ul>
<li>“The Island” by Peter Watts (2009 Novelette)</li>
<li>“Giants” by Peter Watts (short story)</li>
<li>“Hotshot” by Peter Watts (short story)</li>
</ul>
<p>All are available on the author’s web site.</p>
<p>I didn’t manage to watch very many full-length movies this quarter. I recall only three:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em> (2016 film)</li>
<li><em>Iron Man</em> (2008 film)</li>
<li><em>Millions</em> (2004 film)</li>
</ul>
<p>The first <em>Fantastic Beasts</em> movie I can recommend, although not all that highly. <em>Iron Man</em> is a very good take on the superhero movie, better than most of the recent Marvel adaptations. <em>Millions</em> is an impressive and magical film, and quite fun, although the ending is a big weak.</p>
<p>I watched all of Series 11 of <em>Doctor Who</em>, with the exception of the final episode, “”The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos," which we just haven’t gotten to yet. There’s also the New Year’s special, which will be broadcast today, called “Resolution.” That will be available via the iTunes store tomorrow, and we’ll watch it when time allows.</p>
<p>The episodes we watched are:</p>
<ul>
<li>“The Woman Who Fell to Earth”</li>
<li>“The Ghost Monument”</li>
<li>“Rosa”</li>
<li>“Arachnids in the UK”</li>
<li>“The Tsuranga Conundrum”</li>
<li>“Demons of the Punjab”</li>
<li>“Kerblam!”</li>
<li>“The Witchfinders”</li>
<li>“It Takes You Away”</li>
</ul>
<p>I just polled the family, and we’re having a hard time deciding on a favorite. Several people voted for “Arachnids in the UK,” which had wonderful special effects. It also completely failed to have a coherent ending. Several people mentioned “The Tsuranga Conundrum,” mostly because of the wonderful little spaceship-eating monster. Grace mentioned “Demons of the Punjab” and I agree with her — it told the best human-centered story. But our main feeling towards most of these episodes is disappointment. Many of them have great premises, or great scenes, but overall just fail to really fire on all cylinders.</p>
<p>I’m not going to list the <em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> episodes; I just don’t have much to say about them, although the kids loved them.</p>
<p>I want to mention one album in particular that I listened to heavily in the fourth quarter, and that is <em>Akhnaten</em> by Philip Glass. I got my copies in the form of discs 14 and 15 of <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em>. This composition rewards study, and the recording richly rewards repeat listening — it’s just remarkable. As I mentioned in the blog, I would love to see this performed live.</p>
<p>Finally, there are a number of books that I started, or read part of; some of these I will eventually finish; some I won’t. Some will remain on my shelves to dip into in the future. Some might wind up on the give-away pile. I will definitely finish reading Grace <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>. I’ll definitely finish reading the kids <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>.</p>
<h2 id="books-started-or-continued">Books Started or Continued</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Black Corridor</em> by Michael Moorcock</li>
<li><em>Mistress of Mistresses</em> by E. R. Eddison</li>
<li>Luke (Revised New American Bible, 1986-1990 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime story reading; re-reading for me)</li>
<li><em>The Conquest of Bread</em> by Peter Kropotkin</li>
<li><em>Cluttering: Current Views on its Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment</em> by Yvonne van Zaalen and Isabella K. Reichel</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Tombs of Atuan</em> by Ursula K. Le Guin (bedtime story reading)</li>
<li><em>A Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>January 1st, 2019</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-18651062784653315742019-01-01T16:15:00.000-05:002019-01-01T16:15:01.534-05:00Sunday, December 30th and Monday, December 31st, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>I’m continuing right on from my notes on Saturday. I got to bed pretty late last night, and I kept forgetting to take my night-time medications, so I wound up taking them well after midnight, instead of at 9 p.m. when I was supposed to take them. This meant that I was groggy this morning. I intended to get up and make progress in the kitchen, and make breakfast for everyone, but I wound up spending extra time soaking in the tub before I felt up to facing the kitchen. While I was in the tub, the kids made a big pan of scrambled eggs — with way too much salt. So they wound up wasting quite a few eggs. When I got into the kitchen, I had to restart the dishwasher again — once again, something had gone wrong, and the soap was undissolved in the bottom of the dishwasher. I really hope this dishwasher isn’t dying. We’ve used it hard, but for under two years. But I don’t really know how old it is. Maybe it’s ready to give out.</p>
<p>The bathtub drain was running very slowly last night, leading me to look for drain cleaner, realize we didn’t have any more, and add it to a shopping list.</p>
<p>I made a pot of the Café du Monde coffee and turned it into bulletproof coffee. We didn’t have any grass-fed butter, as we were out of the Kerrygold butter, but we had some Challenge butter, purchased for Christmas baking and never used, and more coconut oil, and some chocolate chips. So that gave me and Grace a small energy boost.</p>
<p>Grace and I talked for a while. She revealed that she was craving tacos. Then our housemate came down to talk to Grace, and it turned out that our housemate was craving tacos, too. The kitchen was in no condition to make tacos and we were missing most of the ingredients. I was willing to go get ingredients, but didn’t want to have to spend three hours cleaning up the kitchen before it was ready to make lunch, so I pushed for getting takeout tacos. We dithered around for some time before deciding on a plan. I would take our housemate to Kroger to get drain cleaner and rainbow glitter glue — another shopping list item for an art project that was planned for today. She’d get some baby formula and a few other items covered by WIC. Then we’d go out to La Marqueza Taqueria on East Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti. None of us had ever been there.</p>
<p>So I loaded up some returnable bottles and got our housemate to Kroger. As usual, she had some strange trouble with WIC at the checkout. They were able to ring everything up, and all the items were marked on the shelf as covered by WIC, and she supposedly had enough money left on her card to cover the items, but the system just wouldn’t process her card for some reason. They sent her to the customer service desk, but she was fed up, and I don’t blame her, because it seems like that entire system is designed to humiliate WIC shoppers in front of everyone else in the store. And so she left her groceries and stood at the front of the store waiting for me. I was a few places behind her in line and bought my items, and had them ring up her items as well, because I really just wanted to get us out of there, so we could go get our tacos!</p>
<p>La Marqueza is a very unassuming place. We ordered six beef and six pork tacos, an order of nachos, and a quesadilla. While we were waiting I drank a glass of horchata. We didn’t have long to wait, and soon brought home all the tacos that Grace and our housemate could possibly handle. Everything was really good! So we hope to go back there soon.</p>
<p>After cleaning up the food, the kids decided that they wanted to build the Velociraptor Chase Lego set after all. So they worked on that. Grace, still exhausted, went back into the bedroom to nurse the baby and I wound up alone in the kitchen again, cleaning the stovetop and cast-iron pans and baking trays and emptying one dishwasher load and starting another, while periodically running back into the bathroom to put two rounds of drain cleaner down the bathtub drain. There’s still more to do in the kitchen but it’s now a quarter to ten, and I’ve been catching up on the journal for an hour and forty-five minutes, and I have to work tomorrow, so I’m not sure how much more I will do tonight. I took my medications, so they will be kicking in and making me sleepy shortly. I expect tomorrow to be a very slow day at work.</p>
<p>Our friend Alice apparently passed her virus off to Elanor, who has been coughing horribly. Veronica’s been feeding her broth and tea and she’s now getting a bath. We are trying to keep her away from Chi, because we really don’t want Chi, who is only sixteen days old today, to wind up with a virus. We’re just not sure his immune system is up to the challenge. This also means we are trying to keep Elanor away from her mom, which is also a challenge.</p>
<p>I expect tomorrow to be a quiet day in the office.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>It’s the last day of 2018.</p>
<p>After putting away my laptop last night, I did a little more work on the kitchen. I didn’t get it completely cleaned, but I did get it to the point where the sink was mostly empty, the counters were mostly clear, and it was ready for me to make bulletproof coffee in the morning without having to make room or clean anything.</p>
<p>We didn’t really have dinner last night, since most of us were still pretty well filled up from our taco feast. The kids who refused to eat any of it went to bed hungry. The exception was Elanor — she had a hacky cough last night, and a lot of snot. We fed her broth, and hibiscus tea with honey, and elderberry extract. She seems to have been whacked with a virus, which might be the one that our friend Alice brought. So we are trying to keep her away from baby Chi. It might be a hopeless quest, to keep a virus from spreading around a crowded household full of kids, but we are trying.</p>
<p>I slept later than I intended to. It was gray and rainy again this morning, and had frozen up in patches, including our dirt road, and my office parking lot. I drove to Joe and Rosie’s and had a toasted bagel with peanut butter and a small coffee before work, and read a few pages of <em>The Black Corridor</em>, the third novel of three in the <em>Traveling to Utopia</em> omnibus of novels by Michael Moorcock; I read the other two, <em>The Wrecks of Time</em> and <em>The Ice Schooner</em> this year. I won’t finish <em>The Black Corridor</em> this year, but it’s not very long, so I should be able to finish it early in 2019.</p>
<p>It turned out I had left half my horchata from La Marqueza Taqueria in the car. It was actually frozen, but after sitting on my desk for an hour or two, it was a nice treat.</p>
<p>At work, only three of us were in, and only to catch up on some paperwork and e-mail messages. Human Resources decreed that on New Year’s Eve, they would count four hours as a full day. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.</p>
<p>I ordered a baby carrier, for myself, to replace the New Native carrier that I used to have. Grace sent my old carrier to Syria a few years ago, thinking we probably weren’t going to have more babies. They’ve gone up in price — a lot. It cost $87.50 for what is essentially a single piece of cloth sewn into a sling. I don’t remember exactly what they cost fourteen years ago, but it wasn’t $87.50. I could grumble about that, but I also know I’m not going to make a damned carrier, so I just bit my tongue and bought it.</p>
<p>I’m hoping that I will be able to use it to carry baby Chi on some walks while he’s still too small for the backpack-style baby carrier. Maybe I can use it while walking on the treadmill. I always liked the New Native design more than other baby carriers I’ve tried. It’s a very simple design, just a folded piece of cloth stitched together. It’s much simpler than the more elaborate designs Grace sometimes wears. You put it around your body over one shoulder, diagonally, like you are just won the Miss Universe pageant. Then you open up the fold and stuff the baby in there. It’s pretty foolproof. Veronica used to love to ride around with me that way. I remember taking her to Trader Joe’s with me when she was just a few days old.</p>
<p>I will head to Meijer for a few groceries. Grace wants to make greens, black-eyed peas, and corn bread on New Year’s Day. We also need toilet paper and paper towels, and sparkling water and orange juice for mimosas (well, <em>faux</em>-mosas).</p>
<p>We’ll start the year with our annual <em>Lord of the Rings</em> movie marathon. The extended editions are cool, but I think this year we might watch the shorter theatrical versions. I think I’ve got a set of those versions in the basement. At least, I hope I do.</p>
<p>I’ll probably work tomorrow on writing summary of what I read and watched in the fourth quarter, and get that posted. It’s been a terrible quarter for getting reading done. My totals will be way down. But I think I still have some tomorrows ahead of me.</p>
<p>In fact, it’s been a terrible year in many ways — full of stress and anxiety and ugly politics and awful news. We’re still here. May 2019 be better for you, and for all of us.</p>
<h3 id="the-last-hours">The Last Hours</h3>
<p>It’s the first, and we have just started our <em>Lord of the Rings</em> marathon, watching the theatrical editions instead of the extended editions. I came back to fill in the details of the last few hours of 2018.</p>
<p>I left the office about 3:15, and ran out to Costco. It was rainy and foggy, and I needed to run the car’s air conditioner to clear the fog from the windows. On the way to Costco, I heard on the radio, or thought I heard, that Airport Boulevard was closed at State Street due to flooding, so I decided to get off at Ann Arbor-Saline Road and take Lohr to Ellsworth to the other part of Airport Boulevard to get into Costco, then go back up Lohr to Ann Arbor-Saline Road to get on I-94. In retrospect, though, I think they were probably talking about Airport Drive, not Airport Boulevard. They connect, but Airport Drive is a little further south (and services the actual municipal airport).</p>
<p>At Costco I bought orange juice, La Croix water in the tall cans, celery, apples, bagged salads, eggs, butter, bagels, two bags of Shishito peppers, and industrial-size packages of paper towels and toilet paper. My plan for New Year’s Day breakfast was scrambled eggs, blistered Shishito peppers, and toasted bagels, with our faux-mosas.</p>
<p>Costco was hopping. I had to wait quite some time to check out. Then I went to GFS on Carpenter Road, and bought Jiffy Mix for cornbread and ham hocks. Then it was on to Meijer. I knew it was a bad idea to go to Meijer on New Year’s Eve, but Grace wanted black-eyed peas, and they are the only local store where I’ve been able to find them. Meijer was crowded. I found that the space on the shelf where they stock black-eyed peas was completely empty. So I went to ask someone at the customer service desk. That required about twenty minutes in line. They confirmed that they had no more black-eyed pease. So I went back and picked up a couple of bags of red beans, a couple of bags of split peas, and a couple of bags of pinto beans, in case Grace and our housemate wanted to do something different — a red beans and dirty rice thing, a split pea soup thing, or maybe even a refried beans thing. Then it took me another twenty or thirty minutes to check out.</p>
<p>When I got back in the car, Grace had been sending me text messages. I had left my phone in the car, apparently under the ridiculously optimistic assumption that I’d be able to get in and out of Meijer quickly. Our housemate was making chili, and we were out of diced tomatoes. So I told Grace that I would get gas and try one more place — the little Mexican grocery near Textile off of Carpenter.</p>
<p>That little grocery has hundreds of bags of beans of different types, occupying yards and yards of shelf space. But there were only five cans of diced tomatoes in the whole store, and they were quite hard to find. I’m still confused as to how they could stock so many beans and so few tomatoes. Aren’t tomatoes pretty much a staple of Mexican cooking? Anyway, I finally found the tomatoes, but they did not have black-eyed peas. So then, home. It had taken me three hours to run a few errands. I was pretty sick of the whole thing by the time I got home.</p>
<p>Our housemate was finishing up a pot of chili, made with ground bison, and a pot of packaged Velveeta macaroni and cheese, and assembled one of the Costco Caesar salads. I got the groceries put away, leaving the orange juice and La Croix water in my car to stay cold, since there wasn’t room for it in the refrigerator, and I didn’t want the kids to get into them until New Year’s Day.</p>
<p>I think we’re just going to have to order a case of some nice heirloom black-eyed peas.</p>
<p>The three older kids had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party — their piano teacher invited them. I really didn’t want to go out again, but Grace was feeling well enough to drive them, so after dinner and after the kids did some cleanup, she ran them up to their piano teacher’s house.</p>
<h3 id="millions"><em>Millions</em></h3>
<p>We watched a movie on our housemate’s computer, plugged into our TV. It’s one of Grace’s favorite movies: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millions_(2004_film)"><em>Millions</em></a> from 2004. I actually have a DVD of this movie on order and we should be getting it in the mail in a few days. Having read the description, it sounded like a pretty conventional children’s morality tale.</p>
<p><em>Millions</em> turned out to be something quite different. It’s actually a much odder movie that partakes heavily of magical realism, a real genre-bender. It’s sort of a blend of <em>Home Alone</em>, <em>Stand By Me</em>, and <em>Household Saints</em>; it also reminds me of the old TV show <em>Joan of Arcadia</em>, but with more visual pyrotechnics. It’s really fun, and I enjoyed it more than I expected. The screenplay contains many clever little bits of setup that pay off later in the form of jokes playing out in the backgrounds, or in minor subplots. The movie’s only real flaws center around its ending. It has a couple of endings, and they both feel a little gratuitous and unconvincing: one is a bit too maudlin, and one is a bit to joyful. The whole storyline stretches credulity a little bit, but the meetings with saints are funny and moving, and the back-story about the crime that sets the plot in motion is funny and brilliant.</p>
<p>We’ll have a DVD shortly, and we’ll no doubt watch this one again.</p>
<h3 id="last-words">Last Words</h3>
<p>I will write a summary of quarter 4. I might write some kind of epilogue, or afterword to the whole year-long journal; I’m not sure yet. But it will be a 2019 project, for the “director’s cut,” or book form of the blog, rather than something completed in 2018. After today’s post, I’m going to put this weekly format on hiatus, at least for a while. I will write differently in 2019. I’m not yet sure just what I’ll write.</p>
<p>Even without the quarter 4 summary, I’ve exceeded 450,000 words. If I turn the text into an OpenOffice document with <strong>pandoc</strong>, it’s over 780 pages long. I have started a project to go back and edit the posts, but haven’t even completed editing the posts from the first quarter yet. It’s <strong>long</strong>!</p>
<p>I had hopes that I’d end this year-long writing project with some sort of a bang — a long autobiographical essay, or a number of book or film reviews — basically, something to close it out well. Instead it feels like we are just barely managing to get the basics accomplished, and my free time is being squeezed down to nothing. The medications are helping my anxiety level, but also making me tired. Maybe I need to feel that tiredness for a while, and get some extra sleep.</p>
<p>That’s a whimper to end the year on, not a bang. But maybe a whimper is just more realistic. The holidays have always been a hard time for me, and we have additional challenges this year. I remain hopeful that things will improve in 2019 — that we’ll finally sell the house, that we’ll find more help in practical matters, that our financial situation will stabilize, etc. I’m optimistic because I have to be. How does the saying go? “Hope is a discipline.” I follow <strong>@prisonculture</strong> on Twitter and I think I might have first read this in her <a href="https://twitter.com/prisonculture/status/1009621164241641473?lang=en">tweet</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Before i <em>[sic]</em> log off. One thing. Many years ago, I heard a nun who was giving a speech say “hope is a discipline.” It stuck with me and became a sort of mantra for me. I understood her to be saying that hope is a practice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I hope to keep practicing hope, and remember how richly we have been blessed.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Black Corridor</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the Gollancz omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>)</li>
<li><em>Millions</em> (2004 film)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>Sunday, December 30th and Monday, December 31st, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-43197768186034987402018-12-30T21:04:00.002-05:002018-12-30T21:04:21.414-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, December 29th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<h3 id="it-takes-you-away">“It Takes You Away”</h3>
<p>Last night after dinner we managed to watch another episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>, called “It Takes You Away.” This episode starts in a promising way. Our gang comes across a boarded-up farmhouse in rural Norway. Inside they find a blind teen-aged girl named Hanne, hiding in a closet against the coming of a monster. Hanne’s father is missing; her mother is dead. There’s a lot of delicious ambiguity in the opening minutes. Is the “girl” not what she seems? Is the monster, which we only hear and don’t see, invisible? After all, if the monster is invisible, the sighted don’t really have much of an advantage in fighting it.</p>
<p>Further exploration of the farmhouse reveals a mirror that is also a portal; the portal opens on a series of dark and grim cavernous passages. This is an “anti-zone,” a buffer zone between planes that are not “allowed” to come into contact with each other. In the anti-zone the gang meets a creature called Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs, and encounter the delightfully-named “flesh moths.” This has to be one of the all-time lowest-budget locations ever used since the 2009 reboot. Menace is conveyed with a fog machine, colored lights, and animated moths. Ribbons is a completely thrown-away character. We’re left wondering what the point of all this was, if it wasn’t just to pad out the episode.</p>
<p>As an expeditionary team explores the anti-zone, Ryan, left behind to guard Hanne, discovers that the sound of the monster is being produced by a recording played over speakers hidden around the property.</p>
<p>The expeditionary team reaches another portal, and enters what appears to be a mirror image of the same farmhouse. Inside they find Hanne’s father, with someone who appears to be Hanne’s mother. Then Graham’s deceased wife Grace shows up.</p>
<p>I kept expecting this episode to settle down a bit and spin its story elements back inward for a while, rather than spinning them out further. The story’s treatment of the “but you can’t be here, you’re dead” people are very, very reminiscent of Stanislaw Lem’s novel <em>Solaris</em>. That book is largely about the inability of people to accept the things they feel are impossible, at the cost of much pain. The Solitract seems like an interesting idea as well — but did we need another conscious entity plucked from before the start of the Universe, rather than something that already exists in the immense history of <em>Doctor Who</em>? It feels like too much, to me. “Solitract” sounds like it means “solitary place,” and that describes well the dimension or universe where the Solitract exists. And… did it have to manifest as a crudely animated talking frog?</p>
<p>I think the frog might be an oblique reference to <em>Life, the Universe, and Everything</em> by Douglas Adams. In that book, a man named Prak is given an overdose of truth serum, which causes him to tell <strong>all</strong> the truth. Anyone who hears it goes insane, so Prak is placed in solitary confinement until the drug wears off. When our heroes find him, as part of their quest to find the ultimate Question, he’s done telling the truth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oh, I can’t remember any of it now,” said Prak. “I thought of writing some of it down, but first I couldn’t find a pencil, and then I thought, why bother?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>There was a long silence, during which they thought they could feel the Universe age a little. Prak stared into the torchlight.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“None of it?” said Arthur at last. “You can remember none of it?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“No. Except most of the good bits were about frogs, I remember that.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Suddenly he was hooting with laughter again and stamping his feet on the ground.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“You would not believe some of the things about frogs,” he gasped. “Come on let’s go and find ourselves a frog. Boy, will I ever see them in a new light!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, again — not a bad episode, and there are some nice science fiction tropes going on in this one. But again, it’s entirely self-contained. At the end, The Doctor leaves the Solitract in its solitary place, Hanne and her father are going to head back to Oslo, and the gang is off on another adventure. I’ve actually been expecting Grace to show up; they’ve telegraphed that pretty hard, with Graham’s ongoing grief. But I expected her presence to leave some lasting influence on the story. I guess they’ve been keeping that in reserve so that Graham can appear to enter a new phase of his grief by choosing to give up the faux-Grace. But I don’t really feel like that payoff has been worth the wait.</p>
<h3 id="today">Today</h3>
<p>Things haven’t gone brilliantly today. Grace’s blood pressure has been creeping up, so I asked her to go back on nifedipine. This will knock her for a loop, leaving her dizzy and nursing a headache all day, but I was just not comfortable with the numbers she was getting, and I don’t want to have to rush her back to the hospital. It’s more of a burden on me, though, since she can’t do much supervision of the kids, and we wanted to get out to buy a few things. I’m not sure she’ll be able to walk around a store.</p>
<p>I haven’t had anything to eat yet today. The kids were up and wanted to do some cooking, so we gave Sam instructions on how to roast some potatoes. He promptly ignored them, putting oil on some potatoes, then putting them on a cookie sheet rather than a baking dish and putting it in the oven. The oil of course then drizzled all over the inside of the oven and made a big smoking mess.</p>
<p>I got up and out to the kitchen and spent some time picking more broken glass out of the garbage disposal. Yesterday at some point Grace heard a glass breaking, and kept asking the kids to find out where it went, but no one could find broken glass anywhere. One of them must have thrown a glass into the sink. If they had not removed the wire screen over the drain, which is supposed to remain there, it wouldn’t have all gone into the disposal. But it did, so there I was. I can’t really where gloves for that job, since I need to feel for the little bits of glass stuck in the holes in the bottom of the disposal. I always wind up with a number of shallow cuts on my fingers when I do this. But I got the disposal working again.</p>
<p>Then I had to take apart the bottom of the oven again and clean that. It turns out there weren’t any gloves anyway. In case you’ve never experienced it, the feel of oven cleaner getting into shallow cuts all over your fingers is really quite something.</p>
<p>So I’m not in the best mood on Christmas Eve Eve Day. And now it’s time to pay some bills that I haven’t managed to get to yet. I’m sure that will help. I did read a couple more stories in <em>The Bloody Chamber</em>. It continues to be really enjoyable. I’ve only got two stories left.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Later yesterday afternon Grace felt up to doing a little bit of shopping so I took her to Meijer. We bought ingredients for egg rolls, a can of Café du Monde coffee, more celery for juicing, some flour and sugar for baking, and a number of small stocking stuffer gifts: socks and underwear, and bags of pistachios. They were completely out of egg roll wrappers, but they did have the smaller square wonton wrappers and round potsticker wrappers. Meijer was very crowded and it took a very long time to check out. Grace didn’t have much energy left to give by the time we left Meijer. She had run out of Percoset and her pain level was creeping up.</p>
<p>We got back home and unloaded things and again begged the kids to work on their kitchen cleanup chores. Then was then past time for me to put Benjamin in the car — Grace asked me to take him with me because he was the one she most wanted out of the house for a while — and head to Detroit Metro Airport to pick up Grace’s old friend Alice. It’s been a long while since I have gone to Detroit Metro and I was trying to follow signs to the airport entrances off of I-275, but wound up heading north on I-275 from I-94 instead of south, and so had to get off and loop around, and so was somewhat late to pick her up. The arrival lanes were packed with cars, but the freeways themselves were not, so we got Alice back to our home without difficulties.</p>
<p>As I write this now it’s about 8:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve and I’m trying to figure out what happened between then and now. When I got home last night Veronica had, instead of doing the kitchen cleanup we requested, gone to bed early. In fact we were <strong>two</strong> dishwasher loads behind, because the dishwasher load that should have been completed and put away much earlier in the day had apparently gotten stalled when someone opened the dishwasher and didn’t restart it. So we were pretty angry about that — Veronica going to bed with the dishwasher full of dirty dishes, the sink full of dirty dishes, and the counter covered with more dirty dishes. She swore up and down that she would get up early and take care of dishes in time for me to make breakfast before our housemate needed to start her planned cooking for Christmas.</p>
<p>You can probably guess how that went.</p>
<p>So we had a very late breakfast — I made a pot of coffee, and then a batch of blueberry pancakes, and then another batch of blueberry pancakes and a pan of cheesy scrambed eggs because everyone was very hungry. Then I spent a little time planning with Grace and decided to run to GFS, and then to Costco with our friend Alice so she could get some vegetarian food. GFS did not have the main thing I was looking for: egg roll wrappers. They also didn’t have pre-made eggnog, which Veronica requested. I picked up some steel-cut oats, some Earl Grey tea from Harney and Sons for Grace, a container of wasabi peas (another festive Christmas food), and some vegetable broth. It was looking quite unlikely that the egg-rolls-from-scratch plan was going to come together, so I also bought three boxes of frozen egg rolls: chicken, shrimp, and vegetable.</p>
<p>Our housemate called my cell phone and asked me to bring her four foil pans for the food she was cooking, so she could transport it to her boyfriend’s mother’s apartment, and some brown sugar for the ham. I was actually in the process of loading up my car when I got her call, so she got me in the nick of time — it took only a few more minutes to run in and grab those things.</p>
<p>When I got home I had been planning to run to Costco, but Alice was asleep, and it didn’t seem worthwhile to run to Costco on Christmas Eve for only eggs and eggnog. I did some consultation with Grace about whether we would need anything else for Christmas Even and Christmas Day, and concluded that we could get by and it would be fine if I went back with a bigger shopping list the day after Christmas.</p>
<p>A little while later Grace and the kids decided how we were going to get people to Mass with one car with four seats, and I put the fourth seat back in the Element. The plan was that I would take Grace for 4:30 Mass, and then I’d take the three oldest kids Christmas morning. Grace is still moving pretty slow, so we were quite late, but Grace received communion, Malachi was adorable and peaceful the whole time, and lots of people were excited to meet him. After Mass Grace inquired as to whether she had won a silent auction item she bid on, a few weeks ago. It turned out that she had. It’s a vintage toy baby carriage with baby doll. So we brought that home and stuck it in the garage, and it will be a gift for both Elanor and Veronica.</p>
<p>On the way back we stopped at Stony Creek Liquors and Marketplace near the church. If you try to look up their web site, don’t — it appears that their domain has been hijacked and redirects to some kind of Russian porn site, much to my surprise.</p>
<p>I hadn’t been in that liquor store yet and I was startled by how big it is inside — it looked like a small liquor store occupying part of a building. But it looks like the whole building is the store, and in fact they have a massive selection of beer and liquor and there is a small deli counter in there, too. They had one carton of eggnog left — possibly the last one in Washtenaw County. We also got a six pack of a nice Michigan stout. I picked up a peanut butter-flavored Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll because I was excited to see it in the store, but Grace tasted it as I drove us home and it turned out to be horribly stale, so it went right in the trash.</p>
<p>When I got back home it was time to load up the car with our housemate, one of her daughters, and her baby son in his car seat. The rest of my car was entirely filled with the gifts she was taking to her boyfriend’s mother’s apartment for their Christmas celebration and the trays of food she worked on this afternoon — ham, yams, green beans, and mashed potatoes. On the way I commiserated with our housemate about how bad the kids had been about finishing their chores, and how we were going to have a Christmas Eve dinner of reheated frozen egg rolls because they weren’t willing to do the kitchen work required to cook egg rolls from scratch. I got her and her kids and her things delivered to the apartment, and then of course I got lost on the way back, so I blundered around a bit until I could find a freeway entrance, which let me take a route I knew how to navigate, instead of the maze of surface streets with their roundabouts and curves and numerous renamings.</p>
<p>When I got back, the kids had apparently had a come-to-Jesus moment, and with Alice’s help had done a bunch of kitch cleanup and were actually in the process of prepping all the fillings for won tons. So as I write this, I’m enjoying some slices of black pepper-coated salami and some wasabi peas while the kids finish up that job and heat up a pot of lard on the stove. I will do the actual deep-frying for safety reasons.</p>
<p>Elanor had been taking a nap, and when she woke up and came into the kitchen, we were horrified to discover that she had apparently taken a spill on the front porch and scraped her forehead and skinned the tip of her nose on the concrete. So she looks like hell, but she’s in her usual good spirits. I’m happy that we won’t be taking her to Mass tomorrow morning, looking like that.</p>
<p>Grace did not take her nifedipine this morning but instead had Joshua make her a big glass of celery juice. We have reproduced the startling result that Grace had in the hospital — the celery, apple, and lemon juice cocktail in fact caused a dramatic drop in her blood pressure. She monitored it for the rest of the afternoon and into this evening, taking it every two hours, and it has normalized, but not spiked much above a healthy level. So we’re going to try to get her back into a regimen involving daily celery juice, but perhaps a smaller amount twice a day. We’ll watch her and if her blood pressure starts to get dangerously high, she’ll have to go on the nifedipine, at least her evening dose, until we find a better solution.</p>
<p>It’s time for me to go deep-fry the wontons in lard left over from our friends’ pig. Merry Christmas, and Excelsior!</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I’m catching up on the day after Christmas. I described most of Christmas Eve already, and there isn’t much more to tell. The egg rolls in the form of wontons were quite tasty, and the kids had a good time making them. Grace and I weren’t up to distributing the pistachios, socks, and underwear into the kids’ bags, so we left that for Christmas Day. I called my father and brought him up to date on the situation with Chi, Grace, and the rest of us.</p>
<p>On Christmas Day I got up early with my alarm and got myself bathed, and then woke up the three oldest kids to go to Mass. I wanted us to get there early, which we did, because I thought the Mass might be very crowded, and it wasn’t. Veronica, Sam, and Joshua were reasonably well-behaved. I found out that what I suspected was true — they wanted to go to the 10:00 Mass because they thought there would be coffee and donuts afterwards, as there are on most weekend morning Masses. But they didn’t do that on Christmas, and I wasn’t surprised — I think most people wanted to go home to their own Christmas celebrations rather than socialize at church.</p>
<p>When we got home, our friend Alice took the kids outside to play while Grace and I opened up packages of socks and underwear and distributed them, with the bags of pistachios, into the kids’ gift bags, and brought in the old baby carriage and doll for Veronica and Elanor. Our friend Alice had brought them a small assortment of vintage treasures to pick from including a vintage hippie purse, which Grace claimed. While we were sorting things, our housemate called to request a ride. We told her we would be there soon but we were going to open gifts first. After that was done, since I don’t really know the way there and back very well, and Grace was feeling well enough to take a short drive, Grace took the car to go pick up our housemate and her children.</p>
<p>After the kids all opened up their bags, we spent the afternoon lollygagging around. We ate the reheated frozen egg rolls and Grace and I finally got to see <em>Iron Man</em>, the 2009 movie, on DVD, and we cleaned up the kitchen, and there isn’t much else to tell about our Christmas except that towards evening, Grace’s blood pressure was creeping up a bit. So I asked her to take her nighttime dose of nifedipine, which she did, with a plan to have her use her celery juice in the morning and monitor it and see if she could skip her noon dose.</p>
<h3 id="iron-man"><em>Iron Man</em></h3>
<p><em>Iron Man</em> is generally ranked as one of the best movies to come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, and after finally watching it, Grace and I agree with this assessment. I was impressed that in the midst of all the explosions and iron suit special effects (some of which actually look slightly dated and unconvincing on the small screen after only a decade), the storyline of the movie is actually quite character-driven, and the actors in the lead roles, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, and Gwyneth Paltrow, are all very good. Many scenes are also very well-written, to the point where in parts we feel more like we’re watching a serious dramatic film, where events are layered with symbolic meaning. This is nowhere so evident as in the hilarious, gross, and touching scene (yes, all three at once) where Paltrow has to help Downey replace the tiny reactor that powers an electromatic to keep his heart working.</p>
<p>Downey’s role in the story was a tricky one — he has to convince you that he’s the billionaire head of a weapons company, and that he doesn’t feel any moral qualms about this. But then he has to convince you that he’s had enough of a change of heart to risk destroying his father’s company and alienating everyone else in the firm. Downey navigates this beautifully by underplaying scenes that might easily have become preachy and unconvincing. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_(2008_film)">Wikipedia</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was much improvisation in dialogue scenes, because the script was not completed when filming began… Favreau [the director] felt that improvisation would make the film feel more natural… [i]t was Downey’s idea to have Stark hold a news conference on the floor, and he created the speech Stark makes when demonstrating the Jericho weapon… Bridges described this approach as “a $200 million student film,” and noted that it caused stress for Marvel executives when the stars were trying to come up with dialogue on the day of filming scenes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I had the feeling, watching some of these scenes, that ad-libbing or at least writing on the fly might have been involved, and in my view these scenes really sell the story. Grace and I were both impressed with the way the screenplay ties up loose ends and captures details from the perspectives of multiple characters. For example, there’s a scene earlier in the film where Downey dances with Paltrow at a party and they nearly kiss. Downey has to race off for more drama. But near the end of the movie, we hear Paltrow recount the evening from her perspective, and it is a nice touch that does something that a lot of superhero films don’t bother to do, which is to remind us that assistants and sidekicks and friends and lovers of superheroes are people that <strong>have</strong> perspectives.</p>
<p>Downey is very appealing as the protagonist of this movie, and his role does something else I find interesting. Downey is not actually a large man, or immensely muscle-bound, although of course he’s fit. And so, much of the <strong>physical</strong> presence he displays in the film is actually created by his acting. He convinces the viewers that he’s burlier and more imposing than Downey really is by his confident movement. And I also like the way in which, even in his iron suit, Downey discovers many moments in which he can’t win by force, and has to outsmart his enemies instead.</p>
<p>Grace had some qualms about the portrayal of Arabs in this film, and I had a few too, although as she put it “I wasn’t immediately revolted, the way I often am.” I think the role of Pepper Potts is worthy of some discussion about female characters in superhero films. I’m not really familiar with the old comic book Iron Man, but I’m sure the original role was pretty appalling, and I’m happy they gave her character more agency in the film.</p>
<p>The film runs 124 minutes, and there’s just about nothing I would actually edit out to make it tighter. It could lose a minute or two here and there, but for the most part, it doesn’t drag. And I was pleased that by the time we got to the big showdown, I actually was interested enough in the characters to care what happened. That’s not true of a lot of superhero films.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>The day after Christmas has also been a bit of a snooze, which is far from a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. This morning I gave Chi his first bath. He’s still only twelve days old, so it was more like a thorough soak of his bottom half and a light rinse of his top half. He seemed completely unperturbed by the process, and didn’t fuss at all.</p>
<p>I ran out this morning to get a couple of boxes of donuts from Tim Horton’s. Our housemate brought down her laptop and set it up for the kids to watch the movie <em>Pixels</em>, which I’ve never seen. I watched the first half-hour or so and decided I didn’t need to see the rest. Grace had her celery juice this morning and her blood pressure is comfortably in the safe zone, so she will again skip her afternoon dose of nifedipine, and we’ll watch it and see if she needs an evening dose.</p>
<p>This afternoon I’ll run out to get laundry detergent and pick up a few things at Costco. The tentative plan is for me to go back to work tomorrow, and Alice to stay until Saturday.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Yesterday afternoon I went to The Little Seedling store for more laundry detergent, but they didn’t have any more jugs of the Allen’s Naturally that we’ve been using. So I had to go next door to Arbor Farms and pick up a smaller jug of Seventh Generation detergent instead, along with a couple of bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds, and a few packages of cheese for Alice. In the checkout line, the woman bagging my things said that I looked like I belonged in the Bee Gees. This kind of made my day!</p>
<p>Then I went on to Costco.</p>
<p>Grace and I had received our annual 2% reward in the form of a paper certificate. I was able to cash this in at the counter and use it to pay for another year’s membership, and take the rest in cash. I put the cash towards a load of groceries. We needed to stock up on celery, apples, bananas, oranges, size 4 diapers (Elanor is outgrowing size 3), eggs, frozen crab cakes for Friday’s dinner, bags of salad, corn chips and salsa, and boxes and cans of coconut milk.</p>
<p>The rest of the evening consisted of a lot of cooking and cleanup work. Alice made nachos and roasted brussels sprouts. I cooked a package of steaks from Costco. These were larger than the lamb steaks, so I pan-fried them a couple at a time in our biggest cast-iron pan, then finished them in the oven at 425 degrees — two minutes on a side in the pan, then seven minutes in the oven. For seasoning, I gave them a light coating of salt, pepper, and garlic salt. Some of them also got smoked paprika. I used the pan drippings to make a quick gravy using corn starch, white wine vinegar, and mustard powder. They were delicious. I sliced up one of the leftover steaks to take to work along with some of the multi-grain bread.</p>
<p>Grace’s blood pressure continues to be too high for my comfort. She measured it last night before bed, when she was due for another dose of labetalol, and after having morning and evening glasses of celery juice. It seems pretty clear that the labetalol is not keeping it level — the doses don’t last long enough. We’ve established that the celery juice has a strong antihypertensive effect, but it also doesn’t seem to keep it level over time. Grace will see her obstetrician tomorrow for a follow-up appointment. We’re also working on a plan for who she should see next.</p>
<p>While the kids were finishing up some hand-washing and Grace was working through her e-mail backlog, I read the last two stories in <em>The Bloody Chamber</em>. One of them is “The Company of Wolves,” in which Carter clearly honed the language to a fine point — it’s loaded with alliteration and really beautiful turns of phrase.</p>
<h3 id="back-to-work">Back to Work</h3>
<p>Our friend Alice is still here so it seemed reasonable to go into work, to avoid taking any unpaid days. Grace needed the car today, because the kids are back into scheduled activities. So she and Chi rode in with me this morning, so that she could take the car back home. A number of my co-workers were out, so it was pretty quiet upstairs. I went through the backlog of e-mail and started getting my head back into some of my LabVIEW code. Grace came out to get me this evening as well. I’ve got more leftover steak and bread, as well as some frozen burritos and yogurt, left to eat tomorrow. I should be paid tonight, although most of it is goint to go right to the Team One account.</p>
<p>The weather has been strange. We had a little sun yesterday, but for the most part it has been gray and overcast for almost two weeks. Today it is about forty degrees, and tomorrow it is supposed to be over fifty. We got only a very light sprinkling of snow on Christmas Day. I’m grateful that we’ve passed the shortest day of the year, but we could really use a little more sun.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Grace came to get me from the office last night about 7:15 p.m., bringing Chi with her, and drove me home. She reported that the kids had been grazing on and off during the day, and that she didn’t have any real plan for dinner. So I suggested we stop at Blaze Pizza on Washtenaw. I think the last time we got their pizzas was last January, as reported in this blog. I had them make a meat lover’s, a veggie, a white, and a barbecue chicken. When we got home I was quite happy to discover that the house and the kitchen were in great shape — our housemate, Alice, and Grace had managed to keep the kids on track with cleaning chores.</p>
<p>Grace had me examine her incision. Worryingly, there is some slight bleeding happening, on one side. The other side seems to be healing fine. There was no sign of infection that I could detect, but it seems like she might have torn some stitches, maybe in a fall she took earlier in the week. So I’m glad that she is seeing her doctor today.</p>
<p>I was so distracted last night that I think I may have taken my evening medications twice. I use an alarm on my phone to remind me, but if I’m driving or very busy, I silence the alarm and just remind myself to take the pills later. I can’t really be sure, but the side effects of Celexa seemed more severe than usual last night and this morning. Oops.</p>
<p>This morning I drove in with Alice so that she could take the car back home, and asked her to go with Grace to her appointment this afternoon in case she needs assistance. So I will be carless today. I stopped at Joe and Rosie’s and got a coffee and a couple of day-old pastries for me and a tea for Alice.</p>
<p>I’m planning to go to Costco after work, although that might be complicated by the car situation. We’ll have the crab cakes for our Friday dinner. Alice will leave by a noon flight on Saturday.</p>
<p>The kids have been watching an awful lot of movies and TV shows. After New Year’s Day, we’ll call their holiday TV-watching binge over, and put the TV back in the basement.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>Once again I’m playing catch-up. I was hoping to have more time, on these last few days of the year, to reflect on things, maybe finish a few books in progress, and come up with some insightful digressions, instead of just reporting what happened. But it seems that at present I am barely able to even keep up. So I’m writing this on Sunday night at about 7:30 p.m. after a dizzying weekend and I have some more chores to do before bedtime.</p>
<p>Grace gave me an update about her obstetrics appointment She did not get to see her obstetrician, and was seen instead by a nurse practitioner at the practice who consulted with a physician on call. The physician did not examine her. She got some specific recommendations on the blood pressure ranges they consider to be hazardous. The nurse practitioner examined her incision, but did not palpate her abdomen. She told Grace that everything looked like it was within the range of normal healing. But I’m not really satisfied — no one felt the difference between the two sides of her belly. I hope that she will soon be able to see her obstetrician who made the incision, and get a more thorough examination.</p>
<p>Grace picked me up at my office Friday evening. I was expecting her about 7:15, which would have left us plenty of time for a Costco trip since they close at 8:30, but she got there about twenty to eight, so it was almost eight when we got to Costco. She had baby Chi with her in the car, and was not feeling up to racing around the story with me, so I did the racing around myself while we exchanged text messages. This time I bought mostly fruit, vegetables, and salad. Benjamin wanted more pot pies. Joshua wanted french fries and sausages. They didn’t have frozen french fries — their frozen sweet potato fries seem to be only a seasonal item. Grace wanted honey. Pippin wanted a surprise, to I got him a box of Taiwanese <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_cake">pineapple cakes</a>. I also got some chicken legs. Our friend Alice wanted vegetables so she could pack some for her return trip, and hummus, so I bought a big vegetable tray and a box of little packs of hummus. I got the Kirkland brand (Costco’s house brand), because I am boycotting Sabra. I also got another bag of chips and a seven-layer dip, for no good reason other than I was craving it.</p>
<p>I considered getting more red meat but just felt a little burned out on red meat. It also seems like I am starting to get a little bit of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gout">gout</a>. I was complaining to Grace about a stabbing pain in the ball of my big toe. I thought it might be a plantar wart, but couldn’t find one. Grace suggested gout, so I looked it up on some web sites such as the Mayo Clinic’s web site. The diagrams showing the common location of the pain describe my symptoms exactly. So I will talk about it with my doctor — I see him again in a few days. There’s a possibility it might be related to the blood pressure medication I’m taking, although certainly I could stand to get back onto a healthier diet and exercise regimen.</p>
<p>Speaking of exercise regimen, Grace and I are giving serious thought to spending the rest of my end-of-year bonus on a treadmill. I know that I’d use it, and I think if we put it in the bedroom, she would use it, too, and we could also allow some of the kids to use it, with supervision.</p>
<p>On the way out of the Costco parking lot, I realized that one of my headlights is out. Again. It seems like I just had them both replaced!</p>
<p>When we got home, we put the crab cakes in the oven, then served them with the vegetable tray and the seven-layer dip. Our friend Alice ate a good portion of the dip and chips for dinner. I had hoped that the kids would like the crab cakes, but they didn’t really seem to enjoy them very much.</p>
<p>After dinner, we spent the rest of the evening arguing with the kids about their chores until it was quite late, and eventually went to bed.</p>
<p>Grace’s blood pressure was worry8ingly high again at bedtime, even an hour after her dose of labetalol. So she took another dose of nifedipine, the one with the nasty side effects. This pretty much guaranteed that she was going to feel like crap the next day, exhausted and headachey.</p>
<h3 id="the-next-day">The Next Day</h3>
<p>It wasn’t a great night’s sleep — our little Chi is not a bad sleeper as newborns go, but he wakes us up a couple of times. I got up and threw on some extremely casual clothes to go to the Greyhound station in Detroit — jeans with a ripped-out leg, and a button-down shirt that is too ratty to wear to work. I was anxious and hated to just wait around the house while Grace and Alice finished getting ready, so I ran out to get myself a coffee and a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit at Tim Horton’s, and to gas up the car. I had been planning to gas it up on the way home from Costco Friday night but I forgot. That’s one of the hazards of getting into a conversation with my wife — I forget my regular routine.</p>
<p>We pulled out of the driveway about ten minutes to eleven and made it to the Greyhound station by 11:45, dropped off Alice, and then got back onto route 10. I asked Grace if she wanted to go ahead and go to the Lego store in Troy at the Somerset Collection mall, as this was something I had hoped to do, in order to get the kids a big Lego set as a post-Christmas gift. She thought that was a good idea so we went there. Grace was not too keen on walking, but fortunately there is a walkway from the parking structure into the mall. Grace needed to eat, so we stopped at a place in the food court called Honey Tree and picked on a strange assortment of food — a chicken shawarma sandwich, a cucumber dill salad, a piece of spanakopita, a bowl of clam chowder, and a bottle of cranberry juice. Everything was pretty good except for the clam chowder, which we both agreed was not worth eating.</p>
<p>We made our way to the Lego store. Grace came in with me for a few minutes, but Chi wanted to nurse again, so we found her a bench and then I went back in. I was considering some of the big, big Lego Ninjago sets like the <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/NINJAGO-City-70620">Ninjago City set</a> or the <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/NINJAGO-City-Docks-70657">Ninjago City Docks</a> set. After looking at them in person, though, I decided they were just too big and had too many pieces; they were marked for ages 16 and up, and tagged for expert builders. I think Veronica (14) and Sam (12) could manage sets like that over a few days, but not while surrounded by siblings demanding to participate. I think Grace and I would enjoy it, though, if we had some down time to work on it! I also wasn’t thrilled about spending $230 or $300 on a single set, especially since Grace wanted a Duplo set for Elanor and the younger kids, and I wanted to pick out an “in-between” set for kids who felt too old for the Duplo set and too young for the Ninjago sets.</p>
<p>I wound up solving this by buying a somewhat smaller set, the <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/Destiny-s-Bounty-70618">Destiny’s Bounty</a>, and another one, the <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/Temple-of-Resurrection-70643">Temple of Resurrection</a>. So I bought those two, the Duplo <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/Large-Playground-Brick-Box-10864">Playground set</a>, and for the middle ages, I chose a <a href="https://shop.lego.com/en-US/product/Jurassic-Park-Velociraptor-Chase-75932">Jurassic World Velociraptor Chase set</a>. So I got four sets for a bit more than the price of the giant Ninjago City set. I looked wistfully — again — at the eight hundred dollar Millennium Falcon set on the way out.</p>
<p>We were ready to go, but Grace was feeling flattened, and told me that she needed something to get her up off the bench. So I went on a hunt for a coffee drink. That took some time. None of the storefronts in the food court sold coffee at all. There was a Starbucks, two floors below. There was a very long line at the Starbucks. But I finally was able to bring her back a peppermint mocha, which gave her enough energy to walk to the car. I had to pick up some candy at a little bulk candy place, including some candies in the shape of Lego bricks that actually snap together (well, sort of).</p>
<p>The drive back home was very long, especially since we had to stop so that Grace could nurse baby Chi again. The kids were very excited to see the huge Lego bags holding Lego sets. Veronica in particular was really excited about the Temple of Resurrection — apparently it contains some little masks that she is thrilled to have, although I could not explain why even if I tried. They did not seem excited about the Velociratpor Chase set, though. So we decided they would put together the Destiny’s Bounty ship on the table, and the smaller kids could work on the Duplo set on the floor, and the other two sets would go in our room until later.</p>
<p>Grace had promised our housemate that she would take her to Once Upon a Child, the used clothing store in Ypsilanti, so they left me with baby Chi and headed out again. The kids came to me to complain that some pieces were missing from the Destiny’s Bounty set. Then they found one or two of them, so I’m not sure if any were actually missing, although it wouldn’t be out of the question. If so, it was only a couple of small bricks, and I had to explain to them that I wasn’t going to be able to drive all the way back to Troy anytime soon — they would just have to muddle along as best they could.</p>
<p>When Grace and our housemate got back, our housemate was craving soup. So we improvised a chicken soup in the Instant Pot — we sauteed chopped celery, onion, and carrots, she browned one of the packs of chicken legs in a cast-iron pan, then we put them together in the pot with the two quarts of vegetable broth that Alice didn’t use, along with a bag of the leftover pork and cabbage filling we had made for egg rolls on Christmas Eve. The result was quite tasty.</p>
<p>After getting a dishwasher load going, I helped Grace get herself washed. She is not allowed to bathe her incision fully, and she has been feeling too unstable to take a regular shower. So we put a little water in the tub, so that it stayed below her incision, and she soaped herself and I hosed her off with a spray bottle. She took off the rest of her tape strips, which were loose by now. We didn’t see any more bleeding, so that was encouraging. She does not like to wear the compression belt, but we wrapped her belly up with an ace bandage.</p>
<p>Her blood pressure was high again — so, more nifedipine.</p>
<p>I do have one more book that I’ve been meaning to mention. I’ve been reading a little bit of E. R. Eddison’s <em>Mistress of Mistresses</em>. This is the first book of his Zimiamvia Trilogy. It follows <em>The Worm Ouroborous</em> and seems to take place in another part of the same world, and features a character, Lessingham, who is present in the introductory chapter of <em>The Worm Ouroborous</em> as an observer.</p>
<p><em>Mistress</em> is a less straightforward and more challenging book. It was the first of the trilogy to be published, but it is chronologically the last of the three. In the first chapter, “The Overture,” we learn that Lessingham, apparently a man of our world, has died. Most of the chapter consists of his best friend recounting a brief history of their friendship to a mysterious woman. Then, the two seal up Lessingham’s corpse in a room, open a secret panel above his bed, which hides a portrait of his dead wife, and burn down the castle. It’s a deeply romantic conceit, and a bit gothic as well. In the next chapter we meet Lessingham again, but it’s a different Lessingham — Lessingham in the afterlife, or a sort of ur-Lessingham, of which the earthly one was a sort of copy. I don’t really claim to know what is going on yet, as I have really only finished the first chapter. But if you’re reading Eddison, you’re probably not <strong>really</strong> reading him for the story; you’re probably, like me, reading him for the amazing beauty of the his language, and descriptive world-building:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I can see you now, if I shut my eyes; in memory I see you, staring at the Lynxfoot Wall: your kingdom to be, as I very well know you then resolved (and soon performed your resolve): that hundred miles of ridge and peak and precipice, of mountains of Alpine stature and seeming, but sunk to the neck in the Atlantic stream and so turned to islands of an unwonted fierceness, close set, so that seen from afar no breach appears nor sea-way betwixt them. So sharp cut was their outline that night, and so unimaginably nicked and jagged, against the rosy radiance to the north which was sunset and sunrise in one, that for the moment they seemed feigned mountains cut out of smoky crystal and set up against a painted sky. For a moment only; for there was the talking of the waves under our bows, and the wind in our faces, and, as time went by with still that unaltering scene before us, every now and again the flight and wild cry of a black-backed gull, to remind us that this was salt sea and open air and land ahead. And yet it was hard then to conceive that here was real land, with the common things of life and houses of men, under that bower of light where the mutations of night and day seemed to have been miraculously slowed down; as if nature had fallen entranced with her own beauty mirrored in that sheen of primrose light. Vividly, as it had been but a minute since instead of a quarter of a century, I see you standing beside me at the taffrail, with that light upon your lean and weather-beaten face, staring north with a proud, alert, and piercing look, the whole frame and posture of you alive with action and resolution and command. And I can hear the very accent of your voice in the only two things you said in all that four hours’ crossing: first, ‘The sea-board of Demonland.’ Then, an hour later, I should think, very low and dream-like, ‘This is the first sip of Eternity.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Demonland is the location where the events of <em>The Worm Ouroborous</em> start; it is on the planet Mercury, or at least some <strong>version</strong> of the planet Mercury.</p>
<p><em>Mistress of Mistresses</em> clearly won’t be of interest to everyone. I’m still not sure if I’m going to finish reading it. I first picked up the trilogy and <em>Worm</em> in a used bookstore in Erie perhaps back when I was, I think, back in high school, perhaps in 1982 or 1983. I read <em>The Worm Ouroborous</em> back then, with some difficulty. I have since read it and enjoyed it more, and will very likely read it again. But the books of the Zimiamvia trilogy, although fascinating, I couldn’t really penetrate back then. As well as being fantasy novels, they contain deep and antiquated digressions into religion and philosophy. I’m not going to force myself through chapters if my eyes continue to glaze over. But now, thirty-five or more years later, maybe they will open up to me and pull me in.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Mistress of Mistresses</em> by E. R. Eddison (started)</li>
<li><em>Iron Man</em> (2008 Film)</li>
<li>“It Takes You Away” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 episode)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, December 29th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-79421330291692257012018-12-22T19:01:00.003-05:002018-12-22T19:34:28.275-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, December 22nd, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>I’m back at home and it’s aabout 10:30 p.m., and it’s been another long day. Fortunately I got a full night’s sleep last night, so I was pretty well-equipped to handle it. As I was getting ready this morning I bumped into our housemate who was making breakfast for her kids. I gave her a couple of our reusable plastic mousetraps and asked her to put them in the upstairs bathroom with a little peanut butter as bait.</p>
<p>I went to visit Grace and little Malachi this morning, grabbing a small mocha and a tuna sandwich on my way up to her room. Grace was pretty exhausted. She had not been able to get any significant sleep during the night. Malachi did well, though — he’s passed his blood sugar screening. So for a couple of hours I held him, and had him suck on my finger while I dribbled the last of the donor milk into his mouth from a plastic syringe, while Grace got a little sleep.</p>
<p>Grace’s blood pressure had another “overshoot” back up too high, so there was a lot of back-and-forth with the doctor on call about making small tweaks to her medication schedule. Apparently they are generally more worried about the low numbers she had than the elevated numbers she had this morning.</p>
<p>There’s not much to tell about the afternoon. The mother/baby unit doesn’t have spare patient meals on hand sometimes the way the labor and delivery unit does, and I missed lunch at the cafeteria downstairs, so I had to make do with snacks from Joe’s Java, the cafe and shop. Grace and I had a little time to talk about things. She told me that our housemate wouldn’t set the mousetraps. I asked her why she thought that, and her answer was that, basically, she just seems to refuse to do anything we ask her to do, including putting her laundry in the laundry bin instead of on the floor. It seems to be a matter of principle for her, the way it seems to be for some adolescents.</p>
<h3 id="the-haunting-of-hill-house"><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em></h3>
<p>I read Grace the rest of chapter 3 of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>. Our protagonist Eleanor has now met up with the rest of the cast including Dr. Montague and they begin having conversations as a group. There is some hilarious dialogue in these scenes. Dr. Montague unspools a long story about the history of Hill House. We’re about a third of the way through a novel about a haunted house, and nothing supernatural or frightening has actually happened yet. Jackson is taking her time to really create her setting and characters here.</p>
<h3 id="the-concert">The Concert</h3>
<p>At about a quarter to five I left to go pick up Pippin and Joshua, make sure they were dressed for the Christmas concert, and take them there. They at least had their black pants and dress shirts on. Joshua had his dress black shoes and socks on but Pippin did not — he had his Crocs on. I put on both their ties and tied them, cleaned up a few additional spots on Pippin’s shirt, and asked Joshua to help Pippin get his dress shoes on. He showed up at the door with his shoes on and I think I just assumed that he had his black socks on too, but I found out later he had no socks on.</p>
<p>I drove them to First Presbyterian. They were supposed to be at the church no later than 6:15. We actually got there at 5:45 and I found a place to park in the church parking lot, which was a lot better than how we had to do it last year, parking in a structure. There was a service going on so the choir folks weren’t ready for the kids yet. So I decided to take them for a brief walk, in order to get some food into them, to help make sure no one had a meltdown due to low blood sugar. Unfortunately neither of them had brought a jacket, either. But it was in the forties and we didn’t have far to walk. I took them into a Subway, and we split a roast beef sub. I asked the “sandwich artist” to cut it into quarters. I insisted that we couldn’t have any kind of sauce on the sub, and could eat only the baked, not fried, chips, and couldn’t eat any chips with barbecue flavoring. This was all for the sake of their shirts and ties.</p>
<p>Pippin had agreed to a roast beef sub and I added lettuce and tomato and pickles, but when it came time to eat it, he apparently had a big problem with lettuce and tomato and pickles. I don’t know why. He regularly eats those things at other times. He also complained bitterly that there was “too much air” in his small bag of chips. (Pippin always seems to want things that don’t exist, like a bag of chips with no air in it. Grace says he’s like someone insisting on a kosher ham.) Pippin spent most of the time he had to eat the food complaining about it instead. I pulled all the additions off of Pippin’s sub, set the timer on my phone for two minutes, and told them that was the amount of time they had before we had to leave in order to get back to the church on time. Pippin ate most of his quarter of the sub and we got out of there, and made it back to the church in time for Joshua and Pippin to go in and meet up with their group. I bought a ticket and found a seat pretty close to the front.</p>
<p>The concert went very smoothly from my perspective. My boys were in the first choir, for younger kids. There are three choirs. The music got gradually more complex. Then for the last few songs, they brought all three choirs together, which made for a huge crowd of kids. Pippin was on the far left edge of the group and unfortunately I couldn’t see him very clearly from where I was sitting. During the first song of the full choir he was turning around and seemed to be bumping into or shoving a girl in front of him. I couldn’t tell exactly what was happening or who started it, but there was some kind of altercation going on between the two of them. He got some kind of a warning hand sign from the choir director and I thought he had settled down. But then as the group was doing a kind of spoken-word introduction for the second song, the choir director had to gesture for one of her assistant directors to come and remove him from the group. So Pippin had to spend the rest of the show standing next to the assistant choir director not with the group, but against the far left wall of the sanctuary.</p>
<p>After the show ended and we could turn our phones back on, I explained to Grace what had happened via text message. She was not pleased. There was a reception afterwards. I spoke to the choir director and apologized for Pippin’s behavior. I asked her if she knew what exactly had happened. She didn’t, but Pippin was definitely being disruptive and not focusing on his performance. I didn’t know the girl or her parents and didn’t see her at the reception. Pippin really should apologize to her, and to them.</p>
<p>I drove the boys back to St. Joe’s to say goodnight to Grace and baby Malachi. They’ve already taken to calling him — “Chi.” It’s part of “Malachi,” but it also sounds like <a href="https://ninjago.fandom.com/wiki/Kai">Kai</a>, a character in <em>Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em>.</p>
<p>As I drove, I told Pippin and Joshua a few of my thoughts. I told them that there were different ways that a child could wind up disrupting a performance and the audience (containing a lot of parents, of course) would be more sympathetic to some of them, and less sympathetic to others. If a child throws up from nerves, or passes out, the choir directors and parents would take care of that child and everyone would feel considerable sympathy. I don’t think any of the audience members would <strong>blame</strong> the child for an attack of nerves, or for getting dizzy after standing too long packed into an overheated sanctuary. But if a child gets into a fight of some kind, like Pippin did, and gets a warning, and then continues to disrupt the performance, most people will tend to think badly of the parents.</p>
<p>I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with Pippin. If the choir director wanted to give him some kind of disciplinary measure like making him sit out the next concert, or putting him on some kind of probation, I would fully support that decision — Pippin had earned it. But after Grace grilled Pippin for a while about his behavior, she decided that he really just isn’t ready for this. So we will pull him out of choir. Joshua, who was actually old enough to move on to the next-older group of kids, but who stayed behind to support Pippin, might be able to move up now. Pippin needs some time to work on his self-discipline and interpersonal skills. It’s disappointing. But he’s my son, and I can’t really say that <strong>I</strong> matured quickly, because that would be a big lie. Pippin might be the one who is most like I was as a child, mild autism and all.</p>
<p>Grace’s blood pressure hadn’t really settled down yet, so the medical staff added a second medication. She’s not having the lows and highs she had Friday, but her system definitely hasn’t become stable yet. She managed to get a shower, to wash her incision. It’s not bleeding or leaking any fluid but she had lost a tape strip and apparently it had separated a bit. So I’m not entirely convinced that she’ll be ready to come home tomorrow, although Malachi is cleared to go.</p>
<p>I hope she can get a good night’s sleep. I’ll get back over there tomorrow morning to check on everyone.</p>
<p>When I got home the house wasn’t too much of a mess. An no, our housemate had not set the mousetraps I asked her to set. They were still sitting on the kitchen counter. And the stove is crusted with grease and spills, and the bottom of the oven is full of burned-on spills.</p>
<p>I only took two more days off this week and it looks like I’ll have to spend a part of at least one of them deep-cleaning the stove and oven again, hopefully before someone starts a fire. If I need to, I’ll take another day or two, but taking more days now will mean I’ll have to go into work during the week of Christmas.</p>
<p>It’s about 11:30. Goodnight!</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>I’m writing this at about 6:45 Tuesday morning, as I didn’t get a chance to write last night.</p>
<p>I slept fairly late again Monday morning — apparently I was still catching up on sleep. I made it to Grace’s room sometime after 10:00 with a double mocha and a couple of sandwiches in hand. I brought in the baby car seat with me, expecting that all three of us would be going home about 3:00. But when I got in, I learned that Grace had been cleared to go home. So, we got packed up, and went through the process of readjusting the straps in the car seat to hold a baby smaller than Eleanor. We had Grace in her wheelchair out in the hall, and we were on our way down to the lobby, where I was going to get the car warmed up, loaded with bags, and then bring it up to the front driveway to load Grace and the baby in his car seat.</p>
<p>On our way out the door one of the nurses took another blood pressure reading. This one was actually apparently a mistake — she wasn’t scheduled for any more readings. But it was very high. So they took more readings, including one with a manual sphygmomanometer. (I got second place in a college spelling be with that word.) Her numbers were very bad. I think the highest reading was around 190 over 120.</p>
<p>So, it was back into bed for Grace while various doctors tried to figure out what to do with her medications. The gave her another long-acting procardia, and more labetalol. Then another short-acting procardia on top of that. Her pressures came down a little, but not nearly enough. I spent several extremely pleasant hours, on and off, holding baby Malachi on my lap and on my chest, whenever he was done nursing with Grace. Pleasant hours, except of course for the fear that my wife and companion and the mother of my children was going to blow a gasket.</p>
<p>Grace was not able to see her regular gynecologist and apparently it was a very busy afternoon and evening for births. So, mostly, we waited. Towards evening they took her back to the labor and delivery unit, because they are set up there with equipment that can do automatic monitoring of blood pressure at whatever interval they want. So we were getting readings every 15 minutes.</p>
<p>Her diastolic gradually came down to 150s and then to 140s, but her systolic was then down into the 60s or so. I wasn’t writing these down. The procardia gave her diarrhea and a headache, which is her usual reaction to procardia. Her pain level started to creep up, so she asked for tylenol and, later, percoset. We are wondering if some of her blood pressure problem might be in response to pain.</p>
<p>I read Grace another part of a chapter of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>, with many interruptions. We are into some parts with very funny dialog, and getting more details about the strange geometry and furnishings of Hill House.</p>
<p>Malachi continued to want to be held all the time, whether he was nursing or sleeping. When I left we were trying to get him to accept being swaddled and sleeping in the bin. I asked a nurse to track down a pacifier. We very rarely use them but it seemed like it was time to try one, because I had to take my pinky finger home.</p>
<p>We made some arrangements for a couple of people to drop in and check on the kids Tuesday. Our friend Joy is planning to come visit on Wednesday.</p>
<p>I had left my bag at home because I thought we were coming home, and I didn’t want to have an extra bag to carry. This meant I had also accidentally left my blood pressure medication at home. I normally take it about 1:30 in the afternoon, but I didn’t get a dose, so towards evening I was getting a bit of a headache, too. I did not want to complicate matters by asking if they would take <strong>my</strong> blood pressure, so resolved to just take all my pills when I got home.</p>
<p>When I left at about a quarter to 11, Grace hadn’t actually seen a physician for almost twelve hours, although we were told that the resident and intern were being kept in the loop, and had been asking to see whoever was available. Grace was planning to see if her old obstetrician, Dr. Fleming, might be able to come for a second opinion this morning.</p>
<p>When I got home, the kids had not taken the trash or recycling out, and everyone was in bed. So I had to roust a couple of kids and get them to finish that chore. The kitchen wasn’t in great shape, but I was not prepared to do anything about it. So I took my own pills and went on to bed. My last couple of text messages from Grace indicated that she still hadn’t been able to see a doctor.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I woke up a bit after 6:00 and could not fall back asleep for a little more rest, so I went downstairs to get my laptop and wrote the above entry for Monday. It’s about 7:15 now. I’m going to put my laptop away, get washed up and dressed, grab some kind of breakfast and coffee, and go see how Grace and the baby are doing.</p>
<h3 id="later">Later</h3>
<p>OK! So, it is now Friday afternoon and I have some catching up to do.</p>
<p>Tuesday morning I got myself back to the hospital, and shortly after I arrived the nursing staff wheeled baby Malachi back from the nursery. There was a lot of waiting around and a number of pieces of paperwork to complete. Grace had finally gotten to consult with her obstetrician and she came up with a medication plan that seemed reasonable, involving two blood pressure medications. The first one is her usual labetalol. The second one, nefedipine, is effective but the side effects are bad: diziness and an unpleasant headache. She also continued to take Percocet, which is oxycodone with acetominophen (<em>aka</em> paracetamol) and it seems as if the pain reliever may also have helped reduce her blood pressure.</p>
<p>Little Malachi at some point had another measurement of his bilirubin taken, which was the last test that might have delayed his discharge. It was normal, meaning that he showed no sign of jaundice. So he was entirely ready to come home.</p>
<p>We finally got out the door about 3:00 after some complicated maneuvers involving putting some bags in the car, walking to the pharmacy via a staff-only shortcut, finding out that Grace’s five prescriptions weren’t ready to pick up yet, then walking back the long way around to get back to the labor and delivery unit, walking to parking lot Q to bring my car up to the Family Birthing Center entrance, waiting for Grace to come down in a wheelchair, bringing in the car seat and getting Malachi trussed up and into the warmed-up car, then driving back to the pharmacy and leaving Grace and the baby at the main entrance, finding out that Grace’s prescriptions <strong>still</strong> weren’t ready because apparently a pill-counting machine was malfunctioning, pacing around for another half-hour, looking at compression socks in the gift shop and discovering they cost over thirty dollars, declaring “fuck that,” and, finally, getting the prescriptions and driving Grace and little Chi home.</p>
<p>I had a text message from my boss that my annual bonus check was at the office, and I wanted to get that into my checking account right away to avoid hitting the line of credit for any more money. So I took Veronica and Sam with me and drove out to my office, picked up my check, told my boss I needed to take Wednesday off, then drove to Meijer on Jackson to deposit the check.</p>
<p>As soon as I walked into Meijer, I smelled an <em>Iron Man</em> DVD for $9.99 — I have wanted for some time to pick up a copy of <em>Iron Man</em>, the first movie, but had not yet seen it on sale. There it was, back with the DVDs — for $9.99. So I bought it. Veronica also asked for a copy of the <em>Trolls</em> movie soundtrack, so I bought that for her too, and then unfortunately we had to listen to it in the car while we ran the rest of our errands. Then we went looking for compression socks. I found a couple of pairs for Grace to try, and none of them were anywhere near thirty dollars.</p>
<p>After those errands we ran out to King Shing on Carpenter and put in a big order for Chinese takeout, including several previously forbidden dishes, now that Veronica and Joshua no longer seem to have their allergies to peanuts and shrimp, respectively. We ordered dumplings, sesame balls, Ma Po tofu (my personal favorite), pad thai with chicken, beef with broccoli, orange chicken, and a fried shrimp dish. The shrimp dish was not actually very good but no one cared — and Joshua was just excited to be eating a shrimp dish again. While King Shing was cooking our order we ran to CVS pharmacy and I found another pair of compression socks for Grace to try — these were more expensive, but they were an actual medical-device brand, so I felt slightly better about spending the money on them. Then we hauled all our spoils home.</p>
<p>For the rest of the evening we gorged ourselves on Chinese food and new-baby appreciation, while the kids watched <em>Iron Man</em>, then went to bed. Everyone was excited to meet little Chi.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>I got up and started working on overdue kitchen cleaning, first cleaning the stovetop, then reheating the leftover shrimp dish in the oven for Grace, who asked to eat it, then sprayed the oven with oven cleaner and turned on the fan and timer, thinking that I was going to get back to finishing the oven cleaning in about twenty minutes. I was then planning to run Grace and Chi to Domino’s Farms for his first pediatric appointment.</p>
<p>While I was doing more cleaning our housemate asked me to help her go pick up her baby son at her boyfriend’s mother’s apartment, so I ran her out there.</p>
<p>On the way she realized that she needed to get some more baby formula, but she didn’t have her WIC card with her. So I ran back to our house so she could get her WIC card, then drove her and her son up to Kroger. She had wanted to go to the Stony Creek Road Kroger, but I didn’t feel we had time for that, so I took her to the closer one on Carpenter Road.</p>
<p>I thought she was going to just run in and get formula, and calculated that I would have just enough time to get home to pick up Grace and Chi and get them to his first pediatric appointment on time. But she turned it into a big shopping trip, and apparently had trouble figuring out what was covered and what wasn’t covered by WIC. It is confusing, so I can’t entirely blame her, even though she’s had many months on WIC to figure out how to look for the WIC tags on the shelves, but somehow she wound up in the checkout line with a lot of items that weren’t approved for WIC, and so a stranger in line wound up paying for her extra items.</p>
<p>All this took some time. I got her back to the house about the time that Grace was supposed to be at her appointment. I had her call and tell the practice that we were going to be late, and got Chi trussed up into his car seat, and managed to get him to the appoinment only ten or fifteen minutes late.</p>
<p>After Chi’s appointment Grace and I took the opportunity to have a quick date, and had a late lunch at <a href="http://umisushiannarbor.com/menu.htm">Umi Sushi</a>. I had a wonderful bowl of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkotsu_ramen">tonkotsu ramen</a>. I didn’t think it was wise for Grace to have that much sodium, so she had a less-salty dish of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakisoba">yakisoba</a> with beef and reported that it was excellent.</p>
<p>When I got home, I wound up taking a long nap while our housemate used the kitchen. Then I finished cleaning out the oven, got a breakfast-for-dinner meal together, making a batch of chocolate chip paleo pancakes and a big batch of scrambled eggs, while Veronica assembled one of our Costco salad kits. So that was dinner. The kids screwed around wasting time for some time — about two hours. I read them a bedtime story — a few more pages from <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>, the start of the company’s journey into Moria. Again, there are more strange details in this part of the story than I remember. The “watcher” is described in positively Lovecraftian terms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Out from the water a long sinuous tentacle had crawled; it was pale-green and luminous and wet. Its fingered end had hold of Frodo’s foot, and was dragging him into the water. Sam on his knees was now slashing at it with a knife.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When Jackson and his team developed this into a visual, the monster they portrayed has a lot of tentacles, but I don’t think they are “fingered” at the end. That’s a an unnerving and weird detail! Tolkien makes it stranger by describing the tentacles as “arms” in some passages:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The arm let go of Frodo, and Sam pulled him away, crying out for help. Twenty other arms came rippling out. The dark water boiled, and there was a hideous stench.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And Gandalf gives us some more to think about:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘I felt that something horrible was near from the moment that my foot first touched the water,’ said Frodo. ‘What was the thing, or were there many of them?’</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘I do not know,’ answered Gandalf; ‘but the arms were all guided by one purpose. Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.’ He did not speak aloud his thought that whatever it was that dwelt in the lake, it had seized on Frodo first among all the Company.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a very suggestive passage: it makes the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watcher_in_the_Water">Watcher in the Water</a>’s back-story feel a little bit like Gollum’s back-story; Gollum also “crept… out of dark waters under the mountains.” And both were apparently drawn to the One Ring. In the Peter Jackson film, Gandalf’s statement, that “[t]here are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world,” is moved just a bit — Gandalf speaks these words after the Fellowship has left the Watcher behind, saying “We now have but one choice. We must face the long dark of Moria. Be on your guard — there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.” In this slightly altered context, the words now foreshadow Gandalf’s encounter with the Balrog.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Thursday morning I got myself up and out relatively early. Our friend Joy had told us that unfortunately she couldn’t make it out to visit. I had originally been hoping to work Wednesday through Friday, so that I could take the 27th, 28th, and 31st off. But it was clear that Grace needed more help. Between the nifedipene and the painkillers and the post-surgical pain itself, she wasn’t well enough to drive, or to cook meals, or to walk more than a few feet. So I had a lot to do on Thursday, because there were lots of things on the schedule.</p>
<p>My first errand was to go out to my office and meet with my boss. I put vacation day requests into the timekeeping system for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and used my single “floating holiday” for the 24th, and my last vacation day for the 26th. I told my boss that I might need to take the last three work days of the year as some kind of unpaid leave, possibly under the auspices of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993">FMLA</a>. There is no standard way to request that in the timekeeping system, so he agreed to inquire about that on my behalf. So I asked him to prepare the unpaid leave scenario as a backup plan; if Grace is able to manage without me, I will plan to work those last few days.</p>
<p>After that I had a whole series of errands. I needed to run our housemate and two of her children up to the parking lot of a nearby school to meet her boyfriend, so I did that, then came back and picked up Sam, and ran him back out to Plymouth Road for a speech therapy session. Since we were right next to Umi Sushi, afterwards I got Sam a bowl of the same ramen that I had enjoyed so much the previous day. Meanwhile I tried their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap">bibimbap</a>. Sam enjoyed the ramen and actually finished the entire bowl. I was impressed, and told him “today, you are a man, my son.” The bibimbap at Umi Sushi was not offensively bad, but not something I would ever order again — it didn’t hold a candle to the dish as I’ve had it at some wonderful hole-in-the-wall Korean restaurants, or even at the late and much-lamented Eastern Accents.</p>
<p>My day of errands wasn’t done yet. I had to take Joshua to Saline for a small performance of just the Brio choir (a sub-group of the <a href="http://www.vivavoceyouthchoir.org/">Viva Voce</a> youth choirs) at a nursing home in Saline. His sister Veronica came along to hear him perform. That was a nice low-key event, but the residents seemed to appreciate it.</p>
<p>From there, I ran up to Costco and bought a relatively large load of groceries including two boxes of Duraflame logs, more red meat for Grace, fruit, shrimp for Friday’s dinner, and a few extra treats including a pecan pie and some Nutella. Then we got that all home, and put away, and had a dinner of burgers, salad, leftover pasta and beans, and the pie. After dinner, again, no one seemed to able to manage their usual evening chores. It seems like they have completely forgotten how the evening routine of cleanup, teeth-brushing, and dressing for bed goes. So we didn’t manage a story.</p>
<p>I have to take a brief time-out to run our housemate back up to the school parking lot to pick up her kids. I’ll do that, then try to remember what happened today.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Well, forty minutes later, I’m still waiting to give our housemate a ride, and she’s still on the phone arguing with the person she is supposed to meet, so I’ll try to finish Friday. It’s about 6:00 p.m.</p>
<p>Little Malachi is a pretty good sleeper, as babies go, but our night’s sleep is still slightly disrupted as he wakes up and fusses briefly a few times during the night. So I wound up sleeping fairly late this morning. When I got up, I had a bath and made a large coffee with coconut milk, to share with Grace. I’m trying a type of Starbucks instant coffee to see if that tastes better, and is easier on my stomach, than the Trader Joe’s instant coffee. (Spoiler: it doesn’t, and isn’t.)</p>
<p>Then I drove Grace to Brighton for her first postpartum appointment in Brighton, which wound up being just a blood pressure check — so we drove all the way to Brighton with Chi just so Grace could have her blood pressure checked, something we could have done at home. That’s an annoyance — Grace thought she’d be seeing her obstetrician, but apparently the practice is short-staffed as we get close to Christmas. Anyway, the upshot is that Grace will go off the nifedipine, and monitor her blood pressure herself. That might help get rid of her dizziness and headache. Fortuntaely Chi seems to tolerate the car seat very well — he falls asleep shortly after the car gets moving.</p>
<p>Also, she will soon run out of Percoset, but they declined to give her more because it contains an opioid. They only gave her twenty pills, with an indication to take two every four hours as needed. She’s been taking them less often than that, and so they’ve lasted since Tuesday, but I’m scratching my head a bit about that, because I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect her pain to be gone the seventh day after major abdominal surgery. I’m also worried that going off the painkiller will cause her blood pressure to increase. But I guess she’ll try some combination of acetominophen and ibuprofen for the pain, and see if that is sufficient. If her blood pressure spikes dramatically she’ll go back on the nifedipine.</p>
<p>While I was getting ready to take Grace to her appointment, our housemate was trying to arrange to meet her boyfriend again, and I was ready to give her a quick ride up the school parking lot. But that turned into some sort of extended argument over the phone, and so they didn’t agree to meet. Now this evening apparently they are still negotiating. Meanwhile, we’re having the kids get the fireplace cleaned out, put away a batch of broth that Grace cooked in the Instant Pot last night, and heat a pot of leftover rice to eat with our shrimp and salad for dinner.</p>
<h3 id="the-bloody-chamber"><em>The Bloody Chamber</em></h3>
<p>I’m not sure exactly <strong>when</strong> I managed to read some more stories in Angela Carter’s collection <em>The Bloody Chamber</em>, but in some bits of down time over the last few days, I read a couple more of them: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.” These are both really terrific stories — heavily symbolic, erotic, earthy, and visceral. I’m hoping that maybe I’ll be able to finish this collection before the end of 2018!</p>
<p>It’s going to be a strange, isolated Christmas. We’re trying to make plans to celebrate as best we can. But with one car, with only four seats, we won’t be able to take everyone to dinner at Aunt Shelley’s house, or go out to a restaurant, or even to Mass. We are planning to make egg rolls, but if Grace can’t manage to cook them, even with help, I’ll run to King Shing and we’ll get a big order of egg rolls to go.</p>
<p>It’s time for dinner! After dinner, the kids want to watch <em>The Nightmare Before Christmas</em>, so that’s the tentative plan.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>It’s 6:00 in the evening. It’s pitch black out now, but we’ve made it past the shortest day of the year! Also, there’s a partial government shutdown just in time for Christmas.</p>
<p>Today was “consciously wasted” — Grace and I did next to nothing. We directed the kids to do the kitchen cleanup they didn’t do, last night. I had Veronica make a pan full of bacon. I made some peanut butter and nutella sandwiches, tea, and coffee, and then later some prosciutto and butter sandwiches. Shortly I’ll get moving and make some lamb chops for dinner. I gave my housemate a ride up to the school to meet her boyfriend and pick up her baby son, then drove her up to a convenience store to get some soda. Her boyfriend gave her a waffle maker, so she’s been making waffles.</p>
<p>One of my co-workers had given me a bag of Christmas cookies. I left the bag sitting on one of the little side counters in the kitchen. It had my name on it. There was a spare pastry from Joe and Rosie’s and a bag of homemade biscotti that I was looking forward to eating this morning with my coffee. This morning the pastry and bag of biscotti were gone. We interviewed all our kids and no one would cop to talking these items. I guess it was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.</p>
<p>For most of the rest of the day, Grace and I just chatted and lounged around and napped while the kids watched videos. Grace got some much-needed extra sleep to aid her recovery, in between many rounds of nursing Malachi and changing his diaper. He’s blown through an astonishing number of diapers today. His little tiny baby fingers are already plumping up. You can practically see him growing. No doubt he’s already gotten back to his birth weight, and probably passed it. His little umbilical cord stump fell off. As I type this on my laptop in the dark, he’s giggling in his sleep.</p>
<p>For some reason my seasonal allergies are back. It’s been so warm — well above freezing every day recently — that it seems maybe I’m getting the brunt of leaf mold. I thought I might be getting a virus, but I think it’s the allergy problem I had this past summer, returning. So today I dosed myself with Claritin, Flonase, and my albuterol inhaler, and I’ll try that for a few days. I thought I could stay off it for the winter — the general advice that I’ve heard is to stop after the first hard freeze. But what do you do when the hard freeze is followed by weeks and weeks of thaws?</p>
<p>As the Starks don’t say in the <em>Game of Thrones</em> books, “winter is going.”</p>
<p>We got an interesting Christmas card last night from a Saginaw resident who is interested in buying our old house. He included his phone number, so I gave him a call, and we spoke for some time. Apparently he’s been watching the house for a long time. He actually approached our former realtor earlier in the year, but this was right after we had accepted the offer from the woman who eventually had to back out (after keeping the house under contract for more than a month) because her financing fell apart when she was unable to sell her home. Then apparently he also approached our second realtor a couple of months ago, but this was after we had sent our second realtor a lease with purchase option agreement to look over, and so apparently our second realtor told him it wasn’t available. Then, after leaving us hanging for a month, our second realtor decided not to take the lease, but mentioned that there was a guy who was interested. At that point, we no longer wanted to pursue any arrangement that involved that realtor, so we did not pursue it. Having been rebuffed twice, he continued to keep an eye on the house, and noticed that it had still not sold, and so looked up our contact information via public records, and sent us the card.</p>
<p>Could this be the Christmas Miracle we’ve become too exhausted to hope for — that we can finally sell our house? It’s too early to know yet. He’s going to look into his finance options and we’re going to see where we are with respect to our agreement with the aforementioned second realtor. If our agreement with that individual is expired, I think we could probably move ahead and accept an offer without a seller’s agent, just using an attorney to handle the closing paperwork. But — it’s very tentative right now. Still, a ray of hope on the horizon is better than no ray of hope on the horizon.</p>
<h3 id="luke">Luke</h3>
<p>Last night we tried to catch up on Luke — we’re hopelessly behind, since we missed a week of bedtime chapters. I read a couple of chapters last night and we got somewhat bogged down trying to explain the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Steward">Parable of the Unjust Steward</a>. In trying to explain this parable, I realized that perhaps I didn’t understand it as well as I thought I did. It doesn’t seem entirely clear whether Jesus is holding the Steward up as a model, or not, and what behavior of the steward’s he is or isn’t commending. I think some historical context has been lost. Was the steward doing his master’s debtors a favor, in the hopes that they might hire him in the future, since he was losing his job? And was this shrewd, or corrupt?</p>
<p>Wikipedia says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The parable on the face of it, appears to be commending dishonest behaviour. This issue is sometimes addressed by suggesting that the manager is forgoing a commission due to him personally, but some scholars disagree with this interpretation. However, although the master has “a certain grudging admiration” for the manager’s “shrewdness,” Jesus labels the manager “dishonest.” To add to the interpretations, several different sayings about money were attached to the parable here.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And also:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the parable is about an agent who, knowing he is about to be fired for usury, repents of his sin, asking the debtors to only pay what they owe his master — rather than pay him as well.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, he is forgoing his interest or agent’s fees for managing the loan. I’m not sure that I’m convinced by that argument.</p>
<p>I remember the added sayings about money better than I do the parable itself — the lines about being unable to serve two masters are are well-known and easy to explain. Some other lines are not so easy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m going to have to read some interpretive texts, I think. It makes me feel like Billy Bob Thornton in <em>Sling Blade</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve learned to read some. Took me four years to read the Bible. I reckon I understand a great deal of it. Wasn’t what I expected in some places.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="the-fellowship-of-the-ring"><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em></h3>
<p>We didn’t make a lot of progress, because Elanor was starting to fuss, but we read a few pages about the Fellowship’s progress into Moria. There were only a few passages that jumped out at me. Aragorn reassures the party that Gandalf knows what he is doing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself. He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s a throwaway reference that Tolkien never expanded on, in <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, but it also contains a little more foreshadowing of Gandalf’s fate, in the phrase “at whatever cost to himself.” Tolkien <strong>did</strong> write more about this queen, though, and what he wrote has been published in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Ber%C3%BAthiel#Story_in_Unfinished_Tales"><em>Unfinished Tales</em></a>.</p>
<p>There’s a brief mention in passing of the party’s traversal of a chasm more than seven feet across:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There were fissures and chasms in the walls and floor, and every now and then a crack would open right before their feet. The widest was more than seven feet across, and it was long before Pippin could summon enough courage to leap over the dreadful gap.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I asked my kids to tell me whether they thought they could leap across a seven-foot gap and to a child, they said that they certainly could. So I think we’re going to half to do an experiment, in the driveway, with a measuring tape and some chalk marks. I’m finding it hard to convince myself that the three foot six inch hobbits could jump the gap, especially the middle-aged and somewhat portly Frodo. We’ll have to do the experiment.</p>
<p>And, finally, in last night’s reading we were reintroduced to Gollum, who somehow managed to slip inside Moria before the Watcher slammed the doors — or perhaps he found his way in via a different route? In any case, he’s following them, just out of view:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yet Frodo began to hear, or to imagine that he heard, something else: like the faint fall of soft bare feet. It was never loud enough, or near enough, for him to feel certain that he heard it; but once it had started it never stopped, while the Company was moving.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s where we stopped last night, so I’m going to stop, and go make dinner. I think I’ll pan-fry the small lamb steaks and we’ll eat those with salad and whatever leftovers look good. Maybe we’ll watch an episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>.</p>
<p>This is the 51st weekly post of 2018; I’ve only got one more full week to write about, and then a couple of extra days, and I’ll be done with 2018! I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do then, except that it will probably involve a break from writing this kind of a journal.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li>Luke (Revised New American Bible, 1986-1990 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe Trade Paperback Edition)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, December 22nd, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-37972947975747011802018-12-16T01:20:00.000-05:002018-12-16T01:20:06.313-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, December 15th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>Cooking latkes takes a <strong>long</strong> time. We didn’t actually get them on the table until midnight. The kids were slow to help clean things up and Grace was working on a big pot of beef broth, and so we had no bedtime story and got to sleep very late, well after 1:00. I had forgotten to turn off the alarm on my cell phone, so it still went off at 6:30. I got up to shut it off, and then had a hard time staying asleep for another couple of hours, with kids getting up to use the bathroom and leaving all the lights on. Even the bathroom light shining under our bedroom door is enough to make me unable to sleep.</p>
<p>It’s been a slow day and I’ve spent it mainly recruiting the kids to work on some of the cleanup jobs that they didn’t do on Friday and Saturday — finishing loads of dishes, hand-washing the things I’d alread asked them two or three times to hand-wash. I deep-cleaned the stovetop and the oven. Grace and I went through the freezer and pulled out a number of small bags of things that we’d frozen for making more broth — chicken bones, lamb bones, fish heads, etc. So she’s going to make, as she puts it, an “epic” amount of broth.</p>
<p>Veronica made a baked pasta dish with yeast sauce and she’s taking it to a youth group Christmas potluck at St. Joseph. She made two batches, so we ate one baking dish full. I put too over-easy fried eggs on top of mine, which made a delicious mess. A little later I toasted the kids some bagels.</p>
<p>I finally finished <em>Moderan</em>. The last few stories are some of the darkest. What a collection! It is hard to read because of the grim future it imagines, but Bunch seems so insightful about human nature that they have a ring of undeniable truth to them. It’s a bit stunning to consider that he was writing these devastating parodies of militarism, misogyny, and consumerism in decades ago, and perhaps not so surprising that he didn’t find a wide audience; they weren’t ready to learn what he was teaching.</p>
<p>I’m about to leave to take Veronica to the church. I’ll have about two hours, but it’s Sunday night and nothing around will be open, so I’m not quite sure what to do while I wait for her. Maybe I’ll sit in the car and read a few more chapters of <em>Oryx and Crake</em>.</p>
<p>For dinner tonight we’ll probably eat another bagged salad and pan-fry some more lamb steaks, and eat those with leftover rice.</p>
<h3 id="evening">Evening</h3>
<p>I couldn’t think of any really good way to spend the time while I waited for Veronica. I could have driven home and back, but that would have meant another 35 or 40 minutes spent driving. I couldn’t think of any place near the church where I could spend an hour, like a bookstore. I should look at some maps and see if I can find something better to do next time. So I did in fact sit in the car. I alternated between reading <em>Oryx and Crake</em> with a flashlight and listening to songs from <em>Akhnaten</em>. I ran the car a few times so I could turn on the heat, as it is in the twenties tonight. She came out of the potluck dinner a few minutes before eight.</p>
<p>At home I cooked the lamb steaks. Instead of searing them in the big cast-iron pan, I decided to try an aluminum-clad steel pan with a lid. I cooked them in two batches because this pan is smaller. I dusted them with salt and pepper, and browned them in olive oil for about two minutes, then put the lid on and let them cook for two minutes. Then I flipped them and dusted the other side with salt and pepper, adding some rosemary and smoked paprika, and gave them the same two-stage cooking treatment. I pulled them out of the pan, topped them with a bit of butter, and let them rest. I gave the second batch an extra minute per side in the closed pan.</p>
<p>Both batches were delicious, with a nice crust on the top and bottom and the meat inside in several stages, from browned to medium rare to blue rare at the bone. I didn’t really notice a difference in doneness between the two batches but next time I would probably give them three minutes on each side in the closed pan, since not everyone in the family likes them quite as rare as Grace and I do. They were so tasty, and eating them such a pure carnivorous experience, that I felt like I should have been wolfing them down while rolling around on the floor grunting and growling and perhaps fighting over them with the other members of my pack. I managed to restrain myself somehow, though.</p>
<p>There was lots of cleanup to do, since searing the lamb steaks gets grease all over the stove, and we were already behind on dishes. The kids were fairly cooperative though, so it’s now about twenty after eleven. Grace is reading chapters from Luke, and if that goes OK I will read a bit more from <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>.</p>
<p>Five days to go!</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>It took quite a while to get through three chapters of Luke, although the kids settled down. They settled down, in part, because a couple of them fell asleep. Success!</p>
<p>Grace and I got everyone put to bed before midnight. I had hopes of getting up and out early, but Grace spent some time replying to text messages, and I wound up having a call with my friend Rich, who caught me up on his week. Rich ran sound for a cool concert in which local musicians covered the music from the 1978 concert film <em>The Last Waltz</em>. The film documents the farewell concert by The Band (yes, the band’s name is just “The Band” — they gained fame originally as the backing band for several frontmen, including Bob Dylan). If you’ve never seen it, there are a lot of clips on YouTube. Here’s one, featuring Joni Mitchell singing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2rfbuaMXKM">“Coyote”</a>. That song by Mitchell is a favorite of mine. Her lyrics still astound me! And <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo">here’s a clip</a> of one of their better-known songs “The Weight.” Those YouTube clips are probably not authorized, and so might be taken down. The movie is definitely worth watching if you like roots rock or Americana at all. (Or even if you don’t, or don’t know if you do — it would serve as a good introduction to those styles of music!)</p>
<p>My alarm went off at 7:30, and then Grace’s alarm went off at 8:00, and a bit after that I got bathed and out the door. Grace had two appointments today, but fortunately they were back-to-back and at the same doctor’s office. When I got in to work, my co-workers had found a bug in some of my LabVIEW test code. I managed to fix that, or at least I thought that I had fixed it, and built a new version for them to test, and got out the door about 12:10 to go back to the house.</p>
<p>I met up with Grace, and she drove us to Brighton. She had her appointments, we grabbed a quick lunch, she drove us back home, and then I drove back to work. Unfortunately it was almost 4:00 when I got back, so I had missed almost four hours of work, which means I had to stay very late in order to get my hours in.</p>
<p>When I got back to the office my co-workers had found another problem in the LabVIEW test code. I tried to diagnose it by stepping through the code and logging, but wasn’t able to identify the problem. I will need to run it tomorrow downstairs, on the bench setup, with the actual hardware under test, and see if I can figure out what is going wrong.</p>
<p>I didn’t wind up eating dinner with my family, which is disappointing — I ate some of the leftover summer sausage and crackers. It’s pretty quiet in my office after 8 p.m. That’s good when I’m there because I’m deeply into writing code — I can really concentrate and get things done with no one else there. But it’s not so fun when I’m staying late so I can get enough hours on my time card to avoid having to take any of my remaining paid time off. If Grace and the baby make it to Friday, I’ll take Friday off, and Monday and Tuesday, and then I’ll have to figure out how she is doing and whether I can go back to work the rest of next week.</p>
<p>I have a situation coming up Wednesday morning. I’m supposed to be in a group Skype call at 9:00, but I’m also supposed to drop off my car at the Honda dealership in Ypsilanti at 8:00. So I’m going to try to arrange to have my laptop and headset with me and maybe I can call in using the dealership’s WiFi. If that doesn’t work, I may have to miss it. I don’t think I’d be able to get them to drive me all the way to the West side of Ann Arbor by 9:00.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I got home about 10:30 last night — we’ve been putting so many miles on the Element that I had to stop for gas. I had eaten some leftover summer sausage and crackers for what I thought would be dinner, but when I got home there was an Instant Pot of beef stew still cooking. So we wound up having a very late dinner of beef stew. The broth was delicious and it helped me feel better after a day of cold snacks eaten here and there in a hurry. It was too late for a story, though, and I was really exhausted.</p>
<p>My friend Rich finished an initial mastering job on his concert recording, and I downloaded the first part to my phone, but was too tired to listen to more than a minute or two before I went to bed.</p>
<p>Grace had a bad night. She had painful Braxton Hicks contractions intermittently for hours. So she didn’t even attempt to come to bed until 3:00, and then was sitting up awake and uncomfortable over and over. In addition, Elanor apparently had painful gas and so she was howling and waking up over and over again. So their bad night’s sleep became my bad night’s sleep. This morning before I left Grace called the nurse for her obstetrics practice just to talk over how she was doing. These symptoms were not any of the danger signs they look for, so they did not advise her to come in. She may just have to endure this for a while longer, until her scheduled delivery by c-section on Friday.</p>
<p>Because I slept so badly, I needed to get a little more sleep after Elanor finally settled down and slept more easily, so that I would at least feel that I could drive safely. At 51, I no longer can just easily shake off a bad night’s sleep like I could decades ago. So I got out of the house very late this morning, grabbing a coffee and day-old scones at Joe and Rosie’s on my way in to work. This morning (which I can barely call morning anymore) I am working on trying to diagnose the puzzling problems with my LabVIEW code. When I take a lunch I will run out to Meijer and pick up two prescriptions that I ordered refilled by text message.</p>
<h3 id="evening-1">Evening</h3>
<p>I figured out the problem with my LabVIEW code. It’s a strange story. At some point I wound up accidentally modifying a file containing a strict type definition accidentally, because I was reusing a type definition in a different project. I wound up removing a cluster from the type definition.</p>
<p>Naturally, after did this, any of the VIs in my original project which made reference to the members of that cluster were “broken” — they wouldn’t compile, because they contained references to elements in a cluster that weren’t there. I could see where the errors were, in VIs that used “Unbundle by Name” and “Bundle by Name” on wires that have the type of that strict type definition. Those “Unbundle by Name” and “Bundle by Name” instances still showed me what they were supposed to refer to. The strict type definition was called <strong>Data</strong>. <strong>Data</strong> is a cluster that had another cluster in it called <strong>MC Resources</strong>. That’s the cluster I wound up deleting accidentally. One of the “Unbundle by Name” objects on the block diagram might have, for example, a reference to <strong>MC_Resources.VPD.Set V</strong> and with the <strong>MC_Resources</strong> cluster missing, LabVIEW couldn’t compile the VI containing that “Unbundle by Name” objects.</p>
<p>So I fixed the type definition — I put a cluster called <strong>MC_Resources</strong> back in it, in the same place where the old one was, containing the exact same elements in the same order. Then, boom, all those VIs with broken references to elements of <strong>Data.MC_Resources</strong> worked again, and the project would compile and run again. So I thought I had fixed it, and I made a new compiled application for my co-workers to test.</p>
<p>What actually happened was not what I expected. LabVIEW apparently fixed up those broken references to elements of <strong>Data.MC_Resources</strong>, but as it did so, it <strong>changed</strong> all of them to refer to the first of the ten different cluster elements they used to refer to. Each of these cluster elements is a .NET task reference. They are all used to control DAC and ADC channels. LabVIEW changed my VIs so that instead of controlling ten <strong>different</strong> DAC and ADC channels, they all controlled the same channel. And this change was applied to four different VIs without any noticeable warning or indication that it had been done.</p>
<p>My mind is struggling to come up with a scenario in which this would be the expected, planned, or wanted behavior, and I can’t come up with one. It highlights again how bizarre LabVIEW is and how it plays badly with version control systems. In the C language, if I changed a type definition in a header file that was used in a number of source files, those files would “break” (refuse to compile) in a similar manner to the way my LabVIEW VIs refused to compiled. That makes sense. But if I fixed the header file so that the structure elements referenced in the source files made sense again, all would be well, and the compiler wouldn’t somehow decide to alter all the source files that make reference to the type definitions.</p>
<p>I also struggle to come up with what kind of a design resulted in this behavior. In LabVIEW type definitions, elements of a cluster have names. You can then find these names using pop-up menus. When the type definition broke, the VIs that now referred to elements that no longer existed still displayed the old “path expression,” so they had that path cached somehow inside their data structures. This implies that their references to the cluster elements wasn’t just <strong>positional</strong> (they weren’t just pointing to the 2nd element of the cluster that was the 4th element of another cluster, or something like that). And they also remembered the <strong>type</strong> of the thing they originally referenced. But then somehow when the type definition changed and became compatible again, all those references were modified to refer to the first element of the cluster that was of the appropriate type.</p>
<p>It’s bizarre, and it really makes me wonder what kind of algorithm LabVIEW uses to determine if two types are the same, or different, and how it decides when a type has changed. In a language like C this is very simple, with a couple of simple namespaces for <strong>struct</strong> and <strong>enum</strong> and type definitions to put them in the general namespace. In C++ with more elaborate rules for scoping and namespaces there are ways that the compiler “decorates” the names (or, if you prefer, “mangles” them) so that they are unique by the time the linker sees them.</p>
<p>So, just to summarize, LabVIEW must be taking some pains to preserve the names of the elements and their paths that “Unbundle by Name” and “Bundle by Name” objects refer to, but then, apparently, completely and silently botches the “self-repair” of these references that it does when the broken type definition is fixed.</p>
<p>This is really pretty bad. Those .NET task references are controlling the voltages that we are feeding to a device under test — an amplified photodiode. Fortunately this exact failure scenario didn’t wind up applying damaging voltages to the part, and my code does elaborate current-draw monitoring to shut down any excessive current draw as quickly as possible, to prevent damage. But LabVIEW is used to control all kinds of instruments and industrial processes and the idea that it might silently rearrange references to external hardware devices at, say, Dow Chemical, where I briefly worked — well, that’s the stuff of nightmares and cold sweats.</p>
<p>I finally found the problem by extracting the previous, working version of my code from my Git repository and using LabVIEW’s “Compare VI Hierarchies” to show every difference between two versions of all the VIs in my project. There are over fifty of them and it shows <strong>all</strong> differences, leaving you to decide if the minor wire cleanup I did or improvements I made to comments is semantically significant, or not.</p>
<p>Have I mentioned that LabVIEW is not my favorite programming language?</p>
<p>Have I also mentioned that I think the visual, data-flow paradigm <strong>could</strong> be done better?</p>
<p>Tonight Grace is feeling well enough to attend a book club dinner, so we’ll see how she does with it. I’m feeling protective but not concerned, if that makes sense — she’s really uncomfortable as we get down to the very last few days of this pregnancy. But all the discomfort she’s having doesn’t seem to point to any real threat to her health or the baby’s health. She’s not experiencing anythign on the “warning signs” checklist. The discomfort is mostly just breaking down her morale, I think. But it does have an end date.</p>
<p>Tomorrow morning I have to get up and out and get the car to the dealership by 8:00. Then at 9:00 I have to call in to a conference call. I thought I could Skype in, but apparently it is configured to be accessible using “Skype for Business” and when I tried to access the URLs to sign in, it turned into a mess of unsafe security certificate warnings and broken links. So I got in touch with the guy who set up the call, and he set up the call so I could verify that I can call in via my cell phone and access the conference using the conference ID number.</p>
<h3 id="drama">Drama</h3>
<p>Grace tells me that today our housemate’s boyfriend showed up in the yard and our housemate was trying to draw Grace into more drama, sending her text messages asking Grace to tell him she wasn’t at home. I haven’t gotten the full story of today’s events yet, because there wasn’t time before Grace went to her dinner out, but this is really getting old. He’s not supposed to be at our home at all. Grace had been repeatedly and abundantly clear with everyone involved about that. I think our next step may have to be a restraining order, although the last thing we wanted was to have to use the machinery of the state against anyone.</p>
<h3 id="weeks-and-weeks-and-weeks">Weeks and Weeks and Weeks</h3>
<p>A quick check of the word count tells me that these blog posts have piled up over 420,000 words so far. When I convert it to <strong>.odt</strong> I get 728 pages.</p>
<p>I’m not yet done with week 50, and there are 3 posts to go after that: week 51, week 52, and a partial 53rd week. Whether you count this as the 53rd week or not depends on what week-number scheme you go by; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates">ISO week numbers</a> are calculated with years starting on a Monday:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ISO week-numbering year starts at the first day (Monday) of week 01 and ends at the Sunday before the new ISO year (hence without overlap or gap). It consists of 52 or 53 full weeks. The first ISO week of a year may have up to three days that are actually in the Gregorian calendar year that is ending; if three, they are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Similarly, the last ISO week of a year may have up to three days that are actually in the Gregorian calendar year that is starting; if three, they are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The Thursday of each ISO week is always in the Gregorian calendar year denoted by the ISO week-numbering year.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In that scheme, the 30th and 31st of December are part of week 1 of 2019. I’m not going to use that system. In fact, for most people, using week numbers is inevitably going to be confusing. So I don’t actually use them, except that I’ve been using them for file names. This source file is <strong>2018_week_50.md</strong>, and my entries for the last two days of the year will go into a file called <strong>2018_week_53.md</strong>. The actual <strong>titles</strong> of the posts as currently written don’t mention week numbers.</p>
<p>Don’t get me started about trying to fit my quarterly summaries in between weekly posts that end on Saturdays. Will we ever get a <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-overhaul/">more consistent calendar</a>?</p>
<p>Three days to go!</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Last night Grace drove my car to her dinner out, then I drove my car back, and she got a ride home with one of her friends, so that she didn’t have to attempt to start my car. She had a good time. The kids had been grazing and making food for themselves, so they had already eaten, but there was some leftover pasta and yeast for me. We had the usual struggles over cleanup, but there was enough time to read to the kids before bed.</p>
<h3 id="luke">Luke</h3>
<p>Grace and I read chapters ten and eleven of Luke. There are some great passages where Jesus criticizes the pharisees:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, “Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>And he said, “Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Woe to you! You build the memorials of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. Consequently, you bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them and you do the building.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Was there ever a better description of something like the widespread media hagiography of recently deceased former President George H. W. Bush?</p>
<h3 id="the-fellowship-of-the-ring"><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em></h3>
<p>Despite having to get up very early, I really wanted to finish reading “The Ring Goes South.” This last part, describing the Fellowship’s failure to cross the Misty Mountains, feels a bit slow. There are some moments I had forgotten. I don’t think <em>miruvor</em>, the “cordial of Imladris,” is in the films:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As soon as Frodo had swallowed a little of the warm and fragrant liquor he felt a new strength of heart, and the heavy drowsiness left his limbs. The others also revived and found fresh hope and vigour. But the snow did not relent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was amused by how mocking and annoying Legolas was, with his apparent immunity to cold, and ability to walk on the snow without sinking into it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Legolas watched them for a while with a smile upon his lips, and then he turned to the others. ‘The strongest must seek a way, say you? But I say: let a ploughman plough, but choose an otter for swimming, and for running light over grass and leaf, or over snow — an Elf.’</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>With that he sprang forth nimbly, and then Frodo noticed as if for the first time, though he had long known it, that the Elf had no boots, but wore only light shoes, as he always did, and his feet made little imprint in the snow.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Farewell!’ he said to Gandalf. ‘I go to find the Sun!’ Then swift as a runner over firm sand he shot away, and quickly overtaking the toiling men, with a wave of his hand he passed them, and sped into the distance, and vanished round the rocky turn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The capitalization of “Elf” also seemed a bit surprising here. And I came across a convoluted sentence that took me a moment to parse. Boromir says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘But happily your Caradhras has forgotten that you have Men with you,’ said Boromir, who came up at that moment. ‘And doughty Men too, if I may say it; though lesser men with spades might have served you better. Still, we have thrust a lane through the drift; and for that all here may be grateful who cannot run as light as Elves.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That last sentence is a doozy. The ending phrase, “who cannot run as light as elves” modifies the subject of the second independent clause, which is “all here.” I seem to recall, dimly, that there’s a name for that kind of structure, where the modifiers pile up at the end of the sentence. If I had edited Tolkien, I would have suggested wording the second half of the sentence like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…and for that, all here who cannot run as lightly as Elves may be grateful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m guessing that my version might be violating an old grammatical rule that says one shouldn’t insert modifiers between subjects and verbs. Is there such a rule, and is it the reason that Tolkien put the sentence together the way he did? This might be kind of like the rule that one shouldn’t split infinitives. But I don’t think very many contemporary writers adhere closely to that rules.</p>
<p>Maybe Tolkien portrayed Boromir, who is the son of the Steward of Gondor and was raised as such, as a stickler for old rules of grammar and a creator of elaborate locutions like this one, even in conversation. Did he do this to create a contrast with Aragorn, who speaks in a simpler, more direct style? I’ll have to pay attention to their respective styles of speaking, as we progress through the stories.</p>
<h3 id="morning">Morning</h3>
<p>I set the alarm for 6:00. If I had been able to fall asleep as soon as Grace and I turned out the lights and stay asleep when the alarm went off, I would have gotten 6 hours of sleep. But that didn’t quite happen. Grace was uncomfortable again during the night. But I did get some sleep. I managed to get up and out in time to get breakfast at Harvest Moon Café, and made it to the Honda dealership only eight minutes late. I missed my turn and had to call Grace for advice, because I still just don’t have much practice getting around Ypsilanti. It’s a maze of curving streets that keep changing name, interlaced with one-ways. I thought I was on Washington, but I was really on Washtenaw — my vision doesn’t help matters. I was able to read the next-to-last line on a recent vision test, so theoretically my glasses are fine, but I have some problems focusing at intermediate and long distances and issues with glare.</p>
<p>At the Honda dealership they were able to reproduce the problem with the ignition. They also diagnosed problems with worn rear sway bar links and bushings, and I’m not at all surprised — I last had the suspension looked at several years ago, and it’s been getting noisier and noisier as Grace and I constantly beat up the car on Michigan’s legendary roads. I’m actually a bit surprised that I haven’t broken an engine mount by now.</p>
<p>This is all going to cost about six hundred dollars, and I don’t have six hundred dollars, so it’s going to go on to our ever-increasing pile of debt. I’m having to shuffle money and watch every account like a hawk. The dealership needed to keep the car overnight, which I hadn’t quite planned for. So I got a ride to my office on the dealership shuttle.</p>
<p>This was all complicated by the fact that I had an important conference call for work starting about a quarter to nine. So I dialed into the call using my cell phone from the dealership waiting room. I didn’t need to speak much, but I needed to jump in at a couple of points, including while I was getting a ride to my office. In fact the call ended just as I was walking into the office, which startled my co-worker Adam, much to my amusement; he’d been listening to the call and thought I was still at the dealership, and then I immedialy walked in the door.</p>
<p>Grace and I needed to have a working car, because there was a distinct possibility that I might need to take Grace in to St. Joe’s, and we have errands we need to run tonight and she has appointments tomorrow. I reserved a car online, and had my co-worker Patrick take me to the Enterprise car rental so that I could rent a car for two days. So I have a tiny blue Ford Fiesta for a while, which seems laughably small, like a toy car, but it will work.</p>
<p>Tonight I’ll use the rental to go get groceries at Costco. Then, things may get complicated tomorrow. It depends on when my car is ready to pick up. I need to take Grace to her appointments tomorrow afternoon. If my car is ready before I leave for work, Grace could go to the dealership with me and take my car to Brighton and I could take the rental car to work. Then I could have her meet me at the dealership when I need to drop off the rental. We’ll figure something out. I hope I don’t wind up losing as big a chunk out of my work day as I did on Tuesday.</p>
<p>I still have no idea how we’re really going to manage with one car after the birth, and going into 2019. I’m going on faith at this point.</p>
<p>Two days to go!</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Last night I made it to Costco, then to Meijer, then the Sunoco, then home. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a video game in a repeating cut scene and all my movements are on rails; I just cycle through the same locations via the same route, over and over. I feel like I must be wearing ruts in the road. Or in myself.</p>
<p>There were fat snowflakes spattering on the windshield and the roads were getting slippery here and there. It is melting this morning and it looks like we will have rain, but it won’t be cold enough to really freeze up. Knowing that Grace and I are going to be out of the house a lot this weekend, I stocked up on frozen things that are easy for the kids to re-heat, including chicken pot pies and pre-cooked hamburger patties, along with lunch meat, peanut butter and jelly, spicy ramen noodles, and a lot of extra bagels and buns of various types.</p>
<p>Grace and the kids made a pot of black-eyed peas with ham hocks, so we ate that for dinner. The kids had managed to screw up several things she asked them to do — cleanup chores undone, food burned, so it took some time to get the meal finished and by the time the rental car was unloaded and everything was put away and we were ready to eat, I was pretty exhausted.</p>
<p>There are at least two different spills burned on the bottom of the oven. No one will take credit.</p>
<p>Grace didn’t get to have a conversation with our housemate today. Apparently she’s avoiding Grace and hiding out upstairs, communicating only by text message, and pretending to be asleep if anyone comes up to talk to her. Which means that her kids are effectively imprisoned up there.</p>
<p>Grace had put “chocolate” in her text-message shopping list. I wasn’t sure who asked for that or exactly what he or she wanted, so I got a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates of assorted types including some with dark chocolate, some with almonds, some with a cappuccino-flavored filling (those are really good), and some with something in the middle called a “black pearl,” which contains no actual pearls, but was freaking delicious. The kids mowed through the box and everyone pronounced them delicious.</p>
<p>After dinner I managed to read a little bit more of <em>Oryx and Crake</em> while the kids did cleanup. It’s a pretty quick read and it moves along well. I’m coming up on the climax of the book and I think I have a pretty good idea of what is coming up. It’s a great post-apocalyptic story, and I think we’re about to learn the details of the actual apocalypse, which Atwood has only gradually been revealing. There’s something that already feels dated about the story, though — I keep thinking “oh, yes, <strong>that</strong> apocalypse, the 2003 apocalypse.” It doesn’t feel to me like it is still the one we are headed for. I think we got onto a timeline with a somewhat different apocalypse looming.</p>
<p>I checked my voice mail and discovered that the Honda dealership had called me about 1:30 Wednesday afternoon; my phone never rang, which seems to happen sometimes. They didn’t need to keep it overnight after all; they found an ignition switch somewhere. So it was ready yesterday. But I had already rented a car for two days and filled up the tank to full assuming that I would need to drive Grace to Brighton and back.</p>
<p>Our bedtime story was Luke, chapter 12. Jesus makes some amazing statements. This one jumped out at us. It could be, as they say, ripped from today’s headlines:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west you say immediately that it is going to rain—and so it does; and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south you say that it is going to be hot—and so it is. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This morning Grace and I got up pretty early and went to get the Element, then Grace drove it home and I and drove the rental car back to Enterprise, dropped it off, and had them drive me to my office, which is less than half a mile away.</p>
<p>Fortunately because I returned it early, they only charged me for one day, so I’ll get about $325 refunded out of the $400 or so they charged me, which included a security deposit. That will help to soften the blow of the $650 car repair bill.</p>
<p>Today our bank account is overdrawn by almost $700. I think that will be “settled up” overnight and they’ll take $700 out of my line of credit and dump it into checking, leaving the line of credit balance something like $2,300. But I should also get a paycheck deposited overnight, and at some point soon I should get that $325 refunded. In what order will the transactions be posted? I don’t know. If they process my paycheck and the $325 refund first, I may be able to avoid digging into my line of credit any further this week. But when I plan out the transactions in my spreadsheet, I arrange them in the order of maximum pessimism, to verify that we will squeak by even in the worst-case scenario.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that I’ll be getting an end-of-year bonus. I think it will probably allow me to pay off the line of credit. But it may not pay for much else. Even if it doesn’t, it would be a big help to zero out at least one of our debts.</p>
<p>I’m trying not to feel too demoralized about our insecure money situation; right now, we have everything we actually need, and so many people are doing so much worse.</p>
<p>I’m very grateful that I don’t have to drive with Grace to Brighton and back today. I was looking at losing a big chunk of my work day and so having to stay very late again. But with the rental car turned in, Grace will pick me up when she’s done with her errands. And then I’ll be done with work for a few days.</p>
<p>One day to go!</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>It’s about 8:15 Friday night and I just got home from St. Joe’s. It’s been a long day. Grace brought me home from work last night and we had some beef stew. The kids had been grazing all day so didn’t really need anything. We went through the usual rigamarole of trying to get everyone to work on chores. For our bedtime story I continued right into “A Journey in the Dark,” where the Fellowship enters the Moria.</p>
<h3 id="a-journey-in-the-dark">“A Journey in the Dark”</h3>
<p>We read a good chunk of that chapter. There were many details in this chapter that I didn’t recall. There’s another bit of foreshadowing when Aragorn warns Gandalf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will follow your lead now — if this last warning does not move you. It is not of the Ring, nor of us others that I am thinking now, but of you, Gandalf. And I say to you: if you pass the doors of Moria, beware!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Aragorn doesn’t say anything specific about <em>why</em> he believes Moria is a particular threat to Gandalf rather than all of them equally. But like Elrond, he must have some premonition of what might happen.</p>
<p>The company can’t agree on whether to to try entering Moria or not. Frodo asks them to wait until morning to vote on it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At last Frodo spoke. ‘I do not wish to go,’ he said; ‘but neither do I wish to refuse the advice of Gandalf. I beg that there should be no vote, until we have slept on it. Gandalf will get votes easier in the light of the morning than in this cold gloom. How the wind howls!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But they never wind up taking such a vote, because they spend the night fighting off Wargs. These fights are told in some of Tolkien’s most magnificently alliterative prose:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Fling fuel on the fire!’ cried Gandalf to the hobbits. ‘Draw your blades, and stand back to back!’</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>In the leaping light, as the fresh wood blazed up, Frodo saw many grey shapes spring over the ring of stones. More and more followed. Through the throat of one huge leader Aragorn passed his sword with a thrust; with a great sweep Boromir hewed the head off another. Beside them Gimli stood with his stout legs apart, wielding his dwarf-axe. The bow of Legolas was singing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is lots of great alliteration in this passage:</p>
<ul>
<li>fling, fuel, fire</li>
<li>leaping, light</li>
<li>spring, ring</li>
<li>throat, thrust</li>
<li>hewed, head</li>
<li>stood, stout</li>
</ul>
<p>There are some more distant near-rhymes, and similar-sounding words or groups of words, too:</p>
<ul>
<li>blades, blazed</li>
<li>gray shapes, great sweep</li>
<li>sword with, stood with</li>
</ul>
<p>The scene is reminiscent of the scene in <em>The Hobbit</em> when Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Dwarves cimb fir trees to escape wolves, and Gandalf ignites pine cones to fling at them, but this time there are better fighters in the party. But there’s a very strange detail mentioned only in passing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the full light of the morning came no signs of the wolves were to be found, and they looked in vain for the bodies of the dead. No trace of the fight remained but the charred trees and the arrows of Legolas lying on the hill-top. All were undamaged save one of which only the point was left.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’re supposed to realize that the arrow point was all that is left of the flaming arrow from the night before, ignited by Gandalf, bearer of Narya, the ring of fire:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The last arrow of Legolas kindled in the air as it flew, and plunged burning into the heart of a great wolf-chieftain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the “smoking gun” which tells us that the wolf corpses weren’t silently dragged away — they <strong>vanished</strong>. The flaming arrow stuck into the wolf, and the shaft burned away until the fire met the flesh of the wolf and went out, leaving only the point in the wolf. Then the wolf disappeared, leaving the point behind.</p>
<p>The dead wargs just disappeared. Is this something Saruman does from Isengard, or something Sauron can actually do from Mordor? It is not at all clear. It seems like Tolkien may have realized that an enemy that could create and uncreate armies of vicious beasts magically at a distance was a little too powerful for the confines of Middle-Earth, and so I don’t think we ever read of such a conjuring again.</p>
<p>There’s an interesting change in the film. When Gandalf is attempting to figure out how to open the Doors of Durin, he is the one who finally figures it out:</p>
<p>With a suddenness that startled them all the wizard sprang to his feet. He was laughing! ‘I have it!’ he cried. ‘Of course, of course! Absurdly simple, like most riddles when you see the answer.’</p>
<p>In the film, it is Frodo who actually realizes that “Speak, friend, and enter” has been misread and so become a riddle. This gives him something to do in this scene, but it also makes sense in terms of who Frodo <strong>is</strong>. He’s the heir of the Shire’s most famous player of the riddle game, Bilbo. Although the film then igores the fact that the book has establishes that Frodo has a reasonable command of Elvish and so very well might know the word for “friend” without having to ask Gandalf.</p>
<h3 id="malachi-richard">Malachi Richard</h3>
<p>Grace and I didn’t get a lot of sleep, but we got some. I think I got an unbroken block of about four hours from around midnight to around four, and a somewhat disrupted hour of sleep between four and five. I thought we had to be at the hospital at 8:00 this morning, and so set my alarm for 6:00. But Grace new that we actually had to be there at 6:00, and so set her alarm for 5:00. So she made me a coffee and coconut milk, with just one teaspoon of instant coffee since I didn’t want to be too wired, while I got a quick shower and got dressed, and we made it on time. Having a baby is always a combination of hurrying up and waiting. The team did a whole bunch of medical history on Grace and there was much reviewing of notes and signing of consent forms. They got an IV port into her arm. I didn’t have a lot to do for this part except to occasionally chime in to make sure some detail was remembered.</p>
<p>As write this next part please keep in mind that I am not a medical professional, and I did not take notes today. There may be errors in the details — but the following account is what happened as I remember it:</p>
<p>As they monitord Grace it became clear that her blood pressure was unusually elevated, which was especially strange given that it had been fine the previous afternoon, and Grace had just taken an early-morning dose of labetalol. We all started to have concerns about pre-eclampsia. They took blood and urine to do lab tests to try to determine if she showed any of the other danger signs. There was nothing. She had no headache or visual disturbances. They pushed some IV labetalol and it came down a bit and seemed stable, although it was still higher than her normally well-controlled blood pressure. The “cure” for pre-eclampsia is to deliver the baby, so they got her into surgery.</p>
<p>I’ve been through this c-section process with her before — twice before, in fact. I found myself particularly nervous today. A good chunk of it was because I’ve had so long to worry about it; this was scheduled months ago. In the two previous cases, the c-section was done on an emergency basis, so we didn’t have a lot of time to worry about the situation, and in both of those cases it was the health of the baby, not Grace, that was the worry.</p>
<p>The c-section went well. There was no excess bleeding or other difficulty. Baby Malachi Richard was born about 8:45 and came out in excellent health. He looks quite a bit like Pippin did. They didn’t weigh him or measure him immediately, but got him on Grace’s chest immediately where he settled down while the finished sewing her back together. Grace’s blood pressure during the surgery remained elevated but didn’t spike alarmingly.</p>
<p>After surgery they brought her back to recovery, and weighed the baby. He was 7 pounds, 2 ounces at birth. I held him on my chest for more skin-to-skin for a while while Grace got settled in recovery. As she has with every birth, she began to shiver violently. They have always wrapped her up in heated blankets and it has passed after a while. This time it didn’t pass for a long, long time, despite the blankets <strong>and</strong> the big apparatus of plastic tubes piping warm air onto her — I have no idea what that thing is called.</p>
<p>Grace’s blood pressure readings went “off-the-rails.” One reading came up at 198 over 178, or something like that. Now I was starting to feel terrified. Grace still had none of the other warning symptosm of preeclampsia, though, and the nurses wisely realized that the automatic sphygmomanometer was not giving good readings on limbs where the muscles were violently contracting, so they finally busted out one of the old bulb-and-stethoscope models.</p>
<p>Grace’s diastolic blood pressure was <strong>not</strong> almost 200, but it was worryingly high, even higher than it had been before the surgery. So they continued to add IV medications and started a protocol for adding magnesium sulfate to her IV, which is designed to prevent possible seizures. The protocol involves a bolus dose and then a steady drip for the next 24 hours and the bolus does produces a big flush response. About the same time they also put the baby back on her chest.</p>
<p>Between the reëstablisment of skin-to-skin contact with the baby and the medications, Grace’s violent shivering finally came to an end and a few minutes later they could strip off the heating apparatus and extra blankets. Her blood pressure started to seem much more stable, and she was nursing the baby, so I took the opportunity to go get my first real food of the day. After another coffee, a green juice, and some sushi, I started to feel somewhat calmer.</p>
<p>The afternoon and evening were quite uneventful compared to the morning. Grace’s blood pressure remained somewhat elevated but stable. Another round of lab tests came back without indication of preeclampsia. She never developed a headache or visual disturbances. The baby was quite mellow, alternating between nursing and just lying on Grace’s chest sleeping or looking around. When they both slept, I finished reading <em>Oryx and Crake</em>.</p>
<p>There was some annoyance because one of his heel stick blood glucose tests came back one digit too low, and so they had to do a more elaborate test. That one came back fine. The following tests were even better. So they might be able to stop the heel sticks.</p>
<p>We sent and received a lot of text messages notifying family and friends. Grace posted a picture on Facebook and I posted a couple on Twitter. The magnesium sulfate protocol unfortunately meant that Grace couldn’t eat anything but clear liquids. But she downed ginger ale, apple juice, water, and jello. The staff offered me a couple of spare food trays so I got two more meals and left about 7:30, 13 and a half hours after getting there this morning. I was both tired and antsy and I wanted to check on the kids. Several of our friends had stopped by during the day to check on them, so they were fine.</p>
<p>On the magnesium sulfate protocol, Grace won’t be allowed to keep the baby in her room overnight without another adult present, even if the baby is in the baby cart. This could be a pain. We’re not sure whether the baby will be able to settle down and sleep in the nursery. With the other kids, some haven’t minded it, and some have. They should bring the baby back to nurse. I just couldn’t stay any longer. I’ll get back as early as I can tomorrow and just hope that they can soothe the baby. Otherwise we might get into the cycle where he burns his energy crying, his blood sugar drops, they do more heel sticks, he cries more… then they want to feed him formula, or start an IV. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. I don’t want to go back in the morning and find an exhausted baby who would have been perfectly happy had they not tried to get him to sleep in a plastic baby cart instead of on his mom’s chest.</p>
<p>I’m not exactly sure what is going to happen for the rest of the weekend. We’re not sure when Grace might be able to come home.</p>
<p>Goodnight!</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>It’s 11:28 Saturday evening and it’s been another very long day. I got a full night’s sleep, which was a big help, although I can’t say I was fully recharged this morning.</p>
<p>I got to the hospital about 10:00 this morning. I was not quite sure where to go, because Grace had told me she was being moved to the mother/baby unit, and I wanted to park in the correct lot and go in the correct entrance to avoid a lot of extra wandering around looking for her. So I parked in lot B instead of lot Q. I still wasn’t sure where she was, so I went to the café for a small mocha and an egg-salad sandwich and sent her a text. She told me she was still in the old room, so I took the long walk through the lower-level maze of hallways. After six previous births at St. Joe’s, I know the way pretty well.</p>
<p>She hadn’t been moved to the mother/baby unit yet because just as her blood pressure had “overshot” before the delivery, this morning after extra labetalol, the magnesium sulfate, and her celery juice, it “undershot” and so was extremely low. So they dropped one of her doses of labetalol and added more IV saline and fortunately it gradually came up. But they had not wanted to move her until they were sure she could stand and walk safely. They also wanted to make sure she could urinate without any difficulty after getting her catheter out, and she hadn’t done that yet. Her test results had all been good and there were no signs of excess bleeding either externally or internally. It really seemed like just an over-correction due to the medications. They are trying to make changes only gradually to avoid another overshoot, but I don’t think that will actually be a problem now that the baby is nursing securely.</p>
<p>Little Malachi had a better night than we feared. He was able to settle down and get some sleep in the nursery, and they brought him back several times during the night to nurse. Nevetheless, his blood sugar did drop again to the point where it was <strong>just</strong> below the acceptable range. When this happens they restart the clock. He needs to pass twelve hours of tests. So they’re going to continue to take heel sticks until past midnight.</p>
<p>I brought Grace some vials of breast milk this morning, donated by one of our family friends, and so she was able to squirt this in Malachi’s mouth while he nursed. After adding just a few cc’s of milk, his blood sugar came up noticeably. Grace has colostrum but no milk yet, although it’s on its way, and little Malachi will soon have more milk than he can possibly handle… but he will also grow very rapidly!</p>
<p>I brought my copy of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> to Grace’s room so that I could read some more of that story to Grace. I was able to read a bit to her, although when I read to her it always tends to put her to sleep. We only got though a few pages. Staying in a hospital means constant interruptions. And then after a while, when Grace’s diastolic blood pressure was pretty solidly over 100, they moved us to the mother/baby unit.</p>
<p>About 2:00 I ran an errand to go get us pho from the Pho House. I actually drove by it the first time without seeing it. It is right next to Tim Horton’s on Washtenaw just east of Hewitt. But next to Tim Horton’s, the building actually looks like an abandoned property. It’s a real hole-in-the-wall, but their pho is to die for. When you get it to go, they give you a huge and very full container of their beef broth, and a box with all the stuff to mix into it: fresh basil leaves, bean sprouts, whatever meats you ordered, rice noodles, jalapeñe lime wedges, and hot sauce. Open it all up, drink down some of the broth to make room, and throw in a little bit of everything. The result is something that kisses every part of your tongue with flavor all at once. It’s so good.</p>
<p>I also got a half-dozen donuts from Tim Horton’s, even though I only really wanted one Boston Cream for myself, and wasn’t sure if Grace would even eat one plain old-fashioned. I just had a feeling I’d need them, and that I’d need a half-dozen, not a dozen.</p>
<p>When I got back and we had just started eating our pho, Grace went through text messages and realized that the person who had arranged to take Joshua and Pippin to their choir concert dress rehearsal today and concert tomorrow had backed out, but apparently did this by sending Grace an e-mail Thursday night, rather than calling or sending a text message. So we did not know this. So I hurriedly scarfed down half my pho, grabbed my one donut to eat on the way to the car, and drove back home, where Joshua and Pippin were dressed and ready to go and had been waiting for some time. I drove them to First Presbyterian Church in downtown Ann Arbor. The trip from the hospital to our home and back to First Presbyterian just can’t be done that quickly. There are a lot of surface streets involved.</p>
<p>When we got there we found the building empty. Grace when she handed off the task of getting the boys to these two events, today and tomorrow, had lost track of the correct times for them. So it turned out the dress rehearsal had already ended. In fact, by the time we found out that they weren’t getting a ride, it was already too late for us to get them there.</p>
<p>Since they were quite literally all dressed up with nowhere to go, I brought them with me back to Grace’s room. They got to meet little Malachi and hang out with mom and watch cartoons. And that’s when I realized that I had bought those extra donuts for two of my sons to eat. Sometimes it seems like I can see dimly into the future. Not that clearly — I didn’t know who was going to eat the donuts or when, but I knew that I needed to get a half-dozen instead of two and I needed to leave them in Grace’s hospital room instead of taking them home.</p>
<p>Meanwhile I got a text message from my boss about the Thorlabs holiday party, and realized that I had also made a mistake. I had thought that it was actually on Friday, because our other holiday parties had generally been on workdays. With all that happened yesterday I didn’t even try to go. But I realized that it was actually today, and that it actually ran until 8:00 with a dinner from 6:00 to 7:00, and it was only 5:30 or so. Grace was content with the baby and two sons, so I decided to try to go for part of it.</p>
<p>I thought that maybe I should just take the regular route that I knew well to get to I-94, but decided to put my trust in Google Maps. It came up with a convoluted route using some roads and freeway ramps that I was not very familiar with. So… I tried it. I probably would have been able to make this route work if I had been able to print out a full set of directions, but I had to settle for trying to read the route off my phone. I screwed it up, confused Huron River Drive with Huron Parkway, and missed the freeway entrance Google directed me to. So I had to drive to a different entrance, but that meant I wound up driving through the medical complex in downtown Ann Arbor to get on M-14. Then in my distraction, I took the wrong branch of M-14. I quickly realized my mistake, but still had to drive until I got to an exit with an overpass and matching entrance ramp so that I could turn around and backtrack to get onto M-14 going the right way. That took a while. And I still had a long way to go on M-14 and I-94. There was an uncleared accident on I-94. It must have happened just minutes before I got there. It didn’t look like a serious accident, but a car with some dents and blown tires was partially blocking both lanes. Traffic slowed to a complete stop for a while while everyone merged to creep around on the shoulder. When I got to my exit in Jackson, I was able to follow the route, but it was quite slow, because it was on dark single-lane roads, and it was quite hard to see some of the turns.</p>
<p>Anyway, the upshot is that it took me an hour and ten minutes to go forty miles. I had been hoping to get there by 6:30 but didn’t make it until about 7:00. Fortunately they had saved me a plate. I wasn’t all that hungry after the pho at 3:00 or so, but I ate a bit of the dinner and had a glass of Sandhill Crane Vineyards Pinot Noir. I think it was a 2016 bottling. Michigan red wines are still developing in quality. This one had a a somewhat undistinguished and muddy-looking color, but it wasn’t bad. I’d say that it is a bit sweet for my taste and had a slight syrupy, medicinal flavor, but there were some pleasant notes in there, and the flavors grew on me as I finished the glass.</p>
<p>So I didn’t get to spend very much time at the Christmas party, but I am glad that I went, even though it took an awful lot of driving. I greeted a few folks and showed people pictures of the new baby on my phone and received many congratulations. My boss made a few remarks about how well our business unit, and Thorlabs in general, has done in 2018, which is encouraging, and we played some silly party games with white-elephant gifts. We even played musical chairs. There were also wineglasses and jackets with the Thorlabs logo to take home.</p>
<p>On the way out, I tried to find my way back to I-94, but passed my turn, and put my flashers on and pulled out my phone to try to stare at the map on my phone and determine which way I needed to go. Fortunately one of my co-workers drove right past me and asked me if I needed help. <strong>She</strong> had also just missed the same turn. So I asked her if I could follow her back to the freeway entrance. She turned around, in a driveway, and then I turned around. I thought that in my smaller car, driving onto the right shoulder, I could manage a U-turn, but the road was just a touch too narrow, so I needed to turn it into a 3-point turn. I saw a truck coming towards me, so instead of backing up to make the second point in the turn, I pulled forward as far as I could onto the shoulder to give him room to pass behind me. That driver passed by yelling “are you stupid, or what?”</p>
<p>So, that’s Jackson, Michigan.</p>
<p>I’m still debating whether I should have replied “no, but you’re an asshole!” or just wished him Merry Christmas. I opted to say nothing.</p>
<p>Fortunately my co-worker was waiting for me to follow here, and we were actually only a short distance from the freeway on-ramp. The drive back was uneventful because I took a route that I was familiar with. Even so, it took about fifty minutes, so it was about nine when I got back to Grace’s room.</p>
<p>I hung out for a few more minutes and packed up my bag and caught up on the news with Grace — fortunately, there wasn’t any bad news. Little Malachi’s blood sugar had gone up well. She is going to continue to nurse him while supplementing with donor milk until she has to send him to the nursery to sleep. They will continue to bring him back for feedings. With his blood sugar higher at the start of the night, he should be able to get through it without dropping out of the acceptable range.</p>
<p>The boys have their concert tomorrow. They were supposed to have to attend the dress rehearsal to be allowed to attend the concert, but Grace spoke to their choir director and she is going to make an exception due to our circumstances. So I will need to take them to their concert tomorrow evening — hopefully <strong>not</strong> at the same time they decide to discharge Grace and the baby. This meant that I needed to get some cash out to buy a concert ticket.</p>
<p>The boys hadn’t actually eaten dinner, so I needed to get them fed. So all told I had three more errands to run before I could go home: I had to feed the boys, I had to get some cash out, and I had to fill up the tank, even though I filled it up Thursday night. I took them to Happy’s Pizza and fed them an order of fried shrimp and fries. I got myself a vegetarian sub, and ate about half of it, but my heart wasn’t in it. Then I went right next door to Huntington bank and got some cash out of their ATM. Then, finally I was able to drive back to our neighborhood, and go to the gas station I usually go to, and then go on home.</p>
<p>The house wasn’t too terribly trashed, although our housemate had brought three bags of trash down by the front door and left them there. So I had our kids take them out to the bins. The floors needed to be swept, but apparently the brooms were missing. I think our housemate took them upstairs and didn’t bring them back down. So I will have the kids check with her in the morning.</p>
<p>I had one more thing to do: I had to clean up their dress shirts and pants a bit. So I used a damp washcloth to scrub off dirt, lint, and bits of food. Fortunately they are black, so they hide stains well. I didn’t actually need to run them through the washer. Our choir director knows a thing or two about how to best work with kids.</p>
<p>Then all that was left to do was convince the kids to quiet down, get the videos turned off and put away, brush their teeth, quiet down, and get to bed, and quiet down, and then quiet down again.</p>
<p>They’re very quiet now. It’s about 1:00 a.m. Now it’s time for me to get on to sleep.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li>Luke (Revised New American Bible, 1986-1990 edition)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition) (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe Illustrated Trade Paperback Edition)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, December 15th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-47311571519253724712018-12-08T21:30:00.000-05:002018-12-16T01:21:17.602-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, December 8th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>Last night none of us had much energy and Elanor was pretty miserable. We had an unimpressive dinner of cold cuts, sardines, cheese, crackers, and rolls and tried to help Elanor get some rest. Infant Tylenol helped. I was also not feeling well; I seem to have a mild fever and I’ve been feeling wrung out. So today involved a couple of naps. No one made it to Mass. Grace and Veronica did manage to get out to a social event at the church. Grace also went out to meet a couple of friends who are in town. I fried myself a couple of eggs but haven’t been very hungry, or up to much cooking. Elanor’s rash is healing up. I gave her a bath and she fell asleep in the tub while I was holding her. So she’s currently having a nap herself.</p>
<p>Tonight I think we will have lamb steaks and salad and an Instant Pot of basmati rice with tomatoes, then watch “The Witchfinders,” the next episode of the 11th season. We have a tricky morning in store tomorrow. Grace has to be at a doctor’s appointment at 8:00 in Brighton. So she needs to get up and out early. If I want a ride to work afterwards I’ll have to go with her.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Well, we didn’t manage to watch “The Witchfinders.” The kids weren’t really focused on getting chores done. But I did get my beard trimmed, with some assistance from Joshua and Sam, and read Joshua, Sam, and Pippin a bit more of “The Ring Goes South.” The Sword that was Broken has been re-forged! The Fellowship has finally left Rivendell! But just barely. Then Grace read us chapter 2 of Luke. The kids were not very good at paying attention, but we got through it, and sent them to bed. Elanor is still healing up from the nasty rash associated with Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. It looks worse as it gets crusty, but it is actually healing. She had a better night’s sleep, which meant that we had a better night’s sleep, although it was too brief.</p>
<p>I got up at six. Well, shortly after six. I got a bath and tried Grace’s homemade shampoo again. Unfortunately it coats my hair in such a way that it sticks badly to itself. I can’t even pull my fingers through it. It feels kind of like taffy. So I had to wash it again with a regular shampoo. Apparently this homemade shampoo works really well for Veronica, but not so well on Grace’s hair and my hair. I’m still trying to figure out what I should use daily or weekly. I haven’t had this problem in many years since my hair hasn’t been this long for… twenty years? I can’t recall for sure. We got out and went to Tim Horton’s for a small coffee (for me) and a small tea (for Grace) and two breakfast sandwiches, and hit the road for Brighton and Grace’s obstetrics appointment. She had written it on the calendar as an 8:00 appointment. I think it was actually 8:30, which meant that despite the extra delay to make my hair combable, and a few minutes spent sitting in heavy traffic, we made it on time. Then Grace dropped me off at my office. This doing-everything-with-one-car is quite a pain but we will have to make it work for now.</p>
<p>I had a pretty uneventful work day. I found some improvements to make to the bootloader — we had a problem with a unit in manufacturing that had been programmed with a bad data file. I improved the error-checking in the bootloader and the error reporting in the EEPROM configuration tool so that if we wind up with some kind of similar bad data file in the future, the bootloader will detect the error and report it to the EEPROM configuration tool, which will display an error message to the user, warning about bad data. This is something I try to do when I can — if we come across some case where there is an error like this, even if it isn’t a bug in my code <em>per se</em>, I try to figure out how that error in the process could have been caught and reported, and then implement those changes if they aren’t too risky or difficult.</p>
<p>Grace had to come out and get me, and arrived a bit before 7:00, and then she had to go to a meeting at 8:00. She needed to eat something first, so we stopped for a quick bite at the Coney Island on Jackson. She had a bowl of lemon rice soup, which we hope won’t give her heartburn, and I had a small order of chili cheese fries. These are things that their kitchen can bring out almost instantly. Then I drove home, got the mail, jumped out of the car, pulled out my flashlight, and walked up the driveway to our house while she drove away. She’s going to be a bit late, but maybe not too late.</p>
<p>The kids had left all the lights on in the garage again, so I turned those off, then went inside. They had not taken the trash or recycling bins down to Crane Road, so I told them to do that. They are working on it now. The plan was to feed them leftovers, but it looks like they already heated up some leftover hamburgers and made pancakes. I think they used the pancakes as buns for the hamburgers. An odd choice, but — hey, they seem to be mostly fed.</p>
<p>Grace is talking to a nonprofit in Saginaw about our old house. We might consider donating it — essentially, continuing to pay the mortgage, and just the mortgage, while they occupy it and take over all maintenance and utility expenses. It’s not necessarily ideal, but it chould help make our monthly expenses related to the old house <strong>predictable</strong>, which would be a big improvement over 2018. And there might be a way to deduct our mortgage payments as a charitable contribution. We will look into that. It wouldn’t really help us until we paid our 2019 taxes in 2020. It may be a bit of a long shot. Grace will meet with them on Friday.</p>
<p>Since I’m kind of compulsively confessional here, I should probably mention that I seem to have developed a mild case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epididymitis">epididymitis</a>. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before. As for the cause, I believe I can rule out an STD, but there are other less common factors including, apparently, some viral infections. I think it’s also possible that between the Celexa, which has sexual side effects, and the Flomax, which affects the prostate, and my new blood pressure medication, I’ve simply come across a less common side effect. Some sources list testicular pain as a reported side effect, and I’ve found some Celexa users on message boards talking about symptoms that sound exactly like mine. Fortunately after resting most of the day on Sunday, it seems to be feeling considerably better. If it doesn’t go away completely I’ll arrange to see my doctor.</p>
<p>Barring surprises, Grace will deliver the new baby by c-section in 11 days!</p>
<p>And… the evening is ending with a kid melting down because his siblings are demanding that he do chores I was told he had done, but didn’t. A second is having a screaming tantrum over food I was told he had eaten, when in fact he hadn’t eaten anything — hence the tantrum. Sigh.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I managed to calm down the kids. I got them to get through their chores. I had to rub Benjamin’s back and talk him down so he stopped demanding hamburgers that didn’t exist, and he was finally willing to listen to the other food options that I had been offering him. So I wound up making him a quick omelet with cheese and sliced chicken breast. He ate most of that, and then Elanor ate the rest, and then we had a story.</p>
<p>I read more of “The Ring Goes South.” We read about the weeks between leaving Rivendell and preparing to go over the mountains via the Redhorn Gate. These events are highly compressed in the movie, and it’s interesting how bits and pieces from different conversations are combined and elided. Some of the elements of the movie scenes are rendered much more dramatically, such as the flyover by the <em>crebain</em>. In the book we read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Lie flat and still!’ hissed Aragorn, pulling Sam down into the shade of a holly-bush; for a whole regiment of birds had broken away suddenly from the main host, and came, flying low, straight towards the ridge. Sam thought they were a kind of crow of large size. As they passed overhead, in so dense a throng that their shadow followed them darkly over the ground below, one harsh croak was heard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the movie this is an extremely noisy scene. And there’s a second “flyover” of some kind that happens late at night:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was the cold chill hour before the first stir of dawn, and the moon was low. Frodo looked up at the sky. Suddenly he saw or felt a shadow pass over the high stars, as if for a moment they faded and then flashed out again. He shivered.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Did you see anything pass over?’ he whispered to Gandalf, who was just ahead.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘No, but I felt it, whatever it was,’ he answered. ‘It may be nothing, only a wisp of thin cloud.’</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘It was moving fast then,’ muttered Aragorn, ‘and not with the wind.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the movie, some of that dialogue happens when the Fellowship sees the approaching crows. But here it’s something different. In <em>The Treason of Isengard</em>: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Two, Christopher Tolkien says this is probably a winged Nazgû, although this is not really confirmed anywhere else in the text or in Tolkien’s letters.</p>
<p>When Grace tried to drive home from her meeting, she found that she was entirely unable to start my car. She finally had to get a towtruck via roadside assistance. The driver didn’t do anything special, he just tried to start it himself a few times, and it started. This is becoming a real problem, as we are down to one car and we don’t have any immediate prospect of getting a different car. I can always start my car after a few tries. Sometimes it takes five or six. There’s some kind of a loose contact in the ignition switch, or something like that. I’ve never been completely unable to start it after a few tries. But that keeps happening to Grace.</p>
<p>This morning we were pretty tired because we got up so early Monday morning. So I wasn’t able to get up and into the tub all that early. But we managed to get up and out and I got myself a small coffee and Grace a small tea at Joe and Rosie’s, along with some day-old pastries.</p>
<p>I had a pretty productive work day — more revisions to the MX firmware. After refining some of my error-checking and reporting code until I was satisfied with it, I tackled a big merge, merging all my recent work into the head. That took a while and there were some conflicts and and confusing file histories to sort out, but I’m very satisfied that it is done. I’m wrapping up a “final” firmware version for all our current products. This will be “final” in the sense that I don’t have any outstanding changes planned and any requests in the queue are considered low-priority “might be nice” things. I don’t plan to make further changes unless there are bugs reported, customer feature requests we can satisfy with firmware changes, or we do some kind of hardware change that necessitates supporting additional hardware options.</p>
<p>Grace is in the parking lot waiting for me. She was having trouble getting the car started again. I was sitting here thinking that it might be a good idea for her to ask Joshua to come out and try starting it. I did not send her a text message about this, but I thought about it. Then she sent me a text message telling me that she had asked him to come out and try starting it. It started for him on the first try.</p>
<p>Again, I don’t know what to make of this. It would be obviously silly for me to say “it only likes men to start it,” or “it’s jealous of you so it won’t start for you.” That would be silly, but yet the evidence does seem to point in that direction. I’ve watched her try to start it and she’s just twisting the key the way I am. I have no idea what she is doing differently.</p>
<p>We’re going to head to Costco. It’ll have to be a pretty small load of groceries because I don’t have very much cash on hand this week. I’ll need to keep it under $100.</p>
<p>Ten days to go!</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Well, we didn’t keep it under $100. But it wasn’t too much over. We got a bunch of fruit, more bread rolls, sandwich meat, eggs, and some top round. Grace was quite tired by the time we got home and her tiredness seemed to be contagious. Grace had put some ground bison in the refrigerator to thaw, but it was still partially frozen. So Veronica made a beef stew out of the top round and potatoes in the Instant Pot and it was pretty good, although I was reminded why the top round is cheaper than other cuts of meat — it tends to be kind of dry and chewy. Grace just had a cup of the broth. We struggled to get the kids to stay quiet because our housemate’s kids have all come down with a virus. It’s probably the same thing we had last weekend. Elanor is clearly feeling better, and her little blisters are healing, although they look terrible.</p>
<p>We didn’t have a bedtime story last night. Grace doesn’t have any appointments today, so I took the car the way I usually do, but I’ll have to be home so she can take Pippin to his religious education class this evening. The bison should be thawed and I should have a little bit more time to cook this evening, so I’ll attempt to make chili.</p>
<p>This morning I had a toasted bagel with peanut butter and a coffee at Joe and Rosie’s and read a little bit more of <em>Moderan</em>. I’ve finished the three main sections of the books, and I’m reading the final section, a collection of previously uncollected Moderan stories that don’t fit into the main story arc. For example, in “A Little at All Times,” Bunch describes a sort of alternate eschatology in which the metal and flesh cyborg people of Moderan and their invincible strongholds are ironically brought down not by a contagion that attacks their remaining “flesh-strips,” but by a kind of metal-eating dust, perhaps a nanotechnological weapon as hypothesized by Stanislaw Lem in <em>The Invincible</em> and <em>Fiasco</em>. And a story like “A Little Girl’s Spring Day in Moderan” is very similar to another Moderan story, “A Husban’d Share,” but it’s a little more blatantly naughty, which might explain why it hasn’t been collected elsewhere.</p>
<p>There are some odd inconsistencies between the newly published stories at the end of <em>Moderan</em> and the older stories. Several make reference to “Olderan,” a location that hasn’t “modernized” like Moderan. But in the newly published stories it is spelled “Olderrun.” I think the “Olderrun” spelling is probably an offhand reference to “riverrun,” the first word of Joyce’s <em>Finnegan’s Wake</em>, which begins thusly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The lowercase initial letter is as it was published.</p>
<p>This <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_short_stories_by_David_R._Bunch">list of stories</a> needs to be updated, and it has obvious gaps; for example, it doesn’t list the story “The Escaping” which appeared in the <em>Dangerous Visions</em> anthology. “The Escaping” isn’t in the <em>Moderan</em> collection. And it hasn’t been updated to show the stories that were added to this 2018 edition of <em>Moderan</em>. <a href="http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/02/unjustly-neglected-david-r-bunch.html">Matthew Cheney’s blog post</a> suggests that Bunch may have published 200 non-science fiction stories before selling his first science fiction story to <em>If</em> magazine, and that only 1/3 or so of Bunch’s stories have been collected.</p>
<p>It’s disappointing to realize that there doesn’t seem to be much scholarship on Bunch and his work. There doesn’t seem to be a self-designated Bunch “expert.” No one seems to have stepped up to be his biographer. I don’t think that I’m up to the job, but it seems like the least I can do is to track down his other collection, simply entitled <em>BUNCH!</em>, and do what I can with my modest online voice to promote his work. His stories are difficult and dark and “arty, and not all of them are great. Cheney writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s been said that when Bunch was publishing one story after another in <em>Amazing</em>, <em>Fantastic</em>, <em>If</em>, <em>Galaxy</em>, and <em>The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction</em> during the 1960s and ’70s that readers were outraged — they felt the stories were deliberately opaque, that he was mocking them and their desire for linear narratives with clear plots and sympathetic characters.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>He was.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But they can be quite startling in the stark brutality of the vision of human nature they expose through satire. As Swift did, Bunch is giving me — and you — permission to write satire that truly goes “beyond the pale,” which is where satire should go, because anything in this hell-world that <strong>can</strong> be destroyed by satire — <strong>must</strong> be. He and his work should not be forgotten. And the best way to remember him would be to go blow up something horrible but commonplace — so commonplace that we no longer even <strong>see</strong> it for what it really is — with words.</p>
<h3 id="dropbox">Dropbox</h3>
<p>It looks like Dropbox may have disabled a feature so that I can no longer share files by link with a non-pro account. Or at least they may have partially disabled this feature. The links that I create now seem to go to the preview page on <strong>dropbox.com</strong> instead of downloading the file. But there might be an easy workaround, changing the <strong>?dl=0</strong> at the end of the link to <strong>?dl=1</strong>. Can it be that easy? I’m testing it by sending the link to someone overseas, and I guess I’ll find out. And I’m wondering if this will affect a link I shared a year ago; the files are still there waiting for my editor friend to access them at the end of the year.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Yes, it seems to be that easy. This morning I got confirmation that the <strong>?dl=1</strong> tweak worked to share a file with someone in Germany.</p>
<p>I had to leave early last night to take Pippin to his religious education class. Unfortunately during the whole 5:00 hour (and the next couple of hours, honestly), traffic on I-94 tends to be badly backed up due to huge numbers of cars trying to get on using the State Street ramps. So it took me twice as long to get home as usual. I picked up Pippin and got him to his class at about 6:11, eleven minutes late. It was the best I was able to do. I then hung around the church with the other parents and read more of <em>Moderan</em>. I should only need another quiet hour or two to finish the book.</p>
<p>Grace and the kids made chili and mashed sweet potatoes while I was out. Pippin’s class was done at 7:15 and we got home about 7:30. We ate with our houseguest and her children. The chili was quite spicy, which was a bit of a problem for the youngest children, but it was delicious. Grace is trying some papaya enzymes to help with her digestion, and some burdock tea, which to me smells like apple cores and tastes about like you’d expect the root of some random weed to taste. But the enzymes and/or tea seemed to help her last night and she didn’t have terrible heartburn that made her feel like she needed to — what was the phrase she used? I think it was “vomit fire.”</p>
<h3 id="fire">Fire</h3>
<p>Speaking of fire, I wound up going down a rabbit hole yesterday. I was listening to an episode of the “We Hate Movies” podcast about <em>Terminator 2: Judgment Day</em>. I was remembering Sarah Conner’s dream sequence, in which we see her annihilated by a nuclear blast. This got me thinking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After"><em>The Day After</em></a>, the TV movie about nuclear war, and reading about the story of <em>The Day After</em> I realized that in my memory I had mixed up the plot of a later movie, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin"><em>Special Bulletin</em></a>, with <em>The Day After</em>. I remember that the explosion sequences in <em>The Day After</em> used a lot of stock footage, and so the climax of <em>Special Bulletin</em> is more firmly embedded in my memory. As it is a story about an act of nuclear terrorism, rather than a nuclear war, <em>Special Bulletin</em> now seems to me like the more plausible movie, and at 105 minutes instead of 126 minutes, faster-paced and more engaging.</p>
<h3 id="the-witchfinders">“The Witchfinders”</h3>
<p>Because we got through dinner pretty early, and the kids did a good job cleaning up, I got out my laptop to watch “The Witchfinders,” last week’s episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>. We just watched it on the laptop in our bedroom, so that Grace could prop herself up in bed. It was occasionally a little hard to hear, since Elanor kept trying to grab the laptop, and when she wasn’t trying to grab the laptop, she was wandering around the room trying to grab my cell phone. We had subtitles on, but I missed a few lines.</p>
<p>This one wasn’t bad, and there were things about it I enjoyed. But overall I felt that the plot arc, involving an imprisoned alien army, was a bit over-complicated. Alan Cumming as King James was entertaining, and does “steal the show” as other reviewers have noted, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. I kept asking myself what role his character actually played in the episode. I am left with the feeling that he was added to the script to pad it out, as the story could have been told entirely without him. The climax got too silly for my taste.</p>
<p>Afterwards, I felt like there were some unanswered questions. Does the Morax army comprise one entity, or many? Are they tiny, like the little blob of mud-stuff that The Doctor catches in a bottle? How does that little blob relate to the mud-tentacles and the giant tentacle with a face we see in the climax?</p>
<p>Why would the alien army be imprisoned on a remote backwater like Earth, anyway? If someone knocks down the remaining stump of that tree, will they be freed again?</p>
<p>Are we meant to conclude that the grandmother character, Old Mother Twiston, was also infected with an alien entity, like Becka Savage, before the start of the events in the show, and that’s why she and her granddaughter Willa recited the pagan-sounding verses to each other? If not, why did the alien entities use the same verses later? Or were the grandmother and granddaughter actually witches? Or were they just kind of “goth?” Why did the grandmother die so quickly, after about ten seconds in the water? Maybe the alien entity inside her just faked her “death,” so they would bury her, leaving the alien entity with a body to inhabit, rather than burn her?</p>
<p>I almost want to watch this one again and see if some of these things become clearer. But I’m not sure they will. Once again, I get the feeling that I’ve given these details more thought than the writing team, which is frustrating.</p>
<p>This <a href="https://www.tor.com/2018/11/25/were-all-the-same-doctor-who-the-witchfinders/">review</a> by Emily Asher-Perrin on <strong>tor.com</strong> sums up my feelings about the King James character pretty well:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Speaking of King James, Alan Cumming is a treasure as always… but he seems like he’s appearing in an entirely different episode. He’s far too fun for the subject matter being tackled, and while it’s great to watch him flirt and ponder and come out the other side a different sort of man, it’s hard to imagine why that needed to be any part of a story about witch hunting, or the pain and suffering that it brought to communities of women throughout history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But it also makes a much bigger and more important point: the critique of misogyny embodied in the history of witch hunts ought to be the <strong>point</strong> of this episode, but the episode just isn’t pointed enough to skewer its target:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…at the end of the day, this is an insult to the very real women who lost their lives being accused of witchcraft. Those women weren’t killed because another woman was scared that she was being taken over by “Satanic forces.” They died because they practiced earlier forms of medicine and midwifery… because these women frightened men who could not bear to see women with a modicum of power that they did not possess for themselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This episode, titled “The Witchfinders” has nothing to do with the persecution caused by witch hunts at all. Not really. It doesn’t demonstrate an understanding of the power dynamics that created it, or any amount of care for why those women were actually killed. It’s used as a handy backdrop for a hackneyed alien plot about an army who possess bodies somehow using mud.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Amen.</p>
<h3 id="breakfast">Breakfast</h3>
<p>Grace and I got a decent night’s sleep. Elanor’s sores continue to heal up, and she slept pretty well too. Grace needs the car today, so we managed to get up and out and have breakfast at Harvest Moon. It’s been forever since Grace and I have had breakfast out together. We talked about critical and important things like the identity of that weird sidekick of Lando Calrissian in the old <em>Star Wars</em> movies. I had to look him up — his name is <a href="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nien_Nunb">Nien Nunb</a>.</p>
<p>After breakfast I drove to my office, using Grace’s key, and left the car running while she took the wheel. Apparently I managed to leave my cell phone in the car, unfortunately. Grace has another “non-stress test,” a session where they will monitor her and the baby. We don’t expect any problems, as so far they have all gone well.</p>
<p>Eight days to go!</p>
<p>I just hope she’ll be able to start the car afterwards.</p>
<h3 id="akhnaten-again"><em>Akhnaten</em> Again</h3>
<p>On the drive in after breakfast, I played the concluding part of Act II, Scene 3, and Act II, Scene 4 of <em>Akhnaten</em>, the Philip Glass opera, and tried to share some of my fascination with this opera with Grace. I’m still listening to it, and listening to no other music. The more I listen to <em>Akhnaten</em>, the more I find to be fascinated by: the complex rhythms of the “Dance” section, and the introduction and recapitulation of motifs in “Hymn,” as simple, plaintive melodies are taken up again and again by different instruments and woven into the evolving piece, and the eerie-sounding, narrow, near-dissonant harmonies between voice and instruments — not to mention the stunning beauty of the voices themselves. I would dearly love to see this work performed one day.</p>
<p>I’m still having a vague, hard-to-pinpoint ache in my right testicle. It feels more normal than it did on Sunday. I can’t identify any lumps. But it also seems a little bit larger than it used to be. So I’m not quite sure what to do — wait longer, see if the pain goes away, or schedule a doctor appointment, which might not be until after Christmas? Go to urgent care?</p>
<p>Grace called me at 1:30 because my phone alarm had gone off, reminding me to take my blood pressure medication. Except that the phone is with her, not me. But I had just taken the pill, because even though my phone isn’t in the building, I heard the alarm go off anyway. In my head.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night Grace was unable to come and pick me up from work, because once again she couldn’t start my car. My co-worker Patrick was kind enough to give me a ride home. I got in the car to try starting it, and of course it started up for me on the first try. We continue to be baffled by just why this is such a problem. For dinner Veronica had cooked the rest of the beef in the Instant Pot to make something slightly akin to Mongolian beef, although it seemed like she must have left out an ingredient or two. We ate that with leftover salad and rice. We continue to buy and cook red meat for two or more dinners a week while Grace finishes up this pregnancy, and we probably will continue with the beef and lamb steaks and burgers for a few weeks while she recovers, but I expect to move back to eating less animal protein in the new year.</p>
<p>For our bedtime story, we tried to catch up on the chapters in Luke we had unfortunately missed, so we wound up reading four chapters of Luke, Grace and I alternating chapters. It was unfortunate to try to rush through, though, especially when Jesus starts preaching in parables, because they need to be unpacked and discussed, and we just couldn’t do that last night.</p>
<p>Grace canceled (or had canceled on her) all the things she needed to do with the car on Friday, so I was able to take the car in the morning. I had a pretty ordinary work day. I’m starting to dig into some LabVIEW code to drive a four-to-two optical switch. This has six fiber optic cables connected to it and three control pins, so there are eight settings. The settings configure it to send the inputs to the outputs. I think it’s indifferent to whether you use it with four inputs and two outputs, or two inputs and four outputs. We’re going to use it to route light from three different lasers to one output, which will feed the instrument we’re calibrating.</p>
<p>After work I made my usual Friday evening trip to Costco and brought home some stew beef, some lamb steaks, sandwich rolls, bagels, celery, apples, blueberries, salad, precooked beets, boxed and canned coconut milk, butter, pasta, and a few other items including food for our Friday dinner. I decided to bring home two cheese pizzas. The kids had asked for cookies for dessert, so I picked out a box of Tilamook ice cream sandwiches with peppermint ice cream and dark chocolate waffles for the cookies. Sam made a pot of rice with both basmati and brown rice, which was an unexpectedly good combination, and we put together another bagged salad topped with garbanzo beans. Veronica has been experimenting with chia seed pudding, and made with the canned coconut milk and a little sweetener it is quite good. So with the rice and the chia seed pudding and salad we had things we could feed Elanor, who isn’t really supposed to eat dairy, because she shows signs of a dairy allergy, although she did manage to grab a mouthful of pizza when our backs were turned. The ice cream sandwiches turned out to be particularly tasty.</p>
<p>After dinner the kids would not really stay very focused on cleanup so we didn’t wind up watching any videos or reading anything at bedtime, and despite this, still wound up getting to bed very late, because Grace and I stayed up quite a while talking.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I had hoped to get up at 6:30 and get the car to the Honda dealership by eight. That didn’t happen. Instead Grace and I both left the house on a series of errands some time after noon. She was kind enough to assemble a coffee drink for me out of our nasty instant coffee and coconut milk. Grace drove, since I still don’t know my way around the Ypsilanti area very well. We went to the Honda dealership, but it wasn’t a big surprise to hear that they wouldn’t even have time to diagnose the problem before they closed at 2:00. Apparently they mostly do only small jobs on Saturdays, like oil changes. So we have a time slot scheduled for Wednesday morning at 8:00. I don’t want to spend the money but since we’re down to one car, Grace absolutely must be able to start it.</p>
<p>After we left the Honda dealership, Grace drove us around the corner to the Ypsilanti food coöp to pick up some things I couldn’t get at Costco. We bought a package of newborn-sized diapers, some nutritional yeast, two bottles of olive oil, and a package of molasses cookies for Grace’s go bag. It’s become a tradition for her to eat molasses cookies after a birth. I also grabbed an egg salad sandwich, which was delicious.</p>
<p>Before we left I had been looking at Twitter and noticed that there was a puppet show on offer at an Ypsilanti performance space — in particular, a puppet show based on the original <em>Star Trek</em>. That sounded too good to pass up, so we went to get out a little bit of cash so that I could take the two oldest kids this evening. Grace drove around to find the location so I’d know where it was when I brought the kids back. It’s very close to the strip club. It’s not in the greatest neighborhood, but I guess that’s where there is affordable space for the arts in Ypsilanti.</p>
<p>As we headed back home, I talked with Grace about the fact that I was still having that unexplained pain in my testicle. We decided that since it had been a week, it really didn’t seem like something I should just assume would go away anymore. So Grace drove me to the urgent care in Saline while she went next door to the Brewed Awakenings café. I had almost no time to wait before they examined me. They couldn’t find anything wrong by feel, and the next step was an ultrasound. So they sent me to the emergency room at St. Joe’s.</p>
<p>So, this meant we spent the next four hours or so at St. Joe’s. It took a while but I eventually got the ultrasound. And they found — wait for it — nothing. So I left with the contact information for a urologist and a recommendation to take over-the-counter painkillers and give it another week to see if the pain goes away on its own. My leading theories now are that it’s (1) a weird lingering effect of the virus from a week ago, or (2) a rare side effect of Celexa or one of the other medications I’m taking. But I’m glad to rule out possible severe problems.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we didn’t leave the emergency room until after seven, so we blew our chance to go to the puppet show this evening. We’re back home and trying to carry on with our plans to make latkes for dinner. It’s going slowly.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li>Luke (Revised New American Bible, 1986-1990)</li>
<li>“The Witchfinders” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 Episode)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, December 8th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-44360221101249220232018-12-01T19:03:00.003-05:002018-12-01T19:22:33.173-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, December 1st, 2018<h1 id="the-week-ending-saturday-december-1st-2018">The Week Ending Saturday, December 1st, 2018</h1>
<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>It’s about 8 p.m. and we’re going to watch episode 7 of the current 11th series of <em>Doctor Who</em>, called “Kerblam!” I’m going to try to do a quick recap of the day.</p>
<p>I set my phone alarm for 8:30 and with a superhuman effort managed to drag myself out of bed about 9:15. I got a bath and Grace followed me. We thought we had left enough time to get the kids ready and into the car, but as usual there were last-minute complications. We couldn’t find underwear and socks for Benjamin until we went through several baskets of clean laundry. We finally got everyone into the car and made it to Mass about fifteen minutes late. This week I remembered to contribute some money to the basket for coffee and donuts. I tried to eat only one donut, but the kids kept leaving donuts unfinished, so I ate about two, which is at least one too many.</p>
<p>When we got home Grace and I worked on the situation with our housemate and her boyfriend. I’ll leave off the details, but this involved several errands and a number of conversations. To make it so he would have access to his things without coming to our home, I rented a small storage unit out by my office and put his things in it, locking it up with a padlock I’m willing to lose, and giving the key to our housemate to give to him. Since I was near Plum Market, I brought home a couple of rotisserie chickens and had Veronica make a pot of brown rice. So we had a basic meal of chicken and rice cooked with broth. Simple, but no one complained.</p>
<p>I’ll head back to work in the morning. Money is tight this week but we should get by. I am concerned because the Tahoe is making a knocking sound that sounds ominous.</p>
<p>Grace wants me to apologize to our housemate for my meltdown in October. She’s right, it was wrong. Ideally I wouldn’t have thrown the tantrum at all. Since I can’t undo that, I at least should have apologized long before now. But I haven’t found myself able to do this yet.</p>
<h3 id="monday">Monday</h3>
<h3 id="kerblam">“Kerblam!”</h3>
<p>We watched “Kerblam!” last night. This was a decent episode, but it fell short for me in several ways. The producers tried to maintain a sense that our characters were working inside a truly vast operation, but this wasn’t convincing in many scenes. Every once in a while we’d get a glimpse of the catwalks or conveyor system, via CGI, that showed a vast warehouse space. But most of the scenes weren’t convincing in this regard. We were also supposed to be convinced that the work was grueling. But in most of the scenes where we see people working, we see them moving at a downright leisurely pace while they perform their lines.</p>
<p>This episode also had some incoherent elements. We discover that the missing workers have apparently been rendered into some kind of liquefied remains — kind of a pun on the notion of “liquidating” workers. But when we find out how the workers were actually killed — via violent explosions — the liquid state of their remains doesn’t make sense. It seems to be in there as something left in there from an earlier draft, or just as an unused horror element that doesn’t really fit the tone of the full show.</p>
<p>As a critique of Amazon, it is pointedly somewhat dull, and not sharp. There is a system that destroys the workers within it, and that system is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world">neoliberalism</a>. The story seems like it is on the verge of revealing “the Kerblam! system” as the metaphor for <strong>that</strong> system. But it shies away and veers into a plot involving an idiot/savant maintenance man, Charlie. Charlie, who seems like a good-natured less-than-bright guy with a crush on a co-worker, actually has an IQ of 185 and has been plotting to destroy Kerblam! by framing the Kerblam! system for murdering customers. The mechanism of this attempted murder attempt, as revealed, is extremely clever, and one of my favorite things about this episode. The reference to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon">“Flowers for Algernon”</a> I found downright offensive.</p>
<p>In “Flowers for Algernon,” Charlie, the intellectually disabled young main in “Flowers for Algernon,” is recruited for experimental surgery which raises his IQ to 185. In that story he is the victim. In this story, he embodies some of the worst stereotypes about the disabled as secretly psychopathic savants. By the time we get to Charlie’s super-villain monologue, I had kind of mentally checked out.</p>
<p>There are lots of fun things about this episode. Kira (played by Claudia Jessie) is an endearing and heartbreaking character — although her death is confusing and feels wasted. The interior shots of the Kerblam! management offices were great — I’ll have to find out where it was shot. There were some nice creepy scenes. My kids really loved being creeped out by the delivery robots. And as soon as “rule number one” was mentioned:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rule number one, keep all loose clothing, hair and body parts away from the conveyor and never, ever, climb onto the conveyors. Any person found on the conveyor faces immediate termination.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Grace and I laughed, realizing that before the end of the episode, there would be a dramatic chase or escape involving the conveyor system. And Lo! It came to pass. I’m just disappointed that the satirical edge I was hoping for turned out to be too dull to properly skewer its rightful target.</p>
<p>When I write these reviews, I generally finish saying what I want to say and then look up other reviews from sources that I think are unbiased.</p>
<h4 id="today">Today</h4>
<p>Grace and I both got a decent night’s sleep and because we got to bed fairly early, we started out the day not too exhausted. There was a snowstorm this morning, but the temperature at ground level was too warm to allow it to stick, so it was just a wet mess. After paying yesterday for a storage unit and a tow, for the possessions and car of our housemate’s boyfriend, our checking account is looking pretty scrawny. But we’ll make it through the week.</p>
<h3 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h3>
<p>Yesterday afternoon Grace had to deal with more fallout from last Wednesday. Because our housemate’s boyfriend is not permitted at our home anymore, and our housemate does not have a car, Grace had to take her to meet him at a public place. Several of his family members were there too, and the situation apparently led to a loud public confrontation.</p>
<p>Grace is in a tough position here; she’s neither a social worker nor therapist nor cop. We’re both trying to do the best we can for our houseguest and her family, with very limited resources, and while trying to defend a few firm boundaries around us and our family. I don’t really fear for my safety, or Grace’s safety, or the safety of our kids. The vulnerable people are probably the ones who are going to wind up doing further damage to themselves by attracting more attention from the state. We really hoped to spare them that — in fact, that was our number one goal for taking in our housemate and her children originally. Grace wound up taking that whole crew — housemate, boyfriend, and kids — to a hotel for the night, so they could spend time with each other, since he isn’t allowed at the house.</p>
<p>Last night I got back fairly late and Grace got back fairly late. We didn’t have a lot of Thanksgiving leftovers left over. There was still quite a bit of food in the house including chicken drumsticks in the freezer, and plenty of stock, rice, beans, and canned tomatoes, but not a lot that was quick and obvious. Grace directed the kids to make chicken stew and dumplings using the leftover rotisserie chicken carcasses. We found a couple of packages of edamame in the freezer along with some leftover green beans, so we had those on the side. It was a satisfying meal but we ate very late. I’m now taking three different medications that all have drowsiness as a common side effect. Between them they are really knocking me down. I am getting sleepy quite early in the evening and having a hard time fully waking up in the morning, at least until I’ve had a little time for my brain to warm up, and gotten some coffee down my throat.</p>
<p>Money is quite tight but I will still pick up a short list of things at Costco. I’ve been eating way too many carbs but it’s the perpetual problem: cheap food tends to be very carb-heavy. The kids love it, but Grace and I stumble through the day. As if I wasn’t drowsy enough already.</p>
<p>There’s a little good news. I was happy to hear that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight">InSight</a> made it safely onto the surface of Mars!</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<h3 id="last-night">Last Night</h3>
<p>Dinner went a little bit better last night. I went to Costco and brought home a box of oranges, two bunches of bananas, two bags of hoagie rolls, a package of lamb steaks, a package of frozen hamburger patties, a jar of avocado oil mayonnaise, a package of guacamole packets, three bags of salad (after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaine_lettuce#Food_safety_issues">warnings about romaine lettuce</a>, the only type of salad available was Asian Cashew), a box of frozen chicken pita sandwiches to eat for lunch, and perhaps one or two other things that I can’t remember. I had to put this on my Team One credit card because things just seemed too tight in our checking account and our other credit card.</p>
<p>Our housemate and her children stayed at a hotel with her boyfriend — apparently he moved them to a different hotel. Grace saw her only briefly.</p>
<p>For dinner last night Veronica made a Jiffy Mix in our big cast-iron pan, and we had that with a pot of black-eyed peas cooked in the Instant Pot with a ham hock, and a bag of the salad. That made a pretty good meal and we didn’t eat as late as we did on Monday night. What put it over the top, though, was poached pairs. Grace peeled a bunch of pears and cut them in half, and poached them in some of leftover second bottle of the 2017 Château D’Aqueria Tavel Rose. She mixed it with some honey. The result was really good!</p>
<p>The kids were reasonably cooperative about getting ready for bed while I was finishing some kitchen cleanup, and I was hoping to read them a bedtime story, even though it was getting to be too late — it was a bit after eleven by the time they were all ready for bed, and they were bickering with each other, but I was still trying to make it happen. I got my teeth brushed and was all ready to read the story, but then a fist fight broke out between Sam and Benjamin, so I just sent them all to bed. It was unfortunate.</p>
<p>Grace was not feeling very well and is quite uncomfortable as she gets down to the last weeks of this pregnancy. The chaotic situation with our housemate and her family is wearing hard on both of us. Grace doesn’t need this stress happening sixteen days before we have a new baby (assuming nothing happens to result in an earlier birth). Last night both of us had a pretty bad night’s sleep. I was feeling really wired, although I had not had coffee since before work. My nervous system felt like it was being lit up by the Celexa. At 3:30, the old laptop at the other end of the house woke up and started to play a video, which woke me up. I got up and shut it down, but then could not get to sleep again for some time. I lay awake and listened to every tiny sound that was happening through the house with seeming hyper-acuity — the sounds of specific kids breathing, and trucks on I-94 — against a background of tinnitus that sometimes happens when I take SSRIs. I started to see pages and pages of an autobiographical essay flashing in front of me. It was nothing too unfamiliar, containing a number of ideas I’ve kicked around in my head for years, but last night all the descriptions of my early life were organized around the theme of hearing, which seems to be my dominant, and at times most bothersome, sense.</p>
<p>I eventually slept a bit longer but then the kids were awake quite early, so it became impossible to sleep at least 45 minutes before I wanted to get up.</p>
<h3 id="today-1">Today</h3>
<p>I took to work three leftover boxes of crackers, the box of frozen chicken pita sandwiches, which I had left in my car overnight, and a few of the guacamole packs. For breakfast I got a latte with almond milk at Joe and Rosie’s, and a toasted cinnamon bagel with peanut butter. For lunch I sliced up a little of the summer sausage and warmed up two of the chicken sandwiches, serving them with a pack of guacamole to dip them in and some crackers. The chicken sandwiches were not as tasteless as I feared, although I can’t say they are really that good. But I’m willing to eat them again. Then I had a container of yogurt that past me, before leaving for Thanksgiving, had thoughtfully provided for present me. I’m trying to learn to be nice to future me more often.</p>
<p>At work this afternoon I was in a long meeting this afternoon and we discussed a number of new product ideas, some of which have been kicking around for a couple of years. One I even developed as a prototype on a breadboard. I’m happy to have something new to work on, but not <strong>too</strong> new — we are talking about a new product that will allow me to leverage some of my expertise with the Atmel SAM4E microcontroller family, and even reuse some existing code and some hardware design. This would be a higher-volume, lower-cost product than the big “flagship” products that have occupied me the most since starting at Thorlabs. Those are selling, but the software seems to be approaching stability; everything works well enough, we’ve added all the features that we planned to and then some, and we only plan to make changes to support hardware changes or customer requests. So I don’t have that much to do on the “flagship” product line any more. Hence the LabVIEW code. And hence this new project, which I am looking forward to.</p>
<p>What I’m not necessarily looking forward to is the potential for a very tight schedule for the new project. Ideally we’d demonstrate it at a trade show in March. And I’d feel better about the possibility of hitting that deadline if I wasn’t shortly to welcome a new baby. And, of course, if some of these other stressors I’ve rattled on about, endlessly, were gone. And if Grace and I felt that we had more support.</p>
<p>As things stand now, it doesn’t feel all that positive, although I will continue to drive myself to do the best that I can.</p>
<p>Tonight I think we are going to cook the hamburgers. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a hamburger — at least three or four months. So I’m really looking forward to eating one. Although they often aren’t quite as delicious as imagine they will be.</p>
<h3 id="the-day-the-twisters-came">“The Day the Twisters Came”</h3>
<p>Today I am remembering the event that Wikipedia calls the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_United_States%E2%80%93Canada_tornado_outbreak">1985 United States–Canada tornado outbreak</a>. I was in my senior year in high school. Ninety people were reported killed. An F4 tornado hit Crawford County, which is the county south of Erie County where we lived (in the town of Harborcreek), and Venango County, a little further southeast. Albion, a borough in Erie County, was hit. <a href="http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05149/511826.stm">This article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</a>, from 2005, called “The Day the Twisters Came,” commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the tornado outbreak, describes how the people of Albion had only about two minutes’ warning, but even some who heard warnings didn’t necessarily believe them, since most people in the region had never experienced a tornado.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everywhere, people were wandering around in shock. “It was sad,” recalled Crawford County Commissioner Morris Waid, an emergency worker at the time. “When you looked in peoples’ eyes, they had that look of someone who is really, really drunk, not really focused, you know?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We did some “disaster tourism” after those tornadoes, driving through neighborhoods that were leveled. I don’t remember exactly where we went, and my mother and stepfather who might be able to tell me are both deceased, but I remember very clearly driving around to see whole blocks of homes demolished — not just damaged, with roofs torn off, but <strong>demolished</strong>. And that was probably just an F4, while Niles, Ohio and Wheatland, Pennsylvania were hit by an F5. As of 2018, it remains the only F5 tornado known to have hit Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>There’s some <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2jS_qjpkk">video</a>, if you want to see what F5 damage looks like. It’s hard to imagine experiencing such a storm.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>We ate our burgers! It turns out the frozen Costco grass-fed burger patties are really quite good, and they are pre-cooked, so we were really just thawing them, which mean less splatter and mess in the oven. So that was dinner, along with more bagged salad. And three of the boys were done and ready to hear a bedtime story, in time to read one!</p>
<h3 id="the-ring-goes-south">“The Ring Goes South”</h3>
<p>For them I read the first part of Book 2, Chapter 3 of <em>Fellowship</em>, called “The Ring Goes South.” This is more preparatory stuff, after the long and talky chapter “The Council of Elrond.” Time is passing in Rivendell:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So the days slipped away, as each morning dawned bright and fair, and each evening followed cool and clear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It takes almost two months before the scouts start to bring back news of what has become of the nine Ringwraiths. The bodies of eight of their horses are discovered, along with one black cloak.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Eight out of the Nine are accounted for at least,’ said Gandalf. ’It is rash to be too sure, yet I think that we may hope now that the Ringwraiths were scattered, and have been obliged to return as best they could to their Master in Mordor, empty and shapeless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite this, the Fellowship doesn’t set out for another week. In the film this eight or nine weeks between the Council and the Fellowship’s departure is elided, and it appears they set out after only a day or two. More scenes of this waiting period would only have killed the sense of urgency. In fact it slows the book down, and they know that traveling in winter will be harder, but at least we have the rational excuse that the party would be foolish to set out if any of the Ringwraiths were still roaming around the area.</p>
<p>Elrond tells them that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘With you and your faithful servant, Gandalf will go; for this shall be his great task, and maybe the end of his labours.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a neat little bit of foreshadowing there, without sounding <strong>too</strong> ominous; maybe Gandalf’s got almost enough years on the job to retire with a full pension?</p>
<p>Keep in mind that Elrond can <strong>see</strong> things, he seems to share at least some of the Lady Galadriel’s powers. But his abilities are limited, especially in the present dark times. He tells them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know. The Shadow has crept now to the feet of the Mountains, and draws nigh even to the borders of the Greyflood; and under the Shadow all is dark to me.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We learn that Merry and Pippin will accompany Frodo as well, although Elrond is hesitant, especially in the case of Pippin; he says “my heart is against his going.” But Pippin is insistent, and Elrond gives in.</p>
<p>Gandalf, speaking to Frodo, calls Aragorn “your friend <strong>the</strong> Strider,” in passing. I think that’s the only time in the books that anyone calls him “the Strider.” The word “the” is not capitalized, so it doesn’t seem that Gandalf is using the phrase as an honorific or special title. I’m puzzled why it is written that way here. I suspect this might have simply been an editing error.</p>
<p>I had a little better night’s sleep last night than Tuesday night. I tried to take my Celexa a bit earlier in the evening, and on a full stomach. I think that helped. I will try over the next few days to take the Celexa and Flomax a half-hour earlier each day, until I’m taking all my meds at lunchtime, and see if that helps with my sleep.</p>
<h3 id="rest-in-peace-our-chevrolet-tahoe-20032018">Rest in Peace, Our Chevrolet Tahoe (2003–2018)</h3>
<p>Grace sent me a text message late this morning mentioning that the car was making more noise and the “check engine” light had just come on. She still needed the car for at least three errands today, but I asked her to take it right to Monro and told her I would meet her there.</p>
<p>So I took a two-hour lunch. I drove to Monro and picked her up. Our housemate had perhaps a dozen bags of groceries in the car, which had been in her hotel room this morning when Grace went to pick her up. We transfered these bags to my car. Several of them were leaking meat juice. Apparently she had stocked up on a lot of groceries, but kept them unrefrigerated in their hotel room overnight. I did not unpack all the bags, but I think at least twenty-five or thirty pounds of meat was in those bags, including at least six, and maybe more, 3-pound plastic tubes of raw ground beef. In my view, all of this meat is now in extremely dubious condition; I think it may have been sitting at room temperature for nearly 24 hours. And apparently, also, she didn’t consider where it would be stored. There is limited space in our refrigerator and freezer.</p>
<p>Anyway, we got back to the house, I put one of the seats in the back of my car, we got the groceries inside, cleaned up the meat juice from inside both cars, and had Veronica start trying to find space in the refrigerator for all this meat and other perishable food. I just hope our houseguest doesn’t give herself or her children food poisoning. We’ve told our kids not to eat any of this meat, and to wash their hands with soap and water after handling it, and wiping up any drips. We also warned them especially that Elanor is very vulnerable to food-borne illness.</p>
<p>Sam and Grace got in the car and I drove back to my office, then Grace took my car and drove Sam to his speech therapy appointment.</p>
<p>The news was very bad. The car has not been telling us that it has low oil pressure. We had an oil change not too long ago. But apparently there was an oil leak inside the engine, and it has been grinding itself up. We haven’t seen any drips under the car. All the sophisticated warning messages and lights didn’t do their job to clue us in that this was happening. The car was just in the shop a few weeks ago. We’ve been hearing some extra noise for the last few days. Probably I should have had it in the shop Monday morning, after hearing the noise it was making on Sunday. But now apparently the engine’s beyond repair.</p>
<p>It would cost almost $5,000 to replace the engine. We’re not going to have an extra $5,000 drop into our laps anytime soon. So we have to decide what to do. Do we have it junked right now? Do we keep it at home for a few months in the hopes that we’ll be able to get it fixed? I don’t know.</p>
<p>I was desperately hoping to get through the next few weeks. I thought that maybe if I could make it to Christmas, I could use some of the money from my end-of-year bonus to have the truck fixed.</p>
<h3 id="how-screwed-are-we">How Screwed Are We?</h3>
<p>Pretty screwed. Just to review:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Our family of eight relies very heavily on that car. (We were already facing a problem that once we have a new baby, the car won’t be big enough to transport all of us).</p></li>
<li><p>My car can only hold a maximum of four people.</p></li>
<li><p>Grace has many, many things scheduled through the end of the year. And now I’ll have to ask her to drive me to work, and pick me up from work.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Another</strong> family of four, the family of our housemate and her children, is <strong>also</strong> counting on us being able to transport them in that car. (They won’t fit in my car).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I think it may be time to ask our attorney to help us go ahead and surrender our old home, however that can be best done, and whatever the hit to my credit. I can’t afford to add a car payment to our fixed expenses now, but maybe if we subtracted all the old house expenses, I could.</p>
<p>Our working car — the one I rely on to get to work — is a 2003 Honda Element. I think the engine is in fine shape, but the suspension is getting murdered by Michigan’s rightfully infamous potholes.</p>
<p>Just how big is my end-of-year bonus going to be, anyway? I think it will be quite generous this year. But not enough to solve this. I really don’t know what we’re going to do. Pray, I guess.</p>
<h3 id="vacation-days">Vacation Days</h3>
<p>I have a tentative plan for how I’m going to use up my vacation days in December. From Friday the 14th through Monday the 31st, there are eleven work days left in the year; Christmas is a paid holiday. I have one floating holiday, and seven vacation days. I think the floating holiday has to be used the week of Christmas, so I’ll use it for Christmas Eve, Monday the 24th. Grace’s C-section is scheduled for Friday the 14th, so I definitely need to take that day as a vacation day. That leaves me six vacation days to allocate.</p>
<p>If I wanted to be out of the office from the evening of Friday the 21st straight through until January 2nd, I’d need to use five of those six days. That would mean I would only have Friday the 14th through Monday the 17th off to help Grace with the birth, and then that would be it.</p>
<p>Alternately, I could take more days off during that week. I could take off a block from the 14th straight through to Christmas, then come in to the office for the three days after Christmas and again on Monday the 31st, New Year’s Eve Day.</p>
<p>I’m really not sure which option would be more useful. It depends in part on whether we will have anyone else coming to help. One of Grace’s friends might be visiting the week after the birth. If she can do that and be of help, then maybe it would make more sense for me to go back to work for most of that week.</p>
<p>I hate that I have to make this decision, and that dads aren’t guaranteed any kind of paternity leave at all. I mean, if it’s good enough for Mauritius, Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Mongolia, why not us?</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Thursday night was a slog as I didn’t get home until late, because I had to wait for Grace to come and get me after her language development class for Benjamin. She had given Veronica instructions about putting a couple of trays of seasoned chicken drumsticks into the oven. When we got home they were sitting on the counter. She should have started it over and hour and a half earlier.</p>
<p>This led to some arguing, as you might imagine. Grace needed to eat and get on to bed, as she was exhausted. The chicken had to cook for at least an hour. I wound up heating her up some leftover rice and black-eyed peas with some homemade broth added, and she ate that and we went on to bed, leaving the kids to eat the chicken and clean up.</p>
<p>It wasn’t a great night’s sleep. I woke up again at exactly 4:20 and could not get back to sleep for some time. Elanor kept waking up and fussing in Veronica’s room. I had set the alarm for seven, so we could deal with the Tahoe in the morning. When it woke up, I wasn’t exactly read to leap into action. But Grace and I got to eat cold baked chicken legs for breakfast, so that was nice.</p>
<p>Grace and I drove to Monro, the repair shop that still had the Tahoe. On the way Grace called the towing company that we used to relocate our housemate’s boyfriend’s car last weekend. They told us that to tow the Tahoe back to our house, they would need a flatbed truck, and they wouldn’t have that available until the afternoon. So we held off and went to talk to the mechanics. They told us that after changing the oil, the truck would probably make it a few miles, so Grace drove it home and I followed her in the Element. It’s in the driveway waiting further decision-making. We need to clean it out.</p>
<p>Grace then drove me to work. Friday was a long slog of a day. My co-workers are mostly still very wrapped up in getting some product orders fulfilled, so it was very quiet upstairs. We had a brief visit from the company CEO, and so pizza for lunch. I had some interesting tech support requests from Germany and South Korea. But in the afternoon my lack of sleep started to catch up with me. I drank some extra cups of tea to try to revive myself but was still struggling to stay awake at my desk.</p>
<p>Grace came to get me and we went to Costco. It had been many weeks since Grace and I have been at Costco together for a shopping trip, and it was the closest thing we’ve had to a date night in some time. We brought home two packages of cold shrimp cocktail, a box of cookies for dessert, eggs, butter, blueberries, blackberries, a pineapple, salad, apples, boxed coconut milk, a two-pack of frozen bison, a box of cooked beets, sandwich rolls, bagels, brussels sprouts, and another pepper grinder. The cheap pepper grinders they sell are now refillable, which is a great improvement.</p>
<p>We brought shrimp home because Joshua had finally gotten a full-blown set of skin tests and blood tests at an allergist, and been cleared to eat shrimp. We’ve been keeping him away from shrimp for years since he had a reaction once as a young child. And we’ve been keeping shrimp away from him, which means for years we’ve been avoiding some Chinese dishes that we love. Last night we cut loose with the shrimp. So we had a meal that was entirely cold: shrimp cocktail, bagged salad with chick peas added, and cookies for dessert. Joshua did fine. We’re very glad to be able to eat shrimp again!</p>
<p>Elanor hasn’t been feeling well for a couple of nights — she’s had a virus of some kind. We’ve been giving her a little dose of baby Tylenol to help her sleep. Last night it became clear what kind of virus it is, as her whole bottom broke out in little blisters. We think she has Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. We think our kids probably got it from a play date, but since they have had it before, they didn’t have much in the say of symptoms. But Elanor has not had it before. This is always frustrating because a virus like this was probably contagious in our home several days before any of us knew that it was in the building. So our housemate is not happy to find out about it, but her kids probably already have it, so there may not be a whole lot of value in trying to quarantine them.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I’m getting close to finishing <em>Moderan</em> by David Bunch. The stories continue to be pretty uneven in effectiveness, but the consistency of tone remains remarkable, and some really are quite impressive pieces of work.</p>
<p>We had vague plans to watch videos last night but I was very tired, possibly because I’ve been fighting off the virus that Elanor’s got, so I went to bed early, and didn’t even read the kids a story.</p>
<p>Today has been gray and with a sick baby, Grace and I stayed in bed most of the morning and cuddled her up while she slept. We had plans for today, but didn’t want to spread viruses. Pippin and Joshua were planning to participate in Saline Christmas Parade, as part of their Viva Voce choir group — but the weather today meant that this was canceled, for which we were grateful. The kids made themselves sandwiches. When I finally got up and got a bath, Grace brought me Elanor, so we could soak her rash in the tub, then brought me some tea. The tea got me moving enough to propel myself into the kitchen and make a package of bacon and two batches of paleo pancakes: one with blueberries, and one with chocolate chips.</p>
<p>Later we had a conversation with our housemate and I finally felt like it was the right opportunity to apologize to her for my blow-up on Sam’s birthday, back in October.</p>
<p>It’s almost 7:00 and it’s been a very slow day, but I think we needed a slow day. Elanor is in pretty good spirits given her runny nose and awful rash. We’ll probably watch some videos and maybe read a story and try to get to bed early, to give our little girl yet more down time to recover. So I’m going to call it a week and get this uploaded.</p>
<p>I learned today of the death of former president George H. W. Bush. I’ve pretty much stayed off of Twitter because the number of people praising him is nauseating. Another war criminal has died. I remember marching to protest the first Gulf War. My study of the events of the Bush presidency as they happened was a large part of the development of my political views. He brought us the Willie Horton campaign. He ignored the HIV epidemic. He pardoned everyone involved with the Iran-Contra affair. He invaded Panama. He fabricated the case for the Gulf War. In the prosecution of that “war” — really a crime of international aggression — he committed numerous atrocities. I won’t mourn him, and I won’t mourn his son when he dies, and I have no patience for anyone praising him today.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 reprint edition)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, December 1st, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-90324049440362615052018-11-24T22:59:00.001-05:002018-11-24T23:13:02.559-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, November 24th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>For dinner Saturday night we had the beef ribs, stewed in the instant pot, with a couple of pounds of green beans, which I blanched and then sautéed in leftover bacon fat from breakfast. The kids ate those up like candy. The ribs were delicous, but I think if we make this recipe again we might increase the cooking time by ten or twenty minutes. They were certainly cooked, but hadn’t really started to come apart the way that slow-cooked ribs do.</p>
<p>Sunday was quite a busy day. I’m still fighting to adjust to my medications, and so have been sleepy and slightly disoriented. I woke up and got ready for the day convinced that it was Monday. When I got out of the bathroom I accidentally gaslit Grace, who briefly panicked that she might have lost track of what day it was. I don’t think I’ve ever had this happen before. I’ve occasionally woken up a bit unsure of what day it was, usually while on vacation, but I don’t think I’ve ever been convinced that it was the wrong day. The sleepiness is also interfering with my motivation to continue writing this blog, even though writing daily ought to be a pretty well-established habit by now.</p>
<p>I made scrambled eggs with leftover basmati rice and salmon and tried to herd the kids to get ready for Mass. While I was warming up the car, waiting for the last few people to get in the car, and cleaning a few things out of the front seat, I noticed that our housemate or her boyfriend had again thrown bags of trash in our recycling bin, as well as loose returnable beer cans. Bags of trash filled with both recyclable and returnable containers, but I have pretty much given up trying to convince them to return and recycle; I just can’t continue to make that my problem. So I left the returnables. The trash bags in the recycling are my problem, though; if there is obviously trash in the recycling bin, the recycling folks will leave the whole bin untouched. So I had to dump out the recycling bin to make sure there wasn’t more trash in it, and get the bags of trash into the trash bin. Again.</p>
<p>We made it to Mass, but we were about fifteen minutes late. That was better than the previous Sunday, but still not great. St. Joseph always has coffee and donuts after the 11:00 Sunday Mass. We should start putting some cash in the basket because our family eats a lot of donuts.</p>
<p>On the drive home from Mass we decided to stop for a walk, since the weather was nice. We stopped at <a href="https://localwiki.org/ann-arbor/Hewen%27s_Creek_Park">Hewen’s Creek Park</a> off of Bemis Road. We had not been to this park before. We weren’t up for a long hike, we were hiking in slush and mud and not all of us had suitable boots, and Pippin had a typical Pippin meltdown, but despite this we had a short but very nice walk. The main path follows the edge of a small reservoir, which was partially frozen. There were big star-shaped cracks in the ice, and the kids decided that these cracks were where the giant squids came up to feed. (To the best of my knowledge, there are no giant squids in Hewen’s Creek park.)</p>
<p>When we got home, Grace and I were quite tired and so wound up essentially letting the kids run wild for a good chunk of the day while we did some tag-team napping, with occasional interruptions. I went down first for a while, then she came in and slept for a bit, but after a while I couldn’t stay asleep. Really I would call it a pretty useless day, but I must remind myself that sometimes doing nothing, just chilling out and resting, is actually recuperative and necessary.</p>
<p>When we dragged ourselves out of the bedroom we found that our kids had not been kind to the house, so we had to demand some action. The kitchen and family room were falling into complete chaos. The CD rack was in disorder, with dozens of un-filed CDs precariously stacked up on top of the rack. So we insisted that the kids do some cleanup. They got most of the CDs put away. When I did spot checks, though, I found that their alphabetizing was sorely lacking. Some mistakes were understandable — a Pink Floyd album filed under “F.” (“Yes, a collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd. Will you accept the charges from United States?”) But there’s no good reason they should be confused about where to file <em>The Very Best of Supertramp</em>. And there were a number of orphan discs and orphan cases, loose discs stuck on top of shelves, some broken cases, and at least one completely shattered. At some point I need to sit down and go through the whole rack and check that all the discs are in the right cases.</p>
<p>I can’t get too upset, because this whole rack is filled with discs that I was willing to let them handle, which means I’m willing to let them get damaged. But the rack of CDs is also there for an educational purpose — they are supposed to be learning how to take care of a small library of CDs. They are allowed to listen to any of them, but they are supposed to take one disc out at a time and put it away when they switch to another disc, and they are supposed to keep the whole thing alphabetized so we can find discs. I can’t fault the occasional broken case, as Elanor and our housemate’s two-year-old also have access to the discs and sometimes wander off with them. But they varsity team (the older Potts kids) haven’t even been trying to keep the rack in order.</p>
<p>For dinner on Sunday Grace threw a ham hock in the pressure cooker with a bag of black-eyed peas and broth. I got one dishwasher load, which no one had started on Saturday night, going, and prepped another dishwasher load. It’s demoralizing to start out the week way behind on dishwashing.</p>
<h3 id="demons-of-the-punjab">“Demons of the Punjab”</h3>
<p>While the black-eyed peas cooked in the Instant Pot, and we continued to try to get them to finish getting the family room organized, we took a break to go downstairs and watch the previous Sunday’s episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>, called “Demons of the Punjab.” Set in 1947 in India, it is about the upheaval and chaos that followed the Partition of India into India and the newly created country of Pakistan. The story is brought to life on a small scale by the revelation of a sad secret in the life of Yaz’s grandmother — her marriage to Yaz’s grandfather was not her first marriage. In fact, it was a different marriage that she proudly recounts as being the first marriage to take place in Pakistan. The Partition split families, both physically and politically, and this is dramatized beautifully. The Partition was terrible. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan#Pakistan_Movement">Wikipedia:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the riots that accompanied the partition in Punjab Province, it is believed that between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people were killed in what some have described as a retributive genocide between the religions while 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women also experienced the same fate at the hands of Muslims. Around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. It was the largest mass migration in human history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m still thinking this one over, as it is quite thought-provoking. It has me contemplating the way that the producers placed this plot in a science-fiction (or at least science-fantasy) setting. It feels a bit like a throwback to the very earliest days of <em>Doctor Who</em>, when the show was promoted as educational, and there were serials like <em>The Aztecs</em> and <em>Marco Polo</em>. I can’t help thinking that the historic plot line would have been perfectly at home in a straightforward historical drama, except for the way the story is tweaked to require intervention to maintain the timeline, in a manner similar to the story in “Rosa.” In “Rosa,” The Doctor observes that the timeline is being tampered with by a rogue alien and so she and her companions must intervene to fix it. In “Demons” it first appears that the Thijarian aliens are the threat to the timeline. But the perspective shifts neatly and we come to understand that the “demons” of the story aren’t the demonic-looking aliens at all. And The Doctor plays a supportive role, intervening when necessary, but mostly to ensure that the emotional “keyframes” of the story stand on their own.</p>
<p>This does leave the Thijarians feeling a bit like an unnecessary alien race. <a href="https://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/doctor-who/277575/doctor-who-season-11-episode-6-review-demons-of-the-punjab">Den of Geek</a> points out that the show has already — and very recently — introduced an alien race that might have done the job here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Indeed, it was Jodie Whittaker’s very first on-screen appearance as the Doctor that likewise introduced us to The Testimony: glass-bodied aliens from “Twice Upon a Time” who snatch people out of time and space in the instant before their death so that their lives can be recorded and preserved. It’s one step beyond merely attending someone’s final moments but it’s pretty much the same dynamic in both episodes — we expect predators, and we later find out that they’re historians.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I guess the producers felt that the story needed that same sort of twist, and so a known-benign race wouldn’t do, but still, it seems like a lot of new alien races are piling up and too many of them are “one-offs.” Let’s at least hope that they can be used again in future episodes.</p>
<p>I think this is the best episode of Series 11 to date, largely because the core historical drama it frames is a strong story in and of itself. Looking around at a few reviews, it seems that I’m not the only one to hold this episode in high esteem. If Series 11 continues with episodes of this quality, it will wind up as one of the better seasons of the rebooted show.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>When we came back up from watching <em>Doctor Who</em>, it was time to eat our black-eyed peas and salad. There were enough of both for me to pack a lunch using the 3-tiered “tiffin.” In the third layer I put some leftover basmati rice. A decent lunch will help me get through this short week. I have both Thursday and Friday off work! And I will get paid a day or two early, which will help us pay for our extra Thanksgiving food expenses. We are making plans to set our Thanksgiving table with Fiestaware, which should be pretty spectacular.</p>
<p>After dinner I got another dish load on, and got Veronica to do some of the remaining hand-washing, and we actually got to bed at a reasonable hour, and sleeping without too many interruptions. This morning Grace had an ultrasound. She made a batch of celery and apple juice before she left and so I took some with me in the car.</p>
<p>This morning I tried to go to Harvest Moon Café for breakfast, but it was too crowded, so I had a toasted cinnamon bagel with peanut butter at Joe and Rosie’s. While I was eating the bagel, I read another short story in <em>Moderan</em>. I’ve made slow progress through the book, but I am making progress and do expect to get through it eventually.</p>
<p>I ordered a medium coffee. That’s my typical caffeine intake for a weekday — normally I would have finished it by the time I was done with my bagel. But this morning, I found myself feeling a little wired and not loving the taste of coffee, and unable to finish it.</p>
<p>I suspect this is an indication that the Celexa is starting to take effect. When I went on my first SSRI, back around 1996 or so, I <strong>immediately</strong> lost my taste for coffee — the morning after my very first dose, I knew something had changed. The effect wasn’t nearly that dramatic this time, as I’ve been taking Celexa for a week. I still might find that I need a little caffeine to help me power through the sedative effects of the medication, but I’ll see if I can scale back the dose; maybe I’ll try switching entirely to tea.</p>
<p>The other medication, Flomax, seemed to work incredibly well right off the bat. But the effect seems to have faded somewhat. Maybe the Celexa giveth and the Floxmax taketh away? I really don’t know. I’ll continue to see how my system adjusts over time.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>Grace made soup last night with homemade beef broth — delicious! We ate that with another Costco salad kit and a loaf of bread from Mother Loaf. We struggled as usual to get dinner cleanup done quickly. While the kids worked on dishes I tried to fix some of the problems in the CD rack. It’s a bigger mess than I thought. There are a number of broken cases. There were cases stuck on the shelves backwards, or upside down. There are cases taken apart and then put together wrong. The mind reels. Maybe on Friday we can clear off the dining table, pull all the CDs out, sort them, and put them back in order. Because that’s how I would love to spend the limited vacation time I have to spend with my kids.</p>
<p>Grace gave me an update on the baby. Her ultrasound yesterday showed things going fine. The baby is already estimated to weigh over six pounds.</p>
<p>After cleanup last night I was able to read the kids a story. I finished the chapter called “The Council of Elrond” in <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. It was interesting to note how some phrases spoken in this chapter wound up in the movie, but in the movie are spoken by different characters. For example, Elrond says, addressing Frodo:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘If I understand aright all that I have heard,’ he said, ‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the movies, we hear the Lady Galadriel say versions of the “appointed for you” phrase twice. In Lothlórien, she tells Frodo “this task was appointed to you, and if you do not find a way, no one will.” Then later, in <em>The Two Towers</em>, Frodo stumbles and falls in Shelob’s cavern, and experiences a vision of the Lady Galadriel, and she tells him “this task was appointed to you, Frodo of the Shire. If you do not find a way, no one will.”</p>
<p>I’m so glad to finally finish this chapter. We have made painfully slow progress through <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. I’d like to be able to finish it by the end of the year. Things start moving much faster after “The Council of Elrond!”</p>
<p>At some point late in the evening our housemate and her boyfriend arrived back at the house. I think they were getting a ride. Somehow it turned into a screaming fight between them and the person giving them the ride, in our driveway, late in the evening. This is the kind of thing that can result in me getting text messages from neighbors asking if everything is OK. Grace got an update; it seems like this means that our housemate’s plans for Thanksgiving are off. What that means, I don’t know, but I fear it may mean that she will be trying to cook a separate Thanksgiving meal for her boyfriend and children in our kitchen while we host our own Thanksgiving meal for family and friends.</p>
<p>Grace has pointed out that this keeps coming down to the fact that we never really could offer them what they wanted, which was a separate apartment with their own facilities for everything, including their own kitchen, refrigerator, pantry, clothes washer, and even separate trash pickup. We still can’t offer that; what we can offer is to share. But if we still can’t even agree how to handle trash and recycling, what hope was there that we’d be able to effectively share meals?</p>
<p>This all seems to have something to do with toxic ideas about self-reliance and individualism and pride, which to me very quickly becomes unreasonable entitlement and unwillingness to accommodate other people — to the point where even the <strong>notion</strong> that one might have to collaborate with others seems like an offense and an affront, and so turns into acts that deliberately demonstrate contempt.</p>
<p>Elanor again woke us up a couple of times during the night. Grace had to get up at 7:00 because she has another “non-stress test” today (they just monitor her and the baby). I got out in time to get a breakfast sandwich at Harvest Moon Café. Tonight I’ll make our usual Tuesday night run to Costco.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>I made a run to Costco last night and put it on my black credit card, since our balance in checking was pretty low. It was pretty crowded. I only got a few things: oranges, a pot pie, lamb steaks, apples, pears, crackers, rolls, soy sauce, and white vinegar for laundry. Grace found out that the Mother Loaf bakery was not going to be able to supply the cranberry bread we ordered for Thanksgiving, so had to reluctantly accept some other breads. I’m not sure just how this happened, as she placed the order on Saturday. Apparently it has something to do with the number of loaves of a given bread they can make per batch. Their other breads are still delicious so I don’t think any of our guests will complain.</p>
<p>We made a meal of leftovers last night, along with a fresh pot of brown rice, as we had six or seven containers of leftovers including some chicken, some chicken pot pie, two soups, black-eyed peas, some egg and tuna salad, etc. We got through quite a bit of it, although I think we might have to throw away some of the squash soup, since we just aren’t getting through it and no one really loved it to begin with.</p>
<p>Elanor made quite a mess of her face, hands, clothes, and hair, so after dinner I gave her a quick bath. For some reason she won’t sit down in the tub full of water. She used to sit in the water just fine, but at some point decided that her bottom was water-soluble, or something like that. So she spends the whole bath standing in the tub while I try to wash her up with a washcloth as best I can, and squeeze water over her to rinse her off, and she yells at me. Sometimes, as a parent, you just have to say “whatever works.”</p>
<p>With Grace’s prompting, Joshua and Sam confessed to me that somehow, in the midst of a fight yesterday, they had managed to break one of the black keys off our piano. I’m not sure how to fix it. It’s made of some kind of plastic, and was apparently glued on. So I guess I have to figure out a way to chip off the old glue and figure out what kind of glue to try.</p>
<p>The kids were really off their game last night, as far as getting chores done, and getting ready for bed. I hoped to read them a bedtime story, but it didn’t happen. It was well after midnight by the time Grace and I got the lights out. I was woken up briefly by Elanor, then again by our housemates. Between the medication, the mediocre night’s sleep, and the fact that this is the last work day before Thanksgiving, I really, really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. I stopped at Joe and Rosie’s for an almond milk mocha and a couple of day-old pastries. I happened to have a fully-stamped coffee card in my wallet that I had forgotten about, so the coffee was free, which was a nice surprise. I was paid early because of the holiday. So Grace should be able to pay for our catered Thanksgiving meal tomorrow right from our checking account. Hopefully we will have enough leftover food that I don’t have to spend much money on groceries between today and next Friday, since I have to keep this paycheck alive for a few days longer than usual.</p>
<p>I’m very happy that I’ll have an extra couple of days off work, even though I expect that I’ll have to spend most of Thursday and Friday cleaning.</p>
<p>Yesterday I checked into the “patient portal” system and looked at my recent test results. Everything looked pretty good to my untrained eye. My PSA test was 1.0 ng/mL. My cholesterol numbers seem pretty decent. My cholesterol was 164, and triglycerides 81, and LDL 104. My HDL could be better. It was 44, in the “normal” range, while greater than 60 is considered “desirable.” I’m not entirely sure how to bring that up. I think I had it up higher before when Grace and I were drinking bulletproof coffee regularly and eating something closer to a paleo diet. I know my diet has gone downhill this year as we’ve struggled with the influence of our housemate and her boyfriend bringing carbs and junk food into the house. Our kids are now demanding pasta and bread all the time, and Grace and I wind up sharing them, although reluctantly. We really need to consider how we might improve our diet in 2019. Grace will no longer be pregnant so she should no longer be struggling so hard to find foods that don’t trigger heartburn. In my case it is complicated by having to do something for my own lunches (and most mornings, also my own breakfasts) during the work week when time feels so scarce.</p>
<p>The “patient portal” system continues to be kind of a dumpster fire. It shows under my list of medications a prescription I haven’t taken for about fifteen years (it says “prescribed June 9, 2003”). There’s an option to remove it, so yesterday I told the system to remove it. Today it shows up under a list of “Medications You’ve Asked to be Deleted.” It also appears that I was prescribed Celexa before, in December of 2000. The system doesn’t seem to show any distinction between my current prescription and my original prescription eighteen years ago, and I can’t edit it or add notes. And, as well, it appears that my new doctor prescribed me a blood-pressure medication. But it was not one of the prescriptions that was called in for me the day of my appointment on Monday, November 12th. It looks like it was called in on the 13th. And — no one ever told me I had a new prescription. Not my doctor, not my doctor’s staff, not the pharmacist. So I’m going to head over to Meijer and see if it is actually there for me to pick up.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Meijer wasn’t too bad on Wednesday. I got my prescription, and started it. So far the side effects aren’t too bad. It makes me urinate more, so I’m drinking more water, which doesn’t seem like a bad thing. There’s some extra dizziness on standing that suggests it is in fact lowering my blood pressure.</p>
<p>I spent the last few hours of my work day on Wednesday fixing bugs in LabVIEW code. The open-source, third-party VI that I am using to read fields from <strong>.ini</strong> files works, but it does not follow the normal LabVIEW protocol for error-checking in series. If a value isn’t found, it will just return a default value, like zero. There’s a flag result to check whether the value was found. So I had to create another VI that checks the flag and generates an error and <strong>does</strong> follow the standard error protocol to allow chaining VIs together and reporting the first error. Foolishly I had assumed that these third-party VIs for managing data in <strong>.ini</strong> would work more or less like the standard LabVIEW VIs for managing data in other kinds of files.</p>
<p>There’s another VI that returns an array of <strong>double</strong> (double-precision floating-point) values. This one doesn’t even return a flag indicating success or failure. So I had to write yet another error-checking VI for this one that generates an error message if the returned array doesn’t contain the expected number of elements.</p>
<p>The better thing to do would probably be to add the error-checking I want and expected to the third-party VIs, but I was hesitant to open up that can of worms.</p>
<h3 id="drama">Drama</h3>
<p>I had just about finished up and tested the last of my code changes when Grace informed me that there had been an incident at home.</p>
<p>I’m going to share only the barest sketch of what happened — the things that I think are part of <strong>our</strong> story. Our housemate and her boyfriend were having an argument in or around his car in front of our home. This led to him calling the police and claiming that she had taken pills as a suicide attempt. To the best of my knowledge this wasn’t true.</p>
<p>“Person is making a suicide attempt” or even “person is suicidal” tends to generate <strong>quite</strong> a response from the authorities. Grace tells me that all the kids except her youngest were in the house; her youngest was in the car. Our piano teacher was in the house and my kids were getting their piano lessons when the yard started to fill up with emergency vehicles. Eventually there were three police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance in the yard.</p>
<p>Grace went out to speak with the police and heard about the suicide risk claim. Our housemate told the officers that she was not suicidal. One officer went to speak with our housemate’s boyfriend, who was sitting in his car with their youngest baby smoking a cigarette. That turned into the officer arresting him, leaving the baby in the car. I will leave out the reasons for the arrest.</p>
<p>Grace got the baby out of the car and removed an unlit cigarette from the baby’s mouth and took him inside. She had a conversation with the police. One officer asked if he could search our housemate’s room. Grace told him that we did not consent to any searches at this time.</p>
<p>They took our housemate away in the ambulance for psychiatric evaluation. Then there was a whole flurry of phone calls. Grace made it clear that our housemate’s boyfriend is not welcome here ever again — that SWATting is not something we can tolerate.</p>
<p>We also had a conversation about whether we could pay seven hundred dollars to bail him out; I gave it some serious thought. Almost all the money in our accounts was fully spoken for, to cover upcoming mortgage payments and other fixed expenses. I had a Thanksgiving meal ordered that I had to pick up and pay for on Thursday. Both my credit cards are nearly maxed out, so I couldn’t charge that much on either card. To take out that much cash I would have to overdraw my checking account, which would trigger a withdrawal from our overdraft protection line of credit. Since I already did that a month ago to pay for the new furnace in the Saginaw house, this would leave very little credit available for any other emergency, like a car repair. We are going to squeak through the first few weeks of December with very little margin for error, so spending most of our remaining credit seemed too risky and we had to say no.</p>
<p>When I got home Grace had understandably not finished some of the errands she planned to do for Thanksgiving, although she managed to get to Mother Loaf in time — just barely — to pick up our bread. We wound up with one extra loaf of the cranberry walnut, because at least one customer failed to pick up his or her bread. So we wound up with 3 loaves — multi-grain sourdough, einkhorn sesame, and cranberry walnut. We had 3 extra kids to manage for the evening. We ate dinner very late — I pan-fried lamb steaks and Sam assembled a salad.</p>
<p>Grace spent much of the evening on the phone with our housemate and our housemate’s boyfriend’s mother trying to keep everyone in the loop on what was happening. After taking my medications I started to drift off to sleep. They kept our housemate for observation long enough to make sure that she hadn’t actually ingested any pills. We weren’t sure whether they were going to actually keep her for up to 72 hours for observation, or not — we had to consider that possibility, and warned her on the phone that we thought they had the legal right to detail her for that long without a judge’s order. Grace stayed up a while later to see what was going to happen, and so was awake to go pick her up when they decided to let her go about 1:30 a.m.</p>
<p>We still have to figure out what to do with our housemate’s boyfriend’s car and his things. We don’t want him coming back here, so we probably have to get his car towed to his mother’s house and pack up his things. I don’t want to have to pay for that tow, but might have to anyway. I don’t have very much money left for the week.</p>
<h3 id="thanksgiving">Thanksgiving</h3>
<p>We didn’t manage to get up and ready at 7:00, but I was up about 8:00, and cooking breakfast at about 9:00. Sam got up early and was making noise in the kitchen as he put away dishes and starting another load of dishes. I made instant coffee and scrambled seven eggs, and was somewhat surprised that the kids ate them and were hungry for more, so I also made a batch of chocolate chip pancakes. Then I worked on the bathroom a little bit and tried to direct more kids to do clean-up chores. Joshua did some deep-cleaning in the bathroom.</p>
<p>I brought the television and Blu-ray player up from the basement and set them up in the family room so that the younger kids would be distracted by movies and not interfere with the preparation. We set the table with Fiestaware plates, all in different colors, which was very striking, although ultimately it didn’t make the table quite as fancy as it did the previous year, when we used our “curbside china” — a huge set of vintage china we found set out for trash pickup. Then I headed out to go pick up most of our Thanksgiving food at Tippin’s market. Pickup started at noon and I got there right at noon.</p>
<p>We had ordered prime rib instead of turkey, a tray of green bean casserole, rolls, a container of <em>jus</em>, and a couple of pies. It was supposed to come with gravy, too, but somehow both they and I missed that when we went down the checklist. It was all hot and ready to serve, but we weren’t planning to eat until about 4:00, so I left it to chill in the back of my car and ran to Meijer.</p>
<p>Grace had intended to ask me to pick up macaroni and cheese at Costco but forgot, and we had promised our guests macaroni and cheese. So I found myself at Meijer trying to find Gruyére cheese. There wasn’t any to be found, except for a small amount of the smoked variety. In fact several things on my short list weren’t on the shelf, as the store was pretty picked over. I brought sorbet for punch, and a couple of kinds of cheddar, and flowers for the table, and a few other things like dry mustard and flour. When I got back, preparations were in high gear, but we were considerably behind schedule. So we were stressing; Grace had to go pick up one of our guests.</p>
<p>We had mashed potatoes to make, and cranberry relish, and the macaroni and cheese. I made a pot of pasta and drained it. While Grace ran out to get her friend, Veronica finished the mashed potatoes (they were great!) and I worked with Joshua to make the cranberry relish. I hadn’t used the food processor in a long time and it wouldn’t go on. I wound up moving it from outlet to outlet and then taking it apart to see if there was a burned-out fuse or something — there wasn’t. I had forgotten that the top has to be latched a certain way or it won’t run at all, as a safety interlock. So I felt stupid, but fortunately we got the relish made and it was tasty.</p>
<p>Grace had asked me to do something with the macaroni and cheese while she ran out but I did not feel up to taking on such a critical task — we weren’t following a recipe, but she had something in mind. So I had to say no. She managed to get a sauce made and used up about half the pasta I had prepared and got it in the oven to bake with the rest of the dishes from the car.</p>
<p>Our guests arrived. Our Aunt Shelley brought a number of sides including her delicious hot greens and sliced ham. We heated up the prime rib and green bean casserole from the car. Aunt Shelley commented that our oven was smoking a lot. My ongoing struggle against people spilling food all over the inside of the oven has not really resulted in any improvement, and I have not deep-cleaned the oven for a couple of weeks, so this was the result. Aunt Shelley brought far less food than last year — maybe half as much, since last year we had a <strong>mountain</strong> of leftovers. We still had plenty of leftovers. We won’t need to get groceries for at least a couple of days.</p>
<p>Everything was delicious, but the macaroni and cheese was very slow to show signs of browning. A lot of oil was coming off the cheese, so it was kind of bubbling with oil on top. We finally pulled it out of the oven after people were already eating their desserts, and it was unfortunatley not delicious, although it’s edible.</p>
<p>We managed to get perishable foods bagged up and into the refrigerator and a start made on the cleanup before we all gave up and went to bed. But at least it was a start.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Today was a chill-out day. Grace and I slept late and no one was particularly hungry in the morning. I made a couple of glasses of instant coffee with cocoa powder and coconut milk while Grace got a bath. I sliced some bread and we nibbled at a few leftovers while I slowly made my way through some dishwashing. This afternoon Grace took the kids except for Elanor out for a playdate. I played with Elanor for a bit and then when she started to doze off, the powerful baby sleep waves she was giving off knocked me out as well. So I got a wonderful nap this afternoon, which is helping me as I adjust to new blood pressure medication.</p>
<p>We’ve been eating cold sandwiches of the sesame einkhorn bread (delicious, it reminds me of Zingerman’s sesame semolina), with leftover prime rib and mustard. Grace has gone to pick up the kids and when she gets back, we’ll heat up the macaroni and cheese and, if we can, Grace and I will finally get to see <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em>.</p>
<h3 id="evening">Evening</h3>
<p>For dinner we re-eated greens, candied yams, the above-mentioned macaroni and cheese, and a small amount of leftover black-eyed peas. The kids had left the remaining two containers of sorbet in the back of my car instead of putting them in the freezer, and today was not as cold as yesterday, so it was very soft. They used the rest of the ginger beer and some sparkling water and the sorbet and made punch. Grace and I hadn’t gotten a chance to taste it yesterday, so this was our chance. It was very sweet. We had to cut it with more sparkling water and some leftover wine to make it palatable. Our housemate and her three children joined us for dinner. We are continuing to gradually get the kitchen back into shape, but I have more to do tomorrow. Including, probably, another round of oven cleaning.</p>
<p>It’s about 10 p.m. and we’re about to start <em>Fantastic Beasts</em>. I brushed my teeth and took my Celexa and Flomax so we’ll see if I can stay awake for the whole thing.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>Well, I opted out of staying up for the movie last night. Grace and Veronica were having a loud disagreement and the baby was running around. There were too many distractions for me to feel like I could concentrate on the movie. So I read some more of <em>Moderan</em> and dozed off.</p>
<h3 id="moderan"><em>Moderan</em></h3>
<p>I’ve finished three out of the five parts of the story collection. I continue to enjoy it — it’s dark and deeply weird. Some of the stories are more forgettable than others, but the best ones contain some real “depth charges” — images I read but don’t fully absorb. Then they pop up into my brain unexpectedly days or weeks later. All the same, though, these stories are not exactly consoling, comforting, or suffused with nostalgia. They present an extremely bleak view of human nature that is convincing precisely because of its bleakness. I’m again reminded of darkly satiric authors such as Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem. The <em>Moderan</em> stories as a <strong>project</strong> — a self-consistent series of stories presented in the same universe — makes them build on each other. The world of <em>Moderan</em> is not a very detailed or deep fictional world, but it is remarkably consistent in tone.</p>
<h3 id="winding-up-the-week">Winding Up the Week</h3>
<p>I’m definitely still adapting to my medications. The blood pressure medication is working, but it is very intense in the first few hours, and I really have to stand up slowly. Standing for extended periods of time leaves me extremely dizzy. I’ve really benefited from naps and early bedtimes over the last few days. This morning I wasn’t feeling very energetic, and neither was Grace. We slept quite late. I finally made a pot of tea and we had tea with coconut milk. For most of the day the kids and I just made small meals out of leftovers. During the afternoon I went ahead and watched <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em>.</p>
<p>The movie is not bad, although I suspect it would have been a lot more fun on a big screen, as the magical pocket universe filled with magical animals obviously represented a huge amount of visual effects work. Some of the other recurring effects seemed like they came out of the last Harry Potter movie, the two-parter <em>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</em>.</p>
<p>The world of <em>Fantastic Beasts</em> is pretty dark and gray, and the beasts represent splashes of color whenever they show up. Of the cast, Dan Fowler is really terrific as Jacob Kowalski in just about every scene he’s in, while the leads, Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander and Katherine Waterston as Tina Goldstein, both seem kind of colorless. Wikipedia says that Matt Smith was considered to play Newt Scamander, and I think that would have been a good idea; Redmayne reminded me many times of a less enthusiastic and less emotive Smith. Alison Sudol as Queenie Goldstein is a great supporting actress.</p>
<p>The movie gets underway <strong>very</strong> slowly, like a ship slowly floating out of port. Lots of things happen, including lots of apparating and funny scenes with magical creatures running around, but we’re over thirty minutes in before anything happens that seems significant to the plot. And speaking of the plot — there’s too much of it, with a number of secondary characters that take up too much of the film’s running time. By the end of the movie things are finally moving along at a decent clip, though, and I found the ending to be fairly satisfying, although some things wind up handled a little too predictably for my taste.</p>
<h3 id="evening-1">Evening</h3>
<p>After watching the movie I dug into some oven-cleaning. I couldn’t put it off any more. I need to work on letting go of anger and just doing what needs to be done.</p>
<p>For dinner we heated up a Costco pot pie. After dinner Grace and I had a conversation with our house guest. We are trying to figure out the best way to handle the fallout from Wednesday’s events, and figure out how best to support our housemate and her children over the next few weeks. December is not going to be an easy month for any of us, it seems.</p>
<p>Tomorrow night if possible we’ll wind up my four days off by watching the next episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>, called “Kerblam!” There are only three more episodes in the season after that — it’s a short season of only ten episodes total. And instead of a Christmas special, there will be a New Year’s special, airing on January 1st.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em> (2016 film)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, November 24th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-52702506767203729872018-11-17T16:21:00.002-05:002018-11-17T16:41:06.177-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, November 17th, 2018<h1 id="the-week-ending-saturday-november-17th-2018">The Week Ending Saturday, November 17th, 2018</h1>
<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<h3 id="saturday-night">Saturday Night</h3>
<p>Last night went pretty smoothly until I had to give our friend Luke a ride home. The boys wanted to all go with me. So I took the truck. I got him home fine — he lives just off Plymouth Road. The kids all wanted to jump out of the truck to go say hello to Luke’s mom, who is their piano teacher, and his dad. But on the way back, trying to get back on US 23 South, I could not spot the right ramps. There is not much street lighting, and the signage is a little weak. I also don’t have great night vision, and so I have been trying to do less driving at night. I can see lanes and cars just fine. I have trouble clearly seeing any features that are unlit, which often includes street signs, until I’m on top of them.</p>
<p>I’m not used to those freeway entrances and exits on Plymouth Road. Years ago I lived right off of Plymouth Road, but back then it was two lanes, and half those freeway entrances and exits didn’t exist.</p>
<p>So I made a series of wrong turns. I passed the entrance for 23 South. I went a little further, did a U-Turn, and tried to take the entrance going west, and took the wrong one, getting on 23 North instead of South. So I took M-14 to Plymouth. I wound up taking the exit to Ford Road and then taking Prospect south through Ypsilanti, and then making a wrong turn onto Grove, and taking Grove to Rawsonville Road, and at that point I called Grace to ask her for help navigating. I guess we took the scenic route. I don’t really know my way around the Ypsilanti area very well. I knew that I was at about the right latitude, but too far East, getting near Belleville. As soon as I got Grace on the phone, though, I reached the intersection with Textile, so I knew my way back from there. So from there it was just a long drive down Textile to get to Crane. I was about six and a half miles too far East.</p>
<p>If I recall correctly, I read Benjamin and Joshua a story — Benjamin seems to want to read <em>Ivy Can’t Wait</em> every night. Maybe he has a sense that he has a lot in common with Ivy the Impatient Iguana.</p>
<h3 id="sunday-1">Sunday</h3>
<p>It’s 11:37 Sunday night and it’s been a very challenging day. I have to get up early, 6:00 or 6:30, and get to an appointment with a new doctor at Domino’s Farms. I had hoped to get a little time today to try again to fill out the online forms they keep asking me to fill out, but that didn’t happen. I hope they will not just send me home. It’s taken weeks to get an appointment.</p>
<p>The day started pretty well; I was up at 8, and got a bath. Grace wound up taking Veronica to an early Mass to serve coffee and donuts with the youth group. I didn’t even know this was happening; Grace apparently didn’t find out until late last night and didn’t tell me (she says “I didn’t want you to panic.”) Grace wound up in some kind of long argument with Veronica about clothes, and so Veronica was fifteen minutes for the 9:00 Mass.</p>
<p>My friend John had a thought about the old dishwasher — he was concerned that if we were going to keep it in the garage during the winter, it should be “winterized.” So I looked up a video on how to do that. Apparently with these models all they recommend is that you remove any water left inside the little “sump” in the bottom of the unit, with a sponge and a bucket (or a shop vac). So later in the day I found myself in the garage with a sponge and a bucket disassembling the filter in the bottom of the dishwasher and sponging out some icy, vinegar-scented water. (I think they must have run it with vinegar to try to freshen it up before putting it in their garage). Then I left it all opened up to dry. We had to lock up the garage so the kids can’t go in there until I have it back together. Otherwise, we’ll lose parts. In fact I’m afraid they will break the dishwasher and/or the refrigerator we are storing in there, so I’m wondering if we need to ban them from playing in the garage indefinitely. We’ve been letting them dig into boxes of LEGO in there, rather than bringing LEGO pieces into the house, where they tend to leave them scattered where Elanor could try to swallow them.</p>
<p>Anyway, after my bath I got dressed and came out to the kitchen and toasted bagels, both cinnamon raisin and “everything,” with butter. I made a pot of black tea, got the kids to empty the dishwasher, and loaded the dishwasher again, to try to catch up a little bit on the backlog of dishes. We had tea and bagels and then I worked more on the kitchen while trying to get the kids to follow Grace’s instructions to get dressed and ready to go to Mass.</p>
<p>The kids got dressed (not without a lot of tedious supervision and demands to put on socks and jackets), and I had them in the car at a quarter to 11, but Grace was not ready. It turned out that she had fallen asleep in the tub; she woke up when Benjamin came into the bathroom. Our friend Joy came upstairs and we said goodbye to her; she had to head back to Grand Rapids. I had planned to make a round of fried eggs before we took the kids to Mass, but that didn’t work out. We didn’t even get the car moving until a quarter after 11:00. We drove to Mass, arriving about thirty minutes late for the 11:00 Mass.</p>
<p>I hate getting there late; it is gratuitous stress. There’s not any actual terrible consequence, but it just bothers me beyond my ability to even convey in words. I spent most of the rest of Mass with Elanor in the overflow room since she was getting loud and active. We had coffee and donuts and on top of the bagels the kids were now primed with disturbing amounts of carbohydrate.</p>
<p>When we got back home at about 1:15, I made eggs for a few people who were willing to eat eggs: 2 fried eggs for me, 3 scrambled eggs for Grace, and 4 scrambled eggs for Veronica. I seem to be sharing in Grace’s exhaustion. I tried to take a brief nap hoping that it would energize me, but was interrupted so many times that I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few minutes. That helped a little bit.</p>
<p>Grace stayed in the kitchen for a while trying to plan meals, and started to nod off herself, so she came in to lie down as well and for a while we both napped irregularly, in between interruptions. The kids were running wild and trashing the house. Elanor wound up falling asleep on the floor outside our bedroom door. We’re wondering now if we all might be fighting a virus, because we were so sleepy today, despite having gotten a reasonable amount of sleep.</p>
<p>Our housemate came in and asked us if she could use the kitchen, and of course we said yes. We have never said no. Somehow out of all our concerns both Grace and I have shared with her, about she and her boyfriend leaving the kitchen a mess, making a big mess of the oven, trying to store food and cook two completely separate sets of meals, entirely refusing to eat meals with us, about food upstairs, about her boyfriend smoking in the house, trash all over the yard, all that — her takeaway had apparently been “I’m not supposed to use the kitchen,” which was never true. So it is clearer than ever to us that we have not successfully communicated much — maybe anything at all.</p>
<p>She set herself up with her kids and a laptop in the kitchen and made a meal. Meanwhile the hall and the boys’ bedroom was a huge mess; the kitchen was a huge mess; the family room was a huge mess. These things were not our housemate’s fault. We made this kitchen mess over the course of days, by falling behind and not managing to catch up last week, and not getting as much help from the kids as we’ve tried to get.</p>
<p>Grace and I tried to figure out how to salvage the rest of the day and figure out what we were going to be able to get done. I wanted to work on the online forms, and clean the kitchen, but the kitchen was crowded. Grace tells me we wasted some time indecisively staring at our phones. I mostly remember being very frustrated and feeling like we couldn’t get the kids to help with <strong>anything</strong>. I had a few arguments trying to get them to help empty the dishwasher and put away dishes again. Veronica apparently had put away one round of dishes and started another one but we were so backed up on dishwashing that it was barely noticeable; it seemed like we had not made any progress.</p>
<p>Veronica had another youth group meeting back and the church, and our friends the Martins were also having a celebration at their farm for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin%27s_Day">Feast of St. Martin</a>. And I needed to fill out forms, and there was still a lot of work to do in the kitchen. It was clear we weren’t going to manage to get all of those things done. I really wanted to take the kids out to our friends’ farm. I thought we might even go to the barbecue restaurant in Chelsea afterwards, the way we did a couple of weeks ago. But it was clear that the kids needed to eat some protein (or, really anything besides more carbs) before we tried to take them anywhere, and we just were not going to be ready to go. We also don’t really have the spare money to be eating dinner out, especially now that I’m trying to pay off the line of credit advance we used to pay for the furnace replacement in the old house.</p>
<p>Grace and I slowly got ourselves moving. Somehow it took us about the next three or four hours to do more work on the house and kitchen, and make dinner. We had so much food in the house. Our fridge contains a lot of our housemate’s food items. She rarely seems to throw anything out even when it is obviously past its prime. I finally had the chance to ask her if she was planning to use any of the jars of baby food. She said no, and asked Grace if she wanted the jars. Grace said no, so she threw them in the trash. Again, I’m at a loss. We have talked so many times about how we return things that are returnable, or recycle things that are recyclable. So I once again found myself fishing jars out of the trash in order to clean them out and recycle them. I’m glad to have a little space in the refrigerator back, since it is at a premium.</p>
<p>From Friday night’s Costco run, we still had a package of flank steak and another package of short ribs. Both of those can be cooked very nicely in the Instant Pot. Grace settled on the Mongolian flank steak recipe, a recipe we have tried before, modifying it this time to use less sugar. She got the kids to help her prep. I made a pot of brown rice with a quart of Grace’s homemade beef broth. When it was done, she needed to use the Instant Pot, so I warmed up a red ceramic soup tureen that Joy brought us by filling it with hot water, then put the rice in it to keep it warm for a while, and scrubbed out the Instant Pot insert.</p>
<p>While doing all this prep, somehow Benjamin had a screaming tantrum, Pippin got in trouble for being too rough with Elanor, and Joshua kept getting into that state he gets into where he laughs until he cries. I’m getting thoroughly sick of the “children behaving like screaming lunatics” thing, and the “children fighting like cats and dogs” thing, and the “children screaming for no discernible reason” thing, not to mention the “children running in the house until they fall and hurt themselves” thing. The “children getting loud again very late at night even though we’ve asked them to be quiet a dozen times” thing gets old as well. And I can’t forget that my weekend started out with the “children plugging up the toilet until it overflows” thing.</p>
<p>I assembled a kale salad kit. I had to take a time out and leave the room for a while, because the noise was getting to me, and I was starting to fear that if I didn’t get away from it for a few minutes, I might just snap and beat me some kids. Grace ran Veronica to her youth group event. While she was gone, Benjamin finished slicing up the flank steak. I could not hope to keep them all on track with finishing the recipe <strong>and</strong> simultaneously keep them from fighting and/or destroying our home while she was gone, so we had to put the dinner prep on hold while I just tried to keep them from ruining the meal in progress. Grace came back and picked up where she had left off. An hour later Grace had to go back again to pick her up. I did not feel up to navigating my way to our new church, especially as the route involves dirt roads without much street lighting. I didn’t want to wind up taking the scenic route like on Saturday night.</p>
<p>We eventually finished preparing the meal. The kids were crazy and melting down left and right. Dinner was Mongolian beef over brown rice with kale salad. It was delicous, but there was still a lot of cleanup work. I had to take apart and clean the juicer, and do a bunch of hand washing of Elanor’s bottles, and clean the big ceramic tureen, and the baking pans from earlier, and finish all kinds of tedious hand washing like that.</p>
<p>So now it’s about 12:40 and I had to ask Grace to help me reconstruct what happened today. I could not even remember the order of events. It just seems like a very long, exhausting, aggravating blur of cleaning things and yelling at screaming children. I’m really not sure why today was so hard, but it was. In fact, to me the whole weekend was pretty awful.</p>
<p>It was just on the bed a short while ago, but now we can’t find Grace’s blood sugar monitor. Elanor was carrying the little case around earlier, but I had the kids take it and put it back on the bed and close and lock our bedroom door.</p>
<p>I think we’re going to have to wake up the kids. I still have to record my blood pressure and Grace has to record her blood sugar. We’re a pathetic duo. So I have to put my laptop away and help her wake up the kids and scour the house until we find her blood sugar meter.</p>
<h3 id="monday">Monday</h3>
<p>We woke up Veronica and Sam. The situation with the blood pressure meter was just about the last straw for Grace. Sam diligently looked around until he found Grace’s blood sugar meter. It was hidden behind some other items on a bookshelf in our bedroom. No one had any explanation for how it got there. So we got on to bed. I set my alarm for 6:30. After a not-very-restful five hours of broken sleep I got up and had a bath. Grace and I both left; Grace had a “non-stress test” to check on the baby, and I had to go to my doctor appointment at Domino Farms.</p>
<p>I made it on time, but just. Traffic on 23 North and Plymouth was not bad at a quarter to eight. Fortunately I had the foresight to put some canned espresso drinks in the refrigerator so that I could down a caffeine hit on my way out the door. But despite that, I’ve had a headache all morning.</p>
<p>My new doctor took a thorough history, and seems friendly and engaged, so I was pleased with that. He looked over my blood pressure records. In his view it was a little worrying, but didn’t seem persistently high, even without the labetalol. So he did not prescribe me anything for blood pressure, at least not yet. He wanted to get some labs done first. He also took my blood sugar, which was not elevated. I got a flu shot. He prescribed me Flomax for my difficulties in peeing, and Celexa for anxiety. I talked to him about the big stressors going on in my life. He’d like to see me back on an exercise routine. (So would I, of course.) I told him about my alpha-1 carrier gene and how that led me to a specialist who (I think, correctly) determined that I really was just suffering from bad allergies and bad reflux.</p>
<p>We talked about belly fat and BMI. He asked me to try to see if his practice can get test results from my colonoscopy and PSA test. So I have to try to track down contact info for those providers. He wants to rule out sleep apnea, so will plan an in-home sleep study of some kind. I got a flu shot, so I will probably feel pretty lousy tomorrow. Then Thursday, I have a follow-up appointment with the ophthalmologist. Then I’ll see this doctor again in January.</p>
<p>I don’t think I’m a very good patient, and I told him this; I told him that I seem to tend towards hypochondria, and also tend to somaticize stress. My grandmother was the same way, so at least I come by it honestly. It’s his job to help me figure out the right things to worry about. The retinal hemorrhage worries me a lot, but it might not be the <strong>right</strong> thing to worry about, if it is mostly due to a genetic problem and I can’t do much about it. The ophthalmologist noted “hypertensive retinopathy” but if my blood pressure is not actually high enough to have caused that — then what? Then I guess maybe work on the things I can improve.</p>
<p>Wikipedia says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mild signs of hypertensive retinopathy can be seen quite frequently in normal people (3–14% of adult individuals aged ≥40 years), even without hypertension.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I left I had a dizzying number of things to try to write down. So I drove to the West Ann Arbor health center where I thought I might get my blood test done before work. He had said something about a fasting test. I honestly couldn’t remember if he was talking about one of the tests he requested today, or a future test. It wasn’t clear from the form. So I was standing in line, but realized I should probably come back Tuesday morning on an empty stomach. So tomorrow morning I’ll try to remember not to eat anything at all in the morning and go right to the lab before work.</p>
<p>I had not eaten anything except the 120-calorie canned coffee drink, so I stopped at Joe and Rosie’s on Jackson Road for smoked salmon and cream cheese on a bagel, and exchanged text messages with Grace. Grace’s “non-stress test” was fine. The baby looks fine.</p>
<p>I really need this week to go smoother than the weekend did.</p>
<h3 id="facets">Facets</h3>
<p>Today in random synaptic misfirings: I’m wishing I had my old copy of the Facets Complete Video Catalog #16. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facets_Multi-Media">Facets Multi-Media</a> used to offer a print catalog for sale and I bought one. It was a massive paper catalog and they couldn’t send them to you for free. Although, for some reason I can’t now remember, I wound up with two copies of Catalog #16. I never wound up ordering anything from it, but it was fascinating just to leaf through it. And I read the descriptions trying to find movies that I vaguely remember watching as a child.</p>
<p>Copies of these catalogs seem to be scarce now. #16 may have been the last one, although I’m not sure of that. Facets doesn’t seem to offer a printed catalog any more, but they still send <a href="http://www.facetsmovies.com/user/aboutHelp.php">movies-by-mail</a> for members, kind of the way Netflix used to be. There is still a <a href="https://dvd.netflix.com/">Netflix DVDs-by-mail service</a>, but they seem to offer a much shallower collection of films than they did back when we used the service.</p>
<h3 id="moderan-typos">Moderan Typos</h3>
<p>I sent a note to the New York Review of Books editorial contact e-mail listing the errors I found in <em>Moderan</em>. I was surprised to get a reply immediately:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While those seem very much like OCR errors, I can tell you that our books are not digitized by OCR but by humans typing (fallible humans, true!). They are then proofread. It looks like those two slipped through, unfortunately. I will make a note and these will be corrected on the next printing.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Thank you very much!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So… someone there is answering e-mail immediately. That’s cool. If I find more errors in <em>Moderan</em> I’ll pass them along.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>Because of my doctor appointment Monday morning I had to stay at work until after seven, and I was quite tired by the time I left work. I went to Meijer to pick up prescriptions, and even though my doctor’s office had called them in Monday morning, I still needed to wait fifteen minutes. So I think it was after eight by the time I got home. The kids had not taken both trash bins down to Crane Road yet. I had to remind them to finish a chore that they’ve had to do every week for almost two years. Then I had to drag them back into the kitchen to replace the trash bag, which they forget to replace every single time. This has become tedious.</p>
<p>I started both medications: Flomax and Celexa. So I was not feeling my best from the flu shot, and took two meds, both of which can cause drowsiness. I will try taking both of them at night for a while and see what happens.</p>
<p>Grace made three soups for dinner! One was a blend of potatoes, the leftover cooked sauerkraut, and bratwurst. That was really delicious. She also made greens with black-eyed peas, and she had fixed up the squash soup that was too salty and needed some more sweetness. I think she added some carrot or potato to cut it, and then some molasses to sweeten it. She asked me to make a cast-iron pan of the Jiffy Mix corn muffin mix, so we had that, too.</p>
<p>The kids had not been on top of their chores. The kitchen, which I had left almost spotless Sunday night, was piled with dirty dishes. I got a dish load on and had Veronica hand-wash a few things, but when we don’t stay right on top of it, we tend to fall farther and farther behind. So I was frustrated and feeling exhausted demoralized. Grace needed to get up at 6 to head to Saginaw early to meet the duct-cleaning company, so I was desperate to get to bed. We discovered that apparently someone had broken a glass on the floor in the family room and never cleaned it up. So that was a bit “WTF” moment. Who broke the glass? Elanor, maybe. Who saw it? Sam. What did he do about it? He asked Joshua to help. Did Joshua help? No. What happened next? Nothing. At least, that’s as much as I could piece together. Leaving glass all over the floor so people can step on it? Priceless!</p>
<p>Our friend Joy had brought three used juicers to try. One of them, an all-stainless steel appliance, looked like the best-built one, but it didn’t work well at all; it seemed like the motor was weak, and it kept slowing down. Maybe something is burned out. So she tried another one, a Jack LaLanne juicer. It worked better. As we have now tried three juicers, and taken them apart and put them back together, it really looks like the guts of all of these juicers are actually made by the same company. The inside parts look nearly identical, while the exteriors look very different. I think all of these are “centrifugal” juicers, with a disc blade that spins at high speed. The Jack LaLanne juicer seemed to extract a little bit more from the celery. The pulp was pretty dry, although it also didn’t seem to do as good a job chewing up the celery. There were some big pieces remaining. I think at some point I’d like to try a “masticating” juicer. They are supposedly able to get more juice out of the stuff you put into them. They are supposedly easier to clean than centrifugal juicers. But it seems that they are quite a bit more expensive, and I think we’re unlikely to find a used one at a thrift shop.</p>
<p>I had hoped to have a chance to sit down with Grace and go over my notes from my doctor’s appointment. But it was just too late and everything was too chaotic for that. We managed to get the kids down and the lights off by about eleven. The kitchen was not fully cleaned up. I was feeling odd and jittery because of the new drugs in my system. It was a bit difficult to get to sleep. Then I woke up about 4:20. (Yes, 4:20; I checked my phone. And no, that’s not a hidden drug reference.) Elanor was fussing in Veronica’s room. It took me some time to get back to sleep. Then Benjamin came in to sleep with us, reporting that he had been having bad dreams, at 5:50. Then my phone alarm went off simultaneously with Grace’s phone alarm at 6:00. She sat up and started doing things with her phone and laptop, so the blue light was in my face, even with my eyes closed. I tried to get a little bit more sleep, but it was not really happening for me. Benjamin came in reporting bad dreams and wanted to sleep in our bed. Grace got up and out with Elanor.</p>
<p>I managed to doze off a little bit more, with interruptions. About 8 I got up and got bathed and got out the door a bit past nine. I wanted to maintain a 12-hour fast before my blood tests, although I’m not sure that was strictly required or not, so had only a small glass of water before I left home. I drove to the West Ann Arbor medical center and had my blood drawn. Fortunately I didn’t have a long wait. Then I went to Joe and Rosie’s and got a mocha with almond milk and a muffin, and got in to work about 10:10.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if Grace made it on time. She needed to get up to Saginaw in time to meet the duct cleaning company. It snowed overnight. I saw reports that traffic conditions were hazardous in mid-Michigan. It was beautiful, though, on my morning drive. The sun was illuminating all the snow-covered trees, and the roads in Southeast Michigan were not bad, because the snow had largely melted. It is clouding up, though, and it is supposed to get much colder tonight — into the teens.</p>
<p>The Flomax is definitely helping already, after only one dose. It’s too early to tell if the Celexa is doing anything. I haven’t been on an SSRI in many years, since about the year 2000 I think. I’ve been happy that I have been able to function without them, because of their various side effects, although I definitely have gone through some rough patches over the last eighteen years. I had dry mouth early this morning and I have been yawning even after my morning caffeine, but it’s really impossible to tell how much of this is poor sleep, how much is the flu shot, and how much is the new medications.</p>
<p>I’ll have to got to Costco after work. It’s going to be another long day. I hope we can get through the evening routine better than we did last night. This is the time of year, with the days getting shorter and shorter, when I’d really like to sleep <strong>more</strong>, not less. I’d like to get home, eat some soup in front of a roaring fire, sip a glass of whisky, read everyone stories, and go to bed early, all without ever turning on a bright artificial light. Maybe some day.</p>
<p>I don’t have any reading or viewing to report today. We probably will be too busy and tired to watch a video, but maybe on Wednesday or Thursday night this week we can watch the latest episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>, called “Demons of the Punjab.” The premise, involving the historic partition of British India into India and Pakistan, seems very promising. But the reviews are, once again, pretty mixed, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the real world (or at least this hell-world that we’re stuck in), I’m riveted by coverage of the <a href="https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Toll-Continues-Mount-Californias-Twin-Fire-Disasters">fires in California</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even as Southern California faces at least one more day of fierce wind and bone-dry conditions, state officials and residents are trying to come to terms with the level of death and destruction left by the past week’s wildfires. As of Monday night, at least 42 people were reported killed by the Camp Fire, which decimated the city of Paradise on Thursday. The fire is now the deadliest in California history, beating the grim record of 29 set in a October 1933 blaze at Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. More than 200 people in the Camp Fire area remained missing on Monday, and it is very possible more victims will be found in and near Paradise as the search expands into areas that were too dangerous or difficult to assess right away.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How do we get off the bad timeline? Anyone?</p>
<h3 id="more-philip-glass">More Philip Glass</h3>
<p>To soothe my mind, I’ve been listening to <em>Akhnaten</em>. I’ve mentioned it before, but this is such a beautiful work. Act I, Scene 3, called “The Window of Appearances” is just an unbelievable piece of music. I find myself listening to it again and again, along with the duet “Akhnaten and Nefertiti.”</p>
<p>Not everything in <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em> is quite as enjoyable, though. I have tried to get through <em>Dancepieces</em>, and so far it isn’t really working for me; the pace of most of the pieces is too frenetic, and the repeating, evolving patterns do a little too <strong>much</strong> repeating, and a little too <strong>little</strong> evolving. I’ll try again and maybe something will “click” and I’ll start to like them, but I may have to just admit that I’m never going to love <em>Dancepieces</em> the way I love <em>Glassworks</em>. I’ve started to dig into <em>Satyagraha</em>, which is scale is somewhere between <em>Akhnaten</em> and <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>. The parts are beautiful, but I don’t really have a feel for the <strong>arc</strong> of <em>Satyagraha</em> in the way I have started to get a feel for the arc of <em>Akhnaten</em>, and the way it abruptly leaps across time.</p>
<p>That leap across time, which reminds me of the “smash cut” between the prehistoric past and the era of spaceflight in <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>, is essential to <em>Akhnaten</em>, and it doesn’t happen between pieces, but across a long musical section in the track “The Ruins.” At the start of the track the narrator recites text from Tutankhamen’s tomb. In the recording, he is is panned slightly to the left of the stereo sound-stage, as he says, with spacious reverberation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The new ruler, performing benefactions for his father Amon and all the gods, has made what was ruined to endure as a monument for the ages of eternity, and he has expelled the great criminal and justice was established. He surpassed what has been done previously.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m reminded of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias">“Ozymandias”</a> by Shelly:</p>
<pre><code>I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...</code></pre>
<p>In the opera, as the scene progresses and the orchestra plays, the ruin of Akhetaten appears, and the narrator becomes a twentieth-century tour guide. In the recording, the narrator’s voice becomes quieter, and moves in the stereo sound-stage, so that it is heard almost entirely in the right channel, and the reverberation is gone. His voice has become “smaller.” He does not stay in the right channel, though; his voice gradually moves, as if the tour guide is walking on the stage:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is nothing left of this glorious city of temples and palaces. The mud brick buildings have long since crumbled and little remains of the immense stone temples but the outlines of their floor plans.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After “The Ruins,” there is a wordless piece called “Epilogue,” in which the ghosts of Akhnaten, Nefertiti, and Queen Tye sing together, producing a series of pure, sustained chords that seem nearly inhuman in their precise tonality. We feel as if we are hearing the voices of angels, or demigods. Even the vibrato of the singers seems to be synchronized perfectly. The <a href="http://www.opera-arias.com/glass/akhnaten/libretto/">libretto</a> says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(At first they seem not to know that they and their city all are dead and now a part of the past. They become aware of the funeral cortege of Akhnaten’s father (Amenhotep III) moving across the background. They form a procession of their own and, as the opera ends, can be seen moving off toward the first funeral group still on its journey to the heavenly land of Ra)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And at that point, listening, I’m pretty much speechless as well.</p>
<h3 id="the-real-akhnaten">The Real Akhnaten</h3>
<p>The opera portrays Akhnaten and Nefertiti as inhumanly beautiful, moving majestically across the stage, and singing as immortals might sing. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten">historic Akhnaten</a>, known earlier as Amenhotep IV, tried to introduce a form of monotheism to Egypt. DNA evidence suggests that a mummy found in tomb “KV55” was closely related to Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen, although apparently their exact relationships are disputed. The mummy, originally believed to be female, was later identified as a male with feminine traits.</p>
<p>Is this why Glass used a counter-tenor to sing Akhnaten’s part? I don’t know. Far from being some sort of demigod, Akhnaten may have had a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten#Speculative_theories">genetic disorder</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The rather strange and eccentric portrayals of Akhenaten, with a sagging stomach, thick thighs, large breasts, and long, thin face — so different from the athletic norm in the portrayal of pharaohs — have led certain Egyptologists to suppose that Akhenaten suffered some kind of genetic abnormality.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The genetic disorder theory is disputed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because the god Aten was referred to as “the mother and father of all humankind” it has been suggested that Akhenaten was made to look androgynous in artwork as a symbol of the androgyny of the god.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Genetic disorder or no, the family tree of Akhnaten is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Dynasty_of_Egypt_family_tree">tangled one</a>. Ahmenhotep I may have been the product of <strong>three generations</strong> of sibling marriages. His son <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun">Tutankhamun</a> (<em>aka</em> “King Tut”) was also the product of sibling inter-breeding:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The young king’s mother was found through the DNA testing of a mummy designated as ‘The Younger Lady’ (KV35YL), which was found lying beside Queen Tiye in the alcove of KV35. Her DNA proved that, like his father, she was a child of Amenhotep III and Tiye; thus, Tutankhamun’s parents were brother and sister.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And Tutankhamen himself later married his half-sister.</p>
<p>To quote the character Ed Rooney in <em>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off</em>, “so <strong>that’s</strong> how it is in their family.” I’m not going to add the obligatory “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” because there is. These folks must have been genetic train wrecks. And it apparently was even worse in the Ptolemaic dynasty. As Grover tells Elmo in the <em>Sesame Street</em> special <a href="http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_Street_We_Live_On"><em>The Street We Live On</em></a>, “history <strong>is</strong> fascinating!”</p>
<p>There is a very dated, but still pretty nifty documentary available online: <a href="http://www.nfb.ca/film/lost_pharaoh_search_for_akhenaten/"><em>The Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten</em></a> (note that different sources spell his name differently, as it is a transliteration). Keep an eye out for the Commodore PET computer — one of the first computers I ever used! I’m not sure how well all the historical assertions about Akhnaten measure up to the present-day scholarly consensus, or even if there is a present-day scholarly consensus, but it still captures a mood and a time, and I like the use of music.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>After work yesterday I made a run to Costco, and picked up some of our regular items: bananas, butter, eggs, and a chicken pot pie. They didn’t have any more of that Lundgren short-grain brown rice that we like so much, unfortunately. I got a 12-pound bag of a different kind of organic brown rice to try. My impulse buy this time was a 2-pack of beef summer sausages and a package of assorted crackers. This sausage is not that great, though. It has a strangely soft texture. I’m used to summer sausage from Ted’s Meat Market in Saginaw — it was quite chewy, and delicious. I left one sausage and half the crackers at home and took the rest to work. They are huge — two pounds each. I probably don’t actually want to eat a quarter-pound of summer sausage every day for eight days. Maybe my co-workers will help me. Maybe the kids will eat the other one, although they will probably eat all the crackers and leave the sausage.</p>
<p>I spent some time yesterday working on the money spreadsheets for our Team One account. I was in a mild panic because it turns out I had some errors in the spreadsheet. In one cell I had turned a withdrawal, for our mortgage, a negative number, into a positive number accidentally. But I had also left off an upcoming paycheck, which improves the situation a bit. And I had mis-ordered some upcoming transactions in December.</p>
<p>Even with these corrections, things are going to be very tight at the end of November through mid-December in our Team One account. Unless we have a windfall, we can’t afford any more boiler work through the end of the year. We can’t afford to have our fireplaces inspected and/or cleaned. Our payments for the rest of the paint and plaster work on the old house, $3,500 over the past few months, have left us with very little margin for error. And the cost of the new furnace in the old house, about $3,000, has left me with more debt to pay off, leaving me less money to move into the Team One account.</p>
<p>We will probably squeak through a bottleneck around December 15th. We may hit a low-water mark of under $100. The exact low water mark depends on the exact dates in which various charges and credits actually clear. Some of these, like our mortgage payments, Vonage phone service, and T-Mobile bill, shift around by a few days. It’s my job to plan for the most pessimistic scenario. If I need to, I can overdraw our Huntington account again to bring a little extra money into the Team One account. But we are nearly maxed out on everything, so I’d really rather avoid eating up the small amount of credit still available to us in case of financial emergency.</p>
<p>The good news is that if we make it to the end of the year, things should ease up. With no more big repair expenses at the old house, I should be able to recharge the Team One account and gradually bring up the “low-water mark” we hit each month.</p>
<h3 id="this-old-house">This Old House</h3>
<p>Grace made it up to Saginaw and met the duct-cleaning crew — the company we paid months ago, but who never came to clean the ducts. Yesterday they finally cleaned the ducts. Grace made it there and back without any difficulty, although she was very tired.</p>
<h3 id="these-old-people">These Old People</h3>
<p>I was very tired also last night. When I got home the kids were making latkes, and Grace was making chili in the Instant Pot. Fortunately they had done kitchen cleanup during the day, so we weren’t too far behind. That is such a simple thing, but it gave me a huge sense of relief not to face a complete mess in the kitchen.</p>
<p>We are still using up cans of beans that I stashed away in the basement storage room in our old house back when I was unemployed in December of 2014 (I wrote dates on the cans). They technically expired in 2017 but there was no reason not to use them in chili. They tasted fine. It took the kids something like two hours to finish frying the latkes — on of the reasons we don’t like to make them frequently. Grace and I both just wanted to eat and get on to bed. We finally ate about ten, and Grace went right into the bedroom while I did some cleanup. We got to bed at a reasonable hour. You can’t really “catch up” on lost sleep, but we got a pretty good night’s sleep, with a couple of exceptions. At 4:20 a.m. (yes, again, 4:20; I checked the time on my phone), the old laptop, in the family room on the other side of the house, started playing a video. It wasn’t enough to wake up anyone else, but I’ve always been a very light sleeper.</p>
<p>My first thought was that Benjamin had gotten up and was watching videos. But no one was up. Apparently the kids had left a video playing, and closed up the computer, and it went to sleep. Then at 4:20, some maintenance task ran, and woke up up, even though the lid was closed, and the video started playing again.</p>
<p>It took me a long time to get back to sleep again. Grace and I wound up talking for a while. This is probably because somewhere in the 4:00 hour I reach a point of natural wakefulness before going back into deep sleep for a second round. The Celexa may be also making me sleep more lightly. I’m not really sure. I was also woken up (but don’t recall just when) by Elanor fussing in her bedroom with Veronica.</p>
<p>I took my second dose of Celexa last night. I am experiencing slight diziness. I had a very dry mouth the first night, but it was less so last night. I’ve also got mild flu symptoms — sneezing just a bit. I’ve been slightly headachey. Since I got a flu shot <strong>and</strong> started two new medications, it’s hard to know just what is causing what. My jaw feels sore and my TMJ (temporomandibular joints) are popping. I might have been grinding my teeth during the night. I hope that goes away. That side effect hit me really hard when I was on Welbutrin, almost 20 years ago. I had to stop that medication; it was so bad I couldn’t open my jaw. I hope I don’t have to stop Celexa before I can determine if it helps with anxiety.</p>
<p>I’m so glad to have gotten a <strong>better</strong> night’s sleep, even if it wasn’t even really a <strong>good</strong> one!</p>
<p>Tomorrow I have a follow-up visit with my opthalmologist, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about what is happening with my eyes. Even if it isn’t good, I want to know, so I can determine if there is something more I can do to protect my vision.</p>
<p>If I get a decent bonus at the end of the year, maybe I can use it to buy Grace a new juicer, and buy myself new glasses. I want to try <a href="https://gunnar.com/prescription-lenses/">Gunnar computer glasses</a> that block some of the excess blue LED light from my computer displays. Ideally I would get all three of my glasses — computer glasses, sunglasses, and regular glasses — updated at the same time. That’s really not cheap, but maybe I can at least get new computer glasses. Supposedly <a href="http://www.forestplaceoptical.com/">Forest Place Optical</a> in Plymouth handles Gunnar prescription glasses.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Grace and the kids made chicken paprikash, salad, and pasta with yeast for dinner. Grace got home late from errands and I got home late, so we arrived at about the same time, almost 8, and did not manage to sit down to dinner until 9:45. So, a quick round of cleanup, leaving some of the dishes for Veronica to hand-wash today, with no video and no story, and we got to bed at a sane time. And we slept with no interruptions!</p>
<p>The Flomax is helping me considerably. I didn’t even have to get up to pee during the night. The Celexa is giving me some of the usual side effects that I get from SSRI. I have intense yawning fits. My jaw gets sore, and sometimes my jaw muscles start twitching rapidly — I can feel the muscle “firing” about ten times a second. I struggle to find a “neutral” position for my jaw. The twitching stops if I get it closed at just the right degree of tension, but I can’t seem to get it to relax. It usually settles down after a while. Then there are the muscle tremors, and the slight dizziness, and the dry mouth. So much fun! But… it may be helping my anxiety, and helping me feel not so “stuck” in our various troubles. It’s too early to tell for certain if I’ll be able to stay on it, or if the side effects will become too debilitating.</p>
<p>This morning we have snow coming down, moderately heavy at times. We might have two inches total, according to Weather Underground. The temperature is right around freezing, so I don’t expect it to freeze up badly on the roads, but the slush might be slippery later. I had breakfast at Harvest Moon Café and after a cup and a half of black coffee and a breakfast sandwich, felt more ready to confront the snow.</p>
<p>This afternoon I have my follow-up appointment with ophthalmologist Dr. Puro, right down the street from my office on Parkland Plaza. Grace is going to be running errands all day. I’ll have to see how my eyes recover from the drops. I should be able to drive the short distance back to my office. If I can’t see well enough to drive home this evening, I’ll have to leave my car at work and have Grace give me a ride home.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Yesterday’s opthalmology appointment went fine and I was able to get back to work in under two hours. My doctor only dilated my right eye, so my vision wasn’t too bad, as my left eye could compensate somewhat. The news from inside my eyeball was about as good as I could hope for: there doesn’t seem to be any further damage to my retina, and the swelling associated with the initial hemorrhage is subsiding. I have another follow-up in 3 months. The effect of the drops had worn off by the time I left work, about 7:30, so I had no difficulty driving home, other than the haze of road salt and heavy traffic.</p>
<p>I asked my doctor whether he thought that constant blue light exposure could be playing a role in damaging my eyes. He didn’t reject the idea completely, but said something about a lack of evidence to date. The evidence I’ve seen is worrying enough that I still intend, if possible, to replace my computer glasses late this year or early next year with something that reduces blue wavelengths. I think in a few more years the consensus may be that the more blue-intensive LED lights <strong>are</strong> damaging eyes and we might be looking at the mother of all class-action lawsuits.</p>
<p>Ideally the light <strong>sources</strong> would not have this potential hazard, but I can’t replace all my screens with old CRTs or even old fluorescent-backlit monitors, especially not at work. At home the two monitors on my Mac Pro, an Apple monitor and an old HP portrait monitor that I bought used about a dozen years ago, <strong>do</strong> use the older fluorescent backlights. The Apple monitor is just about the nicest I’ve ever used. The HP, which I can orient in portrait mode for writing, is very nice too, although its backlight is a little dim. But with respect to this potential source of eye damage, maybe dim isn’t that bad.</p>
<h3 id="labview-we-meet-again">LabVIEW, We Meet Again</h3>
<p>At work I’ve been wrestling with LabVIEW again. There is some error-reporting code that I designed to be “non-blocking” — that is, it throws up a window with an error message, but the code running in the main window does not pause waiting for the user to respond. This particular code shuts down voltages if too much or too little current draw is detected, as a precaution to protect the devices we are testing; we want that shutting-down to happen immediately. So I followed some National Instruments sample code, along with some other examples I found in various blogs, to make my code open up another “VI” (virtual instrument).</p>
<p>This code works fine when running the program in the LabVIEW development environment, but was failing when running from a compiled executable (a Windows <strong>.exe</strong> file). There is a second layer of error-checking that normally would display an error after the shutdown, but this shutdown logic intentionally scrubs those errors so that they aren’t reported twice. The problem is apparently that LabVIEW doesn’t know that the VI I’m opening needs to be linked in to the executable, because it is reference indirectly at runtime, by name, and the compiler can’t detect that reference. I was entirely unable to find a way to force the project to include the extra VI.</p>
<p>There is probably a way, but I had to give up on this approach for now. Instead of calling a separate VI which then opens up the VI displaying the error message, I’ve put the error message in the main window. My error-handling VI can’t reference the error message text field directly, so I’ve had to essentially “de-factor” this error logic into a subroutine. Instead I now have duplicated code in several places where the main VI needs to display this kind of error. That’s really annoying.</p>
<p>Update: there’s supposedly a way to do this kind of thing <a href="https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019PVzSAM&l=en-US">using a control refnum connected to a property node</a>, but I have not tried it yet.</p>
<p>In addition, I’ve struggled to make sense of the right way to reference the error message text field. Elsewhere in the code I can set the text of text fields by using the “Value (Signaling)” property node. In fact, elsewhere in the code I can set the text of <strong>this</strong> text field that way. But in some of my code, it is not working. The debugger shows me that the string is coming in as expected, and no errors are generated by invoking this property node, but the text field remains blank. Using a so-called “Local Variable” created from the text field, though, and connecting my string to <strong>that</strong>, seems to work. So there are still some things I don’t understand about how to use property nodes and local variables.</p>
<h3 id="home-again">Home Again</h3>
<p>For dinner last night we had pot pie from Costco, and Benjamin screamed through most of the meal because he had the wrong kind of plate. I think the Celexa is starting to help me tolerate this kind of thing better. It feels like I have a little more “insulation” between my nerves and the noise and chaos of children behaving badly. Over dinner Grace and I struggled to have a conversation with Sam over constant interruptions and side conversations, which we kept trying to squash. We were trying to get Sam to tell us how his speech therapy has been going, and what he is doing in the sessions. (I believe Grace is actually in an adjacent room where she can watch the sessions, so she knows, from her perspective, what he did, but we wanted to hear it from his perspective). It sounds like he is, essentially, having guided conversations with the speech therapist, and getting coaching during them. And it does seem like these sessions are helping him, which is great.</p>
<h3 id="back-to-rivendell">Back to Rivendell</h3>
<p>For our bedtime story last night I read a long section of “The Council of Elrond” chapter in <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. In this section, Gandalf recounted meeting Radagast and then Saruman, and his imprisonment on the pinnacle of Orthanc. There are notable differences between the book and the movie here. In the movie, Radagast is entirely removed. In the book, Gandalf asks Radagast to mobilize an army of spies:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>’“We shall need your help, and the help of all things that will give it. Send out messages to all the beasts and birds that are your friends. Tell them to bring news of anything that bears on this matter to Saruman and Gandalf. Let messages be sent to Orthanc.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>‘“I will do that,” he said, and rode off as if the Nine were after him.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is no violent battle of wizards described; there’s no indication that Saruman “levitated” him up to the top of Orthanc by magic. Gandalf says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘They took me and they set me alone on the pinnacle of Orthanc, in the place where Saruman was accustomed to watch the stars. There is no descent save by a narrow stair of many thousand steps, and the valley below seems far away.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s not entirely clear why Gandalf can’t leave; is he locked there by magic? Are there guards? Or is he just not good at descending stairs?</p>
<p>Without Radagast, the filmmakers needed another way for Gandalf to pass information on through the whisper network and eventually to Gwaihir the Windlord, who eventually rescues Gandalf from Orthanc, so they show Gandalf using a moth as a messenger. But in the book, Gandalf tells the Council that Radagast did indeed carry out his assigment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘…he rode away towards Mirkwood where he had many friends of old. And the Eagles of the Mountains went far and wide, and they saw many things: the gathering of wolves and the mustering of Orcs; and the Nine Riders going hither and thither in the lands; and they heard news of the escape of Gollum. And they sent a messenger to bring these tidings to me.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The film makes Gandalf’s actual rescue extra-dramatic, as he appears to step right off the top of the tower of Orthanc to escape Saruman. There’s no real justification in the book for this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘So it was that when summer waned, there came a night of moon, and Gwaihir the Windlord, swiftest of the Great Eagles, came unlooked-for to Orthanc; and he found me standing on the pinnacle. Then I spoke to him and he bore me away, before Saruman was aware. I was far from Isengard, ere the wolves and orcs issued from the gate to pursue me.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the simplification and extra drama in these scenes in the film don’t really bother me; they are clearly designed to turn some of the talky, somewhat abstract scenes such as the conversastion between Gandalf and Saruman into something that portrays their conflict <strong>visually</strong>. The movie still holds up very well, and I still look forward to watching it every year.</p>
<h3 id="about-last-night">About Last Night</h3>
<p>Again, the kids were noisy and somewhat disruptive during the story, but I felt as if I was a bit insulated from it. Grace and I spent some time talking about what behavior we can tolerate, and what we can’t.</p>
<p>After the story was done, Grace and I noticed that the dishwasher was not running, so we rousted Veronica and Joshua to finish a little of the kitchen cleanup we thought they had already done; I had already told them several times to start the dishwasher and been reassured that they had. They had also left some of the leftover pot pie sitting on the counter. So we were not very pleased at the way they finished up chores.</p>
<p>Baby Elanor woke me up about 3:45. She was in her room with Veronica, and Veronica did not seem to be responding to her. Grace went to intervene, and discovered that while we had told Veronica to get her a bottle of water and have it on hand in case she woke up during the night, Veronica had not done this. Veronica got her water and she quieted down, but Elanor started fussing again a few minutes later, so I went to check on her. Veronica has been complaining that her room is cold. I discovered that her windows were not completely shut and locked, so after stumbling around her room stepping on LEGO DUPLO blocks, which fortunately aren’t as painful as regular LEGO blocks, and latching her windows shut, we were all able to get a little more sleep.</p>
<p>The side effects of Celexa continue to be a bother, but I’m going to try to stick it out longer, as it does seem to be helping my ability to handle chaos. It’s too early to tell for sure, but it also appears that it <strong>may</strong> be helping my blood pressure. Both numbers were in the green-light ranges for all four of the readings I took this morning. I will continue to measure it morning and night and if it looks like this, consistently, I might be able to avoid having to take a prescription blood-pressure medication altogether. That would be great!</p>
<p>I got paid, and sent most of my paycheck back out again, in the form of transfers to the Team One account and a credit-card payment. Things will continue to be very tight through the end of the year and I will have to be extremely vigilant. I will try to stop complaining about it here in the blog. I wish it wasn’t like this and I could look forward to worrying about money less and enjoying the holidays more.</p>
<p>For breakfast I had a <a href="https://www.lacolombe.com/products/mocha-draft-latte?variant=27639157321">canned coffee drink</a> from GFS that past me had thoughtfully left in the office refrigerator, for a day like today when future me didn’t have the time or money to stop for breakfast. I ate the last two packets of instant grits. I’ll have to figure out something for lunch. I’ve got summer sausage and crackers, which is not really the healthiest lunch option, and those shelf-stable <a href="https://atlanticnaturalfoods.com/dima-portfolio/loma-linda-chipotle-bowl/">Loma Linda Chipotle Bowls</a> from Costco, which I previously described as smelling “like burning dog food.” Maybe I should just pitch those in the trash, so I’m not tempted to eat them. I hate wasting food, but it seems like those were wasted when they were made. Tonight I’ll head to Costco and try to spend less than usual. I think we have enough wine to get us through Thanksgiving.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I threw out the Chipotle Bowls. I’ll have to find some better stuff to keep at work.</p>
<p>In case you’re following the thrilling story of the LabVIEW code, I did get the approach I mentioned above working. You can make a reference from a control, and then you can pass the reference as an input to a sub-VI. The trickiness here is all around object types. There’s a sophisticated type system in LabVIEW. But creating objects of these different types is very idiosyncratic, with actions and settings buried in hierarchical menus. It’s easy to make a mistakes and accidentally create an object that doesn’t work, and won’t wire up. The visual representation doesn’t do much to help me diagnose problems with types. They aren’t shown in any clear way in the object properties. I’ve really never seen anything resembling a complete taxonomy of LabVIEW types. Too much of this seems like overly-complex, poorly-documented voodoo. But it is working. I’ve taken to putting links to the National Instruments help pages right in the comments in the code, in the hopes that this will make it easier for me to figure out what I was doing, if I have to update this code.</p>
<p>After work I went to Costco as usual and brought home a load of groceries. For dinner we had salmon, rice, and macaroni and cheese. There was an apple pie for dessert. There was kitchen cleanup. Then it was pretty much bedtime. We didn’t have the greatest night’s sleep. Elanor woke us up, when she woke up and complained for a while. Our houseguest and her boyfriend were in and out of the house early. I’ve been taking Celexa before bed, but I’m honestly not sure if it makes my sleep better or worse.</p>
<p>Today it’s been overcast, and I’ve been sleepy. Grace got up and out early, to take Joshua and Veronica to church at 8, so they could volunteer to help set up the craft fair. Grace also ran down to Mother Loaf in Milan and got some bread and a potato focaccia. That was delicious! I was feeling sluggish, but by the time she got back I was up and bathed and dressed and cooking bacon, and had made a pot of tea.</p>
<p>I had agreed to take them back this afternoon for another round. Pippin wanted to go, too, so I drove them over to the church at 2 (well, we were only a few minutes late). There was some misunderstanding, though. They had signed up to help with the bake sale and the raffle. Minors aren’t allowed to work on the raffle (they were raffling off alchohol, and handling money). They also didn’t want them handling money for the bake sale. So there wasn’t really anything for them to do as volunteers, and I brought them back home. There will be more for them to do tomorrow after Mass.</p>
<p>Grace told some people that I play guitar and now I’m getting recruited to play guitar at upcoming events. Having not practiced regularly in years I don’t feel at all ready. And I’m going to have very little time off over the holidays, so this may not be something I can practically get involved in until next year at the earliest.</p>
<p>When I got back home with the kids, Grace had finished a batch of muffins made out of the remnants of the celery and apples she puts through the juicer. They taste pretty good, although she is still tweaking the recipe, trying to perfect it. They’re high in fiber, that’s for sure. And they taste a bit like celery. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. The kids ate them happily, which I found a little bit surprising.</p>
<p>It’s about 3:45 and I’m still having yawning fits. I just don’t have any energy today. I don’t even really feel up to reading. I will go ahead and post this since I don’t think I will have a sudden rush of inspiration to write more. Maybe I will attempt a nap before dinner. We still have last Sunday’s episode of <em>Doctor Who</em> that we haven’t watched yet. We could watch that tonight if everyone is up for it.</p>
<p>I think we’re cooking beef ribs in the Instant Pot for dinner tonight.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Cluttering: Current Views on its Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment</em> by Yvonne van Zaalen and Isabella K. Reichel</li>
<li><em>The Tombs of Atuan</em> by Ursula K. Le Guin (bedtime story reading)</li>
<li>“Rise of the Spinjitzu Master” (<em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> Season 2, Episode 13)</li>
<li>“The Tsuranga Conundrum” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 episode)</li>
<li>“The Island” by Peter Watts (2009 Novelette)</li>
<li><em>The Complete Cosmicomics</em> by Italo Calvino</li>
<li><em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> (<em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> Season 2, Episode 12)</li>
<li><em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em> (2016 film)</li>
<li><em>A Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes</li>
<li><em>Akhnaten</em> by Philip Glass (Discs 14 and 15 of <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em>)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe – NOTE: look up how I refer to other books in this series bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (Joshua finished reading it)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, November 17th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-33418191507428788802018-11-10T20:04:00.001-05:002018-11-10T20:04:08.724-05:00The Week Ending Saturday, November 10th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>This is week 45 and so I only have eight weeks to complete, and I will have finished out a whole year of daily blog posts, posted weekly. I’ve accumulated over 370,000 words so far, and so I think it’s quite likely I’ll top 400,000 words. Meanwhile as time allows I’ve been attempting to edit all the weekly posts. I’ve made some progress, but I haven’t even finished January yet, so there’s an awful lot of editing left.</p>
<p>Yesterday I got some work done on the editing I mentioned, and updating old blog posts from 2003 about the Iraq War. I managed to get a brief nap in the late afternoon, although the kids kept coming in to check on me, which of course kept waking me up. The day was pretty chaotic. The kids wanted to watch videos, but they weren’t getting chores done. We finally settled on having lamb steaks and salad for dinner, and then they finished their brownie cake project, the one that Veronica and Joshua had originally planned for their shared birthday, the 29th. They had wanted to make some kind of a thin cake out of brownie mix, and roll it up with whipped cream to form a kind of cake roll. That didn’t seem like it was going to work. So yesterday they did something simpler, which was to bake the brownie mix with chocolate chips in it, cut it up, and assemble it into a two-layer cake with whipped cream in the middle and on top. So we ate that for dessert and sang Happy Birthday to them, finally.</p>
<p>After dinner and cleanup it was getting pretty late. We had hoped to watch <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Beasts_and_Where_to_Find_Them_(film)"><em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em></a>, which I got them on DVD a couple of weeks ago. I still haven’t had a chance to see it. But there was not enough time for a full-length movie. Instead I told them we could watch some shorter things on my laptop. So I brought my laptop upstairs to the bedroom and we watched the penultimate episode of season 3 of <em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em>, called “Return of the Overlord.” Then, we watched another episode of <em>Star Wars: The Clone Wars</em> season 1, “Destroy Malevolence.” The Ninjago episode has a lot of silly references: to the Harry Potter books, to <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, etc., while the Clone Wars episode has some scenes with C-3PO that are very much like the droid factory scene in <em>Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones</em>. And then it was about 1:00, and time for bed.</p>
<p>I took my blood pressure again before bed and it was pretty much where it has been all week. I had no caffeine to speak of yesterday, except for a little bit of chocolate, which suggests that caffeine isn’t playing a big role in keeping my blood pressure high. So I decided to take 400mg of labetalol at bedtime instead of 200. When I measured it this morning, that had definitely done the trick. All 4 measurements had my numbers both below 120 over 80, in the 110s and 70s. I definitely felt the side effects this morning, though — lot of random aches and pains and stiffness, and a feeling of tiredness. About five hours later, I just took it again, and it remains somewhat lowered — into the 120s and 80s. That’s an improvement, although the diastolic was still creeping into the yellow zone for two of the four readings.</p>
<p>This might suggest I can’t take labetalol only at night the way Grace does. For now, though, I don’t really want to experiment with taking it during the day. So I will continue taking 400mg at bedtime and continue monitoring myself for a few more days until I can consult with a doctor. There might be something that I could use that has fewer side effects.</p>
<p>The time changed. We set the clocks back an hour, which ought to make it easier for me to get to work by 9:30 tomorrow instead of 10:30 or later. I really hope so. My schedule has been terribly screwed up for several months and my efforts to shift it back have in general been completely unsuccessful.</p>
<p>The kids wanted green tea, so we had a couple of pots of green tea. I made bacon and paleo pancakes (made from the Birch Benders mix) with chocolate chips added, since we are out of blueberries. Then I spent quite some time cleaning up dishes, scrubbing the stove and counters, hand-washing baking pans and frying pans, cleaning out the compost container, etc. As soon as I was all done, Grace and the kids made celery, apple, and lime juice. So we all had juice. The kids are eating leftover cake. Grace and I are trying to stay off the carbs.</p>
<p>This afternoon I’m listening to <em>Akhnaten</em>, Philip Glass’s opera. <em>Akhnaten</em> comprises discs 14-15 of <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em>. It’s a relatively short opera, or at least the recording is relatively short, compared to 3 discs for <em>Satyagraha</em> and 4 discs for <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>. It’s not really understandable without the translated libretto, as it is in “Egyptian, Akkadian, Hebrew, and language of the audience.” But the music is gorgeous, and it has a powerful spiritual feel to it, even if the details of the story are not very clear. (It has something to do with the origin of monotheism, I think). One wild aspect of the music is that I realized only after reading the notes that I was listening to a male singer’s voice. Paul Esswood, who sings the title role, is a countertenor, singing in a vocal range that roughly matches a female contralto or mezzo-soprano range. His performance is pretty amazing.</p>
<p>We didn’t manage to make it to the 11:00 Mass, although I was up and around. I’m not really sure what we’ll get done today. I’m going to wind up the blog text for today and shift over to looking at my spreadsheets and bills, paying some medical co-pay bills and other bills as our balance allows. It may not.</p>
<p>Our housemate, her boyfriend, and her 3 children have all been out for most of the weekend, although they seem to have come back. We hardly speak, and still have no clear notion of when they might be able to move. We’ve also heard nothing at all from our realtor about our proposed lease agreement. Grace will go to Saginaw on Tuesday. She was not able to schedule the duct cleaning, but we want to get up there and check on the house and new furnace anyway.</p>
<h3 id="monday">Monday</h3>
<h4 id="about-last-night">About Last Night</h4>
<p>Grace was out a lot longer than we expected. She was running errands trying to track down some medical supplies. Nothing that should have been that rare or difficult to obtain! But she wound up having to go several places, and still couldn’t get what she needs, so she’ll have to go back today. She was out so long, and used up so much of her limited store of energy, that when she got back, we had to give up on plans to go to Mass, and instead focus on simply trying to feed everyone and get everyone to bed at a reasonable time.</p>
<p>While Grace was out, I had set up my laptop on the dining table and gotten out all the various bills and related paperwork from my bag, including checkbooks, stamps, and envelopes. I fought my way through the process of updating several spreadsheets and paying several bills online, including an online water bill for the old house in Saginaw, an online medical bill (which, confusingly, seems to have been adjusted, so I owed less than the paper bill), a medical bill by check, and a $500 payment to Early Bird Lawn Services — they are the folks who did the plaster repair and painting in our family room. This check finishes paying off the $3,500 we owe them for that work. We still owe them another $120 or so for actual lawn services. We were clear with them when they did the work that we were planning to pay them in part with money we got back from our insurance company, and they have been great about allowing us to pay them over several months.</p>
<p>I say that I “fought my way through the process” because it seems like as soon as Grace leaves, the kids all begin a game of “let’s torment Dad.” They immediately start getting into the refrigerator, and into the kitchen cabinets, and turning on the stove, and playing at the sinks, and dropping glasses and plates, and getting into screaming fights with each other, and slamming the cabinets in the boys’ bedroom, and locking each other out of various rooms, and pounding on the doors. I do my best to tune out any noises that don’t require actual intervention on my part, but… this is so hard. I am glad that I had been taking blood pressure medication.</p>
<p>After Grace got home, she and I managed to have a brief sit-down and I walked her through the current situation with our credit cards, overdraft protection line of credit, and our two checking accounts. There’s a cash-flow crunch coming up over the next couple of weeks. After spending $3,000 on the new furnace I have a new debt, the overdraft protection line of credit, and the first required minimum payment is coming up next week, in the same week that I have to pay one credit card bill and the unknown cost of our gas boiler service, scheduled for Wednesday. If we make it through this bottleneck without any big unexpected expenses, like emergency car repair, we should be OK again, for a while. Well, if we define “OK” as “limping along spending far too much every month and with no emergency savings to speak of.” Last spring I adjusted my state withholding to improve the situation with my 2018 state taxes, but I won’t know how well that worked until we actually file them.</p>
<p>After I ran through the money situation, we tried to figure out how to manage some things coming up on our respective schedules. Tomorrow is election day. Next week I have two doctor appointments, the first one at 8:00 on Monday morning, the second one an ophthalmology follow-up at 1:45 p.m. Thursday afternoon. Both are going to require me to put in extra hours at work to make up the time, so I can continue to avoid using up any of my seven vacation days and one discretionary day. Did I mention again that we are having a new baby in mid-December? Or, maybe earlier.</p>
<p>Grace has been taking some classes to help her work on some specific skills with Benjamin. These, unfortunately, partially collide with Joshua and Pippin’s choir practices. So we are trying to work out how I can get from my office to downtown Saline by 5:45 to pick up the boys on certain days. To do that I have to drive out of the parking lot by 5:15, when I normally wouldn’t leave work until at least 7:15. So that’s more schedule-juggling to work out. And it turns out that the next class is next Thursday, and will be shortly after I’ve had my eyes dilated. I think I can drive back to my office after that, with my sunglasses on, since it is just a quarter mile or so, but I would not trust myself to jump into rush-hour traffic with my pupils all screwed up. So Grace will have to work something out while I stay at work at least until my eyes have returned to normal, which might mean I’ll be driving home quite late. I hope I can at least focus on a computer screen. Maybe with my sunglasses on.</p>
<p>Really I’m stressing about all this because I want to help Grace as much as I can, but I also don’t want to rack up a whole string of “I have to leave early today” and “I’ll be in late today” and “I’ll be out for part of the afternoon” messages at work. I just try to avoid ever being the “seems like he’s gone a lot” guy. Or, to put it another way, I know it will make me <strong>very anxious</strong> to have to be “seems like he’s gone a lot” guy at work and so I want to avoid it for that reason, whether it really bothers my boss or not; it bothers <strong>me</strong>.</p>
<p>While we were finishing up our meeting and deflecting random interruptions, Benjamin did another one of his bizarre Benjamin things — apparently he suddenly decided that he wanted to drink some of the contents of the half-empty bottle of white wine that was on the counter. I don’t think he actually drank more than a very small amount, but he spilled wine everywhere. Grace made him clean it up. It wasn’t really within a child’s reach" in the normal sense of the word. It was at the back of the counter, along the wall. But he was apparently very committed to using a stool and climbing onto the counter to get it. This is just not behavior we’ve seen from any of his five older siblings. Once again, Benjamin is… special. I guess we can’t keep any alcohol on the counter, or kitchen cupboards, and probably not in the refrigerator either, which is going to be kind of a pain in the ass when we have holiday meals and open bottles of wine. I guess I have to keep everything locked up in the basement and hope he doesn’t shoulder-surf the key code.</p>
<p>We made the Jiffy Mix corn muffin mix in the cast-iron pan as usual, and an Instant Pot of black-eyed peas. Because she needed to sit down, Grace handed out assignments: I got the cornbread. Joshua wanted to help, so I had him break and mix up the eggs. Veronica got the black-eyed peas. Grace gave her pretty clear instructions, but she didn’t quite follow them. She said something like “add enough water to cover the ham hock — it should be about a quart.” Veronica did add enough water to cover the ham hock, but she stuck the ham hock in the Instant Pot so it was standing upright, not lying on its side. She added about three quarts of water, apparently not understanding that the “it should be about a quart” part represented a <strong>limit</strong> — Grace was really telling her not to use more than a quart of water.</p>
<p>So, we had a thin black-eyed pea soup for dinner.</p>
<p>Then, I got into an angry state because when the table was set and everything was ready to go onto the table, I went over to the CD player and put on <em>Akhnaten</em>, with the volume set low, to listen to during dinner. As soon as I pressed play and the music started, Veronica began practicing some Christmas music on our piano. I was angry that she was playing right over the music. She responded that she had started playing before I started the music. Joshua then jumped in to also insist that she had started playing before I started the music.</p>
<p>I had to take a time out downstairs because I was too angry to be civil at the dinner table with two of my children.</p>
<p>Grace came down after a few minutes to see if I could come up and eat. She pointed out that the issue wasn’t really whether I had started the music first or Veronica had started playing — the issue was that there was food waiting to go to to table, the kids had been told that there was food waiting to take to the table, and there was no conceivable world in which Veronica should have concluded that it was time to practice piano.</p>
<p>I think I was getting touchy for several reasons — the obvious reasons, “my children screwed up a nice dinner and now they are being obnoxious, lying assholes,” but some not-so-obvious reasons as well. It had been an extra-long day, due to the time change; I had not eaten anything in about seven hours; we had blown so much time that it wasn’t going to be possible for us to finish a podcast; and, of course, my many money-related and time-related worries. Then, another possible reason: the side effects of the blood pressure medication.</p>
<p>There’s also the fucking election. I have tried to write up some notes on the candidates and ballot proposals. I tried to print out the ballot from the State of Michigan’s web site. It comes out in pretty much illegibly tiny type. Michigan Radio (the NPR station) keeps talking about their voter guide. But if you go to their web site, the “voter guide” is just a list of interviews and news stories about the candidates that you can listen to. So if I had a whole quiet day, I could listen to these twenty or thirty audio files and make notes and that would give me some information about the various candidates and ballot initiatives, but it’s nothing I could download or print out and quickly review, or take with me. The League of Women Voters has a ballot guide, but it’s not printable, and it just shows names and parties, nothing more than the information that is on the ballot itself. It’s also incomplete — it doesn’t even show two of the three ballot initiatives that are on this year’s ballot!</p>
<p>There’s no “local paper” with an election guide. There used to be a printed Ann Arbor News, but it hasn’t existed in a long time, and there’s not a paper specific to Pittsfield Township. So it’s the night before the election and I know next to nothing about most of the candidates. At least I have managed to read up a bit on the ballot initiatives.</p>
<p>I’ve been hoping I could sit down again and have an uninterrupted chat with Grace, because she knows more about them than I do. Even thirty minutes with her and the ballot and a notepad would be a huge help to me. But I don’t think we’re going to have a chance. I will try to get up and out early, so I can get to the polling site before work. Without having really finished my “homework,” tomorrow morning I will probably be going into the voting booth quoting Bill O’Reilly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUFY8Zw0Bag">“Fuckin’ thing! We’ll do it live!”</a>. I’m just hoping that there isn’t an hours-long line.</p>
<p>We really could use early voting, or at least no-excuse absentee voting. I totally would have used that this year.</p>
<p>I comfort myself with the words of <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/scum-vs-scum/">Chris Hedges</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, there’s that. I’m voting because I believe one should vote. I’m not very optimistic about the “blue wave” — first of all, I’m far from certain it will happen. And second of all, even if it does happen, I don’t expect much change.</p>
<p>We ate dinner.</p>
<p>And Grace chewed out Veronica again, because when she served herself, she scooped out the beans and meat and left most of the broth. She got a lecture on how we all have to eat our cooking mistakes — if she makes watery beans, we all have to eat watery beans. She can’t pick out the beans and leave the rest even more watery for the rest of us.</p>
<p>We tried to get to bed early. I read Benjamin a few more of the comics from <em>Super Scratch Programming Adventure!</em> and then I read Sam and Joshua a story from <em>The Complete Cosmicomics</em> by Italo Calvino (it’s been on the bottom of the book pile, unfinished, for too long). I chose the story called “The Stone Sky,” in which <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qfwfq">Qfwfq</a> lives inside the Earth, and regards living on the <strong>surface</strong> of the Earth, effectively inhabiting a two-dimensional space instead of a three-dimensional sphere, as far inferior. It’s an interesting story, especially in light of the fact that we now know of <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/inner-earth-teeming-exotic-forms-life-180958243/">lots of organisms</a>. I don’t think his notion of the Earth as containing a multi-layer liquid core is fully up-to-date with current scientific speculation, but that isn’t really important. And I also found that apparently Jane Grant published an article in <em>Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research</em> that refers to Calvino’s story, so I have requested the full text of the article via <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272625762_'The_Stone_Sky'_Dwelling_and_habitation_in_other_worlds">ResearchGate</a>. We’ll see if I get it!</p>
<p>After the story we were on track to go right to bed, and be in bed with the lights off before midnight. But a certain little girl had other ideas. And a certain cadre of Potts boys aided and abetted her. While I was reading the story, Grace allowed Elanor to play with her phone. This kept her quiet. But somehow, she ran off with it. When the story was done, Grace unsurprisingly wanted to find her phone. It was nowhere to be found. She got up out of bed and went from room to room looking in the diaper pail, the trash bin, the toilet, under the bed, under bookshelves — basically, looking in all the places that we thought a little girl might be likely to stick a phone. I poked around a little bit. Neither of us could find it. So I was mad at Grace because the last time she lost a phone like this, I had to buy her a new one. So I went to bed angry, which is never a good idea, and set my alarm for 8:00.</p>
<h3 id="time-changed">Time, Changed</h3>
<p>I thought that setting the clocks back an hour would mean that if I just got up and went to work at the same time I usually do, where by “same time” I mean “time of day” rather than the time the clock says, I’d be get to work an hour earlier than I’ve been getting to work — which would be great. But this didn’t really happen. I got up when my alarm went off, got a bath, and didn’t <strong>feel</strong> like I was wasting any more time than usual, went for a breakfast BLT sandwich at what <strong>seemed</strong> like the usual time — and proceeded to get to work at the same clock time as I was last week, which means I got there roughly an hour later, relative to sunrise and sunset.</p>
<p>That’s… disappointing. And frustrating. And all the rest.</p>
<p>I also managed to pick a fight with Grace before I left, which wasn’t really my intention, but somehow that became important to me. I got enough sleep, in theory. I did not feel good this morning. I think the blood pressure medication is doing its job but making me feel physically beat up, which is having a negative effect on my mood. I was tired and achey today. I had coffee at breakfast, and then I left the office at lunchtime, to go get a grilled cheddar and Branston pickle sandwich and another coffee. I usually don’t need a second caffeine hit to stay awake, but today I did.</p>
<p>I have apologized by text message to Grace and I need to apologize again in person and try to make up with her.</p>
<h3 id="meet-the-parents">Meet the Parents</h3>
<p>It looks like this weekend I succeeded in pissing off my father and stepmother, or at least dismaying them. I guess I had not mentioned to them that we were having another baby, and they happened to see it in a note I wrote about a podcast posting.</p>
<p>Last time I deliberately kept them out of the loop. I was tired of getting lectures from my father on how I was being irresponsible by having children. He had a tendency to call me up to say things like “you should look into whether the state might have a free program for vasectomies for people like you who have been repeatedly unemployed.” So I didn’t let him know about Elanor. We actually created a closed group on Facebook where Grace could talk with her friends about her pregnancy and share pictures and news.</p>
<p>This time, the secrecy wasn’t wasn’t really all that deliberate. At least, I didn’t really mean to keep it a secret indefinitely, although because I mostly have been talking with my Dad about problems like the house, I haven’t really wanted to talk with him about having another baby, too; I didn’t want that to be a “problem magnifier,” if that makes sense.</p>
<p>Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I know all the reasons I’ve kept it quiet on Facebook and not told my father and stepmother. One of them is that this is a late, high-risk pregnancy. I didn’t want to wind up grieving along with everyone we know, if things went badly. I also haven’t shared it on Facebook because I haven’t <strong>been using</strong> Facebook much. But I think mostly it had just become a habit not to talk to my parents about pregnancy. I have mentioned it in this blog, although I’m not sure at exactly what point I first mentioned it. Grace and I have mentioned it in the podcast, although again I’m not sure I know exactly when we first mentioned it.</p>
<p>I guess sometimes I just assume that if anyone wants to know what is going on with me, they will read my blog, and/or listen to my podcast. I mean, I don’t think anyone can reasonably accuse me of under-sharing, right?</p>
<p>This situation probably sounds odd to people who have closer relationships with their parents. It seems perfectly normal to me to have to limit what I share with my father. And one of the reasons I think Grace and I get along well is that she had a similar relationship with her mother.</p>
<p>So my stepmother’s calling Grace, and leaving messages, and my father’s calling me, and leaving messages, and neither of us really wants to get an earful of — whatever. Disappointment, frustration, even expressions of support. Mostly I think we both feel like we’re just barely scraping along, and don’t have the energy for anything else. Not one thing.</p>
<h3 id="maybe-its-not-so-bad">Maybe It’s Not So Bad?</h3>
<p>I have worked over the spreadsheets again, and it seems like if I transfer out less money from my next paycheck, and am able to hold onto most of that and use it to pay the credit card bill and line of credit payment next week, and the boiler service isn’t too expensive, we might squeeze through the bottleneck I mentioned above without overdrawing our checking account again. I might have to put tomorrow’s Costco run on the credit card, though.</p>
<p>I still want to watch <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em> with the kids. If there is enough money, it would be nice to take the older ones to see the sequel, which opens November 15th. Maybe the weekend after Thanksgiving?</p>
<p>They were doing some kind of work on the heating system in my office today. I think they replaced some blowers or something. When they cranked it up and we had warm air coming out of the air vents, it stank of burning oil. I hope that goes away quickly.</p>
<p>I’m still driving around with the dishwasher in the back of my car.</p>
<p>Veronica and Sam keep leaving my bike and her bike outside. They are more-or-less under our overhanging roof, but that isn’t enough to keep them from getting wet when it rains.</p>
<p>When I got home tonight, as I turned into our driveway I noticed that my kids had brought the recycling and trash bins down to Crane Road where they are supposed to be, for tomorrow morning’s trash pickup. I also found a wet plastic grocery bag with a few beer cans in it, in the middle of the driveway.</p>
<p>Grace tells me that today she asked both our houseguest and her boyfriend to take care of some of the cigarette packs and beer cans that she’s found in the driveway and in the woods along the driveway. We’ve certainly mentioned this to them before many times, starting shortly after they arrived. I’m not sure just how that bag of cans got there, but I suspect it got there the same way the cans in the woods and the liquor bottles down by Crane Road got there — I think he just throws cans and bottles out of his car, either as he’s leaving for work, or coming back from work. I can’t prove that, but they didn’t get there by themselves. The kids tell me the bag wasn’t there when they took the trash bins down to Crane Road, and after they left, but must have appeared when they returned.</p>
<p>I had the kids walk the bag down to the trash. If I find beer cans left around the house I normally rinse them out and return them with our returnables. But I wasn’t feeling up to angrily sorting through a wet bag of beer cans, with or without beer left in them, with or without cigarette butts in them as well.</p>
<p>I’d like for there to be some meaning to it <strong>other</strong> than him just giving us a passive-aggressive “fuck you,” for asking him to recycle and pick up his trash. But I’m not sure there is one.</p>
<h3 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h3>
<p>We had a very late dinner last night. It was after 11. Grace tried to follow the instructions in the Instant Pot for cooking a whole thawed chicken. It didn’t go well. I don’t think that thing puts out nearly enough heat. Maybe the instructions are calibrated for much smaller chickens? Anyway, she had to roast it in the oven for so long, she may as well not have used the Instant Pot at all. And after taking it out once and finding that it was really not done, she stuck it back in and let it cook until it was <strong>definitely</strong> done. Which made it kind of over-done.</p>
<p>We ate that with salad and some leftover sliced sweet potatoes. It was so late that our baby girl Elanor fell asleep while still sitting in her high chair, with her little head resting on her neatly-folded forearms. It was almost too cute to bear.</p>
<p>We had no story last night. I measured my blood pressure before bed, and the labetalol seemed to still be keeping my blood pressure at a reasonable level. So I’m continuing with that strategy of 400mg at bedtime until I can consult with a doctor. Grace went through three other medications and for her, the side effects of the other ones were all worse. But she and I might respond to them differently. I’m willing to try something different, as long as it does the job and reduces my risk of further eye damage, and other damage.</p>
<p>Grace is traveling to Saginaw today. We set the alarm for 7:00 a.m. I got in the shower and out by 7:25 and while Grace bathed, made coffee. We didn’t have any ground coffee left in the house, but we did have some instant coffee. So I made coffee with chocolate chips and coconut milk. The bad news is I think the instant coffee gave me heartburn. It’s been in there a while. I also made a small batch of paleo pancakes so that I wouldn’t need to get breakfast out this morning. I ate half of them and left the other half for Grace, kissed her goodbye, and went to vote.</p>
<p>On my way out the door I noticed that our housemate and her boyfriend had left a big bag of trash sitting where the trash bins usually are. (We roll the trash bins down to Crane Road every Monday night, as trash is picked up early Tuesday mornings. It’s been that way every week since she moved in, in March, and we’ve told her about it many times. I did not want to leave a torn bag of trash sitting in our driveway, where it might be ripped open by animals. So I gritted my teeth, and put the dirty, foul-smelling trash bag in the back of my car, and drove it down to the end of the road to put it in the bin. Fortunately the trash had not been picked up yet. But it gives me the opportunity to get pissed off all over again, as their trash is full of recyclable containers and returnable cans; I’ve talked myself blue in the face about that particular issue.</p>
<h3 id="voting">Voting</h3>
<p>My polling place on Textile Road is very close to my house. Parking was a chaotic mess. There was a half-empty parking lot conveniently located on one side of the building, but folks insisted on parking on the grass, in the driveway, in fire lanes, on the edge of the road — places that are <strong>definitely</strong> not safe for parking. I’m always dismayed by the incontrovertible evidence that people will take the slightest excuse to behave like privileged, anti-social assholes. Somebody’s going to get hit by a car in the parking lot. There really needed to be an officer on-site directing traffic.</p>
<p>I was able to get in and vote and get out in only about fifteen or twenty minutes. I posted some notes on Twitter; here they are, lightly edited:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My precinct in Pittsfield Twp. was busy but lines weren’t long. I was in and out in 15 minutes. I’m not too confident about the new scanning machines though. They are supposedly made to suck your ballot right out of the privacy sleeve, but the sleeves don’t fit as described.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I had four ballot initiatives. The best-known one is “A proposed initiated law to authorize and legalize possession, use and cultivation of marijuana products by individuals who are at least 21 years of age and older, and commercial sales of marijuana through state-licensed retailers.” I’m not really happy about the wording which includes a 10-ounce limit and requires “amounts over 2.5 ounces be secured in locked containers,” and I think that may be a point of abusive enforcement. But I am in general in favor of legalization. I think anyone who wants to ought to be able to grow any kind of hemp plant, with or without THC, and create their own derivative products from them, either for recreational use or therapeutic use or cooking, or cosmetics, or even to make paper or rope. Whatever. And so I’m not really keen on the 12-plant limit; I can grow unlimited tomatoes on my property (well, however many I have space for) to make tomato paste. And I don’t think a 12-plant limit makes sense along with a 10-ounce limit. I mean, how much in ounces can 12 plants produce? Also, I can sell the tomatoes I grow on my property, and there are cottage foot laws that would allow me to sell jam or tomato paste. So I’m not keen on being restricted from selling hemp-infused green tomatillo jelly or whatever the hell I want to create. But it’s a start.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s another initiative: “A proposal to authorize automatic and Election Day voter registration, no-reason absentee voting, and straight ticket voting; and add current legal requirements for military and overseas voting and post-election audits to the Michigan Constitution.” I did vote yes for this but again it’s a mixed bag. This one initiative mixes up a whole lot of things that I don’t really think should be all decided once. I’m highly in favor of no-reason absentee voting. I’m highly in favor of election day registration.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Our housemate just asked my wife <strong>yesterday</strong> if she could take her to register to vote because apparently it only just now, um, “registered” in her mind. The problem is that MI registration closed a month ago. So she was disenfranchised because she didn’t do it earlier. But straight-ticket voting is not something I’m in favor of. It encourages partisanship and, in my opinion, reduces the level of voter participation. So if those things were separate, I’d vote for a couple of them and against straight ticket voting. MI has “motor voter” registration which meant when I changed my address with the Secretary of State’s office, to get a sticker for my driver license, I was automatically registered at my new address. But there are plenty of people who don’t drive and/or own cars.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s also a proposal to create a citizen’s commission on redistricting. I think that’s a good idea although the actual proposal is complicated.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>And finally this last one is a perfect example of how these things are often written. The full text reads, and I quote:</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“To renew the millage expiring after December 31, 2019, shall the limitation on the amount of taxes which may be imposed each year for all purposes on real and tangible personal property in Washtenaw County be increased as provided in Section 6, Article IX of the Constitution of the State of Michigan and the Board of Commissioners of the County be authorized to levy a tax not to exceed one quarter of one mill, reduced by the Headlee Amendment to 0.2314 ($0.2314 per $1,000.00 of state equalized valuation) on the taxable value of such property for a period of ten years beginning with the levy made on December 1, 2020 (which will generate estimated revenues of $3.84 million in the first year) for the purpose of acquiring, developing, operating and maintaining park lands and recreational facilities for County citizens?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Can you diagram that sentence? I think removing all the qualifiers you get something like “shall the limitation (on taxes)… be increased… to acquire, develop, operate, and maintain park lands and recreational facilities?” But even the way it is about raising the <strong>limit</strong> on taxes, instead of saying very simply that it will raise property taxes to fund parks, is confusing as hell. Imagine trying to parse that if you read at, say, a fourth-grade level. You are just able to read <em>James at the Giant Peach</em>, although you have to sound out some words.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Remember, “only 7 percent of students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District can read at or above grade level. Nearly half of all adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate meaning they cannot read their child a bedtime story even if they had a book and wanted to read to them.” (Source: <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2018/03/07/reading-detroit-schools-beyond-basics/32717301/">this article from the Detroit News</a>.) Imagine being one of those functionally illiterate people and trying to parse that ballot initiative. You’d give up.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Anyway, that’s my voting story for today. As is often the case in midterm elections, to me the initiatives and local elections for things like County Commissioner and Park Commissioner are much more interesting than the Congressional. And one person like me can have a much more profound effect on one of these small elections for positions like judges and school board members.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>One last comment. It used to be that you could get voter guides in your local (printed) paper. Trying to find a voter guide in Washtenaw County is hard. You can download your ballot from the State site, but it is confusing as it removes the boxes that group candidates, and it is a PDF in something like 2-point type. Almost illegible. And it has nothing on the candidates but name and party affiliation. Michigan Radio (our network of NPR stations) has been advertising a voter guide on their web site, but if you go their <a href="http://www.michiganradio.org/">web site</a> and find the <a href="http://www.michiganradio.org/term/2018-midterm-election">link</a> that says “2018 Midterm Election – Catch Up on Michigan Radio’s Coverage Here — Read up on the issues and candidates before Nov. 6 — Learn More,” there is not actually much to read, and nothing that is downloadable, or printable. It is mostly just a list of all their recent radio stories about the election, including interviews with some candidates. It would take, by my estimate, about two hours and forty-five minutes to listen to all the radio stories on that page, and you’d have to take notes if you wanted to extract some kind of “crib sheet” that you could take with you to your polling place.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The League of Women Voters <a href="https://www.vote411.org/">provides a thing</a> that will show the races and initiatives on your ballot, but it is not printable or downloadable. It’s an interactive online-only thing that lets you expand one topic at a time. Again, you’d need to take paper notes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.vote.org/">Vote.org</a>, which has been harrassing me with several e-mail messages a day since I accidentally clicked on a link to their site in order to check my registration, has a <a href="https://www.vote.org/ballot-information/">“what’s on your ballot”</a> page. But it’s strange — it basically wants you to check all the boxes as if you were voting. I fear that is very confusing — less-informed voters might think that <strong>this is voting</strong>, and I’m also not comfortable telling a web site how I plan to vote. There’s a feature to send this to your phone, but that assumes your phone is online and knows what to do with a QR code (my LG Smartphone doesn’t seem to do anything with it), or that you can send yourself the link and open it on our phone. The links for “more info” all go to <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page">Ballotopedia</a> anyway. So does Ballotopedia make it easier? Yes, sort of — it will generate something you could print, although when I tried it, I got 13 pages of mostly white space, as it removed all the photos, and again it is really just a list of candidate names, with nothing about their platforms. We really have lost something when there’s no easy way to get your hands on some kind of a <strong>printed</strong> voter guide that contains candidate platforms. Ideally there would be more than one, so you could choose your trusted source.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My final point: the loss of this kind of easily accessible printed information is not accidental. D’s and R’s both seem perfectly comfortable with these factors that discourage people without high educational attainment, flexible schedules, and research skills. So go vote, but recognize that by design what you can affect by voting is very limited, and that our system is telling millions of our fellow citizens, in lots of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that voting isn’t really <strong>for</strong> them. Fight <strong>that</strong>. Kthxbye!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>One more note. According to Ballotopedia, the “grade levels” required to understand the 3 statewide MI proposals are between 21 and 23 years of schooling (16 would be generally represent a Bachelor’s degree, 18 a Bachelor’s + Master’s degree, 23 more like a Ph.D. or post-doc.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One nice thing about getting out to vote is that I got into work much earlier.</p>
<p>Tonight I need to do some rearranging in the utility room in the basement, to ensure that the person coming tomorrow to service our boiler has some room to work and access to the sink. And then I can spend half of the next day worrying about how much work is needed and how much it will cost.</p>
<p>I’m hoping that any news from our old house up in Saginaw is good news. No more disasters, please! No break-ins, no squatters, no plumbing leaks, no more contractors who cashed our checks but didn’t do their jobs!</p>
<h3 id="the-congress"><em>The Congress</em></h3>
<p>I ran across <a href="https://culture.pl/en/article/13-things-lem-predicted-about-the-future-we-live-in">this article</a> about things that Stanislaw Lem predicted in his writing. It’s not a terrific article, but it refers to some stories and movies that I had not heard of, including this one: <em>The Congress</em> (the 2013 film starring Robin Wright). I remember seeing a trailer for this movie, but never saw the movie itself, and pretty much forgot it existed. Apparently it is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)">inspired by</a> Lem’s book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress"><em>The Futurological Congress</em></a>, one of my favorite Lem novels.</p>
<p>I should watch it! And I should re-read the novel! And <strong>that</strong> reminds me that I’d love to be able to buy a full set of DVDs of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijon_Tichy:_Space_Pilot"><em>Ijon Tichy: Space Pilot</em></a>. But unfortunately I believe only the second season has English subtitles available.</p>
<p>Apparently there’s another movie, called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_(2009_film)"><em>1</em></a>, (yes, just the numeral one), inspired by Lem’s <em>One Human Minute</em>.</p>
<h3 id="killing-commendatore"><em>Killing Commendatore</em></h3>
<p>I’m a big fan of Haruki Murakami. His novel <em>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</em> is, to me, a modern classic. So I have been curious about the upcoming release of the English translation of Murakami’s new novel, <em>Killing Commendatore</em>.</p>
<p>It’s out now. There’s a copy of my local independent bookstore, Nicola’s Books. I could have bought it. I didn’t. It’s 674 pages. It has an elaborate die-cut cover. I just felt that maybe it wasn’t the right time to take it home. Maybe I would wait until a paperback release. Or something. In the nineties, I eagerly snapped up every translated Murakami novel as they became available, including some of his lesser works like <em>Dance, Dance, Dance</em>. Those hardcovers are scarce and collectible now, but sadly I did not keep all mine. And I’m not that twenty-something guy anymore. I just don’t think I’m up to reading it soon. Maybe next year. I didn’t really love <em>1Q84</em> or <em>Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgimage</em>. Maybe I just don’t like Murakami’s stylistic choices any more.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I think I still have an unread copy of the 2015 release <em>Wind/Pinball</em>, which contains his first two novels. I should dig out that volume and see if I like early Murakami better than late Murakami.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>I left work about 6:30 and made a trip to Costco. I brought home 3 bags of water softener salt. I will need to restock for the winter, since I dont’ really want to be carrying bags of salt in January. So I’ll pick up 3 bags a week for the next few weeks. We seem to go through about a bag a week. I also picked up a bag of frozen tamales for us to try. They are made without lard, which is not a selling point for us. I also got some sausages, some rolls, some sliced roast beef, a chicken pot pie, and a few other ready-made or nearly ready-made items, to try to make dinner times easier for us over the next few days.</p>
<p>I haven’t even managed to get the dishwasher out of the back of my car, and my friends are also replacing their freezer, and offered me the old one. Yes, we could definitely use it! So I need to figure out how to transport it. Our friend Joy has a tentative plan to visit starting tomorrow, and she has a van, so we might be able to pick it up in her van. My Element can hold a lot of things, but I think it is not long enough for this. The real bottleneck, though, is that we need to do further rearranging in the garage.</p>
<p>Grace was in Saginaw yesterday with the kids, to vote in person and to check on things in the old house. The new furnace is up and running and she was satisfied with the installation job, although someone — and we’re not sure who, honestly — knocked some kind of hole in the ceiling in the upstairs hall. So that’s annoying. But I’m just glad that there is a working furnace in the house.</p>
<p>We ate steak and salad last night and I opened another “experimental” bottle of wine to taste. This one was a 2017 Arcturos Pinot Gris from Black Star Farms. We know Black Star Farms mostly from their delicious late-harvest Riesling, a sweet dessert wine. This Pinot Gris is dry. It’s <strong>almost</strong> really good.</p>
<p>Wineries in the Traverse City region have been stepping up their game in recent years, to the point where some of their wines, like the Rieslings, and some sparkling whites, can pretty much go head-to-head with any wines of those styles. This one can’t, quite. But it is still a very nice wine. It definitely has that quality they call “drinkability.” Steak was not the best thing to taste it with, but it matched well with the salad, which had a tart dressing and crumbled blue cheese on it. Grace and I won’t make it one of the special wines we serve at our Thanksgiving or Christmas meals, but we both agreed it would be a definite step up from an average inexpensive white table wine. So I plan to try other bottlings, as I come across them in the future. I expect Traverse City wines to get better and better over the next few years. And if things go better for us, financially, in 2019, we might be able to get up to that area on a vacation.</p>
<p>I was quite tired last night. Taking the medication only at bedtime, my blood pressure looks great in the morning, but is creeping up a bit by the next bedtime. It’s still better than it was without taking the medication. I’ve been tired during the day, so I’m not keen on trying to take a second dose; I’m afraid it would put me right to sleep. Also, it has strange side effects; I can tell it is kicking in because my scalp starts itching. So I am currently planning to stick with the 400mg once daily until I can consult with a doctor Monday morning. I just have to hold out on this regimen for a few more days. My bottle of CBD oil is almost gone, and I don’t think I will get another one. It seems like before long I ought to be able to make my own.</p>
<p>I tried to read a bedtime story. I had selected the second book in the Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, <em>The Tombs of Atuan</em>. I gave up after only a page or so, because the kids weren’t paying attention. Instead I had Joshua finish reading <em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em>. The ending of the story is kind of dark — George’s grandmother shrinks so much that she disappears. It raises, as we say, “many troubling questions.”</p>
<p>I had my alarm set for 7:00 again and managed to get up and out. I have asked Grace to rearrange things in the utility room because today is the day that the boiler guy is supposed to come and service our boiler. If all goes well we might be able to get the heat working! Over breakfast at the Harvest Moon Café I managed to read a few more pages of <em>Moderan</em>.</p>
<h3 id="boiler">Boiler</h3>
<p>I got word from Grace that the boiler service company didn’t show up. Somehow, they say, they “failed to put us on the schedule.” So she is calling around… but we already had to wait several weeks for this (supposed) appointment. So this is not good news. How much longer will we have to wait? Can we turn the heat on even if the system is leaking or low on water? (I’ve been thinking that would be a bad idea.) Shit.</p>
<h3 id="the-island-by-peter-watts">“The Island” by Peter Watts</h3>
<p>It occurred to me that I had intended to read “The Island,” the only remaining story in the Sunflower cycle that I haven’t yet read.</p>
<p>At least, I thought that I hadn’t read it. As I read it, I remembered reading it before. It’s in my copy of <em>The New Space Opera 2</em>, the one I didn’t want to try to dig out of my piles of book boxes. I must have read it in that volume. It was the first of the Sunflower cycle stories, but it has extra resonance if you’ve read more of them: chronologically, it refers to events that are described in <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>.</p>
<p>It’s a long story, not as long as a novella. You might call it a “novelette.” Judged on the scale of the depth and complexity of its science-fictional ideas, it’s a pretty damned thought-provoking story. And it’s not just a story of ideas. There are some dark and emotionally charged moments between the characters. I’m not going to say more than that; go read it, if you want to see an example of how good a recent science fiction story can be. (2009 is still recent, right?)</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>I left work at about 6:20 and so was home earlier than usual, even after getting bogged down in nearly-stopped traffic on I-94 E. The Costco pot pie was ready, and Grace had also made a smaller pot pie of her own out of leftover steak. Grace’s was better!</p>
<p>Costco seems to be constantly tinkering with the ingredients in their pot pie. Recently it seems that they must have changed the kind of fat they use in the crust, and so the last couple have given the grown-ups painful heartburn. We may have to stop buying them. That would be a big pain because this is a “get out of jail free” card we can play during the work week, a dinner we don’t have to do much work to prepare, and which everyone will eat without complaint. Or, at least, a dinner everyone used to eat without complaint.</p>
<p>Yesterday afternoon Grace managed to find someone else to make a service call for the boiler. Someone is supposed to show up tomorrow as early as 8:00. We still needed to rearrange some things in the utility room in the basement so that a service person would have access to the sink and room to work around the boiler. Grace had not managed to muster the energy to do that, but by the time I was home yesterday I was also quite tired. I also didn’t want to be the one to mess with our friend Joy’s things. So she agreed to do it while we watched some videos. I was considering watching the new <em>Doctor Who</em> episode and then <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em>. That seemed like a lot to fit in to one evening, and I was already tired, but we were ready by 8:00 p.m., and I still hadn’t seen <em>Fantastic Beasts</em>, so was willing to give it a try. But Veronica had missed “Rosa.” I can’t remember why she missed it — maybe she was at a youth group event? Anyway, she wanted to watch “Rosa.” So we watched “Rosa” (actually, I worked on editing more of the first quarter of this journal while the kids watched it). There was leftover popcorn and Halloween candy. Then we watched “The Tsuranga Conundrum.”</p>
<h3 id="the-tsuranga-conundrum">“The Tsuranga Conundrum”</h3>
<p>We all felt that this was a pretty entertaining episode, although a couple of things felt a little too familiar. Having everyone injured and knocked unconscious in the opening scene, then waking up on board a spaceship? That felt an awful lot like the opening moments of “The Ghost Monument.” There are some wasted bits and pieces in this story. The Doctor and her companions were missing implanted medical information chips. Valuable seconds of story time are wasted while the characters discuss how the doctors on the ship need this information so that they can properly treat the Doctor and her companions. I thought they were setting up plot gags in which they were given the <strong>wrong</strong> treatment. But nothing at all seemed to come of it. That just seems sloppy to me.</p>
<p>The little monster, one of the Pting, is pretty hilarious. I thought they were going to blow the thing up, and was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t. The side stories are fun. The use of a pregnant male character, as an opportunity for Ryan to unpack his feelings about his father, works moderately well, although it made me wonder at such an implausible species, requiring the baby’s two umbilical cords be cut simultaneously? (And — having cut umbilical cords — they are way, way tougher to cut through than that.</p>
<p>The subplot involving war hero Eve Cicero, played by Suzanne Packer, is moving, but also a bit troubling. She is traveling with her brother, and her “consort,” an android named Ronan. After she dies, Ronan says that he will be shut down. That seems like the kind of thing that the Doctor would traditionally be opposed to, and fight. And sentient sex slaves? That also seems like a bad thing. I’m also not really pleased the way that another black woman found her highest calling in sacrificing herself for others. Not that this isn’t sometimes called for, but we’ve had Grace O’Brien, and now Eve Cicero. I’m beginning to think that the showrunner has a black woman problem. Or, at least, a living black woman problem. I’m gonna bet that there will be another one. And shall we place a bet that these characters wind up somehow connected and resurrected in the season finale? Maybe they activate wonder-triplet powers and become Voltron or something, I don’t know… but I fear it.</p>
<h3 id="rise-of-the-spinjitzu-master">“Rise of the Spinjitzu Master”</h3>
<p>After those two episodes of <em>Doctor Who</em>, Benjamin really, really wanted to watch a Lego Ninjago episode. It wasn’t really that late yet, so we obliged him, and watched the last episode of season 2, “Rise of the Spinjitzu Master.” This one seemed to channel some bits and pieces from the final battle in <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em>. It also seems like the end of the series, or at least a possible end of the series. It looks like the writers weren’t sure if there would be a third season or not. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ninjago:_Masters_of_Spinjitzu_episodes#Season_3:_Rebooted">Wikipedia</a> says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Both the Lego theme and the TV series had an intended shelf life of three years, so it was expected that the second season would be the last. However, after comments from fans, it was soon revived and has been in production ever since.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ll continue with Season 3… because I love my kids, not because I love <em>Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em>.</p>
<h3 id="waiting-bills-and-other-boring-things">Waiting, Bills, and Other Boring Things</h3>
<p>The boiler service person didn’t show up this morning. Go figure. Meanwhile, it might snow tonight.</p>
<p>In last night’s mail, we got a bill from the company that mows our lawn, for $160. That’s $40 a pop, four visits. The problem is that at least two or three of these visits, Grace has given them a check. They haven’t cashed the checks. I need to look through our account online and figure out what they’ve cashed and not cashed. She’s going to look through her record of the checks she’s written. I think we need to stop paying them at the time of service and just record the dates when they come to mow. It’s endlessly confusing when they don’t cash the checks.</p>
<p>Grace and I just got multimedia text messages from our realtor. I can’t receive them since my phone isn’t on WiFi and I don’t have a data plan. Grace tells me she can’t read the message either. She has asked our realtor to e-mail whatever she was sending. It’s been almost a month since we sent her the lease agreement to look over. The agreement was supposed to begin a week ago. So I’m really wondering what she has to say to us now. I’m not sure we have any patience left for it, whatever it is.</p>
<h3 id="zingermans-roadhouse">Zingerman’s Roadhouse</h3>
<p>I got up and out pretty early this morning and because I haven’t been there in a long time, I stopped at Zingerman’s Roadhouse for breakfast. It seems like the place is falling into disrepair, just a bit. The fabric in the booths is dirty and frayed. The bathroom was in rough shape. That wouldn’t be an issue in just about any other place that calls itself a “roadhouse.” But at this “roadhouse,” my grits and eggs cost $15, my coffee cost $2.75, and the small side of fruit cost $3.00. With tax, that came to $22.00. With tip, it came to $27.00. If I’m going to spend $27.00 for breakfast, it really seems like the place should look spiffy, not neglected. I might have bought the blue plate special, $11.00 including coffee, and gotten out of there for $14.00, but today’s blue plate special was the same as it always is on Thursday, cornmeal mush with syrup and fried eggs. I’ve had it; I didn’t want it.</p>
<p>It’s not a good time of year for fruit, but I still hoped they would have had something better on hand than the fruit I got. There were blueberries that were small and sour, and there was only a tiny slice of orange. Apples are in season, more or less, aren’t they? At least, it seems like I can still get lots of apple varieties, and not a lot of citrus.</p>
<p>It was nice to see Mandy, a waitress there who I’ve been chatting with since I first started having breakfast there, back when I started commuting to my current job, in June of 2015. But I’m not sure I need to go there anymore. And… once again, I find myself wishing that the food at Harvest Moon Café was just a little bit better.</p>
<h3 id="blood-pressure-chronicles">Blood Pressure Chronicles</h3>
<p>My blood pressure has not been reading as low as I’d like it to, when I measure it before bed. I’ve been taking 400mg of labetalol at bedtime. So today I added another 200mg taken before breakfast. I don’t like the side effects; it makes my scalp itch, my urinary tract feels sore and I’m constantly having to go pee and not getting very much out, and I feel tired and beat-up. But this is an experiment to see if I can get my evening blood pressure into the green range on the meter. The results ought to be of use when I talk to a doctor on Monday.</p>
<p>Today I’m listening to <em>Dancepieces</em> by Philip Glass, part of the <em>Complete Sony Recordings</em> boxed set. These pieces are beautiful. “In the Upper Room” is a suite for a ballet. This CD contains five of the nine pieces, two additional pieces that are versions of tracks from <em>Glassworks</em>, and one from <em>Akhnaten</em>. Listening to them is a nice emotional break in the middle of an ugly gray day. We might get the season’s first snowstorm tomorrow.</p>
<p>The heat’s back on! Grace tells me that the service call was $135. But the boiler guy recommends another round of upgrades and repairs which would cost more, $840. I’ll consider those in a week or two. Also, she has arranged for someone to clean our gutters on Monday. And we’re trying to puzzle out the mystery of the lost checks written to the lawn guys. They haven’t cashed one of our checks since the beginning of October. We’ve written them at least four more. I’m guessing they are in the glove box of their truck, or lost. If they are going to lose the checks we hand them, or even just fail to cash them in a timely manner and then bill us for work we’ve already paid them for, we need to stop giving them checks in person and just mail them checks when they bill us.</p>
<h3 id="excessive-technology">Excessive Technology</h3>
<p>Shortly after Grace set up my doctor appointment next Monday, I started receiving all kinds of text messages demanding critical information and confirming my appointment. The problem is that just about everything I try to do with these messages is broken!</p>
<p>First, I don’t have Internet access from my phone, if I’m not on a WiFi network. According to [this Pew study from 2015] which is likely somewhat out of date,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>19% of Americans rely to some degree on a smartphone for accessing online services and information…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…7% of Americans own a smartphone but have <em>neither</em> traditional broadband service at home, <em>nor</em> easily available alternatives for going online other than their cell phone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But I have e-mail. Why am I getting text messages with URLs in them instead of e-mail messages?</p>
<p>Unless I’m at home or at a café or somewhere else where my phone is online via WiFi, these links are useless to me. And even if I am online, I probably don’t want to use my phone to fill out forms. That’s what the links lead me to — forms. And what a broken system it is. I typed the links into the address bar on a plain old computer, and tried to fill out the forms. They are pretty user-unfriendly. For example, some of the information is described as “optional,” but if I don’t want to give them the name of a doctor to contact, to transfer in medical records, I can’t proceed. Even though those fields are supposedly optional. (In my case, I haven’t <strong>had</strong> a doctor I see regularly for… ummm… at least a decade, and she’s no longer practicing, and hasn’t been practicing for years. So I don’t think there are really any records I want to have sent.)</p>
<p>They’re also sending links that are hard to read. For example, I just got a link with an URL-shortened code. The code looks like this: 2JJtIG5. My phone’s text-messaging app uses a sans-serif font. It’s next to impossible to tell if that “I” is an “I” (uppercase eye) or an “l” (a lowercase ell).</p>
<p>Oh, they’re also calling me, with recorded messages. From numbers without caller ID, and leaving me two-minute voice mails in which the same text is repeated. It’s mostly just more demands that I fill out the forms online, which… I was unable to complete because of their crappy user interface.</p>
<p>I’m really not feeling great about this new medical practice. I think it’s good that medical practices are doing things like sending text messages to remind patients of appointments. And it would be nice to get some paperwork out of the way before the appointment. Those ideas aren’t bad. But the execution is awful.</p>
<h3 id="friday">Friday</h3>
<p>It was snowing this morning, and it’s supposed to snow more tonight, although it may turn into rain.</p>
<p>Grace made us a terrific pumpkin soup with beef broth last night. We ate that with some bread rolls and leftover greens.</p>
<p>Grace and the kids did just about all the meal prep and cleanup. I was feeling very tired. The labetalol makes me tired. It’s also doing some nasty things to my gut and urinary tract. I wound up having a strange combination of constipation and repeated urgent trips to the rest room. Five or six times yesterday I felt the need to run to the rest room, but had only small bowel movements each time. I didn’t have what I’d call real diarrhea, but things were a bit loose. And I had a similar problem with urination, but even worse — a constantly recurring need to pee, so at least a dozen trips to the rest room, but each time I could get very little out. And a feeling of inflammation or burning all day.</p>
<p>Last night when I measured my blood pressure, it was clear that taking 200mg twice a day instead of 400mg once a day was successfully keeping my blood pressure down, because it was still good before bed. But I’m not happy with these side effects. The tingling scalp is apparently very common, along with tiredness. A “less common adverse event” reported is “difficulty in micturition, including acute urinary bladder retention.” That doesn’t sound good, and the aggravation of my colon is also not good. I haven’t seen any bleeding, but it could be a warning sign of something called “ischemic colitis.”</p>
<p>It seems like I should probably stop this medication. I took a 200mg pill this morning. I will try stopping it until Monday morning when I see the doctor, and just record my blood pressure and see what it does.</p>
<h3 id="the-tombs-of-atuan"><em>The Tombs of Atuan</em></h3>
<p>I read Benjamin a children’s book, and then I asked the rest of the kids what they wanted me to read. They surprised me by asking me to go back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s <em>The Tombs of Atuan</em>. So I started it over, and read the preface, and the first chapter. I have not read this book in a long, long time — it was probably about 1979, when I was eleven or twelve. I really don’t remember it so far, although I’m guessing I will eventually find some scenes or events that I recognize. It’s a dark and strange book. I’ll continue as the kids’ attention span allows, and see where it takes us.</p>
<h3 id="moderan"><em>Moderan</em></h3>
<p>I saw a typo a few days ago but didn’t make a note of it. Then yesterday I saw another one, so decided to go find the earlier one. <em>Moderan</em> has some typos that look like OCR errors. On page 79, the phrase “a shimmer of fight” should read “a shimmer of light.” And on page 47, the phrase “a tight little smite” should read “a tight little smile.” This is disappointing; in general, I’ve always been very impressed by the editing of New York Review Books Classics editions (at least, those that are re-set, like this one is, and don’t just reproduce the pages of an earlier edition).</p>
<h3 id="elections">Elections</h3>
<p>I feel like I should write something about the elections. There is so much to say about them, and the frenzy of other political news, that I’m hard-pressed to separate the meaningful events from the meaningless distractions. I am pleased that the Democrats won the House, but I have learned not to have much hope that the Democrats will mount any kind of notable resistance to the Trump administration.</p>
<p>Two results from this election are, to me, the most significant. The first result <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_Amendment_4,_Voting_Rights_Restoration_for_Felons_Initiative_(2018)">Florida Amendment 4</a>, which restores the franchise to a lot of Floridians with prior felony convictions (but not all). This ballot initiative required a 60 percent supermajority to win, and it won! That’s big news and will enfranchise something like 10% of the eligible voting population. That could mean that Florida will no longer be a swing state.</p>
<p>The second result is not really an election result <em>per se</em>, but about the election process. It’s the widespread and increasing understanding of election fraud and criminal acts of disenfranchisement in states like Georgia and Florida. I see this as a result of the rise of “citizen-journalism” including the deployment of cameras in cell phones and the ability of ordinary citizens to spread stories on social media networks like Twitter. (Of course, misinformation can be spread this way, too.)</p>
<p>Right now several election results are contested as I write this; Florida is going to do a mandatory machine recount in the gubernatorial election. The claims and lawsuits are flying back and forth. The reports I’m reading about voting machines and ballots are horrifying. The way we vote in many states is unworthy of a Banana Republic, and it’s that way because powerful people like it that way.</p>
<p>There’s a criminal situation in Georgia, as well, in the Abrams/Kemp race, with increasing evidence that Kemp acted to disenfranchise large numbers of voters <strong>in the race that he himself supervised, as Secretary of State</strong>.</p>
<p>Hey Kemp? You know you’ve lost the moral high ground when <a href="https://www.apnews.com/02bf11f29ada46d0833be6e3091b0c31">Jimmy Carter</a> calls on you to resign over your blatant conflict of interest.</p>
<p>My hope is that Kemp will be utterly destroyed in court. He should go to prison, and his children should have to change their names. I don’t know if any of this will lead to election reform in the affected states, but I sure hope so. And it’s also clear that some of this is fallout from the dismantling of the <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/10/how-dismantling-voting-rights-act-helped-georgia-discriminate-again/572899/">Voting Rights Act</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it in 2013, Section 5 required states like Georgia to submit election changes like this to the U.S. Department of Justice for review and “preclearance” before implementation. Kemp’s 2008 program failed that review because, as the Justice Department’s rejection letter read, the “flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian, and/or Hispanic voters to additional and, more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To me this kind of disenfranchisement on technical grounds is especially aggravating, because I know that a lot of database systems don’t allow large portions of the population to record their names as they would prefer. It can come down to ignorant or lazy state employees:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the biggest flaws of Georgia’s current “exact-match” program is that it relies on the work of county election officials who input voter registration data into the match system. This means that errors in the system could happen not just by the person filling out the form, but also by the election officials themselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But it seems likely to me that some of these “exact match” failures probably have nothing to do with the diligence of the voters involved, or the good intentions and efforts of the election officials, but are due to the inabilities of different systems to represent voter’s names the way they would prefer them to be represented. Many, many people, even people who aren’t of ethnicities you’d likely consider rare or exotic, have to work around these limitations.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid.html">this gentleman</a>, John Graham-Cumming, can’t put his name into online forms. If even a hyphenated last name is too exotic, what are people supposed to do when they have names like “Björk Gu&oeth;mundsdóttir,” or “José Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo Silva,” or names transliterated from languages represented by ideographs rather than Latin alphabet? Many people have to contend with <a href="https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names">these difficulties</a> all the time, and so despite their best efforts, wind up with records in different systems that will not pass an “exact match.”</p>
<p>These problems aren’t limited to American systems trying to handle non-European names; in <a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/">this article</a> the author talks about trying to put his name, “Patrick McKenzie,” into database systems in Japan that are unable to represent it.</p>
<p>Implicit bias is <strong>everywhere</strong> in technology. Database systems designed only to handle WASPy names, like mine, or only Japanese names, like the systems McKenzie describes, are the natural result of institutional ethnocentrism. Handling names is a hard problem, and ordinary programmers often just punt when the going gets rough. That isn’t good, and we need to improve these systems, and meanwhile try to accommodate their failures. Instead, we have assholes like Kemp who have been weaponizing them. These people need to go.</p>
<h3 id="house-news">House News</h3>
<p>Our realtor finally got back to us. She’s been very ill, apparently, and she’s decided that she is no longer interested in leasing our old house. She also referred us to a friend of hers, but that part of the message was muddled, as she was throwing out sale prices and monthly rental costs that didn’t really match anything in the lease agreement we had our attorney draw up. So I think we will just thank her and move on. We’ll try to consider what we might do next with the house. It’s entirely unclear at the moment.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>It’s 5:39 p.m. and already dark out. We’re getting on towards the darkest days. I have been pretty busy since last night and there is a lot going on all around me, so I will try to finish up a few notes and get this posted before I get derailed.</p>
<p>I’m confused trying to even remember what has happened over the last 24 hours or so. It seems like a cluttered blur. After work I went to Costco and brought back salmon, marcaroni and cheese, and some frosted German cinnamon cookies. When I walked in the front door I discovered that Benjamin had stuffed an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet, again, and the first floor toilet had overflowed.</p>
<p>Grace had thrown basically every towel we own on the floor to soak up most of the liquid but there are seams. There’s a gap around the edge of the bathtub. There’s a sizeable gap in the tile under the baseboard heater. If liquid runs back there, it can soak right into the subfloor material. So far the only times this has been an actual issue have been in this kind of situation — when the kids back up the toilet by playing with it. It’s very aggravating. I think it might be possible to make the floor nearly waterproof but it would be hard. I have no idea how to clean and dry and deodorize all this. I took the front of the baseboard heater off and I’ve been running a fan to try to dry it. But I’m going to have to go after the gap around the tub with a toothbrush or something. It’s a disgusting job because the toilet didn’t contain only water when Benjamin made it overflow.</p>
<p>The kichen was pretty trashed and it took us some time to get dinner made, so we ate quite late. Our friend Joy is visiting. I was hoping we could burn a fire log and have a group story, but there were so many things that required cleanup work. I got one big dishwasher load going, but couldn’t really finish getting the kitchen cleaned up. I tried to read the kids some more of <em>The Tombs of Atuan</em> but Sam went to sleep and Veronica kept leaving so I read an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaPets">AlphaPets book</a> to Benjamin and Joshua instead. It was <em>Ivy Can’t Wait</em>, featuring Ivy the Impatient Iguana. I don’t like this series much but Benjamin seems to love it.</p>
<h3 id="trying-the-rosé">Trying the Rosé</h3>
<p>With dinner I tried another bottle of wine we were considering for our holiday meals. This was a rosé, a 2017 Château D’Aqueria Tavel Rose. (The label puts the circumflex on the first <strong>a</strong> in Château, but does not put an accent on the <strong>e</strong> in Rose; go figure!</p>
<p>This wine is just awful. It has a lovely, rich color. The nose is promising. But on the palate, it tastes like unsweetened Kool-Aid mixed with rubbing alcohol. I didn’t wan to drink it. Grace was also disappointed. I couldn’t even think of any way to use it for cooking. So I did something I very rarely do, as there aren’t many wines I won’t drink at all. I poured it down the drain.</p>
<p>I’ve come to distrust Costco’s wine buyer. Do they have someone actually tasting their wines before they order them? Why are these mediocre-to-awful wines even on the shelves?</p>
<p>It’s not that I don’t like rosé wines. It’s not my go-to style, but last fall we found a really delicious rosé from South America. I’m not sure I wrote down the name. I probably took a picture of the bottle and if I did, it’s probably in my photo library. I’ll see if I can find it.</p>
<p>I think for Thanksiving we’ll probably just have the Chianti and the Riesling (with dessert). We’re not having turkey anyway; Grace ordered prime rib from Tippin’s. If I can, I’ll get to Trader Joe’s in time for Christmas and see if I can find a decent rosé there.</p>
<h3 id="cluttering">Cluttering</h3>
<p>After the kids went to bed I read part of <em>Cluttering: Current Views on its Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment</em> by Yvonne van Zaalen and Isabella K. Reichel. I thought this book might serve as an introduction to someone who is not a speech therapist. But it dives right into the history of the concept and does not explain any of the technical terms that it uses.</p>
<p>It’s not competely opaque, but like a lot of things I read in fields like psychology and sociology, it seems to veer back and forth between aspects of observation and practice that are commonsensical, and theoretical models that seem like complete pseudo-science. Here’s a basic definition (“PWC” means “People with Cluttering”):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to the evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, PWC have an articulartory rate that is perceived to be too fast and/or too irregular combined with one or more of the three main characteristics:</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ol type="a">
<li>Reduced speech intelligibility based on telescoping or word structure errors;</li>
<li>A high frequency of normal disfluencies;</li>
<li>Errors in pausing (St. Louis et al., 2007).</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s some suggestion that the part of the brain responsible for cluttering has been identified, which is interesting, but whether that suggests any useful treatment strategies is unclear so far. The model of cluttering as “telescoping” words and phrases, dropping syllables accidentally, seems useful. The observations about how people who speak with “cluttering” seem to be rushing, even if they don’t actually speak more words per minute than fluent people, is also interesting, and potentially helpful to keep in mind:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…the rate of the PWC fell well within the normal range of syllables per second even though the individuals’ speaking rate was perceived as very fast (St. Louis et al., 2007). We believe that this difference between objective measurements and listeners’ subjective judgment is caused mainly by the high frequency of disfluencies, abnormal prosody, and the errors in pausing and word structure. Speech production of PWC is disturbed so much that the listener’s processing time is affected, giving the impression that the speech goes even faster than measured.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The text gives examples of “coalescence,” in which parts of syllables are inadvertently combined; a PWC might say “mation” instead of “limitation,” or “implations” instead of “implications.” There are also “sequencing errors” which you might know as Spoonerisms: syllables in the wrong order, such as “untedectable” instead of “undetectable.” I haven’t noticed these sequencing errors in Sam’s speech. His cluttering seems to me to manifest primarily as problems with the <strong>rate</strong> of speech: rushing combined with long, apparently involuntary, pauses. I’ll read some more of this book, looking for insight and practical suggestions. Meanwhile, he is getting speech therapy, but I think it is too early to judge whether it is helping.</p>
<p>This morning I was not up all that early. When I got up, our houseguest was using the oven, so I couldn’t toast bagels. I worked on cleaning things up for a while and made an Instant Pot of oatmeal. That took a while because the kids had misplaced the Instant Pot book that has all the cooking times in it. I had planned to toast bagels and make a frittata out of the leftover salmon and rice, but didn’t get to it, because there were other errands to run. While Joy was here, I wanted to pick up my friends’ freezer. My friends John and Regan were upgrading their freezer as part of a major renovation of their house, so they offered us their old freezer.</p>
<p>Joy had done quite a bit of organizing in the garage, assembling more shelves and arranging things. It’s still crammed with stuff, but there are aisles now! You can walk around to get to things! And in the process, she found all kinds of things we were missing, like a rolling pin and a box of light bulbs.</p>
<p>Joy has a full-sized van now, with seats that fold down into the floor of the vehicle (they are called “Stow ’n Go.”) With all the seats folded away, a full-sized upright freezer will easily fit. “Easily,” that is, if you don’t count actually getting it in and out of the van. But with some help both loading and unloading, we got it done. It’s now in our garage along with their old dishwasher.</p>
<p>Having an empty refrigerator or freezer around unsupervised children is a bad idea. There is a key lock on the freezer, but they were not immediately able to locate the key. So we took the door off.</p>
<p>I had to make a special trip to Lowe’s to find a suitable tool to remove the door. The bolts are, I think, Philips #3 machine screws. I had some trouble with them because I could not apply enough torque to them, using a regular screwdriver. I needed something like a nut driver or L-shaped screwdriver that would give me more leverage. Lowe’s had a set of L-shaped drivers, but nothing for a #3 Philips head. So I wound up having to buy a small ratcheting driver set. It seemed to be the only way to get the combination of ratchet driver and #3 Philips tip, unless I wanted to drive a lot farther and spend a lot more time. I was concerned that the one I bought would be too small and flimsy for the job, but it worked perfectly. So the door is stashed behind the refrigerator in the garage, and the screws and the driver set are taped to the top of it waiting for me to reassemble them. There are some outlets in the garage, but they don’t work. We need to get the garage properly wired for power, and then we will run the freezer out there.</p>
<p>Joy is bringing things from her inventory and Veronica is photographing items and listing them for sale on Etsy. Like I said, lots going on!</p>
<p>Dinner is on the table (bratwurst with sauerkraut, greens, soup), so it’s time to wind this up. I didn’t take a labetalol tablet last night. We’ll see what my blood pressure is doing. I’ll be seeing a doctor Monday morning.</p>
<h3 id="writing">Writing</h3>
<p>I’m about halfway through my first pass editing the first-quarter blog posts — weeks one through thirteen. So in a few weeks I should have a more-or-less edited version of the text. That doesn’t include any kind of introduction yet.</p>
<p>Looking at the current output from <strong>pandoc</strong>, when I turn the text into a <strong>.docx</strong> file, and open it in OpenOffice, it’s 197 pages. If I turn it into an <strong>.odt</strong> file, it’s 183 pages. This is due to minor differences between the templates, such as the default fonts. Those could change. I have not made any of the formatting changes that I want to make. I haven’t gotten the weekly posts breaking so they all start on right-hand pages yet.</p>
<p>The text is about 103,000 words. I want to continue experimenting with adding an index, and indexing everything that I think needs indexing. Presumably I’ll be able to get that done. And then — what?</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Cluttering: Current Views on its Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment</em> by Yvonne van Zaalen and Isabella K. Reichel</li>
<li><em>The Tombs of Atuan</em> by Ursula K. Le Guin (bedtime story reading)</li>
<li>“Rise of the Spinjitzu Master” (<em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> Season 2, Episode 13)</li>
<li>“The Tsuranga Conundrum” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 episode)</li>
<li>“The Island” by Peter Watts (2009 Novelette)</li>
<li><em>The Complete Cosmicomics</em> by Italo Calvino</li>
<li><em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> (<em>Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu</em> Season 2, Episode 12)</li>
<li><em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</em> (2016 film)</li>
<li><em>A Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes</li>
<li><em>Akhnaten</em> by Philip Glass (Discs 14 and 15 of <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em>)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe – NOTE: look up how I refer to other books in this series bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (Joshua finished reading it)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, November 10th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-52224351620123763392018-11-03T14:00:00.001-04:002018-11-03T14:00:16.758-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, November 3rd, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>It’s past midnight and I’m finishing up a podcast, creating the video version for YouTube as I write this. And now I’m uploading the MP3 file. So I’ll try to quickly write up my day.</p>
<p>When I got up our houseguest’s boyfriend was working in the kitchen, so I waited a while while he got a meal together. When he was done I went in and made blueberry pancakes with the Kodiak mix. The kids were not all that hungry, having gorged themselves on Halloween candy the night before, so I did not bother with eggs or bacon or anything more elaborate.</p>
<p>The pancakes make Grace feel pretty wiped out — something about the glycemic index, even if she doesn’t add much syrup. It isn’t great for me, but I don’t crash quite as hard as she does afterwards. She mentioned the paleo mix doesn’t have the same effect, so I will stick with that, although that mix is only good with berries in it and does not taste good plain. And it’s well past the end of blueberry season — all I can get at Costco now is expensive organic blueberries imported from — where was it? — Portugal, I think.</p>
<p>So after the pancakes it was more kitchen cleanup, and attempts to direct the kids into cleaning up the messes they made with Halloween candy. Joshua and Sam had started a laundry load that was extremely over-full, and unbalanced, so we had to pull everything out and run that load of clothes through in two loads.</p>
<p>I got to spend a little time downstairs this afternoon and I used it to back up all my hard drives, and to edit the imported CDs from the Complete Sony Recordings by Philip Glass. I like my metadata to be tidy. Mostly, I like to be able to <strong>find</strong> music in my iTunes library.</p>
<p>A 24-disc set which consists of 15 different albums presents a challenge. The “Artist” fields vary from disc to disc (some are attributed to the Philip Glass Ensemble, some to co-composers, performers, etc.), but iTunes lets me specify an “Album Artist” field, so that all these discs will sort under the name Philip Glass. The titles are more complicated, though. Is this one big album with 24 CDs? That would suggest that the disc numbers should all be set to one through 24. But then to make them appear in that order when I’m viewing my collection, I’d have to set every disc to have the same album name, just something consistent like “The Complete Sony Recordings.” Then I’d have to squeeze the album name as a prefix into song names, or something like that.</p>
<p>The solution I finally came up with was to name each CD something like “The Complete Sony Recordings Disc 05: Einstein on the Beach.” The leading zero for one-digit disc numbers is important; if you don’t use it, the albums won’t support <strong>alphabetically</strong> in the proper <strong>numeric</strong> order. This is not idea, because it makes it seems like the four-disc <em>Einstein on the Beach</em> is four different albums, but it works OK and I can find everything.</p>
<p>In addition, I cleaned up track names as best I could. The data that comes from CDDB is always a mess. The track names as they arrived tended to have names that included the artist and album, which was redundant, and made a hash out of the acts, scenes, parts, and other fields. I tried to make them match what the actual CD case called each track, but there’s no way to add subtitles to <strong>groups</strong> of tracks (for example, to give Act II of Akhnaten a subtitle and then group the tracks that make up Act II underneath it). But I wanted to keep those subtitles, because they are on the CD case and they give the listener some information as to what is going on. I kept them as best I could, and so I have some tracks with very long names, like “ACT II: YEARS 5 TO 15: THEBES AND AKHETATEN, Scene 2: Akhnaten And Nefertiti.”</p>
<p>Sometimes iTunes just seems to misbehave and become “stuck” — no matter what I do, it won’t sort some tracks in the order I want. The solution to get it “unstuck” is sometimes just literally to delete and retype the album name or track name exactly the same as it was. Then suddenly it will appear in the desired order.</p>
<p>I tried to make use of the “Sorting” tab under iTunes to specify a “sort as” field for album names. But this doesn’t work at all the way I expected it to. If I type a new album name under “sort as” to apply to some tracks, it just overwrites the album name field on all those tracks. That is absolutely not what I want and is kind of a big pain when one is editing over a hundred tracks at once.</p>
<p>Oh, and watch out for those “compilation” flags. They almost never do what you want, and make sorting very confusing. You don’t have to set them to wind up confused by them. Some albums show up as compilations when iTunes pulls down their CDBD data, even when they aren’t. So if your tracks aren’t sorting the way you expect, check to make sure that flag isn’t set.</p>
<p>When I went back upstairs, having experienced the joy of getting at least a few small tasks finished, Grace asked me if I would run out for black-eye peas and restaurant-sized boxes of Jiffy corn muffin mix. We also needed dishwasher detergent pods. So I took Joshua with me. To get everything I had to three places. First, to GFS — they were just about to close. They had the corn muffin mix. Then, to Target: they had larger-sized bags of the Seventh Generation unscented dishwasher pods we like. But they don’t have a lot of groceries, so no black-eyed peas. Then, Meijer.</p>
<p>Joshua has reached the age where he is starting to examine and understand things around him. So for the first time he paid detailed attention to the checkout line scanners, particularly the self-serve checkout at Meijer. He started out with the idea that the scanners worked by radio waves. But I let him check out the items at Meijer and he figured out, more or less, how bar codes work. I also explained to him how the bagging area is a scale, and weighs what you put in it, as a form of surveillance, to verify that you are paying for everything. He thought that was creepy, and talked about how it reminded him of the (pretty bad, unfortunately) X-Files episode “Ghost in the Machine.”</p>
<p>At Target I also found a DVD copy of <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them</em>, the 2016 movie set that is a sort of prequel to the Harry Potter stories. I thought the kids might enjoy watching that this week.</p>
<p>When I got home Grace had pulled out a bunch of leftovers and was sorting out and using up food. So we had a pot of greens that used up several different greens, I made the corn muffin mix in our biggest cast-iron pan, and she threw a ham hock in with black-eyed peas in the Instant Pot.</p>
<p>While the corn muffin mix was baking, I put Benjamin in the bathtub and washed his hair, thoroughly, twice, with only conditioner, and brushed it out thoroughly. He screamed a bit, for some reason, but not because I was snagging his hair — he put up with the detangling pretty stoically. No, he screamed this time because he didn’t want his ears to get wet. That’s new and I have absolutely no idea why this is now the hill he chose to fight for.</p>
<p>I got him out and dried off, and while his hair was still wet, I sat him down on a stool in the kitchen, got out the clippers, put on the one-half inch guard, and cut his hair much shorter. This trim was long overdue. He was developing a bunch of unintentional dreadlocks, and we needed to do something about it. You’d think the result would be shocking — I cut off most of his hair. But no, it sprang back immediately, and it looks completely normal, just shorter. I got that whole procedure done in 19 minutes. I was pretty proud of myself for getting him through it that fast. Doing it fast minimizes the amount of time a kid can spend complaining or fighting over the bath and/or the haircut. He even swept up and threw away the hair trimmings himself.</p>
<p>Grace also started a bread made out the leftover pulp from juicing celery and apples, with a bunch of spices added. I’ll see how that comes out. It will be very, very high in fiber. That’s good for Grace because in the home stretch of her pregnancy she needs all the help she can get to keep things moving: psyllium, prunes, lots of salad, and this. It might be a little too much fiber for me, though. My colon tends to go into spasm without much warning. I don’t want to have some sort of an accident while driving.</p>
<p>Elanor fell asleep in a chair and the rest of us ate dinner. After dinner we tried to figure out if could possibly clean up and get a podcast together. I had an idea that I might send the kids into the basement with the movie, and use a portable recorder to record myself and Grace having a conversation in the bedroom, so that she could sit more comfortably while we spoke. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave the kids unsupervised in the basement, at least not when so many things are in boxes and half-out of boxes; I didn’t want Benjamin taking apart DVD boxed sets or scattering CDs everywhere. So we decided to let the kids watch the movie on the old laptop upstairs while Grace and I recorded a podcast downstairs.</p>
<p>It wasn’t the most organized conversation — I had not actually managed to make any notes on <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton. I’ve been hoping to read some relevant passages from that book on the show. So we rambled. But Grace and I had reviewed some talking points about nationalism while we got ready for dinner. We had just that small modicum of preparation done, so at least we had that kernel of a conversation to build on.</p>
<p>I’ve finished uploading everything. I just have to double-check that the links work, and share them on Facebook and Twitter. It’s about 1:20 a.m.</p>
<p>I had some insight I wanted to write about — about how our housemate and her family represent, in a sense, immigrants from the “colony in a nation” that Chris Hayes talks about, and how this helps explain their food preferences, except in a reverse sense: they <strong>are</strong> expressing a preference for the exact foods they grew up with. But — these aren’t traditional foods of any sort of traditional culture, though, but cheap, low-quality, high-sugar industrial foods that the dominant oppressor culture sells to the “colony” for profit.</p>
<p>From our perspective, we want to liberate them from the unhealthy processed foods that keep them in thrall to General Mills and McDonalds and all those large corporate interests. We want them to experience better healthy. We want to free them of some of their economic burden, too, by getting them to start eating traditional, lower-cost, local foods. But they seem to perceive this only an attempt to deprive them of their favorite foods (even if the difference between what they prefer to buy and what we prefer to buy, often because we can get things in bulk at Costco, is something we only perceive as a difference in quality — for example, their insistence on Tyson chicken instead of Costco chicken, or Crisco oil instead of California olive oil, or white conventional Kroger eggs instead of brown organic Costco eggs).</p>
<p>This doesn’t explain everything, though; half the time, we can’t figure out what their objection or issue actually <strong>is</strong>. It’s extremely confusing. Sometimes we even watch our housemate bring home her food choices, and cook them alongside us, almost identical to what we are cooking — like the night when we were both making mashed potatoes. And then we would watch her not eat her own food, and throw it all out.</p>
<p>Tonight while I was organizing the pantry I found a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fish sandwich, carefully wrapped up in a french fry container, and left of then shelf. When was it purchased? How long has it been in there, sitting at room temperature? When did they intend to eat it? I have no idea. Sometimes I just go blank and have no idea how to proceed. I guess if it starts to become visibly foul-smelling, I’ll throw it out. But that food has so many preservatives, that could take some time.</p>
<p>I’d love to get our housemate to read <em>Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal</em>, by Eric Schlosser. But I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t read it or find it any more convincing than she finds us.</p>
<p>Also, I should try reading <em>Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes and see if he presents any ideas that I think are worth talking about.</p>
<p>Time for bed. I’ll be starting the week off tired. I’m hoping for a reasonable night’s sleep. If I can, I’ll go to Harvest Moon Café in the morning for coffee and a breakfast BLT sandwich.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>So, today was… interesting.</p>
<p>Over the weekend I have woken up to some strange sparkles of color in my vision, flashes and arcs that would flicker when I turned my head, and when reading I’d notice some blotches on the page in my peripheral vision. It looked a bit like the kind of blotches you’ll see in your vision after glancing at the sun or directly at a high-wattage bulb. I told myself that maybe my eyes were just dry and these things did seem to improve after I was awake for a while.</p>
<p>This morning I had them again, and there seemed to be a spot in my peripheral version that was persistently blurry, like a swirl, or a flaw in glass. As it was right on the edge, it was hard to get a glimpse of. But I became convinced that it was a real thing. So I sent a text message to my boss and told him I was having trouble with my vision and I was going to try to get an urgent appointment with an ophthalmologist, and read the Kellogg Eye Center’s web page. I didn’t think I actually needed to go to the emergency department. It didn’t seem to be getting any worse. Their web page said had a number to call, and instructions to ask for the ophthalmologist on call.</p>
<p>Grace had a “non-stress test” appointment, where they monitored her, and the baby, for a while. Everything seems well. The baby is quite active. On her way out she made a pot of tea, and there was the spice bread she made from leftover juicer pulp last night. I had tea and some of her spice bread and lay back down for a while to try to calm my nerves. When she got home, I asked her to call Kellogg for me, as I was getting very stressed out. After Grace gave their receptionist the general details, I was able to take phone and give a few more details. They told me that they would try to find a time slot for me today. I didn’t have too long to wait. Grace then a 1:00 appointment with a speech therapist, at our home, to evaluate Benjamin on some of his communication issues. About 1:45 I got a call back telling me they could see me at 3:00. So Grace finished up her appointment and drove me to Kellogg Eye Center. I didn’t want to drive — I was feeling very nervous, and didn’t know just how much my vision had been compromised. Also, I was going to need her with me to get home anyway, as they were going to dilate my pupils, and I wouldn’t feel safe driving after that.</p>
<p>I got checked in and didn’t have too long to wait before a preliminary exam, then waited only a little longer before I had an ophthalmologist peering at my retinas. He stopped after a moment and had a technician come in and take my blood pressure. It was elevated, but not so high that it set off any red flag warnings: 143 over 90. For many years my blood pressure was always 120 over 80. In the last few years it has been trending a little higher. This was the measurement after I had been sitting calmly in the exam chair for a while. It might be spiking higher at times of higher stress for all I know.</p>
<p>He found a spot on the retina of my right eye; he called it a “<a href="http://kellogg.umich.edu/theeyeshaveit/opticfundus/cotton_wool.html">cotton wool spot</a>.” My discharge sheet says I had a <a href="http://kellogg.umich.edu/theeyeshaveit/opticfundus/retinal_hemorrhages.html">retinal hemorrhrage</a>. He mentioned two other things: first, that both retinas were showing the early stages of damage due to elevated blood pressure. And second, that the vitreous humor in my eyes showed signs of aging.</p>
<p>My grandmother had macular degeneration and cataracts and by 102 she was nearly blind. She had laser surgery numerous times to try to stabilize the bleeding blood vessels in the back of her eyes. So I have expected that I might have cataracts and similar problems. But she was much older. I expected to start to have to deal with problems like this in my sixties, or seventies, not at fifty-one.</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure what this means. Is it possible to reverse at least some of this damage, or is the damage that’s already happened just permanent? (Fortunately it seems to be confined to a small area in my peripheral vision, so I can still read and still use a computer and presumably still drive). But in any case I’m trying to take this as a very clear and direct warning that I have to do <strong>something</strong> — I’ve got to get my blood pressure down, which I think will mean getting my stress level down. I’ve been hoping to achieve this by getting rid of the <strong>stressors</strong>, especially the house and the money situation, but I think for now I have to do something else to work around the effects rather than the causes.</p>
<p>I was not satisfied with Dr. Moore’s care and so I have not seen him since early in the year. We’ve had trouble finding care for the kids, but we’ve finally found Sam a speech therapist and a physician that Grace is satisfied with. But with my attention on Grace and the kids first, and what with all the other issues and expenses occupying my attention, I’ve fallen behind on basic care for myself. I haven’t been watching my blood pressure, I haven’t been to the dentist in a while, and I haven’t had an eye exam in a while. And my blood pressure has been creeping up. The most likely factor seems to be stress, but we have also fucked up our diet pretty badly since we started trying to accommodate our housemate and her family.</p>
<p>So now I have follow-up appointment with the ophthalmologist in 3 weeks to see what is going on. I also told him I would try to get an appointment with the new doctor that Grace seems to like, as soon as possible. I’m also going to monitor my blood pressure, so I have some numbers to give to the ophthalmologist in a few weeks.</p>
<p>During all this, my friend Regan was texting me to tell me that I could come and pick up their old dishwasher. They are doing a major remodeling job on their house, and will not have a use for it. We have a working dishasher, but they do tend to fail eventually, especially when they get used as hard as we use ours. So before our appointment I took out the seat that was in the back of the car (only one of the two was in there). We went by Regan and John’s house after my appointment and picked up the dishwasher and stuck it in the back of my Element. So we have a nice spare dishwasher. I’ll stash it in the garage. At the moment, though, I don’t feel up to trying to rearrange the garage to make space for it, so it is in the car.</p>
<p>I’ve been wondering if I should try CBD oil for anxiety and stress. I don’t have any Xanax on hand, or I’d take that. This little incident suggested to me that it was time to try it. So on the way home we stopped at a health food store and I bought a bottle of CBD oil. This formulation provides 3mg per half-eyedropper. The bottle supposedly has something like eighty doses.</p>
<p>I’ve never used any of these products before and I’m still a little confused to find that they are apparently legal to sell through health food stores; the latest things I read about their legality was mixed. I’ve used some hallucinogens in the past, but my experience with marijuana is extremely limited. The last time I tried smoking it, almost 30 years ago, the only reaction I remember is that I became very tired, went to bed early, and slept until late the next day.</p>
<p>Today was Joshua and Veronica’s birthday, so the plan was to stop at King Shing and take home Chinese takeout. So while we waited for our food, I took a 3mg dose.</p>
<p>By the time our food came, I could tell that I was feeling, physically, a bit more relaxed. It was noticeable. I was able to talk a little more easily and felt a little bit less obsessive. So that seems like a win. I’ve had a mild headache all day, though, and it hasn’t seemed to do anything for that. I had a little more of the open bottle of white wine with dinner as well.</p>
<p>We also picked up a bucket of Neapolitan ice cream at GFS and took that home. We ate our Chinese food, served the ice cream, and sang “Happy Birthday.” Grace has gone to lie down. It’s about 9:15. I would like to take some Tylenol and go on to bed myself, now. But the dining table is covered with dirty dishes and the sink is full of more dirty dishes. I’ve been asking Sam to finish up emptying the dishwasher for the last hour. So that’s my destiny for the rest of the evening, I think — more kitchen cleanup. Fortunately I don’t have to do literally everything myself; I can supervise the kids in doing some of it. But they are absolutely destroying what nerves I have left tonight, playing and fighting and bellowing inside the house as if they were on a playground at recess. And tonight, I’m really not able to appreciate it.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I slept reasonably well but too briefly. The kids were really difficult last night. I took some Tylenol. I woke up without the mild headache that I went to bed with. Grace had to get up at 7:00, so we set both our phone alarms, and they went off precisely at the same time. I tried to get back to sleep for another hour, but was unable to.</p>
<p>As I’ve been unable to find much coherent guidance online about how much and how often to take CBD oil, I’ve settled on trying 3mg, 4 times a day (before each meal and before bedtime). So I’ll do that for the time being and see what happens. It does seem to be making me a little more relaxed, physically, as if I had a couple of drinks. Mentally, I think that I feel slightly calmer. I don’t feel high or intoxicated or loopy or sedated. I have noticed that I seem to be having a little more trouble in conversation finding the right word.</p>
<p>I had breakfast at Harvest Moon Café and this time, in addition to my breakfast BLT sandwich, ordered hash browns. Then I remembered all over again why I don’t order their hash browns. They got them brown enough this time, but they tasted bad, like rancid oil. And so now I’ve got a little heartburn.</p>
<p>I really wish that place had better food, because it is a locally owned small business in my neighborhood. It’s the place I <strong>should</strong> be supporting. I’ve asked them several times if they can put some fruit item on the breakfast menu. Even bananas or frozen berries would be a start. But they don’t do it. The only thing I really think they make for breakfast that is of good quality and not too loaded with carbs or sugar is my beloved breakfast BLT sandwich on swirl rye bread. But because I can find so few things on their menu that I actually like and think are of decent quality, I don’t really like eating that more than once a week.</p>
<p>Grace is going to try to get me an appointment with a new doctor. When that happens I’ll get a flu shot and get myself established as a new patient, and talk about managing my blood pressure. I measured it at home with our little meter before bed, and right after I woke up. The first reading immediately after waking up was below 120 over 80, which was reassuring. But all the rest were higher than I’d like. I’m writing them down in a little notebook at home. I will continue to measure it. I have no idea if the CBD oil by itself might do anything, but if it does that would be great. I might also try Grace’s regimen of celery juice. I wish I actually liked celery juice. I like a lot of juices and a lot of greens — but I just don’t like that particular one very much.</p>
<p>If I had any extra money at all in the budget I’d be starting a gym membership for myself. But there’s just nothing there at the moment. I just have to make do with our finances as they are until something changes.</p>
<h3 id="moderan">Moderan</h3>
<p>I tried reading a little bit of <em>Moderan</em> before bed. I read Jeff VanderMeer’s introduction, which contained some facts of interest but felt a little weak for such an otherwise distinguished writer. I got partway into the “in-universe” introduction by Bunch himself, in which the narrator explains that he has recovered a bunch of old recordings, and the text that follows contains heavily edited and redacted transcripts from those recordings. The fake introduction has a long and distinguished place in science fiction; I’m thinking of Gene Wolfe’s very brief introduction to <em>The Book of the New Sun</em> where he describes discovering Severian’s manuscript. That, and the brain-melting, time-twisting ways that Severian’s manuscripts come into play in <em>The Urth of the New Sun</em>.</p>
<p>I had a brief conversation with our housemate and asked her if she knew about the McDonald’s hamburger that was left sitting on a shelf in one of our cabinets. She did; it was hers. She had left it there for later. Sitting there at room temperature. I don’t even remember what I said in response, but I remember that <strong>her</strong> response to me talking about food poisoning and bacteria was something like “oh, really?” I should not make fun of people who did not have the education that I had. But… I still find it hard to believe that she’s serious. It seems like that the kind of knowledge that someone, somewhere along the way should have imparted to her, even if she didn’t learn it in school. So maybe actually it’s not an indictment of her, <em>per se</em>, at all.</p>
<p>I’m trying to get out from behind my computer more. So I left the office for lunch. I went to Nicola’s Books and picked up a paperback copy of <em>A Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes. I started reading it while eating a hummus with beef at Star’s Café. I gave them back the pita bread, and had them make me a juice drink with carrot, celery, beet, and ginger. It was just as brightly colored, but far better-tasting and healthier, than <a href="https://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/frappuccino-blended-beverages/witch-s-brew-frappuccino-blended-beverage-cr%C3%A8me">this</a> seasonal horror from Starbucks, and I think it cost about the same.</p>
<p>It’s cold in the office this afternoon so I’m wearing my coat. It has something to do with the team of workers who are climbing up through the roof access and seem to be installing new HVAC equipment and repairing the roof. So that’s making the afternoon a little more exciting.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>I got home fairly late last night, because I got in late and took a long lunch. Dinner was terrific. Grace pan-fried the lamb steaks. In order to clear out space for the kids’ ice cream, we had defrosted last year’s pumpkin, the Musquee de Provence that we roasted and froze last November after Halloween, when the pumpkin was extremely ripe and just starting to liquefy a bit. Grace made a soup in the Instant Pot with this pumpkin, leeks from our friends’ garden, a cayenne pepper with no seeds for just a little heat, turmeric, Jamaican curry powder, and a can of coconut milk. The soup was absolutely terrific. I had another glass from the open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which has held up surprisingly well given that it was not refrigerated.</p>
<p>My friend Rich Wielgosz was a guest on an <a href="https://anonradio.net/">online radio show</a> last night. I don’t know much about that site. It says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All DJs on aNONradio.net are members of the SDF Public Access UNIX System Community. Please join our growing online community of free software authors, teachers, librarians, students, researchers, hobbyists, computer enthusiasts, artists, musicians, and the aural and the visually impaired. We fight for and promote the distribution and development of free software and the non-commercialization of the Internet. Visit <a href="https://sdf.org">sdf.org</a> for more information.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So there you have it. The stream was hard to listen to. It kept shutting down, or skipping. But I heard Rich having a little banter with the show DJ and talking about some of the eighties music he had picked out. The archived show is <a href="https://anonradio.net/archive/201810310100_snowdusk.mp3">here</a>.</p>
<p>Grace told me that Benjamin had an interesting day. He wound up taking one of the two cans of whipped cream that Veronica and Joshua were planning to use to make a cake, and spraying it all over the boys’ room. Then he lied about it, insisting that someone else had done it. Grace was furious with him and I don’t blame her. He is definitely difficult. Grace thinks we need to get him a jungle gym and some materials for “sensory play,” like a water table. I think that’s true, and I’d love to get the kids a jungle gym or other play structure and set it up in the yard. We have no budget for such a thing at the moment and it is not clear when we might.</p>
<p>I’ve been taking my CBD oil 4 times per day and measured my blood pressure again twice in each arm last night and twice in each arm this morning. It seems that <strong>maybe</strong> the CBD oil is lowering my blood pressure a bit. I feel a little less tension in my body. But it is still somewhat elevated. I don’t have my little notebook with me, but if I recall correctly, my readings this morning were in the ranges of 129-135 over 85-90. The diastolic (bottom number) should not be 90, and I think that is more worrying than the elevated systolic. I have not been recording my pulse, but it always seems quite reasonable. I think it was about 70 at the eye clinic and about 60 this morning.</p>
<p>It would be great if CBD oil would bring my blood pressure down all by itself and I could avoid a prescription blood pressure medication, but I really can’t count on that.</p>
<p>And speaking of blood pressure, the check for the furnace went through overnight, and the check for the rubbish bill went through as well. So we hit our overdraft protection line of credit for $1,900. That just brought our balance to a few dollars above zero, so things like a coffee this morning took it negative again by a few dollars. So I moved $250 from savings to try to expenses until my next paycheck arrives Thursday night.</p>
<p>That leaves us only $50 in savings. Our account with Team One also has only $50 in savings. One of our credit cards has $57.20 available. I as going to check the balance of the other one, but their web site is down. I think there is less than $1,000 available. There’s another $1,700 available in our overdraft protection account if we absolutely need it. We might have to use $1,000 of that to pay for the tree removal if the rental agreement for the old house goes through. But I’m only going to do that if we have a clear promise of additional money coming in soon. We’re getting into a situation where even making the minimum required payments on our debts won’t leave much. I will try to run those numbers and see how bad it is. If I die of a stroke today, you’ll know what happened. I am just hoping that both cars keep running at least until late December. I will probably receive an end-of-year bonus that will help us get a little bit of money back into savings for emergencies.</p>
<p>Right now I see myself as situated between opposing forces: there are some huge stressors on the one hand, and then there are the comforting and soothing aspects of my life: my home, my kids (well, they are both a stressor and a comfort, depending), and a good and mutually supportive relationship with my wife. At the moment, the stressors are gaining. It seems to me like the winning strategy is not to push back harder, because some of the stressors are outside of my control, but to find out how to step aside — how to get myself out of the path of the stressors. Of course, it also would be a huge help to get rid of the stressors, or at least to mitigate them. And more supportive community would also be a huge win. This is what we keep trying to build. Every single aspect of our late-stage, extractive, catabolic capitalist system is fighting us as we try to do that.</p>
<h3 id="moderan-1">Moderan</h3>
<p>Last night I finished the introduction and the first two stories in <em>Moderan</em>. The first is called “No Cracks or Sagging,” and describes a project to cover the entire land mass of the planet with a thick layer of plastic. The second is called “The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day” and is the story of the protagonist who voluntarily undergoes a 9-month series of surgeries to have almost his entire body replaced with robotic components. These are not hard science fiction by any means. They are dystopian satires, partaking also of fantasy and horror. They remind me of Stanislaw Lem’s stories in <em>The Cyberiad</em>, but these are even darker, because they seem to be episodes from a time when humanity is in the process of voluntarily giving itself up to fascist ideals of cleanliness and efficiency, while in <em>The Cyberiad</em>, human beings are mostly a humorous memory.</p>
<p>It’s grim, but funny, stuff. Not all the slangy, jargony language really works for me in 2018. But it’s a great example of a writer taking a very, very hard and uncompromising stance for the sake of his art. His work was not widely appreciated by readers in its time. I’m glad I am getting the chance to appreciate it now.</p>
<p>For lunch I ran out quickly for a turkey club sandwich from the liquor store down the road, brought it back to work, and ate all the insides while throwing out half the bread. I’ll make a run to Costco this evening for a couple of things. I won’t need a lot since I plan to go again on Friday.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>At Costco last night I bought only bananas, celery, apples, a couple of bags of salad, lamb steaks, a pot pie, and a couple of bottles of wine for our upcoming holiday meals, and so it was about a $100 shopping trip, which is well under par. We are almost set for wine. I got a bottle of the 2017 Château Reynon Sauvignon Blanc Bordeaux, and a bottle of the 2016 Chateau Grand Traverse Late Harvest Riesling. (should I try to spell “chateau” consistently? It seems right to go by what is on the bottles, and on the bottles, the French wine uses the circumflex, and the American wine doesn’t).</p>
<p>I wanted to buy a couple more bags of the Birch Benders Paleo Pancake & Waffle Mix, but they didn’t have any. I’m not sure if it was just out of stock, or if they have stopped carrying it. I was in kind of a rush yesterday, but maybe I will inquire on Friday when I go back for our usual Friday shopping trip.</p>
<p>When I got home Grace and the kids had just gotten back from Halloween trick-or-treating. She had taken the kids to the neighborhood around our old church, St. Francis of Assisi. They got out very late, and so got back very late, but still had a ridiculously large haul of candy. Grace and I should have both restrained ourselves completely and not eaten even a single piece of their candy, for the sake of our health. But we’re not quite that disciplined. So I ate a few little candy bars, even though their chocolate formulas are all crap now, with PGPR in everything.</p>
<p>It’s weird seeing how many different historic chocolate bars are still in production, even if they are only available as the miniatures in Halloween assortments. Their formulations have all changed, and they are not necessarily being made by their original companies. For example, some of the mini assortments still contain Heath bars. I haven’t had a Heath bar in… well, let’s just say a long time. It’s one of the oldest candy bars in production, first introduced in 1914, and I have to admit I kind of like it, because it is bittersweet and very crunchy. We looked over the bewildering array of products: Almond Joy, Kit Kat, Krackel, Mounds, Mr. Goodbar, Milk Duds, Whoppers, and York Peppermint Pattie.</p>
<p>One of the strangest ones is the 100 Grand bar, originally known as the $100,000 Bar. It’s the candy bar equivalent of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Every few years I am tempted to eat one and I instantly regret it. The ouside is a flavorless paste of crispy rice and light milk chocolate, which tastes mainly like vegetable oil and sadness, while the inside has so much artificial-tasting caramel goo in it that it forms a massive unpleasant wad in the mouth. Chewing it all up is an ordeal. Who likes these? The only thing worse is Milk Duds, which must kill people when their strength gives out and they can’t pry their teeth apart. The Baby Ruth is another traditionally unpleasant bar. And every single year I’m startled to find that there are apparently still people willing to eat Butterfinger bars and Clark bars, which taste predominantly of Butane-2,3-dione. Then there are the nearly-identical bars: Nestle Crunch and Krackel are hard for me to distinguish. Both are waxy.</p>
<p>It’s not that I don’t like peanuts and stuff in chocolate. The Chunky bar used to be pretty cool. It’s not that I don’t like chewy candy bars. I love Charleston Chews. I would like Snickers more if they hadn’t made their chocolate so much worse. I no longer like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, as both their peanut butter filling and chocolate have changed. In general I have switched to eating much darker chocolate and no longer really like milk chocolate very much. I am still tempted occasionally by one of the lesser-known bars, like the Zero Bar, and I’ll occasionally pick up a PaDay bar, although if I can get a Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll that is fresh, it’s much better, and a Pearson’s Vanilla Bun candy bar beats just about any of the above. These are not found in that many stores around here, sadly.</p>
<p>Where was I? Oh yes — we were running late last night because the kids got out late, because they finished their chores late. And they didn’t do a very good job with them. Yesterday they were supposed to finish up the previous night’s dishes in the morning, but didn’t. Once we get behind on dishes, it is very hard to catch up during the week. They had a chance to catch up last night, though, because Grace just pan-fried two steaks and I put together half a bag of salad. We didn’t even serve the kids a real meal, because it was just pointless in the presence of all that candy, although we sliced up one of the steaks so that anyone who wanted to have some could take some pieces. “Anyone who wanted” turned out to be mainly Elanor, who once again ate a shocking amount of food.</p>
<p>Joshua was begging me to pull out a loose tooth from the moment I walked in the door. I tried a couple of times, gripping it in a paper towel and yanking, but it seemed like it was not quite loose enough and needed another day. But then a while later her pulled it out himself.</p>
<p>It took us literally forever (yes, forever has passed; we’re in the infinite future now, and the year is now Aleph-1, the cardinal number of the infinite set of real numbers, which also means that we accept the continuum hypothesis; deal with it) to get the dishes cleaned up, and it was after 10 p.m. when we were done. On other days we would have given up any plans for a video or story at this point. But it was Halloween night, so we were willing to relax the rules a bit. So we then took the kids downstairs, set up my little laptop, opened a bag of popcorn, and watched…</p>
<h3 id="arachnids-in-the-uk">“Arachnids In The UK”</h3>
<p>The gang is back on Earth and only a half-hour has elapsed since they left. Now that Graham doesn’t have space adventures to distract him, he has to confront his empty flat, and his grief. The Doctor isn’t really looking forward to flying off by herself. This incarnation seems to be one of those lucky people who needs people. In addition, she’s been running around non-stop since her most recent regeneration and doesn’t consider herself fully settled into her new self yet. And so she (very humorously) jumps at the chance to have dinner with Yaz and her family. Although, as usual, I don’t think anyone gets to finish a meal.</p>
<p>A lot has changed in thirty minutes. In fact, a nonsensical amount, but let’s ignore that for the moment. There’s a plot line involving giant spiders. Really, that’s just about all you need to know, because the storytelling is just about the weakest aspect of this episode. It’s really an attempt to integrate a short monster movie into the <em>Doctor Who</em> storyline. The monster movie parts work really well. The integration into the storyline? Not so much.</p>
<p>Let me state for the record that the giant spider effects shots are <strong>terrific</strong>. In fact there are individual scenes that are worth the price of admission, that make the whole show worth watching. Everyone in the Potts household loved the giant spiders. Fortunately I don’t think any of us have a particular phobia of spiders.</p>
<p>At the same time, the episode is over-stuffed with back-story and new character introductions. This is very cool in some ways. This <a href="https://www.tor.com/2018/10/28/making-small-talk-doctor-who-arachnids-in-the-uk/">Tor review by Emily Asher-Perrin</a> points out that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the things that’s subtly excellent about this episode is how the Doctor is surrounded by women for the duration of the adventure. Yas and Najia Khan and Dr. McIntyre are by the Doctor’s side for the majority of the episode as they figure out how to handle this spider infestation, while Graham and Ryan pair up a few times away from the crew to have their own terrifying fun. It’s seems like such a little thing, seeing four women storming through that hotel and solving all the problems, but when you’re accustomed to seeing rooms full of men plus a token woman or two, it can’t help but feel a little magical.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I agree with that. It was a lot of fun seeing the women centered in the story. But at the same time there were a <strong>lot</strong> of new characters to get to know, all in the same episode, and each one has a back-story and pre-existing relationships with other characters that we’re supposed to understand. It’s a lot to cram into one episode. I think it would have been better to space these character introductions out a little bit over several episodes so they don’t all pile on top of each other.</p>
<p>Near the end of the show I was distracted by helping the kids hand around popcorn and candy and clean up their messes, for perhaps thirty seconds or so. And the next time I was able to concentrate on the show, the main storyline was over, and I was staring at the screen with my brow furrowed, wondering what the hell happened. As Asher-Perrin writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…the spider conundrum isn’t really brought full circle or ended clearly. Robertson kills the mother spider, but the others are meant to be killed humanely, and we’re never told how that will be done. We’re also never told what will be done to secure the entire hotel site and ensure that more spider-killings don’t occur. Even if the Doctor had thrown in a few lines about her plans for the whole thing, that would have been better than where we’re left. As is, the whole story ends up hanging in midair without a conclusion. It reads as though Chibnall accidentally cut out a scene and never remembered to add it back in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of clear, specific references to other shows. In the opening scenes, the camera rolls around through a huge, empty hotel. I’m pretty sure that’s a shout-out to the Overlook Hotel in <em>The Shining</em>. And Emily Asher-Perrin notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s seems like such a little thing, seeing four women storming through that hotel and solving all the problems, but when you’re accustomed to seeing rooms full of men plus a token woman or two, it can’t help but feel a little magical.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But she doesn’t note that when the women strap on some kind of pump filled with an improvised spider repellent, the four women look like they are right out of a scene from the all-female <em>Ghostbusters</em> remake, proton packs and all.</p>
<p>iTunes had a little trouble playing the episode on my laptop. Every ten minutes or so, the video would freeze, and then flicker in fast-motion for a few seconds. I’m not sure why this was happening — maybe some background task was periodically eating too much CPU time? But when I found myself abruptly watching the conclusion, I wondered if iTunes had experienced a much more serious hiccup, and skipped ahead by several minutes, right over some critical scenes. But no — they’re not in the episode. This really seems like it demands an explanation. It would be nice to find out that this whole episode was originally slated for a 90-minute Halloween Special time slot, but then had to be cut back to the standard length at the last minute, and so we’ll get a full-length Director’s Cut on the DVD. But I suspect that isn’t the case and it is just due to inept and rushed production.</p>
<h3 id="under-pressure">Under Pressure</h3>
<p>Getting ready for bed last night, I found that one of the kids had dropped a marble into the bathroom sink drain. And again, no one did it. Our poltergeist problem continues. Fortunately it was stuck against the plug lifter mechanism, and I was able to get it out with one of our long-tined forks.</p>
<p>This was a little triggering for me, because a few years ago Pippin managed to get a toothbrush stuck in the bathroom sink drain in our old house. It was not enough to block the drain completely, just slow it down. Then days or weeks or even months later, someone turned the water on full-blast and left the room. The sink slowly backed up and overflowed until we had half an inch of water standing in the bathroom and hallway upstairs. Downstairs, we noticed it when we heard the sound of water running down inside the walls.</p>
<p>I’ve continued to take my CBD oil four times a day. I thought initially that it might be having a positive effect on my blood pressure, but the readings last night and this morning were not encouraging at all. Although, I think my current readings might be partly attributable to the fact that today is our…</p>
<h3 id="confrontation-day">Confrontation Day!</h3>
<p>Grace has been in frequent touch with our prospective renter, who is also our seller’s agent, to verify that yes, she did receive the draft agreement our attorney wrote up. I’m not sure of the exact date Grace forwarded her the agreement to consider, but I think it’s been three weeks, or possibly a day or two short of three weeks. So we are going to contact her today and say “we need an answer.” It’s the first day of November, which is the lease start date.</p>
<p>I don’t want to actually be vindictive — I want to be forgiving. <strong>Extremely</strong> forgiving. I generally <strong>am</strong> extremely forgiving, and I <strong>am</strong> patient. What I’m not good at, though, is negotiating things when I reach the <strong>end</strong> of my forgiveness and patience. I keep my cool in sudden emergencies. In fact I become positively frosty, shutting down my emotional reactions and doing what has to be done. But it’s these drawn-out situations that tend to result in me melting down at the end. When I’ve been suppressing my nervousness or anger for weeks or months, swallowing them, at some point it has to go <strong>somewhere</strong>. I don’t have close friends that I talk to regularly and vent. I don’t have a therapist. I just have my wife, and with our very full schedule and very full house, we don’t get to talk things out nearly as often as we’d like.</p>
<p>I really don’t want to have a meltdown over this, but I also really don’t want to have a stroke. I’m really not sure I know how to avoid both those things. It seems like I need to vent months of accumulating stress <strong>somewhere</strong>. (Months working with our current agent; the situation with the old house has been going on for almost two years now). I’ve recounted just how tight our finances have gotten. Having these decisions hanging over me has, I believe, been literally not just endangering, but harming, my health.</p>
<p>I think if we had been in negotiations, trying to iron out numbers or terms we could agree on, that would be one thing. Even if we couldn’t come to an agreement, we’d feel like we were in a mutual process and making progress. But we’ve gotten nothing back. We’ve really done everything in our power to make this possible. Even though we haven’t had a signed agreement, or even a verbal commitment to sign an agreement, we spent $3,000 that we didn’t have to put in a furnace. We’ve been expecting a “yes,” a “no,” a request for clarification of some aspect of the agreement, or a request to change some aspect of it. But we’ve gotten nothing. This is not the first time that this person has spaced out on a critical piece of paperwork; a couple of months ago, she failed to forward a counter-offer to a prospective buyer.</p>
<p>She was apologetic about that, and we kept her on as our agent. But at this point, I think all this means that this agreement isn’t gonna happen. We’ll see if she has anything to say. But at this point, even if she has some very good <strong>reasons</strong> she hasn’t been able to get back to us with anything, and still wants to work out a deal, I think we have to say no, because it is just too stressful for us to continue trying to work with her. (What does this say about what it would be like trying to get a rent check from her, on a regular schedule?)</p>
<h3 id="what-now">What Now?</h3>
<p>That’s a very good question. I’m hoping that at the end of the day we’ll have some new data to help us decide.</p>
<p>This morning Grace made me a celery and apple juice and I downed it before leaving the house. The celery juice seems to leave me a little nauseated, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been eager to join her and drink this daily. It seems to have helped lower her blood pressure, though. If it would help lower mine, I’d happily nauseate myself. But I still need to get myself under the care of a regular physician and go on prescription blood-pressure medication if that seems like the best answer.</p>
<p>I think the real “best answer” would be to buy a good treadmill, as I’ve been hoping to do since we moved, get out from under the financial burden of the old house, have three months’ mortgage payments in an emergency fund, get our overdraft protection loan and credit card debt payed down, and have some disposable income each month to work on maintaining and improving our new house. And an even better answer would involve regular contact with friends and family and people we are intentionally building community with. Under those circumstances I suspect my blood pressure wouldn’t be a problem, or would at least be much less of a problem.</p>
<p>I’d at least like the opportunity to find out, because I don’t think elevated blood pressure is by any means the <strong>only</strong> way in which our chronic stressors are harming me.</p>
<p>The juice wasn’t really enough of a breakfast, and I can’t actually go completely without caffeine without inviting a headache. So I got a coffee and a couple of day-old pastries from Joe and Rosie’s on Jackson Road.</p>
<p>My co-worker Patrick, who knows I am fond of dark chocolate, brought me a little treat from Pittsburgh! It’s a <a href="https://goodnowfarms.com/product/specialreservewhiskey/">Special Reserve, Whiskey</a> chocolate bar. It’s 77% cacao and it’s freaking delicious. He just spent a few days in Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>In 2005, I interviewed for a job in Pittsburgh; we were considering moving our family there. It was a weird weekend; on the one hand, I was excited about the possibility of working for the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, writing artificial intelligence code in Lisp. Pittsburgh seemed like a cool place. But on the other hand, I was nervous about taking a job in which I’d mostly be working on Department of Defense projects. And that same weekend, Hurricane Katrina was busy destroying New Orleans.</p>
<p>If I had gotten that job, and we had moved to Pittsburgh, we almost certainly would be living in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where just a few days ago a man shot up the Tree of Life synagogue, killing eleven and injuring six. And my family and I probably would have been in the crowd of thousands protesting Trump’s visit.</p>
<p>It’s a gloomy, rainy day and I’m not very enthusiastic about going to get lunch, both because of the weather and because of our money situation. So it looks like I am going to eat a couple of packets of instant grits at my desk and call that lunch. Maybe tomorrow I can re-stock the freezer with some more appealing lunch foods.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night Grace was out at a class, so Veronica put on a pot pie. She tried to enforce a strict schedule so that everyone could eat and if everyone stayed on track doing with their cleanup chores, we would have time for a story.</p>
<p>Spoiler: we didn’t have time for a story. But we weren’t <strong>that</strong> far off schedule. Veronica got the pot pie into the oven 20 minutes later than planned, which meant that it came out of the oven 20 minutes later than planned, at 8:20. I ate with four of the kids, including Elanor, who ate a startling quantity of chicken pot pie. Our housemate joined us for some pot pie. I got in the kitchen about 9:00 and got the dishwasher loaded up. Grace got home about 9:30 with Joshua and Pippin and they ate too.</p>
<p>Cleanup would have gone a lot quicker, but for the fact that there was once again a big burned-on mess in the oven. (It didn’t come from the pot pie — that was baked on a baking sheet which caught the drips). It had happened over the last couple of days.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem like I can blame our housemate or her boyfriend for this one. Because I’ve been getting conflicting stories. Grace tells me Veronica spilled butter all over the bottom of the oven when she made toast without putting it on a tray. Sam mentioned something else he apparently did. And I also found evidence that someone had apparently used oven cleaner in the oven, but not wiped it all out afterwards, which suggests that maybe our housemate or her boyfriend had <strong>also</strong> made a mess and mostly cleaned it up.</p>
<p>All this in the space of just a couple of days — and we have asked everyone, including our kids, again and again, to please, please use baking pans under things in the oven to catch drips.</p>
<p>I don’t want Veronica to handle over cleaner without supervision, so after dinner I sprayed the oven and let it sit for a while. Then I had her scrub the burned gunk out, with the fan running, while I supervised. Then I took the bottom panel out of the oven again and cleaned it a little more thoroughly in the sink to remove some lingering grease, while I had her clean the oven door and window. Then I put everything back together and heated up the oven a bit to dry it out.</p>
<p>I realize this is about the most boring topic I could possibly be writing about in my journal: “I cleaned the oven. Then I cleaned the oven again. Then it got dirty again. Then I cleaned it.” It’s boring the hell out of me. It feels like such a waste of my time. And it would be so nice if I only had to do this, say, once a month.</p>
<p>Joshua and Pippin would not stay on track for getting ready for bed after they were done eating, so — no story. They were only ten or fifteen minutes behind, but Grace wanted to make the point that they had many, many warnings throughout the day today about staying on track. And most of the time, staying on track and getting chores done on time is the exceedingly rare exception rather than the rule.</p>
<p>Looking at my blood pressure readings last night, it’s pretty clear that, at least so far, the CBD oil is having no beneficial effect on my blood pressure. Grace has gotten me an appointment with the new doctor she chose for our family, but that appointment is still about ten days away. So I am trying something else — last night I took 200mg (one tablet) of her labetalol, at bedtime, to see if I noticed any change in the morning. She takes it only at night because it makes her very sleepy and unable to drive.</p>
<p>I didn’t notice any reduction in blood pressure this morning but I will try this for a few days. I didn’t notice any side effects to speak of. I will continue the CBD oil because it does seem to have a slight relaxing effect, which might be good for my mood and other bodily systems, even if it is not helping my blood pressure. So I think I will probably finish this bottle, but not get another one.</p>
<p>Because Grace got back so late, we did not place a call to our our real estate agent to talk about the lease agreement. We talked over various options. Since I’ve been harboring so much stress about this, we think it is best if Grace communicates with her. I don’t want to wind up berating her or blowing my top. I think Grace is better able to be civil. We’re also going to let it go for a few more days, since there is nothing we we were really planning to <strong>do</strong> before next Tuesday, when Grace is planning to go up to the house to meet the company cleaning the ducts. Grace tells me the new furnace has been installed, so she can check on that and make sure the heat is set the way we want.</p>
<p>I got paid today and transfered the usual money to our secondary account. I have some bills coming up rapidly, though; there’s a credit card bill and a line of credit repayment due in two weeks. And our gas expenses have increased a lot with all the driving Grace is doing. So it’s discouraging. Another mortgage payment has gone through and nothing has bounced. That’s about the extent of the good news.</p>
<h3 id="moderan-2">Moderan</h3>
<p>I didn’t get to do much reading. I did manage to read another couple of short Moderan story by David Bunch while Grace got ready for bed. The first story is called “New Kings are Not for Laughing,” and it explains how our narrator, “Stronghold 10,” leaves the hospital where he has spent nine months being transformed into a cyborg, with only a few “flesh strip” remaining of his original human body:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With my portable flesh-strip feeder, my book of instructions for new-metal limb control, my plastic mechanical tear bags (for even a King must sometimes cry, you will allow) and all the other paraphernalia to get me started, or at least to sustain me until I should attain my Stronghold sanctuary, I sailed out from the hospital steps, the arrogant doctors watching. Something like a small iron frigate from the Old Days, I guess I was, loaded to the gunwales and standing forth on end.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s only one problem: he seems unable to find his new home, a sort of fort, also called “Stronghold 10.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After five hours of walking hard and going perhaps a stingy mile and a half, and some of that in circles, I stood lost in a little plastic draw, and quite bewildered. The vapor shield was scarlet August that burning month, the tin flowers were up in all the plastic plant holes, the rolling ersatz pastures were all aflutter with flash and flaunt of blooms. A sheen was in the air, a shimmer, and a million devils of heatstroke walked out and wrapped me close in my shell. And I was lost on this seventh day of hot August.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bunch’s prose here really pops, full of alliteration and beautiful strangeness. Along the way, Stronghold 10 meets an unmodified, aged human who served under him during the recent war, and urges him to come join him. But the un-altered human, named Morgbawn, is unenthusiastic:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Ah, no.” But there was still that tiny spark of hope, and I thought I detected it stronger now. YES! I was beginning to wonder if Morgbawn wasn’t finding it a worlds better idea, that of being up and moving with even just one flesh-strip in a pickle jar rather than to lie totally quiet out there, The Battles finally and forever completely renounced for him. “How about it?” “Maybe!” he said. “I don’t know. Come find me where I fall. We’ll keep in touch, maybe. It shouldn’t be long now. When I feel myself finally going, wherever I am, I’ll head for your place. I’ll struggle in as close as I can get. Come find me —” His face retreated and commenced to break up then, he started to move away, and I think in that one anguished moment I understood just a little better than I ever had before what it might be like to be, as Morgbawn surely was, at the very brink of the Forever Total Dark.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Obsession with, and fear of, death is a major theme in these stories. Stronghold 10 is now effectively immortal, but “effectively immortal” is not immortal; we have read in the introduction that this world of Moderan will pass, too.</p>
<p>In the next story, “One Time, a Red Carpet…,” Stronghold 10 finds his stronghold and approaches it, only to be warned away by automated systems. He must confront his fear of death and screw up his own courage to approach the “warning of the line,” maintaining faith that his own new “self” will not destroy him. It’s a crazy and funny juxtaposition, that in this future in which humans have abandoned their mortal bodies and put their faith in efficient technology, our narrator must act on faith:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>YES! we moved on toward the “warning of the line,” fixed in mind and all resolve to die. It might be long and tedious tedious years — wild crying, much praying, high yelling in the night and the gut-sickening fears that claw the hours — before we would attain this readiness again. So I increased the tempo of my going, set my hinges and traces to MAX and moved on to seize THE MOMENT at the “line” of Death. OH GOD… I was ready to KNOW… come zump blaster, come walking doll bomb, come high-up weird screaming wreck-wreck, come Death… come DEATH…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fact that Stronghold 10 is effectively threatened by its/his own new identity is not lost on it/him. In fact, this seems to be another theme in Bunch’s stories, the idea that warfare, and the technology of warfare, alienate us from ourselves:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A man killed by his own self before he could reach himself, stood off and threatened in front of the glorious union of selves. Well, that has happened, and often, I suppose. But this seemed, at least potentially, a little different kind of killing of one’s self. And yet, could I retreat from myself now, and ever face myself again in any mirror anywhere? Chancing, in the long years to come, by reservoirs for run-off, say, the water calm and placid, fixed for mirrors, what would I do? Run screaming? Turn off my head? Switch my eyes dark? Oh, when one cannot face the mirrors anywhere, what of a man is left?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What, indeed?</p>
<p>Maybe these little excerpts will give you a taste of just how very strange and energetic and, yes, beautiful Bunch’s prose really is. It’s remarkable, a little like Joyce, a little like Burroughs, a little like Lem. As I said, almost certainly not for everyone. But what a unique voice he has!</p>
<p>Looking at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_short_stories_by_David_R._Bunch">this list of stories</a>, I’m struck by how many of them are listed as uncollected. It’s great to have the <em>Moderan</em> collection back in print, but I think his work really cries out for a comprehensive edition of all his short stories — although, as the Wikipedia article states, it might not really be comprehensive, as “no definitive Bunch bibliography is known to exist.”</p>
<h3 id="retroblogging">Retroblogging</h3>
<p>As time allows I’ve been “retroblogging” — taking old blog posts that I wrote back in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003, cleaning up as many broken links as I can, and re-posting them on Blogger. Eventually I hope to have them all done. <a href="https://thebooksthatwroteme.blogspot.com/2018/11/retroblogging-iraq-war-february-24-2003.html">Here’s one, from February 24, 2003</a>. I feel that it’s important to not let the Gulf War I or the Iraq War fade into obscurity in our collective memories. It was quite possible at the time to use contemporary sources to know we were being lied into war. I read as much as I could: shelf-feet of books and articles, and listened to hundreds of hours of interviews. There was a ton of stuff out there for people that were looking for it. And anyone with even a passing understanding of our recent wars knew that it couldn’t possibly go well and achieve the stated objectives (which kept changing).</p>
<p>Only fifteen years later the false narrative is apparently the one Millennials and younger people grew up with. But the truth is still out there. Don’t let it be lost; if everyone accepts the conventional wisdom on Iraq, they will have little or no resistance to invading Iran.</p>
<p>The old posts on Iraq that I’m cleaning up — they have many broken links — are <a href="http://thepottshouse.org/blosxom.cgi/root/iraq">here</a>, in reverse chronological order. And there’s one more nearly-finished “retroblogged” post; I worked on <a href="https://thebooksthatwroteme.blogspot.com/2018/03/retroblogging-iraq-war-march-12-2003.html">this post</a> a few months ago, but it needs more work.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>Last night I went to Costco after work and picked up our usual Friday night salmon along with our usual staples like salad, chicken broth, eggs, and butter. They had some of the Birch Benders pancake mix available, but only a small amount — one flat, which was on top of a different brand. So I bought two bags. It seems like they are either low on the product or phasing it out. I’ll check on my next trip.</p>
<p>The kids had also requested a pizza, so I got one of their giant cheese pizzas, and a pumpkin pie. So we had quite a Friday night feast: salmon, rice, salad, cheese pizza, and pie. We ate quite late, though. It was about 9:00 when we got the meal on the table. The kids were quite sluggish about chores, so it was about midnight when we started reading stories. I read Benjamin, at his request, some little comics contained in a book about Scratch programming. Joshua volunteered to read a poem from <em>Runny Babbit</em> by Shel Silverstein — the one where Runny goes to a rancy festaurant. Then I read a few pages of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> and we sent the kids off to bed about 1:00.</p>
<h3 id="moderan-3"><em>Moderan</em></h3>
<p>I read another <em>Moderan</em> stories. I’m not going to list all the stories. As most of them are very short, I think that would become tedious. Many of them are not really stories in the usual sense. They don’t have an arc to them. They are more like vignettes that capture a particular moment in the life (after-life?) of Stronghold 10, and they frequently seem to be meditations on death. In “Battle Won” we read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But now we’re in the clear, thanks to science, our once-dirty Earth ball clean now, coated with plastic, our hardly-used air, mostly a decoration now, colored in beauty with a different hue each month (oh, lovely vapor shield!), our once garbage-wrecked oceans frozen to solid, with any surplus space-hauled long ago, and our temperatures as quiet and as changeless as ever we want them to be, through Season Control in Central. And the birds! The birds are colored tin now! And the animals all are engined. While the trees in ersatz leap through the planned Earth holes and bloom us up “real” leaves that last the course. AH MODERAN! Land where leaves do not drop; land of the plasto-coated land — sweet sweet my shard-hard home.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s hard to get a sense for whether my blood pressure is improving or not. I take four readings, two from each arm, each time. Some of the readings are pretty close to each other, but there are usually some outliers. If I ever put these into the computer I’ll probably wind up doing something like throwing out the highest and lowest, assuming they have a fair amount of error, and average the other two. But each reading is two numbers, so I’m not quite sure how to choose what to throw out. Anyway, I get an occasional green light on both numbers, but most of the readings show up on the meter with one or both lights yellow. I’ve never had a red light, so I guess that’s something. I took another one of Grace’s pills last night but it was hard to see if there was a clear effect in this morning’s numbers. Maybe on the weekend I should add an midday reading.</p>
<p>It’s quite cold in the house today as the heat is still not on. It was down near freezing last night and it’s only in the high forties now. There’s not much sun today, so we aren’t getting any solar gain to speak of through the windows. Maybe we’ll get some sun this afternoon and the house will warm up a big. We have an appointment for boiler service on Wednesday the 7th, so we have at least a few more days before we can get the heat on. I put on another Duraflame log, although the fireplaces don’t truly warm up the house much.</p>
<p>Don’t tell anyone but I didn’t get a shower or bath today and don’t intend to.</p>
<p>Grace got up and made herself a giant celery and apple juice, and me a less giant celery and apple juice. So I started out with that. Then I made us something more substantial. I fried up some small pieces of bacon, and then sautéed some sad leftover asparagus that has been in the refrigerator too long. It was past its prime, but I chopped off the tops and bottoms of the stems. I made two four-egg omelettes out of this bacon and asparagus, one for Grace and one for myself. Sam showed up so we gave him part of them. For the rest of the kids I toasted a tray of cinnamon raisin bagels with butter and served them with cream cheese. Joshua says he thinks they have too much cinnamon in them. No one else agrees with that assessment.</p>
<p>I think we’re going to have a relatively quiet day at home. I’m going to try to get through my bag full of medical co-pay bills and other bills and paperwork. The sun is coming out a little bit, so maybe the house will warm up. Maybe we can get out to Rolling Hills for a walk.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li>“Arachnids in the UK” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 Episode)</li>
<li><em>A Colony in a Nation</em> by Chris Hayes</li>
<li><em>Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal</em> by Eric Schlosser.</li>
<li><em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em> (2016 Boxed Set) by Philip Glass</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe – NOTE: look up how I refer to other books in this series bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (bedtime <strong>listening</strong>; Joshua’s been reading it out loud)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, November 3rd, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-77773079446188717822018-11-02T18:39:00.000-04:002018-11-03T15:53:03.873-04:00Retroblogging the Iraq War: February 24, 2003<h1 id="a-festival-of-gulf-war-related-links-february-24-2003">A Festival of Gulf War-Related Links (February 24, 2003)</h1>
<p><em>This blog post lived for many years on a Blosxom-generated page <a href="http://thepottshouse.org/blosxom.cgi/2003/02/24#festival_of_links">here</a>, and still does. <a href="http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/">Blosxom</a> is a great tool, but my workflow has changed; I now write everything in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown">Markdown</a> and generate HTML and other formats from that source. So to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the war, I have converted the old text to Markdown and generated fresh HTML using <a href="https://pandoc.org/">pandoc</a>, the Swiss Army knife of file formats. I found, however, that many of the original links have suffered from “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot">link rot</a>.”</em></p>
<p><em>Fortunately, I was able to find alternate sources for all of the links, as many of the original pages were preserved by the Internet Archive and could be found using the <a href="https://archive.org/web/">Wayback Machine</a>. If you find that a link has “decayed,” please leave a comment and I will do my best to fix it.</em></p>
<p>Here’s a small plethora of interesting links on the topic of Iraq.</p>
<p><strong>¶ 2</strong> Right after Colin Powell’s speech before the U.N. Security Council, I found two links: this one, from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030224173608/http://slate.msn.com/id/2078196">Slate</a>, called “Smoking Gun - Colin Powell delivers the goods on Saddam,” and this one, from <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/powell-fails-make-case/">The Nation</a>, entitled “Powell Fails to Make the Case.” I listened to Powell’s speech live, and felt that he failed to announce anything truly damning; most of what he said was highly speculative (the nature of the truck on the grounds of a former chemical facility; drawings based on an eyewitness account of a mobile bio-weapons lab; arguments regarding the exact nature and purpose of those aluminum tubes). His rhetoric was strong but his “smoking gun” — clear evidence that Iraq has undisclosed weapons of mass destruction ready to throw at us or a regional target — was, as Powell himself acknowledged before his talk, not there.</p>
<p><strong>¶ 3</strong> For some alternate takes on Powell’s evidence, check out <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html">The Democratic Underground</a> which discusses how the alleged mobile bioweapons labs are not backed up by much in the way of compelling evidence, along with other cases of Bush himself presenting lies regarding Iraq. In a page from the <a href="http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html">Traprock Peace Center</a> Glen Rangwala dissects many of Powell’s claims and states convincingly that “In general, Powell makes some plausible claims that Iraq has not stood by the letter of the law in all respects. However, he does not show that Iraq has developed weapons on any scale, or that it has the potential to threaten Iraq’s own people or its neighbors, much less the U.S. Nor does he show that Iraq may be able to develop its non-conventional capacity if weapons inspectors continue their work in Iraq.” And if you can’t sleep out of concern that Iraq may have nukes, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030313001432/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15206">this</a> article from Alternet may help to calm you.</p>
<p><strong>¶ 4</strong> It should be obvious that Iraq can only prove that it has destroyed particular weapons or provided access to particular sites; Iraq cannot prove that it has no banned weapons. Can you prove there is no anthrax stockpiled in Texas? Geov Parrish writes in <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080509202019/http://eatthestate.org/07-12/AtLastEvidence.htm">this</a> essay that “The onus is not on Iraq to prove a negative… it is instead Washington’s responsibility to prove a positive: not only does a threat exist, but it is so grave and so immediate that it endangers the security of the United States, and that no other options exist but to invade.” In his discussion on The Connection (see my previous weblog entries) Noam Chomsky argued that the case against war should, of course, be automatic; the case for war must be strong enough to overwhelm the normal moral objections that should automatically arise when contemplating the use of force. We seem to have that backwards, at least in our president’s rhetoric: he wants what can’t be given, and when he doesn’t get it, he’ll start bombing.</p>
<p><strong>¶ 5</strong> Indeed, Iraq has improved its level of cooperation and is now allowing flyovers and other improved intelligence-gathering, but you wouldn’t necessarily know about the extent of Iraq’s cooperation, if you got your news from cnn.com. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030302033148/http://www.takebackthemedia.com/news-cnnedit.html">This</a> article shows how CNN removed 750 words from the transcript of Hans Blix’s speech before the U.N. Fortunately, I also listened to that talk live, and so heard the entire thing, and so realized that CNN’s transcript was incomplete; this illustrates the importance of using primary sources wherever possible!</p>
<p><strong>¶ 6</strong> For some background material on the Iraqui regime and how to counter some of the persistent misconceptions out there, see “Counterspin: Pro-war mythology” <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/13/1041990224220.html">here</a> and for a pair of articles about the war from Alternet, see what Nobel laureate <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030224011810/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15084">Jimmy Carter</a> has to say about the necessity of a war in Iraq, and what <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15151">Wendell Berry</a> has to say about the New New World Order (the White House’s National Security Strategy, published, as they say, “in the wake of September 11th.”)</p>
<p>I’m proud to say that I have exposed myself to exactly ZERO minutes of network or cable television news coverage about this issue, and I think everyone could benefit from doing the same. Do a little independent reading and thinking and you will quickly conclude that there is far from a consensus for a repeat of Gulf War I or the need for such an action. And don’t forget to remember to take a look at what your government is busy doing while your attention is directed from national events to this international “crisis.”</p>
<p><strong>¶ 8</strong> Meanwhile, if you’ve found yourself receiving an e-mail petition to forward to the United Nations, please don’t forward it; it’s a hoax. A well-meaning hoax no doubt, but the U.N. has no means of validating, receiving, and processing an enormous number of “e-petitions,” and nothing in particular to do with them once they are received. See <a href="http://www.snopes.com/rumors/un.htm">snopes.com</a>.</p>
<p><strong>¶ 9</strong> For a reminder of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030312202335/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15200">why all this matters</a>, read Sen. Robert Byrd’s speech “War: The Most Horrible Human Experience.”</p>
<h2 id="link-notes">Link Notes</h2>
<p><em>I have provided additional information about the links, such as title, author, and source, when I could find it, in the hope that if a link breaks again in the future, it might be possible to hunt down alternate online sources. If you can help track down broken links to sources, please leave a comment.</em></p>
<p><strong>¶ 2 “Right after Colin Powell’s speech…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Original link: <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2078196">Slate</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030224173608/http://slate.msn.com/id/2078196">“Smoking Gun: Colin Powell delivers the good on Saddam” by Fred Kaplan, Wednesday, February 5, 2003</a></li>
<li>Original link: <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030224&s=kvh">The Nation</a>; restored link: <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/powell-fails-make-case/">“Powell Fails to Make Case” by Katrina vanden Heuvel, February 6, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 3 “For some alternate takes…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>The original link still works: <a href="https://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html">“Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His ‘Techniques of Deceit’” by Dennis Hans, February 12, 2003</a></li>
<li>The original link still works: <a href="http://www.grassrootspeace.org/firstresponse.html">“Claims in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s UN Presentation Concerning Iraq” by Glen Rangwala, February 5, 2003</a>. The site has been updated since then; it refers to a <a href="http://grassrootspeace.org/rangwalafirstresponse.pdf">PDF file</a>.</li>
<li>Original link: <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15206">this</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030313001432/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15206">“The Nuclear Bomb Hoax” by Imad Khadduri, February 18, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 4 “It should be obvious…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Original link: <a href="http://www.eatthestate.org/07-12/AtLastEvidence.htm">this</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080509202019/http://eatthestate.org/07-12/AtLastEvidence.htm">“At Last, Evidence” by Geov Parrish, in “Eat the State: a Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor,” Volume 7, #12, February 12, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 5 “Indeed, Iraq has improved…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Original link: <a href="http://www.takebackthemedia.com/news-cnnedit.html">This</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030302033148/http://www.takebackthemedia.com/news-cnnedit.html">“CNN leaves 750 words out of Blix Transcript” from Take Back the Media, February 14, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 6 “For some background material…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>The original link still works: <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/counterspin-pro-war-mythology-20030128-gdg3o6.html">The Sydney Morning Herald, “Counterspin: Pro-war Mythology,” Uncredited, January 28, 2003</a></li>
<li>Original link: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15084">Jimmy Carter</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030224011810/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15084">“An Alternative to War” by Jimmy Carter, February 3, 2003</a></li>
<li>Original link: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15151">Wendell Berry</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030305033605/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15151">“A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the U.S.A.” by Wendell Berry, Orion Magazine, February 10, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 8 “Meanwhile…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>The original link still works: <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peace-pipe/">Snopes, “U.N. Petition: Send a Petition to the United Nations to stop World War III?”</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>¶ 9 “For a reminder…”</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Original link: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15200">why all this matters</a>; restored link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030312202335/https://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15200">“War: The Most Horrible Human Experience” by Senator Robert Byrd, February 17, 2003</a></li>
</ul>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-51513552105351651672018-10-28T01:15:00.004-04:002018-10-28T01:19:22.530-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, October 27th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>Yesterday got crazily busy and Grace has been quite tired, so things didn’t quite go as I hoped yesterday. We spent much of the day driving around. Almost all the rest was spent cooking and cleaning up.</p>
<p>The kids got up and had leftovers from our barbecue dinner out, but not all of us had leftovers, so I made a small batch of blueberry pancakes. There was a lot of kitchen cleanup to get through. I also wanted to get Sam in the tub and give him a thorough hair-washing. It was pretty dirty. Grace asked me to do it because, well, to put it bluntly, his hair smelled bad.</p>
<p>I had him soak in the tub for a while, then washed his hair twice using only conditioner, and trimmed it with our Wahl electric clipper. I used only conditioner because Grace had suggested that regimen for some of the kids with very curly hair. The conditioner-only regimen seems to work well with Benjamin and Joshua, but their hair is much more tightly curled. Sam’s is more wavy, although it still has a somewhat rough texture. All the kids have some combination of Jewish, African, and Northern European genes, but each has a slightly different combination. So each kid’s hair texture is noticeably different than all the others.</p>
<p>After trimming it, it looked better, but it was clear that his scalp was still dirty. He doesn’t like to get his head wet, so he doesn’t often get in there with his fingertips and vigorously scrub it. So we put him back in the tub and I washed it twice more with Grace’s homemade shampoo, made of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_black_soap">African black soap</a>. I also worked his scalp over thoroughly with a scalp massager brush. That got a lot of dead skin and loose hair out, and afterwards his hair was <strong>much</strong> cleaner and smelled much better, although I should go over it again in a few days. It also left a huge ring in the tub. Joshua looked at it and said that it looked like we had given the planet Saturn a bath. (Joshua’s sense of humor is unique). The tub had been draining slowly for a day or two, but this was more than the drain could handle; it was now almost completely plugged.</p>
<p>Grace put on a tray of small, extremely hot red peppers from our friends’ farm. The plan was to roast them, then blend them up into a hot sauce.</p>
<p>About three o’clock Joshua asked Grace if she was going to take him and Pippin to the pumpkin farm. We had completely forgotten that they were signed up to spend a few hours at the farm with the chorus, where they had a corn maze and other Halloween things. So I asked Sam to let the tub finish draining (very, very slowly), and when it was done, to wipe it out with paper towels rather than trying to wash the soap scum and hair down the drain.</p>
<p>We got them there quite late. The farm is just past the Eastern edge of Washtenaw County, in Wayne County. I always think of Wayne County, the county where Detroit and most of its suburbs are, as all paved. But in fact the Western edge is pretty rural in parts.</p>
<p>Anyway, we got them there only about 30 minutes late, which is unfortunately pretty typical for us. While they were having fun, Grace and I ran a couple of errands. She dropped me off at Lowe’s and she went to Gordon Food Service. I was looking for some LED bulbs that would fit into the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom. It was designed for old “A” type incandescent bulbs, and a lot of LED replacement bulbs are too long or too wide, including the last box I bought at Costco, 100 watt-equivalent Feit brand 3000K “bright white” bulbs that are 100W replacements. I also wasn’t really happy with the “bright white.” They aren’t as bluish as the 5000K “daylight” version, but still too blue to want in our bedroom.</p>
<p>I think evidence is starting to accumulate that the high-energy blue wavelengths from some LED bulbs <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5313540/">can cause eye injury</a>. I think the bulbs I used in our the upstairs bathroom in our old house in Saginaw may have damaged my eyes, over and above what I might have reasonably expected from aging. Of course, I don’t have a control set of eyeballs to compare them to. But in any case I wound up buying GE Relax 60 watt-equivalent bulbs in “warm white,” and they look a lot better in our ceiling fan fixture and also in the bathroom light fixture. I had thought that the “middle” color, of the three Feit options, would look “normal” to me — that is, like the color of an incandescent bulb. But no, it appears that if I want the light to look like an incandescent bulb, I need to go with the “warm” version.</p>
<p>Years ago I used to get Chromalux full spectrum light bulbs to use in reading lamps. They are incandescent bulbs that look purple when not turned on. They are made of glass that contains neodymium, which supposedly makes the bulb emits a more balanced spectrum than that emitted by standard incandescent bulbs. The old Chromalux bulbs apparently had a color temperature of 3200K, which is much closer to the “warm white” LED bulbs than to the “bright white” or “daylight” versions. Apparently you can still get Chromalux incandescent bulbs, although I’m unclear on how they can be sold under the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” Maybe they are exempt as “specialty bulbs?” Apparently GE also sells similar “reader light” bulbs including 150-watt and 200-watt bulb. That seems almost criminally decadent when a 60-watt equivalent LED draws about 9 watts. I don’t actually want to go back to heating my house with light bulbs, but I do want to figure out how to live with less eyestrain and, possibly, eye damage, especially as I get older.</p>
<p>When I opened up the bathroom fixture I found that the Feit bulb I had put in there was extremely hot. I would have expected an incandescent bulb in there to be quite hot, but I was a little surprised that an LED bulb was putting out so much heat. I had thought that the reduced electricity consumption in these bulbs meant that they turned a much higher portion of that electric current into light, and much less into heat, than an incandescent bulb. So I’m puzzled, and that heat can’t really be good for prolonging the life of the bulb. Maybe the 60-watt equivalent, which is also a bit smaller, will operate at a lower temperature.</p>
<p>I also bought drain cleaner. I’ve been using gallon jugs of Zep brand 10-Minute Hair Clog Remover for the bathtub drain that I can’t snake at all, because of the stupid non-removable stopper. That sometimes requires two or even three treatments before the drain gets moving again. They didn’t have it, so I got three smaller bottles of Liquid-Plumr Hair Clog Eliminator. My wife and my kids, especially my daughter who has grown her curly hair out long, put an awful lot of hair down the drain.</p>
<p>I also got some more of the green pads to scrub pots and pans, and some of the silvery steel scrubbers as well, which take off some baked-on grease that is hard to get off with the green pads. Things seem cheaper at Lowe’s than at Home Depot, although I did not do an item-to-item comparison.</p>
<p>Grace picked up some smoked ham hocks to use for cooking black-eyed peas, and some apple juice as requested by her friend.</p>
<p>We had just enough time to go get coffee and bagels at Tim Horton’s, before we had to go pick up Joshua and Pippin. Well, actually we had <strong>almost</strong> enough time. We got there a few minutes after the planned pick-up time. But our kids’ chaperone and the group of kids she was going around with had not actually come out yet, so we didn’t wind up making anyone wait for us.</p>
<p>On the way home Grace stopped at a place on Ellsworth called Think Outside the Books, which we had driven past on our way to Lowe’s. I had never heard of this place and when we passed it the first time, it wasn’t even clear to me that it was actually a bookstore. On the way back we stopped and found that in fact it was a huge used bookstore, but it was in the process of shutting down, because the owner had been unable to pay his rent. So the store was nearing the end of several rounds of price reductions; it was a dollar a book, or a box for ten dollars. Grace wanted to check on how things were going at home, so she left me there for a while with Joshua and Pippin. I skimmed through the shelves. The inventory was very picked-over, and the books were a huge mess, very disorganized and stuffed messily on the shelves. I found very little that I was interested in at all. Meanwhile Grace was gone a long time. It turned out that she had called Veronica, who asked her if she would take her to a St. Francis youth group event. So Grace drove her to St. Francis, then came back to get us. Then she took us back home, and went to pick up Veronica.</p>
<p>She thought Veronica was done at 7:15, but it turns out she had read something about a different event, so she wasn’t done for another hour. So she had to wait quite a while. She didn’t get back until well after 8:00.</p>
<p>This, readers, is how we can manage to use something like $40 worth of gas in a single weekend without even trying. I’m glad that the kids are getting out and doing things — for the first year or so after we moved, they weren’t doing all that much outside the house. But we are using more than twice as much gas as we used to. I haven’t tried to figure it all out but I think between choir, choir-related activites, youth group, regular doctor appointments for Grace, speech therapy for Sam, trips to Grass Lake to visit our friends, and assorted other trips, we are probably spending over $200 a week on gas now.</p>
<p>While Grace was out with Elanor to go get Veronica, I tried a bottle of the new drain cleaner. That worked the first try, although it took a whole lot of water to rinse it all down. Foam kept coming out of the overflow drain. I wanted to make sure I got all that stuff rinsed down since I didn’t want anyone with an accidental chemical burn.</p>
<p>When Grace got back, she remembered the peppers. They were… <strong>very</strong> well-roasted. I think the best word is “carbonized.” I tasted one, and it was like eating burnt paper. They unfortunately were a total loss; even blended with something moist, like tomato paste, they would have made it black and bitter-tasting. But even burnt to a crisp, the seeds inside the pepper were not burned up, and still <strong>extremely</strong> hot. I guess we could have tried to separate out the seeds, but I wasn’t up for dissecting the burned peppers with gloves on to keep the capsaicin off my hands. We’ll have to see if our friends have any peppers left. It’s a shame. We were looking forward to a nice scalding home-made hot sauce to warm us up in January.</p>
<p>Speaking of warming us up in January, we still haven’t gotten a call back from the company we’ve been calling to arrange to have our gas boiler serviced. So the heat is still off. This must be their busy season. But we still need to get our heat on! It isn’t that cold yet, but we want to have it available in November.</p>
<p>So what we thought was going to be a mostly-free day, with time to write and finish a podcast, turned out not be free, at all, but very busy. When Grace got back she was quite tired. We had to recruit several kids to help get dinner ready. We made a giant box of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_mix">Jiffy Mix</a> corn muffin mix, in our biggest cast-iron pan. Veronica threw a ham hock and black-eyed peas in the instant pot. Then we made a dish out of the smaller “salad” turnips and their greens. That involved rinsing the greens several times — they are very gritty. I had to take over from Veronica and rinse them a couple more times. Then, she chopped them up. But when we threw them in the pan on high heat, I realized she had made them very irregular, because the recipe just said “cut them in half,” but the recipe imagined that the turnips would be pretty much all the same size. These were not, so we had her cut up the larger chunks with kitchen shears while they were cooking. The recipe called for searing them on high heat, to get some nice browning going, then cooking them longer with liquid to soften. We threw in some of the leftover white Bordeaux wine and a little honey, then adding the chopped greens and softening them up on a lower temperature. (The recipe called for apple cider vinegar, but Grace wanted to use the wine instead; I’m not sure why. Maybe Grace thought her somewhat touchy stomach wouldn’t handle the vinegar well).</p>
<p>The black-eyed peas were delicious, and the kids always love the sweet cornbread from the Jiffy mix. The turnip dish — well, the turnips were from very late in the season, and they were pretty bitter. The white wine and honey was, I think, too subtle. The cooked turnips and greens were much better with more salt and some white wine vinegar to cut the bitterness. The leaves of the greens were fine but the stems were too hard. Probably we needed to separate them and start sautéeing the stems first, so that they would cook longer. But whatever — we got the kids to eat some very healthy greens. Most of them, at least; I think Pippin refused, but he did eat some black-eyed peas with smoked ham hock.</p>
<p>We didn’t finish eating until almost 11:00. Our housemate smelled the cornbread and came down to eat some of that with us, although I don’t think she ate anything else. We had a reasonably good conversation. I forgot to mention the <strong>gum</strong>. Someone’s been giving either her kids or our kids gum, and so I’ve been having to scrape dirty stuck-on chewing gum off our hardwood floors.</p>
<p>There was a lot of kitchen cleanup. Grace’s energy level was fading. So I fortified myself by finishing off about half a bottle of the white Bordeaux. It didn’t really improve, in my estimation. I still don’t think it was very good. But it was good enough to finish drinking. Grace got the kids to brush their teeth and clean up the dining table and floor. Our housemate helped sweep. I was done in the kitchen by about 1:00 a.m. and Grace and I finally got Elanor settled down and our lights out by about 1:45.</p>
<p>As a last-ditch effort to get a podcast done, I brought up my little Olympus LS-10 digital recorder. I was going to use that to record a conversation before we went to sleep, with a plan to actually produce and upload it Monday night. I thought maybe we could spend a little time talking about how it was our seventeenth wedding anniversary, and what we remembered and looked back on from those dizzying seventeen years. But baby Elanor wasn’t quiet yet — in fact, she was very much the opposite of quiet. So I had to give up on that plan. And not only did we not get a podcast up, I didn’t even manage to get a blog post up explaining that we weren’t going to get a podcast up. Maybe if things go very smoothly tomorrow…</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>During the night there was a nasty smell in the room. It smelled like someone had either vomited in bed or had an attack of diarrhea. That was pretty awful. I went around and felt everyone’s bed and bottom. I couldn’t find the source. Maybe someone just had really, really foul-smelling gas? I thought it might have been a mess in the bathroom, but it also smelled like it was coming from our bedroom.</p>
<p>Later during the night Joshua was up with diarrhea, although he made it to the toilet. About 2:00 a.m., our housemate’s boyfriend was leaving for his work shift. He insists on wearing his shoes in the house, so his tromping around in the bathroom over our heads tends to wake me up. This morning a couple of the kids seem to be sick with sore throats. I’m not feeling my best either, although I’m not feeling terrible. I didn’t have any noticeable fever. It did seem like I was having trouble digesting dinner, although that may be partly because the turnips and greens were older, maybe not cooked enough to completely soften the stems, and so hard to digest.</p>
<p>So maybe another virus is working its way through the household. Grace and the kids will probably take it easy for most of the day, although I know she has two more appointments in the afternoon.</p>
<p>I had a toasted bagel with peanut butter for breakfast, at Joe and Rosie’s on Jackson, along with a latte made with almond milk. I don’t have any lunch food left in my office, so I’ll have to go find something that sounds appealing for lunch.</p>
<p>I’m really, really hoping I don’t have to miss work due to illness, my illness or anyone else’s. I want to have my few precious vacation days available for the birth of the new baby. But kids are unfortunately little virus bombs, and I don’t always get to veto the viruses.</p>
<p>I was wrong — it looks like I did have some spicy ramen noodles left at work! So I’m microwaving that for lunch. Sometimes past me is not actually a total asshole to present me.</p>
<p>I had a strange voice mail on my work phone from an unknown number in Austin. I didn’t answer it, thinking it was probably a recruiter call. But I got a two-minute voice mail message e-mailed to me by the phone system. The message consisted entirely of crackling noises, like a bad phone line. Strange. But maybe it’s appropriate for Halloween season — is there a ghost in the machine?</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>To quote my friend Sean Hurley, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iuRPf9RIZg">“It’s Tired and I’m Late.”</a>. Last night was kind of difficult. I didn’t have enough lunch; my bowl of spicy ramen didn’t quite sustain me until I got home, so I was a bit shaky when I got in a little before 8:00.</p>
<p>I ate a couple of squares of the Pascha 85% dark chocolate to try to give myself enough fortitude to face the evening at home. While Grace and Elanor and I munched a little chocolate, we looked more closely at the purple package it came in. It’s covered with little logos: “USDA Organic,” “Non-GMO,” “UTZ Certified Cocoa,” “Certified Vegan,” “Paleo Certified,” “Celiac Support Association,” “1% for the Planet,” and a kosher “U” logo. Do any of those mean that the cocoa wasn’t harvested or processed with child labor or slave labor? <a href="https://utz.org/what-we-offer/sector-change/child-labor/">UTZ Says So</a>, but are they an authority I should trust on this issue? Should I be looking for <a href="https://www.fairtradecertified.org/shopping-guides/fair-trade-chocolate">Fair Trade Certification</a> instead? It has always seemed to me that the Fair Trade chocolate tasted worse, and I really like this Pascha chocolate; I like it better than the Green and Black brand, and the Endangered Species brand. But I just don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be buying chocolate at all. That’s a horrible thought.</p>
<p>Grace gave me an update. None of the kids had been very sick, but several were not feeling great. Joshua had napped. The foul smells the previous night had probably been children with a virus and bad gas, not actual vomit or diarrhea.</p>
<p>No news from our realtor yet. The furnace guy is ready to install the replacement furnace, if we tell him to go ahead.</p>
<p>Grace and the kids had dinner well underway, and so we were able to get dinner on the table quickly. And dinner was great — we had lamb steaks, Veronica had done all the chopping and prep work to make a dish with all the rest of the eggplant from our friends’ farm, and I made a pot of basmati rice with tomatoes. (I stir-fried 3 cups of rice in butter, then added about 4 cups of water and a can of diced tomatoes and set it to pressure-cook on manual for ten minutes, doing a manual release as soon as it was done — it came out great).</p>
<p>I’m not sure what we’d call the eggplant dish. It was kind of like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille">ratatouille</a>, and kind of like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caponata">caponata</a>. But whatever you call it, it was delicious.</p>
<p>After two disappointing bottles of white wine from Costco, I decided I’d better taste the red wine I have been buying for our holiday meals — are Costco’s buyers just asleep on the job this year?</p>
<p>At least, that was the excuse I needed to open one of the two bottles of 2015 Castello di Monsanto Chianti Classico. I’m happy to report that this wine is quite delicious, with nice oak, leather and tobacco aromas, and a lot of stewed fruit flavor. Grace had only a small taste but agreed that it was pretty decent Chianti. I could only manage one glass, so we’ve got almost 3/4ths of the bottle left. This is why I have been hesitant to open up bottles to pre-screen the wines; I can’t get through the bottles myself without drinking more than I would usually drink. But if I can manage to pick up a beef roast at Costco tonight, we will happily throw it in the Instant Pot with the rest of this Chianti, and I expect the result to taste good enough that no one will feel that we wasted good wine.</p>
<p>So, over the course of my next few Costco trips, in the weeks remaining before Thanksgiving, I’ll pick up two or three more bottles of this Chianti, and I’ll be pleased to serve it at our holiday meals. I should probably also taste the rosé that I’ve bought two bottles of, to see if I’m satisfied with it, and if so, buy another bottle or two of that. just leaves a white wine to sort out. I’ve got one more bottle to try. I’m not happy with it, I’ll try Trader Joe’s, to see if I can find something decent in a mid-priced white wine. Then I just need a few bottles of a decent dessert wine and I think we’ll be set.</p>
<p>Anyway, dinner was delicious, but while we were finishing up the meal, our housemate was making instant oatmeal, because it seemed that once again she could not eat what we were cooking, and once again would not <strong>collaborate</strong> — wouldn’t suggest something else to eat, or help prepare something we could all eat. Early on, Grace got fed up with trying; she’d take our housemate’s requests for a dinner, and cook it with her, only to have her completely refuse to eat it. So, again, she was cooking a different meal for herself, although I think her kids ate our food — maybe not the eggplant dish, as I wouldn’t necessarily expect kids to like that, but I think they ate some of the lamb and some of the rice.</p>
<p>Because Grace had been relentlessly cracking the whip for hours to have the kids help her get dinner ready, we were eating at a fairly reasonable hour — I think it was only about 8:30 or so. So it seemed reasonable to think we would get the meal cleaned up and have time to watch the third episode of the new season of <em>Doctor Who</em>.</p>
<p>After dinner our housemate and her boyfriend were in the kitchen doing something and they were loud. She was yelling at him and calling him the n-word. I really don’t love having that happen around my kids. I could not bring myself to go in there while they were having what I called a “fight” and Grace called a “conversation.” He was again wearing pants that left his entire underwear-clad rear end showing. That’s another one of the things I have some trouble with. I just don’t feel that I should be seeing rear end, even accidentally, when he’s just walking around the house, or I’m trying to clean up dinner. I’m also not really pleased that he dresses like this in front of my kids; I don’t think they are going to emulate him, but it is something I don’t really want to explain, and something I really don’t feel <strong>qualified</strong> to explain.</p>
<p>I’m aware that as a white person, trying to talk to a black person about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagging_(fashion)">sagging</a> is not likely to go well, and I don’t <strong>actually</strong> want to lecture him about respectability politics. After all, I am currently growing my hair long again, not <strong>despite</strong> the fact that it signals certain things, but <strong>because</strong> it does. And I <strong>don’t</strong> believe that convincing black folks to <strong>signal</strong> respectability by emulating white fashion is really the answer to anything. There’s no amount of signaling black folks can do that will <strong>solve</strong> structural racism, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.</p>
<p>What would Miss Manners do with a guest whose pants were falling off? I think the answer to most etiquette questions is to avoid causing embarrassment or expressing needless criticism. What would Emily Post have to say to a guest who calls another guest the n-word? The mind goes blank at the thought. I’m left without a response, and yet, while at the same time, I don’t want my kids to overhear them speaking to each other like this. The sagging pants make me <strong>feel</strong> like he is actively and continually insulting us, the way that drunken college students might <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooning">moon</a> each other. And by extension, it feels like he’s insulting my family, and our values. But I also feel like this is a minefield I don’t want to step onto. I don’t think it would actually go well if, say, I offered him a belt.</p>
<p>This conflict is simply one more reason why I mostly just try to avoid being around him.</p>
<p>Anyway.</p>
<p>We were struggling to get the kids to clear the table. They kept disappearing into our bedroom to play on the computer. We’d send Joshua in to get Veronica and Sam to come out and help, and Joshua would stay in there. They kept disappearing. Nothing was getting done.</p>
<p>After thirty or forty minutes of frustrating, trying to keep the kids on track, I was starting to feel very stressed, so I went down into the basement to get the video downloaded and ready to show. iTunes gave me a lot of trouble. When I tried to download the file from the iTunes store, it would say that it was ready to play, but then it wouldn’t actually finish downloading. I started getting error messages telling me to try again later. The file in my library would show a little error icon, a circle with an exclamation point inside it, but clicking on this icon would not display an error; it would turn into a play button, but wouldn’t play. I quit the iTunes application and re-launched it and started the download again, and the file downloaded without any issues. There was not actually a network problem; iTunes was just in a screwed-up state. It really just seems like each version has become progressively more buggy.</p>
<p>More time went by. I practiced singing the vocal tracks from “The Sounds of Silence” with my loop pedal. I sounded terrible. I tried singing along with the isolated harmony track. That worked, but the original song is in too high a key, and so I couldn’t sing the melody part above it; it goes right up out of my range. I gave up. Even more time went by. Eventually Joshua came down and I asked him if everyone was ready to watch a video. He went back up to check. And yet more time went by.</p>
<p>Joshua came back down in tears because Grace had told him, accurately, that there was no more time left to watch the movie. I didn’t disagree with her. We had waited something like an hour and 45 minutes for the kids to get through the routine clearing of the table, wiping down the table, sweeping up the floor, and loading and starting the dishwasher. So I shut everything down and went back upstairs. Joshua was tearful.</p>
<p>We suggested that there would still be time for a story if everyone got ready for bed quickly. Guess how that went?</p>
<p>Grace had been burning candles earlier, on a high shelf, to try to kill some of the foul smell of sick-child farts. Somehow Benjamin had poured melted candle wax all over one of the kids’ beds. He had also jammed the bathroom sink stopper all the way down, so I had to get under the sink to force it back out. The kids had also left a lot of junk in our bedroom, and had apparently also been eating in there, which is forbidden. So instead of reading a bedtime story, we made the kids clean up our bedroom. So we had to stay up for that.</p>
<p>The stress is of everything going on is getting to me. When we finally got the kids on to bed, I tried to calm myself down. Talking with Grace about how we might pay for our furnace repairs and boiler repairs and any further car repairs was actually starting to trigger a panic attack. We really, really need to hear from our realtor about whether she is going to agree to rent our house — or not. I need some information, so we can make some hard decisions about money. And the ongoing situation with our housemate is just not something I want to try to wrestle with, on top of all this. I’m just trying to stay out of their way and avoid being in situations that are going to stress me out further.</p>
<p>This morning I had breakfast at Harvest Moon Café. I wanted to try something other than my usual breakfast BLT sandwich, so I got a breakfast burrito. It wasn’t great. I got a few more pages read in <em>The Ice Schooner</em>. Someone is trying to sabotage the ship on it’s journey across the ice to New York City. It’s honestly a pretty exciting story! I just wish I had a few quiet hours to finish reading it.</p>
<p>I heard from Grace that Elanor is not feeling well today. She’s apparently having a mild reaction to a vaccination she got yesterday. I’m not feeling too great myself. Physically there’s nothing really wrong with me, but my stress level is through the roof, and if this doesn’t change soon I very well might start to suffer some real health consequences. Even if nothing acute happens, the chronic, long-term stress certainly isn’t doing me any good. Something’s got to give, soon.</p>
<p>I’ll head to Costco tonight.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>After work last night I went to Costco and got a few things including a pot pie, a small pot roast, and two more bottles of that Chianti. Grace had asked me to bring graham crackers and marshmallows, but Costco didn’t have them. When I got home, Grace was out, but there was a small bonfire in our brick fire pit in the front yard, and a few of the kids were sitting around the fire. She had wanted to make s’mores, but it wasn’t working out.</p>
<p>I had the kids help me unload the car and put things away. Grace arrived shortly after that. It was about 8:30 and dinner wasn’t underway. She’d been thinking of eating the pork medallions. I suggested we use up the rest of the Chianti and put the pot roast in the Instant Pot. Veronica assembled a salad from one of the Costco salad kits. Grace chopped up some celery and carrots and threw them in and we told the Instant Pot to pressure-cook the roast for 30 minutes. I got out that 100% rye bread from Mother Loaf to eat with dinner and we went back outside while the Instant Pot did its thing.</p>
<p>We had only a small amount of firewood, one of those bundles you can buy at gas stations. So the fire didn’t last very long, but it was beautiful while it lasted. The moon was nearly full, and there was that chill in the air, without too much humidity.</p>
<p>When we served up the roast and sliced it up, it was still very rare in the middle, and the vegetables weren’t very soft. 30 minutes had not really been enough time. So we put half the meat back in for another ten minutes. Pippin seemed completely willing to eat the rare pot roast, which we found a little bit startling. After another ten minutes it was more thoroughly cooked and the broth was better-tasting.</p>
<p>Because we ate late, <em>Doctor Who</em> wasn’t really on the table, but a bedtime story was. At least, until it wasn’t. Cleanup was slow and uncertain. So we didn’t have a bedtime story for the kids. Before going to sleep I read Grace and Joshua part of the introduction, and the first few chapters, of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson. That book’s been on the shelf waiting for us, but it has been hidden behind a second row of books.</p>
<p>There was no real news to speak of yesterday about the lease agreement. We have arranged to have a new furnace put into the old house, at a cost of about three thousand dollars. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pay for it. The worst-case scenario is that I’ll write a check that will overdraw our checking account and hit our overdraft protection line of credit for at least two thousand. If we go ahead with the lease, I will also have to pay for some tree removal work, which will cost another thousand dollars. Paying for both the furnace and the tree removal would probably eat up our entire overdraft protection line of credit. So I probably won’t do that unless our realtor agrees to the lease arrangement; if she does, I might be able to pay for most of the tree removal with her November rent payment. Then maybe I could use her December rent payment to start knocking down the overdraft. It’s all kind of a high-wire act. If we do this we will have racked up just about every bit of credit we have access to.</p>
<p>If she signs, I might also try to get a small bank loan to cover the furnace work, because I can probably get a much better interest rate that way, and keep the overdraft protection line of credit available for future emergencies.</p>
<p>I might also get an annual bonus in December, but I think it would arrive only <strong>just</strong> before Christmas, which will be too late to pay for the furnace, the tree removal, the gas boiler repair at our new house, etc. So at best it might only help me set aside some emergency money, or pay down some debt I’ve racked up.</p>
<p>We had a fairly large escrow shortfall on our new house — almost $2,000. So they are raising my monthly mortgage payment. I think the increase is bigger than my recent increase in take-home pay. At best, it’s pretty much a wash, which is just one more of the things that make me feel like I’m running in place. If I wanted to pay it in a lump sum, I could keep my mortgage payment closer to what it is now. But I just can’t write that check. I should look closely at their numbers. I don’t think they are allowed, legally, to charge a high rate of interest on the overage, the way that DTE offered to let me finance our energy expenses in excess of our budget plan payments, when we got the settle-up bill. But I should trust, but verify.</p>
<p>At work I’m struggling to debug some drawing code that affects the MX family graphical user interface. Patrick discovered a bug where, when switching between editing different settings, some buttons redraw on top of other buttons. This bug was apparently caused by me trying to follow suggestions from Amulet to fix another drawing order bug. The framework is really bad at properly managing drawing; there’s a static drawing order, but when you dynamically show and hide buttons, it doesn’t work right. So we have a bug introduced by a workaround to avoid another bug. That’s sadly common, unfortunately. Sometimes there are even more layers upon layers of workarounds.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>We tried to make things easy on ourselves last night, by having a Costco pot pie for dinner; we thought we might finally get everyone fed, and the meal cleaned up, in time to watch “Rosa,” the third episode of the current season of <em>Doctor Who</em>.</p>
<p>I gave Grace my ETA yesterday afternoon, so she knew when to expect me. I told her to expect me about 7:30, and actually walked into the house about 7:45. When I got home last night there were sandwiches left out on the kitchen counter and dining table, and a fully-baked pot pie on top of the oven. Dinner was ready to eat, and since the pot pies take 90 minutes, the kids had been given <strong>plenty</strong> of time to get the table ready for a meal. But they hadn’t done it. So, there was that to contend with. I’ll elide the lectures and exhortations and threats to cancel the video. We did in fact manage to finish dinner at a reasonable time, although it could have been even more reasonable. And so we all tromped downstairs to watch “Rosa.”</p>
<h3 id="rosa">Rosa</h3>
<p>It seemed like a pretty bold move for the producers of a British television series to take on the American Civil Rights movement. “Rosa” wasn’t as tasteless as I feared, but it was also pretty simplified, and the plot was one of the most simplistically contrived I’ve ever seen. The villain was tissue-thin, like Don John in Shakespeare’s <em>Much Ado About Nothing</em>, who says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Later in the show our villain, who barely merits a name, is revealed as a white supremacist who has spent time in prison. A white supremacist… alien? Who is racist towards some types of <strong>humans</strong> over others? We’ve seen the reverse played for laughs when Bill Potts is accused of racism by a blue-skinned alien, because she’s never seen a blue person before. But no, it seems that perhaps our antagonist is a time-traveling human. Maybe. Ryan sends him into the past, presumably stranding him. This gets no reaction from The Doctor, which seems strange, given how emotional this same sort of stranding back in time was, in “The Angels Take Manhattan.” Is he really human? Is his stranding in time a sort of chronological death sentence, the way it was for Amy and Rory? I guess he’s not irretrievable, the way they were declared to be irretrievable with some hand-waving about time paradoxes. Will we see him again? I have no clue, but he sure seems like a one-off villain of convenience at this point.</p>
<p>Continuity is a bit poor in this show. The Doctor is tracing “artron energy,” but then later in the episode she refers to “artron molecules,” and I was yelling at the screenwriters for their complete indifference to decades of continuity. Yeah, OK, of course the show’s science-fictional elements are often pretty laughable, but which is it, matter, or energy? And there are some gags, like The Doctor’s reaction to being told she’s “not Banksy,” that are funny in the moment, but which mostly tend to distract and derail the story.</p>
<p>Some of the best moments in the show involve the companions, Ryan and Yaz. Yaz, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, is racially ambiguous in 1955 Alabama, and is not thrown out of the white section on the bus, while in her own contemporary Sheffield, she has experienced racial slurs and branding as a terrorist. This is an interesting moment that suggests that decades later racism has not really diminished, just changed. Meanwhile, Ryan is accustomed to low-grade racial profiling, but the in-your-face contempt is a shock, and he does not want to take it — well, sitting down. At least, not sitting down in the “colored” section on the bus. But there’s a fascinating, complex scene where Rosa (played really well by Vinette Robinson) takes Ryan to a meeting where Dr. King is present, and he agrees to do what she asks him to do in this context — to serve coffee, accepting a subservient role in Dr. King’s presence. There’s a lot going on, in those scenes, not just about race, but class, and voluntary, and involuntary, subservience.</p>
<p>I feel the need to mention <a href="http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Grace_O%27Brien">Grace O’Brien</a>, Ryan’s grandmother, who dies in the first episode, since she’s a continuing presence in the show, and brought up several times in “Rosa.” If we’re talking about racism, I think we should be willing to confront the fact that the producers of the show crafted this character — an older, strong black woman — and killed her in the first episode. Was that really necessary? And because of the way she’s remained in the characters’ thoughts, I’ve got uncomfortable feelings about what this season’s story arc might have in mind for her.</p>
<p>So anyway — “Rosa” is not the most powerful episode, despite the strong subject matter. But it could have been a lot worse. I think it’s telling that we were very excited by the preview for <strong>next</strong> week’s episode, which apparently is a Halloween-themed story involving spiders, called “Arachnids in the UK.” That one looks like it could be classic, old-school <em>Doctor Who</em>.</p>
<h3 id="the-damned-oven">The Damned Oven</h3>
<p>My kids baked the pot pie on a baking pan, which caught the drips. But cleaning up after dinner, I noticed that someone had, once again, let something boil over in the oven. So the bottom of the oven is once again crusted with burned-on goop, which means that it sets the smoke detector off every time it comes up to temperature. No one from my family would take credit. It might have been something one of the kids cooked, but I don’t think it is; our housemate and/or her boyfriend have done this in the past, again and again, despite numerous requests to use trays to catch boil-overs.</p>
<p>I don’t want to clean this up. I know that I should ask her to do it. But I also know that if she does it, she’ll do a very careless job. The last time she cleaned the oven, she left baked-on oven cleaner all over the inside of the oven, and I had to put in even more effort to clean it out, so all our food didn’t taste of oven cleaner.</p>
<p>Our oven has a seam in the bottom where parts fit together. Liquid that lands on the bottom of the oven will drip through the seam down into the compartment with the gas jets and flame spreader. I’m really fed up with having to disassemble the whole bottom of the oven to clean up these messes and stop the smoking. Oven cleaner won’t do that, but I also certainly don’t want her to attempt to take it apart and reassemble it. That’s not likely to go well.</p>
<p>I really don’t know what to do. Trying to get her to clean up the mess will punish <strong>me</strong>. Leaving it alone will also punish <strong>me</strong>, because our oven will smoke like crazy every time we use it, and the eventual cleanup will require much more work. I’m just beyond fed up, and praying for patience.</p>
<h3 id="money-money-money">Money, Money, Money</h3>
<p>I’ve cast our die across the Rubicon — the furnace guy is going to install a new furnace in the old house. I mailed him a check this morning. It’s for about $3,000. That’s going to overdraw our checking account by about $2,000, depending on when it clears. The overdraft protection loan should kick in. I don’t know how we’re going to pay for everything. We’re jumping off a little cliff, here, when we’ve already slid down a long, long hill. I don’t know how we’re going to climb back up. But we’ve made the judgment call that nothing will go any <strong>better</strong> if we leave the old house half-unheated through the winter, whether we turn the water off and “winterize” it or not. It’s still our asset, <strong>and</strong> our liability, for the time being.</p>
<h3 id="baby-girl">Baby Girl</h3>
<p>After “Rosa,” there was the usual interminable struggle to get the kids ready for bed. Things went off the rails for a while because Pippin snuck off and got on the computer. That led to a long lecture from Grace. Joshua read some more of <em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> and also started a <em>Winnie-the-Pooh</em> book; I’m not sure which one. I managed to read just a few pages of <em>The Ice Schooner</em> — I am trying so hard to finish that book!</p>
<p>We got to bed relatively early. It was only a bit after midnight, I think, when we turned out the lights. Elanor once again had a runny nose and was quite miserable during the night. She kept waking up, and didn’t wake up and just grouse and fuss a bit and go back to sleep — no, each time, it required a round of screaming protest. So our night’s sleep was broken up into pieces punctuated by a screaming toddler. I woke up pretty late. I had just enough time to shower and get out. I didn’t have time to read, or stop for a sit-down breakfast. I picked up a coffee and bagel on the way to work.</p>
<p>I’m continuing my struggle with some legacy GUI code. I was not making any progress tinkering around the edges, so I’m refactoring the drawing logic. This is quite painful and slow. But on the positive side, the refactored code executes fewer unnecessary page reloads and is easier to understand. It will be worth doing, when it’s done and I can look back at it. But the <strong>doing</strong> of it — ugh.</p>
<p>My boss brought in leftover cake, so I guess that’s lunch, or at least part of lunch. I should go get a sandwich, but I don’t want to take the time, or spend the money. The box of lunch meals I brought in yesterday, <a href="https://atlanticnaturalfoods.com/dima-portfolio/loma-linda-chipotle-bowl/">Loma Linda Chipotle Bowls</a> from Costco, are not as good as I hoped. I heated one up yesterday, and regretted it. They smell like burning dog food, despite being entirely plant-based, and they give me terrible heartburn, in a way that the spicy ramen noodles don’t, at all. Don’t ask me to explain that. Maybe I’ll eat one anyway, and down a few Tums afterwards, just so I don’t wind up eating only leftover cake for lunch. The box says “Complete Meal Ready in 60 Seconds.” But what’s the hurry? Speed isn’t necessarily the most important thing; I mean, I could probably vomit it up even faster than that!</p>
<p>I had a conversation with Grace about our housemate’s boyfriend’s sagging. She tells me it doesn’t bother her. And she also doesn’t think the kids are going to emulate our housemate’s boyfriend. Apparently Benjamin, our five-year-old, keeps reminding him that his pants are falling down and he should pull them up. He has to try to explain to a five-year-old that he’s got his pants half-down intentionally.</p>
<p>If that discussion with a five-year-old has no influence, I don’t think he’s likely to be swayed by anything this fifty-one-year-old white man has to say to him.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>For dinner last night we had pork medallions and another salad kit from Costco. The kids weren’t really on the ball when I got home, but with a lot of prompting they got the table ready. Veronica stepped up and actually cooked the pork medallions and even scrubbed up the pan afterwards. She was working on a project to dye her hair with henna. Before she went to bed, she rinsed out all the henna. It is unmistakably a different color now, a little more reddish — but, because her hair was fairly dark-colored to being with, the difference is not dramatic. I’m not sure if she’s disappointed or not, or exactly what she was expecting.</p>
<p>It was fairly cold in the house last night — tolerable with blankets, but I wondered whether the cold air might be causing some of Elanor’s night-time congestion and runny nose. I thought we might try a space heater, so I asked Veronica to bring the space heaters in from the garage. I learned that Grace had already given one to our houseguest to use upstairs, since she can’t tolerate the cold.</p>
<p>I set up the second one in our bedroom and ran it on high for a while, then set it to the lowest setting. It kept the ambient air in the room reasonably warm, since our house is pretty well-insulated. I don’t think it helped Elanor stay asleep at all, though. She woke us up several times. She has not yet learned to say “water” or “wa-wa” or even “wa,” or make the hand sign for water that we’ve tried to teach her, when she wants water. So the second or third time she woke us up and screamed at us for a while, I got her a bottle of water and that seemed to settle her down. I think I recall that it might have been about a quarter to five, but my mind was pretty fuzzy, having just been yanked out of sleep.</p>
<p>I’m happy to be able to report that I got some reading done, last night and this morning.</p>
<h3 id="hill-house">Hill House</h3>
<p>As a bedtime story, I read Grace and a couple of the kids more of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>. I got into a groove with the prose, which has an amazing feeling of flow to it — Jackson is right in her protagonist Eleanor’s head. The first chapter, which I read Tuesday night, had a fair amount of telling and not much showing, but the narrative voice was so light and deft that I really didn’t mind this “infodump.” In the next couple of chapters, we get a wonderful sense for the contours of Eleanor’s mind, while learning almost nothing about her physical being. Externally, I assume that she is unassuming, mousy, and introverted. Eleanor has spent years caring for her invalid mother, and has come to feel that she has missed a portion of her life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She had taken to wondering lately, during these swiftcounted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But now, she is “going,” having an adventure:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have not very much, farther to go, Eleanor thought; I am more than halfway there. Journey’s end, she thought, and far back in her mind, sparkling like the little stream, a tag end of a tune danced through her head, bringing distantly a word or so; “In delay there lies no plenty,” she thought, “in delay there lies no plenty.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As she passes through small towns and villages on the road, she experiences lives passing before her inner eye, as if she were dying. But they are not dying visions of her life to date; they are imagined <strong>future</strong> lives. Eleanor’s imagination is startling, both beautiful and strange:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the main street of one village she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night. Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself, in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s a little like Ambrose Bierce’s story “Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This vision gets wonderfully and surrealistically detailed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every evening I patted their heads good night, and once a week I washed their faces and manes and paws with warm water and soda and cleaned between their teeth with a swab.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But then the river of her thoughts sweeps on, and she’s back in the present. But a little later, looking at another house:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin… But the cottage was far behind, and it was time to look for her new road, so carefully charted by Dr. Montague.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While Eleanor is still taking, essentially, a passive role, having selected an adventure that was offered to her, she delights in small acts of defiance. She is possessed of an “imp of the perverse” — she is, internally, rebellious, and encourages a rebellious spirit in others:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile[ and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s something else about Eleanor, carefully set up in these passages: she seems to have porous boundaries. She is quick to identify with others, and to position herself in solidarity with them. This was demonstrated earlier in the incident in which she took great pains to assist the “very little lady” that she accidentally knocks down.</p>
<p>That incident in the novel is quite strange — I think Jackson has cleverly suggested that Eleanor is actually encountering a “little person” — a faerie, who goes from damning her to blessing her — I feel that there is more to unpack in this brief scene; has Eleanor paid for her journey, and will she be repaid for her kindness, later, by some version of the faerie folk? It seems to me that Eleanor, freed from her old life, has allowed herself to drift, in this liminal moment where change is possible, into the land of faerie, and as she does so, she tries on a series of new lives for herself as easily, and reversibly, and also somewhat passively, as if she were trying on new clothes, handed to her one after another by a clothing store assistant.</p>
<p>Eleanor drives to Hill house. She’s been warned by Dr. Montague in a letter not to stop in Hillsdale and not to ask there about Hill House:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am making these directions so detailed because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And of course with this prompt, Eleanor’s sense of rebellion means that she can’t <strong>not</strong> stop. But her rebellion is a careful one, that keeps herself inside the “letter of the law,” at least as she interprets it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In spite of what he said, though, she thought, I will stop in Hillsdale for a minute, just for a cup of coffee, because I cannot bear to have my long trip end so soon. It was not really disobeying, anyway; the letter said it was inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask the way, not forbidden to stop for coffee, and perhaps if I don’t mention Hill House I will not be doing wrong. Anyway, she thought obscurely; it’s my last chance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sticking to the letter of Dr. Montague’s instructions, Eleanor doesn’t actually ask about Hill House. Instead, she asks about houses in the hills:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I thought,” Eleanor said carefully, “that I might even look around. Old houses are usually cheap, you know, and it’s fun to make them over.” “Not around here,” the girl said. “Then,” Eleanor said, “there are no old houses around here? Back in the hills?” “Nope.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And she drives on. By the end of Part I, where I stopped last night, she has met Mr. Dudley, the angry husband of Mrs. Dudley; they are the caretakers. Sam joked that he thought he heard me refer to him as “Mr. Deadly.” I told him that I certainly didn’t think it was a coincidence that his name sounds like “deadly.” Authors like Jackson put considerable care into choosing the names of their characters. “Eleanor” sounds a bit like “oleander” — they are nearly anagrams. The letters of “oleander” can be rearranged into “Eleanor,” leaving a “d” left over. Perhaps the “d” is for “deadly?” Eleanor thinks about oleanders several times:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oleanders are poisonous, she remembered; could they be here guarding something? Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I noticed another interesting name. Dr. Montague’s name suggests doom. Romeo Montague was certainly “star-crossed.” But is Dr. Montague suggestive of Montague <em>fils</em>, the better-known Montague, or Montague <em>père</em>? Lord Montague, Romeo’s father, doesn’t have a lot of lines in <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, and most of them are about his son. But early in the play he says:</p>
<pre><code>Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach?
Speak, nephew, were you by when it began?</code></pre>
<p>Eleanor may be walking into an “ancient quarrel new abroach.” It will be interesting to watch this novel unfold. At the end of Part I, Eleanor has not yet entered Hill House; she has only seen it. But what she’s seen is already unnerving:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She turned her car onto the last stretch of straight drive leading her directly, face to face, to Hill House and, moving without thought, pressed her foot on the brake to stall the car and sat, staring. The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We haven’t even really begun to explore Eleanor’s back-story and character. In the first few pages we were told:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her name had turned up on Dr. Montague’s list because one day, when she was twelve years old and her sister was eighteen, and their father had been dead for not quite a month, showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason, dropping from the ceilings rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I can’t even begin to guess, yet, just what <strong>that</strong> seed will grow into.</p>
<p>If you haven’t guessed, just as I was deeply impressed with <em>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</em>, I’m also deeply impressed with this novel. It’s wonderful, strange, and also, impressively brief. If I ever get a chance to teach a literature class again, I’d love to teach <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em>.</p>
<h3 id="the-ice-schooner"><em>The Ice Schooner</em></h3>
<p>Despite the bad night’s sleep, I was up early enough to finish reading <em>The Ice Schooner</em> this morning. Finally! Now that I have finished it, I can say that, yes, it is an allegorical story about climate change, but because it was written in the sixties, Moorcock doesn’t seem to have been directly referencing our current global warming crisis. In any case, this Moorcock novel moves along quite well and ends decisively. It’s certainly easier to enjoy than <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> or <em>The Revenge of the Rose</em>. There’s a lot in it that is quite dated — it’s a very sexist story, for example. The only female story is mostly a status symbol and possession, although she shows a little agency at the end. But if you’re willing to overlook that, it’s found it worth my time.</p>
<p>Like many science fiction stories of the era, this one juxtaposes low tech with high tech. It’s a story about a society which has survived an environmental crisis by dividing in two. One side has reverted to barbarism. The other has retained a scientific understanding of what is actually going on. In such stories there’s generally a new crisis of some sort, another environmental change or catastrophe, which forces the barbaric side to rediscover the scientists. I’m aware of a number of stories that follow this general outline; it goes back at least to <em>The Time Machine</em> by H. G. Wells, with the Eloi and Morlocks, but there are probably earlier examples. It’s a common trope in stories that take place on generation starships, where the general population does not understands that they are aboard a ship. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of stories by Gene Wolfe (in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Long_Sun">The Book of the Long Sun</a> series), Stephen Baxter (in the novella <em>Mayflower II</em>), and Harlan Ellison (Ellison disowned the disastrous TV show <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starlost"><em>The Starlost</em></a> because of changes made against his wishes in production, choosing to be credited as “Cordwainer Bird,” but the original story was his).</p>
<p>I don’t want to give Moorcock’s book more credit than it deserves. It’s not really a great book. But there’s some nice world-building going on, too, including a system of religious beliefs about an “Ice Mother” that seem to combine a personal deity who answers prayers with… the second law of thermodynamics, which doesn’t. This part seems especially relevant because some of the conflict in the novel centers around climate change denial! Again, I’m not saying this is world-building on the scale of <em>Dune</em> or <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>, but Moorcock did a little research, to write at least <strong>somewhat</strong> convincingly about the technology and culture of a society that has learned to survive in an ice age.</p>
<p>If you’re new to Moorcock, you might try this standalone before trying to dive in to his more interconnected stories.</p>
<p>This book is allegedly based on Conrad’s novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescue_(Conrad_novel)"><em>The Rescue</em></a>. It would be interesting to compare the two. Maybe I’ll do that someday.</p>
<h3 id="money-again">Money, Again</h3>
<p>This morning I mailed a check for $200 to the City of Saginaw, to pay the 2018 rubbish bill at the old house. No one is currently living there and so no one is leaving out trash to pick up, but I’m afraid if I don’t pay it, the city will put a lien on the property, which could throw a monkey wrench into the situation if we have the opportunity to sell it.</p>
<p>To give some idea of how tight things are for us right now, my projected “low water mark” in the Team One checking account is about $21.00, after both mortgage payments go through in the first week of November. The actual numbers will probably be a little bit better than that; I don’t think my mortgage payment is actually going to increase to cover the escrow shortage until December, and things should be better in December. But it’s definitely going to be a nerve-wracking high wire act.</p>
<p>In our other account, my balance today is about $1,500. But I’ve written two checks, for the furnace replacement and for the 2018 City of Saginaw rubbish bill. These total about $3,200. If they cleared today, it would mean an overdraft of about $1,700. This would use up almost half of my available $3,600 line of credit. But of course we have more expenses coming up for the week; I will get groceries after work, and fill up my gas tank, and I have a number of medical bill co-pays that need my attention. So we’ll probably actually overdraw more than that.</p>
<p>A rent check would really help the situation, but we still haven’t heard a decision from our realtor. So the money situation continues to feel very, very uncertain. I don’t know how, or even if, we’re going to pay for tree removal. I don’t know how we’re going to pay for our gas boiler repair. But it does feel like a bit of a relief that we’ve gone ahead and made the decision as to whether or not to install a new furnace; that decisions made the money situation riskier, but it should make things easier on the old house, and thus improve our chances of selling or renting it. We’re not going to get money <strong>back</strong>, <em>per se</em>, but it might allow us to lose a little less.</p>
<p>I had to scrape chewing gum off the kitchen floor last night. I didn’t see our housemate at all. I think she’s hiding out upstairs even more than usual, because she hates the cold in the house.</p>
<p>Tonight I’l make my usual Friday evening run to Costco.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>It’s about a quarter to eleven in the evening. I’m writing this on my little laptop in the family room. I got a box of Duraflame fire logs at Costco last night and we’ve got one going. We still haven’t had both fireplaces in the new house chimney inspected and cleaned. The guy we had inspect the chimneys back when we had the house inspected, before moving in, didn’t seem trustworthy. We got a more recent estimate, and it was pretty shockingly expensive — over seven hundred dollars to inspect and clean them, or half that just to inspect them. So we have not bought a load of firewood and haven’t wanted to use the fireplaces much. Or, at least, use them for big wood fires. I feel reasonably comfortable burning the Duraflame logs, on the theory that they don’t get hot enough to ignite any creosote in the chimney, and don’t generate a lot of creosote or smoke. But maybe they’re not actually good for fireplaces. In any case I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford to have this fireplace work done this fall. We have an appointment at the end of November, but if our financial situation hasn’t improved somehow, we will probably cancel the appointment.</p>
<p>We had a busy day, despite getting a late start. It was a cool and cloudy day in Pittsfield Township, with a little rain now and then. Grace and I had a pretty good night’s sleep last night — baby girl slept well, and so we slept well.</p>
<p>Last night I read a couple more chapters of <em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> as a bedtime story. If they concentrate, the older kids can enjoy this kind of a text, but sometimes the younger ones either fall asleep (which is fine; it was a bedtime story, after all, so we just put them to bed) or get restless and start side conversations. The latter happened last night, and after asking the kids twice to stay quiet while I read, Grace ended the story early.</p>
<p><em>Hill House</em> continues to impress me. In the chapters we read last night, Eleanor meets Mrs. Dudley, a drone of a woman who wants everyone to know that she will put dinner on the sideboard in the dining room at 6:00 sharp, and then immediately leave the house, cleaning up dinner when she returns the next morning. She makes it very clear that she will not be in the house after dark. This is played for laughs, and also… not:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs. Dudley went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.” “I know,” Eleanor said. “We live over in the town, six miles away.” “Yes,” Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale. “So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.” “I understand.” “We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.” “I don’t suppose —” “No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.” “I know,” Eleanor said tiredly. “In the night,” Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled outright. “In the dark,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Eleanor almost giggled, thinking of herself calling, “Oh, Mrs. Dudley, I need your help in the dark,” and then she shivered.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Eleanor gets herself settled in the blue room, one of the bedrooms. As she explores it, we aren’t given a lot of detail on just <strong>what</strong> about Hill House is so unnerving, so as readers we are required to use our imagination quite a bit here. Jackson has started to make the house a character in the book; in fact, <strong>we</strong> have started to do it with her.</p>
<p>Eleanor then meets Theodora, another one of the invited guests. Eleanor and Theodora have an introductory conversation, talking to, and around, Mrs. Dudley, which is quite brutally hilarious. The descriptions of Theodora go a long way towards giving us a more detailed impression of Eleanor, because Eleanor lacks a lot of what Theodora has:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Theodora came through the bathroom door into Eleanor’s room; she is lovely, Eleanor thought, turning to look; I wish I were lovely. Theodora was wearing a vivid yellow shirt, and Eleanor laughed and said, “You bring more light into this room than the window.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The two characters seem to develop a friendship almost instantly, doing the kind of bonding that happens in the face of adversity. The fact of their bonding immediately over Mrs. Dudley’s comments, and against the house itself, serves to suggest how nervous both of them actually feel in this new environment. It’s an interesting way to hint to the <strong>reader</strong> just how the reader should feel about Hill House, and a very clever storytelling trick. We’ll read a little more of <em>Haunting</em> tonight if we can.</p>
<p>This morning I got a bath and it was warm in the tub, but cold in the bathroom, so I stayed in the but for a long while, reading the news on my phone. A mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>I dragged myself out of the tub and started working in the kitchen, recruiting the kids to empty the dishwasher and put away dishes, and to clean the stovetop. They did a first pass of the stovetop and I dug in with some more aggressive cleaning, and cleaned the teapot, then put on a pot of tea. I put a baking pan of buttered bagels under the broiler to toast, and put cream cheese on the table.</p>
<p>When the bagels were toasted I sprayed oven cleaner strategically on the gunkiest parts of the oven, closed up the oven, and turned on both the fan in the oven’s ventilation hood and the big Vornado fan on the floor. While the oven cleaner was doing its work, I fried up a big pan of bacon, recruited Veronica to beat a dozen eggs, and scrambled them. Joshua got out packets of guacamole. So anyone who cared to eat brunch got toasted bagels with cream cheese and/or guacamole, bacon, and scrambled eggs.</p>
<p>After everything was out of the oven and off the stove, I took the racks out of the oven, I turned the floor fan to blow past the oven to help me breathe easier while working with hot oven cleaner, opened up the oven, and started scrubbing it out. This took a considerable amount of work with sponges and steel metal scrubbers. The oven cleaner had softened up some of the spills, but part of the burned-on goo was still as hard as glass and took forever to abrade away. Then there was the loading of the dishwasher, and hand-washing of some things that had sat for several days, like the cast-iron dutch oven, which had been waiting for me to deep-clean it for a week. All this took me until almost 3:00.</p>
<p>Our housemate categorically denies being responsible for any of the oven mess that took me so much effort to clean up. It might be her boyfriend. I don’t know what more we can say or do about that short of putting in security cameras to try to catch the miscreants.</p>
<p>The kids had blown a lot of time on Friday and were very, very late getting out the door to go get some materials for their Halloween costumes. Grace wasn’t willing to take them out again but told them they could ask me. So today they asked me to take them to a thrift store and a craft or fabric store. At about a quarter to 3:00, when I finally felt mostly done in the kitchen, I sat down and had Grace put my hair in a pony tail and add some hair clips to hold the loose parts that are still too short to go into the pony tail, and discussed the situation with her. We needed to be at Mass at St. Joseph’s at 5:00, with a trunk-or-treat to follow, so she wanted everyone back at the house by 4:00. Then I told the kids I was willing to help them run an errand for costume materials, but that I would only take them one place, and since I wanted to take my car, which had a full tank of gas, there were only two seats available.</p>
<p>So I got dressed and took Veronica and Joshua to JoAnn Fabrics by Meijer, which is only a few minutes away up Carpenter. It seemed plausible that we would be able to get in, pick up a few small pieces of felt and fabric and piping, only about five dollars worth of stuff, and get home by 4:00, or just a few minutes after 4:00. We had to stand in line for quite a while, though, to get Veronica’s fabric cut. It wound up being about ten minutes to 4:00 by the time we were ready to check out. Then we had to get in line. The store was extremely under-staffed for the number of customers shopping today for Halloween, so the checkout line stretched all the way to the back of the store. I had to keep deciding whether we were going to just give up and go home without our stuff, or stay in line. We stayed in line, for about 45 minutes, and so didn’t leave until about 4:35 and didn’t get home until about a quarter to five. There wasn’t time for the kids to actually finish their costumes. We had to pack everyone up and head to Mass.</p>
<p>We got to Mass about ten minutes late. I had not actually been to St. Joseph’s yet, but Grace liked it when she went there last week, so it seems to be our new church. It is much smaller than St. Francis, and smaller than St. John the Baptist in downtown Ypsilanti, so it has a friendlier feel. One downside is that there doesn’t seem to be a cry room to speak of. Eleanor was very rambunctious, so I spent most of the Mass with her in the small vestibule, trying to keep her entertained, and also trying to keep her from running back into the sanctuary. I tossed her in the air, a wrestled her, I tickled her, I showed her the stained-glass windows, I dangled her upside-down. In short, she exhausted me.</p>
<p>After Mass there followed immediately after the trunk-or-treat in the parking lot, with coffee, cider, and donutes. I led the kids around from car to car. Not only had they not really finished their costumes, but they hadn’t even brought bags to collect candy. So they filled up their pockets and the plastic bag from JoAnn Fabrics. It worked out reasonably well. None of my kids won the costume competition. Their costumes weren’t really finished, so this was not terribly surprising.</p>
<p>The kids’ piano teacher showed up with her kids, and I had a chance to talk with her. She is a fan of all kinds of different genres of music and so had been impressed that our kids want to learn songs by Simon and Garfunkel, and other elderly-person music. I told her about how I have, basically, two CD collections: one upstairs, with all the CDs that I don’t mind terribly if the kids damage, and more downstairs, more CDs still in boxes. I also told her about my vintage Yamaha DX-7, wondering if she might be interested in trying it out, because it was featured in so many old hit records. She mentioned had heard something recently about the iconic synthesizer that was used for the fake harmonica solo in Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” but didn’t remember the name of it. I told her that the DX-7 was in fact <strong>that</strong> synthesizer; it was played with a breath controller to make that sound. We talked more, about teaching homeschool groups, participating in homeschool groups, what it’s like to record music rather than perform it live… anyway, she seems cool. I’m hoping she’ll come by sometime and I’ll set up the DX-7 for her to play.</p>
<p>And speaking of more CDs, downstairs…</p>
<h3 id="philip-glass-the-complete-sony-recordings">Philip Glass: The Complete Sony Recordings</h3>
<p>I received a package yesterday containing 3 CD sets. I ordered these a couple of weeks ago, because <em>Nixon in China</em> stirred up something in my mind, and ever since hearing it, I’ve been wanting to hear more Philip Glass. I’ve been curious about <em>Satyagraha</em> for years, since reading that Kim Stanley Robinson listened to it a lot while writing the Mars trilogy. And recently after watching some excerpts from a recent performance of <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>, I’ve been intensely curious about that opera as well. I have an old cassette of <em>Glassworks</em>, and once thought of it as one of my favorite albums. In short, I wanted to hear a lot of Philip Glass. Fortunately, there <strong>is</strong> a lot of Philip Glass. Having looked at a lot of his CDs on eBay, some of which are out of print and a bit scarce, including some rarities like a remixed version of <em>Glassworks</em>, I decided that the most cost-effective way to satisfy my Glass craving was probably just to order a copy of <em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em>.</p>
<p>This is a 24-disc set. That ought to keep me going for some time. Here’s a <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22527-the-complete-sony-recordings/">review</a>.</p>
<p>So I’ve been playing <em>Glassworks</em> for the kids, both on our home stereo and in my car. The special remix for “compact cassette” is a bit of a dud — at least on my first listening, it sounds more like a badly equalized, somewhat muddy version of the original album. But the other stuff, stuff that I’ve really just barely started listening to, is <strong>remarkable</strong>. The original 4-CD recording of <em>Einstein on the Beach</em> is just stunning. I expected to experience this opera more as an interesting exercise, a kind of hypnotic ordeal to sit through. But this recording, as opposed to the recent video clips of the live performance, make it sound, in a way that I didn’t quite expect, <strong>gorgeous</strong>. It’s going to take me a while to fully unpack and appreciate the 4-disc <em>Einstein on the Beach</em>, the 3-disc <em>Satyagraha</em>, and the 2-disc <em>Akhnaten</em>, as well as the <strong>thirteen</strong> other discs in this collection. But I’m sure I’ll be writing about it at length over the next few weeks. It’s a really impressive collection, and fortunately comes with a cool little book to help me wrap my head around all these works; it includes the librettos.</p>
<p>I feel like I’ve been, in a sense, preparing my whole life to listen to the operas of Philip Glass. I first heard <em>Glassworks</em> when I was sixteen. It impressed me right off the bat, and I listned to it a lot back then. But now I don’t think I really heard everything that made <em>Glassworks</em> so beautiful. Forty-five or so years later, an amateur musician myself, I feel like I’m finally ready to really <strong>hear</strong> it, and the rest of his work.</p>
<h3 id="and-the-cure">And… The Cure!</h3>
<p>While I was at it, I also picked up two reissued CDs by The Cure: <em>Seventeen Seconds</em> and <em>Faith</em>. I had these back in the day and played them a lot. I think I might have been in Junior High when I first listened to these two records. They are so similar that they feel kind of like one extended album. They were significant to me, and I still appreciate them a lot; <em>Seventeen Seconds</em> still seems like a groundbreaking work, even listening to it after the operas of Philip Glass. So, I’m listening to Philip Glass… and The Cure. I’ll probably have comments about these albums as well in a future post.</p>
<h3 id="dinner">Dinner</h3>
<p>While I was finishing up today’s journal entry, and listening to <em>Songs from the Trilogy</em>, an album of excerpts from his three operas, Grace cooked some steaks in a cast-iron pan, deglazed the pan with a little bit of red wine, and sautéed arugula from our friends’ farm in the pan drippings. We ate that, along with a little salad, and tasted another one of the white wines from Costco that I wanted to audition for our upcoming holiday dinners. The arugula was absolutely fantastic. It was harvested very late in the season, which meant that it had quite a pungent flavor. Some of the food our friends grow seems to have a particular affinity for their farm’s soil, and it takes on a wonderful <em>terroir</em>. One of these was radishes. I never really liked eating radishes by theselves or in salad until I ate their radishes, which were delicious enough to polish off like candy. This arugula was another one. What a terrific way to finish out the week — it’s about 1:00 a.m. and we’ll be going to bed in just a few minutes.</p>
<p>The wine is a 2017 Château Reynon Sauvignon Blanc Bordeaux. I think this is the white wine for this year. It’s quite dry, and quite tart — more tart flavor than I usually like in a white wine. But it’s got a long finish, and some oakiness. It’s just altogether more interesting on the palate than the other white wines I’ve tried recently. The tart flavors are more complex than in the other white Bordeaux we tried, the 2014 Château Ferrande Graves. So I think I’m going to end my search and say this is the white we’ll serve this year at our holiday meals. Over the next few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I’ll buy a bottle of this a week. I need to find a few bottles of a good dessert wine, too, like the justifiably popular <a href="https://fromheretosunday.com/traversecityrieslings/">Traverse City Rieslings</a>.</p>
<p>Elanor is having a meltdown. Benjamin smeared toothpaste all over our space heater. It’s time to get things cleaned up and get on to bed. It’s been a difficult week! But it ended very nicely. And I have hopes that week 44 will be better.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-shows-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Shows Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Complete Sony Recordings</em> (2016 Boxed Set) by Philip Glass</li>
<li>“Rosa” (<em>Doctor Who</em> episode) (NOTE: look up formatting)</li>
<li><em>The Haunting of Hill House</em> by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Deluxe – NOTE: look up how I refer to other books in this series bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (bedtime <strong>listening</strong>; Joshua’s been reading it out loud)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, October 27th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-26215509094237149362018-10-20T22:45:00.001-04:002018-10-20T22:45:29.501-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, October 20th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>We had an exceptional dinner last night. Grace made a delicious eggplant lasagna out of the eggplant our friends grew. We baked it in a giant stainless steel baking dish that our friend Joy brought here. We had salad from Costco and baked sweet potatoes and leftover wine. It was a terrific hippie repast. For dessert, Veronica had made two coconut custard pies — basically, an egg custard she made with unsweetened canned coconut cream. She flavored the custard with cinnamon and molasses. We found that we were out of sugar, so molasses was the only sweetener, and unfortunately that didn’t quite work — the custard needed just a little more sweetening. But we’re very happy she’s getting the chance to experiment in the kitchen, and learning how to come up with her own recipes. If we make coconut custard pies again, we’ll try making them a little bit differently.</p>
<h3 id="the-sound-of-silence">“The Sound of Silence”</h3>
<p>After cleaning up, I went down into the basement and did a little bit of singing. I’ve been working on learning the vocal parts to Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence.” There are only two parts, so it isn’t that challenging to remember the parts, but my voice is quite rusty. I was singing through my Boss RC-30 Loop Station. I would sing Paul Simon’s part, which is the lower part. It’s pretty simple, as he used a lot of repeating notes, only changing pitch a few times. Then I’d try to sing Art Garfunkel’s part, the well-known melody, over the first part. The melody swoops way up and so it requires a pretty wide range to sing… and I don’t have that. I can almost get there if I warm up for a while first, but I’m still really straining at the top end, so I have to try tricks like dropping an octave halfway when I cross a certain threshold pitch. I can also try dropping the key, but I’m not sure there is <strong>any</strong> key I can sing that melody in.</p>
<p>Today I found a video on YouTube that includes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BBGdtJu37s">four tracks</a>. I was imagining that maybe this video contains four tracks from the original multi-track tape because the original was a four-track tape, but I’m not sure that is true. In the comments to the video, the poster linked to five WAVE files on Google drive. These match the four tracks in the video, but there is an extra bass track. Was that one of the tracks on the original multi-track tape? Again, I have more questions than answers. Floating around online are stories that say that the multi-tracks may be lost or unusable, and indeed even the earliest-generation monaural or stereophonic masters may be lost or unusable as well. So what is the pedigree of these four (or five) tracks? I have no idea, but they probably didn’t come from anywhere near as close to the original recording session tapes as I’d like.</p>
<p>Anyway, examining the four tracks in that video:</p>
<h3 id="track-one-drums-and-bass">Track One: Drums and Bass</h3>
<p>These may have been recorded together along with one of the electric guitar tracks played in the room at the same time, since there’s audible bleed. It’s a very unremarkable rhythm section, as rhythm sections go.</p>
<h3 id="track-two-electric-guitar">Track Two: Electric Guitar</h3>
<p>There’s a track that contains, I believe, three electric guitar parts; the second and third were probably overdubbed onto the first arpeggio track, which is tricky because you can’t undo mistakes. The first few notes of this track has <strong>acoustic</strong> guitar arpeggio parts, and then it morphs into the electric guitar part.</p>
<p>The arpeggio part is a good <strong>part</strong>, as far as the composition goes, but I find the performance questionable. The guitar playing the arpeggio is out of tune, noticeably. Then there are two unremarkable parts layered on top of it, and those two parts seem to be even more badly out of tune. The parts blend especially badly at about the 8:10 mark, near the end. But the worst thing about these overdubbed guitar parts, in my opinion, is that in the final mix, they make it sound like the <strong>vocals</strong> are drifting out of tune. My ear assumes the tuning of the accompaniment is correct and stable, and so tends to assign blame to the singers. It’s only in isolation that I can hear how bad the electric guitar tracks are.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6OpJYiDG4Y">Rick Beato</a> claims that the guitar tracks were <strong>meant</strong> to sound dissonant, but I’m not sure I buy that. I think the layers of “bluesy” guitar on the track are just gratuitous and doesn’t actually contribute to the song.</p>
<h3 id="track-three-art">Track Three: Art</h3>
<p>The third track is Art Garfunkel’s part. There’s a little bleed with acoustic guitar and Paul Simon’s voice, so they may have recorded these tracks in the same room together, or else maybe it was in his headphones and he was singing along with Paul Simon’s track. Garfunkel is right on pitch and his voice really soars here, with a little vibrato and tremolo. It’s beautiful. I’ve heard that he may have overdubbed another pass, but it’s not really clear to me that he did; it doesn’t sound double-tracked, the way <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCK0Dw5_OVY">double-tracked vocals</a> sound “thickened.”</p>
<h3 id="track-four-paul">Track Four: Paul</h3>
<p>The fourth track is Paul Simon singing the low part. It’s a decent performance, in that Simon conveys some emotion to match the emotions in Garfunkel’s tracks. There are definitely some technical flaws, though. Simon’s pitch drifts briefly off-key here and there. It’s very noticeable at about 11:52, on the word “sleeping,” and on the phrase “teach you” at about 13:31, and again at about 14:10 on the word “forming.” I’m not actually writing this to criticize Simon; it’s better than I could do without a little auto-tune. He also plays an acoustic guitar guitar on this track — in fact he recorded his vocal while accompanying himself on guitar, which would make it extra-challenging to get a perfect vocal take. I think there’s also a second acoustic guitar part overdubbed, with some higher chord voicings thrown in here and there.</p>
<p>I always find it pretty fascinating to come across these source tracks for songs I have only heard in their final form. Until reading about this song over the last couple of days, I had always thought that it was Paul Simon singing the melody part — after all, his name comes first in “Simon and Garfunkel,” and Art Garfunkel sang the backing track. It’s just the opposite. And in fact Simon used quite a simple and unassuming backing part that lets Garfunkel’s part stand out.</p>
<p>There’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flv_yUfOU7c">another interesting video</a> that analyzes the harmony, and demonstrates how hard it is to add a third part which doesn’t inadvertently double any of the notes in the existing two parts; it’s hard to avoid this, because Simon’s part is quite atypical as harmony parts go, with its runs of repeated pitches. It doesn’t follow Garfunkel’s part much as that part moves up and down the scale, but tends to land on just a few notes and stay on them for a while. In the video, Aimee Notle speculates on just <strong>why</strong> Simon used such a “droning” part. She comes up with the generous interpretation that Simon did it this way in order to fade into the background a bit and let Garfunkel shine.</p>
<p>For my part (ha ha), I think there’s a simpler answer. Those repeating “droning” notes would be relatively easy to hit while playing <strong>and</strong> standing next to someone who was singing a different series of notes. I know that in the church group I played with a number of years ago, I’d sometimes have to play a guitar part while singing harmony, when everyone around me was singing the melody. That can be tricky, and I found it difficult. Of course, I was no Paul Simon and still am not. But in his early twenties, I think the real Paul Simon probably also found it a little difficult. So it’s my theory that he wrote a deliberately simple part that would be relatively easy for him to sing alongside Art Garfunkel, a part that would let him “anchor” his pitch on a few easy-to-find notes, while splitting his concentration so that he could also play a steady accompaniment on guitar.</p>
<p>In my recent reading about the song, I discovered that the song was initially a flop, but the producer Tom Wilson added the drums, bass, and electric guitars <strong>without Simon and Garfunkel’s knowledge or consent</strong>. That’s pretty stunning. The original was called “The Sounds of Silence” (plural, which makes more sense given the lyric, where the narrator finds the sound of silence in different places). And to me, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4">it simply sounds a lot better without the extra instruments</a>. In that original version, I can hear the harmonies much more clearly, and nothing sounds badly off-key.</p>
<p>Grace was pretty wiped out today and it took her a long time to get moving. The kids made some oatmeal and I made bacon and scrambled eggs and a pot of tea. We ate some of the 100% rye bread from Mother Loaf and it was terrific. It is a very high-fiber bread, and extremely filling, so we didn’t really regret only buying one pound of it.</p>
<p>I have some news, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned here yet: we have a date scheduled for Grace’s C-section. It’s December 14th, a Friday. That means if Grace’s obstetrician doesn’t decide to intervene earlier, due to problems with Grace’s health, or any worrying signs from the baby, that will be the baby’s birthday. But we know from experience that surprises often happen late in pregnancy.</p>
<p>After breakfast, which was more like a very late lunch, there was kitchen cleanup, kids to shove outside to play on this beautiful Fall day, fights to break up, etc. I haven’t gotten much of anything done today.</p>
<h3 id="sam-is-twelve">Sam is Twelve</h3>
<p>It’s Sam’s birthday and he’s twelve years old. We will have a birthday dinner tonight, at his request, and a cake designed to his specifications. That’s how we traditionally celebrate birthdays.</p>
<p>I’m not sure we’ll manage to get a podcast recorded and produced tonight. In fact I’m pretty sure we’re going to blow it again. It’s almost 8:30 and Grace just got back from a grocery run, and cooking is just getting underway now. The kitchen is crowded with kids and our housemate and her boyfriend, but I’d better shut this down and go see what I can do to help.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Well, things went pretty badly last night, to my regret.</p>
<p>Just a few minutes after I wrote the last few words under Sunday’s entry, Grace asked me to come into the kitchen to help her get the cake ready. I found that our housemate was deep-frying chicken wings on the stove and making mashed potatoes for herself, her boyfriend, and her family, <strong>while</strong> Grace was trying to finish up preparing a three-course meal: greens cooked with a smoked ham hock, sausages, and… <strong>mashed potatoes</strong>. (Sam had asked for “bangers and mash.”) <strong>Everyone</strong> was in the kitchen.</p>
<p>She <strong>usually</strong> cooks before or after we do. But this time she was trying to cook a separate meal, with a dangerous pot of boiling oil on the stove, in the midst of a kitchen already fully occupied; the occupants included several young children who like to grab things on the stove.</p>
<p>Grace did not mind everyone in the kitchen trying to work on things at once, but I lost my cool.</p>
<p>There’s quite a bit of back-story.</p>
<p>I had told our housemate a couple of times that we were planning a birthday dinner for Sam, and that she and her boyfriend and her kids were invited to join us.</p>
<p>Very often, our housemate doesn’t care to eat what we cook, and so makes a separate meal. That’s been an ongoing source of conflict, for several reasons, including the fact that she rarely cleans up after herself. Given that we cook almost all our meals, if someone else messes up the kitchen and promises to clean it up “later,” there’s only really a short “later” before we need to use the kitchen again. So, “cleanup delayed is cleanup denied.” Out of simple necessity, I wind up doing most of the cleanup from those extra meals. That often includes deep-cleaning the oven and stovetop, due to the regular boil-overs and drips and spills that would have been a lot easier to clean up on the fly, before they were burned on.</p>
<p>Very often, she and her boyfriend won’t even clear the dishes from these separate meals, or clean up the food their children spill on the floor while eating these separate meals. So we very often have to do that cleanup too, when we want to eat our own meals.</p>
<p>The time I spend on cleaning up these separate meals is time I don’t have to read my kids a bedtime story, or talk with Grace, or work on a podcast, or do my own reading, or writing. I spend it cleaning up after people who won’t clean up after themselves.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to say or think that I should just leave it until they feel the need clean up — but we’re talking about people whose tolerance for mess seems to have no limit. So I generally give in first, and with her work schedule she was often not even around to <strong>ask</strong> to clean up after herself.</p>
<h3 id="sugar">Sugar</h3>
<p>The details are tedious to recount, but it’s become absurd, and Grace and I can no longer make any sense of her food preferences; we have tried our best to accommodate them. The accommodation never goes the other way, if it requires them to inconvenience themselves or stretch themselves in even the slightest way.</p>
<p>One of my triggers yesterday was sugar cereals. Our housemate insists on bringing products like Cap’n Crunch’s Sprinkled Donut Crunch cereal into our home. The existence of this kind of thing in the house is too much of a temptation for a couple of my younger kids, who tend to steal these sugary foods when adults aren’t looking. It’s easy to say “well, that’s the parent’s fault!” But a three-year-old has simply not developed the parts of his brain necessary for exercising self-control. The machinery just isn’t there yet. It ought to be there in a seven-year-old, but it doesn’t always work.</p>
<p>Anyway, she becomes resentful when our three-year-old, or seven-year-old gets into the pantry or the freezer to get at the sugary foods.</p>
<p>Our response to this is to explain that this is <strong>why</strong> we don’t bring food like this into the house. I’ll bring a dessert for our Friday evening dinners; it is for consumption <strong>that evening</strong>, so the kids don’t have to restrain themselves for very long. We really don’t want this kind of food in storage, in the house.</p>
<p>Her response is to tell us that we should beat our kids so they will obey us.</p>
<p>So, we couldn’t convince her; the sugar cereals thus became contraband. She’s smuggle that stuff in, and hide items upstairs.</p>
<p>Well — surprise — bright kids are bright enough to find hiding places.</p>
<h3 id="birthdays">Birthdays</h3>
<p>We have made it a point to celebrate her birthday, and her boyfriend’s birthday, and their children’s birthdays — Grace has made <strong>several</strong> special meals and special cakes for them, for each birthday as it comes up.</p>
<p>But they weren’t planning to share Sam’s birthday dinner with us, because of this degree of food pickiness that, to us, has become worse and worse over time, until at present it is completely incomprehensible. She told us she couldn’t eat sausages — that sausages made her gag. But she had sausages for breakfast. And speaking of breakfast — I made a lot of scrambled eggs and bacon. But she wouldn’t eat them. She wouldn’t eat the bacon, because she wanted to eat her own sausages. Which she then cooked… in the fat from the bacon. She didn’t want to eat the scrambled eggs I made, but I think she then made her own scrambled eggs… by scrambling some more of the same eggs.</p>
<p>The previous night, we had served pre-made mashed potatoes from Costco. They were very tasty. Her boyfriend wouldn’t eat them. He wanted to boil and mash his own serving potatoes, which he did while we were eating. But he doesn’t really know how to cook, so I had to help him cook his separate potatoes, while we were cleaning up, because if I hadn’t intervened, they would have boiled off all the liquid and burned up up on the stove.</p>
<p>So anyway, the night of Sam’s birthday, she was making a pot of mashed potatoes, from the same potatoes that Grace was cooking, to make a pot of mashed potatoes. I can’t understand why. Maybe she likes them without the skins? Maybe she likes them made slightly differently? But for whatever reason she wasn’t willing to work that out with Grace (and we bend over backwards to accommodate requests). She couldn’t work out sharing a pot of mashed potatoes. She had to make her own, at the same time that we were making mashed potatoes. It’s just gotten incomprehensible. We can’t make any sense of it.</p>
<p>She wasn’t planning to sit down and join us to help celebrate Sam’s birthday. She was planning to feed herself, her boyfriend, and her kids in the kitchen, since we wouldn’t let them take food upstairs, while we ate Sam’s birthday dinner and sang happy birthday for him, a few feet away in the family room.</p>
<p>We didn’t actually <strong>need</strong> her and her boyfriend and kids to eat the fucking sausages. They were welcome to cook something else. But we did expect them to sit down at the table with us and sing “Happy Birthday” for our child, the way we’ve done for both of them and each of their children.</p>
<p>I think that was another trigger for me — seriously? You can’t even sit with us to help celebrate a child’s birthday, as we did for your birthday, and your children’s birthdays?</p>
<h3 id="so-many-reasons">So Many Reasons</h3>
<p>My rant last night was mostly about food, but there was certainly a lot more pent-up resentment in it — resentment over seven months of annoyances and grievances and carelessness and requests ignored and promises broken. This includes the complete trashing of our upstairs bedroom with food — food stored up there, food eaten up there, our dishes and silverware and glasses vanishing upstairs and not reappearing for weeks — after we asked them from day one not to have food in the room, for sanitary reasons.</p>
<p>In this blog I’ve mentioned the smoking, and the trash left in the driveway and yard. There are a lot more things. There’s insisting on throwing trash in our recycling bin, which means it isn’t picked up, which means I have to dump it out in the driveway and sort out the rotting garbage, with clouds of flies buzzing around. We’ve explained how the trash, recycling, and returnables work in Michigan. But they won’t separate out returnables, either — they almost always wind up in the trash or recycling. Which means that people desperately in need of money are literally throwing money away. I guess that’s some kind of pride issue, because they think only the poorest of the poor return bottles? By comparison to them, I am wealthy, but I’m not too proud to return bottles and cans, at least the ones from my own household. I’m not even too proud to dig through the trash to pick out the returnables they won’t bother with. It all helps, and besides, I just hate the thought of putting glass or aluminum into a landfill.</p>
<p>There are more things still, that I just can’t make sense of.</p>
<p>I constantly remind myself that she had a very different background and upbringing than I did. But then I think about it — the years raised by a single mother, living in a trailer, eligible for social security, with my mom trying to get my father to pay child support, and I think that we ought to have quite a bit in common.</p>
<p>I remind myself that she is still pretty young, and I certainly was not always responsible when I was her age. I remind myself of this especially when I suspect she is just nodding along with what we are asking her to do, with no intention of doing it. It’s just ordinary adolescent behavior. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still maddening. I try not to get worked up about things that are “merely” cultural differences. I try not to see them through the racist lenses that my upbringing gave me. It’s a challenge. Where is the line between taking offense at cultural differences, and taking offense at careless indifference towards others? How can I continue to show compassion and solidarity when I’m “triggered?”</p>
<p>I’m constantly second-guessing my reactions, and swallowing my feelings of resentment reflexively as they arise. I’m constantly asking myself “What if I’m just being racist? Or demonstrating a lack of class consciousness?”</p>
<p>The whole point of our family Catholic worker house was not to be a cafeteria, or a kitchen, or an apartment. It was to live in community. Living in community is often <strong>uncomfortable</strong>. There’s inevitably some friction. But adults work these things out and figure out how to work together in mutual support.</p>
<p>There’s no “mutual” going on here.</p>
<p>We don’t seem to be able to establish what that even is. Their approaches to inter-personal behavior and work and responsibility, and their relationships to the place they are living, just seems so very, very different from ours that we are really having a hard time finding common ground; the common ground that we expected we would develop over the months of living together.</p>
<p>My months of resentment at the way we’ve been fundamentally unable to come to <strong>any</strong> stable agreements around how to manage food and meals or, well, <strong>anything</strong> boiled over, and I just <strong>lost it</strong> until I was screaming at them as loudly as I could, bellowing about how their garbage food is going to give their children diabetes and rotten teeth, raging about how much food they waste, and how they are spending their scarce cash on junk food in the midst of all the healthy food they could possibly eat.</p>
<p>I did not actually tell them they had to leave, but they left.</p>
<h3 id="aftermath">Aftermath</h3>
<p>After that, I finished assembling the cake — a store-bought angel food cake cut in half and filled with a blueberry compote and topped with a grape-flavored frosting, per Sam’s request. (Store-bought cake was the best we could do, unfortunately, given Grace’s energy level, and how late we were doing everything).</p>
<p>We had a an awkward birthday dinner. The mashed potatoes in particular were delicious, but I could barely taste them. We didn’t light candles. We sang, but it seemed like our hearts weren’t in it.</p>
<p>It was never my intention to ruin my sweet, patient, diligent, twelve-year-old boy’s birthday dinner. I feel pretty terrible about that. I guess it wasn’t ruined, exactly, but the mood was pretty muted. And then we spent the next hour or so talking with the kids about what had happened, because there wasn’t anything else anyone could think about.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what happens next. I’m not even sure what they did next. They all left, and they might have driven to her boyfriend’s mother’s house to sleep, but I’m not sure about that. They may have slept in his car, in the driveway, since I think they were there, in the car, when I left yesterday. But I don’t know for sure. Maybe they came back early this morning and were waiting for me to leave for work before they came in the house.</p>
<p>Grace and I were too wired and upset to go to sleep. So after kitchen cleanup, which was finally finished around midnight, I read Benjamin a Clifford book, and read the older boys the second part of the introduction to <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em>, and we again talked about what the many terms meant. Grace came to bed after a while, but we stayed up talking until — well, I don’t even know what time it was. It was probably after three. It might have been four.</p>
<p>So, not a great night’s sleep. Sam got up about eight and started humming to himself and putting away the dishes. I got into the bathtub about nine. I didn’t leave our driveway until about 10:00. I needed a coffee. I was quite late to work.</p>
<h3 id="ground-rules-and-solidarity">Ground Rules and Solidarity</h3>
<p>I’m sure there are lessons to learn from this whole experience, but I don’t think Grace and I are quite ready to unpack them all yet. But there are a few things that it seems like we were in agreement on, when we spoke about all this last night:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our ground rules were important to us.</li>
<li>Most of our <strong>actual</strong> ground rules seemed so inherently obvious to us that we left them unspoken.</li>
<li>When these were constantly broken, we tended to believe that our guests had broken them only accidentally.</li>
<li>Because of this framing, we’d bring them up <strong>apologetically</strong>.</li>
<li>We never set clearly defined consequences for repeatedly breaking the ground rules.</li>
</ul>
<p>Grace and I are both so different from our guests, in terms of class and culture and education, that we have had a very hard time understanding pretty much anything about their behavior — we anticipated having some difficulty, but it was much greater than we anticipated. Very often, we just found ourselves literally dumbstruck by their behavior, unable to understand or even really process what we were seeing. And we’d just kind of go blank in such circumstances. “Going blank” generally turned into “ignoring it and hoping it would go away.”</p>
<p>As you can no doubt tell, we’re doing a lot of second-guessing our behavior. Well, at least I am. I think for various reasons Grace is better at maintaining a clear sense of limits and maintaining her equanimity when her limits are challenged. I think part of that is due to her experiences with her family of origin. Her family was in many ways more stable and less less marginalized than mine; she had more community, and more role models.</p>
<p>We’ve been trying to err on the side of constant compassion and forgiveness because it’s not lost on us that they are the more economically vulnerable ones here, and they have suffered a lot of traumas already. In fact my whole intent in agreeing to host our housemate and her children was to give her and her children a chance to decompress and enjoy a little stability in a supportive environment. I don’t think that ever actually happened, for reasons that didn’t have a lot to do with what we were offering. She didn’t ever seem to be able to what we were actually offering, which was <strong>mutual support</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="solidarity-for-never">Solidarity For Never</h3>
<p>One idea I keep coming back to is the idea of solidarity, and how it works, and has to work for <strong>community</strong> to work. We may literally have just not had enough shared cultural background for this <strong>ever</strong> to work out. To us, it was obvious that since we weren’t charging rent, we were offering community centered around things <strong>other</strong> than that financial sort of transaction.</p>
<p>I’m really not sure she ever managed to understand that.</p>
<p>I keep coming back to the idea that eating communally <strong>must</strong> be the center of any kind of communal life, for both practical and spiritual reasons.</p>
<p>Practically, feeding thirteen people out of one refrigerator and one pantry, in a home with one kitchen, simply required planning, even if only to figure out where the food would be stored and how to stay out of each other’s way. Also practically, our meals together would be pretty much the only time we’d talk with our guest and her family; it was the time we had to raise concerns and work out agreements about all manner of things. It was the time to work on understanding each other. We expected to share meals with reasonable regularity, at least dinners.</p>
<p>And, mostly, that didn’t happen.</p>
<p>Spiritually, meals together are for us a sort of unofficial sacrament. Our housemate is a Christian, but raised in some evangelical Protestant communities with… well, let’s just say the everyday theology she was raised with was apparently different than the Episcopalian and Presbyterian theology Grace and I were raised on. And me, I can barely call myself a functioning Christian, but yet I still try to practice my Christian values.</p>
<p>Again, I’m not sure she or her boyfriend ever understood any of what we are trying to do with our family and community on a spiritual level, even as it manifests around something as basic and practical as a daily meal together; it’s not like we were inviting them to sing hymns or attend hours-long prayer vigils.</p>
<h3 id="and-stress">And… Stress</h3>
<p>Another frustrating and sad aspect to all this is that I feel like I might not have let things get to this point, had we not been so constantly driven to distraction and worry by our own financial situation. But as that situation has dragged on and on, and eaten up most of my available credit, we have found ourselves dangerously tight on money. As the one who manages the money every day, most of that stress falls on me.</p>
<p>Under these circumstances, wasted food (which is wasted money), surprise expenses, emergency expenses, surprise messes, and all the other surprises became kind of “of a piece” to me, all potential triggers for the kind of meltdown I had last night.</p>
<p>I have general strategies to avoid the situations that might stress me beyond my ability to manage that result, but they failed me last night. I didn’t <strong>want</strong> to go in the kitchen to help with everything going on, but I didn’t want to refuse to help Grace, either, especially once she had asked me. I’m <strong>here</strong> to help her. But things went very wrong. I have to figure out what that is telling me, and what to do about it.</p>
<p>And I have to work with Grace to see if there’s anything more we can do for our guest and her family, to help ease the transition. We had <strong>already</strong> asked her to find a way to move out as soon as she was able. It was never in our plans to throw anyone out in this manner. Given our failures in communication and mounting frustrations, I don’t actually have much confidence that it really could have gone any other way. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise; maybe she never really <strong>believed</strong> that we were getting frustrated with them, at least not enough to do anything about it, until this moment.</p>
<p>To avoid this kind of thing we would have needed to build up that trust and solidarity and community starting on day one, and continue building it, and while we kept trying, we just were unable to get our guests to reciprocate. I’m leaving out the details of a lot of interactions that demonstrated, to me, chronic low-level dishonesty and manipulative behavior. So to me it seems, ultimately, like there really was no solidarity, no “mutual” in “mutual support.” Although early on, it seemed promising.</p>
<p>If we’re to figure out how to avoid disastrous failed attempts at community like this in the future, we’ve got to understand more about how successful Catholic Worker houses function. But I think we’ve also got to try to ensure that the people living with us are willing to work at being in solidarity and community with <strong>us</strong>, too.</p>
<p>I’m so tired today that I’m dizzy. I haven’t heard any news from home. I got in so late that I won’t get home until about 8:00 this evening.</p>
<p>Stinkbugs are flying around my office today, crawling on my computer screen and my coat and dropping onto my desk. Last fall and winter I was careful not to harm them. This year I’m just throwing them on the floor and stepping on them, stink be damned.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>Last night when we got home our guests were there. They didn’t come down all evening, though. I really didn’t want to see them, and the feeling was likely mutual.</p>
<p>I guess we did succeed at achieving something “mutual,” but it sure isn’t support.</p>
<p>I’m still second-guessing myself and asking — did I bring all that poison, distrust, and hostility? But then I remember the constant lying, and tell myself “no.”</p>
<p>Grace has spoken to our guests. They are working on a plan to move out soon.</p>
<p>It’s funny how we actually asked them to leave about six weeks ago, but we haven’t heard about any progress at all towards an actual estimated date, until the day after I blew up at them.</p>
<p>If we have to tiptoe around each other like this until they are finally all moved out, it’s gonna be a real slog for me.</p>
<p>We had steak and salad and got to bed about midnight. I read Benjamin a Little Critter book before bed, but it was getting too late to read a story for the older kids afterwards. I had hoped that we might watch the second episode of <em>Doctor Who</em>, but that didn’t happen; it took us too long to get everything cleaned up. We had to send the kids back down the road with diapers and extra trash, rinse recyclable bottles that were piled up in the laundry room, fold laundry, get a dish load going, hand-wash pots and pans, etc.</p>
<p>The sirloin cap steaks from Costco weren’t as good as they were before. I’m not sure how to account for that. Maybe they weren’t as fresh, since they had been in the refrigerator since Friday. Maybe it just wasn’t as tasty a cut of meat this time. They weren’t as tender as the last ones. We found ourselves wishing for steak sauce.</p>
<p>I wound up leaving my lunch at home again. Maybe I can bring it tomorrow.</p>
<p>There was no news about the proposed rental agreement for our old house yesterday. I’ll ask Grace tonight if she’s heard anything.</p>
<p>I had breakfast at Harvest Moon and got to work at a better time. I didn’t do any reading, but I did work on editing a few more pages of this blog text, from the first quarter.</p>
<p>I’ll make a small Costco run this evening. Maybe we’ll have time to watch <em>Doctor Who</em>.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>So, Tuesday night we got through dinner before it was too late, and we managed to watch <em>Doctor Who</em>, although Grace and I were both pretty tired, and so perhaps not at our TV-watching best. I tried to avoid any contact with our housemates. In fact I was feeling myself heading into full-on panic attack territory whenever I saw them — a deeply unpleasant feeling of being unable to catch my breath. Grace and I stayed up talking things out for a while before going to sleep, and that was comforting, and helped.</p>
<h3 id="the-ghost-monument">“The Ghost Monument”</h3>
<p>The Doctor and her companions <strong>are</strong> rescued, extremely improbably, by a spaceship, in what simply <strong>must</strong> be a reference to <em>The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</em>. But in a twist, they are rescued by <strong>two</strong> spaceships, piloted by two contestants in some kind of competition, and so split up. We never really get a good explanation for why the contestants pick them up. In <em>Hitchhiker’s</em>, it happens because the <a href="https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Infinite_Improbability_Drive">Infinite Improbability Drive</a>, which passes through every point in the Universe, also tends to do things that are extremely improbable along the way. It’s mentioned that the competitors Angstrom and Epzo have picked up “bonuses,” but it’s never mentioned how or why kidnapping people will give them any kind of bonus in the game. At least, I don’t recall hearing any explanation.</p>
<p>The look and feel of these spaceships are heavily <em>Millennium Falcon</em>-ish. They are quite impressive. But the storytelling is a little less than impressive. None of the characters seem to have suffered any harm at all from their brief exposure to hard vacuum. People don’t literally “explode” when briefly exposed to vacuum, but it’s awfully hard on the body. I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, in the context of the only vacuum-exposure scene I’ve ever found at all convincing — Bowman’s exposure to vacuum in <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>. There’s a very brief nod to some kind of medical procedures, but it isn’t very convincing. Even elsewhere in the <em>Doctor Who</em> continuity, brief exposure to vacuum is shown to have some hard consequences; it blinds the Twelfth Doctor.</p>
<p>There are some decent and funny and entertaining scenes in this show, but none really made me say “wow.” There’s a gag where a cigar saves everyone’s lives, which is pretty funny, but the elements that went into that scene were telegraphed hard in advance, so I wound up knowing exactly how it was going to play out before it happened. It was still pretty funny to have such a Freudian joke in a story about the first female Doctor. At one point the group went running through a corridor in some kind of industrial plant, and I yelled out “Running through corridors! Now it’s <strong>finally</strong> <em>Doctor Who</em>!”</p>
<p>I think part of the episode’s weakness is that a number of the many plot elements were introduced by “telling,” and never reinforced by “showing.” For example, we’re told that the planet’s water is dangerous because it is filled with flesh-eating micro-organisms. So I was <strong>expecting</strong> to see this demonstrated at some point, but it never was. When the group repairs the ship, they talk about how they have to align the solar panels, and then we cut to a scene where we hear that they have done it, but we don’t see them doing it. And over the whole course of the story, no one seems to actually become dehydrated, weakened, or even mildly inconvenienced by the supposedly brutal desert planet’s climate.</p>
<p>The episode ends with a touching lesson in coöperation. But later, Grace and I were discussing this scene, and Grace mentioned that it isn’t clear to her <strong>why</strong> Angstrom decided to help Epzo and share the prize money. I think she has a good point. <strong>He</strong> wouldn’t have done it for <strong>her</strong>, and she could really use the <strong>whole</strong> prize in order to rescue her family members; the original setup suggests that giving up some of her prize money might cost the lives of some of her family members. The ending was touching, but doesn’t really fit very well with the story elements that the script has set up.</p>
<p>The new TARDIS “desktop” (the redesigned interior) does look cool as hell. And I have to admit, we all laughed at the notion that the console now contains a cookie dispenser. Does the TARDIS bake them fresh, though? I mean, wouldn’t time travel play havoc with “best by” dates?</p>
<p>I think I should cosplay the Thirteenth Doctor for Halloween. I’m wondering if I can find the appropriate trench coat, t-shirt, and suspenders.</p>
<h3 id="viruses">Viruses</h3>
<p>I was a little bit concerned about Grace, because she woke up in the middle of Tuesday night shivering, and seemed a clammy and slightly feverish. I am not concerned about some kind of minor viral infection. I’m concerned about either something like a full-blown influenza that could leave her dehydrated and in trouble, or even an enterovirus, since she’s around kids so often. In the back of my mind is also the strange <em>aerococcus urinae</em> bacterial infection she had at the end of her pregnancy with Benjamin. But she seemed to feel better during the day yesterday, and was not running a fever at all, and her blood pressure was good. So for now I’m going to assume it was probably just a mild viral infection she was fighting.</p>
<h3 id="the-tahoe-breaks-down">The Tahoe Breaks Down</h3>
<p>Early Wednesday afternoon Grace sent me a text at work, to tell me that her car, the Tahoe, had abruptly broken down in traffic while she was driving Joshua to the library. So we had a complicated situation. I took half a discretionary day and left work early. But my car only has two seats in it, and she needed to get Joshua home in time for a piano lesson. So she had the towtruck driver meet her there, and arranged for his piano teacher to <strong>also</strong> meet her there to take Joshua back to the house, while she rode with the driver out to Monro Muffler Brake & Service on Washtenaw near Carpenter. I met her there. They were not able to immediately figure out what was wrong with the truck, so we left it.</p>
<p>I had not eaten lunch and neither had Grace, so we went to the Pho House on Washtenaw for noodles, and talked over some of the things we’re trying to get done.</p>
<p>While we were eating, Monro called. The Tahoe needs a fuel pump. With new spark plugs and wires and fuel injector service, that is going to run about $1,400. We were kind of hoping to spend that money on, among other things, getting our gas boiler serviced so we can turn on the heat. But we told them to go ahead. They said it might be done by the end of the day, or Thursday morning. So that seems promising.</p>
<p>We still have not scheduled duct-cleaning at the old house. It’s just one of the things that we’ve put off to the point of nearly forgetting about it, after the contractor we paid never actually completed the work.</p>
<p>The latest furnace contractor who looked over the old furnace told us that it actually seems to be working reasonably well, and he says the heat exchanger is <strong>not</strong> cracked. A previous contractor told us that it was unsafe to use and could produce carbon monoxide due to its cracked heat exchanger. It seems like perhaps he was just lying to us. This is the kind of thing we have <strong>constantly</strong> had to contend with, when dealing with contractors in the Saginaw area. We rarely came across any who seemed trustworthy. I’m not going to claim the contractors in Washtenaw County by comparison are all honest and forthright, because we’ve had some bad experiences working with people here, too, but in Saginaw it was pretty much the rule, and here it seems to be the exception.</p>
<p>But that’s good news in a way — we can get the furnaces up and running in the old house without replacing both of them. Replacing the main furnace will be only about $3,000.</p>
<p>I probably could put $2,000 of that on a credit card and pay a thousand of it in cash. Well, I mean I probably <strong>could</strong> have done that if the car hadn’t broken down this week. I might still be able to do it using my overdraft line of credit. But I think I’m only willing to do that <strong>if</strong> we have a signed lease agreement, so that I’m pretty sure we’ll start getting some money in, so that I can pay it off quickly.</p>
<p>We haven’t heard back from our realtor who, when last we heard, was looking over the lease agreement with her attorney.</p>
<p>The latest contractor also told us that no, he couldn’t easily remove the old furnaces from the crawlspace. It has to be done by either busting open a very heavy-duty masonry wall, or by cutting up the pieces of the old furnaces <em>in situ</em> in the crawlspace and pulling them out through the rather small door into the crawlspace. (I suppose tearing open the floor from the family room above might also be an option, but that seems even worse). In any case, he told us, he isn’t equipped to do those things.</p>
<p>So — lots of expenses, and lots of things up in the air.</p>
<p>The kids are asking me about Christmas presents. Well — indirectly. They’ve been asking what we’re going to do for Christmas. I’ve been telling them “we’re going to go to Mass.”</p>
<p>After lunch I took Grace to an ultrasound appointment. The baby looks good. They checked Grace’s temperature and blood pressure — both seemed good. In fact, her blood pressure seems lower than it has been in some time. She thinks that her daily celery-and-apple smoothie is helping to stabilize her blood pressure, since it seems more controlled now than it was when she was just taking her medication. She’s not going to make any changes to her medication regimen at this point, but she’s certainly going to stick with the smoothies, on the grounds that they seem to be helping, and almost certainly aren’t hurting.</p>
<p>Grace and I talked things out a little more last night, trying to unpack all that has been happening with our housemate and her boyfriend, and why I blew up. I still did not want to see them, but most of the sense of panic was gone. I listened to her have a conversation with our housemate, in which she talked out her ongoing concerns about how having junk food in the house encourages Pippin, who already has problems managing his food choices, to basically refuse to eat any healthy food at all, skipping meals and starving himself, in the hopes that he will be able to get his hands on sugary junk food. She also mentioned how, when he hasn’t eaten for too long, he gets low blood sugar, and tends to have a full-on screaming meltdown under stress.</p>
<p>I’ve long known that I am prone not to <strong>hyperglycemia</strong>, in the form of diabetes, but <strong>hypoglycemia</strong>. My father is prone to this, too. If either of us goes too long without eating, we get shaky — our hands tremble, we feel weak. And we’re also <strong>emotionally</strong> shaky — prone to overreactions. Basically, we feel like things happening around us are threatening. I think Pippin has inherited this. Grace’s explanation of Pippin’s behavior brought home to me that on Sunday, when I blew up at our housemate and her boyfriend, I had not eaten for about eight hours, and my late breakfast had been a relatively small meal. I realized that my lack of self-care had been a contributing factor: I had not managed my tendency towards hypoglycemia that day, instead spending my time working on cleaning up the kitchen.</p>
<p>I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I think the mechanism is something like this: I don’t eat, and my body gets shaky. The physical symptoms are a lot like the symptoms my body would be showing if I was having some kind of fear response. In terms of my primitive brain, my body is responding much as it would if a saber-toothed cat was trying to get into my cave to eat me.</p>
<p>This fear response primes my brain to start looking for a cause — something it can identify as the problem, to try to figure out how to make me safe again. The lower-level, more primitive parts of the brain are not really all that good at distinguishing causation from correlation. So they latched on to the situation that was bothering me, and has been bothering me for a long time, and somehow turned that into “this thing is an immediate and serious threat and you must take action.”</p>
<p>I get that this is all manner of fucked-up, but this is my best guess at just <strong>why</strong> I blew up so badly. It helps explain why sometimes minor chronic stressors like this will abruptly become intolerable to me, when failing to manage my blood sugar has made me more vulnerable.</p>
<p>If Grace indeed was fighting off a virus — and I’ve been feeling like I might be fighting off a virus, as well — that could have played a part in making my body feel like it was under threat. And I’m sure the low-level sleep deprivation didn’t help, nor did the loneliness and boredom I’ve been experiencing at work, nor did my usual seasonal affective disorder. Not that any of this really <strong>justifies</strong> my reaction, but perhaps it can help me understand what triggers this sort of thing and maybe manage these things better.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>We had a Costco pot pie for dinner last night and managed to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Joshua continued reading <em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> out loud. I read a bit more of <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em>, completing the first chapter and just a bit of the second chapter. The first chapter is terrific. In chapter 2 he starts getting into the real history, and my mind starts to wander a little bit. I need a glossary; he uses a lot of unfamiliar terms. Sometimes I have to read chapters like this several times before I feel like I’ve really understood them.</p>
<p>Grace did not seem feverish last night or this morning. We caught up on sleep and woke up on late. I was slow this morning, deliberately, since I was hoping we’d be able to go pick up the car before I went to work. The shop didn’t call, so we called them. The car wasn’t ready. I had to install one of the fold-up seats in the Element, so that she can use it to drive Joshua and Pippin to choir this afternoon. Her key to my car would not start it, for reasons I don’t quite understand, until we flipped it over and tried again; then it started on the first try. Grace drove me to work. We stopped to get bagels and coffee for me and tea for her, and since we both needed to eat, she just came up to eat with me in the office. I introduced her to three new co-workers who had not yet met her. So I started out the work day very late, which means I’m going to have to stay very late tonight. I don’t have any lunch or dinner food here, so she’s going to bring me something when she is running errands tonight.</p>
<p>Hopefully we’ll be able to pick the car up Friday morning. Friday morning I will have gotten paid, which will make it slightly easier to cover the repair bill — but not <strong>that</strong> much easier, since most of that paycheck is already committed to next week’s expenses. But it might keep me from taking our checking account below zero and hitting the overdraft line. That’s probably about the best outcome I can hope for next week.</p>
<p>Since moving in February of 2017, we’ve been paying two mortgages every month, along with all the other expenses that go with continuing to own and maintain the old house. This means we’ve been, on average, spending just a little more each month than I take home. We’ve been doing this in the hopes that we will soon be able to get out from under the old house, in a way that won’t destroy my credit rating. But it’s all coming down to the wire. Both of my credit cards are nearly maxed out, and a number of things we’ve been putting off are now becoming urgent. I don’t know exactly how all this is going to play out. We’re still hoping there is some outcome we can get to that winds up with someone <strong>living</strong> in our magnificent old home, and not just shutting off the water and leaving it to sit vacant through the winter. But there’s honestly not much more we can do.</p>
<p>I’m really hoping that the reason the car isn’t done yet is <strong>not</strong> because they found a lot more wrong with it. I’m afraid Grace is going to get stranded, unable to start my car. That weird starting problem is something else that needs attention, but I’ve been putting it off because I’ve never been unable to start it after a few tries.</p>
<h3 id="editing-editing-editing">Editing, Editing, Editing</h3>
<p>I’m still editing the text of this blog. I’m still working on posts from the first quarter of 2018. In fact, I’ve only just finished a second pass at editing the post from <strong>the first week</strong> of 2018. At this rate, editing the 2018 posts is going to take a long, long time. I’ve scaled my ambition back a bit; I think I will try to make my first deliverable a book-length manuscript of posts from just the first <strong>quarter</strong> of 2018. But even that is going to be a lot of work.</p>
<p>I was talking with Grace about this a bit, wondering why I’m doing it. There are some practical reasons: for one thing, I’m figuring out a worfklow that will allow me to turn any of my Markdown content into a book, or at least a book-like manuscript, and that seems valuable. But as for who the audience is for this hypothetical book, or e-book, made from these blog posts — I still can’t answer that.</p>
<p>In <em>The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</em> radio show, Zaphod Beeblebrox implanted a clue in his own brain to help him figure out the mystery of just who actually runs the galaxy. He reminded his future self that he should go find a man named Zarniwoop. Zaphod explains this to the receptionist in the <em>Hitchhiker’s Guide</em> headquarters:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Sir, can I ask why you want to see Mr. Zarniwoop?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Yeah, I told myself I needed to.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Come again, sir?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“I came to myself in a dream and said ‘Go see Zarniwoop.’ Never heard of the cat before, but I seemed very insistent.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oh, Mr. Beeblebrox, sir, you’re so weird, you should be in pictures!”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Yeah, baby, and you should be in real life.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beeblebrox meets up with Marvin, and then completely fails to convince the elevator to go up. He turns to Marvin:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Marvin, just get this elevator to go up, will you? We’ve got to get to Zarniwoop!”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Why?”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“I don’t know, but when I find him, he’d better have one hell of a good reason for me wanting to see him!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, dear reader, I hope you have at least one good reason to help explain to me why I have written all this.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Because I got into work very late yesterday, and I didn’t want to take any more discretionary time off than absolutely necessary, I stayed very late last night. Grace came to get me at about a quarter to ten.</p>
<p>I decided that I didn’t really need to eat a late dinner at home, since I wasn’t all that hungry. I ate some cashews, hazelnuts, toasted chick peas, and a few prunes, and drank a couple of glasses of water, and that was good enough.</p>
<p>The kids had done a good job of cleaning up after dinner, so I took them downstairs and let them watch an episode of <em>Ben 10: Alien Force</em>. Benjamin has been asking to see this show for a long time; that, and <em>Castle in the Sky</em>. We keep telling him there is not enough time on a typical week night to watch <em>Castle in the Sky</em>, but Grace told him we had time last night to watch <strong>one</strong> episode of <em>Ben 10: Alien Force</em>. Of course, the first episode (I think it is called “Ben 10 Returns, Part 1”) is a cliffhanger, so he really, really did not want to stop there.</p>
<p>This morning I was up earlier than usual, so I took a little time to read more of <em>The Ice Schooner</em>. It’s moving along nicely and I am continuing to enjoy it, although I have not quite even reached the halfway point.</p>
<p>Grace told me last night that the car was ready. I had hoped that Grace and I would get out early enough to have breakfast out before picking up the car, but that didn’t really work. So we went to get it, and I paid about $1,500 on my Team One credit card, which has pushed my balance almost to the limit again. I am trying to keep some cash free because I might <strong>also</strong> have to pay for the total replacement of the main furnace. I’m considering paying for that by writing a check which will overdraw my checking account, hitting our $3,600 overdraft protection by at least $2,000. But it seems like that might at least be <strong>possible</strong>.</p>
<p>Last night Grace told me about an interaction with our housemate. I’ve mentioned that we wanted to provide a supportive environment for her kids. But for some reason she and her boyfriend refuse almost categorically to allow her girls to play outside in our yard with our kids. We get confusing and contradictory reasons: she doesn’t want them to get their clothes dirty, although her bedroom is right next to a clothes washer and dryer. She’s afraid they’ll get a virus.</p>
<p>Apparently she explained to Grace that her point had been proven, because when one of the girls <strong>did</strong> go outside for a while, when she came back in, later that evening she was coughing. Grace asked her if she showed any signs of a virus: a runny nose, a fever? No. Grace told her that this is what happens to smokers who exercise — they start to cough. Our housemate thought that was ridiculous, because her daughter isn’t a smoker. Grace reminded her that her daughter is breathing secondhand smoke <strong>all the time</strong>, and that this isn’t just something people make up — the dangerous effects of secondhand smoke on children, and even adults, are quite real.</p>
<p>I’m not sure she can believe or process that. I’m reminded of the time we told her not to use the downstairs bathroom, because I had a bad enterovirus and had been doing horrible things in the bathroom, and we hadn’t yet had a chance to sanitize it, and enteroviruses are very, very contagious. She either didn’t understand us or didn’t believe us, and so of course she got it too and was then doing equally horrible things in the bathroom at her job. Talking that over with her later, it seemed like she didn’t actually understand what bacteria or viruses were.</p>
<p>So these educational differences that I mentioned are real, and they’re hard for us to even understand or believe.</p>
<p>If you add “home economics” or “meal planning” or “sharing a home, a pantry, a refrigerator, a kitchen, and a dining table” to “secondhand smoke” and “infectious diseases” to a list of “things Grace and I learned from our schooling and our upbringings,” then <strong>maybe</strong> our housemate’s behavior starts to make a little more sense. At least, that’s the interpretation I’m going to choose to try to believe in, today.</p>
<p>I’ll head to Costco and we’ll have dinner, and maybe we’ll watch “Ben 10 Returns, Part 2” tonight. I really need to start making notes for a podcast episode. I’d like to talk about <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em>. We again have too much to talk about, but it is not well-organized. That’s not a recipe for a stellar show. We’ll see how the weekend goes. I need to get in touch with the Michigan Department of State, which manages car registrations. We still have not received the sticker and registration for the Tahoe, although I paid for it at the same time I paid for the Element. So it ought to be registered — if Grace is stopped and a police officer looks up the car, it should show up as registered. But we want the sticker and the piece of paper.</p>
<p>I’ve also got to write a bunch of checks, and that’s going to be painful. Most of them are small, but we still have to pay $200 for trash pickup at our old house in Saginaw, since no one else owns it; I’m not sure what will happen if we don’t pay it, but the city might put a lien on the house.</p>
<p>I also checked out the gas bills online. We’re paying a fixed amount, on a budget plan, but our actual bills for the last couple of months have been shockingly high. This means when it comes time to settle up, I’m going to owe them something like an extra thousand dollars. It’s all piling up on me and I’m feeling pretty hopeless about ever getting us to a more secure financial position!</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I’m writing today’s entry at about 9:20 p.m. We just got back from Chelsea where we ate dinner at <a href="https://www.sh52bbq.com/">Smokehouse 52 BBQ</a>. Today is my seventeenth wedding anniversary! We didn’t start out the day with a clear plan, but we wanted to get out and do <strong>something</strong>, even feeling broke and worried about money and stressed. We had a huge meal, including burnt ends and deep-fried pickles for appetizers. I had Nashville hot fried chicken, which lived up to its name, making my nose run and my face turn red. I’ve had it before at Zingerman’s Roadhouse. This was at least as good, if not better. In fact all the food was quite good. The kids had a number of different kid’s meals: chicken tenders, smoked ribs, and pulled pork sandwiches. Grace had a salad with roasted butternut squash, pears, cranberries, walnuts, romaine, and pulled pork with a balsamic vinaigrette and also munched on Elanor’s chicken and waffles, and we brought another takeout serving of chicken and waffles home for our housemate. I also had a pint of Defloured N.E.I.P.A. from <a href="https://www.witchshatbrewing.com/home">Witch’s Hat Brewing Co.</a> in South Lyon. N.E.I.P.A. apparently stands for New England India Pale Ale, which, until today, I didn’t know <a href="https://www.beeradvocate.com/articles/15649/its-official-new-england-india-pale-ale-is-a-style/">was a thing</a>. It has orange and grapefruit juice in it, and I thought it was pretty good. Maybe the citrus will help keep me healthy as the weather gets cold.</p>
<p>Personally I’ve never really been able to understand chicken and waffles. It seems to be two meals on the same plate. The fried chicken is good, and the waffles are good, but they don’t seem to really complement each other or go together. So… it’s not that I don’t like the parts of the meal. I just don’t understand why they are combined.</p>
<p>Last night I brought home a load of groceries from Costco as usual, and as we usually do on Friday evenings, we had salmon and salad. I tried a cheap white Bordeaux, a 2014 Chateau Ferrande Graves. I think this is a white wine blend. I really didn’t care for this wine much. On the nose, it is quite musty and yeasty, smelling more of grape skins than grapes. The review notes I’ve seen mention “lemon zest” and it does have some strong citrus notes, but not much else. It is just sour and dry. After letting it breathe for a while, I still didn’t notice much in it that I liked. It’s a pretty color, though. I’ll taste it again in a day or two but I’m not expecting to change my mind. I won’t be buying any more bottles of this one to serve at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. I think it’s just another example of the general problem I always have with the Bordeaux wines that you can get imported into the United States — the good stuff can be incredibly good, but it’s also incredibly expensive. Meanwhile there’s quite a bit of affordable Bordeaux wine available, but the bottles I’ve tried have never been worth drinking.</p>
<p>It was too late to watch a movie and there was a big pile of clean laundry on the bed, so we folded laundry while I read excerpts from <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em>, and then we got to bed. Grace was feeling exhausted.</p>
<p>Later in the evening our housemate’s youngest child, an eight-month-old, seemed to be having some difficulty with chest congestion and she was concerned about him, so they took him to the Pediatric Emergency Department at St. Joe’s. They noted some congestion but did not think it was very serious. Our housemate was complaining that she and her girls have some sort of a virus. We haven’t seen much of them.</p>
<p>This morning I toasted buttered bagels from Costco and, while Grace ran to Milan to pick up bread from Mother Loaf, made scrambled eggs. The kids had some kind of huge noisy fight before Grace and I were even fully up, so they got <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KP_duty">KP</a> and had to deep-clean the kitchen and family room. They did that fairly well, so my cleanup work was considerably easier! Grace came back with pan au levain, another small 100% rye loaf, and a couple of bialys. This week’s bialy was made with salami and goat cheese and it was delicious!</p>
<p>It was raining and windy on and off today, and for a while we even had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graupel">graupel</a> coming down. The temperature kept changing. So we were had-pressed to find a fun outdoor activity for everyone. When it cleared up for a while, we thought we might go for a walk at Rolling Hills Park. But then the weather got bad again. We decided to drive out to our friends’ farm, hoping that the weather would improve. We had an invitation to do some gleaning — to bring home leftover produce. Today was their last CSA pickup. So we went, but we were slow and late at everything today. We didn’t get out there until about 5:00. We filled up the truck with gas and headed out. My musical selection for the drive was Moby’s album <em>Play</em>. Grace and I used to listen to this album a lot; it had come out shortly before we met. Today we were both struck by how much we still enjoy it. It has held up quite well. As we headed West on I-94, we got to see a weird and gorgeous mix of sun and very low clouds in swirling layers as the weather pattern slowly moved through.</p>
<p>They had some leftovers that weren’t picked up for the CSA, and some produce left in the garden. I put Elanor on my back in the backpack baby carrier, but she really hated it, and as soon as I headed out to the garden, the weather got bad again. She did not enjoy being in the carrier in the wind and cold rain, so I took her back inside the barn. We took a bag of hot peppers, a bag of arrugula, and other goodies including three kinds of turnips wqith their greens and some pea shoots. Just a week ago I was marveling at the beautiful rows of rainbow swiss chard, the peppers, and nasturtiums. But earlier this week it got very cold, down into the twenties overnight, and the pepper plants were all wilted, the chard was half-collapsed, and the lovely nasturtiums were compost. What a difference a week makes. The brussels sprouts are still coming along. If things go well there may yet be a nice crop of brussels sprouts. But this has been a strange growing season. I think a lot of our leaves are going to blow off without ever turning colors, although we’ve had a little fall color.</p>
<p>When we left about 6:30, we weren’t quite sure what to do. We were considering having burgers at Culver’s. We were considering just going home and cooking our lamb steaks and roasting some potatoes. But I asked Grace if she could think of anywhere in Chelsea we’d like to eat, and she suggested we try the barbecue place. And we’re glad we did. I have paperwork and bills and writing to work on and more bills and all kinds of things to think about and worry about, but it was great to stop and have a good meal. The kids enjoyed it. The boys are down in the basement watching a few more episodes of <em>Ben 10: Alien Force</em>. It’s now about 10:30 and I just want to read a little bit more of <em>The Ice Schooner</em> and get on to bed with the wonderful woman who has been my wife for seventeen years.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Play</em> by Moby (1999 album)</li>
<li>“Ben 10 Returns, Part 1” (<em>Ben 10: Alien Force</em> Season 1 Episode)</li>
<li>“The Ghost Monument” (<em>Doctor Who</em> Series 11 Episode)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (bedtime <strong>listening</strong>; Joshua’s been reading it out loud)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, October 20th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-12619322544987527382018-10-13T19:54:00.000-04:002018-10-13T19:54:48.074-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, October 13th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>Last night we had a chicken and rice dish with carrots, mushrooms, and parsnips, cooked in the Instant Pot. That was quite good and well-received. Along with that we had a big salad with homemade dressing. The dressing consisted of Grace’s homemade mayonnaise, a container of pre-made guacamole, grapeseed oil, white wine vinegar, and a little bit of brown sugar. With the salad we provided some extra toppings: diced hard-boiled eggs, oil-cured olives, diced beets, and blueberries.</p>
<p>After dinner and cleanup I took the kids down into the basement with a bag of Costco popcorn to watch our DVD of <em>Matilda</em>, the 1996 movie. The plot involves a young girl born into a family that doesn’t understand her. She’s gifted and loves to read. The scenes where she discovers her local library are beautiful. The movie is funny in parts, but I found the portrayal of Agatha Trunchbull to be pretty disturbing. The plot, involving a murder mystery, is overly complicated, and the film is overly long. I like the ugly home sets and dated cars and Danny DeVito’s narration is fun. But ultimately the portrayal of several of the characters just seems mean-spirited and a lot of the physical comedy just feels like abuse. So personally I don’t feel like I can recommend it. Grace stayed upstairs for a little peace and quiet and so I can’t ask her what she thought of the movie.</p>
<p>We were ready for bed early but Grace was not. So she and I did not actually get to sleep until about 2:00. I keep trying to stay on a consistent schedule but it falls apart on the weekends.</p>
<p>Since I couldnt’ go to sleep, I read the story “Hotshot” by Peter Watts, in the <em>Reach for Infinity</em> collection. Paging through this anthology, I remember reading most of the stories, but didn’t remember much about that one. Either I didn’t read it or I just didn’t find it memorable. It introduces a couple of the characters that appear in <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>, particularly Sunday Ahzmundin, the protagonist of both. It follows Ahzmundin as she takes a brief sabbatical from her training for the <em>Eriophora</em>’s gate-seeding mission that will occupy the remainder of her life to plunge into the photosphere of the sun, because the powerful magnetic fields that twist and break there apparently have a deeply strange affect on the human mind — they supposedly allow for the existence of free will, in which neurons fire on their own accord, without deterministically responding to their inputs.</p>
<p>This requires some explanation, but I’m unfortunately really not the guy to provide it. Let’s just say that Watts’ ideas about consciousness don’t come out of nowhere. In <em>Blindsight</em> I followed his arguments pretty well because I was familiar with the “chinese room” and other concepts from the field of artificial intelligence. This stuff on free will is related, but not as familiar to me. And Watts does not provide an elaborate annotated bibliography for <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>. He probably talks about the antecedents for these stories on his blog. If you want to search for his posts in which he discusses the topics, <a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/">go wild.</a>.</p>
<p>Watts actually makes a lot of his work available for download. You can find the full text of “Hotshot,” in the form of a PDF file, <a href="https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf">here</a>. In fact you can find the two other stories that are part of the Sunflower Cycle, “Giants” and “The Island.” “The Island” is the story that appeared in <em>The New Space Opera 2</em>. Yesterday I was griping that I didn’t want to have to take apart a whole palette of boxes to dig out that book in order to read the story. It looks like I won’t have to! <a href="https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm">Here’s the page</a> with links to the stories. I’ll try to get both “Giants” and “The Island” read this week, and write up any thoughts.</p>
<p>This morning I finished reading <em>The Wrecks of Time</em>, the first Moorcock novel in the <em>Traveling to Utopia</em> omnibus. I’ve mentioned before how I found this novel to be “Ballardian.” It gets even more Ballardian. It’s got references to Jung, archetypes, psychodrama, and other elements of sixties thought; there’s even a brief reference to the grail, as well as a crucifixion scene that seems, really, like a pointless provocation. The end seems a bit abrupt and strange, but there are some beautifully odd scenes along the way, including one in which Faustaff comes across a giant “dump” of artifacts carefully piled up from all of human history — but brand new, not relics. This is the scene which is illustrated on the cover of the Arrow 1975 paperback edition of <em>The Rituals of Infinity</em>, where Faustaff winds a clock — although that illustration is not correct, as in the story the subspace earths don’t all appear in the sky until the final chapter.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’d like to be able to recommend this Moorcock novel, but unfortunately I can’t. It wasn’t a complete waste of my time, since it is short and contains some interesting scenes. But while it is evocative in places, and the protagonist seems intriguing, it just doesn’t develop him well enough, or tell an interesting enough story about him, to make it really worthwhile. And the unexamined sexism is off-putting. I’d actually recommend it more to fans of early <strong>Ballard</strong>, not fans of Moorcock. While it does show the origins of some of his later multiverse ideas, Moorcock never used the setting or the protagonist again, so the time spent getting to know both of them feels a bit wasted.</p>
<p>The next novela in this omnibus volume is called <em>The Ice Schooner</em>. Apparently Moorcock modeled the story of this novel after the Joseph Conrad novel <em>The Rescue</em>. It looks interesting, and I hold out hope that it is more fun than <em>The Wrecks of Time</em>. It also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a science-fiction novel called <em>The Escape Pods of the “Glen Carrig”</em>.</p>
<h3 id="something-is-rotten">Something is Rotten</h3>
<p>Something in the basement is developing a sulfurous smell. It’s been growing for a week or so. At first I thought it must be a container of some kind of leaking cleaning supply, like drain cleaner. But it seems to be strongest in my office. I could not identify the smell or where it was coming from, so I asked Grace to go down and sniff around and see if she recognized it or could find the source. Grace thinks it’s coming from the closet in my office that holds the sump.</p>
<p>This may need some professional attention. When the previous owner renovated the basement he made some improvements to the drainage, and apparently removed the sump pump since it didn’t seem to be needed. It seems that something may be needed, although it is odd that this is the first time we’ve noticed it. Just another house thing to worry about. We’ve been planning to put in a radon system as money allows. Unfortunately to get any work done in there I’ll probably have to break down my computers and audio gear and move everything out of the room, which will require a lot of work and likely be disruptive to our podcast production.</p>
<p>Aside from the regular kitchen cleanup — and it already feels like I’ve spent half the weekend cooking and washing dishes — Grace had a bunch of small gardening tasks and errands to work on this afternoon. So it’s already almost 4:30. She and I were supposed to have a money-planning meeting, but I’m not sure that is going to happen; we don’t have a dinner plan yet, and we also want to get a podcast done. So I’m scratching my head a bit wondering how we can get everything done.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Well, yesterday could have gone better, but at least we got a podcast out. Grace was out for several hours yesterday and so we missed the chance to sit down and plan out spending. She called me and had me put the pot roast on to cook, and it sat in the oven at 300 degrees for three hours, inside a dutch oven. It was quite delicious, although maybe just a bit over-done.</p>
<p>We discovered that Daniel had actually taken the salt-crusted rye loaf we bought the Saturday before last from the cabinet where we keep the bread, and hidden it. Fortunately those crusty breads last a long time without going moldy and it was still perfectly fine. So we ate that with the pot roast, along with a salad and leftover chicken and rice. I made a little beef gravy from the pan drippings, which helped out the pot roast.</p>
<p>It was something like 10:30, after doing a round of kitchen cleanup and leaving some more hand-washing for Veronica, when Grace and I finally went downstairs to record the podcast. I had hoped to write an essay on the Kavanaugh nomination and read that, to at least organize my thoughts before we discussed it. That didn’t happen. Grace and I hadn’t really talked much in advance, so we weren’t entirely on the same page as far as the points we wanted to make. The less we prepare, the longer we tend to run, so this was one of our longer shows. The only part that wasn’t rambling was when Grace read the remarks she had prepared for the Front Porch Republic conference. Once again, given the actual constraints on our time, we had to decide whether to press on and do a show without much preparation, or miss another week. (Do we drive our audience away <strong>passively</strong>, by not releasing enough shows to keep them interested, or <strong>actively</strong>, by releasing shows that they don’t like? Hmm…)</p>
<p>We finished recording right at midnight, and it took me about an hour and a half to prepare and upload everything. Once again I am so grateful for the bash scripts I have put together to make this process easier. They help me stay on track and avoid stupid mistakes in the process, even when I’m not very alert.</p>
<p>I wasted a few minutes trying to catch up on Facebook — I spend very little time on Facebook these days. The evening ended on a frustrating note for me because I hoped to come upstairs to find the kids asleep and lights off, so I could go right to sleep myself. But they had apparently fought Grace every step of the way about getting on to bed, and so everyone was awake. We had to set the alarm for 7:00, because Grace needed to get up to take our housemate to an appointment. So she was not going to get enough sleep, and neither was I, and we were both going to be starting the week off with our schedules all out of whack.</p>
<p>I managed to get a little bit more sleep after Grace got up and out the door this morning, but I’m still feeling logy. I had a nice lunch all packed with pot roast and gravy, chicken and rice, and salad, and I was even thinking about taking it out to the car before I left. But then I got distracted — Joshua got up to come and say goodbye — and I forgot all about my lunch. So it’s still in the refrigerator. It should still be edible tomorrow. The salad will probably be a little worse for wear, although it’s the bagged Asian chopped salad, which has a lot of cabbage in it, and the cabbage holds up better than lettuce.</p>
<p>I was running too late this morning to stop for breakfast, or even for a coffee. So I had tea and pop-tarts at the office.</p>
<p>I didn’t get any reading done last night or this morning.</p>
<p>While I was downstairs last night, I opened up the closet in my office and pulled up the cover of the sump in the floor. I feared that it would be full of foul-smelling, moldy water, or something like that. But it seemed completely dry. It also came to me just what the smell in the basement reminds me of. It reminds me of the smell of some sort of spray pesticide that I recall smelling before — RAID canned wasp killer, which is a pyrethroid formula, or a pyrethrin spray that was used by my ex-girlfriend’s landlord long ago when their apartment wall was infested with bees.</p>
<p>We have not used anything like that since moving into the house, and so I’m really wondering where this smell is coming from. Did the previous owner use a pesticide for some kind of infestation in the basement, and the smell is only coming up from the sump now, two years later? I’m baffled.</p>
<p>I didn’t notice much in the way of effects from breathing the fumes while I worked on the podcast in the basement, although it does seem like my throat was a little irritated, and still feels irritated today.</p>
<h3 id="giants">“Giants”</h3>
<p>The story “Giants” by Peter Watts can be found online on the Clarkesworld site <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_09_14_reprint/">here</a>. This is a story set in the Sunflower Cycle universe and I found it to be quite good; better than “Hotshot.” It’s about an episode in the long journey of the ship <em>Eriophora</em>. The story makes reference to an uprising on <em>Eriophora</em>. Is it the same group who rebels in <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>? It’s not entirely clear. We don’t learn the name of the point-of-view character. The character is criticized for being sympathetic to the Chimp. So it sounds like her. But:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hakim turns to me as the Chimp lowers us toward the storm. “Maybe we should wake them up.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“Sunday. Ishmael. All of them.”</p>
<p>So — Sunday is in hibernation. But there are eight million stories in the naked city — or, rather, thirty thousand stories around the naked singularity. And the story hints at several points that the point-of-view character may be something quite different than a standard “crewsicle.” In his Reddit “ask me anything” interview, Watts said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chronologically, the order is “Hotshot”; “The Freeze-Frame Revolution”; “Giants”; and “The Island”. But each was designed to be understandable whether or not you’ve read any of the others, and Sunday doesn’t even appear in all of them, so go wild.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So I guess it’s time to read “The Island.”</p>
<p>Grace had an appointment for Elanor at the eye doctor this afternoon, and so she brought my lunch, and brought it by my office about 4:00. I am grateful that she is able to help work around my dumb mistakes. Lunch was delicious.</p>
<p>Tonight if we can get through dinner at a reasonable hour, we should be able to watch the season premiere of <em>Doctor Who</em>. I have not read anything about the plot of the first episode, although I did see that the reviews seem to be quite positive.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I went to Costco after work and picked up two rotisserie chickens, more salad, pork medallions, bread rolls, four dozen eggs, and a box of pancake mix. When I got home, Grace was out running an errand, but the kids had gotten the table set and a salad on. So we didn’t have to do much prep before eating — just put the groceries away. Pippin immediately got up on a stool, opened up the high cabinet where I had stashed them, pulled down the bag of bread rolls, opened them up, and ate one. I had bought them specifically so that the kids would eat last week’s sandwich meat for lunches this week, and dinner was on the table. That bought him some immediate consequences.</p>
<p>We started dinner without Grace. Pippin sat at the table, surly, and would not touch the three <strong>very</strong> small servings of roasted chicken, salad, and rice on his plate. He has recently taken his food pickiness to a whole new level. I’m not sure what to do about him.</p>
<p>Grace finally got home. Her half-hour errand had turned into a two-hour errand when her friend did not show up to meet her as she expected. As soon as she sat down and told Pippin to eat, he ate. Of course it took him another forty minutes to eat six forkfuls of food, and everyone else was done. I’m furious that he will do this for Grace and not for me. I had already told everyone that we were canceling the evening’s planned viewing of the season premier of <em>Doctor Who</em>. But he ate, eventually, and the kids did a pretty good job of cleaning up and getting ready, so we went ahead and watched “The Woman Who Fell to Earth.” We watch TV shows from the iTunes store using my ThinkPad, with an HDMI cable running into our battered, modestly-sized LG display, and the audio output from the display running into my old Yamaha STAGEPAS 300 PA system (with the terribly noisy fan).</p>
<h3 id="the-woman-who-fell-to-earth">“The Woman Who Fell to Earth”</h3>
<p>The show was pretty well-received. Overall, I thought the producers did a good job of avoiding a number of obvious pitfalls. Having seen the new Doctor’s clothes, I was concerned that they were going to make her a “manic pixie dream girl,” a “madcap” character, a Mary Poppins type whose job was to entertain and teach everyone with her zany-but-maternal emotional labor. They didn’t really do that. Her outfit makes some sense in the context of a hurried race through a thrift shop’s inventory, and her quest for pockets — lots of pockets — set up in the show.</p>
<p>The ending, with its extended coda, felt a little needlessly slow to me. The lack of opening credits seemed odd. And it seemed odd that the Doctor’s change of gender went almost unremarked. He’s been a man for 55 years (thousands of years, in-universe), and is now suddenly, this time, a woman, with no comment, no explanation, not even lampshading? We’re to believe that the previous streak of 12 men were just due to a dozen consecutive coin tosses that all came out the same way?</p>
<p>The villain interested me more when I thought it was a giant ball of sparking tentacles. But my kids were hiding behind each other (there isn’t a sofa, downstairs), so the monster of the week had its traditional effect, as is only right and proper. Personally I’m always hoping that the aliens will feel more alien.</p>
<p>They’ve set up a <em>Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</em> moment with the ending. Will they really go there? I don’t know. It was interesting to have the TARDIS off-screen for the whole show. It would be an interesting change to make the whole season about the adventures of the Doctor and her new companions as they chase down the TARDIS, which has gone rogue for some reason. Will they do that? I don’t know. But it seems like this season and this Doctor is off to a reasonably good start.</p>
<p>Oh, and I almost forgot — Grace and I both noted that we liked the music in this episode quite a bit.</p>
<p>I need to go to Costco again tonight because last night we discovered that we have no more diapers. Grace had asked Veronica to check, and somehow she just reported that we had plenty, when in fact we had none. Last night we had to dip into the emergency stash we keep in the car for road trips.</p>
<p>This morning someone had again gotten into the bread rolls, leaving two of them sitting out, one with just one bite taken out of it.</p>
<p>The weather’s been strange. Strange seems to be the new normal. Florida is going to be hit by Hurricane Michael. There’s a possibility that Michael will drop a huge amount of rain as it crosses the Carolinas, which have not even fully dried out from Florence. Meanwhile, it’s been in the low eighties here, in the second week of October. That’s not record-breaking for the region, but it feels unusual. The situation in Alaska and Siberia has been record-breaking, though. And there’s a strange situation in Syracuse, New York, where they are breaking records for highest <strong>low</strong> temperature; Tuesday morning’s low was 70°.</p>
<p>I’m aware of the special IPCC report on <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/">Global Warming of 1.5° C</a>. Aware, but I don’t have a lot to say about it; I’ve said a lot about this topic in the past, and I’ve pretty much talked and written myself out on the subject. Although maybe it’s time to take it up again on the podcast.</p>
<p>The “A1.” point in the outline of the “Summary for Policymakers” reads:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A1. Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0° C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8° C to 1.2° C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. (high confidence)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The only valid questions now are “what are we going to do about this?” We still have options to decarbonize and down-shift and avoid some of the most catastrophic warming, but as Elrond says to Arwen in <em>The Two Towers</em>, “that future is almost gone.”</p>
<p>I heard this morning that our friend Joy was in a bad car accident. Her car was totaled and she was apparently not badly injured, but is in pain with bruised ribs. I know what that feels like and it’s no fun.</p>
<p>Grace has a book club meeting tonight so I’ll be picking up a pot pie at Costco along with the diapers. She says she will be back about 10 p.m.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Things were a bit confused when I got home. I had agreed with Grace that I would pick up a pot pie. But as I looked around Costco and thought about how long it takes to bake a pot pie, I decided instead to bring home packages of pre-cooked ribs and mashed potatoes instead. They also had those great macarons, so I bought a box of those for dessert. I also picked up a couple of bottles of wine. I will buy a bottle or two of wine on each trip for the next few weeks until I’ve got enough.</p>
<p>How much is enough for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s? I don’t know for sure — I’m not really sure how many guests we will have for the meals. I don’t remember how many bottles I bought last year, and apparently I did not put the details in my blog posts. I think I got more than a dozen bottles, and fewer than two dozen. We didn’t finish them all by New Year’s Day, but that just meant we had a few spare bottles to pull out and drink with meals during the winter months, which wasn’t a bad thing. I’ll be picking up a variety — red, white, rosé, dry, sweet, from France, South Africa and other exotic locales — even Michigan.</p>
<p>I was considering bringing home single bottles of wines to taste-test, and then going back to get more of the ones we like. The problem is that as Grace and our housemate are both pregnant. So the only adults available to drink them would be me, and our housemate’s boyfriend, who rarely joins us for meals. So I’d be storing opened half-full or three quarters-full bottles in the refrigerator. We don’t have room for that. It could be fun to invite some friends and have a wine-tasting party to help me pick what to buy for the holidays, but realistically with everything going on, I don’t think we will actually manage to do that. So I’m just going to put my faith in Costco’s wine buyers and take it as a given that all the wines they are selling are good enough to serve at our holiday meals, taste-untasted.</p>
<p>Things were confusing with the trash and recycling. Monday was a Federal holiday, so we thought the trash and recycling wouldn’t be picked up until this morning. That’s why I was baffled when Veronica was rolling the trash bin down to Crane Road yesterday morning instead of evening: that was too late for Tuesday early-morning pickup, but too early for Wednesday early-morning pickup. But it seems like the trash was picked up during the day yesterday.</p>
<p>When I got home, Veronica had put half the pork tenderloins on our stoneware baking pan at her mom’s suggestion. Grace had had the same idea — that it would take too long to heat a pot pie — but she hadn’t coordinated with me. So now we have a shit-ton of ready-to-heat food. We at the salad, one of four packages of mashed potatoes, and the pork medallions. I don’t think the stoneware baking pan was the right thing to use under the broiler. I think I heard it crack. But I didn’t want to contradict Grace’s instructions in front of Veronica.</p>
<p>Our housemate’s girls joined us for dinner but just picked at their food, and since they didn’t finish their (very small) portions of meat or salad, I wouldn’t give them cookies, which made them scream. But their mom told me that they had actually both eaten earlier.</p>
<p>Trying to damp down the screaming, or rather, my <strong>response</strong> to the screaming, and of trying to organize the meal without Grace around, I had a wee dram of scotch whisky. This actually helped me sleep better than usual, a few hours later, although I did wake up feeling kind of gross.</p>
<p>Our housemate had completely clogged the vacuum cleaner again by sucking up pieces of paper, so after dinner I had to take that apart and clean it out again. I’m always baffled by the way that people think that since a vacuum cleaner <strong>can</strong> suck up larger things sometimes, that they <strong>should</strong> use it that way. This includes my own kids.</p>
<p>The oven is crusted with burned-on goo again, and no one will admit to making the mess. I forgot to clean that up, and I forgot to take the stoneware baking pan out of the oven, too, so I hope that no one heats up the oven with that thing still in there. I just have to hope there is not too much of a mess when I get home.</p>
<p>Grace did get home a little bit after ten and she had a good time at her book club, discussing <em>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</em>. She had eaten, so the portion that I had set aside for her went into the 3-layer stainless steel “tiffin” for me to bring to lunch today.</p>
<p>Grace has forwarded our real estate agent’s rough notes for a lease-to-own agreement to our attorney, who is looking it over. Last night I scanned our latest mortgage statement to send him, too. We’re not sure the numbers are really going to add up. The idea is that our renter would pay us, and we’d continue to pay our mortgage (interest and principal), plus the monthly lump sum that goes into escrow for taxes, and our insurance. But we are eight years into a thirty-year mortgage, and the idea is that after the lease period, the renter would own the house. To make that work, we will need to make additional principal payments each month to accelerate paying off the mortgage. By one online calculator I found, we’d need to pay $375.00 extra each month.</p>
<p>We’ve tried to make clear that we’re willing to pay <strong>something</strong> out of pocket each month to make this agreement work, and get out of having to pay $965.04 (our current monthly lump sum for mortgage, interest, and escrow) plus energy bills, water bills, etc. Even if this requires that we borrow money to replace two furnaces, which will turn into a monthly payment. But I’m not sure we can make the numbers work out — I’m not sure our renter can afford (or wants to afford) to pay most of what it would actually cost us each month to do this. So I think there’s a good chance it will fall apart and very shortly we’ll be trying to decide on a plan C, after plan A (selling the house) and plan B (leasing the house) have fallen apart.</p>
<p>We had three stories last night: I read <em>The Very Hungry Caterpillar</em> to Benjamin. Joshua read a few more chapters in <em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em>. And then even though it was late, I really wanted to start reading <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em>. Most of the kids had gone to bed by this point but Joshua stayed with us and listened. I read the first section of chapter 1, the introduction. It’s slow going, especially since I made an effort to explain to Joshua a lot of the terms, like “dictator,” and “syndaclist,” and provide some background information on what labor unions are.</p>
<p>I said it is slow-going, but it’s also pretty fascinating, and so once we got into it, I could not resist staying up until about 2:00 reading. Paxton is writing about how the early fascists emerged as a reactionary splinter group from leftists. There’s a common right-wing talking point, spouted by people like Dinesh D’souza, about how the Nazis were really leftists and therefore, leftists are Nazis. It’s laughable to a historian, but it gets traction in part because there is <strong>some</strong> historical truth to it; it seems that the early fascists <strong>were</strong> leftists, but leftists who decided that nationalism was a higher priority than internationalism. In the process they abandoned what I would call the <strong>moral</strong> principles of leftist thought — international solidarity, support for the vulnerable, opposition to war, an anti-authoritarian stance — while at the same time promoting <strong>some</strong> pieces of the leftist agenda, like universal suffrage, an 8-hour work day, confiscatory taxes, etc.</p>
<p>It’s a strange and confusing story, but what <strong>is</strong> pretty clear is that by the time fascists had gotten into power, what they actually <strong>did</strong>, as opposed to what they said in their manifestos and propaganda, does not bear much resemblance to the to-do list of the traditional left. And so again while that right-wing attack of leftists as fascist has a grain of historical truth, it doesn’t offer much insight into the fascist agenda; it obscures such insight. Which is precisely <strong>why</strong> the right uses it so disingenuously.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I was turned on to this book by Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House. I’ve already thanked him for that episode, “The Monster Fash,” and I will thank him again on Thursday, in person, if I can.</p>
<p>I remembered to bring my lunch!</p>
<p>It looks like Hurricane Michael is going to hit Florida as a category 4 hurricane. At least that’s the latest news I’ve seen.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>I didn’t wind up writing anything on Thursday at all, so I’m catching up on Friday. Mostly it was just a busy work day and I left early.</p>
<p>Wednesday night we ate some of the ribs we didn’t eat on Tuesday night. When I tried to clean up the stoneware baking pan, I discovered that it had in fact cracked. It was a small crack, but when I washed it up, water must have gotten into it, because it very quickly grew, and then the piece just sort of broke in two. So we really destroyed that thing quickly. Oops. We’ll have to study up on how to use them. Clearly this was not the right way. It might be best to reserve it for cookies. A little quick Googling reveals that we’re not the only people ever to have cracked one of these things.</p>
<p>My father called and left a message, although again as sometimes happens, my phone didn’t actually ring. I called him back. I just brought him up to date about the situation with the house in Saginaw, and how the kids are doing. I told him (and I don’t think I’ve told <strong>you</strong> yet) that our health insurance is going to cover Sam’s speech therapy. That’s great news. He brought me up to date on what he’s up to, but I’ll leave him and his wife, my stepmother, their privacy. I really have little to no sense of personal privacy at all but I’m trying to remember that not everyone is like me.</p>
<h3 id="twitter">Twitter</h3>
<p>My Twitter presence has grown a bit, abruptly, and it was kind of startling. There have been some improvements that have made Twitter much more worthwhile for me. First, Twitter on the web has allowed users to get a chronological feed of their follower’s posts again. That feature has screwed up for some time. Wired has an article about it <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-chronological-timeline-will-save-us/">here</a>.</p>
<p>This basically gives me more power to curate my own feed by selecting who I’m following, with fewer tweets stuck in my timeline by algorithms.</p>
<p>And I think this has consequences, because for the first time ever, I’ve had a tweet get some high engagement numbers. Well, high for me, that is. I happened to see a post early enough to make some comments on it, and that post became popular. Therefore, my comments got a lot of “impressions” — that is, views on other people’s timelines. One reply to a post got 17,417 “impressions.” And this led to 116 “engagements” — likes or replies. This was actually quite startling, because I suddenly had a lot of responses: 76 likes, 8 replies, etc. Most of my tweets get no response at all.</p>
<p>In fact, I usually get so little response that I’ve never had a real reason to study my Twitter Analytics before. I didn’t even really know all this information was here. I’ve been on Twitter for a decade. In 2018 there weren’t a lot of features like this.</p>
<p>Oh, and I’ve gotten some new followers out of it.</p>
<p>I don’t know for <strong>certain</strong> that the feed changes led to this, but it seems plausible.</p>
<p>I still don’t know what I’m doing with Twitter. It is addictive but also constantly makes me feel like I’m wasting my time.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night Grace and I went to see Chapo Trap House do their thing live in Detroit at the Majestic theater.</p>
<p>Just what their live “thing” is, is a bit hard to categorize. It’s sort of like political improv comedy, but as a group. I’m scratching my head a bit. There are some historical precedents. I’m thinking of Will Rogers making jokes about what he had read in that day’s newspapers, and comics like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, and also Marc Maron’s run doing “Morning Sedition” on Air America. The group format allows them to riff off each other, and also takes a little of the pressure off the performing situation, for the individuals. It’s still a bit of a high-wire act, though — the whole <strong>group</strong> can fail to be funny, and be stuck trying to get through a segment or talk about an article that just isn’t working.</p>
<p>And, yeah, that happened, although things picked up in the second half of the show.</p>
<p>I’ll come back to that. First, yesterday I arranged to leave work a little earlier than usual and got on the road about 5:45, having planned to get home about six, so we could leave in time to get a bite to eat and then drive to Detroit.</p>
<p>What actually happened is that I was stuck in traffic for a while: even at 6:00, traffic on I-94 gets bad and slows to a crawl. Grace had a similar problem driving Joshua and Pippin back from their choir practice. So we both got home about ten or fifteen minutes after six. Our sitter was there, but Grace had a hard time getting moving yesterday and she was not ready to leave. So she had to do some washing up and I waited around for another half-hour or so, and we didn’t leave the driveway until almost seven.</p>
<p>We found the Majestic Theater without too much difficulty, although it was a bit confusing because the theater <a href="https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/05/22/majestic-theatre-complex-getting-1-million-makeover-midtown/633525002/">is under construction</a>, the only visible signage refers to the Magic Stick and the attached bowling alley, and the bulk of the building is hidden behind construction barriers. I really don’t know my way around Detroit and didn’t know where to park. Everything was confusing. We found street parking, which appeared to be un-metered, around the block, but we did in fact have to pay at a machine where we punched in our license plate number and fed it a credit card. I’ve never seen a system of signage and parking payment machines quite like this, but it seemed to work all right.</p>
<p>Walking around Woodward is kind of cool — downtown Detroit has streetcars now. Some of the small apartment buildings in the area are quite gorgeous. So this of course got us talking about would have, could have, should have — under what circumstances we might have considered moving to Detroit. The answers were still, basically, “in a different life.” In this life, we were intrigued by the homes in Indian Village, but I was absolutely horrified by the condition of the road infrastructure that would have been part of my daily commute to this job, and at that point we were also deeply in debt, with nothing we could have used to make a down payment on a mortgage, even a modest mortgage. So we didn’t pursue it. And I’m still really glad I don’t have that commute.</p>
<p>The inside of the theater, under construction, is a pretty weird and unfinished place. There was a men’s room attendant, which I have to say I’ve only ever seen in movies. I had no cash, and so unfortunately I did not tip him. (I’m told you’re now supposed to tip a men’s room attendant five dollars for handing you a paper towel to dry your hands — what?)</p>
<p>The doors opened at 8:00 and the tickets did not indicate what time the show would actually start. So we dithered a bit over whether we wanted to leave and go get some food. We had arm-bands and hand-stamps to get back in, but I did not want to lose our seats. We probably needn’t have worried about that. I went out to walk down the block and see what food was available while Grace held our seats. There was a small Chinese place which was crowded, with a line out the door. There was a McDonald’s. I’ve made it the habit of decades never to darken the door of any McDonald’s — it’s such a long-standing habit that I’m not even sure I would have been able to walk through the door. There was a liquor store across the street, but with the construction blocking the sidewalk I would have had to walk some distance to cross at the light. I didn’t want to miss the start of the show. So I decided not to hunt for food any further and went back to the venue.</p>
<p>It turns out there is a restaurant attached to the bowling alley right next door, but I didn’t know that.</p>
<p>The show started with video clips, including the gruesome clip from the original <em>Robocop</em> movie (set in Detroit), in which Emil is drenched in toxic waste and then splattered by a car. There were a couple of other clips during the show; at one point they made it look like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon">QAnon</a> was “hacking” the video feed, with a video clip of computer graphics and a voiceover by James Adomian. That was fun. But most of the show was, basically, “Chapo reads the news,” with the group seated, Will Menaker in the rightmost chair (from the perspective of the audience). The rest of the group on stage were, in right-to-left-order, Virgil Texas, Felix Biederman, Amber A’Lee Frost, and Matt Christman.</p>
<p>In the first half, they meandered a bit, rambling about Detroit, talking about the gruesome news story about Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and legal resident of the United States, allegedly dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, his remains spirited out of the building in diplomatic pouches. That does not seem to have been proven with any evidence yet, but it’s a pretty horrible allegation; in any case, he has not been found, alive or dead, whole or in pieces.</p>
<p>They read a long article about James Kirchik and his failed bid to get onto the Yale Corporation Alumni Fellow ballot. This segment didn’t really work for me; I don’t know who he is and I really don’t care a lot about these folks. There’s some humor to be had from mocking someone like this, but not that much. And it went on and on. At one point some hecklers in the crowd started yelling at the stage. I <strong>think</strong> they might have been asking the Chapo gang to do the “Yale Alumni” roll call they did in a live show in Hamden, CT, and included in episode 246. But I am not positive about that. I <strong>think</strong> Felix heard “Yale alumni” and thought that maybe the people doing the yelling were Yale alumni. There was more yelling, the show ground to a halt, and Felix then stood up and sort of… well, to be blunt, he started screaming obscenities at the hecklers.</p>
<p>For a moment it looked possible that the show might come to a premature end then and there. The dark side of my personality found that part was pretty fun, actually — I always like getting to a moment in a live show when it sort of “hangs by a thread” and I’m not sure what is going to happen next. But of course I’m glad that there was not actually a fight; that’s never as much fun in real life as is in movies and TV shows. I <strong>think</strong> theater security may have escorted the hecklers in question out, but I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, shortly after that Will ended the first half of the show and they ran a pretty funny fake ad for “Chapo Brain Worm Pills.”</p>
<p>In the second half the group got a little more traction with the audience. They talked about an article by Thomas Friedman, a reliable source of laughs for the left, who has been spouting off about how America is actually in the midst of a civil war. So it was fun to hear the gang eviscerate that blowhard for a while.</p>
<p>Overall, it wasn’t a great show, but it had a certain rawness and realness to it that I appreciated.</p>
<p>When the show ended the Chapo folks took a brief break and then came out for a book signing. There was a long line, and Grace and I had to decide what to do next. I actually already own two copies of the book — an “advanced uncorrected proofs — not for sale” copy and a regular hardcover edition. I had planned to bring one of them to the show, but wound up leaving both of them at home. Really, I guess I just didn’t care all that much about getting the book signed. I would have liked to say hello to Matt and thank him for his “Inebriated Past” shows, but I didn’t want to wait an hour to do that.</p>
<p>So instead Grace and I went looking for food, and found people walking back towards the theater with pizza slices in little triangular cardboard boxes, and so discovered that the bowling alley next door has a pizza parlor attached. We ordered a Greek salad for Grace, with chicken, and an order of cheese fries for me. While the waitress tapped out our order on an iPad or something like it, Grace confirmed with her twice that she had ordered chicken on her salad. Then after I ordered my fries, I asked her a third time. Yes, she said. There would be chicken!</p>
<p>The food took a long time to arrive. I think it was over thirty minutes. And when it showed up, Grace’s salad was pretty awful — she had me taste the beets. It was warm and wilted and looked not only unappetizing, but like a food poisoning risk. Oh, and there was no chicken. I repeat, there was no chicken. We made sure there was no chicken.</p>
<p>Knowing that we are typically more likely to get food poisoning from vegetables or a salad in a situation like this — especially lettuce — than from fries or a burger, Grace tasted my fries — they were average but had nothing really wrong with them — and asked the waitress to bring her a plain order of fries instead. Her fries arrived <strong>very</strong> quickly. I think the waitress was a bit mortified. She still got a tip. She should have double-checked that the order was correct. I think we can hold her responsible for that, but the quality of the food and the speed of prep wasn’t her fault, so we couldn’t really hold that against her. I suppose we shouldn’t have expected much from bowling alley food — but Grace and I fondly remember CUBS’ A. C., a restaurant attached to a bowling alley which had pretty good food, including terrific French onion soup. So I guess we have been spoiled.</p>
<p>Grace drove us home (it’s a bit confusing, and easy to get on the wrong freeway). We got in about 1:00. We paid the sitter. We were not ready to go right to bed. Several kids were awake, and we wanted to digest our food a bit. So we actually got the lights off about 2:15.</p>
<p>It’s actually pretty impractical and expensive for Grace and I to have dates like this, and this is why we don’t do it very often. But it’s always nice to spend time with her. Even seeing a weird and uneven live show involving a long drive and a terrible meal out.</p>
<h3 id="leasing-the-house">Leasing the House</h3>
<p>We’ve had our attorney draft a lease agreement for us to send on to our realtor in Saginaw, who is hoping to rent our house. This is complicated, and we’ll still be on the hook for some big expenses, but — it might be the least bad option. So we’ll see what she thinks of the agreement. If we can’t make this arrangement work, it’s not clear what our “plan C” should be. We have one or two more things to think over, and if none of them are workable at all, it’s probably time to let the bank deal with it.</p>
<p>This evening we’ll get our usual dinner and maybe watch a movie in the basement, if chores are done on time.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>We got to bed very late on Friday night. I went to Costco after work and got a pretty standard load of groceries including the salmon we usually get for Friday dinner. Everything took forever once I got home, though. The kids were scattered and Grace was feeling too tired to come out and do much. But we finally got dinner together. Our housemate steamed asparagus, and Veronica made a pot of rice and baked the salmon. Since it was taking so long, it occurred to me that I would have enough time to chill a bottle of white wine, so I put one of the bottles I’m considering serving at Thanksgiving into the freezer for a while.</p>
<p>It’s a white wine from South Africa, a Badenhorst Secateurs Chenin Blanc 2017. The bottle has a distinctive label with a hand-printed look. Previous years have gotten high scores from wine magazines, but I didn’t think it was all that special. It’s certainly not a bad wine, but the Chenin Blanc we had during the summer was much better (and unfortunately I’m not sure I wrote down exactly what that was, although I must have taken a picture of the bottle, so I’ll see if I can find it). Anyway, this one was quite a dry white, pale, with flavors that lean towards the mineral side. Its <em>terroir</em> is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swartland">Swartland</a> which is a dry region, with a lot of shale and granite, where the vineyards are on hillsides. That probably contributes to the minerality, although I would have expected grapes grown in a dry region to yield more concentrated flavors. I can’t really recommend this one, but since it was only a ten-dollar wine it wasn’t a bad value for the money. I think there are much better bottles of Chenin Blanc out there, and probably even better bottles from the region.</p>
<p>We were just too scatter-brained and slow getting cleaned up last night to have a proper bedtime story. Grace and I stayed up way too late on social media.</p>
<p>On Twitter I wound up in a conversation with a guy who claims that he was the heckler at the Chapo Trap House show. The facts are confusing; the Chapo gang released an episode in which they mentioned the incident at the end. They said that security told them that the guy who started shouting was a Yale alumni. The guy who posted on Twitter said he was not a Yale alumni, he was just sick of the Yale alumni story because it wasn’t working. None of us could really hear what he was saying very clearly. I agree with him that it wasn’t going over well. I mentioned that Grace was quite angry that some of them were smoking in the venue; that’s not even legal in Michigan.</p>
<p>I’m still mulling over what I think of the show. It probably was one of the weaker shows on their tour. From the excerpts of other shows they’ve put in the podcast, it seems like some have gone much better. But I’m wondering what the gang thinks about the tour now; was it a good idea? Would they do it again? I think it’s legitimate to ask whether their success with the podcast may have misled them into believing that they could really pull off live shows in front of good-sized live audiences, successfully convincing the audience members that it was worth the drive and twenty-five bucks to hear them do material that had a good chance at being hit-or-miss. Different members of the group seem to have very different levels of comfort and experience with live audiences, and that shows. I think for the most part they are all making a good-faith effort, but that’s no guarantee of success.</p>
<p>We didn’t get up very early. I managed to read a few more chapters of <em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock. I’m about a third of the way through the book, and so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. But Moorcock has disappointed me a couple of times with novels that don’t really come together and finish well. So I’m not going to hazard a guess as to what I’ll think of the novel by the time I get to the end.</p>
<p>I made pancakes using the Kodiak Cakes mix from Costco. I tried putting the blueberries in after the pancakes had set on one side. This seemed to work better, although I probably put too many bluerries in each pancake. I like it when they burst from the heat, but I’d wind up flipping them and the pancakes would be finished, but the blueberries hadn’t burst yet. So my blueberry pancake technique still needs a little work. The Kodiak Cakes mix is mostly wheat flour, unlike the Birch Benders mix. The Birch Benders mix tastes good if you burn it a little bit. This mix doesn’t; it gets bitter.</p>
<p>While I was working on pancakes, Grace went down to Milan to pick up bread from Mother Loaf. We were running pretty late, so she just made it. Grace isn’t eating dairy, but she brought me the last bialy. This week’s bialy was stuffed with ricotta, shallots, and capers. It was delicious, although it would have been better right out of the oven. We got pan au levain (that’s just the basic, classic sourdough). They also had a special 100% rye, sold by the pound rather than the loaf, so we got some of that to try.</p>
<p>When we got breakfast cleaned up we drove out to our friends’ farm. Grace wanted to pick up some eggplant, because we had a plan for our friend Susan to come over this evening and make a sort of “eggplant enchilada” thing — rolled-up slices of eggplant stuffed with ricotta cheese and prosciutto, and baked with sauce.</p>
<p>We got there quite late and so we didn’t have much time to spend, but we’re still very glad we went. The kids immediately went feral for a while and played with our friends’ kids. Grace and I had cups of strong black coffee with our friend Bonnie and finally started to feel like we had woken up. Grace went out with Bonnie to pick eggplant, then I went out to explore their garden beds. They are growing amazing peppers — purple sweet peppers, jalapeño, cayenne, and more. They have a huge bed of nasturtium, some gorgeous rainbow chard, and a big crop of brussels sprouts on the way. This has been a poor growing year and things are behind, but if it goes well they will soon have, as Michael put it, “a shitload of brussels sprouts.” So we have that to look forward to. On the drive out, I tried playing the soundtrack to <em>Arrival</em>. That’s hard to listen to in the car; it gets too quiet to hear well. So I switched to U2’s album <em>Achtung Baby</em>.</p>
<p>I’ve been missing this disc for a while, although I had the case. It turns out that in 2018 I still had not ever heard this complete album, although I had heard a couple of singles from the album. It’s one of their better albums. You can hear Eno’s influence, but it is toned down from his work on <em>The Unforgettable Fire</em>, an album which I think has a few great songs but a lot of dull, over-produced, overly atmospheric sections. <em>Achtung Baby</em> is more an album of real songs — songs with a lot of texture in places, filtered vocals and a lot of effects on percussion and guitar, but songs nonetheless. I was joking that the song “Zoo Station” sounded like The Edge was playing inside an oil drum and Bono was singing through a box fan. I also commented that even in 1991 a lot of bands were still essentially reproducing sounds originated by the Beatles; the vocal on “Zoo Station” reminds me of John Lennon’s vocal on “Tomorrow Never knows,” played through a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_speaker">Leslie speaker</a>. This album also has the song “Until the End of the World,” a song I first heard in the movie of the same name. That’s long been a movie that I was fascinated by — it’s an interesting failure of a film. But that’s a topic for another day.</p>
<p>It was a game day today, but we managed to avoid game traffic for the most part. There were planes buzzing around the stadium dragging banner ads — it’s been so long since we’ve seen them that Grace didn’t remember what they were. These are a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLNC9w1j6HQ">crazy dangerous way to do advertising</a>.</p>
<p>We saw what we think was the visiting team’s busses, going the other way on I-94, bracketed by a police escort. According to the schedule I just looked up online, the visiting team was the Wisconsin Badgers, although I didn’t even know there was a football team called the Wisconsin Badgers, so please fact-check me if you care to.</p>
<p>I was going to change the light bulb in the bathroom, and I thought that I must have some spare LED bulbs somewhere. But when I tried to find one, I realized that all my spares seem to be the BR30 shape, which is what all our kitchen and basement fixtures use. So I’ll have to go find spares, and now I’ve got a toxic CFL bulb to dispose of. There’s another CFL out in our bedroom. Those things just never lasted as promised; they were a huge con.</p>
<p>It’s after 7 p.m. and getting dark out; our friend canceled, because she became ill and didn’t want to risk giving our children a virus. That’s disappointing but we’re still making eggplant lasagna. I’m going to wind this up and post it. We’ll probably have time to watch something in the basement tonight — maybe another episode or two of <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>, or <em>Bablylon 5</em>. The kids probably want to re-watch the first episode of the new season of <em>Doctor Who</em>. I don’t really feel like I need to watch it again, but I won’t fight them over it. We’ll probably watch the next episode Monday night.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li>“The Woman Who Fell to Earth” (TV show, <em>Doctor Who</em> series 11)</li>
<li>“Giants” by Peter Watts (short story)</li>
<li>“Hotshot” by Peter Watts (short story)</li>
<li><em>The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished, and Newly Translated Writings</em> by Jack Kerouac (editd by Todd Tiechen) (Library of America)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (bedtime <strong>listening</strong>; Joshua’s been reading it out loud)</li>
<li><em>The Wrecks of Time</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Ice Schooner</em> by Michael Moorcock (in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014) (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, October 13th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-78391943185306612142018-10-06T17:33:00.004-04:002018-10-07T15:19:49.998-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, October 6th, 2018<h1 id="the-week-ending-saturday-october-6th-2018">The Week Ending Saturday, October 6th, 2018</h1>
<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>I didn’t get to properly describe the event we went to last night. A family friend has an annual celebration for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaelmas">Michaelmas</a>, which is a lesser-known Christian festival not celebrated by all denominations. There was a priest there to hold a prayer service, a priest of the Byzantine Catholic rite, as opposed to the Roman Catholic rite that is better-known in America. Grace knows a lot more about this subject than I do, but from my perspective, even though we got there late, it was very cool to observe and participate as well as we could; we had to flip around in a prayer book trying to figure out what was being sung, and it was in a pretty bad key for my voice, so I was struggling to sing outside my range, but we tried. It doesn’t help that I haven’t done any singing for a couple of years and my vocal machinery feels and sounds rusty.</p>
<p>After the service all the kids from several home-schooling families formed a big line and donned a cardboard dragon head and blankets, and became a dragon. Our friend Michael played his mandolin and led the dragon around his farmhouse until his son, dressed as St. Michael, slew it. Then we had a pot-luck dinner in their huge timber barn, an amazing building that dates back to 1900.</p>
<p>Many of the adults there were farmers of one sort or another, and I know next to nothing about that kind of work. Combine that with my general intraversion and it means I mostly hung out with Grace or wandered back and forth sort of listening in to conversations here and there. Our kids played with the other kids and had some kind of mock holy war. I’m not really sure what was going on but they all seemed to have a good time. I always enjoy just being out at the farm in Grass Lake. It’s a beautiful spot.</p>
<p>In the mail Saturday evening I got the car registration sticker for my Element, although we didn’t get the one for Grace’s Tahoe yet. A few days earlier I got a change of address sticker to put on my driver license. And there was also some kind of receipt showing that my voter registration had been changed and indicating that I should get a new card soon. I thought I was going to have to go in to a registrar during business hours so this was a pleasant surprise. So I will keep an eye out for that, and make sure that when I get the card, the online system shows that I am registered where I live, instead of in Saginaw.</p>
<p>I also got a box of one dozen CDs. I ordered them for myself and for the kids. They include some albums that I loved back when I was in high school or so:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)</em> by Eurythmics</li>
<li><em>Speaking in Tongues</em> by Talking Heads</li>
<li><em>Fables of the Reconstruction</em> by R. E. M</li>
<li>The 4-track EP <em>Wide Awake in America</em> by U2</li>
</ul>
<p>I still want to get my hands on some more old tracks that were originally on U2 vinyl EP singles, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “The Unforgettable Fire.” These EPs were never released on CD, until recently, but you can now get them on the bonus disc of the deluxe version of the 25th anniversary edition. I had these tracks, like “Boomerang 1” and “Love Comes Tumbling,” on a cassette, recorded by a friend in high school, and I want to hear them again. I know they aren’t terrific; you can find them on YouTube. But I want them in my library. I wore the oxide off that tape. Those tracks were never released on CD, but you can now get them on the bonus disc of the deluxe version of the 25th anniversary edition of <em>The Unforgettable Fire</em>.</p>
<p>Most of <em>The Unforgettable Fire</em>, the album, did not originally and still does not sound very good to me, aside from the best-known tracks “A Sort of Homecoming,” “Pride (In the Name of Love),” and “Bad.” Listening in 2018, it seems like Eno’s influence is much too heavy on the rest of the tracks and most of them just don’t work well.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>The Singles 81>85</em> by Depeche Mode</li>
</ul>
<p>That character between 81 and 85 is supposed to be a “greater than” sign, in case it didn’t work out when translated to whatever electronic device or print document you are looking at. The actual album covers use a > sign. Wikipedia uses a right arrow, “→,” in the title for the 81 to 85 collection, but not the 86 to 98 collection, which I already owned, although that CD’s cover uses the same > sign. So how do you “spell” the “official” title? And what is the authoritative source? Well, <a href="http://archives.depechemode.com/discography/albums/16_thesingles8185.html">Depeche Mode’s web site</a> shows an arrow, so we’ll go with it. And why do I spend so much time trying to get these details right? (Have you met me?)</p>
<p>I got a copy of:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Disintegration</em> by The Cure</li>
</ul>
<p>That’s an album that I’ve sadly never heard but which gets great reviews; the albums I knew and loved by The Cure back in my vinyl days were <em>Seventeen Seconds</em>, <em>Faith</em>, and <em>Pornography</em>. <em>Seventeen Seconds</em> and <em>Faith</em> sound so consistent, they seem like they could form one long album. Things get much more aggressive and churning in <em>Pornography</em>. I heard later songs by The Cure when I was a radio disk jockey in college, and the album <em>The Head on the Door</em> came out. But I never really liked the later, more upbeat music. So I’m curious about <em>Disintegration</em>. The kids wanted to hear it because it is name-dropped in the 2015 movie <em>Ant-Man</em>.</p>
<p>I also got:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>The Nightmare Before Christmas</em> (1993 film soundtrack)</li>
</ul>
<p>I did not notice when I ordered it that the CD cover shown in the eBay listing was for the Italian version. So the CD I got is in Italian. The kids’ reaction to unexpectedly hearing the familiar songs in Italian was so funny, I am not even disappointed. Maybe they’ll learn to sing the songs in Italian. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, too — I asked Veronica to file it on the shelf, and she came to me a while later looking at the CD cover and asking if it should be fild under “Colonna,” “Sonora,” or “Originale.”</p>
<p>For Joshua I got:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>The Best of Simon and Garfunkel</em> by Simon and Garfunkel (2010 Sony collection)</li>
</ul>
<p>Although all he will play is “The Sound of Silence.” Over. And. Over. That, and “Sweet Dreams” from the Eurythmics CD, and the extended dance remix of “Sweet Dreams.” It’s driving me a little bonkers, to be honest. But I guess I’m glad that they like at least some songs. I hope they will proceed to listening to the whole albums.</p>
<p>I got some new CDs just for myself, too, which I don’t really expect anyone else to enjoy but me:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Entertainment</em> by Gang of Four</li>
</ul>
<p>Gang of Four hit me like a freight train when I was about sixteen years old. I think the very first Gang of Four record I bought, at a Big Lots store if I recall correctly because it may have been water-damaged, was a <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Gang-Of-Four-Gang-Of-Four/master/94541">four-song EP</a> with only four tracks, “Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time,” “He’d Send In the Army,” “It’s Her Factory,” and “Armalite Rifle.” I then found <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Gang-Of-Four-Another-DayAnother-Dollar/release/377025">another EP</a> with “To Hell With Poverty,” “Capital (It Fails Us Now),” “History’s Bunk!,” “Cheesburger,” and “What We All Want.” And then, some time later, <em>Entertainment</em>.</p>
<p>I think most of the tracks on those first two vinyl EPs I have on later CD collections, although I would have to look through them to be sure. In any case I found their absolutely uncompromising approach to minimalist music — really a thumb in the eye of the whole notion of rock-and-roll virtuosity, but technically virtuosic in its own way — and anti-war, anti-capitalist lyrics to be incredibly inspiring. It’s clichéd to talk about young punks (or post-punks, in this case) as “angry.” Gang of Four was angry, but <strong>righteously</strong> angry, and the attitude that still pours from these tracks is contagious, and still inspiring, a protest music for the end of capitalism. <em>Entertainment</em> and the other records I listed here were some of the records that were most formative of my tastes, although not, I should mention, the kind of music I actually play. Trying to cover Gang of Four songs just seems like it would be impossible, doomed to result in a sad, bad parody of the originals. But I’d still like to try someday.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Arrival</em> (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Jóhann Jóhannson)</li>
</ul>
<p>This is some of the coolest, most beautiful ambient music I’ve heard in recent years.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Music Has the Right to Children</em> by Boards of Canada</li>
</ul>
<p>I haven’t listened yet.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Nixon in China</em> by John Adams with Libretto by Alice Goodman (Orchestra Of St. Luke’s, Edo De Waart, conducting)</li>
</ul>
<p>I had already purchased that version of <em>Nixon in China</em> from the iTunes store, but I have been gradually replacing all my lossily-compressed purchased iTunes library tracks with losslessly-compressed tracks ripped from CD. It’s also just much easier for the kids to manage physical CDs. Supposedly with iTunes library sharing on our local network, I could play any of the tracks from my iTunes library using any device and program that can support the DAAP (Digital Audio Access) protocol, even something like an Android phone or laptop running Linux. But in practice, according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Access_Protocol#DAAP_authentication">Wikipedia</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Beginning with iTunes 4.2, Apple introduced authentication to DAAP sharing, meaning that the only clients that could connect to iTunes servers were other instances of iTunes. This was further modified in iTunes 4.5 to use a custom hashing algorithm, rather than the standard MD5 function used previously. Both authentication methods were successfully reverse engineered within months of release.[4]</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>With iTunes 7.0, a new ‘Client-DAAP-Validation’ header hash is needed when connecting to an iTunes 7.0 server. This does not affect third-party DAAP servers, but all current DAAP clients (including official iTunes before iTunes 7.0) will fail to connect to an iTunes 7.0 server, receiving a ‘403 Forbidden’ HTTP error. The iTunes 7.0 authentication traffic analysis seem to indicate that a certificate exchange is performed to calculate the hash sent in the ‘Client-DAAP-Validation’ header.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>As of October 1, 2018, the iTunes 7.0+ DAAP authentication still hasn’t been reverse engineered, so no third-party application can stream from servers running iTunes software (from 7.x, all the way up to and including version 11.x).[5]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fuckers.</p>
<p>I wasted an hour or so last night trying to get four different Android applications to connect to my iTunes library. iTunes running on Windows on my ThinkPad will do it. As far as I know there’s still no way to get my iPad to do it, even though it is an Apple device. This deliberate breaking of working functionality is one of the reasons I avoid purchasing any music from the iTunes store, and have not listed my current podcast with Apple.</p>
<p>Maybe there’s a third-party program that would <strong>serve</strong> my iTunes library via a version of DAAP that would actually work?</p>
<p>I’ll have to look into Firefly Media Server… although it doesn’t look too promising, with three forks. Two of them seem to be dead ends, with no updates in at least six years. <a href="https://github.com/ejurgensen/forked-daapd">This one</a> seems to look more promising… possibly?</p>
<p>Today I wasn’t up bright and early. When I did get up, I made bacon and blueberry pancakes and they weren’t coming out well — it seemed like I just couldn’t get the temperature of our big pan right. So they’d be burned on the outside and liquid on the inside. After eating I felt the need for a nap, so I took a brief nap, and then just didn’t want to do anything, so I wasted several hours putzing around on Twitter until I drained my phone battery. Grace ran errands. When she got back we had a brief call with our realtor, who is still considering renting our old house in Saginaw and trying to write up a document proposing terms. I was twenty minutes late picking up Veronica, unfortunately. I stopped by Barnes and Noble to see if I could pick up a copy of <em>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</em> by Betty Smith — she needs to read it for a book club, and very soon. But they closed at 8:00. I thought they were open until 9:00.</p>
<p>When we got home Grace was roasting a chicken but it was not going to be done for some time, so we decided to have sandwiches for dinner. While the chicken was roasting and we struggled to corral the children into getting the table set for dinner, she made some mayonnaise. So we had salad and sandwiches for dinner but it took so long to get everything ready that we could have eaten the chicken.</p>
<p>I posted a note on our podcast blog saying we just weren’t going to get a show out. This is frustrating and disappointing but we just couldn’t get it done.</p>
<p>When I went downstairs I tried to check my e-mail, and discovered that since Dreamhost had completed a server migration for e-mail users, my old account settings would no longer work. So I had to mess with that for a while. The Mac Mail application apparently couldn’t recover after changing account settings; it locked up and I had to kill it and restart it. This also means I have to help Grace change her e-mail client configuration. Fortunately I think Webmail still works, using our “vanity” site. I saw a note that Dreamhost advises people not to use their own web site names for Webmail, but to use <strong>webmail.dreamhost.com</strong> instead. This is the first I’ve heard of this, despite having filed numerous tickets with Dreamhost technical support about Webmail problems over the past few months.</p>
<p><em>…brief intermission while I stomp around the room and rain a shower of curses on DreamHost…</em></p>
<p>The kids managed to knock down and break a wooden wall hanging, a sculpture of a bird that our friend Joy put up. It was an old and fragile piece of wood, and it had broken in two places. Grace had asked the kids not to attempt to glue it without talking to me. Yesterday Sam ignored this and tried to glue it himself, and botched it up and made a mess. He used a clear Gorilla glue that is supposed to be set with water, rather than a white glue. He not only ignored Grace’s instructions to consult with me, but didn’t read the instructions on the bottle. The clear glue unfortunately doesn’t clean up with water, and he got it all over the sculpture. There really was no salvaging it, unfortunately; I’m not even sure what kind of solvent would clean it up. It was then all over my hands. And now there is some on my laptop.</p>
<p>When you have broken wood ends, you only really have one chance to glue the ends together cleanly, or the broken wood fibers won’t fit back together. If you have two breaks, you should repair them one at a time, rather than try to clamp <strong>two</strong> adjacent breaks, which are very likely to shift. The wood was brittle and old, so there was a good chance I wouldn’t have been to successfully glue it.</p>
<p>So I guess Sam was upset, because he had been hoping that he could fix it himself. I think he could use some experience doing some beginner wood shop projects. At least then he would start to get a feel for what he <em>doesn’t</em> know how to do.</p>
<p>After putting my laptop away, I discovered that the sheets and pillowcases and mattress pads I had put on the bed just <strong>stank</strong>. The sheets had come out of the washer and dryer all wadded up, with the mattress pads wrapped up inside the twisted-up sheets. They seemed dry but they must have been wet for a long time. So we wound up angrily stripping the bed and angrily sleeping on the bare mattress.</p>
<p>They we found out that one of the kids had had an accident in his bed, too.</p>
<p>We didn’t get much else done, and now it is 1:23 a.m. September has ended. It’s time to go to sleep. I’m going to be very tired in the morning but at least I’ll have some cool new music to listen to at work tomorrow. And maybe in a day or two we’ll be closer to working out a plan for the old house.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>A few minutes after we had turned off the lights and were starting to fall asleep — about 2:00 a.m. — we heard the beep from our oven that indicates it has reached the requested temperature. I could not ignore this so I got up to go see who was using the oven. Our housemate or or housemate’s boyfriend had apparently put a McDonald’s pie and a frozen chicken pot pie in the oven, right on the wire rack, and turned on the oven. This is after two consecutive weekends in which I’ve had to spend hours of my limited free time scrubbing out the inside of the oven due to spills. Both of these things can and will boil over and drip. But the oven had just come up to temperature, so they had not started dripping yet. I angrily put them on a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words">shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits</a> <strong>baking pan</strong> like we have asked them to use, <strong>over</strong> and <strong>over</strong> and <strong>over</strong> again.</p>
<p>This morning when I got up and out, the oven was off, the baking pan was still in the oven, the apple pie was gone, and the pot pie was a charred mess burnt all over the baking pan.</p>
<p>Grace had left the whole roasted chicken in the cast-iron dutch oven sitting on the stove overnight and I don’t know what to think about that. Especially since that, given the oven was on for at least a few hours, the extra heat from the oven was slightly warming the pots and pans on top of the stove. I hope we don’t have to throw out a whole roast chicken and vegetables.</p>
<p>It was strangely warm in the house last night and I need to check that our housemate has not turned the heat on. We have not turned the heat on and we have told her that we’re not ready to turn the heat on, because I need to get someone out to look at the system, which was leaking water all over the floor in the utility room. I want a couple of valves to be inspected and repaired or replaced, and the system probably needs to be flushed and refilled with water before we consider turning it on.</p>
<p>I don’t know what might happen if someone turned the system on while the radiator pipes didn’t have enough water in them, due to the leakage I’ve mentioned, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be good.</p>
<p>On my way out the door, I put the registration sticker on my license plate. So I shouldn’t be police-bait. We’re still waiting on the sticker for Grace’s car, though.</p>
<p>For breakfast I stopped at the Coffee House Creamery on Jackson Road and had a latte with almond milk, and a toasted cinnamon bagel with peanut butter. I am fixating on that free coffee as one good thing that happened today. See, there’s a good thing. All the rest might be going to hell and falling apart and outside of my control, but I got a free coffee drink.</p>
<p>On my lunch break, I went to Nicola’s books to pick up a copy of <em>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</em> for Grace. I was happy to find that they had a copy in stock, because she needs one immediately. I had another bagel for lunch, an egg salad sandwich on a toasted asiago bagel with lettuce and tomato at Barry Bagels. Sandwiches last night, bagels today — I’ve got to lay off the carbs. I’ve been blowing up like Violet Beauregarde over the last few months, eating so much bread.</p>
<h3 id="formats-formats-formats">Formats, Formats, Formats</h3>
<p>I’m trying to figure out a clean and simple way to use <strong>pandoc</strong> to convert these blog posts to… well, <strong>some</strong> downstream file format that I can use to generate a nice print version.</p>
<p>I don’t want to <strong>edit</strong> the downstream format. Or, if I must edit it, I want to edit it as little as possible. For one thing, I’ve got 40 separate Markdown files (and there will be 52 when I’m done with the year). I use them to generate HTML for the blog posts. If I make a correction in any of these upstream files — and I’m constantly making corrections as I edit this text, because it is hundreds of thousands of words long and there are a lot of things to fix, as I’m constantly noticing errors — I’ll want to re-generate the downstream file. When I do that, any changes I made manually to the downstream file will be overwritten, and I’ll have to make them again.</p>
<p>Basically, I want my writing workflow to look like a programming workflow. I might even use <strong>make</strong>. There should be one “canonical” version of the text, and then, downstream formats. The computer should handle the tedious work of generating all the derived presentation formats.</p>
<p>If possible, I don’t want to have to manually tag index entries in the downstream format. I’d like to be able to use some kind of tagging in the source Markdown file for all the index entries. Then I can just use something like OpenOffice to actually insert the index itself.</p>
<p>I’d also like to be able to control page breaks, in a specific way. I want page breaks between Markdown files. Specifically, I want page breaks before the content from each Markdown file starts, and these page breaks should make it so each blog post starts at the top of the next odd-numbered — that is, right-hand — page. Book chapters are usually formatted this way.</p>
<p>These things don’t seem like they should be that difficult. But the Markdown file format was not designed to encode index entries or page breaks, and the <strong>.docx</strong> and <strong>.odt</strong> each have limitations and make some things weirdly hard and complicated.</p>
<p>The documentation for <strong>pandoc</strong> shows how to insert raw XML data into downstream formats. can You insert a code block, and inside the code block, specify a format in brackets representing the downstream target format. If you’re not generating that target format, the contents of the code block are ignored. That’s great, because it means I can add stuff to my source files that will be included when I generate, say, an <strong>.odt</strong> file, but won’t be included when I generate some other format, like HTML. There’s an example that shows how to insert a page break into a downstream Microsoft Word <strong>.docx</strong> file. The page breaks aren’t included if you translate to some other format. I verified that this works, but the tags are highly specific to the <strong>.docx</strong> format, and it seems like other converters don’t work so well.</p>
<p>The example just inserts a basic page break, to make the text start at the top of the next page. It doesn’t do what I want with odd pages. In fact, it’s not clear to me that Microsoft Word <strong>can</strong> do what I want with page breaks, which seems crazy, so maybe I just haven’t found the trick yet.</p>
<p>OpenOffice seems to be able to handle even and odd (left and right) page breaks, but when I dig into the <strong>.odt</strong> file format, the specification specifically says it doesn’t support odd and even page breaks. That’s strange.</p>
<p>This also seems like something I ought to be able to do with <strong>styles</strong>. So, I’ve modified the default “Heading 1” style in a new OpenOffice Writer document, so that the modified style always includes a page break tied to a right-hand page. I’ve supposedly saved this as a template, and supposedly set this template as the default template. But this doesn’t seem to mean that these styles will be applied to a <strong>pandoc</strong>-generated <strong>.odt</strong> file when I open it. There’s also apparently a standard template that <strong>pandoc</strong> uses when it generates an <strong>.odt</strong> file. And supposedly a way to override it. I can’t figure out where the standard template lives. There’s a way to get <strong>pandoc</strong> to dump out the template. I exported that to a file and tried to get <strong>pandoc</strong> to use it, but it gave me an error about an invalid character, so some detail was wrong, there. The <strong>pandoc</strong> templates are on Github, so I downloaded the default template and tried using that. That seems to work. But the template format doesn’t seem to support changing paragraph styles. I tried making a simple <strong>.odt</strong> file and setting the paragraph style, and then looking at the generated files inside the <strong>.odt</strong> container, which is really a <strong>.zip</strong> file. When you do that, the <strong>styles</strong> file is modified, not the data file. But the <strong>pandoc</strong> template doesn’t have styles in it.</p>
<p>It seems like I have to find a way to either modify the template to do what I want, or get the template to use the styles that will do what I want.</p>
<p>I used to be fairly expert at Microsoft Word styles; I was a technical writer for a big documentation project. But that was <strong>.doc</strong>, not <strong>.docx</strong>. And as a once-upon-a-time web developer and Java developer I know a little about XML. But I never was really a front-end guy, or rather, I was a web developer before there really were separate front-end developers, and before CSS and all that fun. So I’ve never become expert on style sheets and especially not the ways in which these XML formats were adopted into word processors.</p>
<p>It’s a lot to figure out all at once, so I’ve been trying to create very simple examples and look at the generated files. But between templates and styles and other somewhat hidden and obscured behavior, it’s quite confusing. I did not want to have to take days and days to develop expertise in buried and semi-documented file formats. But I guess that’s my fate now, unless I want to try to become an expert in TeX instead.</p>
<p>On the <strong>pandoc-discuss</strong> Google Group, a kind stranger sent me an example piece of Lua filter code that can insert index entries into <strong>.docx</strong> files despite the complex formatting required. So maybe I need to go with <strong>.docx</strong> and automatic generation of index entries, because manually fixing page breaks is a lot easier than manually inserting index entries. Or maybe I can adapt his example to <strong>.odt</strong>. The <strong>pandoc</strong> command-line tool has a built-in Lua interpreter and Lua code can operate on the intermediate data structures it creates when transforming text from one format to the next. So just about any transformation <strong>should</strong> be possible.</p>
<p>I could consider migrating the whole year’s worth of writing from Markdown into some other format. But I don’t know what that format would be. And I’m really, really used to writing in Markdown.</p>
<p>Basically, if I’m going to turn this into some kind of book, I’m going to need all the help I can get, to make the workflow easier. I don’t want to have to manually mark up hundreds of index entries, when making any correction to the upstream Markdown files will result in regenerating the <strong>.docx</strong> or <strong>.odt</strong> files and wiping out all that work. I don’t want to have to manually adjust each page break in a 52-part document that is already over 300,000 words, especially since any edit might change the page break locations. So… I have to find some kind of solution. My formatting requirements like they should be all that hard.</p>
<p>Maybe the right way really would be to do all this in LaTex, the way real academic publishers do it. I should at least look into that possibility. But I keenly feel how every bit of free time I spend trying to get my <strong>tools</strong> working the way I want is time I can’t spend actually writing and editing. It’s all well and good to have to build one’s own lightsaber — when one is a young Jedi. Jedi knights don’t have day jobs and gaggles of children!</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I got home quite late. It was very foggy when I left the office, so I decided to drive on surface streets through downtown. That seems safer when it’s foggy or icy, since traffic is moving quite a bit slower. But it also takes a lot longer.</p>
<p>When I got home the kitchen was quite trashed, and so was the family room, and the dining table. It was noise and chaos and I realized that I was immediately getting very frustrated and bothered by all this, probably in part because I was long overdue for a meal. I usually walk in the house with my hands full — with a bag and some papers and an armload of mail. I can’t put down my bag and go through the mail because there is literally no clean and dry surface available to put things down on, I find that maddening. I wanted to put down Grace’s book and open a package from Powell’s books and on two dining tables there was barely one spot where this was possible. And there were so many toys and other things on the floor that I couldn’t even walk around our family room.</p>
<p>The trash and recycling had not been taken out. Dinner was underway, but getting the kids to finish the basic chores like setting the table was taking forever. We ate very late. I think it was almost eleven. We had roast chicken and salad and an instant pot of rice, and some vegetables that had spent too long in the pot. Our housemate had made beans flavored with chili pepper. But the same thing happened as always seems to happen when she makes food from scratch — she didn’t like the results and wouldn’t eat it. She’s always talking about how she loves spicy food, but I guess the beans were too spicy for her. Grace and I didn’t find them too spicy. The kids did, but they’re kids.</p>
<p>I read Benjamin a story but the other kids still had chores. No one had run the dishwasher during the day, so it was still full of dirty dishes after the meal, and so we couldn’t load it. So the dish situation was backed up. Our housemate and the kids did get the kitchen situation improved a bit, but with a lot of work to do today. The cast iron dutch oven had sat wet for most of the day, and you can’t do that with cast iron. The interior is covered with rust. This will not really harm it; it’s superficial. But it takes a lot of labor to get it back into shape. To be specific, it will probably take a lot of <strong>my</strong> labor to get it back into shape.</p>
<p>I think our housemate eventually wound up scrubbing the burnt pot pie gunk off the baking pan, although it was her boyfriend who left it in the oven all night until it was a blackened mess.</p>
<p>Elanor was up way too late, and had a shrieking tantrum while Grace tried to get ready for bed. It was very late again, about 2:00 a.m. Grace was in the bathroom just a few feet away getting ready — whe was even visible, with the bathroom door standing open. But Elanor lost her baby mind and went into frightening full-on rage mode. She kept trying to crawl off the bed, but she was too worked up to do it the right way, feet-first. So after a couple of hard landings, I tried to comfort her and keep her on the bed, but she was having none of it. I thought we might have to call an exorcist. Jesus. I half-expected her to spray pea soup in my face. She held out until Grace came to bed. Then it was all over pretty quickly.</p>
<p>I have tried to get her used to the idea that sometimes if mom is not available, she’ll have to settle for dad. She and I had a good time at the farm on Sunday — I was carrying her around up in the air, and she was giggling and having a great time. But yesterday I was the antichrist, apparently, as far as she was concerned. I know I shouldn’t take it personally, when one of my kids wants mom and no one else. But it’s one of those times when parenting seems not just unrewarding, but like some kind of aversion therapy.</p>
<p>I got two books in the mail last night. I had ordered them from two Powell’s locations, but they must consolidate them and ship from one place, since they both came in the same package. They were two Michael Moorcock books, in the recent <a href="http://www.multiverse.org/index.php?title=The_Michael_Moorcock_Collection">Michael Moorcock Collection</a> Gollancz editions: <em>Traveling to Utopia</em> and <em>The Nomad of Time</em>.</p>
<p>I didn’t get any reading time to speak of last night, but this morning I had a very rushed breakfast at Harvest Moon Café and read a few pages of <em>The Wrecks of Time</em>, the first of three novels in <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>. So far it’s dated and sexist, but also quite funny.</p>
<p>Grace made a homemade shampoo yesterday, which I tried out this morning, so we’ll see how that works out.</p>
<h3 id="more-formatting">More Formatting</h3>
<p>So, I’m trying a very simple experiment. I created a new OpenOffice Writer file, with three paragraphs in it. Each paragraph just has one word in it. So the file just has three words. I modified the second paragraph with the <strong>Format/Paragraph</strong> dialog, and checked the checkbox to insert a break, and chose Type <strong>Page</strong> and Position <strong>Before</strong> from the drop-down menus, and checked the <strong>With Page Style</strong> checkbox, and chose <strong>Right Page</strong> from the drop-down menu, leaving the Page Number at zero. This is about the simplest example I can come up with.</p>
<p>There’s now a page break before the second paragraph. I save my file, calling it <strong>test_para_formatting.odt</strong>, and quit OpenOffice Writer. I haven’t touched a template or a style. Then I use 7-Zip to unzip the <strong>.odt</strong> file (it’s really a <strong>.zip</strong> file, containing a folder full of seven files and three folders, one of which contains nine more folders, and so on). But the interesting files are <strong>content.xml</strong> and <strong>styles.xml</strong>.</p>
<p>The actual relevant contents of <strong>content.xml</strong> is an unformatted mess, but if I format it as I see fit, I get this:</p>
<pre><code><office:body>
<office:text text:use-soft-page-breaks="true">
<text:sequence-decls>
<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Illustration"/>
<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Table"/>
<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Text"/>
<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Drawing"/>
</text:sequence-decls>
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">one</text:p>
<text:p text:style-name="P1">two</text:p>
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">three</text:p>
</office:text>
</office:body></code></pre>
<p>I’m not sure what’s up with all that, but the second paragraph is represented by:</p>
<pre><code><text:p text:style-name="P1">two</text:p></code></pre>
<p>I never explicitly gave it a style, but apparently OpenOffice Writer gave it a style, named “P1.” But if I look in <strong>styles.xml</strong> I don’t see anything called “P1.” It’s actually in <strong>content.xml</strong> in a section called <strong>office:automatic-styles</strong>, right before <strong>office:body</strong>. The automatic styles section looks like this:</p>
<pre><code><office:automatic-styles>
<style:style style:name="P1" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard" style:master-page-name="Right_20_Page">
<style:paragraph-properties style:page-number="auto"/>
</style:style>
</office:automatic-styles></code></pre>
<p>That doesn’t have anything about page breaks. But it refers to “Right_20_Page.” That seems to be defined in <strong>styles.xml</strong> as a master style:</p>
<pre><code><office:master-styles>
<style:master-page style:name="Standard" style:page-layout-name="Mpm1"/>
<style:master-page style:name="Right_20_Page" style:display-name="Right Page" style:page-layout-name="Mpm2"/>
</office:master-styles></code></pre>
<p>Which, in turn, seems to refer to a page layout name “Mpm2.” That seems to be defined as:</p>
<pre><code><style:page-layout style:name="Mpm2" style:page-usage="right">
<style:page-layout-properties fo:page-width="8.5in" fo:page-height="11in" style:num-format="1" style:print-orientation="portrait" fo:margin-top="0.7874in" fo:margin-bottom="0.7874in" fo:margin-left="0.7874in" fo:margin-right="0.7874in" style:writing-mode="lr-tb" style:footnote-max-height="0in">
<style:footnote-sep style:width="0.0071in" style:distance-before-sep="0.0398in" style:distance-after-sep="0.0398in" style:adjustment="left" style:rel-width="25%" style:color="#000000"/>
</style:page-layout-properties>
<style:header-style/>
<style:footer-style/>
</style:page-layout></code></pre>
<p>That seems to be the bottom of this rabbit hole. There’s nothing at all about in any of this that uses the <strong>break-before</strong> property which is what I thought I needed to use. And I got myself quite confused yesterday since the OpenDocument-v1.2 specification says “In the OpenDocument XSL compatible namespace, the fo:break-before attribute does not support even-page, inherit and odd-page values.” It looks like OpenOffice Writer uses <strong>style:page-usage=“right”</strong> instead of the <strong>break-before</strong> attribute.</p>
<p>So now I’m wondering how I get my generated <strong>.odt</strong> files to use this <strong>page-usage</strong> attribute for paragraphs that have the Heading 1 style. Can I modify the default Heading 1 style to have this attribute?</p>
<p>I thought I did it, by modifying the Heading 1 style in a new blank document, saving it as a template, and then configuring OpenOffice Writer to use that file as custom template. When I launch OpenOffice Writer, or create a new blank document, I get that style for Heading 1, so the page breaks are just the way I want them. But there’s always a catch. When I use <strong>pandoc</strong> to generate an <strong>.odt</strong> file, and open that, the Heading 1 style doesn’t have that “right page” configuration.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s overridden somewhere?</p>
<p>If I unzip the generated <strong>.odt</strong> file, what do I see?</p>
<p>In <strong>styles.xml</strong> it does appear that there is a style with the <strong>display-name</strong> Heading 1. Maybe that’s overriding the Heading 1 style from the default template? It looks like this:</p>
<pre><code><style:style style:name="Heading_20_1"
style:display-name="Heading 1" style:family="paragraph"
style:parent-style-name="Heading"
style:next-style-name="Text_20_body"
style:default-outline-level="1" style:class="text">
<style:text-properties fo:font-size="115%"
fo:font-weight="bold" style:font-size-asian="115%"
style:font-weight-asian="bold" style:font-size-complex="115%"
style:font-weight-complex="bold" />
</style:style></code></pre>
<p>Hmmm. What happens if I try inserting that <strong>style:page-usage</strong> attribute?</p>
<pre><code>style:page-usage="right"</code></pre>
<p>and saving the <strong>styles.xml</strong> file, and zipping the folder back up, renaming it with the suffix <strong>.odt</strong>, and opening it with OpenOffice Writer again?</p>
<p>Hmmm. I get a warning message about how the file is corrupt and shouldn’t be trusted. There’s an option to let OpenOffice repair the file, but when I have it do that, it says it can’t repair the file. I guess it’s good that OpenOffice is looking our for me, or something.</p>
<p>Is this something I can fix by changing the template that <strong>pandoc</strong> uses to generate the <strong>.odt</strong> file? The standard one is <a href="https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-templates/blob/master/default.opendocument">here</a>. But when I look at that, I see a number of styles that I think are for tables of contents, not headings. And I’m not even sure those are making it into the generated <strong>.docx</strong> file.</p>
<p>So let’s set this problem aside for now and see if I can do anything with generating index entries.</p>
<h3 id="generating-index-entries">Generating Index Entries</h3>
<p>It’s possible to write filter code in Lua and use it directly from <strong>pandoc</strong> without having to install any other language run-time environments or development tools. That’s a really cool feature. Let’s see if I can make it do something. On the <strong>pandoc-discuss</strong> list a user gave me some sample code that will do this for <strong>.docx</strong> files. But I want to make it work with <strong>.odt</strong> files, so I’ll start by creating a simple example of an OpenOffice Writer file with an index entry. If I select a word and add an index entry for that word, it looks like this:</p>
<pre><code><text:alphabetical-index-mark-start text:id="IMark165009928"/>two<text:alphabetical-index-mark-end text:id="IMark165009928"/></code></pre>
<p>That seems reasonably simple, with the exception of the <strong>text:id=“IMark165009928”</strong> bit. The [spec] indicates that there are some other optional attributes like <strong>text:key1</strong> and <strong>text:main-entry</strong>, but I’m going to ignore those for now. The spec doesn’t say how the <strong>text:id</strong> attribute is interpreted; it just says it’s a string. I’m going to assume it should be unique. It looks like maybe I need something like a UUID.</p>
<p>After quite of bit of trial-and-error, I’ve got a Lua filter that looks like this:</p>
<pre><code>-- A very simple UUID generator for producing numbers for index entries. We might need something better.
local random = math.random
local function uuid()
local template ='xxxxxyyyyy'
return string.gsub(template, '[xy]', function (c)
local v = (c == 'x') and random(0, 0xf) or random(8, 0xb)
return string.format('%x', v)
end)
end
function handle_span(span)
local spanType = span.classes[1]
if spanType == "i" then
if FORMAT == 'odt' then
local id_str = uuid()
local open_str = '<text:alphabetical-index-mark-start text:id=\"' .. id_str .. '\" />'
local close_str = '<text:alphabetical-index-mark-end text:id=\"' .. id_str .. '\" />'
return { pandoc.RawInline('opendocument', open_str .. pandoc.utils.stringify(span.content) .. close_str) }
else
return pandoc.Str(pandoc.utils.stringify(span.content))
end
end
end
local FILTER = {
{Span = handle_span}
}
return FILTER</code></pre>
<p>And this seems to do the right thing. In my raw Markdown I can insert a link element like so:</p>
<pre><code>[Lego Ninjago]{.i}</code></pre>
<p>And the <strong>.odt</strong> will contain:</p>
<pre><code><text:alphabetical-index-mark-start text:id="093c999bba" />Lego Ninjago<text:alphabetical-index-mark-end text:id="093c999bba" /></code></pre>
<p>But if I am not generating an <strong>.odt</strong> file, I’ll get a span like this:</p>
<pre><code><span class="i">Lego Ninjago</span></code></pre>
<p>Which seems to appear in rendered HTML as just ordinary text. So there’s one thing working!</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>During the day I received a scanned document from our realtor — a rough draft of a lease agreement. Really, it was a purchase agreement marked up with hand-written notes, but it should serve as a starting point for something we can give to our attorney, and say “here, draft this into a real lease agreement.” So Grace and I are pondering it now and wondering if we can make this work out.</p>
<p>After work on Tuesday I went to Costco for a few things: a big package of paper towels, a pot pie for dinner on Wednesday night, a couple of bags of oranges (the bananas weren’t ripe), some asparagus, more celery for Grace to juice, and some cookies for dessert. I got out the door for $82.66, which seems to me like evidence that we’re getting better and managing our grocery purchases and spreading them across two trips.</p>
<p>When I got home we had two checks from Liberty Mutual. So we have been reimbursed for the reversed “depreciation” of the amount they paid us for the damage to the family room ceiling. Like I’ve mentioned, Grace understands how that workds and I really don’t. What I understand, though, is that they were supposed to pay us this money many weeks ago and it took many weeks of calls and e-mail messages to eventually shake it loose.</p>
<p>For dinner we had lamb steaks and salad and cookies, and then things got busy with cleanup. The cookies were Danish waffle cookies, not too sweet, and the kids only ate half of them, leaving some more for their breakfast Wednesday morning.</p>
<p>The bedtime story was another few pages of the chapter called “The Council of Elrond,” from <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. I am hoping we’ll be able to finish <em>Fellowship</em> by the end of the year, but this is a hard chapter to get through. It’s fascinating to me, but I think maybe it doesn’t engage the kids very much because there isn’t much action. There’s more action coming up, though, including a number of scenes that should be very recognizable from the movie, like the events in Lorien and Moria. But Veronica has apparently decided to boycott the stories altogether, Sam has been somewhat indifferent to them lately, and Joshua wants to read the stories himself — last night he had a meltdown because I wouldn’t let him read another story after we were done. So I have to plan some story time where he gets to read. Grace reminded me that he’s just trying to do what I do. I’ve told him he needs to work on slowing down and speaking clearly, and he actually has been doing that. So he should get to do some reading.</p>
<p>I had breakfast Wednesday morning at Harvest Moon Café again and this time I had gotten out early enough that I was able to finish my coffee and take a moment’s peace.</p>
<p>Blogging pretty much got away from me yesterday. I worked a little bit on some Lua code to process links in my Markdown documents. I have gotten a simple form of indexing working, but to be really useful the indexing needs a few more features. I’d like to be able to specify the <strong>text:main-entry</strong> attribute so that I can index variants of existing index entries. There are also things I’d like to be able to do with links; I’d like each Markdown document to have an index of links at the end that shows the actual web link. When I generate HTML, the links will be live. But when I generate a format designed to wind up in print form, the reader will just see a highlighted word or words where the hyperlink is; I’d like the reader to be able to search a list and find the actual link that he or she can type in if desired.</p>
<p>There’s a Lua example that shows how to extract the links from a Pandoc document and use a Lua table to has them and keep a count of the number of times each link is referenced. I want to do something more elaborate than that. I’m not entirely sure how I want the finished product to look. Maybe in the <strong>.odt</strong> format, the links would get a link number, or something like that. And then in a separate table at the end of the document they’d be arranged by number; each table row would show the link text and the URL. Although some URLs are not very convenient for printing — they can be very long, for example. So this is the kind of thing that might require some manual fix-up.</p>
<p>During my lunch hour I went to Meijer and deposited the checks from Liberty Mutual in the Huntington Bank ATM, and picked up a few items for lunches. I bought two Corelle bowls for cooking ramen noodles in the microwave — I don’t want to use paper bowls for this purpose. I also picked up some frozen burritos and several chocolate bars.</p>
<p>There’s a brand out now called <a href="https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en">Tony’s Chocolonely</a> which claims to make chocolate from a supply chain that is entirely free of slave labor. I bought six of their brightly-colored packaged bars: two each of “extra dark chocolate 70%,” “dark almond sea salt 51%,” and “milk caramel sea salt.” These are huge bars: 6 ounces. I one of each kind home to try after dinner.</p>
<p>Why “Chocolonely?” According to their web site:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And because he felt like he was the only guy in the chocolate industry that cared about eradicating slavery from the industry, he named his chocolate “Chocolonely”. Get it? The chocolate industry was a lonely place for 100% slave free crusaders!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, OK then.</p>
<p>At work I was able to work with a couple of co-workers to test a LabVIEW application that I worked on a while back. I was happy to find that it mostly works. There was a problem with one of the test voltages, but it my co-worker Patrick opened up the homemade test fixture and tightened up some screw terminals. That fixed the problem, so it seems like that really was a hardware problem. There were some other minor bugs, having to do with failing to read the <strong>current</strong> state of front panel controls in event handlers. I created some new property nodes, which read values from the controls, and that fixed the problem. I still consider myself to be a bit unschooled in LabVIEW, and it remains sometimes inscrutably idiosyncratic to me.</p>
<p>We had a Costco pot pie for dinner, and after dinner we tried the dark almond sea salt and milk caramel sea salt chocolate bars.</p>
<p>Grace and I aren’t really fans of milk chocolate, but the milk chocolate tasted fine; it wasn’t filled with caramel, but rather flavored with “crunchy caramel” — what I’d actually call something more like a “toffee crunch” or “toffee crisp” bar. Our milk chocolate fans liked this one. Grace and I enjoyed the dark almond bar with sea salt much more. It reminded me of what a Hershey’s bar with almonds used to taste like, before their chocolate formulation went to hell. I’d rate this bar highly. There is one thing that is a little strange about the Tony’s bars: instead of being scored in a grid, so they can be easily broken up into consistently-sized chunks, they are molded into more arty geometric shapes with angles and curves. You can still break them up, but the pieces won’t be of consistent sizes and shapes.</p>
<p>According to their web site:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To us it doesn’t make sense for chocolate bars to be divided into chunks of equal sizes when there is so much inequality in the chocolate industry! The unevenly sized chunks of our 6oz bars are a palatable way of reminding our choco friends that the profits in the chocolate industry are unfairly divided.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, OK then.</p>
<p>After eating these huge bars, even with our whole family, everyone was full up on chocolate, so we left the 70% dark chocolate bar in the cupboard for Grace and the kids to taste on Thursday. 70% is getting into what I consider to be dark chocolate, although when I want a more serious hit of choclate for its mood-enhancing properties, I eat a few squares of 85%. Recently I’ve been enjoying <a href="http://paschachocolate.com/our-chocolate/3-5oz-chocolate-bars/85-cacao/">Pascha brand organic 85%</a> a lot.</p>
<p>We’re in a kind of strange purgatory between summer and fall; last night, we had to turn the air conditioning back on. It was cool outside, but not cool enough to keep heat from the oven from building up in the house. But then tonight it’s supposed to be in the forties.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>I’m a grown-ass man, allegedly, but with all that pot pie and chocolate last night, I managed to give myself a tummyache. My stomach was churning for hours. I spent some time talking about money issues and the proposed lease agreement for the old house, and that certainly didn’t help.</p>
<p>Despite a pretty promising start to the evening, it wasn’t a good night for sleeping, and I was quite late getting into work. Sometime during the night, Benjamin got in our bed. I didn’t notice until it was nearly light out and he was wiggling around. Grace woke up in a puddle because apparently he had an accident during the night. Our foam mattress from Costco is very far from waterproof. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it dried out and deodorized. Elanor also had a bit of a difficult night and woke us up several times grousing and complaining. This was all not what we hoped when we got to bed last night — and we actually got to bed before midnight.</p>
<p>I read Benjamin a brief story. I’ve been reading him Little Critter storybooks by Mercer Mayer some nights, but I have not been mentioning these in the blog. After that Joshua read a few chapters from <em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl. I have not read this book before and while I am finding it funny, I am also finding it quite disturbing. The portrayal of George’s grandmother is really pretty horrifying, and seems quite ageist and misogynistic to me.</p>
<p>After the story I had just a little quiet time available to read a few more pages from <em>The Wrecks of Time</em>. So far I am finding this obviously dated science fiction novel to be really enjoyable — the story is flying along and this version of Moorcock’s multiverse cosmology is explained quickly in passing, without bogging down the story in infodumps. I swear that there’s also a shout-out to J. G. Ballard’s <em>The Crystal World</em>, as one of the variant earths, Earth 13, has turned to crystal. (It looks like this book was first published as a book in 1967, but serialized in 1965 and 1966; <em>The Crystal World</em> appeared in 1966, although Ballard wrote about a similar idea in his 1964 story “The Illuminated Man.” Come to think of it, maybe the influence went the other way?)</p>
<p>On my way out this morning I noticed more bits of trash in the yard — sauce cups from takeout food, papers, etc. Down at the end of our driveway, by Crane Road, I saw blowing around a page from the children’s book <em>Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus</em>. I wonder if some of this might have been scattered when the trash was picked up? But we certainly don’t have that excuse for the stuff in our yard. So I have asked Grace to give the kids a trash bag and tell them to make a careful walking inspection of our yard and our driveway down to and including part of Crane Road.</p>
<p>I had tea and pop-tarts for breakfast at the office. I tasted the Tony’s 70% dark chocolate bar at lunch time. It’s OK, but the texture is a little bit chalky. It’s not going to replace the Pascha bar in my affections anytime soon. If Tony’s releases a darker bar, I’ll be happy to taste it. So for now I can recommend the 51% dark almond bar with sea salt — I thought that was very good. The others were decent, but not great.</p>
<p>We had a rough money week. We spent more than usual on gas, due to some long drives, and on various other small things like hair care products: small things, but they add up. It also threw us off when I missed getting to Costco Friday night and had to run out to a few other places where some of our usual items like salad were at least twice as expensive per ounce. Big Costco packages really are saving us a non-trivial amount of money each week. Grace and I are now looking at this sum from Liberty Mutual and trying to figure out if we can spend some of it on things we’ve been putting off for a year or more: for example, getting our fireplaces inspected and getting a cord of wood delivered, so we can have regular fires this winter. I also want to set aside a little money now for holiday meals. And we may need another car seat. Things like that will eat up that extra money pretty quick.</p>
<p><em>Doctor Who</em> series 11 will premiere in just a few days! It will be a short season, only ten episodes. I have purchased a “season pass” on the iTunes store, so we will probably watch the first one Monday night, assuming the kids can get through their chores.</p>
<p>Grace and I are considering going to see the Chapo Trap House crew next Thursday night in Detroit. Tickets are $25.00.</p>
<p>I was contemplating taking three kids to see They Might Be Giants on October 24th — but it looks like it is a 14-and-up show, strangely. None of the kids will be old enough, although Veronica will be just a few days from her fourteenth birthday, and I’d consider that close enough. Tickets are $40.00 each… I’m going to have to give that some serious thought. I’m kind of pissed — I thought this might be a great opportunity to take three of the kids to their first rock show.</p>
<p>The Shin Ramyun “Gourmet Spicy” noodles from Costco were in fact spicy enough to make my nose run!</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night we had a pretty basic end-of-week meal: bagged salad, scrambled eggs, leftover beans, and one of the Tony’s 70% dark chocolate bars. Grace needed to get herself and the kids up and out early, so we set our alarms for 6:00 a.m. and did our best to get to bed before midnight. We came pretty close, although the kids were not fully quiet until a bit later.</p>
<p>Grace got up and out with everyone by about 8:00, which was no small achievement. I had a little quiet time to read and so I read a few more chapters in <em>The Wrecks of Time</em>. Previously I mentioned a shout-out to J. G. Ballard’s <em>The Crystal World</em>. Reading more, I think that Moorcock must have been reading a lot of Ballard at the time, because his characters are very Ballardian, especially in the way they lecture each other and show very flat affects. I also mentioned the sexism in this story. That has only expanded one of the ways that Faustaff knows that a female character is not a human is because, supposedly, all women involuntarily respond to him with sexual arousal. And so when he meets one who doesn’t, she’s clearly not human — although she invites him to have sex anyway. Elsewhere, the female characters seem to do little other than make the men sandwiches. This is really far from unusual in science fiction written by men in the 1960s, and so I’m pretty used to just grimacing at it and continuing on to find out what happens in the story, but I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you found it intolerable.</p>
<p>There are some amusing little puzzles to work out. Several characters have last names that start with “O” — Orelli and Ogg, who formerly worked for Faustaff but are now “salvagers.” I think we first meet these characters on Earth-15. “O” is the fifteenth letter of the alphabet. Make of that what you will.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-755">FerretBrain article</a> on these lesser-known Moorcock books suggest that this novel, originally called <em>The Rituals of Infinity</em>, is one of his better books; it recommends this one, along with <em>The Winds of Limbo</em> (originally known as <em>The Fireclown</em>), <em>The Shores of Death</em> (originally known as <em>The Twilight Man</em>), and <em>The Eternal Champion</em> (“the novel, not the omnibus”). In the recent Gollancz Michael Moorcock collection books, <em>The Winds of Limbo</em> and <em>The Shores of Death</em> are in the omnibus <em>Moorcock’s Multiverse</em>, and <em>The Eternal Champion</em> (the novel) is found in <em>The Eternal Champion</em> (the omnibus), not to be confused with “The Eternal Champion” (the story), which is found in <em>Elric: The Sleeping Sorceress</em>. That’s all perfectly clear, right?</p>
<p>I can be hard to find copies of some of these books. My strategy has been to periodically look on both Alibris and eBay, and to not assume that the cataloging is good. Don’t assume that the publisher’s name is present. Broaden the search terms as much as possible, and search only on author’s last name and two or three words of the title. This will give you the best chance of finding the edition you want, although you may have to wade through hundreds of listings that match the broader search. I just found some inexpensive copies of <em>The Eternal Champion</em> and <em>Moorcock’s Multiverse</em> on eBay and ordered them, so we’ll see what shows up in a week or two!</p>
<p>I’ll head to Costco after work today. I need to do some deep-cleaning of the kitchen this weekend, and Grace and I need to get a podcast out.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I left work relatively early and took a little time to myself to run some errands. I went to Sally’s Beauty Supply on Ann Arbor-Saline Road to get some nail files. (I do four nails on my right hand, rather than just cutting them off short like the rest of my nails, because I use them for finger-picking guitar). I then went a few doors down to Target and took a look at DVDs and shampoo. My hair is getting long enough that I need to put some effort into maintaining it, so I got some Neutrogena “anti-residue” shampoo. I used this years ago when I last had long hair. I think the last time I had really long hair might have been twenty years ago. But that was pretty much a mullet, shorter on top, and this time I’m just growing it all out.</p>
<p>I like to look periodically for movies on sale. I keep hoping to find a copy of <em>Iron Man</em> (the first one) marked down to $10.00, but that movie must continue to sell well so I haven’t seen it marked down that far. I considered buying a set of <em>The X-Files</em> Season 11, but I wasn’t sure if it was really any good. Reading some reviews today it sounds like a mixed bag, but then, <em>The X Files</em> was always a mixed bag, especially after the third season or so. I came across a DVD of <em>Matilda</em> for $5.00. The kids have been reading Roald Dahl recently and specifically asking me if I could get them the movie. So I did.</p>
<p>At Costco I managed to keep the price tage under $200.00. I got some more of the knockwurst, to eat with sauerkraut. I got a hunk of pot roast. Instead of an apple pie to go with our usual salmon, rice, and salad, I got a package of apple strudel. These were pretty good for store-bought pastry, but overly sweet, so we probably won’t get them again. I also got salad, eggs, Canadian bacon, the bacon we usually get, English muffins, and a few more of our regular foods.</p>
<p>Everyone was very tired last night so shortly after dinner we all pretty much just went to bed without a story (although I read half of a book, which I’ll describe below).</p>
<p>This morning I made toasted English muffins with butter in the broiler; half of them were topped with cheddar cheese. I also briefly fried half the slices of Canadian bacon and put them on a plate, and put the other half (a separate package) in the freezer for another time (probably next weekend). I made a giant plain omelette. This all went on the table as “assemble-them-yourselves” egg muffins. People who didn’t want cheese could choose the muffins that didn’t have melted cheese on them. Then they could assemble some combination of Canadian bacon and cooked egg. Our housemate and her boyfriend peeled and shredded potatoes for hash browns. I got Grace to come out and assist with that. So that was breakfast, along with a pot of black tea. We didn’t go to the Mother Loaf bakery today.</p>
<p>After breakfast and a little down time to digest, I wrangled pots and pans for a while. The Instant Pot needed a deep cleaning. The cast-iron dutch oven needed a deep cleaning to take off rust and give it a fresh coat of oil. This is all messy stuff and my hands were coated with black goo. The kids have been helpful but only so helpful; we have to follow up relentlessly, asking them again, and again, and again. All of them but Sam will default to just procrastinating to the point way beyond when the work was needed. It’s endlessly frustrating and at this point we just to continue to take it on faith that <strong>eventually</strong> they will learn how to do chores readily, when they are needed, without micro-management.</p>
<h3 id="fascism">Fascism</h3>
<p>We got a few more books in the mail last night. One is a nonfiction book, <em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton. I learned of this book when Matt Christman of the Chapo Trap House podcasters released show #245, “The Monster Fash,” dated September 13th. It’s a solo recording in the mode of “Drunken History,” and about the actual history of the rise of fascism. It’s a necessary and very welcome counter to the narrative that fascism is fundamentally phenomenon of the left. This is one of the Chapo Trap House episodes that makes me glad I’m supporting them. I have listened to this show twice at work, and I feel like I actually learned something, especially about the history of Mussolini’s rise in Italy.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m going to try to get this book read and discuss it on the podcast. We’ve had so little time to work on the podcast recently, though. And I will generally gravitate towards fiction, especially if there are “books about ideas” (that is, the kind of mind-bending science fiction that I love so much) on my to-read pile.</p>
<p>Speaking of Chapo Trap House, Grace and I have tickets to go see them do a live show in Detroit on Thursday evening. It’s a bit hard to get out on a weeknight like that, but Grace has arranged a sitter. I have listened to excerpts from a couple of their live shows, but I’m really not sure what it will be like. Grace does not listen to the podcast and so the various personalities and running gags and in-jokes won’t make a lot of sense to her. But we’ll do our best to have a fun night out. I just hope they don’t run too late; it’s a 45-minute drive from our house in Pittsfield township and we have a sitter through midnight.</p>
<h3 id="peter-watts">Peter Watts</h3>
<p>Peter Watt is not a fascist. I think Peter Watts would agree deeply with the late Ray Bradbury, who is reported to have said that he wasn’t trying to predict the future, but to prevent it — or rather, to prevent particular kinds of futures that he foresaw.</p>
<p>A number of years ago I became a Peter Watts fan, reading <em>Starfish</em> and the rest of his Rifters books, and I have looked forward to each new published book. Some time ago — ummm, it may have been nine or ten years ago at this point — I asked him if he would consider calling in to a podcast. He was generally agreeable. I should get in touch and see if he is still agreeable. Because I’d love to talk with him about his newest book.</p>
<p>His newest book is called <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>. When I start reading a new Peter Watts book, there is very little hope that I can do anything else but continue to read it until I’ve finished it. They always grab my attention from the first paragraph. This book is quite short. I think it’s just barely 50,000 words. He refers to it as a novella. The question as to its exact length might be significant when it comes to determining what awards it is eligible for. Anyway, it’s a really good, fast-paced science fiction novella or short novel. I read about half of it after dinner last night and the other half in the bathtub this morning.</p>
<p>The layout of the printed book is a little quirky. There’s some red ink involved and so some interstitial pages between sections of the novella feature artwork that has red in it. But throughout the text, every page or two or three, there’s a single character in red, while all the rest are in black.</p>
<p>At first I thought that maybe the red letters spelled something out, either in plaintext of code. I generally don’t have the patience for this sort of thing. I already put in a lot of work to <strong>intepret</strong> the texts I read; I don’t generally like the idea of having to do extra work to <strong>decode</strong> them. But I think the letters also do some other things, besides carrying a coded message. In “red letter edition” bibles, the words spoken by Jesus are printed in red ink — the color of blood — to hilight their particular status as allegedly <strong>his</strong> words, and not the words of anyone else, imbued with special authority, humanity, and sacrifice.</p>
<p>The whole story is about humans who live in a starship and are awake only every few thousand years. Visually, the lonely red letters help to convey a sense of the gaps of time that occur in the story in between the awakenings of our protagonist. Hidden messages, not encrypted messages (steganography, not cryptography) also are used by the mostly-hibernating humans to communicate with each other, so just the <strong>implication</strong> that there is a hidden text within the text gives extra resonance to these plot elements, making the reader feel like he or she has also been the recipient of a subversive hidden message.</p>
<p>In one characters pass a message that is hidden in dissonant eighth notes in a musical composition, rendered in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohlen%E2%80%93Pierce_scale">Bohlen-Pierce</a> scale. That’s a real scale, and I was not familiar with it. It’s useful hear becaues two “tritaves” (not octaves) of a 13-step scale allow an easy encoding of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The humans are keeping their plans secret from the artificial intelligence they call the Chimp, that runs the ship. The Chimp has very good, but not perfect, surveillance of the ship, but he’s not quite as smart as the humans, and doesn’t necessarily have a human aesthetic sense. So the implication is that he wouldn’t be able to tell which notes are dissonant.</p>
<p>I wrote down the first few red letters and found that they spell out “I see you’ve found my eigth notes.” I haven’t picked out any more. I’ll leave it to you to find the rest. But I’ll also leave you with a question — to whom is the writer, our protagonist, addressing this steganographic message?</p>
<p>(This is my way of suggesting that Peter Watts’ stories are worth not just reading, but re-reading).</p>
<p>I’m not going to recount the whole story, because I don’t want to spoil it, and also because it’s vague — vague to the reader, and also vague to the <strong>characters</strong>. The ship’s actual mission, and the state of the galaxy outside the ship, is nebulous (heh heh, that’s a little interstellar-travel joke). The ship creates black holes, apparently both for its motive power and to open gates in a daisy-chain of wormholes; it is slowly traveling orbits of the galaxy in order to create a transit network, and to hook its daisy-chained routes into other networks, since it isn’t the only ship doing this. The technology is pretty advanced. So is the hibernation technology that allows the humans to sleep through most of the millions of years of their odyssey.</p>
<p>Watts doesn’t dwell very much on these technologies; the science fiction is a little less “hard” because this future is so distant. “Deep time” has long been one of my favorite science fiction tropes, and he convincingly raises some of the problems associated with slower-than-light travel across huge spans of time (without faster-than-light travel, every trajectory is <strong>timelike</strong>, rather than <strong>spacelike</strong>, meaning that it partakes of more “distance” in time, than in space.</p>
<p>But that’s all mostly just the setting. What makes this book work well is that this is really a <strong>human</strong> story, not a science lecture. And the humans on board have special status, granted a very strange kind of longevity — and a nearly godlike perspective — but they are fully human as well, with the vulnerability that implies. The origins of its mission, the state of human civilization outside the ship, and its eventual endgame are all occulted. Every once in a while the ship encounters a terrifying hint that there are other beings or technologies out there, haunting the wormhole network. But this isn’t any consolation to the crew in their isolation; the only safe course of action is to get as far away from these manifestations as possible, as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>The idea of a group of humans actually born and raised for a life of extreme isolation and extreme hazards is a theme in Watts’ writing going all the way back to <em>Starfish</em>. And so is the idea that such people might love this isolated work — in this book, people undergoing a diaspora in time even more than space — but also come to resent the way that each day, technology makes people easier to use, and sacrifice. The people in charge aren’t going to let little things like compassion and human weakness stand in the way of the mission. This is certainly not a new message in science fiction — for example, it’s one of the main themes in <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>. But it’s a message that is more relevant each year in this hell-world timeline.</p>
<p>Anyway, go read <em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em>. Peter Watts deserves to be a much better-known author. It seems also like I haven’t been keeping up with his recent stories, some of them set in the same “Sunflower Cycle.” Two of them are in <em>The New Space Opera 2</em> (the 2009 anthology) and <em>Reach for Infinity</em> (the 2014 anthology). I have both of those in storage and I don’t remember if I read those stories. Unfortunately <em>The New Space Opera 2</em> is in the worst possible positions in my stacks of 140 or so boxes of books: buried in the bottom center of a palette stacked 3 boxes across, 3 boxes deep, and four boxes tall. I’ll have to decide if I’m up for tearing apart the whole palette to get to it. (And this is one of the reasons I’ve been hoping to get everything shelved!) <em>Reach for Infinity</em> is a little easier to get to — it’s on the front edge of a palette, only the third box down from the top, so I only have to remove two boxes to get to it. So I’ll pull that one out first. Maybe I’ll read that tonight while the kids watch <em>Matilda</em>.</p>
<h3 id="moderan"><em>Moderan</em></h3>
<p>I got another book in, a book from the New York Review Books Classics series, called <em>Moderan</em>. This collects a number of long out-of-print satirical, dystopian stories by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Bunch">David R. Bunch</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He published at least 100 stories in science fiction magazines between 1957 and 1997, and nearly as many in literary magazines. No comprehensive David R. Bunch bibliography is known to exist; Bunch published almost exclusively in little magazines, digest-sized fiction magazines and fanzines, making a complete tally difficult (as the latter, particularly, are poorly indexed, and few indexes cover both the full range of little magazines and their more-commercial peers).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But some notable people knew of his work; Harlan Ellison included two of his stories in <em>Dangerous Visions</em>. I’m embarrassed to admit that while of course I’ve read <em>Dangerous Visions</em> and the follow-up volume <em>Again, Dangerous Visions</em>, I don’t recall either story, “Incident in Moderan” or “The Escaping.” I’m wondering if I will recognize them if I read them again.</p>
<p>“Satirical, dystopian” anything, whether on the lighter side or the darker, are squarely in my wheelhouse. So I’m really looking forward to checking out this collection.</p>
<p>I don’t have a copy of <em>Dangerous Visions</em> in my library currently, although I really should add one. I had old hardcover copies from the Science Fiction Book Club, back in the day, but they are long-gone, and I’ve been holding out until I can get a uniform edition of all three books (heh heh heh, that’s another little joke… unfortunately).</p>
<p>SERIOUSLY HARLAN ELLISON IS DEAD CAN WE FINALLY GET THE LAST BOOK NOW</p>
<pre><code>ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT</code></pre>
<h3 id="kerouac">Kerouac</h3>
<p>As part of our subscription of the Library of America, we just got a new volume, a relatively skinny book called <em>The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished, and Newly Translated Writings</em>, edited by Todd Tiechen. This book includes a couple of short novels that Kerouac apparently wrote in French, which have only recently been translated into English. I don’t know Kerouac’s work very well, having really only read <em>On the Road</em>. But apparently this volume mostly is made of scraps and leftovers. I am curious about the journals, though — I’m always interested in finding out how writers approach their journaling.</p>
<h3 id="kano">Kano</h3>
<p>The Kano folks got back to me on Facebook, about my assertion that the Kano device was making HTTP requests to Facebook, as I determined when trying to use a proxy server. Apparently they overlooked my message for — how long? A year? I don’t even remember. I’m not even sure the Kano still works; I basically stopped using it since I couldn’t get the proxy server feature to work, leaving it open to whatever web site the kids wanted to access. If I can, I’ll get the proxy server set up again, and the Kano set up again, and see if I can get a clear log of these requests to send them.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished, and Newly Translated Writings</em> by Jack Kerouac (editd by Todd Tiechen) (Library of America)</li>
<li><em>The Anatomy of Fascism</em> by Robert Paxton</li>
<li><em>Moderan</em> by David R. Bunch (New York Review Books Classics 2018 edition)</li>
<li><em>The Freeze-Frame Revolution</em> by Peter Watts (finished)</li>
<li><em>George’s Marvelous Medicine</em> by Roald Dahl (bedtime <strong>listening</strong>; Joshua’s been reading it out loud)</li>
<li><em>The Wrecks of Time</em> by Michael Moorcock (in progress; found in the omnibus volume <em>Traveling to Utopia</em>, Gollancz 2014)</li>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em> (Gollancz, 2014) (omnibus volume containing 3 novels; finished the first, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, October 6th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-21984606797732184292018-09-29T15:46:00.001-04:002018-09-29T15:46:22.281-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, September 29, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>After Grace woke up from her nap, she was amenable to the idea of going for Chinese food, and our housemate was pretty happy about the idea, too. So we asked Veronica to make a pot of rice and ran out to Meijer for paper towels, two cans of oven cleaner, and two of those long-necked lighters to replace a couple that went missing. Then we continued up Carpenter Road to King Shing and took home a pile of takeout: orange chicken, beef with broccoli, rice noodles, dumplings, sesame balls, and two big bottles of ginger ale. The meal was a hit.</p>
<p>Before bed, I finished reading <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. I’m still chewing over my impressions of the third part of the book. Overall, for now I’ll just say that it didn’t end as well as I hoped it would. There are some nice action scenes, but there are also a number of rambling passages where von Beck blathers about the rise of fascism. I’m about as sympathetic an audience to this topic as I can imagine, but this just tended to let the air out of the story’s tires. I also wasn’t really happy with the way Moorcock treated Oona in the last few chapters; she’s there, but she is off-stage for much of the action, and has little to no dialogue. And so my impressions of the book are mixed. The first part is really exciting, but the rest of it fails to live up to that excitement. I’m feeling ambivalent about whether I want to try to read the next Moonbeam Roads novel, <em>Destiny’s Brother</em>. And I feel like I can’t really recommend <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> without reservation, although it is better than some of the “mid-career” Elric stories I discussed before.</p>
<p>This morning I read a bit more of <em>Oryx and Crake</em>. That book moves along pretty quickly and so I expect that I will probably finish it by the end of the month. Atwood’s style in this book is really light and engaging, often flirting with the comic, although the setting and circumstances are incredibly dark. I’m enjoying that combination a lot.</p>
<p>Today I made a late breakfast of paleo pancakes (made with the Birch Benders mix), with the rest of the blueberries. There weren’t enough blueberries, so we salvaged some blackberries that were starting to go bad and cut them up into the mix too. I also turned leftover white rice and leftover salmon from Friday night into a big frittata, started on the stove and finished in the oven baked in our largest cast-iron pan. That was a hit.</p>
<p>I spent quite a while after the meal working on the kitchen. Grace went through the refrigerator and pulled out things we can dispose of. There was a fair amount. I gave the oven a thorough cleaning, which involved removing the bottom of the oven compartment so I could scrub off some burnt-food that had dripped through crevices. I finally got all the black burnt material off the bottom of the oven. Some of it was burnt plastic. I was able to get most of it off by going through yet more of the green scrub pads, but some bits were so hard that I finally wound up chipping them off with a steel screwdriver. The ceramic coating over the metal is so hard that this didn’t actually scratch the surface. I wore gloves, but they weren’t long gloves, and so I got a couple of mild burns from oven cleaner that wound up on my arms. I also put a nice long gash on my leg, scraping it against the corner of the drawer that goes under the oven; it’s got sharp corners. I got the oven racks mostly clean of burnt-on goo. Sam helped with that a bit, scrubbing the racks while I scrubbed the oven.</p>
<p>While I worked on the oven, with the sliding door open and two fans running, I had <em>Cheap Trick at Budokan</em> playing in the family room, turned up loud enough so that I could hear it over the fans and the sink. Benjamin was walking around with his hands clamped over his ears complaining that it was too loud. I just told him that if it was too loud, he was too old.</p>
<p>Our housemate showed me her laptop, which is not booting properly. After I was done with the oven, a took a look. It won’t get through a disk check, throwing all kinds of sense errors. The hard drive is pretty unambiguously failing. So I have to ask her what she wants to do. I have some 2.5-inch backup drives that I don’t need. I could probably successfully swap out the existing drive. But I can’t restore Windows and I don’t have a backup of any of her files. I’d have to make it an Ubuntu MATE machine. So I’m downloading an Ubuntu MATE install DVD image and I’ll ask her if that would be OK with her. If she wants it to run Windows, I will have to take it back to the shop out by my office and see if they can replace the drive and reinstall a Windows image.</p>
<p>I finished the production work on this week’s podcast and got it uploaded. This show was actually just under an hour in length, which makes it one of the shortest shows we’ve ever done.</p>
<p>And so I have finished most of the items on my to-do list from Saturday, except the one that said “finish and file those pieces of paperwork.” And I have to add “try fixing our housemate’s laptop.” I think the laptop is next. It’s only 5:00 p.m. I think we’re going to have lamb steaks for dinner, which is pretty quick, and so I’m optimistic that maybe we’ll be able to watch a movie this evening, or at least have a story.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<h3 id="pauls-house-of-pancakes-and-laptop-repair">Paul’s House of Pancakes and Laptop Repair</h3>
<p>I got my housemate’s laptop fixed. A number of months ago I bought three 2.5 inch hard drives to use for backing up my old Mac Mini. A few months later, I found the two missing external drives that I had been using for that purpose, so the three drives became spare. I never even opened the packaging on one of them, so that one became the replacement drive for the ThinkPad.</p>
<p>I had printed out a web page of diagrams from IBM showing how to remove the cover. It wasn’t difficult, although because everything is made of fragile plastic, snapping it back on resulted in a tiny broken plastic tab. (Recent incarnations of these easy-to-service machines always seem like they are designed to be opened up and closed back up <strong>once</strong>). I discovered that the internal hard drive was screwed into a flimsy little caddy, made of folded metal so thin that it looked like tinfoil, with a little clear plastic top stuck to the drive via adhesive, which I needed to peel off to remove the caddy. But the little metal tabs on the caddy, four of them, which stick out at so they can be screwed into four anchor points in the case, were not screwed down. Not one of them. I tried taking two of the screws from the drive and using them to screw down the caddy, but of course they have different threading.</p>
<p>The computer didn’t come from Lenovo like that; this must be the work of either a previous owner, or the shop that sold me the used laptop. (I can’t be too angry; the used laptop, which has been working fine for months, only cost me about $100). In this unsecured state, it seems possible that the drive’s edge connector might come a little bit loose from the socket, especially if the laptop took a minor drop or some similar shock, as there was space behind the drive where it could slide out. It didn’t seem like the original drive was loose, though. So I was not quite sure what to do. I didn’t have a large assortment of tiny screws to try. I think I had some heat-resistant “Kapton” tape, but I wasn’t sure where it was, and I wasn’t sure what I would tape the caddy <strong>to</strong>; tape did not seem to be the right way to secure the drive. The screws that connect the caddy to the mounting points probably do more than just keep the drive from coming loose. They also probably serve as points where heat can escape from the drive into the frame, and dampen vibration.</p>
<p>I considered trying to stuff something in the case to make it so the drive couldn’t slide backwards, but I wasn’t sure what to use; it should be something non-conductive, vibration-absorbing, and heat-absorbing. Filling that gap with silicone caulking might work, but I think that gap might actually be important for airflow within the laptop. So I finally opted just to leave the new drive sitting in place the way the original drive had been sitting in place, burned a DVD-R with Ubuntu MATE, installed the OS, booted it up and got everything working, and gave it back to our housemate.</p>
<p>I’d like to correct the situation with the drive screws eventually. Looking at the IBM parts store, it’s completely useless unless you have a 7-digit “FRU part number.” Looking at eBay, I see a lot of replacement caddies that look like the right part. Some of them come with screws, but most of the ones that come with screws only come with the four screws that connect the drive to the caddy, not the caddy to the laptop. I found one that comes with eight screws. It’s $7.99 with free shipping, so I ordered it. Just to get four damned screws, which I can only hope are the right ones. When they arrive, I’ll have to borrow the laptop back from our housemate and try screwing down the hard drive.</p>
<p>I tried plugging the malfunctioning drive into the hard drive dock on my Mac Pro, out of curiosity, to see if Disk First Aid could even talk to it. The drive spun up, but the computer wouldn’t recognize it at all. Our housemate had not been really clear what a hard drive even was, so I opened it up, so I could show her what is inside a modern hard drive.</p>
<h3 id="logic-projects">Logic Projects</h3>
<p>While I was in the basement, I did a little cleanup of audio files and my Logic project directories. I had been missing the source files and Logic project for the very first Grace and Paul Pottscast. I found it; I had never renamed the project, so it was still called something like “Live Setup PR40 x 2.” So now I have all those archived in one place. As an experiment I tried zipping a directory full of audio projects, to see if it would actually save any hard drive space. After fifteen minutes of compressing, it turned an 18-gigabyte directory into a 16-megabyte zip file. That’s not really worth the effort. I’m pretty sure I must have tried this experiment before and come to the same conclusion.</p>
<p>Browsing through old podcast files, I stumbled across some recordings that I had completely forgotten about. At some point Grace and I made a series of short recordings about our gardening project, little ten-minute segments. I think Sean Hurley used these for a couple of segments of his live streaming shows. Some of the details are lost to in the mists of time. I’m not even sure he has archived recordings of all the various “Sitting in the Woods with Sean” and other live shows he did in, I think, 2012 or so.</p>
<p>Man, that makes me want to do some live shows.</p>
<p>I also took a crack at tweaking my interview with Sean. I had originally panned our two voice tracks hard left, and hard right. That was a bad choice. It sounds kind of cool in headphones, but it’s not very listener-friendly. So I’d like to redo these and pan the tracks more like I pan my current podcast, with my voice panned 20 (out of 64) ticks to the left, and Grace’s voice panned 20 ticks to the right. But what I found when I opened the project was that some of the referenced audio files were missing. So if I want to bounce the projects again, I’m going to have to find them. Fortunately I still have the old bounces to use as reference, so it shouldn’t be too hard.</p>
<p>I experimented briefly with just duplicating the old bounced file and using the “channel operations” in Izotope RX to do the re-balancing. You can do that: you tell Izotope that you want to re-balance left and right, and it will obediently blend the requested percentage of sound from the opposite tracks. That’s pretty cool! Although since there are clips of music and radio drama on the track, to make this work I’d have to select only the dialogue sections and re-balance those. That’s very tedious. And since there are places where our dialogue sits on top of some of the music and radio drama excerpts, those overlapping parts would wind up sounding strange; the panning of the instruments would change as the excerpts faded in and faded out.</p>
<p>I also opened up one of the old “cassette restoration” projects that I did years ago. I had used my cassette player, a Tascam rack unit, to digitize three cassettes of music by Grace’s kindergarten teacher, Eileen Packard, and her collaborator, Paul Recker. Together they performed as recorded as “Peanutbutterjam.”</p>
<p>I did the first digitization of those cassettes a decade ago, but I never got the audio quality that I hoped for out of that Tascam deck. Even when it was new, it had audible flutter right out of the box. Being a sort of obsessive perfectionist, I was not satisfied with that. I should have tried to get it serviced, but for all the years in Saginaw, I never felt like I had money for that sort of thing. At some point I loaned it to a friend of mine, and never got it back.</p>
<p>I also was not satisfied with my attempts to improve the audio, using Izotope RX for noise reduction, and some equalization, and other plug-ins I tired using to improve the stereo imaging. It always sounded fuzzy to me. I must have burned test CD-Rs and tossed them out, unsatisfied. And a few years ago I wound up buying a used Nakamichi cassette deck at a very low price, and hoped to use <strong>that</strong> to try again. But it needed servicing right off the bat, and still needs servicing, and that’s expensive, and I’d have to ship it off to one of the vanishingly small number of people that still do this kind of service on old cassette decks, and it is kind of costly (understandably so), so the deck is still sitting downstairs… anyway, you get the picture.</p>
<p>So, I’m embarrassed to say, the project has languished on my hard drive for a <strong>decade</strong>. The cassettes have been slowly decaying in a box. (Cassettes stored in a dry cool place actually last a long, long time, so “decay” very slowly, but they don’t get <strong>better</strong> with time). This means that Grace and the kids haven’t gotten to listen to these cassettes themselves, or any kind of copy, during that decade.</p>
<p>I had vague hopes of trying to get a better recording, maybe getting in touch with the artists to see if they had ever had the master tapes digitized, or if I could help them with that, but I never did.</p>
<p>Anyway, yesterday I finally burned the tracks from the album “Incredibly Spreadable” to a CD-R and took it upstairs to play. The recording still sounds fuzzy and terrible to me, but I have evidence that no one cares about that but me. But now the kids can hear a song that goes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wonder where’s my underwears? My underwears so fine? Oh, are they in the washer? Where’s those underwears of mine? Well, are they on the clothesline? Did they blow into a tree? I have to find those underwears, Oh gosh oh golly gee</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just today I did a search, and it turns out that this album, <em>Incredibly Spreadable</em>, is actually available on the iTunes store. It sounds better than my cassette. Since there was a vinyl album, there must have been a master tape that they were able to digitize.</p>
<p>You can find it within the iTunes application. Google can find the online preview page for the album: type “”site:itunes.apple.com Peanutbutterjam" into Google. But the iTunes web site doesn’t seem to handle searching within its preview pages at all. The preview page for <em>Incredibly Spreadable</em> is <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/peanutbutterjam-incredibly-spreadable/1026244467">here</a>, but if I click on the magnifying glass icon to search, it says “Search apple.com,” and if I type in “Peanutbutterjam” or “Eileen Packard” or “Paul Recker,” I get no results at all. I guess Apple decided they don’t want people searching for music on the web pages for their service that sells music. But (taking a sip of tea) that’s none of my business.</p>
<p>You might be able to find a vinyl rip by searching “Eileen Packard” on YouTube. I found two album rips that were uploaded just a few days ago, and if YouTube is to be believed, I was the first person to listen to one of them.</p>
<p>Only that one album is there on the iTunes store, though. I have two other cassettes digitized for a total of three, although <a href="http://discogs.com">Discogs</a> only shows two albums. I never finished turning the other two albums into separate tracks. I should just do that. It won’t even take much work. I really should go ahead and get the Nakamichi serviced, and I should digitize any remaining cassettes that I want to preserve, running the signal into one of the audio interfaces I’ve got now, without worrying that I’m not getting the best possible audio quality out of the process. I need to stop letting the “best possible” be the enemy of the “possible at all.” These are cassettes from the 1980s. “Quality” is relative; a mediocre transcription will, I need to tell myself over and over, sound better than none.</p>
<p>Our friend Joy arrived and she and Grace worked on a massive cooking project, involving the food we needed to use up, as well as a bunch of fresh produce that Joy brought. Banana bread, broth, beef stew, tomato sauce, lamb steaks. We had lamb steaks for dinner and banana bread; they came out much better this time, just seared in a pan, not finished in the oven at all.</p>
<p>There was quite a bit of cleanup. I did as much as I felt that I could, as it got later and later. I read the kids stories while they did more in the kitchen. I started reading more of <em>Crime and Punishment</em>, but we have lost track of what is going on. I picked up <em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter, a collection of stories. I read a few pages of the first story, the title story, and realized that it is actually a bit more explicit than I expected, so I didn’t proceed further, and sent the kids to bed. But then I stayed up to finish the title story. It’s a pretty great story! But… not a good bedtime story for kids. I’ll finish this one myself.</p>
<p>It was quite late before Grace came to bed, and we didn’t get the lights out and the baby quiet until about 2:00. So this morning I didn’t exactly leap out of bed at the crack of dawn. I was hoping that Grace and Joy might be able to pull some boxes out of the garage and do some rearranging, using the shelving that Joy brought. But it’s been raining on and off, so that might not be possible.</p>
<p>Two new co-workers start work at my office today. Our business unit is doing quite well!</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>Last night was busy and complicated. Joy and Grace got some organizing done in the garage even though it rained a lot and so they couldn’t stage boxes in the driveway. We haven’t really been able to organize much in there since we moved. It looks like it’s completely full of stuff, but a lot of those stacked boxes are empty or nearly empty, and so that stuff can actually be organized and stored in much less space. I think today they’re going to break down boxes. Joy found a box labeled “Fiestaware.” I thought it might be mis-labeled, but we opened it up and there were indeed a few of our old pieces of Fiestaware in it. So we have even more pieces than we thought! I have taken them down into the basement storage room, but they are not packed up with the rest of the pieces yet. Right now they’re just sitting on a shelf.</p>
<p>My boss ordered sandwiches yesterday so I ate Jimmy John’s sandwiches for lunch and pre-dinner, as well as leftover soup made with pot roast and lamb broth. So when I got home I wasn’t very hungry. We ate leftover greens with ham hock, very late, and went to sleep very late. Joy had brought us a special treat, something I’ve never tasted before: fresh dates! Some were brownish, and those are ripe and delicious. Some of them were still yellow, and we discovered that before they are ripe, they have a very thick skin that is hard to chew, and the flesh is dry and reminds me of a crabapple. On Twitter I asked Anna, our pastry chef podcast guest, if she has ever baked with fresh dates. She posted a picture of a labneh panna cotta that she made with dates, date syrup, candied carrot, and halvah. Wow!</p>
<p>We didn’t get the kitchen cleaned up. I didn’t read the kids a story, or get any reading in myself.</p>
<p>Grace, Joy, and I spent some time talking in the garage about our plans for the fall. There is something in the garage that is moldy, and so makes my throat and sinuses burn. We think it is one of our car seats, the one we loaned to our housemate, who left it sitting outside in the rain. It’s not clear if it can be cleaned up and salvaged. We might need to buy another car seat for the new baby.</p>
<p>I didn’t manage to work on any of the paperwork in my bag. Tomorrow is my birthday and my driver license is expiring, so I need to get that renewed today or tomorrow. There are some bills I need to pay as well, including the trash pickup bill for our old house in Saginaw, and a small medical bill (a co-pay). After paying two thousand dollars in August and September towards the plaster and paint work, while we are still waiting for a promised $1,700 from our insurance company, I’m hard-pressed to pay any extra bills. I’m even nervous when I have to pay for an extra tank of gas when we have to drive out of town. I’ve needed to put those tanks of gas on a credit card, and that credit card debt is creeping up.</p>
<p>I had breakfast at Harvest Moon and got in and out of the restaurant in under 25 minutes; my usual BLT breakfast sandwich and coffee. Tomorrow is my birthday. I don’t really feel like celebrating. I think Grace will make me a cake. Then Thursday, it will be Benjamin’s birthday, and we’ll have another cake.</p>
<p>I bought myself a present: I ordered some CDs that have been sitting in my eBay shopping cart for over a year, including some requested by the kids: a Simon and Garfunkel collection for Joshua, and the soundtrack to <em>The Nightmare Before Christmas</em> for Veronica. The transaction was flagged by my credit card company as “possibly fraudulent.” Apparently they don’t have a warning message for “fiscally irresponsible.”</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Today I am 51 years old.</p>
<p>Last night went pretty smoothly. Dinner was just about ready when I got home. We only had to wait for the kids to get the table set. We had sausages and sauerkraut, rice made with lamb broth, and a huge salad, which was a Costco salad in disguise, doctored up with extra additions like beets. It was delicious. I ate a lot of salad. Joy had brought us some more fresh figs, so I ate a couple more of those. They are so sweet that I can only eat one or two at a time, but they are delicious.</p>
<p>After dinner I got a dishwasher load going, and the kids did some hand-washing, energized by the prospect of watching a movie. So the kitchen was in reasonably good shape by the time they were done. I took them downstairs to watch an episode of <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>. The episode that was next up on our planned skim through ST:TNG was “The Next Phase.” I’ve seen this one before. Ensign Ro and Geordi are stuck “out of phase” after a transporter accident. A Tor essay about the episode is <a href="https://www.tor.com/2012/08/28/star-trek-the-next-generation-qthe-next-phaseq/">here</a>. In that article Keith R. A. DeCandido claims that the episode “was intended as a budget-saving ‘bottle’ episode, but it wound up being very expensive due to all the phasing effects.” I’m a little unconvinced that anyone thought this episode would save money, as there are also several scenes shot on a Romulan ship, with elaborate sets, and of course the extra actors and costumes.</p>
<p>The physics are crazily inconsistent (as DeCandido asks, one obvious question is “how do they not fall through the floor?”) But despite that, it’s a pretty good episode. I find the funeral sub-plot a little unconvincing. Other than Data, the crew seems to be pretty indifferent to Geordi’s loss and presumed death. Picard is pretty casual about letting Data arrange the funeral. I’d have thought he’d say “OK, go ahead and plan a memorial service, but please check in with Counselor Troi and let her approve your plans, or make suggestions.” The only part of all this that rang true for me is Ensign Ro’s belief that she and Geordi are dead, and her reaction to it: she seems almost relieved, but also puzzled. And there’s a funny line, where Worf and Data are talking about the appropriate funeral arrangements. Data says “Ensign Ro was a Bajoran. Her beliefs should be reflected as well. However, their death rituals are quite complicated.” Ensign Ro groans “Oh, please, not the death chant!” Worf says “The Bajoran death chant is over two hours long.” There’s another funny moment when Ro gets to work out a bit of her anger by shooting a disruptor right through Riker’s head, although since she and the disruptor are “out of phase,” he can’t feel it.</p>
<p>I’ve begun attempting to edit this journal. When converted into a Word file, or a PDF file, it’s over 500 pages of text. Weeks 1-39 total 290,589 words, according to Microsoft Word. I’m doing only light editing of the text: improving grammar here and there. I’m considering what to do with links, and how and if to try to index the whole thing. I’ve been thinking about trying to get a few paper copies printed, in book form, even just as a vanity project. It is so large that it might make sense to print it in four separate volumes, one for each quarter. If I keep writing at a similar average rate, at the end of the year I might have 400,000 words and 800 pages. I think I may be slowing down, though, as the days get short and my energy levels drop. But we’ll see how it goes. I still can’t say definitively what I should do with this, or even what I want to do with it.</p>
<p>It’s weird to re-read some of the stuff I wrote over a year ago. In January I wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Things are going to be tight in February due to the rather large car repair bills we had in December. We have a number of “carryover” bills — I haven’t finished paying for the lawn care and hauling expenses at the Saginaw house in 2017. I have to write some extra checks this month. And we had some extra expenses related to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. There were extra special bottles of wine, extra special food, and extra travel. There were some movies and meals out. There were extra fire logs. But these things were cheap compared to the car repairs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Looking forward at October, November, and December, this is making me nervous, since we already have big bills, and in addition, unlike last, our credit cards are nearly maxed out. It’s just yet another reminder that we’ve got to resolve the Saginaw house problem.</p>
<p>When we went down into the basement to watch <em>Star Trek</em>, our friend Joy had set up a little bedroom, including a little electric candle light fixture. Earlier in the evening she had talked about the significance of the candle in the window, used by the Mennonite community as an ongoing expression of solidarity for the victims of America’s imperial wars. I joked with Joy that it was “this little light of hers,” and she mentioned how as a Quaker that theme of inner light was very much a part of her religious tradition.</p>
<p>I then noticed that the very next episode of <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>, which we plan to watch, is called “The Inner Light.” Hmmm…</p>
<p>This morning I stopped at the Coffee House Creamery and had a toasted bagel with peanut butter for breakfast, with an almond milk mocha. Today I left my lunchbox at home, so Grace actually brought me a sandwich and a cookie on her way back from a conference.</p>
<p>I did some editing of week 1 of this journal, first going over a paper copy to mark it up, then making the changes to the Markdown source file, then producing an updated Microsoft Word file and viewing it in Word’s magnified “Reader Mode,” which helped me catch more errors. This is very time-consuming. It’s hard for me to imagine putting in this level of effort for each week. So this has me scratching my head and wondering if I’m really ambitious enough to get these journal entries ready to appear in any kind of print form. I also experimented with adding index entries in Word, and <strong>that’s</strong> very tedious. Today I’m feeling like if I can’t find a simple way to mark index entries in the original Markdown source, the indexing just isn’t going to happen. I’d have to take a week off work, once the Microsoft Word version was final, just to create the index. So I’ll have to dig into more of the possibilities that Pandoc has to offer — it does have a way to write filters that operate on a document’s abstract syntax tree.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>Last night we had a low-key but delicious birthday dinner: black-eyed peas, salad, and cornbread. Grace made a very dark chocolate cake, and we were planning to eat it after watching another episode of <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>. So I took the kids downstairs and we watched the episode called “Imaginary Friend,” in which a little girl’s imaginary friend actually shows up, manifested by a powerful alien intelligence. I recall seeing this one before. The child actor Shay Astar, who plays Isabella, Clara’s imaginary friend, is wonderfully creepy, reminding me a bit of Christina Ricci as Wednesday Adams. The girl that plays Clara, Noley Thornton, is quite good, too. But overall this episode drags a little bit. I think one of the comments on the Tor rewatch page, by “AlyssaT,” summed up the problems with this episode quite well:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>it didn’t quite know what it was trying to be and it didn’t have the guts to just go full force in one direction. Was it more of a family episode that explored the difficulties of raising a child on a starship (as a single dad, no less!), not to mention the difficulties of being that child? Was it a story about Troi and her job? Was it a story about friendship, and how we connect with others? Was it a freaky-deaky red-eyed demon child “horror” ep? Was it a “ship in danger” plot? And while I usually really like those community-building touches, here I felt like it made all things seem even more crowded and schizophrenic…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The episode even resorts to making Isabella’s eyes glow red when she is angry, which just seems like an <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedEyesTakeWarning">awfully cheap and easy trope</a>.</p>
<p>I was thinking we might watch “The Inner Light,” but I decided that I wanted to save that one for a time when Grace would come down and watch it with us.</p>
<p>When we got back upstairs, Grace told us that the cake, which needed to be chilled to set up, was still gooey. She gave us the option of eating it as it was, or leaving it overnight to firm up and eating it for breakfast. I chose breakfast. So this morning I had Turkish coffee (with cardamom, made in the press pot accidentally because Sam got out the wrong bag, but a delicious accident it was), and extremely potent dark chocolate cake. So I am <strong>quite</strong> well-caffeinated. I brought half of it in to work for my co-workers. It’s the kind of thing that one can only eat a small piece of, so I assume that I will probably be taking some back home.</p>
<p>Today, September 27th, is Benjamin’s birthday, so I think Grace will be making <strong>another</strong> cake, to his specifications.</p>
<p>Today Dr. Ford is testifying in the Kavanaugh hearings. I’m not going to go into it, in this journal — Grace and I will probably talk about it in a podcast. I heard the start of Ford’s opening statement on my car radio as I drove to work this morning.</p>
<p>I’ve done some more editing, and incorporated text originally written as a separate blog post on January 1st into the journal entries. This pushes my word count for this journal to over 305,000 words, and that doesn’t include my review of <em>A Wrinkle in Time</em>, or the quarterly posts. What can I say but LOL?</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>I left work early yesterday because Grace sent me a text message reminding me of a choir open house in Saline at 5:00. I was in my car about a quarter to five, which meant that I just barely beat most traffic to downtown Saline and the First Presbyterian Church there. I found a route without roundabouts. Miraculously, I found parking on the street. The building was locked, though, so I wasted some time looking for an unlocked door, and finally had to get Grace to let me in. So I was a few minutes late. Joshua was happy to see me at a choir event, since these are usually things his mom does with him during the day. There were snacks. There weren’t a lot of people fighting over the vegetable trays. Someone had made deviled eggs carved into the shape of little bunnies, or something cute like that, with the bottoms cut off the eggs so that they sat upright. We chatted with a few parents. When we left, I took Grace’s car with Joshua and Pippin and she took my car. We had to wait in heavy traffic.</p>
<p>Grace went to Bush’s and picked up a Bill Knapp’s pre-made chocolate cake. She also filled my gas tank. But she had trouble starting my car, as sometimes happens, and had to let it sit for twenty minutes before she could get it started. It’s one of those things I can’t quite explain. I’ve always been able to get it started, usually on the third or fourth crank, occasionally by the fifth or sixth. The battery is not dead. There’s a problem with the starter or the key switch mechanism. Since I’ve always been able to start it, with a little effort, I haven’t made it a high priority to get it fixed. It doesn’t start reliably for Grace, though. I joke that my car is jealous of Grace and prefers that only I touch her. But it’s so odd that it seems like it may actually be a matter of the way I touch it (or turn the key). I’ve probably worked out through daily practice exactly what kind of movement tends to work — exactly how fast and how hard — and I do it automatically. Then she tries to turn the key the same way and… nothing.</p>
<p>Benjamin asked for pot pie for dinner, and we hadn’t gone to Costco, so Grace picked up a dozen small frozen pot pies. She was going to back them all, but I tried to estimate who was going to eat what and suggested we make six instead and save the rest. Then we found out that our housemate and her boyfriend and kids were going to eat with us, so put three more in the oven. Then it turned out that the kids ate far more of the pot pies than we expected. I didn’t expect the littlest kids to finish even one each. Benjamin ate two. So Grace was right, and I was wrong; we should have made the full dozen. I didn’t realize how small they are; the ones I get for lunches are bigger.</p>
<p>Grace and I didn’t want to eat the pot pies and so I fried us some eggs. After dinner I realized that there is something wrong with the Dawn Farm eggs. A number of them had a lot of blood spots. It’s normal to find an occasional little blood spot, but these were big clots; I had to pick three out of one egg. Grace commented that she had to pick clots out of several of the Dawn Farm eggs as well. I also noticed that the whites were quite cloudy, rather than clear. I always crack the eggs individually into a container before putting them in the pan, and none of the eggs seemed obviously rotten, but I noticed that yesterday’s cake had a strong sulfur smell and my boss at work commented on it, too. I felt a little queasy after dinner. So I’m not actually sure what is wrong with the eggs. I think maybe the chickens weren’t healthy, or weren’t fed healthy feed. What makes fresh eggs excessively sulfurous? Were they just stored too long? I really don’t know. But I know that these just weren’t quite right.</p>
<p>We didn’t really finish a full kitchen cleanup, but instead tried to get to bed at a reasonable hour. I read the kids a few more chapters of <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em>. Things are getting exciting; Roz has just fallen off a building and been knocked unconscious. I think we should be able to finish that book in ony one or two more reading sessions. Maybe even tonight.</p>
<p>This morning I went to the Coffee House Creamery for breakfast, and had a toasted cinnamon bagel with peanut butter and a three-shot latte made with almond milk. While I ate that, I did a little more editing of these 2018 blog posts. I’m not even through January, but I’m going to slowly plug away at it, and hope that I get quicker; I’m also going to look into writing plug-ins for Pandoc in Lua.</p>
<p>There is some good money news. Grace finally got a call back yesterday from a supervisor at Liberty Mutual. They have issued a check for more of the repair cost for the family room, as well as the original window board-up they never covered. So we will get about $2,000. That will certainly help. Working with Liberty Mutual has been a ridiculous exercise, though. We can’t recommend them to anyone.</p>
<p>Kavanaugh’s performance yesterday was an utterly disgusting spectacle. I wrote on Twitter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kavanaugh revealed himself to be a classic crybully. Unfortunately he wasn’t really speaking to anyone in the room. He was speaking directly to Trump’s base of aggrieved, entitled sociopaths and they saw a knight in shining armor bravely defending his honor against smears.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>They saw Kavanaugh standing up for <strong>them</strong>. They actually believe that he worked his butt off to get where he is now because they still believe in meritocracy.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The people who picked him and vetted him and are going to ram him through don’t believe in meritocracy. They believe in power and psyops. They knew he was a garbage person. They are reveling in the anger and the distraction it is causing. Watch their other hand closely!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>While this has taken over the entire news cycle, the administration us very likely quietly picking our pockets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Last night I posted one of those colorful text messages on Facebook that simply said “Jesus Christ, what an absolute asshole.”</p>
<p>I heard this morning that the Republicans are going to hold a vote on Kavanaugh at 1:30 p.m. I’m not at all optimistic; I don’t believe the Democrats will stand against his nomination. Jeff Flake a supposedly moderate Republican, has already stated that he will support Kavanaugh. But we’ll see.</p>
<p>It’s hard to believe that we’re seriously talking about this, but William Gibson (“<span class="citation" data-cites="GreatDismal">@GreatDismal</span>” on Twitter) asked:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So is “boofing” an alcoholic enema? Recall tales of this as a means of avoiding detection on breath, but not as one of the many preppy routes to alcoholic poisoning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I responded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I was in college in 1985, I heard from an incoming freshman girl that at her high school, “bufu” meant “butt-fucking.” I was told that at these schools was huge social pressure to have had anal sex, even more so than vaginal sex. That’s my guess at the meaning of “boof.”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It also makes sense to me that <em>at a Catholic school</em> this would be a widely promoted practice; a way to have sex while reducing the risk of pregnancy and still preserving virginity, sort of.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course I don’t know for sure what it meant to that particular in-crowd at that school at that time. That’s the whole point of this sort of slang; it’s meant to be inscrutable to people outside the group.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Kavanaugh’s assertion that it meant “farting” doesn’t even make any sense, and is just another example of his many outright lies to the Judiciary committee.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s some debate about whether “Have you boofed yet?” on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page referred to anal sex, or to alcoholic enemas. The responses on Twitter lean towards “anal sex.” I can’t say that I know for sure what Kavanaugh meant. But I’m very sure he didn’t mean “have you farted yet?”</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>We’ve been busy. Because I left work early on Thursday, to go to the chorus open house, I had to stay later yesterday. I was planning to jump in my car right at 8:00 and make it to Costco just in the nick of time to buy a few groceries. But I blew it, and by the time I was leaving, it was too late to do even a quick grocery run. So instead I went to Plum Market to buy some Achatz four-berry pies and hamburger rolls (and Jesus, Plum Market is expensive; I was going to buy some fish there, but nope). Then I went to Kroger to get some frozen fish and salad and blueberries. And I’m reminded why we use Costco; it’s far more expensive to buy things in regular-sized quantities. I bought three boxes of frozen fish fillets and three bags of salad, and some small containers of blueberries. Grace and I made a plan to go to Costco this morning.</p>
<p>Our housemate and her boyfriend had not cleaned up the oven, so it had to stay a burnt-up mess a little longer. We ate quite late, because the kids had not gotten a handle on kitchen cleanup and were procrastinating hard.</p>
<p>I fried up some frozen salmon burgers for the grown-ups and the kids ate the breaded cod fillets. I ate one of them and they were actually pretty tasty. The berry pies were really good, probably one of the best commercially made pies I’ve ever had. We left the second one for breakfast.</p>
<p>While getting dinner on the table, I smashed my food against one of the wooden stools that the kids keep bringing into the kitchen — where were actually four of them in the room at the time. This sent me onto an embarrassing tirade of f-bombs about the damned stools and how much I hate them getting underfoot all the time. I thought I might have broken one or even two toes (years ago I dislocated a little toe and broke a bone in my foot doing something similar with a milk crate). I iced my toes with a bag of edamame. They were not swelling too badly so I decided to just wait and see how they were in the morning.</p>
<p>For last night’s bedtime story, I finished reading <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em>. Finally! It’s an enjoyable story, although maybe a little age-limited. It seems like it is right at Joshua’s grade level.</p>
<p>This morning we were up and around reasonably early. This morning the toes don’t actually seem broken. They aren’t terribly swollen, although one is a lurid purple and sore, with tingling and numbness.</p>
<p>In the kitchen, I got the fans going and sprayed oven cleaner on the nasty spots in the oven, then put a big “X” of blue gaffer tape across it so that no one would try and use it. The kids ate the second pie for breakfast, and Grace and I drove first to the Mother Loaf Bakery in Milan, and got some great bread: a sandwich loaf, a salt-crusted rye, a small, ultra-dense multigrain loaf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>100% mixed grain madness. It’s a blend of our whole grain, Michigan-grown, organic buckwheat, wheat, rye and spelt flour and groats/berries.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’re looking forward to eating that one. We also tasted their cranberry, cornmeal, and herb bread which was extremely tasty too, although we had enough. Grace and I also had them cut one of their ricotta, pine nut, and herb bialys in half, and we ate that on the drive to Costco — and wow, was that ever delicious. Still warm from the oven, an amazing combination of crunchy outside and chewy inside, with the soft, warm herb-flavored ricotta… <em>salivating all over keyboard</em>…</p>
<p>I need to make this quick, because we’re going to a party in Grass Lake and we’ve got to get everyone loaded into the car in just a few minutes, as it is a thirty-minute drive. We went to Costco. It’s much more crowded and Saturdays, and we kind of hate that. We brought back a reasonably-sized load of food including bagged salad, lamb steaks, carrots, celery, eggs, butter, blackberries, bananas, a couple of whole chickens, and a big bag of popcorn. So that should be plenty for the week. We also got a whole tray of wrap sandwiches to take to the party.</p>
<p>When we got back our housemate and her boyfriend were cooking on the stove (but not using the oven). Grace made a pot of Bob’s Red Mill steel-cut oats in the instant pot, with dried cranberries and hazelnuts, for the kids to eat. As soon the stove was not in use, I started working on the oven again. Despite sitting soaked in oven cleaner for a couple of hours, the burned-on spots were extremely tenacious, so I had to unscrew the whole bottom panel of the oven interior (again). Our housemate did help scrub it a bit once I had that panel in the sink again. This was so unnecessary and it makes me mad.</p>
<p>We’re getting the kids loaded up to go to the party and so I’ve got to get this posted and get out of here! That’s the week.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Bloody Chamber</em> by Angela Carter</li>
<li><em>Incredibly Spreadable</em> (album of live children’s music) by Peanutbutterjam (Eileen Packard and Paul Recker)</li>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> by Peter Brown (bedtime reading, finished)</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em> (Gollancz, 2014) (omnibus volume containing 3 novels; finished the first, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, September 29th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-36058668994656333392018-09-22T17:27:00.000-04:002018-09-22T17:27:00.737-04:00The week ending Saturday, September 22nd, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>It hasn’t been a great day. I’ve been slammed by allergies, and so it’s almost 7:00 p.m. and I haven’t gotten much of anything done today. Grace brought me an affogato from Milan Coffee Works, and a lot of bread, and both those things tend to trigger my allergies. It seems like if I eat dairy only in small quantities and only occasionally, I can keep myself at a point where I have no symptoms. But if I’m reacting to pollen, and reacting to dairy, and then add flour, a combination like that can trigger a full-blown allergy attack, and then I’ll feel awful and my nose will run like a faucet, and it I don’t get it settled down, I might wind up with a sinus infection on top of the allergies.</p>
<p>So I’ve gone back on Flonase and Claritin. I have that spacey, dizzy hay fever feeling today. I haven’t even done any reading. We got up late. I made fried eggs and bacon and toasted English muffins, and made myself a pot of tea with honey. I had an egg sandwich and a couple of glasses of tea and that’s all I’ve eaten today. When I have bad allergies I don’t feel like eating. I feel mostly like fasting and napping. But I needed to do some more kitchen clean-up. This included applying the rest of a can of oven cleaner, because there had been more spills in the oven. It’s better, but could use a deeper cleaning at some point.</p>
<p>I tried to take a nap this afternoon but the kids, including our housemate’s three, were so noisy that I wasn’t very successful. Grace has been out meeting with a friend, and then out again, running some errands. We still need to record a podcast. The kids want to be fed again. I don’t want to skip another podcast. So I’m trying to pull myself together.</p>
<p>Last night I read more of <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> to the kids that showed up for it. We’re getting near the end of that book. I also started reading a book that has been on my shelf for over a year, waiting for the right time: <em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood. This is a quick read and it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that is very gritty and physical. She writes a lot about the details of living in a wild setting, like trying to bathe in rainwater, and being surrounded by insects and animals. It’s beautiful in a strange way. I think we can all identify with sometimes wishing we had no responsibilities and could just stroll around the woods, although the swollen insect bites don’t sound appealing. And our protagonist’s memories are spooling out a disturbing story of genetic engineering. This novel was no doubt an influence on Jeff VanderMeer’s <em>Borne</em>, which unfortunately I started but still haven’t finished. It’s hard to decide where the boundaries of genres are. Atwood has apparently made strong statements about how she didn’t want <em>Oryx and Crake</em> to be called “science fiction.” I don’t really care what she calls it, but it is helpful when people can discuss similar books or use sub-genre labels such as “urban fantasy” to find more books they like.</p>
<p>Late last night our housemate brought some some kind of ice cream cups or treats into the freezer, planning to take them to a birthday party this morning. Daniel got into them before we were up and moving. This has been a big problem; if there is junk food in the house, our kids tend to find it. I think we’ve actually trained Benjamin (almost five) to stop taking food that doesn’t belong to him, but Daniel (seven) still does it. We also heared this morning that apparently he’s done it other times, which we didn’t hear about. This makes things hard because it means he’s gotten away with stealing, weeks or months ago, and we don’t have details to . It’s very hard to hold a seven-year-old accountable for something that happened in the past. Kids don’t have great memories. Kids will make up details when you interrogate them. They don’t reliably separate the truth from their confabulations. And if we try to apply some kind of punishment or consequence for something that happened weeks ago, it’s not clear that he will really have the behavior-modification affect that we want.</p>
<p>So we eventually got Daniel to confess, and he had to give up some of his possessions as punishment. And now we have to make restitution to our housemate, which means a gift card, and we really don’t have extra money for this kind of thing.</p>
<p>Grace went to visit a friend who was having an open house for her Catholic worker house, and her friend had quite a bit of food left over. So she brought home big trays of (fattoush)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattoush], melon, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujaddara">mujaddara</a>. There are so many transliterations for that word, but I’ll just stick to the Wikipedia version. However you want to spell it, this is a dish of lentils, rice, and browned onions. This is actually a perfect thing for me to eat for dinner, since it has nearly no allergy-triggering ingredients. So that’s dinner! Sometimes things do actually work out to make our lives easier! And we might have time for a podcast after all.</p>
<h3 id="water-softener">Water Softener</h3>
<p>I forgot to mention it back when it happened, but about a week and a half ago the water softener service guy came out and fixed the softener. Apparently there was a little part that was clogged with hard water minerals, and so water would not flow through the salt tank. He replaced that piece and it is working well again. And since we had paid him to come out and fix it just a couple of weeks earlier, the “a service call is good for thirty days” rule was in effect, so he didn’t charge us for this second trip. I feel pretty happy about that, as I was fully expecting that he might find some expensive thing to charge us for.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Grace and I went down to the basement to record a show. We weren’t very prepared, and so agreed to mostly wing it. I did print out some notes from my blog about Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. I talked about my recommended reading order, skipping over most of the mid-career stuff, and recommended the novel I’m currently reading, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>, also known as <em>The Dreamthief’s Daughter</em>, even though I haven’t finished it and can’t necessarily vouch for the other two Moonbeam Roads novels.</p>
<p>We recorded for just over an hour. I made one edit, to cover Grace’s bathroom break. The finished show is only one hour and six minutes long, which is really pretty short as Pottscasts go. Post-production went pretty smoothly, and Grace and I got to sleep around 1:30 a.m. It was a big help to have dinner out of the way before recording! Many Sunday nights I’ve missed dinner entirely, or scarfed some leftovers down just before going to sleep, since Grace and the kids often eat while I’m doing the post-production work.</p>
<p>This morning I knew that I was supposed to bring leftovers. But when I took my bag out to the car, I was distracted by the fact that the kids had left the garage door wide open and all the lights on again. So I went in to tell Grace, and on my way back out, entirely forgot to take the leftovers. This kind of thing happens to me almost without fail when there is some kind of upsetting disruption in my morning routine.</p>
<p>I got a 3-shot mocha made with almond milk for breakfast. I’m debating what to do for lunch, as I don’t really have anything left in the refrigerator or kitchen cabinets at my office.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I got back from work quite late last night, after staying late to try to finish up some very tedious changes to the LCD GUI’s online help. Getting the text formatted right on the screen involved a lot of recompiling and testing.</p>
<p>Last night our housemate made a bunch of quiches for dinner. Sadly, although we thought they were not bad and ate them, she did not like the way they came out at all and would only eat the crust.</p>
<p>We struggled through our usual cleanup chores with the kids. Grace asked me to wipe down Elanor’s high chair, which gets downright disgusting, so I worked on that. I took a little time with Joshua, who has been asking me to show him how to play electric bass. I dug out one of my method books out of a box and burned a CD containing the lesson tracks. We pretty quickly discovered that Joshua’s hands really just aren’t big enough to play bass yet. So we’ll have to regroup. Maybe he can learn ukulele. I no longer have a decent ukulele I’m willing to let the kids play, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to pick one up.</p>
<p>The kids asked me to read from either <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> or <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>. I was ready to read one of those, but then Benjamin asked me to read <em>The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System</em> by Joanna Cole. I was going to read that one first, and then read a second story, but it is actually pretty long for a children’s book, with quite a bit of text. I thought I was going to have to stop and explain how Pluto was no longer considered a planet, but it seems the book is new enough that it does not call Pluto a planet, but a “plutoid.” I’m a little confused because Wikipedia tells me that the book was published in 1990, but Pluto wasn’t officially demoted to the category of “dwarf planets” until 2006, and the term “plutoid” wasn’t adopted until 2008. So I guess this must be a revised edition. And I must be pretty out-of-date, since I didn’t know that the term “plutoid” had been adopted. Apparently the plutoids are a subset of dwarf planets. The book may have seized on the term a little <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutoid">too eagerly</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A plutoid or ice dwarf is a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet, i.e. a body orbiting beyond Neptune that is massive enough to be rounded in shape. The term plutoid was adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) working group Committee on Small Bodies Nomenclature, but was rejected by the IAU working group Planetary System Nomenclature. The term plutoid is not widely used by astronomers, though ice dwarf is not uncommon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve never heard of “ice dwarf.” I think “dwarf planet” is a much more widely accepted term, and Cole probably should have stuck with it, but I’m sympathetic to the difficulties of trying to choose a term when the terms are changing rapidly. How do you stay up-to-date when apparently astronomers themselves haven’t settled on nomenclature? Wikipedia shows a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutoid#/media/File:Euler_diagram_of_solar_system_bodies.svg">somewhat complicated chart</a> showing the inter-related terms “Planets,” “Satellites (natural),” “Trans-Neptunian objects,” “Dwarf planets,” “Minor planets,” “Small Solar System bodies,” “Centaurs,” “Comets,” and “Plutoids.” And when you dig down into the meanings of <strong>those</strong> terms, you find that there are a lot more fine distinctions that can be made.</p>
<p>I’m all in favor of “teaching the controversy.” It’s an exciting time in astronomy, and our understanding of the solar system is advancing rapidly. As we learn more, we keep finding that it is more complicated than we thought. But this nomenclature is far too complicated for my four-year-old. And that chart doesn’t even take into account “Neptune trojans,” cubewanos," “Plutinos,” “Sednoids,” “KBOs,” “SDOs,” “Oort cloud objects,” and other bodies.</p>
<p>I think calling Pluto a “dwarf planet” should be uncontroversial, even though it is <strong>also</strong> a Trans-Neptunian object, a Plutoid, a Kuiper belt object, and a Plutino. And “dwarf planet” is specific enough, at age 4.</p>
<p>Maybe when he turns 5, <strong>then</strong> we can start talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.</p>
<p>When we discovered Pluto, we knew far less about the solar system than we do now. It turns out there are a <strong>lot</strong> of objects out there that are <strong>around</strong> the size of Pluto — probably hundreds, possibly thousands. We know of one that is actually bigger than Pluto: Eris. And there may very well be more. If we’re going to call Pluto a planet, fairness would dictate that we call Eris a planet, too. And if we start referring to these dwarf planets as planets, those textbooks are going to be changing much more often. So, it seems to me perfectly sensible to draw a bright line around the four “terrestrial planets” and the four “giant planets,” all far larger and far closer to the sun than bodies like Eris and Pluto, and call those the planets. Kids can learn those first — there’s plenty to learn about the planets! Then if they want to get into the weeds out beyond Neptune, they can move on to the much messier study of the smaller bodies.</p>
<p>Anyway. After I finished <em>The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System</em>, it was too late to read another story. The kids were tired, and so didn’t seem to mind much that they didn’t get a second story. We went on to bed. I had breakfast at the Harvest Moon Cafe this morning. This evening if everything goes smoothly, we will record a podcast with Anna, a pastry chef who works in New York City.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Things went pretty smoothly last night. I made it home in time to have beef stew with my family. That was delicious. We cut into the salt rye from Mother Loaf bakery and I used it to soak up the broth. Wow.</p>
<p>We got set up in our basement podcasting studio in time to welcome our guest, almost like we know what we’re doing! And we didn’t record an hour of silence and need to start over. Amazing!</p>
<p>Of course, the kitchen is a horrific mess, but I suppose we can’t have everything.</p>
<p>Our conversation with Anna went well and I got the Logic project set up, and bounced the master audio file. I will finish the post-production work on Sunday. It’s a relief to be a little bit ahead of schedule!</p>
<p>At bedtime I read the rest of <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>. We have finally finished it! There’s a nice segment near the end where Orwell talks about prejudice against “tramps” and “tramping.” He unpacks the prevailing attitudes, and then very deftly shows that the behaviors that people associate with criminality, lack of character, or even claim represents an “atavistic throwback” to nomadic migration (and I’m not even going to begin to unpack the racial and cultural bigotry inherent in that terminology) are actually forced on the tramps by the social structures around them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism — one might as well say that a commercial traveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s interesting to consider how this same kind of social-structure analysis applies to people receiving food benefits, unemployment benefits, etc. If I’m receiving the very limited cash payments available to me while unemployed, which I believe is still $362.00 a week, I have to focus entirely on getting a job that paid as well or better as my previous job. Even though I’m trying to live on a small fraction of my previous income, I can’t simply attempt to supplement that unemployment with a small income so that I can pay my mortgage. Any income at all will reduce that payment and so there is no net benefit to me in taking a temporary job to help me stay solvent until I can find a better job. That’s a social-structure reality that provides a “perverse” or “reverse” incentive. People receiving safety-net entitlements face this kind of problem all the time. And on top of it, they are faced with the silent (or not-so-silent) judgment of people who don’t understand the bind they are in.</p>
<p>I read a few little passages from <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> during our conversation with Anna, although I’m not sure they made all that much sense in context. I am hoping to do a show on that book, and I’d especially like to find a guest who knows more about Orwell than I do (which is, to be honest, not very much), and would like to help us discuss the man and his writing.</p>
<p>The kids were cranky last night and woke us up several times. Elanor woke up for a while, protesting something or other. Benjamin stole into our bed, and we didn’t notice until I kept kicking someone. I thought it was Elanor who had climbed to the bottom of the bed, but no, it was Bilby. Then he woke us up in the middle of our deep sleep, probably about 4 a.m., by running into the bathroom and turning on all the lights. So it was a broken night’s sleep and we were not very alert this morning.</p>
<p>Grace took my car, to take Sam to a speech therapy appointment, so she can pick up Sam’s bike afterwards. I took her car, and was unhappy to find that it didn’t have enough gas to get me to the office, so I had to stop for gas, making myself still later.</p>
<p>I’m really glad, though, that Sam is finally going to see a speech therapist. We tried years ago to get him this help through the Saginaw school system. The people involved delayed and dithered for months, until the paperwork had expired. Several of my kids have a stutter, and problems clearly articulating words. Benjamin has the most difficulty, but Sam is probably a close second. Grace and I do our best to give them the time to finish sentences. But I know their speech difficulties make them very frustrated, because in a house full of kids it is hard to give them enough time and quiet to get their words out. Their siblings and peers aren’t always accommodating. Sometimes they just give up on the project of getting their words out, and that can’t be good.</p>
<h3 id="cluttering">Cluttering</h3>
<p>Grace informed me that Sam’s speech difficulty (“disfluency”) is called “cluttering,” as opposed to stuttering. I’m not sure if insurance will cover treatment for “cluttering.” I had never heard of it, so I’m cramming on the subject.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<h3 id="sam-meets-bike">Sam Meets Bike</h3>
<p>When I got home last night, the kids told me that after just a short time on the now pedal-less bike, Sam had gotten the hang of balancing the bike. My old bike was leaning against the garage, and he was actually riding around the driveway. Successfully riding a bike for the first time. I was a bit stunned. I guess we can get pedals put back on my old bike.</p>
<p>Also last night, our friend Joy came to visit. When I got home she was out running an errand, but Grace and the kids were looking over all kinds of nifty stuff that she brought with her including a big stash of cloth napkins. The kids had done a not-so-great job with chores, and the kitchen was in a barely-usable state. Grace had assembled a big pot of soup out of leftovers, and put together a bagged salad from Costco, and broiled the lamb steaks. So that was dinner.</p>
<p>We should have eaten the lamb steaks a few days earlier. They weren’t spoiled, but it seemed like their flavor was a bit past its prime. I also should have taken them out of the oven earlier. They really need to be eaten closer to rare or medium rare, but I was not concentrating, what with the chaos in the house, and was confused by the fact that they were browning faster on the bottom than on the top. So they were more like medium or medium-well. Grace had put them in a sheet pan, and in the center of the oven rather than close to the top. We got tastier results throwing the steaks in a hot cast-iron pan on the stovetop, to sear them, and then putting the skillet in a pre-heated oven (at 450) for just a few minutes to finish them up. We also should have finished them <em>au beurre</em>. I think we didn’t do it that way last night because everything was dirty.</p>
<p>For last night’s bedtime story, I read a little bit more of <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em>, and then tried to read some more of <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. Benjamin stubbornly refused to stay quiet, though, and was interrupting and talking over the story constantly. So I couldn’t make much progress. We’re still in the chapter called “The Council of Elrond,” and only made it through a couple more pages. Bilbo has just told the council the story of his discovery of the ring:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Very well,’ said Bilbo. ‘I will do as you bid. But I will now tell the true story, and if some here have heard me tell it otherwise’ — he looked sidelong at Gloín — ‘I ask them to forget it and forgive me. I only wished to claim the treasure as my very own in those days, and to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me. But perhaps I understand things a little better now. Anyway, this is what happened.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tolkien is actually lampshading <strong>two</strong> sets of changes here: first, in-universe, Bilbo did mislead the other party members about exactly what happened with Gollum and the discovery of the ring, and this was supposed to indicate that the ring was already making him greedy, and leading him to tell both himself and the others a self-justifying story. But Tolkien is also addressing readers who might have read the earlier text of <em>The Hobbit</em>. The changes are detailed in the two-volume <em>The History of the Hobbit</em> by John D. Rateliff. The biggest changes were to the chapter “Riddles in the Dark.” Per <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit#Revisions">Wikipedia</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the first edition of <em>The Hobbit</em>, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the outcome of the riddle-game, and he and Bilbo part amicably. In the second edition edits, to reflect the new concept of the ring and its corrupting abilities, Tolkien made Gollum more aggressive towards Bilbo and distraught at losing the ring. The encounter ends with Gollum’s curse, “Thief! Thief, Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!” This presages Gollum’s portrayal in <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I haven’t had any down time to finish reading <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> or to make any further progress in <em>Oryx and Crake</em>. We have gotten occasional updates from our realtor about showings, but we haven’t had any news of an offer. As the month drags on, this feels worse and worse. I want to get a furnace into the old house, but I don’t have the money to do so. I keep hoping we will get some bit of information that will suggest a way forward on the house situation. Sometimes the best thing to do really is stay the course a little bit longer, until a new course of action becomes clear. But it really seems like we are stalled out, and have to choose one of several bad options soon.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night we had meatball soup, made by our housemate, apparently with Grace’s help. It was starchy and pretty tasty. She and her boyfriend ate with us, which has been a rare event. Cleanup was big and difficult, though. Grace had put a hot air-lined pot into its insulating pouch and the plastic melted, which got plastic all over the pot. Then apparently it was heated on the stove. So the pot was splattered with melted, burned-on plastic. This stuff came off, but it took me over an hour of scrubbing and I went through three of the heavy-duty green Scotch-Brite scouring pads. This also unfortunately took most of the shiny stainless-steel finish off the pot, leaving it with more of a matte finish, but I didn’t really see a way to avoid that. Going over it again with steel wool smooths that out just a little bit. Steel wool was useless to actually grind off the burnt plastic, and so was that melamine “magic eraser” material.</p>
<p>I’ve been craving carbs, and somewhat unusually for me, dark chocolate. I think the best course of action is to try supplying myself with some relatively low-sugar dark chocolate, 85% or more, and see if eating a little bit of that every day helps ease my craving without gorging myself on sugars and starches. Because I’m <strong>also</strong> packing on wait in a way that I find very, very demoralizing. This morning I tried to put on the jeans I wore last fall and winter and they were too uncomfortably tight to wear.</p>
<p>The kids had not cleaned up the kitchen during the day, and left quite a mess. There was no counter space, the sink was full, and the stove was all coated with goo. So in addition to all that scrubbing, I had to run two dishwasher loads and clean the stove. I described my carb and chocolate craving to Grace and we considered running out to get some chocolate or some kind of dessert, but settled for making a coconut milk hot chocolate after dinner. This helped bring my mood up just a bit, but I have definitely had better days.</p>
<p>I wanted to take a break and read a little bit of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> between the first round of scrubbing and getting back to more kitchen cleanup, but our bed was covered with laundry that Veronica was folding, and the rest of the kids were in our bedroom watching videos on Grace’s laptop. I wound up sitting at the table in the empty family room/dining room for a while, but it was too dark to read at the kitchen table (our light fixture in that room uses little decorative bulbs — it’s on my “to do when we have money” list to replace it with something much brighter, and add a couple of extra floor lamps). So I didn’t get a chance to read last night at all, and taking some time to read is what usually helps me calm and center myself; that, and playing guitar.</p>
<p>I’m also, I must admit, trying to get through books just to cross them off the list. I would like to “stall out” on books less often; there are way too many half-finished books on my shelves. (Although I’m torn; part of me thinks that it is a good thing to be willing to set aside, at least for the time being, a book I’m not actually getting much out of; that part would argue that <strong>finishing</strong> is no virtue, just an obsession). I’ve been trying to consciously reduce my obsessive behaviors, and take David Feldman’s advice: he reads a number of daily papers, and suggests that people read the first few paragraphs of each article, and if the article hasn’t really pulled you in and fascinated you, just skip it.</p>
<p>I’m half-horrified of this, but only half-horrified. I used to be completely horrified by it. I used to make it a point of pride to read every issue of the <em>New Yorker</em>, or the <em>New York Review of Books</em> cover-to-cover. But as I get older and feel my reading time to be much more limited, I’ve started to come around to his way of thinking, and in fact I apply it to listening to his podcast, as he suggests; if I get behind, and miss a few episodes, or don’t finish them, I don’t attempt to catch up; I just pick up the next one, when I get around to it.</p>
<p>But I’d still like to be able to cross off more books, especially since now that I’ve started documenting just what I read, it’s become a kind of competition with my past self.</p>
<p>I haven’t really gotten any reading done all week, other than a little time spent reading aloud to the kids at bedtime. And a funny thing tends to happen with that bedtime reading: if it’s a children’s book, I often wind up going on autopilot. I’ll proceed through several pages, reading aloud, the kids listening or not as they choose, and then realize that I have no idea what I’ve been reading about, at all, and that I’ve actually been disengaged, thinking about completely different things, letting some parts of my brain and body handle the bedtime story while the part I usually think of as “me” does its usual obsession, worrying, self-criticism, or whatever it does.</p>
<p>Maybe the next book I should read to the kids is Marvin Minsky’s <em>The Society of Mind</em>.</p>
<p>I mentioned that Sam was diagnosed as “cluttering” when he speaks. We are going to try to get his speech therapy covered by my health insurance. He has another session scheduled. Apparently his speech therapy will cost $200 per session, if they won’t cover it. If we really can’t get it covered, this might be the incentive that drives me to just surrender the Saginaw house to our lender. Sam has to be able to speak clearly to people, or his prospects for further education and employment will be severely hampered. Sending him to see a speech therapist weekly would cost almost as much as the mortgage on our old house. I don’t <strong>really</strong> want to just replace the one monthly expense with the other, as that doesn’t get us ahead by very much. But if we did free ourselves of those expenses, maybe we could send him every other week, and still have a little bit of take-home pay freed up to pay down debts and start, just <strong>start</strong>, to build up a proper emergency fund.</p>
<p>We’re going to have to get Benjamin evaluated as well, because he seems to have a pretty severe stutter.</p>
<p>And we’ve noticed, for a while now, a strange speech-related behavior that Joshua exhibits. He speaks fairly clearly, but after he’s done speaking, and often when we are replying, he will continue to move his mouth for a few seconds, as if he’s still speaking but someone turned his volume knob to zero. I’m not sure I’d call that a “disfluency,” but it sure is weird. Is this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palilalia">Palilalia</a>?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Palilalia is similar to speech disorders such as stuttering or cluttering, as it tends to only express itself in spontaneous speech, such as answering basic questions, and not in automatic speech such as reading or singing; however, it distinctively affects words and phrases rather than syllables and sounds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or a form of echolalia?</p>
<p>He doesn’t “sub-vocalize” while reading silently. Maybe if we just make him aware of it, he will be able to stop himself from doing it.</p>
<p>On my lunch break I went to Nicola’s Books to see if I saw anything interesting. They have the sixth volume of Knausgaard’s <em>My Struggle</em> in hardcover, for $33.00. It’s a very fat book. I’ve got plenty of other fat books on my shelf, waiting for me to either start them, or finish them. After reading a review on <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2018/09/my-struggle-book-6-by-karl-ove-knausgaard-reviewed.html">Slate</a>, I’m not actually sure I want to read this one. Maybe I should just let myself keep my overwhelmingly positive impressions of the first five volumes, challenging though they were; reading them was rewarding but also difficult emotionally, as I found myself starting to run Knausgaard’s bleak and depressive software on my own mental hardware. I like Charles Finch’s comment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Like life, his books are both boring and relentlessly interesting; like life, they seem somehow both very long and very fast. In other words, they’re like life. A second life, which the reader briefly lives in Knausgaard’s stead, prosaic, meaningless, yet of course also replete with the most serious possible meaning, replete with sad vastness, private infinities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Volume six contains a lot of commentary about the fallout Knausgaard experienced after publishing the previous volumes. It also contains a very, very long essay about Hitler. Maybe I don’t need that to run those two pieces of software on my mental hardware. Maybe nothing good could come of doing that. Maybe I should finish the new translation of <em>Crime and Punishment</em> instead.</p>
<p>At the very least, I’ll probably wait and see if a paperback edition comes out that matches my editions of volumes 1-5. Maybe it will at least be a little more portable than the massive hardcover brick. Maybe they’ll release it in two volumes. Maybe I’ll buy it then. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe it will be enough to know that I could read it if I wanted to, having read the previous five, and choose not to.</p>
<h3 id="labview-yet-again">LabVIEW, Yet Again</h3>
<p>My co-worker Patrick and I finally got a chance to sit down on the hardware test rig and test some of the LabVIEW application code I wrote some time ago, but which we never put into full production. And of course we have found several problems. One seems to be a hardware problem in the test rig. We’ll have to investigate that further. Another seems to be a software problem I introduced when refactoring. This sent me back into a LabVIEW tizzy, using a <strong>for</strong> loop structure to propagate fields from clusters of data from one array into another.</p>
<p>And here some of the difficulties of propagating types through LabVIEW code made my life baffling for a time. For a programmer so used to text-based languages, doing an operation like “give this object this type” continues to be a frustrating thing in the all-visual LabVIEW environment. LabVIEW has many, many little tricks up its sleeve; there seems to almost always be a way to convince it to do an operation in a clever way that hides a lot of complexity. The problem is that if you don’t (yet) have a lot of experience in the environment, it can be hard to find that particular trick, and sometimes the environment feels like it is fighting you.</p>
<p>For example, I wanted to pass two arrays into a <strong>for</strong> loop, and inside the loop I wanted to copy elements from each cluster in the first array into each cluster in the second array. This seems simple enough. LabVIEW will auto-index arrays when you hook them up to “tunnels” on a <strong>for</strong> loop. You just wire them up. The visual “syntax” is a tiny box on the input.</p>
<p>But it turns out that there’s a quirk. If you hook up two arrays with different numbers of elements, the number of iterations of the loop will be limited by the array with the fewest elements. In this case, the array I wanted to fill had no elements. LabVIEW arrays are dynamic; I wanted it to <strong>create</strong> those elements from the elements in the first array. But it wouldn’t do it; it stubbornly refused to execute the body of the <strong>for</strong> loop at all.</p>
<p>There was a workaround, of course; LabVIEW has a very rich set of operations. But the workaround was inelegant and downright ugly; it involved filling in elements of a cluster, starting with a constant, and assembling a new array of clusters, and then putting that in the second data structure. It was one of those “wow, this works, but it makes my skin crawl” situations.</p>
<p>So I finally got it cleaned up by — I’m guessing you might have guessed the answer — cleaning up the types, to make them uniform. When I did that, lo and behold, almost everything I wanted to do in the <strong>for</strong> loop went away. And this suggested a <strong>further</strong> simple refactoring, which got rid of the data-copying from one array to another altogether. Sometimes it really is better to just leave a workaround in place if it isn’t a performance problem, but sometimes it really is better to just bite the bullet and finish the refactoring, and let that refactoring lead to the next one, and so on, until the code is so dramatically simplified that you can’t think of anything else to simplify.</p>
<p>On my lunch break, I bought some dark chocolate: six bars total, three to leave at work and three to take home. If it is 85% dark chocolate (or more), I won’t eat it for the sugar, and my kids won’t get it out of the cupboard and scarf it down, because it isn’t sweet enough to overcome their aversion to bitterness. But I <strong>will</strong> eat it, perhaps a quarter of a bar, when I’m having that craving.</p>
<p>I also bought some Dr. Bronner’s bar soap, and some more dishwasher pods. I didn’t really want to go to Arbor Farms, but they had the good chocolate. So this was an exceedingly expensive little errand: six bars of dark chocolate, three bars of soap, three bags of dishwasher pods, a small wrap sandwich, and a packet of broad bean crisps, and it cost me something like seventy dollars. Ouch.</p>
<p>I was going to have a late second lunch, since I stayed pretty late today, but the leftover soup and mujaddara really didn’t smell and taste good anymore, so I wound up throwing the rest of it away and eating some more dark chocolate and broad beans.</p>
<p>I’ll head to Costco in a few minutes. It had better be a pretty light load after spending so much earlier.</p>
<p>Between the dark chocolate and the successful bug fixes and refactorings, maybe the day isn’t terrible after all.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I kept the price of my Costco run down to about $160.00, which was not bad. I tried hard to pick up items I was certain we could use over the next few days. Grace was away at a pre-conference dinner, so didn’t join us. I thought the kids might make rice, because it’s one of the things we do regularly on Fridays, even though Grace was not there. But they didn’t, so we ate salmon and cheese pizza and an apple pie.</p>
<p>Our refrigerator is becoming clogged up with leftovers that didn’t get used according to plan. For example, we only cooked half the pot roast, and didn’t immediately freeze the other half, and so now that other half is eight days old and not looking or smelling too good. I might try trimming it rinsing it, but I think there’s probably no salvaging it at this point. This happens in part because we haven’t been able to establish a habit of planning a weekly menu with our housemate, although not for lack of trying on our part. So we’ll have a plan for the food items I bring home, but our housemate will unexpectedly make a big meal for dinner without planning with us, trashing the kitchen and not cleaning up. We’ll have that food to eat, then we’ll have an unused high-value food item like the pot roast going to waste, and on top of it, we’ll have to spend a whole evening cleaning up the kitchen. It’s truly maddening. We’ve been trying to explain that with thirteen people in the household, we really can’t just improvise meals. The quantities of food and cost of those quantities of food are both just too high for this to be a casual, improvised endeavor without planning.</p>
<p>Grace and I really, really hate wasting food. We make mistakes sometime and waste happens — for example, I put several bags of bananas up in the cupboard, and no one pulled them out for a few days, and by the time we remembered, them, they were overripe. We’ll make banana bread, but I think some of them are too far gone. That was a mistake and I try not to beat myself up about it. But a couple pounds of what was very high-quality meat? That just seems like a terrible sin.</p>
<p>Anyway, Grace got home late and she still had to work on her talk for today, so she stayed up quite late, and then had to get up early. We wound up setting the alarms on 3 different devices for 6:45 a.m. I was nervous for her, and woke up about 3:00, and was unable to get back to sleep for a while, so wasted time on Twitter for a while. She got out on time. It’s 5:00 p.m. now and I’m not sure when to expect her. I’m thinking we might go out for dinner when she gets back, or get takeout, or something like that, because we haven’t done good meal planning.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly I’ve been quite tired today. I spent a long time in the tub trying to feel ready to face the day. Sam made coffee, so there was coffee when I got up. I made a tray of bacon in the oven. We are out of paper towels, and I forgot about that because we didn’t consult on a shopping list, so the bacon fat is still in the tray, in the oven, rather than filtered and in a can in the refrigerator. I also made a pot of oatmeal. That got eaten. I did some kitchen cleanup, and read another chapter (finally!) in <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. I have only one chapter left, a long chapter, and the brief epilogue. Then I tried to take a nap, but was woken again and again by Veronica bellowing at her brothers. She seems to always jump directly to maximum volume. So it hasn’t been a great day. It’s overcast and ugly out. But on the positive side, it’s nice and cool. Our houseguest is calling it cold, but she’s from California so that’s not surprising.</p>
<p>We received another offer on the house, but it was an offer for only $60,000. That’s too little for us to consider. Our realtor is talking further about a lease agreement, and we’re talking about possibilities for replacing the furnace or furnaces. This all seems like we have our back to the wall and we’re not happy negotiating from that position. We are still considering the option to walk away.</p>
<p>I have a pile of paperwork to look at, and bills to pay, and I feel like I can’t get even fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quiet time to look at those things. There are things I need to look over with Grace, too, and when she’s with me, it is often the case that we can’t actually finish a single <strong>sentence</strong> without that sentence being interrupted. We could really use a date night. I can’t even remember when we had our last date with just the two of us. It’s probably been over a year.</p>
<p>I also need to finish the post-recording production work for the podcast episode with Anna. That shouldn’t take too long. I’ve got some other topics in mind: I want to do a whole show, or at least a whole hour, about <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>. And Grace gave a talk today at a conference — maybe she’ll read the talk, and we can turn that talk into a bonus episode like we did last time.</p>
<p>So — goals for the remainder of the weekend:</p>
<ul>
<li>Clean up the refrigerator</li>
<li>Clean the oven (at some point this week, someone spilled food all over the inside of the oven again and burned it on, <strong>and</strong> apparently did a half-assed job of cleaning it with oven cleaner, leaving oven cleaner residue all over the inside of the oven; it looks like if I don’t jump in and do a good cleaning job on the thing, no one will).</li>
<li>Finish the podcast</li>
<li>Finish and file those pieces of paperwork</li>
<li>Finish reading <em>Daughter of Dreams</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Those things don’t seem like they should be out of reach, but we’ll see.</p>
<p>Our housemate’s boyfriend says he is sick, and the girls are sick, so if they have a virus we’re trying not to catch it. We aren’t planning to turn the heating system on in the house until Halloween, in part because we need to get someone out to service it.</p>
<p>I wish I had more of a topic for today, instead of just a bunch of miscellaneous gripes and worries and plans. But sometimes all the little miscellaneous things drive out most or all of the more organized thoughts, and that’s just the way it is.</p>
<p>With Grace gone, we didn’t make it to the Mother Loaf Bakery today.</p>
<p>It’s officially the first day of fall. I should probably start reading that copy of <em>Autumn</em> by Karl Ove Knausgaard that I picked up a while back.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell (finished)</li>
<li><em>Oryx and Crake</em> by Margaret Atwood</li>
<li><em>Dragon Ball Z: Broly - The Legendary Super Saiyan</em> (1993 animated movie, 2018 Fathom events theatrical release)</li>
<li><em>The 36th Chamber of Shaolin</em> (1978 Hong Kong Martial Arts movie)</li>
<li><em>Hacker’s Delight</em> second edition by Henry S. Warren (used as a reference)</li>
<li><em>Iron Monkey</em> (1993 Hong Kong Martial Arts movie)</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> by Peter Brown (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em> (Gollancz, 2014) (omnibus volume containing 3 novels; the first, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, September 22nd, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-58100627533545189152018-09-15T18:26:00.002-04:002018-09-15T18:26:42.634-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, September 15th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<h3 id="iron-monkey"><em>Iron Monkey</em></h3>
<p>It’s been a difficult day. We stayed up later last night than we probably should have, and slept late.</p>
<p>First, we watched a movie in the basement, called <em>Iron Monkey</em>. This is a Kung Fu movie from 1993 and it’s a lot of fun, with the over-the-top flying moves and fight scenes that I love. Like a lot of Kung Fu movies, it also features characters with a strong moral code, fighting corrupt state officials and monks. there are only a few moments that make me a bit embarrassed to be showing it to my kids. There are a few painfully sexist gags where women get thrown around and used as punching bags. I’m not talking about the fight scenes that actually feature Jean Wang as Miss Orchid. She’s a great character. I’m talking about a late fight scene where a woman winds up throw around as collateral damage and literally goes richocheting off the bad guy. But it could have been worse — for the most part I thought this movie was fine for the kids. There are some terrific scenes of people cooking Chinese dishes, and scenes showing how traditional Chinese medicine was practiced. There are even some bits of music and calligraphy as well. I’m not sure how accurate these scenes were, but they were interesting. It wasn’t all ridiculously over-the-top flying fistfights, although there were plenty of those as well.</p>
<p>After that we sent the kids to bed but Grace and I stayed up a while longer. We got up late. I read some more of <em>Icehenge</em>. The second novella is really quite good, and continues to be better than I hoped.</p>
<p>We decided to take the kids to the St. Francis parish picnic, which was actually held indoors because it has been cool and rainy. That was a big potluck in the parish activities center. Grace made a terrific potato salad. It took us forever to get the kids ready to go, though; no one seemed to be able to find and put on decent clothes, a couple of kids couldn’t find their shoes, and then there was last-minute confusion with a car seat which had been swapped with a housemate’s car seat, and which was in her boyfriend’s car. But we made it and managed to get there in time for everyone to eat and for the kids to make it to some of the activities in the gym.</p>
<p>Afterwards we gassed up Grace’s truck and came on home, and started to work on putting away laundry, sorting laundry, and washing more laundry. It quickly became evident that the situation upstairs in the laundry room was a lot worse than we thought, with blankets and a forgotten load of wet items piled up there because Veronica apparently lost track of it. It was starting to get on towards evening. I hadn’t really prepared enough for a podcast; I had selected some articles to read, but hadn’t printed them out, hadn’t marked them up, and hadn’t even finished reading them. I realized I just didn’t have it in me to record and produce and upload a podcast tonight. So I wrote some notes on Facebook and Twitter apologizing for that. No show tonight. We will at leat start out the week with some clean laundry ready to go, though.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>Last night was disjointed as we were off our regular schedule. We didn’t record a podcast. We spent a few hours working on laundry: folding it, putting it away, and trying to figure out what happened to some of our laundry that was left upstairs. Grace then left for a while to run a couple of errands. While she was gone I threw together one of our “such as it is” dinners — I heated up the rest of our tortillas, got out some salsa and leftover meatless taco filling made with walnuts, and a half-empty can of refried beans that was in the refrigerator. I scrambled a half-dozen eggs. I put that on the table and let the kids eat what they wanted. Elanor got a torn-up tortilla and bits of egg. When Grace got back home with more eggs and dishwasher packs, I scrambled another three eggs for her. I got the dishwasher loaded and going, and asked Veronica to do some hand-washing, and it was time to get ready for bed. Four of the kids had taken a nap late in the day, so bedtime was very unevenly distributed; Benjamin and Pippin were very restive.</p>
<p>In the fridge we’ve still got leftover roast chicken, another whole chicken, a bag of kale salad, and some top round we haven’t eaten yet. There’s a package of salmon burgers in the freezer, and we have a bag of little dinner rolls. We just stocked up on eggs. There’s a bag of brussels sprouts to shred or roast. There are potatoes in the pantry, and another bag of bananas that aren’t ripe yet but will be soon. There’s rice and oatmeal and chicken stock. So there’s plenty of food to get through the next couple of days. It’s just mostly not of the ready-to-eat kind of food. I will run to Costco again on Tuesday night after work to pick up a few things.</p>
<p>We are having some difficulties with our housemate, and I’m scratching my head as to what I want to write in this journal, which I’ve been making public. I’m also wondering if I should write about it in separate files that I keep private. I guess it depends on what I’m hoping to <strong>do</strong>, eventually, if anything, with this public text, and that private text.</p>
<p>In this public piece of writing I’ll just say that one big difficulty stems from conflicts over how we procure, prepare, and consume food.</p>
<p>Grace and I have long hoped to live in community, have tried to establish community, and <strong>have</strong> lived in community, both with our families of origin and with other people, at different points in our lives. We believe that all efforts to live in community must center around, and pivot around, preparing and eating food together. This is why co-ops of all kinds, extended families, religious orders, etc. all find ways to center and organize their lives around food. And that simple word, “food,” extends outwards in all directions — into our culture, our finances, our food choices, our desires to garden and grow our own food and to support food production in our community.</p>
<p>Trying to be in community with people who have fundamentally different values around food is <strong>hard</strong>.</p>
<p>There are other issues that have come up. One of them is the simple fact that our housemate’s boyfriend smokes, and that’s an ongoing problem. He doesn’t smoke in our house, but even the residue that spreads to everything he comes in contact with, and the people and things that are transported in his car, is a problem. It’s not even second-hand smoke; we’re talking <strong>third-hand</strong> smoke, or even <strong>fourth-hand</strong> smoke.</p>
<p>This past week, due to a situation involving transferring babies from their car to our car, and a sleeping baby no one wanted to wake up, Elanor’s car seat wound up in his car for a few days, and his baby’s car seat wound up in our car. We had to leave for the parish picnic with Elanor in his baby’s car seat in our car. Even our short exposure to that car seat — literally, to a <strong>thing</strong> that had been in his car while he he smoked cigarettes — left my throat raw and my voice hoarse, although I wasn’t coughing, and seems like it also left Elanor miserably coughing half the night. Elanor can get a nap today, but Grace and I can’t; I’ve got work, and she’s got a whole string of appointments.</p>
<p>Yesterday evening we got back Elanor’s car seat, and just a couple of days in his car left it reeking of smoke, too. So we had to disassemble it and take the cover off and run it through the washer, twice. The first time, Veronica forgot to add laundry detergent. It still smelled like smoke when it came out of the dryer. The second time, it seemed improved, so we reassembled it. But we’re wondering if actually might need to throw it out and buy a new car seat. Cigarette smoke residue is <strong>persistent</strong>. I can smell cigarette smoke on my clothes today, because I spent an hour in a car that also contained a car seat that had spent time in a smoker’s car. And smokers <strong>cannot</strong> smell it.</p>
<p>When we took a class on infant CPR at Mott, the respiratory therapist who taught the class described an incident in which an infant heart patient’s parent came into the room. There’s no smoking in the building, obviously, but there was smoke on the parent’s clothes. That cigarette smoke residue was enough of a respiratory challenge that the child went into cardiac arrest. She had to administer CPR and rescue the child. The parent in question apparently didn’t believe that this “third-hand” smoke could <strong>possibly</strong> be that harmful to the child, and so the next day it happened <strong>again</strong>.</p>
<p>I don’t think Elanor is actually <strong>that</strong> fragile — she’s been off all her medication for many months, and her vitals look good. It’s been over a year since her open-heart surgery and for the most part she seems to be quite robust, active, and healthy. But it’s an interesting correlation that just in the last week, she’s started to show health problems; we’ve been worried about pneumonia and infections. Her chest x-ray showed nothing worrying except a slightly enlarged heart, which I believe is normal for a child who used to have her particular congenital heart defect, before it was repaired; while waiting for infants with her condition to grow large enough to get through the the surgery safely, her doctors <strong>allowed</strong> her to develop a slight heart enlargement, on the grounds that it was safer than doing the surgery immediately after birth. She should “grow into it” as she gets bigger. And her blood tests showed nothing worrying, except a slight anemia. We’ll work on that with diet. So my only remaining explanation for her recent coughing is an environmental irritant. She could have seasonal allergies, I suppose, but I really don’t think that is the actual culprit.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any way we can convince our housemate to take seriously the idea that her boyfriend’s smoking could put our fragile infant with Down Syndrome and a repaired congenital heart defect into the E. R., or into the ground. She’s allowed to make her own choices about the environments she puts <strong>her</strong> children into. But Grace and I insist that <strong>we</strong> be able to control the environments <strong>our</strong> children are exposed to.</p>
<p>That’s all I’m going to say about this matter for the time being.</p>
<h3 id="icehenge"><em>Icehenge</em></h3>
<p>Last night and this morning I finished most of <em>Icehenge</em>. This book, which didn’t seem like it was all that promising, has continued to impress me more and more, and I now regard it as a sort of warm-up for Robinson’s amazing Mars Trilogy, and later works. The premise seemed dumb, but it’s not a dumb book at all. It touches on many of the same themes. One of the most prominent theme is Robinson’s attempt to answer this question: “What it would be like, given our limited human brains, to actually live to be several hundred years old?” He takes this question on quite seriously, and <em>Icehenge</em> explores how family relationships would change, how careers would change, how cultures would change, and how our own perception of our own lives would change.</p>
<p>I think this book would serve as a great introduction to several of Robinson’s later works, including the Mars Trilogy, <em>Aurora</em>, and <em>2312</em>. I don’t think there’s as much of a clear through-line to his Science in the Capital series, which I have to admit I never finished, or his Three Californias trilogy, which I have to admit I never started. I don’t think I will ever finish the Science in the Capital series; it just seemed a little too much like other simplistic disaster potboilers that I’ve read. And I haven’t picked up <em>New York 2140</em>. You’d think, as someone very interested in anthropogenic global warming, I’d be interested in climate fiction. What I’ve read of this particular sub-genre hasn’t impressed me, though. This book is pushing me to dig deeper into Robinson’s older work.</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about it yet, but I’m very excited to hear that there’s a new novel from Kim Stanley Robinson, called <em>Red Moon</em>. It’s due to arrive in late October. When it comes out, I probably won’t be able to read anything else until I’ve finished it!</p>
<p>I just got a string of text messages from our realtor. So it’s time to close this file, take a deep breath and ask Dorothy Parker’s old question, “what fresh hell is this?”</p>
<h3 id="oh-that-fresh-hell">Oh, That Fresh Hell</h3>
<p>The fresh hell was nothing too unexpected; the showings of our old house this weekend resulted in no interest in a purchase.</p>
<p>Over lunch, I finished <em>Icehenge</em>. The ending is pretty satisfying, and succeeded in surprising me slightly; I thought that I might have the ending sussed out. Along the way I think I noticed two subtle references to other works: one, to Robert Silverberg’s <em>Dying Inside</em>, and another, to the short story by James Tiptree Junior called “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.” I think there are also some scenes that are stylistic shout-outs to William Gibson’s Villa Straylight. There may be other scenes that Robinson also had in mind, and I feel like there are, but I can’t quite put my finger on them.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>I made pretty good progress at work and left late. The particular problem I’ve been trying to solve involves calculating wavelength given frequency. Given a frequency in Hertz, we can calculate the wavelength in meters by dividing the speed of light in meters per second by the frequency.</p>
<p>Things can get a little tricky when trying to do this by computer with very large or very small numbers. The speed of light is already a pretty big number, 299,792,458m/sec. But when working with frequencies of light that are more conveniently measured in <strong>THz</strong> than Hz, and wavelengths that are more conveniently measured in <strong>nm</strong> than m, we can wind up doing math on big numbers.</p>
<p>If we have a number like 191,500,000MHz, to get Hz we have to scale it up by 10^6. The result will be in m, and to get nm we have to scale it up by 10^9. Like so:</p>
<pre><code>wavelength = 299,792,458m/sec / 191,500,000,000,000Hz = 0.00000156549586m or 1565.49586nm</code></pre>
<p>Instead of scaling up the divisor and quotient we can just scale up the speed of light by 10^3 and get the same results — that is, divide 299,792,458,000 by our frequency.</p>
<p>Because our laser device can be tuned in increments of 1Mhz, we want to display the wavelength in nanometers with 5 fractional digits. We want a precise 9-digit number. But here’s where we start to run into a problem: the ARM microcontrollers in the device only support 32-bit integers and 32-bit single-precision floating-point. Single-precision floating-point doesn’t really provide that many digits of precision. If we do the math for 191.487767THz, we get 1565.59594. A more precise calculation using 64-bit floating-point tells us that the value should be more like 1565.59587. So that result is off by by 0.00007nm. The calculation is less precise than our laser is.</p>
<p>In addition, some adjacent frequency values will produce identical wavelength values. Values from 191.487768THz to 191.487784THz will all produce 1565.59582. So if the user is changing the frequency in 1MHz steps, the displayed wavelength in nm will appear to get “stuck”</p>
<p>We can’t fix this by, say, scaling up by 100 so that more of the digits are to the left of the decimal point. The problem is in the way floating-point numbers are implemented. They are stored as an exponent and a significand, and this gives us a very wide range of values that can be represented, but only 6 to 9 significant digits of precision. That’s because the significand has to be a binary number with a fixed width. So in this case, there just aren’t enough possible values. We’re getting values that are as precise as possible, but they aren’t precise enough for our needs. We want five significant digits to the right of the decimal point.</p>
<p>We ought to be able to do this using integers. Our frequency in MHz is already effectively an integer since we can only tune the laser in 1MHz increments. Working with integers, to get a wavelength value with five digits to the right of the decimal point, I want to start with six digits and round by adding 5 and dividing by ten. So we want our result to be a ten-digit integer. To get this we can scale up our speed of light value still more. For example:</p>
<pre><code>wavelength = 299,792,458,000,000,000nm/sec / 191,500,000MHz = 1565495856fm</code></pre>
<p>After adding 5 and dividing by ten, we’d have 156549586 in units of fm * 10. The LCD GUI could display this as 1565.549 86 (formatted with the space to separate the digit for readability).</p>
<p>There’s only one problem: we can’t work with integers that big.</p>
<p>Well, we can’t <strong>easily</strong> work with integers that big.</p>
<p>The Atmel SAM4 series has 32-bit integers. The compiler I’m using, for the Keil ARM-MDK, actually lies to me. The online help shows that it supports <strong>long long</strong> and claims these are 64 bit values. It will compile code written using <strong>unsigned long long</strong>. (I didn’t think the chip would magically grow 64-bit register, but I thought that maybe the compiler would do 64-bit math using a math library to provide 64-bit operations even though the hardware can really only work with 32-bit integers; it’s slower, but it certainly can be done). But no; it just lies to me. The code using <strong>unsigned long long</strong> compiles just fine, with no errors or warnings. I am able to specify 64-bit constants, and even 64-bit specifiers for formatting numbers with <strong>printf</strong>. But the generated code uses 32-bit values and so I get completely wrong results.</p>
<p>Finding that the compiler would accept <strong>unsigned long long</strong> produced a momentary feeling of victory, followed by a feeling of defeat as I determined that, no, it really was just pretending.</p>
<p>This is an absolutely <strong>egregious</strong> failure to correctly implement the C standard. I’m using the compiler <strong>armcc.exe</strong> version 5.06 update 5 (build 528), for anyone curious, part of the Keil toolchain MDK-ARM Essential Version 5.24.1. I could complain and file bug reports. But I don’t really have time to litigate this with my vendor; I’m just trying to solve a problem.</p>
<p>So this was discouraging, but I wasn’t sunk. There are algorithms that will let me do 64-bit division. The problem was finding one that works, isn’t too slow, and wasn’t difficult to port.</p>
<p>I messed around with some unattributed code I found, but couldn’t get it produce correct results. So then I turned to one of the thousands of books that are still packed in boxes in my basement. Fortunately because they are all catalogued in Delicious Library, it is easy to find the right box. The book is <em>Hacker’s Delight</em>, second edition, by Henry S. Warren. This is a terrific book; I used to own the first edition and liked it so much I bought the next one. You can’t go wrong with either one, but the second edition has a little more cool stuff in it.</p>
<p>Warren describes many, many algorithms in this book. The thing that makes it useful is that these algorithms aren’t theoretical, written for some theoretical computer. They are designed and tested to run on real machines, and tested and optimized for modern RISC instruction sets. Some of them are in pseudo-code, but he has a lot of sample code in C as well, and he’s tested this code.</p>
<p>Of course, “modern” is always relative, but Warren lays out his reasoning for why the algorithms are written the way they are. He’s done the math and worked out the timings, at the instruction level. He explains that if your microprocessor supports <strong>this</strong> kind of instruction, you can make the algorithm run faster this way, or if you are willing to use the space for a lookup table, it can run a little faster like <strong>so</strong>, etc.</p>
<p>In fact, part of what the book does is to make a case for what a future computer architecture’s instruction set <em>ought to</em> contain, if we want that computer to be able to run certain common operations efficiently. Another part of what the book does is to suggest what kinds of optimizations, <em>compilers</em> should be able to help provide, given certain hardware support. It’s really a deep dive into the relationship between algorithms, compilers, optimization, instruction sets, and hardware, wrapped up and presented as a cookbook of tricks to help the programmer do tricky things as efficiently as possible.</p>
<p>Anyway, the book has just the algorithm I need. It even has an implementation in C. And, the author allows people to use his code! You can even download it <a href="http://hackersdelight.org/">here</a>. Even if you didn’t buy the book! (But I recommend buying the book; it’s a great book).</p>
<p>The code I’m using is available <a href="http://hackersdelight.org/hdcodetxt/divlu.c.txt">here</a>. In particular, I borrowed his <strong>divlu2</strong> function. That function takes four parameters:</p>
<ul>
<li>Two 32-bit unsigned integers, representing the high and low parts of a 64-bit unsigned integer dividend</li>
<li>A 32-bit unsigned integer divisor</li>
<li>A pointer to a 32-bit unsigned integer remainder</li>
</ul>
<p>It returns a 32-bit unsigned integer.</p>
<p>Warren has other algorithms that will work with bigger numbers, but I chose this one because it actually does what I need. My divisor and quotient will both fit into 32 bits. I made some minor tweaks to his code. I removed the remainder logic, since I don’t need it. I modified his C implementation to follow my “house style.”</p>
<p>My general policy, having been writing C code for a living on and off for almost 30 years, is to avoid <strong>goto</strong>. Some programmers use <strong>goto</strong> routinely in error-handling. I don’t. I use the structured programming concepts I learned way back in school. I just believe these constructs make code more readable in most cases.</p>
<p>But I’m not entirely dogmatic about it; I’ve used <strong>goto</strong> in C code on occasion, to break out of nested loops. The need for <strong>goto</strong> always suggests to me that I should consider refactoring my code to avoid it, but sometimes there just isn’t a simpler way to do things, so I use it. I think I’ve probably actually come across fewer than a dozen cases where I felt that <strong>goto</strong> was justified, in <strong>decades</strong> of writing code in C and related languages.</p>
<p>I guess my rule could be stated “don’t use <strong>goto</strong> in C code unless you have a very strong justification for doing so.”</p>
<p>This is not all that different than Edsger W. Dijkstra’s advice in his famous letter to the editors of CACM, <a href="http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html">“Go To Statement Considered Harmful,”</a> in which he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The go to statement as it stands is just too primitive; it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one’s program. One can regard and appreciate the clauses considered as bridling its use. I do not claim that the clauses mentioned are exhaustive in the sense that they will satisfy all needs, but whatever clauses are suggested (e.g. abortion clauses) they should satisfy the requirement that a programmer independent coordinate system can be maintained to describe the process in a helpful and manageable way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>David Tribble has <a href="http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html">annotated</a> Dijkstra’s famous letter, which might help us understand it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here, finally, we get to the crux of Dijkstra’s argument concerning the lowly goto statement. Essentially, Dijkstra argues that the “unbridled use” of goto statements in a program obscures the execution state and history of the program, so that at any given moment the values of the call stack and loop iteration stack are no longer sufficient to determine the value of the program variables.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>This obfuscation is a consequence of the fact that an unconstrained goto statement can transfer control out of a loop before it is completed, and likewise can transfer control into the middle of a loop that is already being iterated. Both cases complicate the way in which the counters in the loop iteration stack are modified.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tribble makes the point that Dijkstra is talking about the use of <em>unstructured</em> <strong>goto</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What Dijkstra means by the goto statement <em>as it stands</em> is otherwise known as an <em>unstructured</em> goto. That is, a <strong>goto</strong> statement with no restrictions about how it may be used in an otherwise structured language.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In my own code I’ll occasionally justify <strong>goto</strong> in cases where I want to break out of deeply nested code, jumping <em>forward</em>, and I can’t find a clearer way to express the code.</p>
<p>Of course, at the machine language level, most flow control involves jumps that are the equivalent of <strong>goto</strong>, either conditional or unconditional, and of course high-level code <strong>turns into</strong> code with this kind of <strong>goto</strong> in it. (I say “most flow control” because some architectures do provide instructions that implement loops without explicit <strong>goto</strong>).</p>
<p>So this suggests another possible justification: a programmer might want to use <strong>goto</strong> because he or she knows that using <strong>goto</strong> will result in a compiler generating a certain desired sequence of instructions, for performance reasons. I’m not a big fan of this approach, using C as more readable assembly language, because it tends to be very fragile. A minor compiler update or change to an optimizer can and likely will break the programmer’s assumptions. In these cases, I think it might be better to write a reference implementation in C without <strong>goto</strong>, and a platform- and compiler-specific implementation in assembly language, for maximum control of the implementation.</p>
<p>Warren uses <strong>goto</strong> in a couple of places like so:</p>
<pre><code>again1:
if (q1 >= b || q1*vn0 > b*rhat + un1) {
q1 = q1 - 1;
rhat = rhat + vn1;
if (rhat < b) goto again1;}</code></pre>
<p>He’s not using it to escape from nested loops; he’s using it to create a <strong>while</strong> loop, albeit a <strong>while</strong> loop with an extra exit condition at the bottom. So essentially he’s combining a <strong>while</strong> loop and a <strong>do</strong> loop. In C; there’s no:</p>
<pre><code>loop_if ( condition 1 )
{
/* Loop body */
} continue_if ( condition 2 );</code></pre>
<p>Although — maybe there should be something like that? What if we had a language that supported this kind of loop, and we also had reversed versions of these statements:</p>
<pre><code>loop_if_not ( condition 1 )
{
/* Loop body */
} break_if_not ( condition 2 );</code></pre>
<p>And what if we allowed the statements <strong>break</strong>, <strong>continue</strong>, <strong>break_if</strong>, <strong>break_if_not</strong>, <strong>continue_if</strong>, and <strong>continue_if_not</strong> to be used in the body of the loop?</p>
<p>Would those constructs help people better express their programs?</p>
<p>Then, we could also have a straight-up loop, using an unconditional <strong>loop</strong> keyword:</p>
<pre><code>loop
{
/* Loop body */
/* optional break or continue statements or their negative versions can go anywhere in the loop body */
};</code></pre>
<p>So we’d have some extra keywords; we’d have <strong>loop</strong>, <strong>loop_if</strong>, <strong>loop_if_not</strong>, <strong>continue</strong>, <strong>continue_if</strong>, <strong>continue_if_not</strong>, <strong>break</strong>, <strong>break_if</strong>, and <strong>break_if_not</strong>. But we could express a huge variety of loops, and we’d avoid keywords from Common Lisp, Dylan, and Ruby that I find hard to read, like <strong>unless</strong>. The equivalent of a C <strong>do</strong> loop could look like so:</p>
<pre><code>loop
{
/* Loop body */
} continue_if( condition_1 );</code></pre>
<p>And what if we had a variant of <strong>break</strong> which used a label? That would pretty much cover all the loops I ever use, and the only conditions under which I would typically use <strong>goto</strong>. Although I’m still chewing over how to stick the label to a set of braces; I might like to put the label after the top brace, and I might like to use a Perl-like sigil as a cue to the compiler, and a label namespace. But I haven’t thought about the problem very hard yet.</p>
<p>Anyway, this is why they don’t let me design computer languages… but I am still harboring a secret plan to design and implement a language.</p>
<p>But anyway, let’s look at Warren’s code again:</p>
<pre><code>again1:
if (q1 >= b || q1*vn0 > b*rhat + un1) {
q1 = q1 - 1;
rhat = rhat + vn1;
if (rhat < b) goto again1;}</code></pre>
<p>There are some funny things in this code. Both conditions depend on <strong>rhat</strong> and <strong>b</strong>, and two “branches” of the first condition depend on <strong>b</strong>, so that’s three comparisons that depend on <strong>b</strong>, and two that depend on <strong>rhat</strong>. This suggests to me that there might be a way to combine these conditions. But for now I’m going to assume that if there really was a good way to optimize those comparisons, Warren would have done it, and so I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole, at least not today. (Did you ever wish you could split yourself into multiple clones, like Michael Keaton does in <em>Multiplicity</em>?)</p>
<p>Normally I’d write a loop like this, which executes zero or more times, as a <strong>while</strong> loop, and I’d use <strong>break</strong> to end the loop early. But this logic is backwards: the code goes back to re-evaluate the loop condition if <strong>rhat < b</strong>. We could do that like this:</p>
<pre><code>while (q1 >= b || q1*vn0 > b*rhat + un1) {
q1 = q1 - 1;
rhat = rhat + vn1;
if (rhat < b) continue; else break;}</code></pre>
<p>But if we’re willing to reverse the comparison to <strong>rhat >= b</strong>, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be willing to do that, we can just write it like this:</p>
<pre><code>while (q1 >= b || q1*vn0 > b*rhat + un1) {
q1 = q1 - 1;
rhat = rhat + vn1;
if (rhat >= b) break };</code></pre>
<p>I took a peek at the generated assembly, and it didn’t seem to be inflated by this change, and I tested the function, and got the same results, so I’ll stick with this change to get rid of the <strong>goto</strong> statement. I think getting rid of it makes the underlying structure of this code fragment clearer; it’s a while loop with an extra exit condition. And I don’t see a good reason <strong>not</strong> to remove the <strong>goto</strong> statement.</p>
<p>I could spend the rest of the day profiling the slightly different versions of the function to determine if there is any significant performance difference at all, but for my present application that amount of work isn’t justifiable.</p>
<p>Ideally, I’d have a version of this function in optimized assembly language to use. Then I would just treat it as a black box in my code. But I haven’t been able to find one. I suppose I could work on writing one (but see again my earlier comment on splitting myself into multiple clones to free up time…)</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Costco closes at 8:30 and I made it in the door at exactly 8:10 last night. I bought fruit, celery, pork medallions, lunch meat, rolls, a box of ramen for the kids, and a chicken pot pie. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to return all the returnable cans and bottles, so they are still rattling around in the back of my car. And I made the mistake of going to Costco while I was quite hungry, so I brought home a few extras that weren’t strictly necessary including a box of cookies, “Petite Palmiers.” I also bought some dark chocolate caramel candies, a bag of toasted chick peas, and a bag of toasted hazelnuts. I really do start to crave carbs, <strong>hard</strong>, as the days get shorter. I have to watch myself a little more closely; we didn’t actually need those things, although they will certainly be eaten.</p>
<p>Grace made chicken soup in the Instant Pot using the second chicken we bought last Friday. It was quite good. We’ve got a fair amount of leftovers, so Friday’s shopping trip shouldn’t need to be all that big.</p>
<p>Things have been difficult with our housemate; I’ll leave it at that for now.</p>
<p>While Grace was getting ready for bed, I read a bit more in <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. I’ve finished the second of three parts of the novel. Things have gotten complicated as Elric, whose own body is an enchanted sleep, and who is now piloting Von Bek’s body, travels the <a href="http://stormbringer.wikia.com/wiki/Moonbeam_Roads">Moonbeam Roads</a> and meets his daughter, Oona. We’re getting into highly abstracted locations now, enchanted places, and I have to confess I am not really enjoying this part of the story quite as much as I enjoyed the earlier parts. If the third part is good, I will still consider it a good book. If the third part doesn’t improve and the story doesn’t end well, then I’ll consider it an interesting book that had a lot of promise but which didn’t quite work out.</p>
<p>I heard today from our realtor that she is showing the house again.</p>
<p>Grace and I continue struggling to try to figure out what to do with the house. I’m considering whether it might be possible to borrow a few thousand dollars to put in a furnace. That might make it simpler to lease the house as-is.</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>The Saginaw house has been shown a few more times and there are more showings scheduled, but so far we haven’t gotten any new offers.</p>
<p>Last night we had a pot pie for dinner. The kids were begging for a movie afterwards but Grace and I were really not up for it and wanted to get to bed early. I read some of the kids a few more chapters of <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> and we sent them off to bed. Then I read a little bit more of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. Not very much, though — I was too tired to concentrate. So Grace and I did get on to sleep at a more reasonable time, about 11:30. We were woken up by Sam and Joshua making ramen for breakfast, and then Pippin screaming his head off, as someone apparently said something to him that set him off. I had breakfast at Harvest Moon. I should get paid tonight. Grace found the paperwork for renewing my driver license, which was behind one of the benches in the family room for some reason. I’d been wondering where it was. I need to get that paperwork done and also change my voter registration so I can vote locally.</p>
<p>I spent a good chunk of time working on what seemed like a simple task: getting our Amulet GUI to display a special character, the “plus/minus” mark. (There’s an HTML entity for it, <strong><code>&plusmn;</code></strong>, and if it works correctly in your browser, or you are reading this in some other derived format such as a printed PDF file, you might be able to see the character between the quotation marks here: <strong>“±”</strong>.</p>
<p>The standard Arial Bold 12 font that comes with GEMStudio doesn’t have this character; it contains a limited subset of the character from the Windows TrueType font. GEMScript has a number of strange limitations. It doesn’t handle escaped character codes in string constants, although it will do it in character constants.</p>
<p>What I finally wound up doing was copying and pasting the character directly into the string constant in the source code. That’s not something that I would ever consider doing in a more conventional programming language, like C, or Python, or Java, or JavaScript. In fact sometimes it works to put special characters in strings, but the C standard specifies that implementations are only <strong>required</strong> to support uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, and a handful of special characters including punctuation, brackets, etc. (basically, everything printed on the keys of an American keyboard), and a few whitespace characters like tab and form feed.</p>
<p>GEMScript supposedly supports Unicode strings, but given that, it’s pretty crazy that you can’t specify Unicode characters in strings.</p>
<p>There’s a tool which will generate an Amulet font file from your installed Windows fonts. You can specify a range of characters to include. So I extended it a bit, to include the plus/minus character (it has the code value 0xB1). But it didn’t work right; my characters were all way too big, now.</p>
<p>I finally learned that the fonts that the GEM Font Converter creates are affected by my Windows accessibility settings. I had my on-screen text set to use “medium” size fonts, instead of the default “small,” because I’m fifty years old.</p>
<p>The idea that this setting would affect the fonts that the GEM Font Converter can retrieve from Windows is insane, but not actually surprising. Windows is a collection of layers and layers of historic hacks. Of <strong>course</strong> they just made it so that the accessibility settings simply scaled up the fonts that the Windows API provides to clients, rather than adding a new API or modifying an existing API to allow the client to indicate whether the client wants the raw font or the font scaled per the user accessibility settings. Microsoft pretty much always takes the route of maximum backwards compatibility, even if the results are surprising or confusing.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s how you can waste half a work day trying to get your Amulet GUI to display a single special character. I don’t recommend it. (But the page finally looks just the way I want it).</p>
<h3 id="grayscale">Grayscale</h3>
<p>As an experiment, I set my phone to show all images in grayscale. This is supposed to make your phone and the applications on it a little bit less addictive and sleep-disruptive. It seems so far like that is true, but it also seems like this setting makes the phone eat its battery charge a lot faster than usual. So I’m not sure I can leave it that way.</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night we roasted the pork medallions from Costco and at them with kale salad. Then after a long delay trying to get everyone to brush their teeth, I took the kids down into the basement to watch another Kung Fu movie. This one was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_36th_Chamber_of_Shaolin"><em>The 36th Chamber of Shaolin</em></a>, from 1978.</p>
<p>Watching it, we had the same problem we had watching the last one: at a random point in the movie, the playback froze up, and I had to force iTunes to quit. After launching it again, I could play that same part of the movie with no issues. Technical problems like this are one of the reasons I don’t really like buying movies through the iTunes store, although I’ve been doing it since I still have a lot of iTunes store credit.</p>
<p>This movie is rated PG, compared to <em>Iron Monkey</em> which was rated PG-13, but this one actually feels more violent and includes scenes of blood. The blood is a pretty blatantly fake color (almost magenta), but it was a little surprising. We also have moderately convincing makeup showing gangrene and bruising. So I guess this movie makes the attempt to be a little more realistic, in that it connects fighting with violence and injury and even death.</p>
<p>The version available from iTunes is strange, in that it is both subtitled and dubbed. The dubbing doesn’t match the subtitles, so if you are reading along and listening it’s really laughably confusing at times. The movie also feels a little long, at almost 2 hours. But many of the training sequences are really fun. I was talking to the kids about their favorite rooms. My personal favorite was the one in which our hero has to walk through a room full of swinging sandbags, knocking them out of the way with his head. All around him, fellow students are slamming their foreheads into the sandbags and then falling down, dazed. I just hope this doesn’t encourage my kids to give themselves concussions.</p>
<p>The actual history of the Shaolin temple, and what was taught there, is a lot more mundane, although still <a href="https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4516">interesting</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the 5th century, an Indian Buddhist master named Buddhabhadra traveled to China to spread Buddhism, and by the year 477, he had become influential enough that Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei built the original Shaolin Temple for him to begin teaching Chinese monks. These are among the few facts of the early Shaolin that scholars generally agree upon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Over the ensuing centuries, the Shaolin Temple performed basically the same function as it still did into the 20th century. It was essentially a boarding school for boys. The younger the recruit, the better; students as young as 5 or 6 years old were preferred. They developed tremendous flexibility and agility, and studied Buddhism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 1972, when American TV viewers first saw Kwai Chang Caine wrap his arms around the hot cauldron and brand himself with the marks, what they didn’t see was the rest of this elaborate test called the Wooden Men Labyrinth. But nobody else ever saw it either, because like so much of what we think we know of the Shaolin, it was the purely fictional invention of modern authors.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ouch.</p>
<p>But still, I grew up occasionally watching <em>Kung Fu</em>, the television show, and my step-brother Tony liked to show me Bruce Lee movies. I’m a fan of Jackie Chan and an even bigger fan of the fantastically beautiful and artistic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxia">wuxia</a> genre. While it’s important to be skeptical of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism">Orientalism</a> and stereotyping that goes into these films, I love the tales of legendary heroes fighting corruption and injustice with humility, tenacity, bravery, and discipline. I’m a big fan of <em>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon</em>, and <em>Hero</em>, and <em>House of Flying Daggers</em>. I’m curious about <em>The Forbidden Kingdom</em>, although the reviews aren’t terribly good, and <em>Curse of the Golden Flower</em>, although the reviews for that one also aren’t very good, and it is rated R, so I don’t want to show it to the kids. I’m also curious about <em>The Assassin</em> (the 2015 film), and <em>Dragon</em> (the 2011 film), although <em>The Dragon</em> is also rated R. Are there any more I should be looking for? How are the twenty-six(!) old Zatoichi films? How is the 2003 film? How is <em>Tai Chi Zero?</em></p>
<p>Some of these are available via the iTunes store, and I still have a credit, so maybe we’ll try some more of them.</p>
<p>I’d like to pick up the 2013 Criterion Zatoichi set, with 27 discs(!), but that’s not really in the budget.</p>
<p>If you are wondering what I’d like for my fifty-first birthday, besides “selling the old house,” that’s it: the <a href="https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1012-zatoichi-the-blind-swordsman">Criterion Collection Blu-ray set called <em>Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman</em></a>. My kids and I would watch the hell out of those. In fact I thing those movies would be great to show on Potts House movie nights, when we get our basement set up with a projector or a big screen and enough chairs to have folks over to have dinner and watch movies, also known as “chili and Netflix.” But unfortunately the very basic basement home theater we hope to set up is another one of those goals, like beds for our children, that keeps receding into the future, as we continue to fail to get our finances under control.</p>
<p>There are three showings of our old house today. Grace and I are praying that one of these showings will turn into an offer. We just had to pay choir tuition for two of our sons and it is a big expense. We still haven’t received our last reimbursement from Liberty Mutual. I got paid overnight, and today I am making a credit card payment; I have been setting aside money from the last three paychecks to put towards paying down one of our two credit cards. But it’s discouraging when we just had to charge something that is bigger than our payment. It means our debt situation continues to move in the wrong direction.</p>
<p>For lunch I had a grilled cheddar and marmite sandwich with a side of pickles and olives, and a cherry Italian soda. It was tasty but like anything involving marmite, damned salty. So I’m guzzling extra water and hoping I haven’t damaged myself. While eating I read two more chapters of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. The story does pick up a bit in the third section; we get more scenes with fighting, and Elric doing things, like summoning Meerclar, Mistress of Cats. So I’m feeling optimistic about the rest of the book.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>Last night after work I went to Costco as usual. It was a pretty standard load of groceries, except that I’ve been adding red meat at Grace’s request. So I got some beef and some lamb chops. This adds quite a bit to the final bill, unfortunately. Grace and the kids did not make a pot of rice so when I brought salmon home we had salmon, salad, and one of the giant Costco pumpkin pies.</p>
<p>After dinner and a half-assed cleanup job we took the kids down into the basement. They wanted to watch Ninjago, but I’m kind of sick of Ninjago, so I put on the second disc of our DVD set for the original <em>Star Trek</em> animated series. One or two of these episodes we had seen before. So I wound up going into my little office room in the basement and continued the ongoing project of cataloguing books. I started a new box with all the Elric books I’ve finished and a couple of recent Library of America arrivals.</p>
<p>I’m reusing a 12" by 12" by 12" book box. This is unfortunately the last empty one. If I’m going to have to continue to store most of my books while still slowly acquiring new books for much longer, I’m going to need to order more boxes. The plan for the last couple of years has been to get everything shelved, or at least large sections of the collection shelved, and do some purging as we un-box and shelve books. I suppose we could also try to purge while everything is still in boxes, but that sounds incredibly tedious: look through the online catalog, identify some books we’re willing to get rid of, take apart the stacked boxes to pull out the ones containing the books to purge, open up the boxes and take them out, leaving loose space in the boxes which I would presumably fill with newsprint or something like that, and then re-stack everything.</p>
<p>My Mac Pro seems to be running slower and slower and it’s been hot in the basement. The Delicious Library program just crawls, when you do things like add a shelf. I don’t know why it is so slow, but it makes me wish I hadn’t put my whole book inventory into this program. Maybe I should have stuck with a simple spreadsheet, or just flat text files. The integeration with Amazon is nice, though; I like the ability to look a book up that I have in my hand, in Amazon’s database, and then find it and add it to my library with one click. The bar code scanning functionality is nice, too, although it tends to fail sometimes, which I think is oten more an artifact of the uneven and inconsistent bar coding on products themselves, rather than the scanning code.</p>
<p>I have a suspicion that the boot drive is going, or is at least very bogged down. Maybe the CPUs are throttling? But I don’t remember that ever happening before, even when I had the machine running in my hot attic office in Saginaw. I have blown out dust pretty recently so it shouldn’t be a matter of clogged airflow. And the fans aren’t blasting.</p>
<p>I am really not sure why it is so hot in the basement. Last summer even when it was hot outside, the basement stayed cooler than the first floor. I think it may have something to do with the old dehumidifier we are running down there; it puts out a lot of heat, and the basement level may be so tightly insulated that the heat can’t escape. I need to make sure everything gets a fresh backup. I haven’t had the money to replace drives, but it’s overdue.</p>
<p>While I was waiting for Delicious Library to catch up, I looked up movies this weekend. I saw a special movie scheduled, with just two showings: <em>Dragon Ball Z: Broly - The Legendary Super Saiyan</em>. Knowing almost nothing about the whole Dragon Ball Z franchise, I thought maybe I would take the kids. I’m trying to get them interested in animation and film that is not all part of their current obsession, Lego Ninjago. This movie is apparently in limited release as part of the marketing campaign for a a forthcoming movie, <em>Dragon Ball Super: Broly</em>, which I also know next to nothing about.</p>
<p>After the kids finished four old animated <em>Star Trek</em> episodes, they were bored with it and we finished up and came back upstairs. We managed to get to bed at a fairly reasonable time. This morning we didn’t sleep all that late. Grace drove down to Milan to pick up some bread at the Mother Loaf bakery. It turns out if you get there before noon, they have a lot more bread! (That’s sarcasm… we’re just always running late to do everything). We got several loaves today, including a breakfast brioche which was fantastic. While she was getting bread, I hauled out the griddle and made pancakes. It is still really hard to get good results on our cast-iron griddle. Even letting it heat for five minutes, it’s too cold for the first batch, and then too hot for the second batch. So the pancakes were unevenly cooked, although not too uneven to eat.</p>
<p>I took the kids to the movie. I had not really intended to take Benjamin, but he was unhappy at the last minute and I wanted to avoid a meltdown, so he came with us. When we got into the theater, the trailer for the new Broly movie was playing, but there was no sound. Some of us in the audience spent a minute or two entertaining ourselves doing our own voiceover, karaoke, and foley. But the sound remained off, so I walked back down towards the lobby and told the ticket-taker about it. He called someone on his radio. After a few more minutes we had sound, but we had missed a few minutes, so we didn’t really know what was going on. And that situation sort of continued through the movie. Most of the movie consists of big, dramatic fight scenes, which I expected, but I was expecting a little more plot and story. Maybe Dragon Ball Z is the wrong franchise for people who want plot and story.</p>
<p>Anyway, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Z:_Broly_%E2%80%93_The_Legendary_Super_Saiyan">Wikipedia</a> has a plot summary that explains the part that didn’t have sound:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On his planet in the Otherworld, King Kai senses the destruction of the South Galaxy by an unknown Super Saiyan, telepathically contacting Goku upon realizing that the North Galaxy will be targeted next. At that moment, Goku and Chi-Chi are sitting down having an interview at a private school which they hope Gohan will attend, Goku abrupted uses Instant Transmission to reach King Kai’s planet and get the entire story.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Back on Earth, the Z-Fighters are having a picnic in an unknown peaceful area when a spaceship lands and an army of emerging humanoids greet Vegeta as their king. Their leader is a Saiyan, Paragus, who claims that he has created a New Planet Vegeta and wishes for Vegeta to accompany him in order to rule as the new king. Vegeta initially refuses, but agrees after Paragus tells him that a being known as the “Legendary Super Saiyan” is running rampant throughout the galaxy and must be destroyed before he comes to Earth. Skeptical of Paragus’ story, Gohan, Trunks, Krillin, Master Roshi and Oolong go along with Vegeta.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So. The drawing style is all over the map, constantly shifting, which is fun. There are a lot of explosions, and the way the characters fight and smash each other and the scenery seems quite reminiscent of <em>Akira</em>. None of us really enjoyed the film all that much. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that hearing the first few minutes wouldn’t really have helped. Joshua described it as “all abs and eyebrows.” The movie was mercifully short, and I was grateful for that. Sam and Joshua think it could have used more dialogue and more story. I guess this wasn’t a good introduction to the Dragon Ball Z franchise. Maybe I’ll poke around in the iTunes store and see if there’s something else.</p>
<p>After the movie Grace and I put my old aluminum-frame Marin mountain bike, which I used to use for commuting, in the back of my Element, and took it to a local bike shop. The bike has been in storage for about ten years. Sam is behind on learning to ride, so I asked them to remove the pedals, so he can use it as a balance bike, and then maybe after a while we can put the pedals back on. I am embarrassed to report that I actually didn’t know that Sam could not yet ride a bike. We have a bunch of bikes and I see the kids riding all the time; I just thought he was riding, too. This is what happens when we’ve been living in “crisis mode” to one degree or another for about five years; we’ve been putting off every expense, including keeping the kids in rideable bikes. For a year and a half, I was only living with my family half the time, and the kids weren’t even playing outside. And since we’ve moved, it feels like all I’ve done is worry about money and try to figure out what we are going to do with the old house.</p>
<p>He’s tall enough now to stand over the top tube, which was a little startling. So they will check out the inner tubes which may well have dry rot by now, brake pads, etc. The bike was decked out for commuting, with a water bottle cage, frame pump, lights, lock, and upright handlebars. So I stripped some of that stuff off of it. I guess I’m giving up hopes of ever riding it again.</p>
<p>I used to be so into bikes — reading bike magazines, taking road rides on weekends, trail riding occasionally. Somehow all that ended, for various reasons. One reason is that most of the bike makers that I really liked, such as Cannondale, stopped making bikes in America, and I’m still disgusted about that. Another is that starting about 2001 we moved to places that I didn’t find to be very bike-friendly. I never found long road rides around Saginaw like I used to have in Ann Arbor. While I used to love commuting from my old apartment on West Hoover in Ann Arbor, to the medical campus, when we moved out to Medford, there didn’t seem to be a good, safe route to my job on South Industrial. Then in Saginaw, I worked from home at first, and later had a 45-minute commute to Dow in Midland, which would not have worked by bike at all. And now I’m about 13 miles away from my job, at least as I-94 runs. That doesn’t seem all that far, but I really can’t imagine a safe bike route. That part of town is extremely hostile to cycling.</p>
<p>So maybe Sam can use it, now. But I really have to find a way to get some regular exercise. My regular walks in downtown Saginaw were doing a lot to put a floor under my physical health and prop up my tendency to fall into depressive spirals in times of great stress. And I am getting nearly no exercise at all, other than the occasional shopping trip.</p>
<p>Joshua has been asking to learn how to play electric bass. So I’m going to get him set up with my old bass downstairs and give him access to a lesson CD and book. We’ll see if he actually shows any inclination to work at it.</p>
<p>I invited someone I know only through Twitter, “<span class="citation" data-cites="verysmallanna">@verysmallanna</span>,” to join us for a podcast episode. She’s a pastry chef and, I think, a millennial, in New York City. She has a podcast with a couple other folks, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-572505758">the Bread Line Podcast</a>. It seems we have some common interests. So I’m excited to talk to her. She’s free to record on Tuesday or Wednesday night, so we’ll try that.</p>
<p>I’m not sure yet what we’re going to do for tomorrow’s show.</p>
<p>A few days ago, my father sent me a picture which was sent to him by a relative; it shows my family in Washington state. I’m wearing an R.E.M. concert t-shirt. Because of the t-shirt, and because of Google, and my memories of the show, I was able to place the exact date. I was seventeen years old. The show was at the Paramount theater in Seattle, July 12, 1985. I would have been 17, and this would have been the summer between my Senior year in high school and starting college in the fall. I don’t remember a lot of details about that trip, but I just happen to have kept a journal, which I still have. It’s short on dates and times and locations, but contained enough detail to remind me where we were, and when. I should transcribe it and find some extracts that I can add to the piles of writings that I’m trying to hammer into book-length manuscripts.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>Dragon Ball Z: Broly - The Legendary Super Saiyan</em> (1993 animated movie, 2018 Fathom events theatrical release)</li>
<li><em>The 36th Chamber of Shaolin</em> (1978 Hong Kong Martial Arts movie)</li>
<li><em>Hacker’s Delight</em> second edition by Henry S. Warren (used as a reference)</li>
<li><em>Iron Monkey</em> (1993 Hong Kong Martial Arts movie)</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson (finished)</li>
<li><em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> by Peter Brown (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em> (Gollancz, 2014) (omnibus volume containing 3 novels; the first, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, September 15th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-549311611543023429.post-67124702163040782062018-09-08T17:03:00.003-04:002018-09-09T21:16:11.876-04:00The Week Ending Saturday, September 8th, 2018<h2 id="sunday">Sunday</h2>
<p>I read “The Flaneur des Arcades de l’Opera,” the Elric story. This one is actually a “metatemporal detective” story, and it’s a big mess of overlapping tropes: seven or eight characters, alternate history, multiverse stuff, Moonbeam Roads, the Cosmic Balance, Edwardian-era settings and clothes, etc. The Elric character is an avatar of Elric in a different plane, with a sword-cane that is somehow an avatar of Stormbringer. It has some nice descriptive language and settings, but it really just seems like there is too much crammed into this thing — I suppose you’d call it a “novelette,” as it is a long-ish short story broken into chapters, but doesn’t seem long enough to be called a novella. Whatever you call it, I enjoyed some of the bits and pieces, but there was just too much flying by, too fast, to care about the characters and fear the threats they are fighting.</p>
<p>On Saturday night I was planning to read more of <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> to Grace but the kids were very slow to quiet down, so I couldn’t read out loud. Instead I started reading the last, giant volume of Gollancz Elric stories, <em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em>. The first novel is <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>, originally known as <em>The Dreamthief’s Daughter</em>.</p>
<p>I am a little suprised to say it, but I’m really enjoying this novel. The writing is tighter and rich with symbols, visions, and dreams, and feels like the work of a more mature and settled and confident writer. It’s an Elric story, but, eliptically. The Melnibonéan sorcerors, as part of their education, lie on dream couches and take drugs that allow them to experience dreams that, subjectively, last tens, hundreds, or thousands of years while only a day or two of time passes in Melniboné. In this novel the protagonist is an albino aristocrat, Ulric von Bek. This Ulric is the son of the protagonist of the earlier Moorcock novel, <em>The Warhound and the World’s Pain</em>. He seems to be an incarnation of Elric, or else maybe Ulric is dreaming that he is Elric, or maybe Elric is dreaming that he is Ulric.</p>
<p>The precise nature of their connection is a bit mysterious at this point. While in the metatemporal detective novelette I found that annoying, in this context, where the story elements are stripped back and everything feels less crowded and frenetic, I don’t mind it at all. I also think it is less frustrating because we are discovering von Bek’s overlapping identities along with him. This novel is deeply entangled with Moorcock’s Eternal Champion themes and characters that crop up in many different works under many different names. As I’ve only read his Elric stories, I really don’t know very much about all this, and apparently the rabbit hole goes quite deep. In some of Moorcock’s novels we have characters that are almost, but not quite, identical, as they seem to exist in separate but very similar planes. In the <a href="http://www.multiverse.org/index.php?title=Ulrich_von_Bek">Multiverse wiki</a>, we learn about Ulrich von Bek, whose first name is spelled slightly differently. The bold annotations are my additions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is something curious about Ulrich von Bek.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>The Dreamthief’s Daughter</em> <strong>(also known as <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>)</strong> is about <strong>Ulric</strong> von Bek, who was living in the 1930s and at odds with Nazism. He’s locked up in a concentration camp in 1935, but soon escapes and thereafter has heroic adventures alongside Elric, an Eternal Champion, and falls in love with the elfin Oona.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, <em>The Dragon in the Sword</em> is about <strong>Ulrich</strong> von Bek, who was living in the 1930s and at odds with Nazism. He’s locked up in a concentration camp at some unknown time, is freed in 1938, and then escapes into the Middle Marches in 1939 after he tries to kill Hitler and thereafter has heroic adventures alongside Erekosë, an Eternal Champion, and falls in love with the elfin Alissard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like I really need to solve all these puzzles to enjoy this novel. And because these novels form an intricate knot and overlap in time, I don’t think it’s really necessary to read them in any particular order. So far it’s really quite engaging, and a novel about the rise of fascism in Germany seems quite relevant these days.</p>
<p>I didn’t notice it initially, but the Gollancz omnibus edition has an unusual property. It’s apparently printed on paper that has a lot of ultraviolet-reactive dye in it, the same kind of stuff that is in some laundry detergents and which makes clothes look “whiter than white” — they emit more light than they (apparently take) in, because we can’t see the ultraviolet light they receive, but can see the visible light they give off. The effect is that, when reading it under our LED room lights, the paper gives off a faint purple glow. It is visible mainly where the paper curves into the binding, and so there’s a shadow there — a shadow where a faint purple glow is visible. I managed to take a picture of the effect, although it doesn’t look as bright to the camera as it does to the naked eye. I have to believe that this was a deliberate design choice, for a book with a title that mentions moonbeams!</p>
<p>We were slow and sluggish to get going on Sunday morning. I eventually made pancakes and bacon. There was a Huron Valley DSA picnic at Prospect Park in downtown Ypsilanti. We took the family. We didn’t bring any food, but as we expected, there was more than enough food, and at the end of the picnic folks were trying to figure out what to do with it all, so we didn’t feel too guilty for mooching. The kids played in the park. It was breezy, which make the hot day feel much more bearable, but it was making life difficult for the folks who were trying to grill burgers. We don’t really know the DSA folks all that well yet, and even among socialists I’m just not very good at socializing. But we spoke to a few folks, and the kids had fun. Joshua tells us he made four different friends. I was wearing a t-shirt that said “C.O.W.” (for College of Wooster). One guy there recognized the shirt and it turns out he was a college of Wooster alumnus, class of 2009 (graduating twenty years after I did!)</p>
<p>I forget his name, but I should see if I can get in touch with him; maybe he’d like to join us on the podcast, to talk about millennial economic issues?</p>
<p>Before we left for the picnic, Grace put a loaf of customized banana bread into the oven to bake. We were trying to use up a number of very bruised bananas that no one was going to want to eat. The “customization” was the addition of the leftover taco meat substitute we made for last Saturday, which was made from ground walnuts and contained some of our cayenne chili peppers.</p>
<p>The result was banana bread that left my mouth burning slightly.</p>
<p>The combination wasn’t really bad, but just a little disconcerting. The kids ate it all, but no one was really excited by the flavor combination. When trying to think about how we might improve it, all we could come up with was “take out the chili peppers and just use the walnuts.” That would yield a pretty standard banana bread with walnuts. In other words, we couldn’t really think of a way to improve on a basic banana bread with walnuts. Maybe add small chocolate chips? I don’t know.</p>
<p>We’ve had some heavy rain in short bursts over the last few days, and I’m grateful for that. I think we’re still way behind on rain, because the storms haven’t lasted very long. And it is showing us that our gutters are all screwed up.</p>
<p>I didn’t have a good plan for the podcast — or, rather, I had two many articles and things to talk about, but no ideas that were well-organized. I considered writing an essay about McCain, but didn’t get it done. Fortunately our friend Elias Crim was available, so Elias joined us via Google Hangouts last night. It wasn’t a very long conversation. It was under 90 minutes. So I was on track to getting the show completed fairly early in the evening. But I ran into a little problem. The hard drive that holds all the Logic projects was full.</p>
<p>I had not even noticed that it was getting full. So I had to transfer a number of projects to another hard drive. That took a long time. I moved most of the podcast projects from the last year. That came to about 100 gigabytes of data. That freed up enough room to work with or now. For the last few years I’ve been planning to buy some new, larger hard drives, but while the house is still our financial responsibility, it hasn’t been a high enough priority, so I’ve been getting by with older, smaller drives.</p>
<p>I can get bigger drives, but if I am going to continue to create 100 gigabytes or more of raw recordings a year, that’s going to add up. Drives are cheap these days, but everything I consider worth keeping, I have to consider worth backing up, and that requires at least two backup drives for each working drive. I should give some serious thought to a formal retention policy. I should probably just go ahead and delete all the raw files from the podcast projects, and keep the finished WAVE files that I use to create the MP3 files. I don’t think I’m ever actually going to need or want to remix or re-edit the podcast episodes. I don’t think my kids are going to want to open old Logic projects (and it probably won’t even be possible without a lot of software archaeology). But I still have a hard time deleting old work.</p>
<p>Dinner was a pot roast recipe, modified. The original recipe called for instant onion soup mix and a can of pre-made cream of mushroom soup. Several of us aren’t eating dairy. Grace put the recipe together with dried mushrooms and coconut milk and other things we had on hand. It was pretty tasty, although the coconut milk “broke” and curdled a bit.</p>
<p>After finishing the show about 1:30 a.m., I did some kitchen cleanup and got to bed quite late, not until about 2:30 a.m. I read a little more of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> while Grace got ready for bed. I’ve finished the first four chapters. Still, I do want to get back to <em>The Conquest of Bread</em>. I’d like to be able to talk about Kropotkin a bit on an upcoming podcast episode.</p>
<h2 id="monday">Monday</h2>
<p>We haven’t been getting good news about offers on the old house. Our realtor tells us that one guy who viewed the house said he would consider offering us $20,000. And she had showings yesterday, but from these showings we only got one offer, for $60,000. I have to look at the offers; I think this might have been another offer submitted by the folks that previously wrote an offer for $70,000. All this is not encouraging. As I mentioned on the podcast, “we’re in deep trouble.”</p>
<p>This morning (well, it was closer to noon) I made a pile of paleo pancakes with the paleo pancake mix. I used up the rest of our blueberries. We’ve been trying to use them up, because some of them have been in the refrigerator too long.</p>
<p>It’s about 2:20 p.m. and we had another brief downpour. We were planning to grill this afternoon. I have buns, and I was going to grill some salmon burgers and some black bean burgers. But I’m not sure the weather is going to cooperate. And really, I feel like I could use a nap. But first, Joshua wants to check his e-mail.</p>
<h2 id="tuesday">Tuesday</h2>
<p>It rained on and off repeatedly for much of the day yesterday and so we did not grill out on the deck. The day had a feeling of disappointment, frustration, and helplessness about it. I felt like I spent half the day cleaning up the kitchen. The situation with our old house is weighing on me, every minute. Our financial situation is weighing on me, every minute, and leaving me constantly nervous. One thing went better this long weekend, though: I did not feel constant heartburn. So that was an improvement.</p>
<p>For dinner I toasted buns and baked black bean burgers. These burgers tend to be dry and so need a lot of toppings, like guacamole. I ate mine with sauerkraut and mustard. There was nothing wrong with them but after imagining all weekend that we would cook them on the grill, what we actually made was bound to seem a little bit disappointing. We ate them with more of our favorite kale salad from Costco. We made a dozen burgers, but we only ate eight of them. So I packed up two bare black bean burgers on buns and put them in a glass storage container alsong with two unopened packets of guacamole to bring for my lunch today. The lid would not fit on the container, so I wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it on the top shelf of the refrigerator, hoping I would remember to bring it.</p>
<p>Elanor was a bit off, yesterday, and so we’re watching her closely. She did not feel feverish, but just slightly clammy. I can’t think of a better way to describe her but “spaced out.” She would lie down for a nap, but not really sleep, just sort of stare into space. She sat in her chair and drank from a bottle of water and ate some black bean burger and guacamole, but she did it sort of robotically, without whacking the table to demand more and her usual yelling and waving her arms to communicate. She was wetting diapers and seemed like she was plenty hydrated, so we were not really <strong>that</strong> worries, but it wasn’t like her.</p>
<p>Later in the evening, she went off to sleep and seemed to be sleeping normally. This morning before I left for work she seemed a bit more like her old self, and smiled at me. Grace will keep a close eye on her today. We are hoping that maybe she was just fighting a virus, or maybe is having an immune response to the vaccines she received a week ago. I feel perhaps just a touch feverish today and so maybe I’m fighting the same virus. That might help explain why I was feeling pretty listless myself yesterday.</p>
<p>Before bed, I read Joshua and Sam a few more chapters from <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em>.</p>
<p>While Grace got ready for bed last night I read more of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>, finishing the first part of the novel. Things have started to go magical, and I’m pleased to say that the transition happens smoothly, and pretty convincingly. Moorcock still has lots of pages in which to screw up this book, but it remains really enjoyable. Our protagonist has gone down into an underground realm, which borrows a bit from the hollow-earth world of Burroughs’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellucidar">Pellucidar</a> stories, a bit from the giant underground sea imagined by Jules Verne in <em>Journey to the Center of the Earth</em>, and a bit from stories about the lost continent and civilization of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(lost_continent)">Mu</a>. Moorcock puts his own spin on these underground world concepts, and I really like what he’s done with the place.</p>
<p>This led to me thinking a bit about the nature of inspiration and “early” work versus “late” work. I’ve come to think of the early Elric stories, written by a very young Moorcock, as genuinely inspired, ecstatic work, written under the influence of the genre and the language. That’s one way to write great work: in a blast of youthful energy and inspiration. But it’s not the only way to write great work. One can also revise a great work into existence, outlining it and drafting it and diligently working it and re-working it until it is also glistens. It might not have as much of the raw exuberance as the first kind of work, but it can be as satisfying, or even more satisfying.</p>
<p>What doesn’t seem to work well is trying to write in the hot blast of inspiration when the inspiration has left. I believe Moorcock’s mid-career — and it seems like he had a mid-career spanning decades — fall into this hole. He wrote them quickly for money, but the inspiration and drive that used to let him write so quickly peter out as a writer’s internal editor grows in knowledge and prowess. And stretching out the short works into long works didn’t really do them any favors, because they didn’t really have enough structure and polish to be successful long works.</p>
<p>I think the real tragedy of Philip K. Dick is that he never really developed a later style. For whatever reason, and his biographers supply lots of them, from drugs to mental illness to physical illness, Dick continued to work as he did when he was very young, writing in binges, even as his ideas demanded more serious and sustained treatment. And so some of his greatest works like <em>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</em> are hot messes of brilliant insight and world-building combined with poor editing and riddled with internal inconsistencies. In the case of <em>Androids</em> this mostly adds to the hallucinatory quality of the novel, but I have no doubts that <em>Androids</em> could have been revised into razor-sharpness if Dick had approached the writing process with more diligence.</p>
<p><em>Daughter of Dreams</em> is a work of Moorcock’s “late style.” Moorcock deliberately and consciously attempted to bring his whole <em>ouvre</em> into a single intricate pattern. In the introduction to the Gollancz volumes Moorcock writes that he has created:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…a new Elric/Eternal Champion sequence, beginning with <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>, which brought the fantasy worlds of Hawkmoon, Bastable and Co. in line with my realistic and autobiographical stories, another attempt to unify all my fiction, and also offer a way in which disparate genres could be reunited, through notions developed from the multiverse and the Eternal Champion, as one giant novel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think it’s debatable whether this was a worthwhile program, or a self-indulgent and gratuitious project. Were readers <strong>asking</strong> for all their favorite Moorcock works to be tied up like this? But it seems like along the way, the attempt produced a “late style” and what seems so far to be a pretty successful and visionary work of fantasy for grown-ups.</p>
<p>Edward Rothstein wrote, in his review of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16rothstein.html">Edward Said’s</a> book <em>On Late Style</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What artist does not yearn, some day, to possess a “late style”? A late style would reflect a life of learning, the wisdom that comes from experience, the sadness that comes from wisdom and a mastery of craft that has nothing left to prove. It might recapitulate a life’s themes, reflect on questions answered and allude to others beyond understanding.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>But even if that kind of culminating style is not granted to an artist, observers want to discern it. We want to be reassured that there really is something progressive about human understanding.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ll be fifty-one years old this month, and so I freely admit that when I’m seeking, and finding, in Michael Moorcock’s work a narrative of his development as a writer, I’m also seeking evidence of my own, and hope that I will be able to do some <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanonWelding">Canon Welding</a> on my own, much more limited, pile of old writing, in the genres of criticism, personal essays, and autobiography, and make of this pile something resembling a coherent narrative of <strong>my</strong> development as a writer. And, maybe, get some traction on the next project, whatever it is, because I am starting to feel the limits of both time and inspiration. Keeping in mind that the goal has to be to keep having goals. As <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gy2JJBoUbM">They Might Be Giants</a> put it:</p>
<pre><code>No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.</code></pre>
<p>When I left this morning, I almost forgot my black bean burgers. I was partway down the driveway to Crane Road. Driving in reverse back to our house is difficult, but I did it. I went to get my wrapped-up lunch, and was infuriated to discover that one of my burgers was gone. No one would confess to eating it, but I confess that I got angry at them. Finally Veronica told me that late last night (I think it must have been late last night), our housemate asked her if she could eat one of the burgers, and Veronica told her that she could. Of course it’s not our housemate’s fault, if she asked and got permission. But I’m angry at Veronica, because I packed them for myself, and she didn’t check with anyone else before giving one away!</p>
<p>And of course all this happened while I was already running late. Because even though Grace and I got to bed fairly early, we slept like logs, and didn’t wake up until quite late.</p>
<p>There was another burger that I had put in a plastic bag, but it was one that I deliberately did not pack for myself, because it was liberally sprinkled with vegan “cheese.” I like a lot of vegetarian foods a lot, including tofu, and some dairy substitutes like cashew milk ice cream; they’re great. But vegan “cheese” is an abomination. It has the texture and taste of the plasatic insulation that I strip from wires when I’m building an electronic project. If I went vegan again, I’d just live without cheese rather than eat that fake stuff.</p>
<p>Anyway. I had a few goals for yesterday, and they didn’t seem like they would be that hard to achieve. I needed to move some money between a savings account and a checking account, to get ready to write a check to the guys who did the plaster and paint work on the old house. I did that. I was supposed to sort through my clean laundry and get things folded and put away. I failed to do that. And I was supposed to ask Grace to trim my beard, since it’s time. I failed to do that, too. I did manage to give Benjamin a bath and wash his hair. I want credit for that — washing our four-year-old’s hair is not so easy. Last night as he sat on the toilet, Benjamin started singing, and completely cracked us up. He was singing “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus, the chorus that goes “I came in like a wrecking ball…”</p>
<p>I discovered this weekend that the kids have apparently broken the garage door opener. It looks like they were whacking at it with a broom handle or something. There’s a torn wire dangling. It still runs, but won’t stop running when the door has gone all the way up or down. And because the garage is full of boxes, I can’t get a ladder in there to climb up and examine it.</p>
<p>“I came in like a wrecking ball” is now stuck in my head. Benjamin will turn five in a few weeks.</p>
<p>Something is wrong with our water softener; it is just not maintaining itself. When I hold down the button telling it to do an extra regeneration, it seems to start, but it won’t actually do the cycle. The salt storage container has plenty of salt in it, but it doesn’t seem like it is pushing water through the container; it still has as much undissolved salt in it as it did a couple of weeks ago when we had the service technician come out and get it working. Sometimes when I examine it the display, several indicators are blinking, including the “service” indicator. Sometimes, none of them are blinking. The water is yellow-green, not the worst it’s been, but not what it should be. We need to get the service technician out to our home again. He told us that the last service call was, I think, “good for thirty days,” which ought to mean that he will come again for free. But I’m not happy to contemplate what he will tell us. If the system needs an expensive repair or some part replaced, we just can’t afford that, but yet I also don’t want to ruin our clothes and our water heater.</p>
<h2 id="wednesday">Wednesday</h2>
<p>Grace mailed a check for $1,000.00 to the paint and plaster guys yesterday. We are still chewing over the question of what to do next, re: that old house.</p>
<p>Last night I got home quite late. Grace was putting the finishing touches on a birthday cake for one of our housemate’s children and dinner was on the table. The food per the birthday child’s request was pasta. The cake was a layer cake with strawberry filling and pink icing. I ate an embarrassing quantity of cake.</p>
<p>Elanor was still not feeling her best but again nothing seemed seriously wrong. She stuffed herself at dinner as usual and didn’t seem as spaced-out as she was at dinner on Monday.</p>
<p>Then, cleanup. I got a round of dishes going, but there was more cleanup than I could finish. And I was distracted from working on dishes. Elanor was wearing so much of her dinner that Veronica stuck her in the tub to clean her up, and she promptly pooped in the tub. I dealt with that, and it turned out to be a big pain. The bathtub drain, running very slowly to begin with, became completely clogged. So I had to sit in the bathroom and run several rounds of drain cleaner down the drain, waiting for the chemicals to do their work. That took quite some time. It eventually worked, though, and the drain started moving reasonably well again, although it isn’t completely clear like the bathroom sink drain. I will try using our enzyme cleaner for a few days, although I’m not sure it really does very much.</p>
<p>The tub drain is hard to do anything with, because it has a built-in stopper that just lifts up a bit leaving a small gap around it. It isn’t removable. I can’t even fit one of those thin plastic snakes down the drain to pull out hair. We’ve tried those mesh strainers that go over the drain to catch hair, but they don’t fit well over the built-in stopper. At some point I want to have the built-in stopper mechanism replaced with a more standard drain that I can clean out.</p>
<p>While Grace got ready for bed I read a few more chapters of <em>Daughter of Dreams</em>. The story is continuing to move along and I don’t really have anything to add to my comments from yesterday.</p>
<p>We gave Elanor some gripe water and some infant Tylenol and she seemed to sleep well, better than Monday night.</p>
<p>This morning Grace is going to get in touch with our realtor and see if we can counter the $60,000 offer at $70,000; we might be able to borrow enough to close at $70,000. I think that’s about all we can do, though. We are nearly out of ideas and feeling quite despondent and stressed about the whole mess. I’m running numbers to see if there is any way we can afford to have the furnaces replaced, and wondering whether that might actually gain us anything in the long run. If we can get Liberty Mutual to actually cough up our remaining reimburstment that would help, although we would still need to come up with over $4,500.</p>
<h3 id="reviewing-a-review">Reviewing a Review</h3>
<p>Yesterday I listened to “Star Wars: The Last Plinkett Review,” a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f83D18xL7VE">YouTube video</a> by RedLetterMedia. I’m a fan of the <a href="http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/">“Mr. Plinkett” reviews</a>, although not an uncritical one; the jokes about rape and murder of sex workers really never were very funny, but they also have held up very poorly over time, as the culture has left that kind of joke further behind. But wrapped up in all that is a pretty damning critique of Lucas and the prequel films, which are indeed awful train wrecks.</p>
<p>This brand-new review of <em>Star Wars: The Last Jedi</em>, which at this point is quite belated since the movie came out nine months ago, really doesn’t show the same degree of insight as the original prequel reviews. “Mr. Plinkett” has some good criticisms; the movie is in fact too long, and the Canto Bight scenes drag. The four-plot structure is a little bit too busy. These are valid criticisms, although I also think he’s over-emphasizing simplicity. In his first prequel review, he says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When you’re in a weird movie with like aliens, and monsters, and weirdos, the audience really needs someone who’s like a normal person like them to guide them through the story. Now this of course doesn’t apply to EVERY movie, but it works best in the sci-fi, superhero, action, and fantasy genres.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And later:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now I need to explain that I don’t think that all movies should be the same, or conform to the same kind of structure, but it works well in certain kinda movies. So unless you’re the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Lars Von Trier, David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Sam Peckinpah, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, or Jim Jarmusch, you really shouldn’t stray away too far from this kind of formula.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this is smart and true, to an extent. When <em>The Phantom Menace</em> came out, there hadn’t been a new <em>Star Wars</em> movie released for <strong>sixteen years</strong>. The movie really <strong>did</strong> need to re-introduce <em>Star Wars</em> to a new generation of fans, while still appealing, if possible, to old fans (and, as “Mr. Plinkett” demonstrates, it did a terrible job at that). But in his current review, he seems to be asking us to hold the <strong>eighth</strong> movie in the franchise, and the <strong>middle episode</strong> of a 3-movie series, to that exact same standard; he’s constantly carping on how it doesn’t follow the template of a basic-but-serviceable genre film. I don’t really think it was <strong>necessary</strong> for <em>The Last Jedi</em> to do that, though; I think “Mr. Plinkett” underestimates, and condescends to, the film’s audience.</p>
<p>I know getting into the comments section on YouTube is like jumping into a mosh pit of angry teenagers with body odor and fleas, but I did it anyway.</p>
<p>In response to “Chris Scorpio,” who wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How can ANYONE watch this hour long breakdown, and STILL think The Last Jedi is a good movie???</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I replied with the following (slightly edited):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because, back when it came out, I watched it several times, and thought hard about it. I do admire the film, although this review has given me some food for thought about pacing and asked me to re-think the story and its weaknesses in <em>The Last Jedi</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m considerably older than the gentleman that produced this video and I’ve been thinking and writing about the <em>Star Wars</em> movies for a long time. I love the old films, but I’m not dumb enough to believe they are perfect. And I’m not dumb enough to believe they are free from politics, or plot holes, or humor.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>From my perspective, “Mr. Plinkett” takes <em>Star Wars</em> way too seriously. Worse, he apparently thinks Star Wars takes itself very seriously. It doesn’t. <em>Star Wars</em> has always contained a lot of comic elements. Watch for the actual gags in Episode IV. The movie is constantly injecting little jokes.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>He apparently thinks the movies were consistent about what the force is. They haven’t been. In fact, in his old reviews, he brutally mocks the scene in <em>The Phantom Menace</em> where we learn that a person’s ability to use the force is due to midichlorians in their blood. Then, in this review, he mocks this movie for contradicting that idea, because I guess that’s canon now, and he thinks sticking to the established canon, even the stuff introduced in the prequels, which he righfully dislikes, is more important than telling a good story. I don’t respect that perspective.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Star Wars</em> has always played fast and loose with facts and at best can only be called science fantasy, not science fiction, because the world-building doesn’t really bear any scrutiny. And that’s been OK for several generations of fans now.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Star Wars</em> has always contained a lot of hand-waving and plot holes. It features a ship that “made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.” That was a gaffe, an error in the original script, where Lucas didn’t bother to correct it to make sense of the word “parsec.” Even ten-year-old me watching it for the first time knew it was a dumb gaffe. But now it’s canon. (I haven’t seen <em>Solo</em>, but I hear they actually tried to make sense of this, rather than just letting it fade).</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The original movies were always about implausibly close shaves. Hell, the <strong>ending</strong> of the first movie is all about an impossibly accurate shot delivered at the last possible second. “Mr. Plinkett” goes on and on about how Rose and Finn skid their stolen spaceship into the rebel base just as the door is closing. Did he ever criticize the scene in the very first <em>Star Wars</em> movie where Luke and Leia swing on a cable across a bottomless shaft in the Death Star, just as stormtroopers are about to force open a door and reach them? The timing of that scene is <strong>awfully</strong> convenient, don’t you think?</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>But no, he mocks the implausibly close shaves in this movie, not the old ones. Like many <em>Star Wars</em> fans he can’t <strong>see</strong> the lovable flaws in the old movies. He can’t see them because he puts the first three movies on a pedestal, because he imprinted on them at an age before his critical faculties were fully formed. I’m not asking him to disdain the old movies, but I <strong>am</strong> asking him to apply his critical insight consistently. No one could tell <strong>him</strong>, apparently, that <em>Star Wars</em> has always had flaws that don’t hold up under excess scrutiny. But yet now, he seems to be adamant about telling a new generation that if they enjoyed <em>The Last Jedi</em>, they’re wrong, because he thinks he has nothing more to learn about film.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Star Wars has always contained a lot of politics. The originals were an allegory about Nazis and resistance fighters and featured a line of heroes that literally inherit their special abilities. Those ideas were old then, and they were political. That’s OK. But why is it not OK to subvert those stale tropes now? Because most Star Wars fans are <strong>reactionary</strong>. This movie presses their buttons rather than comfortably patting and stroking their feelings and their world view with its nationalism, American exceptionalism, white supremacy, male domination, and unexamined views about race and inheritance.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>So, he’s given me some good points to think about regarding the length of the film, and plot holes. But you know what? I’ve thought all those thoughts already. I thought most of them while I was in the theater. And I grimaced for a moment and shrugged them off and continued to enjoy the film simply because there is a lot in it to enjoy. I even went back to see it again, to absorb more details that I missed the first time, and I enjoyed it even more the second time. I didn’t conclude that this movie was so terrible that I should boycott Star Wars films forever.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Because deep down I’m not a reactionary crank.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I still respect “Mr. Plinkett’s” reviews of the prequels, though. The prequels are awful and deserve every bit of scorn he heaps upon them.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>And honestly it’s pretty funny how this review is basically a soft remake of his famous prequel reviews, only this one isn’t as funny, insightful, or convincing. Let it never be said that “Mr. Plinkett” doesn’t know how to use irony.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But honestly this comment by “btron3k” sums it up better than I did:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Plinkett has jumped the shark. Just another clichëd review jumping on the “<em>Last Jedi</em> is terrible” bandwagon. Plinkett was better when he actually deconstructed the films in a thoughtful way and the side jokes were a natural part of the review. Now it’s repeating the formula and just looking for negatives to make the review stand out from the million other negative Internet reviews.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And put even more simply, “The Chosen Chub” replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s fundamentally a great movie despite its flaws. I enjoyed it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think it’s too early to claim that <em>The Last Jedi</em> is “fundamentally a great movie.” I think it has a lot going for it, though, and it deserves thoughtful consideration. “Mr. Plinkett” doesn’t agree, though; while, in the introduction, he says “it both succeeds and fails for me at the same time,” by the end of the review he is emphasizing only the failures, and jokingly (or not so jokingly) calling for a boycott of the next one.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWqVJZMh6-w">This video</a> is much more interesting and convincing, illustrating <strong>why</strong> the script of <em>The Last Jedi</em> takes such great pains to overturn expectations, while “Mr. Plinkett” doesn’t really <strong>explain</strong> the director’s iconoclastic approach, instead referring to Rian Johnson’s attempt to make a great movie that subverts expectations as “trolling,” and asking “why troll the situation at all?” As if iconoclasm wasn’t a time-tested and proven strategy for making memorable movies. And he accuses the director of actual hostility and disdain for the audience, while at the same time speaking condescendingly of that same audience. He claims that Johnson</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…didn’t want to give the audience what it wanted, what it craved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Apparently they wanted Brawndo, with electrolytes!)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And what it craved was the familiar, the heroic… the adventure. He was kind of like a schoolteacher that was rewarding us with “movie day.” But instead of showing us something fun, he showed us something fun, but educational, too. That’s not fun!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m still scratching my head wondering just what he thought <em>The Last Jedi</em> was trying to educate us about. Of course what he really means it that he thinks it was trying to <strong>indoctrinate</strong> us with a world view. And that’s true. But it’s <strong>also</strong> true of all the old <em>Star Wars</em> movies. It’s just that the world view is the world view of a newer generation and not the prematurely aged unwilling to consider that there rigid world views might run better with software updates.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The audience wanted wanted Luke to come out of hiding, show that he was a true Jedi badass and help Rey stop Snoke and Ren.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imma stop him right there and say that clearly, yes, a lot of “the audience” wanted that. But I didn’t. Why? Because <strong>it was too late for that</strong>. That would have worked great in a movie made in 1985, <strong>thirty-three years ago</strong>, a movie released a couple of years after <em>Return of the Jedi</em>, a movie picked up the story a few years after the events that movie, a movie about the resurgence of the Empire and the re-awakening of the resistance. But that movie never happened. Instead we jumped reality tracks and we’re on the bad timeline, where the bears are named Berenstain and we got Jar-Jar Binks. Then we got a “soft remake,” <em>The Force Awakens</em>, because it was <strong>necessary</strong> to pretty much re-introduce <em>Star Wars</em> after such a long hiatus, and we got the First Order, just because.</p>
<p><strong>Thirty-five years</strong> after the <em>Return of the Jedi</em>, it was too late to the sequel. That broken timeline can’t simply be duct-taped back together and decades edited out to let Luke come back as that “true Jedi badass.” In-universe, we’d need some <strong>really</strong> good explanation for why Luke wasn’t <strong>broken and changed</strong>, but just chose to hide out for all those years on Temple Island while the First Order rose to power. I suppose they could have had him frozen in carbonite, but other than that, it wouldn’t make <strong>sense</strong> for Luke to be actually tanned, rested, and ready to return; did he just have really bad Internet access, so couldn’t get any news? And of course in in our bad-timeline universe, real-life Mark Hamill is 66 now. Would he really make a convincing Jedi badass? Harrison Ford, now 76 years old, already got his wish and Solo died in a terrific scene in <em>The Force Awakens</em>. And Carrie Fisher — well, I still can’t really talk about it, okay? She was sixty, but seemed older; a healthy lifestyle, she had not, as Yoda would say.</p>
<p>“Mr. Plinkett” also asks “why not take the audience in an entirely new direction?” He mocks the idea that the <em>Star Wars</em> universe is “played out.” And I agree, there’s lots to do in the <em>Star Wars</em> universe, as in any fictional universe. But I don’t think he’s actually asked thoughtful question, in good faith. Is he seriously proposing that the long-awaited <strong>eighth</strong> film of a series beloved by generations of fans should just bail out completely on the characters and situations set up by the previous seven? And he knows very well that <em>Star Wars</em> is never going to end; press releases have already announced that there will be another trilogy, and it won’t feature the Skywalker family, or any of the well-known locations. What we’re watching when we watch <em>The Last Jedi</em> is the middle episode in a trilogy that has been constructed to wind up an arc, and pass the torch; basically, to do what Lucas himself utterly failed to do when he chose to focus the prequel trilogy on the story arc of an an iconic but lightweight character from the original trilogy.</p>
<p>“Mr. Plinkett” says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our black-and-white, good-versus-evil space saga is now a muddled ambiguous gray.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes — because this <em>Star Wars</em> was made to appeal to grown-ups, who are ready to ponder ambiguous and serious messages.</p>
<p>I wrote a <a href="https://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2016/01/star-wars-force-awakens.html">long review</a> of <em>The Force Awakens</em> on my old blog a couple of years ago. But I still have not published a detailed review of <em>The Last Jedi</em>, because I didn’t feel the need to, but in my <a href="https://thebooksthatwroteme.blogspot.com/2018/01/read-it-watched-it-and-heard-it-2017.html">2017 wrap-up</a> I wrote the following (slightly edited):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After <em>The Force Awakens</em>, it was not entirely clear to me what direction Episode VIII would take. Would it just remake <em>The Empire Strikes Back</em>, or would it do something bolder? It would have been a safe choice to follow the story arc of <em>Empire</em> closely, and a lot of fans probably would have enjoyed that, but to really open up the possibilities for future films, it needed to do something bolder. It actually really impressed me and won me over emotionally in scene after scene. In fact I’d say it isn’t just “good for a Star Wars movie,” but actually a good movie even considered outside of the narrowed criteria of <em>Star Wars</em>, or even science fiction, fandom.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I can see how people who were very attached to the structure of the original trilogy found themselves offended. There are indeed some updated politics at play. But I wouldn’t really call them radical. Basically, this film introduces 1990s-era “social justice” ideas into the script, including feminism, disdain for toxic masculinity, and tropes about success through collective action and mutual aid rather than extremely high-risk, unlikely individual heroics.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>People offended by the idea that <em>Star Wars</em> movies would have a political agenda forget that the originals had political agendas, not from the 1990s but from a hundred years earlier. Those agendas included toxic militarism, and the idea that a person’s importance in the galaxy depends primarily on who that person’s parents are.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>For every angry reaction, it seems to me like people have forgotten what is in the original film. People are angry about the “jokes” in the movie. They forget that some of the most iconic scenes in the original 1977 film involve sight gags and bad jokes. People are angry about how Finn does not behave heroically. They forget that Han Solo had a similar moment, in which he planned to take his reward and get the hell out of danger. Reading complaint after complaint about the new movie, it really seems like people forgot what <em>Star Wars</em> <strong>is</strong>. Folks are complaining that “the force doesn’t work that way,” and I hear them saying “but… but… the <strong>gleep glop</strong> magic fantasy world doesn’t have <strong>glop gleep</strong> magic! That’s not canon!”</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>This is a little different than the disastrous retconning that George Lucas did in the prequel trilogy. He said that instead of <strong>gleep glop</strong> magic, your ability to feel and manipulate the Force comes from <strong>the midichlorians in your blood</strong>, which deflates the fantasy aspects of the movies entirely; who wants The Force to have an entirely materialist explanation? It’s like saying that achieving sainthood just requires enough vitamins.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The amazing battle sequence at the end of the movie takes place on a white plain of salt crystals with red underneath. This is a call-back to the battle scenes on Hoth in <em>Empire</em>, but with a twist; the white surface has become a blank page. When one of the ship’s skis, or even a person’s foot, touches the salt surface, it turns blood red. (This is not really a spoiler; it’s in the trailer). In this sequence the sacrifices of all those who died fighting the Empire (and the First Order) are inscribed on the landscape in what looks like their blood. It’s moving, and jaw-dropping.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I get that arguing about all this is not actually going to “fix” the movie, for anyone who went to see it and found themselves thrown out of the story by the iconoclasm of the new one. For those people I can only suggest giving it a second chance. Each time the director broke with the storytelling tradition established over the previous seven <em>Star Wars</em> movies, I felt myself puzzled at first, but then I came to feel that at each of these points, he had successfully used the breaking of the convention to tell a bigger, more open, more universal, and yes, more inclusive, story, and it worked for me.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I first saw <em>Star Wars</em> before it was called Episode IV, in the initial 1977 release — actually, in a sneak preview showing before the film officially opened. It was probably on May 24, 1977. That summer, I was nine years old; young enough to be completely wowed by the movie, but old enough to bring some critical judgement to the movie as well, especially to my repeat viewings. I saw it again at least a half-dozen times over the next year. The movie moved me, pushed back the boundaries of my imagination, shaped me, and gave me, and has continued to give me, a lot to enjoy, chew on, think about, and re-think over the years.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Those years, though. They’ve gone by. It’s been <strong>forty years</strong>. You can’t keep telling the same story in the same way. I think this new movie really does a fantastic job of breaking out of the limitations of the original film, bringing <em>Star Wars</em> to another generation in a way that allows it not to be constrained by the limitations of the aging cast or the original story. Anything can happen, now. And <em>Star Wars</em> is made great again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, “Mr. Plinkett’s” own review contradicts itself, revealing his lack of good faith.</p>
<p>He talks early on in the review about how many people were concerned, after <em>The Force Awakens</em> which was a “soft remake” of the first <em>Star Wars</em> movie (although he insists on calling it a “soft reboot”), that <em>The Last Jedi</em> would be a remake of <em>Empire</em>. It isn’t really a remake of <em>Empire</em> — not really — although of course there are <strong>some</strong> parallels.</p>
<p>He makes this point when he points out the huge differences in plot structure. But then, towards the end of the review, although he has not been focused on the parallels to <em>Empire</em> for most of the review, he comes back to further criticize the movie by contrasting scenes <em>The Last Jedi</em> with scenes in <em>Empire</em>, pointing out how scenes that he now claims are <strong>parallel</strong> have different moods.</p>
<p>Which is it? Is <em>The Last Jedi</em> a remake of <em>Empire</em>, or a different movie that isn’t directly comparable? “Mr. Plinkett” seems to want to have it both ways, and criticizes <em>The Last Jedi</em> both because it is, and because it isn’t, a remake of <em>Empire</em>. That really reduces his credibility, and makes him seem like he’s reaching for any reasons to criticize the movie, even reasons that contradict each other.</p>
<p>At many points in the review he finds things to like about the movie, and tells us so. He says the script “has its moments.” He says “you really can’t fault how great this movie looks.” He says “Another thing people take issue with is the ‘low-speed chase’. You know, I’m OK with this. In a weird way it kind of reminds me of <em>Star Trek</em>… it was different, to say something positive.” He says “I’m not here to take a huge dump on this movie.” He says “you got me movie, I’m interested now.” But then in the last few seconds of his review, he claims that the movie “fails spectacularly on every level.”</p>
<p>There’s a reason for the disconnect. While “Mr. Plinkett” spends much of the movie talking about technical problems he finds in the script and story, poor blocking, and supposedly contradictory statements by characters (which are mostly not really contradictory, but reflect different circumstances in different moments), and hating on the jokes, he’s <strong>left out</strong> the arguments that justify his claim that the movie “fails spectacularly on every level.” He’s left them out, because to include them he’d have to say the things that he’s not comfortable saying out loud, but really only wants to hint at.</p>
<p>He didn’t make this particular review to convince an unbiased person; the actual case he builds against the movie isn’t all that convincing, and demonstrates a “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude. Watching it, I don’t believe he <strong>really</strong> despised the movie; he had a mixed reaction to it. A mixed reaction doesn’t justify saying the movie “fails spectacularly on every level.”</p>
<p>But he had to come to that overhelmingly negative opinion. Because that’s where the clicks and shares live — in a cynical kind of rancid negativity.</p>
<p>In his reviews of the prequels, “Mr. Plinkett” did use negativity and button-pushing jokes, but they weren’t in the service of something entirely cynical. His nasty jokes wrapped well-structured and well-thought-out criticism of the prequel films, criticism which I believe is still convincing. In this review? Not so much; he cherry-picks weak moments (his comments about the really stupid fight choreography in Snoke’s throne room is absolutely correct), and nit-picks plot details, and claims that these add up to a terrible movie. And he also claims that moral and emotional ambiguity (also known as “complexity” and “realism”) <strong>also</strong> completely ruin the movie.</p>
<p>Clicks and shares, baby. Clicks and shares.</p>
<p>“Mr. Plinkett” crafted this particular review video not to convincingly review the movie, but to cater to the angry, toxic <em>Star Wars</em> fans, who have attacked the cast of <em>The Last Jedi</em> on social media.</p>
<p>At this point in his career, “Mr. Plinkett” is a disguise that the successful Mike Stoklasa no longer actually needs. He’s earning plenty of money from his ventures now; his other video series are extremely popular. Why is he still dragging out “Mr. Plinkett?”</p>
<p>Because he’s <strong>hiding</strong> behind that identity; he’s using it to shield himself from the criticism he deserves, for producing work that panders to reactionaries.</p>
<p>Do you think I’m exaggerating? At one point in the review “Mr. Plinkett” jokingly yells the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wasn’t expecting such outdated and sexist sailor talk from such a progressive film. How dare they! I’m protesting! C’mon Antifa, let’s get <em>Star Wars</em> next!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He’s mocking “political correctness” that he finds in this movie by imagining a viewer who would find it sexist to refer to the Millenium Falcon_ as “she.” But no one’s done that. He’s joking about the politics of an imagined fan of this movie, <strong>without really making a good-faith effort to talk about the politics of this movie.</strong></p>
<p>It’s lazy. And he’s addressing this right at an audience that thinks Antifa is a punch line, and feminism is a punch line. Remember, he’s doing this as “Mr. Plinkett.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is why this all seemed weird and bad. When they’re on the casino planet, and Rose is complaining about, like, the industrial-military complex of the universe, or whatever?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yeah, that significant scene in the film when Finn, a former stormtrooper, is beginning to come to grips with the moral consequences of his whole previous life, and his complicity in the First Order. I hate it when a movie makes me think.</p>
<p><strong>At best</strong> “Mr. Plinkett” is channeling the reactionary world view of Fry in <em>Futurama</em>, who famously said that “clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.”</p>
<p>He sets himself up as arbiter of That Which is Acceptable in filmmaking:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Twists and turns are one thing, but confusing actions and motivations that are literally incomprehensible? That’s not acceptable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thanks for weighing in, boss. I’ll make sure management gets your memo. This really seems odd.</p>
<p>And Stoklasa, now a multi-millionaire, is just a funny guy punching up, right?</p>
<p>Personally, I don’t think joining the chorus of those criticizing <em>The Last Jedi</em> from the alt-right shows courage, or convictions. I’d like to think that Stoklasa is smarter than this, because I really do enjoy a lot of his work. But now I think maybe I’ve been over-estimating him, giving him the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t deserve. And maybe “Mike Stoklasa” is the real mask, covering up the truth about the man behind this review — that inside, he really <strong>is</strong> Mr. Plinkett.</p>
<p>How does that phrase go, the one that’s been kicking around social media for a while? The one attributed to Maya Angelou, well-known feminist and member of Antifa?</p>
<p>Oh yes — “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”</p>
<h3 id="while-im-hating-on-things">While I’m Hating On Things</h3>
<p>I also hate <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-hOigoxHs">The Big Bang Theory</a>. Just, you know, in case you were wondering.</p>
<h3 id="i-hate-my-phone">I Hate My Phone</h3>
<p>Last night I spent a little time trying to figure out how to disable as many of the Google apps on my phone as I could. I never installed or opted-in to these apps; they installed themselves, and they are constantly updating themselves, and they are constantly turning on new tracking or notification features that I don’t want. Even though I don’t use them, they use up an increasingly large chunk of storage on my phone, to the point where they are starting to generate notifications complaining that they don’t have enough storage space left to update themselves.</p>
<p>The only app on my phone that I’ve deliberately chosen to install is Twitter.</p>
<p>It seems to be possible to delete the updates, turn off notifications, delete the space by, kill, and disable these apps. I’ve done this to a number of them and that freed up a lot of space. I’m not very confident that they will remain killed and disabled; I guess I’ll find out over time. I need to try the same thing on Grace’s new phone, which is pestering her constantly.</p>
<p>If this doesn’t work, I guess the next step is to try to install a completely new OS. I’ve done a little bit of Android hacking, just enough to know that this could be a huge time sink.</p>
<p>Here’s an <a href="https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-free-google-services-that-cost-you-battery-life-privacy-android/">article with a few more tips</a>.</p>
<p>Where’s a fully open source, surveillance-free phone that I can purchase and use with T-Mobile?</p>
<h2 id="thursday">Thursday</h2>
<p>My father called me late yesterday afternoon for an update. His older brother, my oldest uncle, died. I can’t consider flying out to attend the memorial. I unfortunately never got to know this uncle well. I only met him a couple of times. I think the last time was twenty-five years ago. This is the lasting consequence of the way my family split apart and wound up spread thousands of miles apart. My father would like to find some way to help us deal with the house, but neither of us is quite sure what he can do. We’re just not sure that putting any more money into it at all would help us get it sold. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do that which will leave my credit rating intact, but we’re running out of options and it may be time to just bite the bullet and allow the lender to foreclose, leaving it to the banks and attorneys to figure out. Without even one viable offer at this point, trying to get a short sale completed before winter doesn’t seem possible.</p>
<p>Last night I got home relatively early, about 6:30. The kitchen was not ready for a meal. The kids were working on that. Grace was engaged with paperwork for doctors, so I sat and worked on the blog for a while. After a while it became clear that no one really felt like cooking, so we went ahead and ordered a couple of pizzas.</p>
<p>Elanor seemed chipper when I got home, like she must be feeling better. But Grace told me she had not really been well, and had slept for a good portion of the day. Again, she never seemed to have a fever to speak of, except perhaps a mild one. But Grace was concerned enough that she set up an appointment yesterday for 8:00 this morning.</p>
<p>At bedtime I read more of <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>. I’m getting closer to the end of the book. Orwell writes in this part of the book about the various professions employed by beggars, about English slang, about the hierarchy of beggars, and his theory as to why begging was so disreputable. (His interesting conclusion: it isn’t because of the nature of the work, since many people in English society do menial or useless work, but it’s really entirely because it isn’t sufficiently remunerative. I want to read this section on the podcast, and talk about it). I also read more of <em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em>.</p>
<p>Despite the labor savings that came from ordering pizza for dinner, we did not get to bed very early. In fact it was about 1:00, and we set our alarms for 7:00. We did not want to give Elanor medications that might hide her symptoms. She slept badly, with mild fits of coughing, and a lot of yelling, so of course we slept badly too.</p>
<p>Grace got her to the doctor this morning and they seem to be taking her symptoms seriously; they wanted to get a blood test, but could not access a good vein. They also want a chest x-ray. So they sent her home for us to get her as hydrated as we can. (She drank water from a bottle at dinner last night until she refused to take anymore, so I’m not entirely sure this will work). I think they want to rule out pneumonia, so Grace and I are a bit worried. Apparently chest infections are common in infants with Down Syndrome.</p>
<p>Grace also heard from Mott yesterday trying to confirm an appointment on Monday. We are confused because we didn’t think she had anything scheduled until December. So Grace will try to confirm that. Maybe it is best if they move it up given her recent illness.</p>
<p>Grace’s schedule is stacking up with a lot of appointments and it is a lot to keep on top of, especially combined with our ongoing concerns about getting the old house sold, which is sapping our concentration.</p>
<p>The Saginaw contractors are a gift that keeps on giving. Yesterday Grace got a call from a duct-cleaning contractor because he couldn’t get into the house. He couldn’t get into the house because we had been informed that the duct-cleaning company had finished that work something like six weeks ago, and we have since removed the contractor lockbox and put on a different realtor lockbox.</p>
<p>Apparently they never completed the cleaning and were trying to complete it yesterday. Grace was understandably infuriated. We’ve been telling potential buyers that the ducts were professionally cleaned. We had to spend a chunk of our own money to have asbestos remediated to get this done. Back in July. We both feel like suing this company, or at least reversing the credit card charge. But unfortunately none of that will actually get the job done, so we will probably wind up just grinding our teeth and scheduling a time when Grace can meet the contractor up at the house.</p>
<p>We’ve been constantly, repeatedly gob-smacked by the utter incompetence and carelessness of <strong>everyone</strong> involved in getting repairs done on the Saginaw house, and that includes (oh boy, does it ever include) our insurance company.</p>
<p>We don’t have word back from our realtor on the buyer’s response to a counter-offer.</p>
<p>Of course our highest priority is our baby’s health. There’s not a lot I can do from here. I’ll take off work if it seems like that would help.</p>
<p>So, there are plenty of things hanging over our heads right now. Low blood pressure should not be a problem!</p>
<h2 id="friday">Friday</h2>
<p>Last night Grace was very tired, and I don’t blame her, since she had to get up and out early on Thursday morning. We gave Elanor a dose of infant Tylenol again at bedtime and while she complained a lot about <strong>going</strong> to sleep, once she was asleep she stayed that way without coughing or waking up and griping.</p>
<p>The kids weren’t very cooperative getting dinner together. It sometimes happens that when Grace and I are stressed out, the kids actually start to act out worse and worse. We theorize that they pick up on our stress level and it stresses them out. Don’t ask me to explain it further than that, as I really can’t. But it happens fairly reliably that when we are at a low point and need them to be calm and well-behaved, they do the opposite.</p>
<p>I wasn’t willing to read most of the kids a bedtime story because they were so bad about getting ready for bed in a timely manner. But Sam got one — I read him part of “The Council of Elrond,” the next chapter in <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>. That book was by request. This is a great chapter, one of the most famous. It’s very talky, and it may be hard to get through for first-time readers, but there’s so much back-story unfolding and so much detail. And the voice of each character is quite distinct.</p>
<p>When we left off, Elrond had just brought Boromir up to date on the recent history of the ring. The idea that Boromir’s people have known about Imladris (their name for Rivendell) for many generations but never tried to go there is maybe a little hard to swallow, although the in-universe explanation is that it is hard to find Rivendell if the elves don’t want you there. The idea that Boromir basically got the Microsoft Outlook meeting notice inserted into his calendar via a dream, and managed to arrive the morning of the meeting, is also perhaps a bit much — when did Elrond send the message, and how long did it take Boromir to find the place? The text says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Here,’ said Elrond, turning to Gandalf, ‘is Boromir, a man from the South. He arrived in the grey morning, and seeks for counsel. I have bidden him to be present, for here his questions will be answered.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boromir reports that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>’In this evil hour I have come on an errand over many dangerous leagues to Elrond: a hundred and ten days I have journeyed all alone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boromir tells us that his brother (Faramir, though we have not heard his name yet) experienced a dream, several times (“…a like dream came oft to him again…”), and Boromir experienced it too (“…and once to me”).</p>
<p>Is it implied that Elrond sent the dream? To make that work, he would have basically needed administrative access to the whole calendar! That suggests that someone above his pay grade made these arrangements. This idea isn’t really emphasized a lot in Tolkien’s work, but it pops up occasionally; Gandalf mentions to Frodo early on that he believes “Bilbo was <em>meant</em> to find the Ring, and <em>not</em> by its maker.”</p>
<h3 id="compiler">Compiler</h3>
<p>I got myself prematurely excited because it appeared that my compiler for the ARM SAM4 family, part of the Keil MDK-ARM, supports <strong>long long</strong>. It’s mentioned in the online documentation that 64-bit numbers are supported (I know they wouldn’t be natively supported by the microcontroller core, or fast, but I thought they might be supported by a standard library).</p>
<p>But in fact this is a sort of feint. Apparently some compilers support it, but not others. They must share a front end, or something like that: this compiler accepts <strong>long long</strong>, and <strong>unsigned long long</strong>, and the size-specific <strong>uint64_t</strong> and <strong>int64_t</strong> types, and long long constants, signed or unsigned, and the <strong>%lld</strong> and <strong>%llu</strong> type specifier strings for <strong>printf</strong>. But it’s all a ruse. It actually silently compiles the code to use 32-bit values. And the debugger gives strange results; viewing two <strong>uint64_t</strong> values in the watch window will show the same value twice.</p>
<p>So that’s very annoying. If the compiler can’t actually handle <strong>uint64_t</strong> and related types, it shouldn’t pretend to. It should issue an error.</p>
<p>I’m working on this because I have to come up with a way to calculate wavelength values that are accurate to more digits than I can calculate with 32-bit floating-point numbers. Our laser modules allow tuning in 1MHz steps. The corresponding change in wavelength is small. So if we can specify two adjacent frequencies, for example 191,529,986MHz and 191,529,987MHz, I want to be able to display a similarly precise wavelength value when we switch between them. This is easily calculated using double-precision floating-point, yielding approximately 1565.250769 and 1565.250761. (I will display these values with 5 fractional digits).</p>
<p>If you do the calculation using single-precision floating-point, though, which is what the LCD GUI and my SAM4E microcontroller both support, there’s a problem; the precision tops out at about seven digits. There aren’t enough floating point values available to uniquely represent these result values that are close together. So when the user is turning the encoder knob to adjust the fine-tuning offset, the frequency value on the screen changes continuously in steps of 1MHz, but the displayed wavelength value gets stuck for a while, and after every 16 steps or so, jumps to approximate value. That’s ugly and it’s going to confuse end-users.</p>
<p>I’m not out of tricks yet, though; there’s a 64-bit integer library that might run on the SAM4E. I’m going to try using that to do the calculation. I wasn’t able to find a fixed-point type library that seemed suitable, but this one might do the trick. It implements 64-bit integers using a <strong>struct</strong> containing two 32-bit integers. What to do with the truly gigantic integer result, after calculating it, might get a little bit tricky. I can only pass data to the LCD GUI using 16-bit words, or strings. I can’t use <strong>snprintf</strong> directly on the structures. The saving grace will be, I think, that I know how many digits, in decimal, the result is going to be. So I can divide by a large power of ten to scale 64-bit values down to 32-bit values that I can work with directly, using groups of digits. If I have a modulus operator that would be great, but if I don’t, I should be able to fake it with division and subtraction.</p>
<p>Grace tells me that Elanor is slightly anemic, and she told me about some new research that suggests that this sometimes happens to babies who were born by C-section. So we’ll look into supplementing her diet. I don’t think all the blood test results are back yet.</p>
<p>Our realtor told me that she has given more showings, and we’re waiting to see if any of those showings result in offers. I heard last night that one buyer offered $65,000. I am really struggling to decide if I want to try to make that offer work. I’d have to borrow about $30,000 and that is a lot to borrow, especially on top of an existing pile of debt. It will leave us burdened financially for a long time.</p>
<p>Grace has been looking into options to lease the house and it’s possible we might wind up considering doing that after all, although it is not my first choice.</p>
<p>I’m headed to Costco.</p>
<h2 id="saturday">Saturday</h2>
<p>I indulged myself yesterday and had breakfast at Zingerman’s Roadhouse. It’s been a few months. I like to have a breakfast dish, sometimes one of their breakfast specials, sometimes not, and a side of fruit, which is little platter of very good fruits. Their basic “Roadhouse Joe” coffee is strong and bitter, but not very acidic. I drink it with cream but no sugar. I have asked at the Harvest Moon Cafe if they would consider putting some kind of fruit on the breakfast menu — anything, really. I’d settle for a scoop of frozen berries, or some pre-cut melon, or a banana. The waitstaff tells me they get a lot of requests like this, but at present they have nothing like this available at all.</p>
<p>I went to Nicola’s Books and they had the new J. R. R. Tolkien/Christopher Tolkien book, <em>The Fall of Gondolin</em>. This is not really new material, exactly; I think most or all of the text exists in <em>The Book of Lost Tales</em>, <em>Unfinished Tales</em> and <em>The Silmarillion</em>. Christopher Tolkien has done is tease out those different threads of the story and put them in one volume as the last of three “great tales.” The first two were <em>The Children of Húrin</em> and <em>Beren and Lúthien</em>.</p>
<p>I believe that the first of these three is the smoothest and most coherent. I’ve read that one. The next one contain fragments of stories that don’t entirely match up in style, and which were written decades apart. Even the character names are inconsistent. I believe this one is the same way. I think it is actually to Christopher Tolkien’s credit that he <strong>didn’t</strong> try to homogenize these pieces. But I think that also means that the latter two books are really only for hardcore Tolkien fans who are willing to accept the inconsistencies.</p>
<p>Oh, and there are also gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee. I haven’t actually started reading the text, but I confess that I did eagerly page through it looking at Lee’s amazing drawings.</p>
<p>I also picked up a mass-market paperback edition of Kim Stanley Robinson’s older novel <em>Icehenge</em>. This story weaves itself into the story of Earth’s colonization of Mars, although I think it doesn’t ever actually match up with characters and events in Robinson’s terrific Mars trilogy.</p>
<p>I bought a fairly modest load of groceries at Costco last night, as Costco loads go. For dinner we had salmon, salad, and an apple pie. I brought home a couple of fresh whole chickens and some red meat. I should have gotten eggs, too. Some things are getting more expensive. I haven’t gotten cashews in a while and I wanted to get a container of cashews, but they are now $21.00. That just seemed too high so I didn’t do it, although brown rice with cashews and sriracha sauce is a favorite snack in the Potts household.</p>
<p>I also got one more lantern to keep in the basement for future power outages. I’ve been buying one a week for a few weeks now, and we have six. I think that’s plenty for us to get through a power outage. Next week I will get more spare batteries. Costco also has some smaller lanterns and flashlights that might be useful. I also want to get a set of 3 dish tubs, a small container of dish soap and a small container of bleach, paper plates, and paper towels, and bundle these things up on a shelf to have ready for washing up when we only have bottled water. I would also like to have a whole-house surge protector installed, get the electrical panel rearranged and correctly labeled, and have it wired up so there is a place to hook in a generator. Some of that has to wait until there is more money available. I’m hoping we can get through the fall without a lengthy outage.</p>
<p>The kids were not very cooperative last night, in getting ready for dinner, and cleaning up after dinner. So we had no story. While Grace was getting ready for bed I read the first few pages of <em>Icehenge</em>. It’s quite an engaging story and a quick read as well, although I wish this reprint paperback edition had been re-set and looked better. It’s not as bad as some terrible-looking print-on-demand books I’ve looked at recently, but it doesn’t look very good, and Robinson’s story really deserves better.</p>
<p>This morning I picked the book back up, and finished the first section. It features some of the same themes that are important in <em>Aurora</em>, notably the difficulties in creating a sustainable closed ecosystem inside an interstellar spaceship. It’s impressive work, and really deserves a better edition. It’s especially impressive considering that this was his first published novel (although it is really sort of a fix-up, as the first two parts were published earlier as separate novellas).</p>
<p>Grace has been juicing. Her breakfast for a few days has been a celery/apple smoothie. This seems to be helping her feel better and lower her blood pressure, so I’m all in favor. I will have some, although I don’t really love the flavor of celery juice the way she does.</p>
<p>It has cooled down quite a bit, and I am grateful! We might try to get out for a walk this afternoon. Grace and I were pretty lazy this morning. I made bacon and blueberry pancakes and haven’t done much else.</p>
<h2 id="books-music-movies-and-tv-mentioned-this-week">Books, Music, Movies, and TV Mentioned This Week</h2>
<ul>
<li><em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien (bedtime reading in progress, again, after a long hiatus)</li>
<li><em>Icehenge</em> by Kim Stanley Robinson (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Fall of Gondolin</em> by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, with illustrations by Alan Lee (ooh, nice pictures)</li>
<li><em>Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook</em> by Mark Bray (in progress)</li>
<li><em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason</em> by Chapo Trap House (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Conquest of Bread</em> by Peter Kropotkin (in progress)</li>
<li><em>The Wild Robot Escapes</em> by Peter Brown (bedtime reading in progress)</li>
<li><em>Elric: The Moonbeam Roads</em> (Gollancz, 2014) (omnibus volume containing 3 novels; the first, <em>Daughter of Dreams</em> in progress)</li>
</ul>
<p><em>Ypsilanti, Michigan</em><br />
<em>The Week Ending Saturday, September 8th, 2018</em></p>
Paul R. Pottshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04401509483200614806noreply@blogger.com0