You should say Hi sometime.

(It works equally well in both English and German)

Bridges burned can always be rebuilt.

I really need to keep in mind that I’m part-time and only getting a part-time salary, and so I really need to not let myself get drawn into things during my off time that aren’t urgent.

I’ve hit my 40 for this pay period but I still needed to complete some back to work on boarding stuff before midnight tonight, so I went ahead with that. Then because I was already logged in I started fiddling with some code I need to get working again so the reporting overnights can start running again. All of that is a code base I created back when I was full time and hadn’t yet retired.

So I start looking at things in the code with an idea that I’d just get a better idea of what I needed to do next week. Next thing I know I’m immersed in that report code, and I had to force quit myself. Because today all of the time I spend working on it would have to be non-comp time if I kept at it…which I really wanted to do because I can’t stand a software problem I haven’t figured out yet.

But no. I’m not hourly, I’m salaried and that means no overtime. I’m fine with that, and if I have to work non-comp for urgent things I will. I did that back in the day and especially while I was working on JWST. But sometimes I just did it whether it was urgent or not because I could not stop myself until I get it figured out.

See…that’s going to bother me…

I knew when something was going to nag at me all night long if I didn’t figure it out. A shrink would probably have a field day with me I suppose. But it did get me good performance reviews.

I have to pace myself now. This isn’t urgent Get to it next week…

Firstly…

I am not nearly at his level of accomplishments, but this is how I feel, and especially now that I’m getting myself back to doing my political cartoons. And I’m even more focused now on this blog, and the idea of blogs as an alternative to the commercial social media that helped deliver us to this moment. Blue Sky exempted ( @brucegarrett.bsky.social ). Lots of people are decamping Twitter for Blue Sky now, because its user controls allow you to keep the trolls out of your feed, keep them from reposting you to their followers, keep them from seeing anything you post. Unlike Musk’s Twitter which has removed all of that entirely because…Musk. Which brings me to…

I finally deactivated my Twitter account on the eighth. I’d been holding onto it after Musk took over because I’d been an early Early user and had an account name that was actually my name and not my name plus a string of numbers. Maybe that sounds like a strange reason but I like my name. I’ve never been comfortable using a handle, although for a brief time I went by “Coyote”, which was actually a reference to a character in the book of the same name by Peter Gadol, not the Coyote of native myth and legend or the Warner Brother’s one. It didn’t last long but if I ever went back to using a handle it would be Coyote Gato.

Digging in my heels and insisting on going by my own name wherever I happen to be online might also have something to do with how often my bitter maternal grandmother used the fact of my having my dad’s family name against me. Yes, my name is Bruce Garrett. What of it.

Anyway, Twitter became too much Musk (musky…pungent…). I think I knew I was going to drop Twitter back when the hurricane hit inland and all the disinformation came pouring out like an overflowing sewer, where once there was useful and immediate emergency information. The damage Musk had done to the service became sickeningly clear.

So that deed is done but however much I despise Musk and his kind I still felt it as a loss. I was there at the beginning. (I was there when USENET was a thing…) But it was over some time ago.

I didn’t bother getting a zip archive of my time there. I have my own website here and that’s personal history enough.

As I said…I’m getting back into doing my political cartoons. Here’s a work in progress from a few days ago…

This is about one of the few bright spots in the election day aftermath. Larry Hogan, former governor of Maryland, was running for the senate in a state where a democrat seemed certain to win. Our Maryland republicans are batshit crazy, but Hogan stood out for being somewhat moderate-ish and was much respected for standing up to Trump during the worst years of COVID and getting our state the tools we needed to cope. He had the good will of lots of democrats and moderates here and he eventually term limited out of the governor’s house. So standing up to Trump you’d have thought our republicans would not have anything to do with him, but they wanted to turn the Senate badly (and alas they did, but not with him), and that snake McConnell got him to run and Trump even endorsed him.

Of course during his campaign he kept all that on the down low. He made a big deal of his alleged support for abortion rights and how he would stand up to Trump like he did during COVID. But it was all a sham. At a private GOP fundraiser he made a big deal out of getting Trump’s endorsement. But the fear was all that goodwill he got from Marylanders during COVID would get him elected.

Thankfully our voters saw through it. We didn’t give our votes to Trump either, although I am well aware of the subset of my neighbors who most likely did. All you had to do was drive anywhere outside the urban zones to see the Trump/Vance signs. As I said, one bright spot post election.

Lastly (for now…), this from my Blue Sky feed…

Can I get any more stark mad liberal democrat American? I dunno, but I intend to make it fun.

Well that was a short stint at being alcohol and tobacco free…

As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H. L. Mencken.

Last night’s nightmare was vivid, intense, and very unwelcome. Not that any nightmares are welcome, but this one which clearly sprang from all my stress and fear over the coming election was one I could have done without. I won’t retell it, partly because some of its details are almost comical in their surreality. I’ll write it all down in a private dream diary I keep later today. But the essence of it was I was among 14 others being rounded up to be taken to a place where I was pretty sure we were all going to die. I tried to slip the line but was put back into it by an idiot who was also in the line and thought he was being helpful. I escaped once, was recaptured, escaped again, almost recaptured, then finding my way to a safe hideout, only to realize that one of the others there, by a slight slip of the tongue, was a betrayer.

When I awakened from that last moment, it reminded me of a meme I’ve been seeing lately on commercial social media. The one about being disappointed to realize that you had friends you would not want to know where Anne Frank was hiding…

I considered reposting that except I don’t have any friends or family (on my dad’s side) that I would feel that way about. We would all keep Anne hidden, of that I am certain. But there’s another side to that coin.

Turn it around. Put yourself in Anne and her family’s place. If You had to hide, let’s say because the hate mongers have been painting a target on You for decades, and now suddenly they have free reign to do with you and everyone like you as they please, who out of all the people you know would you worry about turning you in?

Well…again…nobody among my friends or family (paternal side) would do that to me I am certain. And yes, there are a couple on the maternal side who I’m pretty sure would resist…which would make them just as much a target as me. But there are those others who have occasionally walked into and out of my life that I’m pretty sure would.

But even more disturbing than that are the ones I’m not sure about. I can see their faces as I type this and I honestly don’t know what they would do. It’s a very creepy feeling.

Ever have that feeling?

I’m part time at the Institute now, theoretically three days a week up to 40 hours per pay period, which is every two weeks. That actually works out to just five days per pay period. So my weekends are Very long by comparison. Today is the end of my first pay period, but I have been off since last Wednesday at 1 because I hit my limit that soon. So I’m off work until next Tuesday, apart from an hour web tag-up on Monday. I put the final touches on my front yard Halloween display Thursday, and fed the goblins Thursday night. But starting Thursday was also the beginning of a few days I could slow walk myself out of bed, and then take my morning coffee walk around the neighborhood.

I can feel myself starting to stress once again about work and I promised myself I would not let that happen. But I reckon it’s just me. Understand that my workplace is an exceptionally good environment, I just stress over every little thing. I can keep telling myself that whatever happens I can always go back to being retired with enough retirement income I can live comfortably, but it doesn’t work. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of just letting whatever will be…be. Que Sera, Sera…but not right this moment. I’m going to be a mess on election day.

My thoughts this morning as I took my walk weren’t helping.

Nowadays, they call it The Lavender Scare. That McCarthy time in the 1950s when the witch hunts for communists and homosexuals in government and private industry contractors was, shall we say, energetic. The newspapers of the day referred to gays and lesbians obliquely as “security risks” because you don’t actually use Those Words in family newspapers.

Now comes Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 and all the fascist energy to tear down our democracy and rebuild it in their image, and it’s going to make the McCarthy years and all the witch hunts and black lists look positively liberal.

And here I am thinks I as I’m having my morning coffee walk, an open and proud gay man, working for a government contractor.

I remember when I was living in a friend’s basement, dialing around looking for whatever likely work I found in the want ads. At that moment in time I had enough programming skill I could plausibly apply for computer work so long as a degree wasn’t required…which wasn’t often. But one day I saw one and called the number in the ad. A man on the other end asked me about my skill set…what programming languages had I worked in, and did I have any database experience. When he seemed satisfied enough to schedule me for an interview, he asked if I could pass a background check for a security clearance. And I told him honestly, because I have always dug in my heels at moments like this, that my police record was spotless, but that I am an out gay man, so not vulnerable to blackmail but if it’s going to be a problem anyway then no. He assured me that it Would be a problem, and hung up.

Is it going to be a problem again in my lifetime? I hope not. But don’t be telling me it can’t happen here. In my lifetime it Was happening to people like me. It did happen here. Yes it can happen again. You bet it can happen again. A lot of decent god fearing oh so sinless and righteous people who vote are praying for it to happen again.

It isn’t just me. I have a few young gay friends on Facebook that I worry about. I saw the before Stonewall time…

(The above panels are from A Coming Out Story)

I feel grateful sometimes that I lived to see a better world for us emerging. Now it’s this. And unlike me my young friends have their whole lives in front of them.

Is it going to be this again for them?

Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.

…except those who want to be fooled.

This is…amazing…

I don’t think he’s ever made his own bed, let alone his own breakfast, lunch or dinner a day in his life, let alone worked a deep fryer in a fast food joint. My first real W-4 job was at a Burger Chef. I worked the night shift and that included closing up and an hour of cleaning the food prep after closing. Show me the staged photos of him cleaning the prep area after closing…go ahead…this man could not have handled the work involved back when he was a teenager himself, let alone now.

He’s had everything handed to him his entire life and that’s why he gets pissed off whenever he doesn’t get his way.

It seems I am always buying one of these Oaxacan wood carvings every time I go visit Epcot Mexico. But this one was a Must Buy the moment I saw it…

I’d never seen the artists do a crab before, and here in Baltimore and along the Chesapeake Bay Maryland Blue Crab is serious business, so of course I took it home with me.

A couple years ago the city gave us new trash cans designed for use with trash trucks that automatically pick them up and dump them into the truck. I’m familiar with the system used with these types of trash cans as it’s what they do in Oceano. Every trash day out there residents roll their trash cans out onto the street by the curb, the trash trucks come alongside, and a mechanical arm reaches out and grabs the trash can, hoists it up and dumps its contents into the truck. Now they only need one operator per truck, which is good for small town budgets but not so much for the workers.

That system isn’t going to work here in Baltimore and I’ve wondered what giving us those kinds of trash cans was buying the city. Trash here is usually picked up in the alleys, some of which are so old and so narrow the city needs trash trucks specifically made for them. There is no room on either side of the trash truck for those arms to reach out and pick up trash cans.

For almost two years now I’ve watched the trash workers roll our new trash cans out to the backend of your usual trash truck…the ones with an open back and a claw that comes out and compresses trash dumped into the back…lift them up over the open back of the truck and manually dump the trash inside of them, then roll them back to our backyards, It looked to me like all that was accomplished with the new trash cans was giving the workers something with wheels on it, but much heavier to lift and dump.

But there was a master plan after all and I’ve been seeing it now. On the backs of all those standard trash trucks the city has been installing devices that pick up the new trash cans and dump them into the back of the truck. The workers still have to roll the trash cans over to the back of the truck, but then these devices do the work of lifting and dumping. Then they roll the cans back to our yards.

Well, actually they just leave them in the alley and we have to put them back. (shrug)

It’s a neat idea and I can see where both the city and the unions like it. It doesn’t cost workers their jobs, it makes their jobs easier (no heavy lifting), and the city doesn’t have to buy all new trash trucks, just these add-on devices.

Well at least I got it out of me…

…necessarily.

I went to my storage room and brought back the empty containers for my backyard garden stuff because I’ll be putting all that away for the winter soon. While I was there I re-sorted and re-packed the storage unit such that all the stuff I am unlikely to need on a regular basis is in the back and the seasonal stuff is in the front where it’s easier to get at. After Halloween is over I’ll put the Halloween stuff back and take up and pack the garden stuff and put that away too, but it the very front of the storage room. Next spring it’ll be easy to get to then. Probably, if I’m smart, when I put the empty containers back in storage, I’ll put them behind the Halloween containers so they’re easy to get to next Halloween.

I used to think storage rooms were a symptom of excess unless you were living in a small apartment. Which I’ve been. Once I bought the house I figured if I needed a storage room too then I had too much stuff. But seasonal things like garden lights, Halloween and Christmas decorations take up space most of the year when they’re not deployed outside. Eventually they take up space you’d rather be using to live in. I suppose this is why people who have garages don’t have any space in them for their cars.

I tried using the space under my backyard deck as a storage space, but it isn’t weatherproof…I’ve tried several ways to make it weatherproof and could not…and the plastic Rubbermaid storage bins I bought are only water tight for a while. If you leave them to the weather the plastic hardens and cracks and rain gets into them and ruins what’s inside. So I gave in and rented a small storage unit near where I live. And now as I’ve been moving seasonal stuff in and out of it I see the usefulness of having one.

You like making your neighborhood bright and cheerful, and that means decorating your lawn and garden. I have a nice solar light display I put out in the backyard every spring that my neighbors love, and I try to add one little thing to it every season. This week I’m working on my Halloween display. In December it’ll be the Christmas one. I’m not trying to win any prizes with any of this, I just like sprucing things up around the house when I can and doing something to brighten my world a little. That stuff doesn’t need to take up space in your house when it’s not deployed outside. Especially if your house is a little Baltimore rowhouse. I need every square foot of that space to live in.

Oddly enough having said all this, the Christmas stuff stays in the basement, but it’s in a corner between the dryer and the freezer that I really can’t use for anything but storage. I also use space under the basement staircase for storing stuff that isn’t seasonal and I might want to get my hands on right away. Last major power outage we had all my big coolers where in the storage unit and I couldn’t get them out because of the power outage everywhere in the neighborhood. So I lost a lot of food in the fridge that I could maybe have kept on ice in the coolers. Now the coolers stay in the house, under the basement stairs.

On the way home from Bobby D’s (a local rib joint) I saw my lawn cutter guy and we chatted for a bit. I’d told him previously about the fungus that killed my Japanese Maple tree. He said he saw another one in the neighborhood with the bark coming off and dark spots of fungus inside. So it’s spreading around.

My next door neighbor’s tree is showing more dead branches. Probably won’t go completely dead before it drops all its leaves for the winter, but next spring and summer for sure it’s over. Homeowner’s son says dad doesn’t care about the tree. I suppose it’s too late now anyway.

I’ve brought my Halloween stuff out of storage and I need to start getting it put out for the goblins. No tree to decorate with Halloween lights this year.