Tiny Thoughts

Sunday was one of those days: 72°, lots of sunshine, and an azure sky without a hint of cloud. I hate days like that. Okay, I’m kidding. Mostly. But not entirely.

Today started off cloudy, which sometimes makes me feel better than sunshine does. I like for the day to match my internal feelings. Some may say the day is the external  projection of our internal feelings. To that, I say, “Meh.”

Soon the day turned sunny, and the temperature steadied at 72°, and the sky was once again without hint of cloud. It was a carbon copy of Sunday. (I wonder if today’s kids know what a carbon copy actually is, despite every email program having a “cc” button. And do they know what a second sheet is?)

I know I should get up and walk about the ‘hood for exercise, but it gets old after a decade. The cracked sidewalks and aged streets I've walked hundreds of times: you get to a point where you just d’wanna see the same old same old.

Last night I made a decision to not turn my cell phone on unless I am driving somewhere. I’ll keep it just for emergencies, like when my car breaks down (though it hasn’t done that in a while). “But what about contact with the outside world?” you ask. Yes, what about it?

As I lay in bed this morning, priming myself to get up and throw myself at a new day, I thought about the Afterlife and I wondered if it might possibly be like the "hunting" dreams I sometimes have. “Hunting” in the sense of searching – searching for something but never finding it. Searching, and searching, and more searching. One thing about an Afterlife: you can’t wake up from being dead. People should consider that when they hope for an Afterlife.

The midday local news is on my television. The talking heads are talking about changing the name of the Washington Redskins football team. The news people talk about that a lot these days. It’s a big, ongoing kerfuffle in Redskins land. Some people have way too much time on their hands.

I went to the grocery store around noon. I am increasingly dismayed to see food containers looking just the right size for me but bearing labels proclaiming them to be “Family size.” And why must deli-made potato salad carry a nutrition label listing servings, calories, and so on, while deli-made coleslaw does not? Why must a salmon fillet from the store’s seafood department carry a nutrition label when crab-stuffed mushrooms do not? It seems inconsistent.

As I type these words, I have a window open beside me. Outside air drifts through; it smells fresh and feels pleasant. I hear intermittent sounds: a car, a motorcycle, a snippet of conversation, squeals of children at play, a dog barking. My front door is open and sunlight streams in and gleams off the oak floor. Sound and light are my connection to the outside world, the real world. Cell phones, marvelous as they are, can’t connect you to that world.

Winter Approaches

Night time lows have been in the 30s of late but have stayed above freezing. Last night the temperature fell into the 20s, so I gave in and turned on the oil heat. This morning, as the sun lit up the eastern sky I looked out and saw that the world outside was covered in frost. Well, my small piece of the world, anyway. Warm weather isn’t gone for good – next Wednesday will be about 70°, they say – but winter is announcing itself. It’s around the corner. For some reason, I am reminded of a conversation from  the movie Groundhog Day. In the movie, Phil, a TV weatherman (Bill Murray), is leaving his room at an inn when he encounters a man (Ken Hudson Campbell) in the hallway.

Phil: “Buon giorno, signore.”
Man: “Think it’s going to be an early spring?”
Phil: “Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on his smiling face a dream of spring. Ciao!”

That’s all we can do when winter arrives: hibernate, and dream of spring. If you’re wealthy, you can jet to your villa in Provence and enjoy the breezes off the Mediterranean. If you’re semi-wealthy, you can hop a plane to New Providence Island and enjoy the trade winds while you cavort in one of the pools at the Atlantis. (Yes, I’m aware that the Atlantis resort is on Paradise Island, not New Providence, but there’s no airport on Paradise Island so you have to fly to Nassau and take the bridge over to … oh, heck, you’ll figure it out when you get there.)

I haven’t posted a blog for a week now, but it’s not because I haven’t been writing. In fact, I have been writing. I’ve been writing a new piece of software, and I find that writing code is a good outlet for my creativity. I enjoy coding. I start with nothing and soon I have a program, and it does things – or, more accurately, it allows you to do certain things more easily because it exists. And then I think of a feature that would be useful, and I add it. Then another feature, then another. I have to guard against the lure of rampant featuritis. It’s easy to get sucked into that.

There is a strange time distortion when I’m writing code. I’ll sit at my computer and it’s the middle of the day. After what seems like a few minutes, I’ll notice it’s dark outside. That’s when I realize hours have gone by. When I’m in deep concentration, I’m in a zone, and time passes much faster outside the zone than inside. It’s the opposite of smoking weed, where you put a frozen dinner in the oven and then go listen to music or watch TV or chat with friends, and after what seems like an hour you suddenly remember the dinner and you think, “Oh my god, that dinner is burnt up by now,” and you run to the kitchen and yank open the oven door, only to find that the dinner is still frozen – because it has only been five minutes since you put it in the oven. (Not that I know anything about weed.) It's like the Indonesian phrase made famous by Harlan Ellison: Djam Karet – “the hour that stretches.” (Not to be confused with Djam Karet, the progressive rock band.)

But back to winter. This is the time of year when fall foliage colors are near their peak in the mountains of Virginia. When I lived in the mountains, I lived on a tree-lined street that, for a couple of weeks every fall, would be arched over by limbs of ancient trees holding leaves of flaming reds and yellows. The leaves fell to the road below and made it a Technicolor road. I still see it in my mind’s eye. I probably took a photo of it, a photo in which the colors never appear as brilliant and alive as they do in real life. If I did take a picture, that picture is now as lost as the other hundreds of photos I’ve taken along the timeline of my life. I still see them in my head. Your brain is the ultimate archive for images; it saves the best ones and it saves them in living colors – colors that are likely better than reality ever was.

The day is warming up fast. It looks like the temperature will hit today’s prediction of 61°. I may have to take a walk, maybe drive to a park and see if I can find something photo-worthy. ‘Til next time.

Thoughts

There’s a saying in central Virginia (which could apply to many places in the world, but I don’t live in those places, I live here in Virginia), and the saying goes: “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a minute and it will change.”

About 10:30 this morning I was Skyping with a friend who lives 180 miles west of me. I remarked about the weather here, saying, “It’s bright and sunny today, but that’s going to change soon.” And sure enough, as was foretold in the Prophecies, two hours later, at half past noon, I looked outside and saw that not only had the sky become cloudy, but rain was falling.

As yard work was now off the schedule, I decided to make a big bowl of Mexican rice for consumption later today (and tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that – and furthermore, it might be called Spanish rice. Latino rice? Hispanic rice? ¿Arroz español?) Whatever it is, when I make it I make enough for 4 servings. Usually Mexican rice is a side dish, but for me a serving is a full plate, a meal (and yet only about 310 calories – I did the math). As I mixed the ingredients, I reflected on how containers at the grocery store are shrinking. A 16 ounce can of diced tomato now holds 14.5 ounces. An 8 ounce bag of shredded cheese used to be standard; the bag I purchased holds 7 ounces.  Meanwhile, restaurant meals get ever larger, with big plates and heaps of food: all you can eat buffets … never-ending this or that … decadent desserts … free refills … ultimate deep-fried whatchacallits with extra dipping sauce, and so on. If you go to the restaurant’s website and look at the nutrition section, you’ll be amazed at how many calories are packed into those meals.

I used to eat a lot of lunches at Applebee’s. One of my favorite menu items was the Oriental Chicken Salad. A peek at their nutrition info told me that this innocent sounding meal was 1390 calories, with 1600 milligrams of sodium. The Oriental Grilled Chicken Salad, which sounds healthier, has 1290 calories and a whopping 2190 milligrams of sodium. (The American Heart Association recommends limiting your sodium intake to less than 2,000 milligrams per day.) To be fair, Applebee’s does offer “heart-healthy” menu items – or did when I last ate there. But there seems to be a balance between healthy and tasty, and the more you have of one, the less you get of the other.

The oven timer beeped and I took the arroz a la mexicana out of the oven. It will have to sit atop the stove and cool for a while before it can go into the fridge.

By happenstance, I found out that today, October 17, is Spirit Day. Everyone is supposed to wear purple to show they refuse to tolerate bullying or harassment of LGBT kids, who are frequent targets of bullies. Spirit Day is a fine idea. But there was already a Purple Day (March 26) to promote epilepsy awareness. Couldn’t Spirit Day have picked another color? Breast cancer uses pink, and St. Patrick’s Day uses green, but I think orange is pretty open. I mean, I haven’t observed crowds of people dressed in orange. Football fans, sure, but not regular people.

I’d better go check on that Mexican rice. ‘Til next time, adiós.

Columbus Day

The rain stopped today. For the past week rain fell day and night. At times, rain fell hard enough to soak a person in seconds. At other times, the rain slowed enough to allow a person a quick walk from house to garage or from parking lot to store without too much damp inconvenience. The weather brought its own mood to my home and summoned to my mind a stanza from Fountains of Wayne’s Valley Winter Song.

“And late December
Can drag a man down
You feel it deep in your gut
Short days and afternoons spent pottering around
In a dark house with the windows painted shut”

Though it’s not late December, the thick cloud cover makes the daylight shorter than it should be for mid-October. It’s December-ish. My house is dark. Most of the windows are painted shut. And who wants to go outside when it’s cold and raining out there? I stayed inside and pottered around.

(The rainy week also brought to mind Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Long Rain, but that’s a lot more drama than I want to get into now.)

Over in Richmond, they held their annual Folk Festival on the riverfront this past weekend. Last year over 200,000 people attended. This year’s attendance was down, but over 100,000 fans showed up despite the non-stop drizzle. I was not one of them.

There is something else special about today. It’s Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus used to be a hero. Americans, especially Italian-Americans, loved Columbus. Then, Native Americans pointed out the inconvenient fact that Columbus’s discovery of the New World opened the door to brutality, enslavement, and near-annihilation for them.

Columbus is a hero to some people and a villain to some people. So parts of the country have renamed the holiday. Berkeley, California, calls it Indigenous Peoples Day; South Dakota calls it Native American Day; Alabama calls it American Indian Heritage Day; and Hawaii calls it Discovery Day.

I don’t blame Columbus for all the negative consequences of his discovery. The guy was just looking for a shortcut to the East Indies. He even thought he had found it. Hence: Indians, his name for the people he found living here. It didn’t take long for people to figure out that Columbus had not found a new way to reach the East Indies, but the name stuck. Indians.

Columbus once said, “Riches don't make a man rich, they only make him busier.” He should know, because in his lifetime he endured poverty and prosperity.

Creepy-Crawly

I went outside to do some yard work and saw this little beastie crawling up the wall of my garage. His coloring would have hidden him nicely on certain plants, but he stood out like a bird treat on the gray cement block. I went back inside, got my point-and-shoot, and snapped this photo. This caterpillar is a Papilio polyxenes, the larval form of the Black Swallowtail butterfly.