…still in it.

Had four new run flats put on the Mercedes this morning. I had not run flats on it because several years ago the Costco in White Marsh said they couldn’t get the run flats for my car anymore, and talked me into putting on a normal tire set, which I expected to drive less rough and last longer than the run flats were. They did neither. But I think I understand the problem better now.

My car has the stiffer sport suspension in it, because as I am told, the diesel engine weighs significantly more. So Daimler puts the sports suspension on their diesels. Sports suspensions ride harder and wear tires out faster. And so my experience with not run flats was basically the same as with the run flats.

The only advantage to the not run flats is they’re hundreds cheaper. But the stress of driving around with only a tire plug kit in case I got a flat wasn’t worth it. I’ll keep the plug kit in the trunk of course, but I feel better knowing that I have some leeway to get the car someplace safe and off the road if a puncture happens.

This time I went to the Costco in Owings Mills, which is more like your standard Costco than the one in White Marsh, which I think was a Price Club way back in the day. I could almost imagine myself walking through the Costco in San Luis Obispo the floor plan is so identical, except they can’t sell alcohol here in Maryland so no Kirkland tequila (I joke, you can get the good stuff at the Costco in San Luis). I had no trouble getting run flats from them, and there were lots of places nearby to grab a bite to eat and shop while I was waiting than at the White Marsh one.

So that’s the 210k service and new tires. Now I’m ready for another trip to Oceano. But I’ve no idea when I can get enough vacation time for that. I’m hoping maybe next September. I’ll see if I can negotiate a week or two of work offsite.

I heard Ed McMahon on Johnny Carson tell your usual lounge lizard joke once, that I still think is kinda funny. He said if you’re ever hiking in the wilderness make sure to bring along everything you need to make a martini. That way, if you’re ever lost, you can make yourself a martini. And while you’re mixing it up someone will tap you on the shoulder and say “That’s not the way to make a martini,” and you can ask them how to get back to civilization again.

As I said…a lounge lizard joke. But a good one. And it probably works for making a margarita. I think I finally have the right mix of ingredients to make that perfectly smooth Italian margarita I’ve only been able to get sporadically at various bars and restaurants. And along with that, a silky smooth basic margarita. And probably someone will tell me this isn’t the way to make a margarita.

Whatever. I’ve wondered for so long why some places make their margaritas so tart I can barely sip them. Pretty sure now it’s too much lime.

I’ve seen the bartenders use all sorts of things…sour mix, Grand Marnier instead of Cointreau, simple syrup. It’s been hit and miss. Last summer my brother took me to Avila Beach golf club, just up the coast from Pismo, and there I watched a young bartender make me a margarita from scratch…a good tequila, Cointreau and a fresh lime she cut and squeezed herself, plus something in a mystery bottle that I thought might be sour mix or simple syrup. It was the smoothest, nicest margarita I’ve ever had. But when I tried to do that myself it came out way too tart.

I’ve tried ready made margarita mix. The Kirkland stuff is very good. But I can’t make an Italian margarita with it. I’ve tried a bunch of different recipes all to no avail. Your basic margarita follows a 321 rule. Three parts tequila, 2 parts Cointreau (some substitute Grand Marnier) and one part lime. I think that one part lime is where a lot of bartenders get it wrong and it turns out too tart. But just fiddling with the amount of lime wasn’t working for me. I bought some fresh limes to try and duplicate what I had at the Avila Beach Club and could not.

But I really Really like that Italian margarita. So recently I tried experimenting with it in ernest. I started subtracting lime from the accepted recipes but too little was no good either. A good margarita is a balance of sweet and tart and while I lean toward sweet in just about everything (my go-to tequila for making margaritas, Tres Generaciones plata, is a slightly sweet and very smooth tequila) the lime needed to be in there. Then I got a tip: use agave sweetener, but sparingly, to balance out the lime. Instead of one part lime, one half part lime and one half part agave sweetener. Or maybe two-thirds part lime and one third agave sweetener. I am stil fiddling with it.

But it works!

Now I can have my Italian margaritas at home whenever I want. Which isn’t often because at my age my body doesn’t take alcohol like it used to. I go out for dinner now I’m more likely to have a mocktail as an actual drink. In fact, a new gay mocktail only bar has opened up near the DC gayborhood I’d like to try sometime soon.

• I find myself anxiously checking first thing in the morning that my Social Security check was deposited when expected. Now I’m instantly paying bills with it I don’t have to until the first of the month, on the theory that if Apartheid Clyde decides I died several months ago like that guy in Washington State, he can’t claw it back from my bank accounts if it’s already in the hands of someone else and at least my bills are paid while I’m wandering through empty Social Security offices trying to convince the system that I’m not dead yet.

    I’m not. I feel fine. I think I’ll go for a walk.

• The Not Run Flats I was talked into buying at Costco last time, because they said they couldn’t get the right ones for my car, didn’t last any longer than the run flats would have anyway, and they didn’t ride any better. So I will have run flats put back on. The Costco in Owings Mills says they can get the right ones for my car now. It’s about 500 bucks more for a set of four but I can avoid the constant the anxiety of running with only an emergency tire plug kit in case I get a puncture.
• The Disney+ Percy Jackson series has already been renewed for a third season which means we will get to the introduction of Nico di Angelo and hopefully see him through the rest of the first five books of the series. But the big reveal during the fight with Cupid doesn’t happen for six more books after that one and I have serious doubts that Disney is going the distance there. If they just let it end with the last of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books then they don’t have to deal with that big reveal in The House of Hades that it wasn’t Annabeth Nico had the crush on.

The best fan art there is of this scene and imo much Much
better than the official graphic novel adaptations, by 
alessia.trunfio

• Pretty sure going full time isn’t going to work for me, given the very low energy levels I have. I would just be working and sleeping all week long with maybe a little energy left for housework on the weekends. I need to make visit to the GP again, which I haven’t in a couple years now, to talk about this, and also verify my measles vaccine status and get the next updated COVID shots before the lunatic currently in charge of our public health services takes vaccines off the market in favor of Draino cocktails.

I really dislike doing this because it seems so much like begging for attention, but I have a story I’ve been working on for years and I would really like some feedback on it.

It’s a sorta-kinda ghost story but in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House where the frights don’t come cheaply from blood and gore and monsters that pop out at you, but instead some strange creepy occurrences and things that go bump in the night. Sorta-kinda.

I play with some tropes. The story takes place not an old victorian mansion but a modern office building. The timeframe is the worst of the subprime mortgage collapse which is important to the background of the plot.

My main characters are a young gay male couple going through a bad patch due to money problems brought on by the meltdown, and also the spending habits of one of them. That one accepts a part in a cheap reality TV ghost hunter show to make a few bucks, but also he’s a computer geek…I play some with that trope too…and a rationalist with an obsession for debunking what he considers occult balony.

There are also a handful of other characters, amature ghost hunters and reality TV charlitans. And lurking in the background, a bunch of brutal predatory capitalists involved in building this luxury office building that nobody, including themselves, wants to spend the night in after it was completed. Or any other time of day.

What I’d like to know is the writing good enough it doesn’t bore you to tears reading it? Do my characters seem realistic? Is the dialogue convincing? Does the story make you want to read more as you go along? I’ve only finished (somewhat) six chapters of it and it’s hard to keep going without any feedback. And truth be told I’m still working on the middle part. I know what it has to do, not just how to do it.

The first chapter, which I’ve posted elsewhere, and got some Very good feedback on, is only one page. It basically tells you what the story is about. If it doesn’t interest you it’s okay to bail after that. The second chapter is background for my two main characters and why they got themselves into this reality TV thing. If they don’t interest you go ahead and bail there. The third chapter is exposition, as they’re driving to the site, on the history of the building that’s allegedly haunted. Does this interest you? If not go ahead and bail there. Things don’t really start happening until the fourth chapter and maybe that’s a mistake but I wanted to set the stage and lure the reader in.

Comment on this post (it’s the React! link) or email me if you like at bgarrett@pobox.com (the brucegarrett address is whitelisted so I would need to add you first) and I’ll send you the links to the Google Docs.

Otherwise…pointers to a good editor I can hire to look it over would be welcome too.

I’m hanging out at the bar at Old Juan’s, a favorite place for good Mexican food and margaritas. It’s a short walk from my brother’s house and by now some of the bartenders there recognise me and know what I’m likely to order. As I’m savoring my margarita I happen to glance out the window by the bar and see a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom (but seriously…it’s a BMW masquerading as a Rolls Royce) pull into the parking lot with three older folks inside. This is something I’m not used to seeing in Oceano, which is a completely wonderful place to stay and to live, but what you’re more likely to see on four wheels there is somebody’s meticulously restored to better than factory new classic muscle car, not that empty status symbol for the rich and tasteless. 

After a while I mention it to the bartender, who tells me that because of the massive fires in LA, a bunch of celebrities and wealthy Los Angelenos have come up the coast and are hanging out in San Luis Obispo.

I can see it. Regretfully. That part of California, to which Oceano, Pismo, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Sun Beach also belongs, and also Morro Bay, is a bit of coastline in paradise that I was hoping to retire back to someday, because it’s where my dad’s side of the family is from and I was born in California. But it’s been “discovered” and if you have to ask what it costs of buy a house there you should be looking at Bakersfield instead. Which I won’t. The term “valley people” has a different meaning where my brother lives.

So best I can do now is visit my brother and the family there every now and then.

As I leave for my walk back to my brother’s house, I see the old folk getting back into their “Rolls”, and I can’t help but think You could have bought a Bentley for that money… Oh well…

#IHangOutAtTheBarForLocalGossip
#ItsNOTaRolls!

Some people journal. I Daytimer.

When I started getting actual W2 work as a contract software developer (as opposed to freelance work for pay I did initially for one of the GLIB admins) I began keeping a work diary on planner pages I initially bought at an office supply store. Those are the small three ring binders at the left. One of those is just a bunch of free form notes about my work on the BGE Home work measurement system.

Later I discovered DayTimer’s 24 hour two page per day planner and that worked for me LOTS better than the Franklin-Covey business day only Planner (because Highly Effective People only work business hours I reckon). A software engineer’s work is almost never just nine to five, and there were times while I was working on James Webb that I pulled some overnights.

(Sometime around then I started a New Yorker-ish cartoon I was going to submit to Christopher Street showing two guys on a first date sitting across the table from each other at an outdoor bistro, and one is saying to the other “I’m sorry hon, but it won’t work. You’re Franklin Planner and I’m DayTimer” But then Christopher Street went belly up…)

Then, just before I retired, DayTimer got bought out and the 24 hour two page per day desktop refills became lost in the mists of time and the new company’s business model. I was really PO’d, but eventually accepted an almost as good but only barely good enough substitute. I keep complaining about it on the new company’s website. They’re actually Still making the pocket size wirebound 24 hour two page per day planners but those don’t work for me.

Anyway…I keep my planners because I’m weird about things like that, and sometimes you need to have that paper time machine.

So I’m trying to tidy things up at Casa del Garrett (east) in anticipation of a very dear friend coming for a short visit, and I wanted to organize these a bit better. What you see in this photo compasses my entire working life as a (W2) software developer/engineer.

You can see where I was storing them on their sides under the bookshelves and dust accumulated. I’ll be tackling that with the Kirby later.

I was browsing through the old pre-Daytimer entries when I found the day in 1994 I put a deposit down on the last and best apartment I ever lived in, and a bunch of work I did for BGE Home when they were transitioning away from paper timesheets to a mobile data terminal system. There are repeated entries about a batch editor that I had to think about for a moment to remember what exactly it did (it processed the field tech’s digital timesheets to make them ready for ingest into the work measurement system). I see in there a problem I had to address when timesheets crossed day boundaries and the system wasn’t picking up on the fact that the tech was still on overtime after midnight.

One little corner of my life…

Man…what happened to Utz?? I recently bought two bags of Grandma Utz’ kettle cooked potato chips (a favorite). One to put away and the other to snarf down on with a sandwich. The chips in the first bag tasted horrible. Then I looked more closely. The bag now says “Kettle-Style”.

Uh-Oh. The bag used to say “Hand Cooked”. So now “Kettle-Style” joins the Assembly Of Foodstuffs That Are Not What You Think They Are. Cheese Food Product. Lemonade Flavored Drink. Hershey’s Chocolate.

I dumped most of that bag of potato chips thinking okay maybe I just got a bad batch. But the second bag was no better. I double checked the sell-by date and that bag was supposed to be good until September. I’m tossing it nearly full because it is just uneatable.

A friend was complaining some months ago that in his opinion Utz was using a new cooking oil that tasted rancid. I just thought he’d got a bad batch, or that his aging taste buds were going rogue on him.

Maybe that’s my problem. But I think not. American corporations care more about what Wall Street thinks of them then their customers. Something was changed not to improve the product, but to improve the bottom line for Wall Street. That’s sad. Utz used to be my go-to potato chip. Nobody, absolutely nobody made them as good as Utz. That is, until I discovered the ones Trader Joe’s sold. Guess where I’m going this morning…

[Update…] Another good place to get potato chips that don’t taste like they’ve been fried in furniture polish is your local Amish market if you have one. There is one in Cockeysville just up I-83 from me, and also one in York PA.

…sorry. But between the server move and my being on the road during a time of crazy winter hanging on even in the Southwest weather, I haven’t had the energy or the time to post here. I wanted my few regular readers here to know this place is not abandoned, regardless of what you might have been seeing if you tuned in. And I have a backlog of stuff I want to write about when I get to Oceano, so stay tuned.

…because you need to be a better consumer.

Today in The Computer Geek Chronicles…I don’t know how I’d cope with these gadget’s, especially Apple’s since they seem to love breaking things so you have to buy new hardware you really don’t need. But anyway…

I’m listening to the radio and chance across some sort of Christian tune that I could swear was a note for note steal from a passage in Finlandia by Finnish composer Sibelius. So I go looking for Finlandia in my iTunes library, only to discover I never copied that over. Further investigation shows I didn’t copy it over because I don’t have it on any digital media.

But I have some LP’s with it on them, so I fire up my household stereo, and the turntable which I’m sure is happy to know I still love it. Two good versions are by the very theatrical Leopold Stokowski, who was well known for taking…liberties…with the music he was conducting (See Disney’s Fantasia…). The other by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Finlandia is political protest. It was written as a veiled protest against Tsarist Russian control of the Finnish press. (One of my favorite composers, Dimitri Shostakovich, often butted heads with his soviet overlords) It has it’s energetic, you might even say bombastic passages. But toward the end is this beautiful, soulful, hymn like passage that gets to me every time I listen to it, the way Ralph Vaughan-William’s similar passage at the end of his 6th symphony’s first movement.

I could easily see why it would be co-opted by the religious set, and in fact Sibelius made that passage into a single set piece for his Masonic Ritual Music with a chorus for solo opera singer. I have no idea what those lyrics were, but they almost certainly weren’t Be Still My Soul.

So anyway, to remedy that omission from my portable music library, I went looking for it on iTunes. I couldn’t find the Stokowski version but I did find a copy of the von Karajan version. Then I remembered I have a problem with copying music onto my devices, ever since I upgraded the OS on my iPhone.

I’m still on old Apple hardware, and for several iterations now I’ve had to add a special software patch to my copy of iTunes on my artroom Mac Pro. Then the software patch simply refused to download due to some unexplained “network error”. Hahahahaha…that’s Apple’s way of saying time to spend more money at the Apple Store.

The bug is well known out in the wild, but Apple, in it’s traditional way, won’t fix bugs that allow you to not buy new hardware. So this means I can no longer copy music from my iTunes library to my iPhone.

The work-around is I buy new music on the iPhone. It still gets copied onto my Mac Pro copy of iTunes once I log in. And this allows me to then copy it to my very old iPod.

Because (don’t start laughing yet…), Apple hasn’t updated the iPod OS in over a decade, so the last patch to make iTunes compatible with the iPod, probably a decade old now at least…Still Works.

Dig it. So for now, until Apple decides to stop letting older versions of iTunes download new music from the iTunes store, I have a work-around to get music I buy from Apple onto my iPod. To get music I buy in CD format and copy into my iTunes library, I have to use a third party app. At least that works without my having to Jailbreak the iPhone.

I had my first mock cocktail at Rocket to Venus last week and it convinced me that these alcohol free drinks could actually work for me. I haven’t given up drinking entirely, but I have to be very careful because it really is the case that more than one drink in a week’s time and I will get heart flutters. That said, later this week I’m planning on having one or more of La Cuchara’s lovely Velvet Undergrounds (Ancient Age Bourbon, Angostura Bitters, Orange, Hickory Smoke…yes…smoke…you read that right…) but that’s a break up celebration date and heart flutters seem appropriate for such things.

But now I’ve discovered mock alcohol, and in my quest for the perfect mock alcohol I can now report that “Cut Above” mock whiskey is…horrible. To me it tastes like that stuff they put on microwave popcorn to make it taste like it has butter on it, but served as a drink.

That might be me and your mileage may vary. I’ve learned over the years that my genes play a bigger role in how things taste to me than I would have thought when I was a kid. Cilantro tastes like soap, but others seem to like it. I can eat Durian candy and it tastes fine to me, but to others it apparently tastes like vomit. And I’ve never liked the taste of beer, but others will tell me that beer is the bread of life. I can tolerate a good German wheat beer, but that’s all.

So maybe whatever they’re using to simulate the taste of whiskey in Cut Above is just something that reacts badly with my taste buds. But I ended up pouring that entire expensive bottle down the drain because I simply could not drink more than a couple sips. I bought it thinking at worst it would simply not become a favorite, but there is always worse than worst.

I bought a bottle of Free Spirits mock Bourbon tonight at a spot on The Avenue, and I’m sipping it contentedly now. It’s not a perfect imitation, but close enough that I can tell myself it’s not a top shelf Bourbon but good enough for a nightcap. I can tell they’re using cinnamon to give it that alcohol bite, but it kinda does work.

My high tech thermostat was telling me that it’s 13 degrees outside when I got up this morning (it’s taking readings from the AC unit outside where it’s mostly in the shade this time of year). I was hoping for something a bit warmer so I could do my morning walk. But I reckon that’s going to have to wait.

I sure can’t wait for the temperatures to rise into the 50s, like the forecast is saying, later this week. It’ll come with a lot of rain but that’ll help get rid of the snow that’s keeping the car put for now. Of course that’ll mean more flooding.

I’m taking the train to Walt Disney World at the end of the month, as a winter mental health break. Initially I’d wanted to do it right after New Year but there were no roomettes available and this would have to be a train ride because this is the snow time of year and I didn’t want to drive down only to find my streets a foot or more deep in snow and nowhere to park. I’d given some thought to taking a week during Valentine’s day to perk me up, but on reflection that would only have depressed me more. A round trip on the Silver Meteor was available within my budget for the end of January and I took that.

But there were no Disney rooms available in the park other than the top level thousand dollar plus rooms which I can’t afford, and as I write this even those rooms are unavailable. It was frustrating, but on the other hand good to see that DeSantis and Rufo are having zero effect on Walt Disney World’s popularity. I made sure to get my room in Port Orleans Riverside for the May/June two week vacation (can I call them vacations if I’m retired??) now instead of waiting until the annual pass renewal.

I can only wring five nights in a hotel row hotel this trip, but that gives me walking access to Disney Springs which is a must have if I can’t get into any of the park hotels (resorts…whatever…), and the train ride is itself a relaxing part of the vacation. I haven’t done the Silver Meteor in a long time. This time I’m getting off in Kissimmee instead of Orlando. It’s just the next stop down but that gets me a drive into the parks without having to navigate I-5 traffic. I’m renting a car for the stay so I can get around the parks on my own schedule, not the bus schedule, and Florida weather allowing it should be a moment of fun and relaxation. 

Then I get to go back home and trudge through the rest of the winter in Maryland. And spend money on the car. It needs new engine and transmission mounts. So it goes…

3:19PM. It’s getting late in the afternoon for this time of year and the shadows are getting longer and the temperatures are going down from the high of cold as hell to colder than hell. And my car is completely clear of ice. I had to do very little wiping it off and no scraping at all. Most of the clearing was done by the sun. It is currently 26 degrees outside.

All that said, I’m retired now and didn’t have to be in the office this morning. I could lounge around the house doing a laundry and some odds and ends and just let the sun do most of the work. But I didn’t hear a lot of scraping this morning either. Work From Home is still apparently a thing for most of the working neighbors here.

Streets are mostly clear of ice and snow but I am not taking the car anywhere for a while because of all the salt on the road. This is the time of year when I have to make double sure I get the undercarriage wash at the car wash. Frequently.

Finally swept four inches of snow off the car just now. There’s still a thin crust of ice covering most of the body, but here’s the thing: with the sun out now and a clear sky, even though it’s well below freezing that sunlight will melt the rest of it off by mid afternoon.

It was 19 degrees out there as I worked, but on the side of the car where the sun was hitting the car body directly there was liquid water in spots and I was able to just brush off the ice with a gloved hand in those locations.

Probably helps that my car is painted a dark color.

…is my favorite winter activity. We just had a band of pretty fierce snow flurries pass through Bawlmer hon. Moderately large flakes being driven horizontally by the wind. Seems to have stopped as I’m typing this. Forecast is for a bit more snow this coming Tuesday.

When it snows I enjoy hanging out at home in just my cutoffs and a t-shirt, drinking hot coffee or tea with the heat turned up a notch. Yes it adds a tad to the heating bill but I keep the heat low most of the rest of the time and I can afford it. Heinlein said to budget for the luxuries first. I budget for the utilities first. I suppose there’s some overlap there.

Mayo Clinic sent me a follow-up survey about the Cologuard test I had last year. I’ll stick it in the mail when the weather permits. They should know how many of us had false (abnormal) positives (me) versus how many positives were in fact the real thing.

I haven’t had to fill in the beans with a #2 pencil since grade school. But it all came back to me!