D’oh!

A CNN reporter reached for a metaphor to describe the empty streets of Watertown after the bombing. What she came up with was, “it’s like a bomb dropped somewhere.”
You think?

A Week of Spring

I walked through the ‘hood today and, passing by the cucumber tree, I snapped a photo to compare with the photo I took last week. Here’s how the tree looked last Sunday, a mere week ago.

And here’s how the tree looks today.

The tree is a Magnolia acuminata. Its common names are cucumber tree,
cucumbertree (one word), cucumber magnolia, and blue magnolia. This tree was planted in 1718, before the United States of America was a country. What has it “seen” in its almost 300 years? Native-Americans. Slaves. Settlers headed west. On a sunny day in 1864, General Robert E. Lee stood in its shade and looked south toward Petersburg, under siege by Union forces. Now children play under it on summer days. As trees go, I’m sure this one is in the autumn of its days.

What’s In A Name?

I’ve never thought about this, but I recently discovered that there are countries where the government maintains an official list of first names. If you want to pick a name for your baby boy or girl, you have to choose a name from the official list. If you’re an adult and you want to change your name to a name that’s not on the official list, you can’t. The government simply won’t recognize the name. You’ll be nameless, which as you might imagine, will prove to be very inconvenient.

I learned about his while reading about a 15 year old Icelandic girl named Blaer Bjarkardottir. She just learned that her first name, Blaer (an Icelandic word meaning “light breeze”), is not on the list. On official documents she is now identified as “girl.” Her mother is suing the government to get her daughter’s name back.

Blaer seems like a perfectly good name – pretty, even – and I don’t understand how a government can say “Bjarkardottir” is fine but “Blaer” is unacceptable. You can’t even pronounce Bjarkardottir. 

Germany and Denmark also maintain an official list of names for their citizens. Swedish names must meet approval of the tax authorities. China has rules about what you can name a child, and until the 1960s French children had to be named after Catholic saints. Well, that’s what the Internet says.

Once in a fit of puckishness I decided to change my name to

(pronounced: The Engineer Formerly Known as Wayne.)

Later I changed it back. I would have been okay with the government banning my new name. But a government that bans “Blaer”? Words fail me. What is wrong with you, Mannanafnanefnd?

Not familiar with the Mannanafnanefnd? That’s the Icelandic Naming Committee whose purpose is to ensure that personal names are sensible. I’m talking to you, Mannanafnanefnd. What’s up with your name?

The Diet That Wasn’t

I went to my doctor last week and learned I was at my heaviest weight ever. The scales read 222, but that was fully dressed, with athletic shoes, and having eaten and drank that morning. My weight right out of bed is 212. But still! Two hundred twelve pounds is way more than I should weigh.

So I started a diet on Sunday. Made it to Monday. Made it to Tuesday. Made it to … nope, not Wednesday. That was the day I blew my diet all to hell by going to a Chinese restaurant and buying takeout – a serving of moo shu pork and a quart of pork fried rice. So good!! I ate the whole thing! I ate half of each as soon as I got home. I ate more at dinnertime. And I got up at 3 AM and ate the remainder. It was a bazillion calories but my stomach was so-o-o happy. And big.

The next day, all evidence of the crime was gone except for the pancakes that came with the moo shu pork. If you’ve never eaten moo shu pork, allow me to explain. Moo shu pork is a stir-fry dish but instead of being served over rice, it is rolled up in small, thin pancakes. Before being rolled into a pancake, a sauce comprised of hoisin sauce and a small amount of soy sauce is spread on the pancake. Then the moo shu pork is added and the pancake is rolled up.

I never use the pancakes that come with moo shu pork. It’s too messy, or maybe I just don’t know how to properly roll up a pancake. So the next day I’m left with the pancakes. They’re 8 inches square, white, and very thin. Here’s what I do with them.

I cut each pancake into quarters – little squares 4 inches per side. I grind flaxseed and put it into a bowl. I add honey and stir until I have a gooey mixture of honey and ground flaxseed. Then I spread some of the mix on a square of pancake, add another layer of pancake, spread more gooey mix on that, add another layer of pancake, and so on, until I run out of both pancake and gooey mix. Then I eat it. It’s quite good! It tasted a lot like baklava, although baklava has butter and cinnamon and vanilla extract in addition to nuts and honey.

Yup, my diet is blasted all to hell. I have to start over, and now I have even more weight to lose than when I began. Oy.

This Is How Government Works

I don’t work for the National Weather Service (NWS). Sometimes I use the NWS website to check the outside temperature. That’s my only connection with the NWS: as a consumer.

Eleven months ago in May, 2012, I sent an email to the NWS advising them that the local automated weather reporting station was malfunctioning and reporting Light Rain or Light Drizzle when actual conditions were Fair and Sunny. A few days later I received a reply stating that the weather reporting station did not belong to the NWS – it was an Automated Weather Observing Station (AWOS) maintained by the FAA.

For almost a year the weather station has continued to malfunction. Meanwhile my original complaint circulated round and round in the bowels of government, collecting reports about other malfunctioning weather stations, being copied to persons here and there, until the whole mess landed on someone’s computer and they decided to close the circle by sending the email to me and telling me to fix the malfunctioning weather reporting station.

It’s nice to know the government hasn’t forgotten about the malfunctioning equipment. It’s a little disheartening to know that after a year they’re still pondering how to fix it and are totally confused about who is responsible for it.

Rambling Photos

Jalapeño pepper. It was green and smooth when I bought it. Now look at it. It has really let itself go. Peppers will do that if left to their own devices.

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Supreme pizza from Walmart – find it next to the deli. Sausage, pepperoni, peppers, olives, tomatoes, and onions. Very good crust, too. Although when I fixed this pie, I added anchovies and more onion. (Note: this pie is out of the box and before it went into the oven.)

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The Cucumber Tree is budding and will soon have leaves. The tree was planted in 1718. In the background is Violet Bank, built in 1815 to replace a home destroyed by fire in 1810. It served as General Robert E. Lee's Headquarters from June 8, 1864 to November 1, 1864.

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The city is building a new courthouse. It seems very big for a city of 16,000. I think maybe City Council is suffering delusions of grandeur. The brick façade is partially complete. The plans call for a cupola on top of the building.

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Shot through my door at sundown.

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Sun at my back.

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The neighborhood as seen across a nearby park. There once was a school in the center of the park. It was called the Flora M. Hill elementary school. Ms. Hill was the principal. I attended the school from grades one through three and remember seeing Ms. Hill sitting in her office. The school was torn down a long time ago and the small city block it stood on is now called Flora Hill Park. The white dot is the moon rising over the neighborhood.

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Very small bear? Or very large safety pin?

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A beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Burlington

I grew up in Virginia. During the American Civil War, Virginia was a Confederate state. General Robert E. Lee’s army, the primary fighting force of the Confederacy, was called the Army of Northern Virginia. For most of the Civil War, the capital of the Confederacy was Richmond, Virginia. So you might understand why I thought I was a southerner.

In 1969 a new job took me to Burlington, North Carolina, and I found myself in a very insular culture. One Saturday morning I stopped at a diner for breakfast. I sat at the counter and ordered an omelet. The conversation went like this:

Me: “I’d like an omelet.”
Cook: “You want scrambled eggs?”
Me: “I’d prefer an omelet.”
Cook: “You want scrambled eggs?”
Me: “Okay, I’ll have scrambled eggs.”
Cook: “I know where you’re from.”
Me: “Where am I from?”
Cook: “You’re from up north.”

Oh, great. I’ve been identified as a Yankee, an outsider, because I ordered an omelet. Omelette is a French word, but omelets are eaten all over the world. Iranians add sugar to their omelets. Chinese omelets are served with brown gravy. A southwest or Western omelet is filled with diced ham, onions, and green bell peppers, though there are variants. In Spain, an omelet is filled with sliced potato. In Thailand, an omelet is fried in vegetable oil and served over steamed rice. In 1969, omelets were served everywhere in the world except, apparently, in Burlington.

When I was a kid, there was a New York Deli restaurant in Richmond. It was a hole in the wall kind of place – narrow and deep. Their food was delicious. My favorite was their hot pastrami sandwich with mustard on Jewish rye bread, dill pickle on the side. One day in Burlington I had a craving for a pastrami sandwich so I stopped at a supermarket to buy ingredients.

First I looked for the pastrami. I couldn’t find it. So I asked the manager of the meat department if the store had pastrami. His reply was, “What’s pastrami?”

Fast forward to 2013. I’m sure the people of Burlington know about omelets and pastrami by now. Well, I’m not really sure, but I’m hopeful.

Bon Iver

Sunday morning, 3:30 AM. Listening to Bon Iver. The Grammy award-winning Indie folk band was founded in 2007 by Justin Vernon. Here’s one song:

Pedro

… Not to be confused with Jesús, the man in charge of the crew that installed a hole in my roof and then refused to fix it. Pedro could have done a better job, and he doesn’t even have a brain.

Big and gnarly…the Cucumber Tree in winter.

Heating Oil Prediction

We finally got a nice day in central Virginia. Sunny, and the temperature reached 72°F.

I mowed the grass for the first time this year. Exactly a week ago it was snowing. In fact, if you scroll down this blog to the post titled Spring Snow you can see a photo I took from a front window. You can also see that the date on that post is March 25. Today is April 1. Today is Monday, and the weather people are saying that by Friday the high temperature may not get out of the 40s. The temperature has been up and down, which is not unusual for central Virginia in February. But this is early April. The weather should be settling down.

For Richmond, the usual March average high is 60°F and the average low is 37°F. But this year the March high averaged 53°F and the low averaged 33°F. March was cold. My boiler burned a lot of heating oil. When the boiler is running it burns a gallon of oil per hour. The last time I bought heating oil, the price was $3.90 per gallon. When the boiler runs I’m burning money – like a lot of people. Ten years ago, heating oil cost me about $1.85 (in 2012 dollars), which means the price increased 110% between then and now. So, naturally, I wondered what the price will be in another ten years. If the price of a gallon increases by another 110% over the next ten years, the price will be $8.19 per gallon (in 2012 dollars).

That’s an average annual increase of 7.75% due only to supply and demand – or manipulation by OPEC, or by oil companies, or by futures traders, or by whatever your favorite conspiracy group happens to be. But suppose the price of oil is not driven higher or lower but stays constant at today’s price, except for inflation. And suppose we have the same amount of inflation over the next ten years as we had over the last ten years. Then in ten years, heating oil will cost $4.94 per gallon. That’s a 27% increase in price due only to inflation (2.4% annually).

So if heating oil increases in price over the next ten years by the same inflation-adjusted percentage as it did over the last ten years, and if inflation stays the same, then heating oil will cost just over $10 a gallon by 2022. Of course, the future isn’t predictable and the price of $10 per gallon is just a middle-of-the-road, “if-things-keep-going-as-they’ve-been-going” prediction.

Just saying: heads up.