Today began with much dizziness. Then, as I tried to prep the backyard deck for the coming winter, fatigue. So much fatigue I thought I was going to collapse on the deck, and was grateful my neighbor across the alley was also working in his backyard and could see if I wasn’t moving.

Something else I noticed is the tremors in my left hand are worse today, and I’m starting to see a small beginnings of it in the right hand. That’s my drawing hand. I know I have to expect that to get worse, but if the day comes that I can’t draw anymore I don’t know how much longer I’m going to want to keep living.

So it goes…as the Tralfamadorians say…

I took this photo of George back in the early 1970s when we were both teenage boys and I was getting deep into photography as both a photojournalist and an artist. George was one of those rare friends who could give the camera a completely natural straight-on look, and enjoyed letting my camera give him some love. This one was taken somewhere along one of our hikes at Great Falls.

He was beautiful, which was another reason why he was a favorite to take with me on a camera hike. In retrospect I think he had a crush on me, but I was crushing on another classmate and was oblivious. He paid my way into a drag race at a track deep in PG County and also for a pit pass. His favorite drag racer was competing. But it was during the Saudi led gasoline shortage and though heavy gas rationing was no longer in place it was still a time of shortages, and I got afraid I would run out on the way back and asked if we could leave the track early before the gas stations closed.

He sadly agreed and I can still hear his wistful voice saying as we drove off, that his favorite was probably making his run about then. I wrote about it here back in 2013, long before I knew what had happened to him. This photo is from our last camera hike, a few weeks after the race. He never took another with me and we drifted apart. It’s my favorite photo of him. I made him a print of it and he told me afterward that even his dad thought it was a good one.

The memory of that moment and the sound in his voice as we drove away from the track stuck with me, and I began to feel more and more like I’d betrayed his trust. It has persisted painfully all these years.

I began trying to search for him online, first on the various blogs where I thought he, or a mutual friend, might be, then as the Internet became a thing. I tried all the people search websites I could find, but I could never remember how to spell his last name so the searches came up blank. It went on for decades. Then on Facebook someone posted some pages of his high school yearbook and I saw his picture in it and got the correct spelling. I immediately found him: he was living in Florida, got his address and sent him a letter. It came back as no longer living there, forwarding address unknown.

The more I dug the more it began to appear to me that he was in a bad way, maybe even homeless. I became alarmed and contacted a private detective agency and gave them what I knew. If he was homeless or on the edge of it I wanted to help. I felt I owed him. I’ve had other friends who have gone through periods of homelessness here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and I’ve seen how they can convince themselves that their situation is hopeless and they just give up. I came near enough to that myself. With effort mutual friends and I got them the help they needed and back on their feet. I would have done that for George if I could have.

The agency found him right away. But it was bad news. Yes he was still alive, something I was worried about because we are both old men now. But sometime between when we were teenagers and the old men we are now, he had become schizophrenic.

He was being cared for in a place I thought was sketchy, but that was none of my business. I sent him some letters and postcards but never heard back. I don’t even know if he got any of them or if his caretakers simply trashcanned them.

So now I know, and I have to let it go. Or at least try to make peace with it. Somehow.

We were young and he was beautiful and fun to be with. I should have paid more attention…and maybe been a little less self absorbed. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, but then I suppose none of us do, for better or worse. Things just happen and you do you best to navigate the wreckage to the other side.

Never ask me why I am an atheist. I might just shrug and give you whatever answer I think you want. Or you might get an earful about every knife in my heart and all the good hearts I’ve ever known that happened to us for no reason. There is no God. All we have in this life is each other.

 Shine on George, wherever you are…

…but we’ll see what comes of it.

First thing I wanted to do this morning was contact the money manager of my 401k and start the process of withdrawing my Required Minimum Distribution and establishing a recurring monthly withdrawal. Supposedly the paperwork involved in that could be uploaded to them via their app, so I am hopeful there is no major delay in getting that sorted out and I start to receive my money. But we shall see. When I called their number I was presented with the usual notices and a voice menu asking me to tell the computer what I was calling about. Instead of giving me a list of choices it just said I could say my reason for calling in my own words, but the more words I used the better. So I described my situation. It then told me it would connect me with the appropriate customer service. Then it told me I had been verified by voice print.

???

!!!

Ooookay. That was a little creepy and I sincerely hope they’re using more than just my voice because any crook could record me and get into my account otherwise.

So I got that process started and I am more at ease now that at least some of it will come through soon enough that it will cover the missing paycheck/vacation payout I thought I was getting from the Institute when I retired.

So I was feeling a Lot calmer today, and decided to take another hike on a different part of the NCR rail-trail. Then I went to White Rose in York for food and a margarita. While I was there I hit the boutique soap shop where a lady has a corner of the store she sells her custom made tie-dye t-shirts and found two good ones. I will need to give them a quick wash to get the smell of boutique soap out of them.

This blog post represents a change of bloggy work flow. From now on I do the first draft here and if I want, I’ll repost to my Facebook friends. They’re either going to have to start following me here more regularly or wonder at some point where I went. There’s apparently a new push by “Meta” to claim all the artwork you’ve posted to your facebook page, And The Links To Your Private Websites, as fair game for “training” their AI monster. That’s “training” as in stealing your work. I’m not having it so once again I am about to take all my artwork and photography off my Facebook page and I do regret that somewhat because it gave all that more of an audience then it gets here. But the reason blogs don’t get the traffic they used to is Facebook set out to throttle blogs, the way the casinos in Atlantic City throttled that big beautiful boardwalk that used to be there. They don’t want anyone straying outside their cocoons because then you’re not spending money inside them.

This video touches on things I’ve written about here before in this blog post. But it adds some details I hadn’t known about too, which is always good.

I’m really coming to love all the new science videos coming out lately! There’s a complaint making the rounds…a perfectly legitimate complaint…that the Internet began as a library and now it’s degenerated into a shopping mall. It’s true enough, and the big commercial social media companies are largely to blame. I remember a time when the question everyone was asking about the Internet was how is anyone going to make money on this thing. Well now we know and it’s a tragedy. But websites and blogs like this one are still out there, and if you dig and are persistent you can find your way back to the library.

I have transitioned back into retirement, and I should be feeling great about it. A couple days ago I was. I’d made plans to visit the ancestral Garrett homelands in California, and hang out with my brother in Oceano. I’d bought train tickets from Baltimore to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be driving cross country during snow and ice season, and also across red America after election day. I figured I’d decide how to get up the coast to Oceano when I got to LA, since the train schedules going north don’t always sync well with the Southwest Chief. Then I realized I had time left on my Disneyland annual pass and I could take a MetroLink to Anaheim and spend a few days in California Adventure and then take the Surfliner north to the Grover Beach station, which is walking distance to my brother’s house in Oceano.

So I was in a great frame of mind. Then. Later that afternoon I took an ad-hoc hike along the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore and it was a sunny pleasant sky blue day. Got a nice BLT at a local shop next to the trailhead. I was feeling wonderful. There was however, a problem I was waiting to get resolved the next business day. I have been in a state of despair ever since. I’m typing this now after waking up from a bad nightmare.

When I got what I thought was going to be my final paycheck plus all the vacation time I’d accrued, it was massively less than I’d thought. So I asked HR to look into it, and naturally it’s my fault, or so they say. And the tax man’s. This is going to make things difficult for me for the rest of this year, and it’s too late to cancel my train tickets and Disney hotel reservations without taking another big hit.

And while it’s true I have enough in my 401k to retire comfortably, the problem for me at this point is the current managers of my 401k have much more stringent rules for making sure you are not and never have been married that the other one I was previously on did not. Which is (hahaha) why the Institute dropped them and pushed us all onto the current one. So the buffer I thought I had to tide me through the paper are you or are you not or have you ever been married chase isn’t there and I’m going to be struggle to make ends meet until this new 401k manager decides I’ve satisfied requirements. And they have fucked me over dragging their feet on other matters before.

Saving grace of all this might be that at 73 I am subject to the Required Minimum DIstribution now and this current 401k manager has already informed me that I have a chunk out of my 401k I now I have to withdraw. Hopefully this means they will get serious about letting me do that.

Here’s the thing many of my friends and practically all my classmates don’t really get about me. I was raised by a single divorced mother and didn’t get a chance to finish college because the money ran out and what great granddad Garrett had put aside for me and my brother got disappeared somehow. I knocked around this and that low paying job for half my working life. And even when I started making a good living as a software developer it was contract work at first with zero benefits.

Mom didn’t have any tangible property when she died, let alone a house in Montgomery county that could be sold for a big profit, and I just don’t have the foundational wealth most of the rest of my classmates and co-workers have. It’s not like they’re rich by any means, just comfortably middle class. I on the other hand, am literally a kid from the other side of the railroad tracks.

If it wasn’t for the benefits I had at STScI I wouldn’t have anything but social security to retire on at all. The 401k and b have enough in them to let me have a comfortable, if not fabulous retirement, but I can’t tolerate sudden complexities very well at all. Like having to go through a paper chase just to prove I’ve never been married before I can access my retirement funds.

Most working people in this land of the free and home of the brave can’t tolerate surprises either. We have lived hand to mouth for most of our lives, if not all of it. I’m also excessively lucky I can still keep my employee health plan, even accounting for how that and Medicate part B increases are likely to eat all of the coming SS COLA increase and then some. You’ve no idea the panic that sets in whenever I hear republicans talking about cutting social security.

I’m just anxious and sick to my stomach right now. I just want to stay in bed for the rest of the week. Maybe the rest of my life.

Despair. Nightmares. So on and so forth…

I was out and about a couple nights ago, just wandering around my little corner of Baltimore, and chatting with a friend in DC via cellphone. The kid who grew up with telephones wired into the wall, and local long distance charges through the roof, is loving how all that changed in the 21st century. I carry my phone with me in my pocket and it is also my music library, weather radar, encyclopedia, and all around handheld computer. I was feeling great since my short afternoon hike on the NCR rail trail north of Baltimore. Despair was to come the next day but just then I didn’t know that. It was a lovely blue sky day and the evening was cool and but not so cold yet that I couldn’t be out and about in a flannel shirt and no jacket.

I decided to stop for a drink at one of my favorite restaurants, I won’t say which because of what I saw going down and what I did about it.

This particular restaurant served a specialty drink that they smoked in front of the customer before serving it. I discovered this delightful thing about smoking a drink at the upscale Basque restaurant across I-83 from me. They call it a Blue Velvet and it is decadently good. But that restaurant had a fire and it’s been closed since last January, although they say they’re opening back up this December. So when this other place started serving a smoked old fashion I tried it out and it was excellent. If pricey.

So I go inside and sit at the bar. A new bartender is there…a young woman I’d never seen before. She asked me what I wanted and I asked if she could make me that smoked old fashion and she said yes.

So I’m chilling out at the bar while she’s making it. Eventually one of the regular bartenders comes back and starts working the little glass washer at the end of the bar. He sees me and asks me if I want my usual food and I say no, just a drink tonight. I don’t really know this bartender, but he seems to know me. There are other regulars behind the bar I see often, but this is late Sunday night and so I suppose these are the off hours staff. He’s tall, thin and bearded and he seems okay. But his interactions with the young woman really put me off.

She starts walking over to me with my drink and the guy grabs he by the arm as she passes by him and says something to her. It wasn’t a rough grab but it was a grab, and the first thing I’m thinking is no, you don’t touch your staff like that. He says something to her and she nods and walks over to me and puts my drink down.

The process at this restaurant involves putting a smoker over the glass. They apparently get them from one of their suppliers and it has that company’s name on it. It’s a wooden thing that fits over the glass and has that company’s logo carved onto it. On the top of the smoker is a small bowl the bartender fills with some wood like hickory, mesquite, or red oak. Once the bowl is filled a torch lighter is used to burn the wood, and smoke drifts down from the bowl and covers the top of the drink. At the Basque restaurant the bartender would bring a small bottle prefilled with smoke and pour the smoke from the bottle over your drink while you watched. It’s all very theatrical in a way but that’s part of the enjoyment.

So this new young bartender starts trying to smoke my drink using their smoke top device, but it isn’t getting the smoke down onto the drink. I’ve seen this happen before and suggest to her that the smoker is clogged. She agrees. But then the other bartender comes over and sees the problem with the smoker and basically takes over the process from the young woman. He brings over a new smoker, fills it’s bowl with wood chips and starts torching it himself, saying in front of her and me that he needs to show her how it’s done so she doesn’t screw it up. And I’m thinking no, this is not how you train your staff. This is how you make them want to quit.

I can appreciate there are customers who will get all ornery when they’re being served by inexperienced staff, but that’s on them. I’m fine with being part of the process of teaching someone their job, especially when I can see they really want to learn. And this young woman was, before the other guy came along, pleasant, cheerful and wanting to make my time there good. It wasn’t her fault that the damn smoker she picked up was clogged. The other thing is you give staff the tools they need to do the job, and don’t be putting it on them when the tools fail them. Get them better tools.

So now there is discord behind the bar. The young woman is upset and she goes off to work the tables in the seating area; a task I think she was mostly there for and only did behind the bar while the other bartender was away or on his break. Periodically she comes back to the bar to take the drink orders from the tables, and goes into the kitchen to bring out their food. But a definite chill is in the air and I am completely sympathetic with the young woman.

I hear another staff member, also young woman, just casually say to the guy “She’s pretty angry at you.” He seemed to shrug it off. I saw him talk to her semi privately a couple of times but what was said or what it was about I had no idea. Whatever it was it didn’t clear the air.

I am loath to insert myself into other people’s drama, but there are limits. I kept an eye on the movements of the young woman until I saw an opportunity to catch her eye away from the others, and motioned her over to a spot where we could talk without being seen.

I told her 1) I saw him grab your arm. That was way out of line. 2) you do not criticise staff in front of the customers, that is completely unprofessional. 3) the crapped up smoker was not your fault.

She thanked me but the look on her face was thanks enough. I went back to finish my drink. At some point someone, or some someones (there were other young women working there) must have said something to the guy because he came over and apologised to me for putting all that in front of me.

Okay…I’m a gay male and the dynamics of straight male/female interaction is a foreign land to me. Fine. But I think I get workplace dynamics pretty well. You keep your hands off your co-workers. Train your staff with a measure of patience and humility: you had to be trained once yourself. Keep your criticisms private. Keep it away from the customers. Whatever it is.

I first heard of this child’s skull and the explosive argument about the human emergence from reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis. It was a pivotal time in my life when I was hungry for spiritual guidance, having basically walked away, mostly, from the Baptist religion of my youth.

I would remain an agnostic for decades until finally becoming an atheist in my middle fifties. I dipped into this and that 60s/70s spiritual fad, read about Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, sorted through the detritus of various gurus and spiritual cults, glanced at the pamphlets I was handed while photographing protest marches in DC. None of it moved me much. I was a science geek from an early age, took a class in logic and semantics in college, and could not seriously abide plain nonsense no matter how enchanting it seemed to me as a work of art.

So I wandered through my early 1970s, dazed and confused…

I discovered Ardrey’s book at age twenty while working at Industrial Photo in Silver Spring, in a corner of the basement where it had been tossed by some prior worker among random open boxes of inventory. I picked it up and read…(I understand the sexism of the text I am about to quote…sorry…but it’s how he wrote it in 1961)

Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was [mankind] born. The home of our [fathers] was that of the African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about – slowly, ever so slowly – on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.

In neither bankruptcy nor bastardy did we face out long beginnings. [Man’s] line is legitimate. Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator’s way. But most significant of all our gifts, as things turned out, was the legacy bequeathed us by those killer apes, our immediate forebears. Even in the first long days of our beginnings we held in our had the weapon, an instrument somewhat older than ourselves.

[Man] is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe. And if [man] in time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we made our quick little march.”

He was writing this during peak cold war about when I was doing my duck and cover drills in the elementary school I attended. So I have a hunch about what “time of need” he’s talking about there.

The book instantly grabbed me for these nuggets of pure gold on the first page: not born in original sin, but born of this earth, and we can know ourselves after all, but to do that we have to look to our past, to our evolutionary heritage. He makes it even plainer later in the book when he says we are not fallen angels but risen apes; a metaphor I have always held close.

His books have been rightly criticized for the over emphasis on the killer ape hypothesis. I’m told the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001 was heavily influenced by African Genesis. A different and more complete picture has emerged since the book was published. I bring it up here only to say that Ardrey made me familiar with the long and acrimonious argument Dart’s discovery began, as related in the above video. But science Does self correct, if the evidence is there. Eventually even his most ardent critics came to admit they were wrong, and Dart was right. And it was walking upright, on two legs, that grew the large brain, not the other way around, freeing the arms and hands to do…things.

And I think Ardrey’s point still stands, if not quite as dramatically as he put forward. Given our ancient ancestors’ lack of physical stature, our canines ridiculously small by comparison, having no claws or talons or poisonous venom, how long should we have lasted on those African plains, had we not been born with a weapon in our hands? This same videographer has another one about the one simple thing we could do that gave us an advantage over the other animals we were competing with for food: we could throw things, hit and inflict damage at a distance from our physical selves. Our bodies, our shoulders specifically, are adapted to it.

Rocks and stones first probably, then spears, and from there to arrows…bullets…nukes.

Ardrey addresses this in his book too. The weapon that gave us a survival advantage, now threatens it, if we don’t learn to manage as he put it, those deeper understandings of ourselves, and those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.

This video came across my Facebook feed just now and I’m glad I found a copy on YouTube I could share with you on my blog here. I can see myself in it so clearly I’m stunned.

This is me, mostly. And it might seem strange to think of me as having grown up in an unstable environment, because the usual image of that is a horribly brutal family situation and mine wasn’t that. I never experienced childhood homelessness. I was never physically abused. I never went to bed hungry or out the door in dirty clothes. By all rights I have to say I had it pretty good. But family life on mom’s side was still dicey at times and this video really gets how I learned to cope with it.

Thing is when you grow up in certain situations they don’t seem unusual to you because that’s your normal environment. It’s only as you get older and have more contact with the world around you that you begin to see how odd it might seem to others. But even then it’s still normal to you.

Mom’s love was the one constant I had growing up. Everyone else in her side of the family (I never had any contact with dad’s side until I was in my middle teens) was a minefield of is it good today or angry, and that was mostly about the central family drama that I was in the middle of and which I won’t go into now. The only one I never had to be careful around on the maternal side besides mom was my maternal uncle who lived in California who was always cheerful and fun. But he was clear across the country from me. I grew up with a bitter always angry and hostile maternal grandmother and that was the big minefield I learned to navigate growing up. Mostly by going to my room and closing the door, or going out for a walk. To this day long walks are how I work off nervous energy.

Don’t even get me started on the teachers I had all through grade school until I entered Woodward. Being the only son of a divorced mom they all pegged me as a problem child the moment I entered their classrooms and treated me that way (Montgomery County let me see the notes those teachers wrote in my school record, but wouldn’t let me make copies alas). Then there were the bullies my being a skinny girlish art kid attracted. Woodward was paradise compared to everything that came before, but even then it wasn’t until my senior year there that I finally began to feel secure enough to open up and make real friends.

So I see myself in this video very clearly. I can think of at least one other friend here who probably can too. I see you. Survivor’s Intelligence.

Of all the symptoms of Parkinson’s, the one I dislike the very most is fatigue. Tremors at this stage I’m in are trivial. I get the occasional stiffness, mostly in my thighs, but it’s not bad. I get the dizzy spells randomly. The brain fog comes and goes. But fatigue, when it hits, slams me down. It sucks the minutes of my life I still have left away and I just want to stay in bed and I get nothing done.

I have to be careful though, and not attribute everything that happens to me to Parkinson’s. The fact is I am 73 now and so some of this, maybe even most of it, is simply just my getting old. Also, my heart. I was told when I had the heart attack in 0ctober 2019 (tomorrow is the anniversary), that I have a leaky heart valve. I’m three years away from the time my cardiologist and the surgeon that did my angioplasty say are when I’ll probably need it replaced.

They say it can be done nowadays without opening up my chest. Lovely. Another scary procedure to be done inside my beating heart.

I have a book I purchased to write everything my family would need to know upon my demise. It’s titled “Sorry, It’s Your Problem Now.” I should probably get to work on it…

Got some good woodworking done today, something I’ve been looking forward to doing once I was on retirement time. Happy to note that Parkinson’s wasn’t bothering me at all and I can still work the table saw and other power tools pretty easily for a 73 year old. Even moving and lifting to its feet the Ryobi table saw wasn’t a problem.

As you can see I’m doing all this outside. I keep the table saw in an outside tool shed because it’s much too heavy for me to take up and down stairs, and there is really no place inside for me to be doing any woodworking. This means I have to do any woodworking during the part of the year it’s warm enough and not raining.

I had two things I wanted to at least get cut so I could stain and seal them later, and what you see in this photo is, or will be when I’m through with it, a lid for the storage bench at the front of my basement art room I needed to make after I got the new hot water tank; which required adding a bunch of new pipe and regulators to a space I was using to store art supplies. The lid will keep all that new plumbing in its own space and I can store my supplies on top of it.

I needed to buy nothing. The wood was from my stack of spare pieces from other projects. The power tools I’d bought long ago. The minor skill set I have for this work I got long ago while working for a couple of guys who had their own custom speaker shop, plus while working in a custom plastic shop. That odd skill set I have now was a benefit of the way I ricocheted around different jobs and workplaces when I was a young man, before I settled in to PCs and software development. I am no carpenter, but I can do most of the Harry Homeowner stuff around the house that needs doing and maybe a bit more.

Via Josh Helfgott on Facebook…

Researchers just found the graves of more than 1,000 children who died LOCKED UP in America’s youth prisons, scattered across 29 states, most in plots nobody bothered to mark.

Georgetown University researchers have traced children’s graves to 40 reform schools and youth prisons, from Salem, Oregon, to Augusta, Maine. The kids died between the early 1800s and the 1950s. Most were poor and disproportionately Black. Many had committed no serious crime and were locked up for being “incorrigible.” Death records mostly blame tuberculosis or flu. The project’s leader, Marc Schindler, says those records deserve skepticism, and his team’s report lists “violence and neglect” among the causes.

The biggest site is in the woods across the street from Maryland’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, which opened in 1870 as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. More than 230 Black boys are buried there. Children as young as 5 were sent there, some just for being poor, homeless or orphaned. A state report says white guards beat them with a brass-studded belt. In the 1920s the boys were leased out to nearby farms, and the institution kept most or all of their pay.

State officials knew that cemetery existed for decades and did nothing. Schindler rediscovered it in 2024, while he was a top Maryland juvenile justice official. More than 200 of the graves are gray cinder blocks with no names or dates.

Don’t be lulled into thinking the abuse documented in this article is something out of the past. It’s still happening, only moved into privately owned and under the radar camps for so-called troubled youth; usually just teenagers being teenagers with parents who were probably brutalized themselves. Every now and then that youth gulag archipelago peeks out into the open, as when a couple years ago a kid whose parents sent him via an “escort” service to one in the backwoods of North Carolina was put into what the other kids there called “the burrito”: wrapped tightly and locked into an alarmed sleeping bag on his first night there. He had a panic attack that night, allegedly checked on, then later found dead, naked from the waist down, underwear next to his body, and bruises on his arms. Radio silence after a couple news articles about him and another kid who died trying to escape. These outfits often have powerful protectors in their state legislatures.

Faulkner said the past is not dead it is not even past. How humanity treats its young is its judgement on itself and whether it deserves a future. It’s the two sides of the human coin. We raise decent, noble souls as often as we grow sickeningly cruel sociopaths and indifferent zeros. Yes Sam, there is good in this world; but is it enough?

Still in it.

That three pointed star hood ornament on a Mercedes-Benz actually has meaning apart from just being a company logo…

Back when the internal combustion engine was a new thing, Gottlieb Daimler invented the first high speed four stroke internal combustion engine. He sent a postcard of the city of Stuttgart with a star he had drawn on it to his wife, writing that someday that star would shine over the factory he would build, that would make their fortune.

Years later his son’s decided on the star to represent the company, and the three areas their father wanted to motorize: Land, Sea, and Air.

My star, and the car it rides on, has just over 220k miles on it now…

So…about that Hardware run I mentioned the other day…

I was away from the house over the weekend (more on that later) and I’ve a habit of turning off the water to the house if I’m away on a road trip, however short. What I’ve noticed over a long enough period with the house water turned off is one or both of the toilet tanks will drain empty.

The leakage can’t be much or I would notice it and replace the leaky flapper valve and all is good again. But the very very slow leakage I don’t notice until I return home, turn the water back on, and hear one or both toilets in the house start filling. Which usually means a trip to the hardware store for new flapper valves. You let them dry out after a period of use and they either shrink when they get dry again or harden and won’t seal anymore.

This is something I just need to bake into a long road trip: go buy some flapper valves before leaving, so I have one or more ready for when I get back home and turn the water back on.

Anyway…this time I saw water on the bathroom floor, apparently because one or more gaskets had also failed, not badly just enough to start dripping, and I ended up replacing everything from the turn off valve to the stuff in the tank.

Which was easy and simple because the parts for my old-ish standard toilets are available practically everywhere. I am no Luddite but before buying into the latest and greatest new thing my first question is how easy is it to get parts. Because everything breaks eventually. Most of what is in my house may seem surprisingly low tech or old tech for a guy like me because of this.

When I did the big backstage tour at Walt Disney World I was told the rides that required the most maintenance by far were the water rides. In this house it’s nearly always something water touches. The sinks, the toilets, last month it was the hot water heater. I’ve had to replace my roof three times to deal with leaks. The electrical and gas services have given me next to no trouble at all, though I’ve had to replace a bunch of appliances. It’s almost always something to do with water.

Hoisted From The Blog Archive…just because…

The wind never seems to stop here on the plains.  It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now.  The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage.  The days have grown short, the nights cold.  And long.  Very long.  And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind.

Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage.  Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you.  Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead.  There is only you here tonight.  You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away.  So very far away.  Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night.  There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago.

Listen to the wind.  Listen carefully.  There are ghosts here on the plains.  Hear them talk tonight among themselves…

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. “When he was depressed,” she says, “he would just grab a handful.” Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew “would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person.”
-Vanity Fair

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
-Wikipedia

Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.

Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.

Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.

“I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. “At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”

As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.

“It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottom of the end of a pole.

I did the best I could.  The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head.  There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.

I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.

He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
-The Laramie Project

Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.
-Wikipedia

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin.
-Vanity Fair

Dr. Cantway:  I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in.  I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this.  Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.

Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour.  You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing.  Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew.
-The Laramie Project

Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.

“I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Aaron Kreifels:  I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him?
-The Laramie Project

My last day at Space Telescope this trip was last Wednesday. After that were days I didn’t usually work anyway. That’s because when I came back to work it was part-time; Tuesday and Wednesday full eight hours, then half a day Thursday working from home, to make a twenty hour work week.

Eventually, because I had a recurring Monday afternoon web meeting with our ITSD staff, I switched the half day Thursday for a half day Monday working from home. Then I’m off until the following Monday.

But Monday was a work from home day. So yesterday didn’t really feel like being retired, even though I didn’t need to do the web meeting, and could not anyway because I turned in my equipment last Wednesday. The short wave radio is sitting on my desk where the office laptop used to. Yesterday I’d been retired for five days but it didn’t really feel like it. For the past two years Tuesday was the first day of the week that I needed to be in the office and put in a full day.

And…it’s Tuesday…and I don’t need to be anywhere.

The awareness begins settling in; that strange feeling…like I’m a kid again and school’s out and I have the whole summer ahead of me.

“Oh that magic feeling nowhere to go…” Actually, I need to go to the hardware store…