One of Those Days

Ever have "one of those days"? I'm having one of those days.

For some reason, I went into my garage today, the parking spot for my trusty Jeep Grand Cherokee. I call it "trusty" because it's 30 years old and going strong. I noticed the tires were low on air. No problem, right? I'll just drive to the nearby Sheetz gas station and pump some air into the tires.

The Sheetz station is about a half mile from my house so I got there quickly. I waited in line for access to the air pump. Finally the man ahead of me pulled his car up to the air pump. I saw him get the air hose and do something. Then he put the hose back on the pump. He came around his car and said to me, "The air pump appears to be broken. I'm going to ..." and he named a nearby location where there was an air pump. It was about two or three miles away.

I followed his car to the next air pump. He put air into his car's tires. At this point I was prepared to pull up to the air pump and pump air into my car's tires. But as the man was about to open his car door, I realized that I had forgotten to bring money with me. I mentioned that to the man, and the man gave me four quarters. That was kind of him. He drove away and I pulled up to the air pump. A sign on the pump informed me that the pump required five quarters in order to operate. If I had a dollar I could get change in the store, but I had no money at all. (Not to mention, no wallet and no driver's license.)

I drove back to my home and parked in my garage. I have a pump that slowly, slowly can inflate a tire. I began putting air into the left front tire, which showed 20 pounds of air pressure. It required 20 minutes to bring the tire up to 30 pounds. I moved to the next tire. Its air pressure was only 10 pounds, so it required about 30 minutes to inflate. Then I moved to the right side of the Jeep. Tires on that side were at 20 pounds. Altogether, the four tires took about an hour and thirty minutes to bring them up to 30 pounds. That doesn't include the 15 or so minutes I spent traveling to two non-functional air pumps.

After spending so much time putting air into my tires, I wondered if the battery was still charged. So I got into the Jeep and I turned the ignition key to the Start position. The engine would not start. The battery was dead. I got my charger and put it on the battery and plugged it in. It's charging now, as I type this. When the sun goes down, about two hours from now, I'll go to the garage and remove the charger from the battery. Or maybe I should go out later, like 8PM. Or maybe I should leave the charger on the battery all night. It's only charging at about two amps. Nah, the last time I kept the charger on a battery all night, the battery exploded when I tried to start the Jeep. You can read about it here.

History

My house was built in 1946; it's getting old and creaky. I was born in 1946; I'm getting old and creaky. So I know how my house is feeling. Still, I suspect my house will continue on into the future for a much longer period of time than I will.

I moved into my house in 1951 when I was 5, almost 6, years old. I attended a community college when I was 18. I moved out of the house when I was 19 to attend college in Richmond, Virginia. Then I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, when I was 20 to attend Virginia Tech. 

After graduation, I moved to Burlington, North Carolina, where I worked for five years, designing missile guidance systems and trouble-shooting production problems. Sometimes I had to travel. I flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to several West Coast cities, and to a few places in-between the coasts. I left that job in 1974. A friend and I bought a camper van and we traveled the country, from east to west and north to south.

We went to Chicago. We went to Indianapolis. We drove across Montana. (I blogged about Montana here and here. I blogged about Denver here.) We went to North Dakota. We went to Wyoming and watched Old Faithful do its thing. We went to a World's Fair in Spokane, Washington. In fact, we drove across all the northern states on our way to Seatle, and then down the Pacific Coast Highway as far as Los Angeles. The Highway doesn't go all the way to LA on the coast, so we drove through central Oregan and then through a redwood forest in California and hit the coast again at Crescent City.

Then we drove back to the East Coast. We drove across the "southern" states, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas – close enough to Dallas that we could see the skyscrapers – but we didn't want to see a big city nor become immersed in its traffic, so we kept driving.

It would take weeks to write about all the people and places we saw – in fact, I don't think I could cover everything I saw and did if I had only a few weeks to write about it. It was historic. I suppose everyone has a time in their life that they look back on with amazement at all the places they visited and all the people they met.

At the time I made my trip around the country, there were no cell phones – hence, no cell phone cameras. And I didn't take my film camera. So I have no photos of that trip. Or rather, the images I have are in my head: images of my friend, his two dogs, my dog, and the camper van that carried us and our hitchhiking passengers. The images carry feelings for me. Sometimes I wish I had taken a camera on the trip and returned with photos, but I have many other photos that I never look at, so I don't think it really matters. 

For a while after that trip, I bought surplus electronics by sealed bid at government auctions and sold it by mail order through classified ads in electronics magazines. Much of what I bought was non-functional and I had to repair it before I could sell it. Long tractor-trailer trucks would often stop in the street in front of my house and I would load the equipment into the truck, sign the bill of lading, and send the equipment on its way.

Later, I worked in Roanoke, Virginia, designing schematics for electronics and laying out printed circuit boards – at first manually with tape and mylar, then later I performed both jobs on a CAD system. I was also the Buyer for all the electronics, so I spent a lot of time on the phone. I enjoyed both aspects of my job, both Design and Purchasing. I lost that job at the end of 2000 when the company went out of business. The world wasn't ready for self-navigating mobile robots.

Three Poems

In the book that is my memory, on the first page of that chapter that is the day I met you, appear the words "Here begins a new life."
– from La Vita Nuova

I haven't always been a blogger. I used to write poetry. The three free-verse poems that follow this sentence were written many years ago.

Poems From Another Lifetime

When it’s 2AM
and the night is quiet,
I seem to not fit the world.

Said the wrong things today,
spoke when I should have listened,
was silent when I should have spoken.

At 2AM it comes to haunt me,
to live in my head and make me feel that
something in me doesn’t fit the world.

I get through the noisy day,
until it’s 2AM
and the night is quiet, and then

I seem to not fit the world.

II

My connection to you
is more than who you are
and what you do.

My connection to you
is lifetimes of love.

Perhaps you were my daughter
many lifetimes now.

Perhaps I was your son
not that long ago.

Maybe we were brothers
or sisters
or lovers.

Man and wife
or children together.

I look into your eyes
and see someone that I know
well beyond our time together.

I loved you long before we met.
I had forgotten how much.

Now,
I remember.

III

Warm rains have come and gone,
Melting the winter snow,
Cleansing the earth's gentle heart.

Sun shines brightly on my face,
Gently cheering me,
Softly warming me.

Morning beckons me, night is gone.
Memories linger bittersweet,
Longings now hidden.

Questions haunt me,
Ghosts of the night,
Chased by the sun.

I would live that night again,
Dream the dream,
Feel the wonder.

Though my heart is wounded,
The sun shines now,
I live, still.

A Tale of Three Toothaches

A few years ago I awoke in the darkness of the night with a toothache. The ache kept me awake until morning. Then I called my dentist.

My dentist said to come to his office right away. So I did that. He examined my tooth, took x-rays, and told me to see an endodontist. He recommended one. 

Soon, I was sitting in the endodontist's chair. The endodontist was a pleasant young woman with a ton of fancy equipment in her office. She examined my tooth, then she performed a root canal. Later, she capped the tooth. The procedures cost $3500. As I said, this was a few years ago, so today the cost might be much higher. 

A year or two passed, and then one night I awoke with a toothache in another tooth. This time I did nothing. The pain went away and returned around 3PM. Then, it went away again. But it returned every day for ten days. Then the pain disappeared and hasn't returned.

Another year passed, and one night I awoke with a toothache on the other side of my jaw. Just as before, I did nothing about it. The toothache lasted for seven days, then it disappeared and hasn't returned.

I'm not offering medical advice. I'm just describing my own experiences, for what they may be worth. But I cannot help wondering about that first toothache. What if I had done nothing? Would it have gone away? Could I have avoided a root canal and a crown? I'll never know.

Early Years

My commenter (LL) on my previous post said when she was young, she made 50 cents per hour. That reminded me of my first paying job: newspaper delivery. I was 13 when I started that job.

Newspapers today are a shadow of what they used to be. Newpapers were thick and heavy. I had about 80 to 100 weekly papers and about 120 Sunday papers. I delivered the weekly papers by rolling them up and then loading them into the basket on my bike. I biked down all the streets on my route, delivering papers to both sides of the street. I was bitten by dogs three times. On Thursday afternoon, I spent several hours collecting money from the first half of my route, and on Friday afternoon I collected from the second half of my route. I spent several hours each day just collecting. On Saturday morning, I would go over the route again and try to collect from the homes where no one was at home on Thursday or Friday. 

The Sunday papers were so thick and heavy that it was impractical for me to deliver them by bicycle. So my father got up early every Sunday and we would load the bundles of newpapers into the trunk of his Buick Electra, and we would begin delivery. I would grab a newpaper and run to the first house and throw it on the porch, then run back to the Buick and grab another paper and deliver it to the other side of the street. Back and forth I ran, for several miles, delivering papers from the Buick's trunk to the customer's porch. 

It was a hard job, especially when the weather was bitterly cold. And how much money did I make from this job? After paying for the newspapers, I cleared about seven dollars per week. That's right - a dollar per day for working at least 30 hours per week. 

During the weekdays, I always stopped at my grandmother's house on the way home. She would make me a big stack of pancakes, with butter and syrup, of course. I could eat much more then than I can eat now, because I was always on the go. And being young, my metabolism was no doubt higher than today.

One morning as I was leaving in darkness, I saw a dark spot in the yard. I went over to it and saw that it was a hole. I returned to the house and went to my parents' bedroom.

Me: "Dad, there's a big hole in the front yard. It's about three feet across."

Dad: "Get the flashlight and see how deep it is."

So I went outside with the flashlight. The hole was lined with brick and was about 12 feet deep. It was clearly the remains of a well. I returned to the house and told my father the bad news. That was the end of his night's sleep. From somewhere, my father acquired the side of a large crate and covered the well with it. Later that day, a dump truck arrived and filled the hole with sand.

After my parents passed away, I moved back into that house. The well, filled with sand and soil, is still in the front yard. Nuria uses it as a flower garden. I put bricks around the perimeter of the flower garden, and Nuria planted decorative solar-powered lights among the bricks.

But where did the well come from? My neighborhood was part of a plantation in the Civil War era, and the plantation may even have been much older than the Civil War. The eastern half of Virginia is full of history, and history contains its own surprises. 

Time Traveler

When I was a very young child, my parents and I lived with my grandparents. They heated their home with a coal stove. At the end of their backyard, next to an alley, there was a small shed. The shed contained a "bin" where coal was stored. Periodically, a truck would drive through the alley behind our house, and it would stop and unload coal into our coal bin. One of my chores was to go out back periodically and fill our coal scuttle with coal and bring it to the house.

I observed that many lumps of coal had impressions of plant stems and leaves on the surface of the coal. I was four or five years old and too young to know about fossils, but I thought it was interesting. These memories are from about the year 1950, but I remember them still. Though it was long ago, in my mind I can still see those lumps of coal and the fossil leaves imprinted onto them.

Also from that time period is the ice man. Many homes did not have refrigerators – the technology was fairly new and prices were high. So, many families had an "ice box", literally an insulated box into which a block of ice would be placed on a shelf inside the top of the icebox. I can recall the ice delivery man. He drove a yellow truck and he would stop at certain houses and unload a block of ice for that home's icebox. There was a factory nearby that produced blocks of ice. The ice man bought quantities of ice and delivered it to his customers.

Soon, oil heat came into fashion and coal and coal bins disappeared. Refrigerators became affordable and the ice man and his blocks of ice disappeared. How many things we take for granted today. I wonder, what will disappear from tomorrow's world? If anyone knew the answer to that question, they could become a millionaire – or perhaps a billionaire. 

Saturday Morning

In a blog I posted yesterday, I said that there was still a little snow on the ground, and more snow was due to fall during the night. And it did.

Looks like we received about five inches, just what the weatherman predicted. The current temperature is 28°F. The forecast calls for a high of 38° today followed by a low of 17° tonight. I expect to have this snow around for a few days.

Nuria is supposed to work today, and she is outside cleaning the snow off her car. I told her to stay at home today, but she is not hearing it. She is the most loyal employee God ever created.

Before I could finish writing this post, Nuria's car was clean.

But You Wouldn't Want to Live There

I was writing an email to a friend when I was prompted by an inner voice to include this text:

I think our lives -- the path our spirits travel, with obstacles and rewards -- were put in place by God so that we might learn lessons. Sometimes we learn by succeeding, and sometimes we learn by failing, but it is the experience that teaches us. Never take a measuring stick to your life, because you don't know what God is measuring. Just know that you will have to go through the experience again and again until you learn its lesson, and the lesson involves love. Love for your fellow humans and love for yourself, because you are a creation of the Creator and therefore you have the Divine inside you. Everyone does, even though not all of us may be able to see it in our everyday lives.

My friend asked me to expand on this subject, so I decided to make it a blog post. 

If there is a God, and if God is good, then why does evil exist and why is there suffering in the world?

Imagine a world where there was no suffering and everyone was happy all the time, only because that is the way God commanded it to be. If you were always satisfied and if everything went your way, how would you feel about that? You'd probably get tired of it faster than you think. Life would become boring. And there would be no escape.

An episode of The Twilight Zone titled "A Nice Place to Visit" was based upon the premise that a place where a person can have everything they want would quickly become a nightmare. There is a Wikipedia entry on this subject. You can read it here.

More Snow Coming

Snow began falling in my part of Virginia on January 5. The snowfall ended early on the 6th with an accumulation of about two inches -- a very light snowfall. But now it's the 9th and the ground is still mostly covered with snow, with patches of grass here and there. The snow lingers because the weather  has been cold, with nighttime temperatures in the teens and daytime highs of only about 33 degrees Farenheit. 

Date: January 5. Backyard (below).

 

     

Date: January 9. Backyard (below). The forecast: more snow.

Today is January 10. There is still a lot of snow on the ground. 

The forecast calls for more snow tonight.

First Snow

I posted a blog titled "The Subaru and the Snowstorm". But as night fell, so did the snow. I just took this photo from a front window in my house, the first snow of 2025:

Nuria took a photo, too, for her "girls" in Costa Rica. Of course, her three girls are in their 30s and 40s, but two of them have children that might be interested in seeing snow. Too bad they're a thousand miles away, but at least today we can take a picture and have it ready to transmit within seconds. 

It's the first snow of 2025 for my central Virginia city. The forecast calls for snow early tonight, changing to a wintry mix (rain, snow, and sleet) then changing to rain and snow for tomorrow. Fortunately, Nuria has tomorrow off work. Depending on the condition of the roads in the morning, the store may be closed tomorrow. 

It's midnight – time for me to go to bed. G'night, everyone.