Challenges

I was reading an answer to a question about autism on the Quora website and I encountered this phrase: internalized stigma. Our culture says many things about people who are different or disabled in some way. These attitudes that people have toward disabilities can be adopted by the disabled and can negatively influence their feelings about themselves. They can feel that they are somehow, because of their disability, "broken” or “second rate” or “defective.” 

But it also occurred to me that we are talking about physical issues. Each of us is a spirit that is inhabiting a physical body. That body will go through many changes over the course of its lifetime, from the helplessness of a baby to the helplessness of very old age. The spirit inside a body may also experience helplessness caused by injury, or disease, or congenital disorders.

There is a grown man who lives near me and on warm days he sits in a chair on his porch and blows bubbles. I have walked past his house a number of times and seen him on his porch blowing bubbles. Inside his damaged brain is a spirit that cannot view the world as the rest of us, and cannot express itself as the rest of us. The connections in his brain aren't wired for that, but the spirit inside him is as unbent, as unbroken, as the spirit inside each of us who consider ourselves as "whole." Our bodies function, our brains function, and we call ourselves normal. We fail to recognize that our bodies are normal now, at this point in time. Our brains are normal now, at this point in time. All it takes is an auto accident to disable us. All it takes is a blow to the head to change who we are for the rest of our life.

So perhaps we shouldn't focus so much on what we perceive as a disability, and instead try to keep in mind the vision of a shining flame. Because inside every living person is a spirit, and that spirit is here, living in a body, in order to experience certain things, in order to learn. The same is true of people who do not have recognizable disabilities. We're all here to learn. I don't know what each of us is here to learn, but I would guess that love and compassion and doing the right thing are at the top of the list, and that those qualities must apply to every one of us. You cannot be a loving person while loving one and hating another. You cannot be a compassionate person unless you have compassion for all of us.

These truths have been spoken many times, but as long as some of us don't "get it" then we will need reminders.

Languages

My evening Skype conversation with my Costa Rican friend was concluding, and I said, "Good night." 

"Te amo," she replied.

Recalling some Hollywood-movie Italian, I said, "It's the same in Italian."

She shook her head. "In Italian, it's ti amo."

"Of course!" I said. "Can you say it in Portuguese?"

"Eu te amo," she replied.

"Do you speak Portuguese?" I asked.

"When I was young, I lived for a while with a Brazilian girl. I love the language. I know it somewhat but I don't speak it." 

When I was a boy I found a book in the attic. It was printed in Portuguese. It must have belonged to my mother or father, but I never knew which one. And why did they have it?

I didn't ask my friend how she came to know some Italian, or how many other languages she "knows somewhat." Of course, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are all Romance languages. (Romance as in Roman.) They're all derived from Latin. So it's not surprising there are similarities. Although the same phrase (te amo) in French (another Romance language) is "Je t'aime" so the similarities go only so far.

I like languages and I wish I had an aptitude for learning other languages, but I don't. I've studied Spanish and though I'll never be fluent in the language, it's still fun to learn some of it.

According to dictionary.com,

Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent. About 10 percent of the Latin vocabulary has found its way directly into English without an intermediary (usually French).

Many Spanish and English words are derived from the same Vulgar Latin words and are therefore similar. Does that make Spanish easier to learn for English speakers? I would think so. But then, I haven't attempted to learn Chinese yet. When I do, I'll let you know if it was harder to learn than Spanish. I haven't decided which Chinese dialect I should learn, but I'm leaning toward Mandarin. As I explained in a recent blog post, I'd like to know what those Chinese restaurant waiters are saying about their customers. 

"Foolish round-eyes, eating sweet-and-sour cat and don't know it!" Tell me they're not saying that! I enjoy Chinese food too much.

Christmas Day 2020

The song of the day is That's Christmas to Me from the 2016 album That's Christmas to Me by a cappella group Pentatonix. This performance was done at the 2015 Country Music Awards.

Christmas Eve

Gusty winds, lightning, heavy rain. That's the forecast for this Christmas Eve. The high temperature today will be 64°; the high temperature tomorrow will be 37°. That drop in temperature alone forebodes stormy weather ahead.

Let it rain. I have nowhere to go and nothing to do but laundry. In fact, the laundry can wait ... gotta have something to do on Christmas Day. Come Christmas Day I'll do the laundry, I'll change the sheets on the bed, I'll look around and see what else needs cleaning. Normally I'm not real big on house cleaning. Ask anyone who knows me. The sentence, "That VirtualWayne, he is so big on cleaning his house!," is a sentence you will not hear anyone say, ever. Very rarely, I will have a female visitor to my home who—to prevent her head from exploding—will clean and tidy up my house. Afterward, my house still will not look like one of those homes in the magazines, but it also won't look like a tornado just struck it, which unfortunately is its usual condition. My father once told me, "If it weren't for women, men would be living in caves." That is so true.

The sun is rising. My back door faces east and it's a sliding glass door, so from my computer I can look at the back door and see the morning going from dark to gray. The clock reads 7:21. That's the time for sunrise here. Time to eat breakfast.

That didn't happen. Instead, I went to bed. I slept for two hours during the night and suddenly two hours didn't feel like enough sleep. So I went to bed at sunrise and I went to sleep. I slept until noon. Now is the time for breakfast. Or rather, brunch.

So I heated leftover rice in a small pan, added butter and Lizano salsa, stirred in two eggs, scrambled it together, and added a side of grits and sausage links. That's a decent brunch. This is a meal I've been making all week, and I have one day left before all the eggs, rice, and sausage links are used up. 

Dimness pervades inside and outside. The overcast is thick. Rain falls on and off at this point, but heavy rain is on the way. Christmas Day is on the way, too. 

I have a Christmas card sitting beside my computer monitor. Some people still send 'em out. I used to send Christmas cards to my friends and acquaintances. But as the years went by, and social connections became frayed and broken, I quit sending them. One by one I quit sending them until at last, I looked at the short list of names remaining on my Christmas card list and I asked myself, what's the point? If you enjoy sending out Christmas cards, then good for you and by all means send them out. But when sending them becomes more of an obligation than a joy, then there's really no point. I still enjoy receiving them, however.

Merry Christmas to all my readers. Thanks for all the comments you've posted to my blog. I read every one of them. May you have a blessed Christmas this year and every year. 

Ellie Goulding

The song of the day is Love Me Like You Do from the 2015 album Fifty Shades of Grey by English singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding.

Winter Solstice

Today (which, by the time you read this, will be yesterday) was December 21, 2020, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year in Earth's Northern Hemisphere. This day is mostly over-and-done now. It was the first day of winter, and days will now begin getting longer. In the Southern Hemisphere, today was the longest day and shortest night of the year. For those who live down under, this is/was the first day of summer, and days will now begin getting shorter. By "day," I refer to the number of hours of daylight, not the 24 hour day, which is always 24 hours long.

Also tonight, the "Christmas Star" reappears after 800 years. The Christmas Star is not a star, nor does it have any legitimate connection to Christmas, so of course newspaper writers call it the Christmas Star. It's actually a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. A conjunction happens when two planets come close together from our perspective. They aren't really close together, but their orbits take one planet near the other from our point of view. The event's true name is the Great Conjunction of 2020. For ordinary, non-star-gazing folk, the night sky will look like any other night sky. But if you know where to look, you might be able to see the Great Conjunction of 2020—the Christmas Star.

I felt tired this afternoon, and so I lay on my bed, and I fell asleep. When I awoke the time was 10:30 PM. I remembered that tonight is "Christmas Star" night. I went to my front door and looked outside and saw the Christmas Star. Holy smokes, it was huge! It was the size of the Moon! I went back inside and put on my eyeglasses and looked outside again. Now I could see that the Christmas Star really was the Moon.

I stepped further outside and walked down my sidewalk, looking at the sky. I didn't see any manner of Christmas Star, but I did see the constellation Orion, with it's easily recognizable Orion's Belt, and I could see the four corner stars in Orion. But there is far too much nighttime light pollution in my city for me (or anyone) to see more than a few stars, and that is a real shame. If I were to drive west to the mountains of southwest Virginia, away from cities, the sky would have thousands of bright stars. (I haven't actually counted them, so it might be hundreds. Either way, it's impressive.) I suspect people who live there take it for granted.

It is 11:55 PM and I'll have to hit the Publish button now while today is still the winter solstice, or else a blog post about the winter solstice won't be pertinent to the moment. If you badly wanted to see the Christmas Star and missed it, just go out and look up—if it's the 22nd. If it's not, then look again on the 23rd. It probably won't look much different than it does tonight. Happy star-gazing!

J.Fla

The song of the day is a mashup cover of DJ Snake's Let Me Love You and Alan Walker's Faded. This cover features South Korean singer-songwriter J.Fla.

Christmas Thoughts

There was a time ... I remember. I see it in my mind's eye. I was not here, but far away. I put myself there again, for a while.

I look out at the ocean. The shallow water is pale green and flat. Calm and peaceful. Tranquil. Pretty, even. Today. The ocean is beautiful today. Another day the ocean will be angry. It will be a killer.

Life is like that. One day life is calm, peaceful, beautiful. Another day life is turmoil. Perhaps the ocean is a metaphor for life. Or, perhaps life is a metaphor for the ocean. After all, the ocean was here first. The ocean gave birth to life. Life is a child of the ocean. We all carry some of the ocean in us. It is part of our blood, part of our sweat, part of our tears. Our body fluids share their chemistry with the sea. The sea is our mother. I suppose if the sea is our mother, then the Sun must be our father. Surely light came first. Light, and the warmth it provides, preceded everything.

But enough of memory. Today is day five before Christmas 2020, for those who celebrate Christmas. Today is cloudy and wet in my small city. The temperature is 38°F. A cold but gentle rain falls. I have moved my chair in front of the fireplace. I have a fire log burning in the fireplace. The log casts its heat and light onto my bare legs and body. It feels very, very good. For me, there has always been something primeval and lush about warmth on a cold day.

I have nothing to say today. I have written many words and said nothing. So I sit in my chair in front of my fireplace, holding my phone with both hands, with my elbows propped on the arms of my chair, and I dictate into the phone. The phone writes down everything I say and when I am done, a few taps on the phone will transfer what I have spoken into a blog post. What a world we have created! I hope a jovial Christmas spirit grants your wishes.

Eras

I saw a YouTube video titled, "Man in Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era." The title made me ask, "What is my era? Do I have an era? Does everyone have an era?"

Maybe "my era" is the era of Old Time Rock & Roll music (think Tom Cruise in Risky Business). Or maybe my era began with the Beatles. No, it can't be any of those because music is timeless.

Many years ago, I spent a winter in an unheated cabin on a lake in western North Carolina. I had no TV, only an AM radio. The little cabin had no heat, and every morning the faucets would be frozen. A glass of water left on a table would freeze overnight. In the mornings I would step into a sheet metal shower stall and only a trickle of water would come out of the frozen water valves. I had to stand there while the trickle of water melted the ice in the valves so that water could flow. I slept on a sofa under an electric blanket set to high, with several more blankets piled on top of it. Good times.

But late at night, that old AM radio tuned in WBZ in Boston, Massachusetts. WBZ was a 50,000 watt clear-channel station and I had no trouble receiving it at night. I listened to Larry Glick do some great interviews and play some great music. If you missed Larry Glick, you missed a radio gem. There are things that are impossible to describe; things of which people will say, "You had to be there." The Larry Glick show was one of those things. Think of American Graffiti and Wolfman Jack broadcasting from a high-power Mexican station and you'll have a sense of what I mean.

I suppose my era was an era of transition, because so many things were in transition at that time. Technology was in transition. Culture was in transition. I was in transition. I was preparing to take a journey across the United States, twice. From central Virginia across the northern states to Seattle and down the Pacific Coast Highway to L.A., then east across the southern deserts and back to Virginia—via Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where I stayed a few weeks and studied Transcendental Meditation. I drove through the Great Plains where there seemed to be nothing but flat grassland to the horizon. I suppose the winter I spent in western North Carolina and that trip around America signaled a transition—the end of one era and the beginning of another.

How many eras does a person get to have? I was a child, I was a teenager, I was a young man, and so on, each era having its own priorities, its own memories. I'm coasting now—not trying to set fire to the world, not trying to invent the next gee-whiz gadget. Some would call it running out of runway, but that is as it should be. 

If I had to summarize my life in one word, that word would be learning. I came here to learn, and I've learned a few things but, I think, fewer than I should have, but with luck—with luck—it will be enough, it will be sufficient. I will tell you a secret, to believe or disbelieve, to do with as you please. Here it is: When you die, when you pass on from this world, you will meet the Angel. The Angel will review your life with you, the "good" things and the "bad" things, and then the Angel will ask you, "What have you done that is sufficient?" Try to have a good answer.

Christmas Week

Today is Friday, December 18th, so Christmas Day is seven days away: one week, less about 3 and a half hours. I don't celebrate Christmas, though I don't care if other people celebrate it. When I was a kid, Christmas Day was exciting. There was Christmas music on the radio, and Christmas shows on the television, and Christmas parades through the main street in town with pretty girls in cheerleader attire. And for the nighttime parade there were carbon-arc searchlights, which haven't been built since 1944, having been replaced by the invention of radar. If you're a kid and you get to look into a carbon-arc searchlight, it makes a lifetime impression. And the high school bands in the parade would march by, with the drummers beating those big base drums that vibrate all your internal organs, especially your heart. And convertible cars drove by with beauty contest winners in evening gowns sitting high and waving. And Santa came by last, throwing candy here and there. 

The Christmas TV shows always included Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life—though for the latter I preferred the remake with Marlo Thomas, It Happened One Night. Do stations still air Christmas movies? I haven't seen one for several years. They probably come on channels I don't receive, like Disney or Hallmark. It's okay, I've seen enough of them to last a lifetime. 

Just seven more days and Christmas morning will be here. In this time of Covid-19 with so many layoffs and store closures, I hope there will still be some Christmas cheer to be had. But I know some families will be worried about paying the rent and buying food and not so much about buying Christmas presents. I hope those families with money to spend on presents for their kids understand how blessed they are. I hope they understand that many families are not going to be blessed as much this Christmas season. It's easy to take blessings for granted, but they should never be taken for granted, lest they be taken away when you least expect it. Give to the food bank. Give to the Salvation Army bell-ringers. If you have, then consider sharing, even if just a little bit. And may your Christmas season bring you unexpected blessings.

Pentatonix

The song of the day is God Only Knows from the 2019 album The Best of Pentatonix Christmas by a cappella group Pentatonix.

I'll Be Back!

What person who has seen the film The Terminator can forget Arnold Schwarzenegger's character, the Terminator, and his classic line, "I'll be back!"?

One day, perhaps, I'll look up from my death bed to the people around me, and I'll tell them, "I'll be back!" Because I will. All of us will be back. Again, and again, and again, until we get it right.

Each of us is playing a role in the longest running drama of all time: creation.  We're babies in this creation and we have to learn. Said William Shakespeare in As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts...

Make of that what you will. In this world we are all mere players. We have our exits and our entrances. We have our roles to play.

We begin as novices with much to learn. We make mistakes, but we learn and we remember. As lifetimes pass, we make fewer mistakes, and the mistakes that we make are more subtle. Still we learn, because we experience the consequences first-hand. The only way we can learn is to try, fail, and try again.

Have you ever met someone who seemed much wiser than their years on Earth? Have you ever met someone and thought, "That person is an old soul"? If you have, that person very likely was an old soul.

I'm climbing a long, long ladder. Those who understand me are near me on the ladder. Those who do not understand are far below me on the ladder. But those who are far above me on the ladder are the "old souls." They have learned lessons I have yet to encounter. 

We choose our lifetimes; we choose our lessons. We're not thrown into the struggle without thought or reason. We're given a life that offers us a chance to learn a lesson—a chance to evolve spiritually. What may seem pointless now, does have a point. What may seem random now, was carefully planned before we were born, in a timeless epoch that is our true home. There is a reason things may seem random and senseless, and the reason is that we can see only one page in the middle of a long novel. First we trust, and eventually we know, that the other pages are there. 

For your life to make sense, you have to trust. "What goes around comes around" is a modern version of a verse from Galatians, "for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Wisdom is timeless and Truth will always prevail at the end.

Contentment

It might surprise you to know that I am content. There are things I could do that I would enjoy, but if I don't do them I am not disappointed, nor do I feel I have missed something. I feel content when I sit in my house. I feel content when I walk down the street. I feel content when I sit in a friend's house and chat. I feel content when I read a book, listen to music, watch a video, experience the outside world: the buzzing of insects, the shouts and squeals of children at play, the scent of flowers and freshly mown grass. I feel content when I write a blog post at 2:00 AM. I feel content when I get behind the wheel of my 25-year-old Jeep and let it take me somewhere. I do not ask life to give me things to make me content. I feel fortunate to have the things that I have, while I have them, and one of those things is contentment. I do not expect this comfort will last forever, but while it lasts, I am content.

I do not envy the wealthy. The things for which they strive are ephemeral and mean little except in the eyes of the equally blind. I do not envy the wealthy because they are struggling with their own lessons and wealth is a trap for them. I care little for outward appearances. I admire qualities that cannot be easily seen but are more real, more lasting, more meaningful.

I live in my own world, but I know where I am and where I've been and where I soon may be. I am okay with that. My memory is a stream of places and people. Once hurtful memories have lost their edge while good memories get better with distance. But even as I write this, and even as I know this, I know I have fallen short and will fall short again. 

Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting For Godot, "At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on."

I have been sleeping, but at least I know I have been sleeping, and that is one step forward.

Sam Fischer

The song of the day is 2018's This City from the EPs Not a Hobby and Homework by Australian singer-songwriter Sam Fischer.

Small Mysteries

I came home from a grocery store trip today and when I got to the back door of my house, the sliding door wouldn't open. Despite the fact that it was unlocked, the door would not move. I made several attempts to open it, then gave up and walked around the house to the front door. There, sitting on the front porch in front of my door, was a UPS package. Were it not for the stuck back door, I would have entered the house as usual and would not have known the package was there.

The stuck back door was a "first-time" event. The door had never gotten stuck like that before today. I picked up the package and entered the house and walked to the back door. I was easily able to slide the door open and closed. I did nothing to fix the door. It simply was no longer stuck.

I don't know if there are "porch pirates" in my neighborhood, but they seem to be everywhere. So, I'm glad I found the package before it could have been stolen. Which means, I'm glad the back door was stuck, thus forcing me to enter the front door. 

The package wasn't for me; it was for my Latina guest (who left four days ago) and it arrived late. It was supposed to arrive on December 3 and it arrived on December 9. If an angel was involved in protecting the package, he (the angel) wasn't helping me, he was helping my guest. 

Why do I refer to the angel as "he"? In religious contexts, many angels are referred to as "he" and "him." Recall the archangels Gabriel and Michael. Recall the archangels Raphael and Uriel. If an angel was involved in such a trivial matter—and why not? and who are we humans to judge what is trivial and what is not?—then the angel involved must be Raphael. How do I know? That is a long story, and it involves many nigh-unbelievable events that I cannot yet write about and which the world may not be ready to hear. 

I have a guardian angel. I must have, because in my younger years I did some incredibly foolish things and I somehow came through unscathed. Some would say I was lucky. I would say I had a guardian spirit helping me at those times. I think we all do, but some of us refuse to listen. I once had a married, female friend who already had two boys when she got pregnant again. She lost the baby through a miscarriage. Eventually she became pregnant again. One night she phoned me and told me that she had started spotting, and she said that is how her previous miscarriage began. She asked me to send my angel to her and save the baby. I did ask, and the spotting stopped and a few months later a healthy baby boy was born. Was an angel really involved? Did I play any part?

I don't know. The world is far stranger than any of us can fathom. We only think we have it figured out, but no one has it figured out. I want my Latina friend to write about her angel—Raphael. But time is fleeting and filled with busy trivia that seems important at the moment it's happening. Mystery abounds, and sometimes we discover the why of things, but much later, and sometimes we never discover the why. 

As Paul said, "For now we see through a glass, darkly..." We don't even know all the questions, to say nothing of all the answers. It is something I ponder in the early, dark hours of morning.

Back to Normal

While my guest was here, the dirty dishes washed themselves. It worked like this: we would eat a meal, and then I would get up from the dinner table and do something and when I returned to the dining room, all the dishes and utensils and even the pots and pans had been washed and were in the dish drainer, clean and shiny as new. It was like magic. I don't know how it happened, but I figure poltergeists were somehow involved.

I had an errand to run this morning, but when I got out of bed the outside temperature was 27°F and to my recently hibernating body the inside temperature felt not much warmer. The thought of walking to my car filled me with shivers. Then I realized that I could run my errand tomorrow instead of today, and the decision was instantaneous: I returned to bed. Because I believe in that old adage, "never do today what can be put off until tomorrow." Or something like that.

When I cleaned up the supper dishes, I found a pound of bacon (uncooked) lying on the kitchen countertop. It had been lying there since about noon. I would like to report that it was hidden in an inconspicuous corner of the countertop, behind one thing and under another thing. But alas, it was in plain view and I didn't see it. The package was open and had been off refrigeration for about six hours, and I wondered briefly if it was still okay to eat. Then I thought "Sure it is," because it wasn't cooked. After I cook it crisp, all the germy critters that have been growing in it for the past six hours will be deceased. Probably. So I stuck the bacon back inside the fridge. Now, I'm thinking of that bacon less as food and more as a science experiment.

It's evening and the outside temperature is 27°. Looks like tonight will be a repeat of last night. Tomorrow morning I'll get up and take a shower and watch some TV news and then I'll get my Jeep out of the garage and drive to LabCorp where I'll be stuck with a syringe and some of my blood will be drawn out for tests. It happens every six months. The results are always the same. My cholesterol and triglycerides will be too high. My doctor wanted me to take a statin. I resisted for a long time, but I finally said "okay" and I took the statin. It made my cholesterol number go up! (In case you don't know, statins are supposed to make one's cholesterol go down.) On one visit, my cholesterol was so high that I asked my doctor, "With my cholesterol so high, how is it that I'm still alive?" She responded, "Some things we don't understand."

After LabCorp, I have to go to the grocery store. Maybe if the doctor knew what foods I eat, she would understand my high cholesterol. Or as I put it to her once, "Doctor, how many Whoppers do I have to eat to get my recommended daily allowance of chocolate?" 

She didn't answer. It's possible she thought I was joking.

To Be Continued?

My guest flew back to her homeland today. I drove her to the Richmond airport. Proof she is no longer here is my evening meal: factory-cooked chicken nuggets with Buffalo wing sauce. Plus a BBQ sandwich. While she was here, I ate real food with actual veggies cooked on the stove top. Now I'm back to eating faux food, the diet of many single men, I'm sure.

This morning I drove my guest to Richmond International Airport. We went to the ticket counter to check her bags and there we hit a snag. She was boarding "paperless" and the ticket agent asked for her QR code. This was new; neither of us had ever been asked for a QR code. (QR codes are ubiquitous, but I'm talking about the QR code you receive as a mobile boarding pass.) How would someone without a functioning mobile phone be able to fly? That person would have to go to the ticket counter and get a paper boarding pass. So if you're flying paperless, you might want to print a backup boarding pass to carry with you, just in case. (If you're thinking that printing a boarding pass kind of defeats the purpose of going paperless, well yeah, it does. But it's better than returning to the ticket counter, standing in line, and maybe going through security twice.)

We got that issue settled and walked to the concourse entrance and said our goodbyes. She sent me a video from her plane as it took off from Richmond. I returned to my Jeep and drove home. What will happen next in this international relationship? I don't know, but I know this is not the end.

Dance

Morning arrives. I get out of bed, I eat, I go back to bed for some more zzz's. Phone call. Glasses are ready for pickup. Up again and drive to Walmart. Try on glasses. Adjust frames. Leave store, drive home. Tell my guest we're going for a ride. We go to the Jeep and I drive down to the river.

Looking upstream into the afternoon sun.

This is another part of the greenway, maybe a mile further up the river from where my previous walk on the greenway took place. It's closer to the river.

A few cars are parked around the area, but only a man pushing a boy in a wheelchair are visible. The other people have probably walked out of sight. The greenway goes this way and that way, so you don't have to walk far to get out of sight.

The river looks muddy, but there are plenty of fish in that water. And there are plenty of ducks and geese on the river.

The leaves that remain on the trees have lost most of their color and won't be on the trees much longer. The high temperature today was in the mid-50s. The sunshine made it comfortable. Still, a light jacket or hoodie was necessary to be really comfortable. 

The Appomattox River flows down to the James River and thence to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I've made the trip down and back more than once. In fact, I've blogged about a few of those trips. They were memorable, and not in a good way.

We leave the river and drive toward my home. I stop at a friend's house on the way home and we spend an hour with him and his Shih Tzu named Lizzy before we continue on our way home.

Eventually suppertime arrives. My guest fries pork chops that she batters with beaten egg and bread crumbs, while I stir-fry pieces of white onion in a wok with a little sesame oil, soy sauce, oyster sauce, and red pepper flakes. When the onion starts to become translucent around the edges, I dump baby spinach leaves into the wok and continue stirring until the leaves are wilted down. The meal is very good. Tomorrow night I'll make the same dish but I'll use hoisin sauce instead of oyster sauce. Because, why not?

After dinner I make a fire and turn down the room light. The mood is cozy. I put on some music and my friend stands up and walks to me and takes my hand. We dance. In the middle of my living room, lit by the glow of flickering firelight, we dance. I've danced with women in my life, but I can't recall slow dancing in my living room with firelight setting the mood. I should do that more often. Maybe everyone should.

Gallo Pinto

Another very good, ordinary day occurred today. I was up and at 'em at 9 AM, but my guest usually arises at about 6AM. She made my breakfast: Gallo Pinto, scrambled eggs, and pork sausage. Unless you're Hispanic or Latin, you may not be familiar with Gallo Pinto. It's basically black beans and rice and chopped onion cooked in oil and various seasonings.

One of those seasonings is Lizano Salsa, with which I was unfamiliar (other than hearing the name) but now I have a bottle in the cabinet above my kitchen stove. The Gallo Pinto was tasty and went well with scrambled eggs (though I understand that fried eggs are the more usual accompaniment). I want her to explain, slowly while I type, how she assembles the ingredients for this dish. In other words: her recipe. Yes, there are recipes on the Web—probably dozens of recipes. But I want the recipe I tasted.

Usually, when I want breakfast sausage, I defrost a couple of Jimmy Dean's pre-cooked sausage patties, but the real thing blows away Jimmy Dean's version. My guest cut them to about the size and thickness of biscuits, a manly sausage patty! Then there's taste. Not that Jimmy Dean's frozen, pre-cooked patties aren't good; they are. But they can't beat the real thing for taste. Frozen cooked sausage and a microwave oven are pure convenience, and there's nothing wrong with that, if that is what's most important to you.

After breakfast, I drove to Wally World and dropped off my guest. I went home and waited for her to text me to pick her up. The traffic in and around the Walmart parking lot was about as congested as it can get. Nevertheless, we got home unscathed and unpacked her purchases. They were mostly Christmas presents for her family in Central America. The things she bought would cost much more in her own country due to import duties. And some items here are simply not available in her country. Hence, the shopping trips.

Tonight, I "cooked" dinner: chili dogs with store-bought coleslaw and potato salad. The chili dogs were very good. Junk food usually is. Partly, it's because the food is jam-packed with sodium. It's also high in "bad" fats. When I say "bad" fats, think about it: would you rather eat bacon or olive oil? 

After dinner we sat beside the fireplace and watched the movie "10" from 1979. (It holds up—a mark of a good script.) Once again, the lights were low and the flames in the fireplace cast a comforting warmth over us. I could get used to this.

An Ordinary Day

Morning. Daylight awakens me. It's going to be a nice day, but a cold one. My guest informs me that we are going to Walmart. Super-crowded, 20-shoppers-per-register Walmart. She buys things to give as Christmas presents. I, too, buy a few things, including fire logs.

Then we go to Target, where we burn time and buy nothing. I navigate the shopping center to an exit road and we go home. The Jeep is unloaded and we walk up the street to visit my friend Butch. For an hour or so we enjoy conversation. We leave.

Back at the house, we put things away and I take a short nap. When I get up we talk for a while, and my guest tells me she's hungry. "What do you want?" She shrugs. "Hot dogs?" she asks. That sounds easy, so I assemble two chili dogs with sides of coleslaw and potato salad. They're good.

I light a fire log and we sit at the end of the sofa, beside the fireplace, and watch Leonard Cohen videos. We both are fans of his music. I've been a fan from the evening I watched him perform a concert on Austin City Limits many years ago. That concert is now on YouTube.

The house lights are low and the fire casts its hypnotic, flickering glow on us, over us, around us. She goes to bed, and I go to my keyboard to type a blog post that I did not have time to write earlier. It's a post about nothing special, about an ordinary day in many ways, but a very nice, ordinary day. Except for the firelight, the house is dim. The air is 37°F outside, on its way to 29° tonight—a foretaste of winter. Tomorrow's high will be 57°. The boiler in the cellar provides our heat; the fire log and the music provide our comfort.

Good night, all. I hope your evening is pleasant, too.

Holiday Food

When my friend's shopping trip reached its conclusion and I received a pick-me-up text, I drove to the mall and picked her up and then decided that, before we went to my home, we would take a walk along the greenway beside the river. The greenway has a paved path. It was late in the day and the air was somewhat cool, so we walked only a mile. Along the way I snapped a photo.

It's not a great photo, but photography was not my mission. I merely wanted to be outdoors and do some walking. We were not the only people who were walking the greenway and enjoying the late autumn air. Winter begins in three weeks, on December 21. The trees will be bare and the air will be colder, and walkers on the greenway will be much scarcer.

We returned to my home and my guest prepared dinner. She put together a great salad with lettuce, tomato, chopped green onions, bacon bits, garlic croutons, dried corn, cranberries, and avocado Caesar dressing. She made rice sauteed in butter and diced onion and seasonings. She sauteed broccoli, carrots, and onion with seasonings, she made deviled eggs, and she cooked a chicken breast in some manner of herbal seasoning. She is spoiling me. Soon I will have to return to Stouffer's and Healthy Choice and such, and I'm not going to like the change.

I snapped another so-so photo in order to document dinner (and to help me fill space in my blog post). This was dinner, except the deviled eggs are not in the picture and the croutons were added to the salad later. It really was a delicious meal, and that's coming from someone who is normally non-judgmental about food. I can eat most anything. I've eaten alligator, and pickled jellyfish, and pickled pigs feet. I'll admit I've never eaten roasted tarantula. There are some lines I refuse to cross.

Thanksgiving Postscript

This Thanksgiving was different.

My guest from a foreign land arrived in Richmond on time, two days before Thanksgiving. The next day she decided to clean my house, and I was somehow roped into helping. I really couldn't not help her, because it was, after all, my house, so I felt more or less obligated to pitch in. We worked all day and got the first floor clean and orderly. The next day was Thanksgiving, and I prepared the meal, which entailed heating vegetables. I also microwaved sweet potatoes, mashed them, and added brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter. They were delicious. I winged the recipe but, apparently, it's hard to mess up sweet potatoes.

The next day we went to Walmart and commenced shopping for various items, some of which were needed if we expected to eat again, and some of which she wanted to take to her home. We argued briefly over who was going to pay for her purchases. I wanted to pay, but she insisted that because she was buying things for herself, she should pay. The way I saw it, if someone flies 4,000 miles round-trip to visit me on their dime, the least I can do is pay for their Walmart purchases. (Never let it be said that I didn't do the least I could do.) But she wasn't having it.

When we got home from our shopping outing, she cleaned my bathroom, which she hadn't gotten around to cleaning the previous day. While she cleaned, I took a nap. The thought that I should help with cleaning the bathroom tried to enter my mind, but I am adept at keeping such thoughts out of my head. 

The next day we cleaned and organized the second floor of the house. By "we," I, of course, mean "she," mostly, but I helped as much as I could by staying out of her way. What is this obsession with living in clean houses? I already miss the dust bunnies that used to live beneath every item of furniture in my house. Dust bunnies are the closest thing I have for a pet.

Now, I finally have time to add a few words to my blog, only because my guest is at the mall buying goodness-knows-what. I would gladly keep her company as she shops, but she knows very well how that would go:

"When do we go?"

"I have to go to the doohickey department and look for a thingamajig. 

"When do we go?"

"Calm down, we just got here."

"When do we go?"

"Ay, Chihuahua, you are making me crazy."

"When do we go?"

"Son of a biscuit eater!"

"When do we go?"

So I drop her off at the mall and I go home. It's better for her. It's better for me. 

Thanksgiving Day Minus Three

A breezy morning arrived today, with hordes of brown leaves dancing down the street. Those are the leaves that made it past the gutters, which seem to be a magnet for dead leaves. The trees are half naked now, their last leaves awaiting that just-right gust of cold, autumn breeze to launch them onto the wind.

Today will be sunny. This afternoon the high temperature will peak at 59°F. Tonight's low will drop to 33°. That's what the weather prognosticators say. The days will be sunny until Thanksgiving. That day, and the night before, have a good chance of being wet.

For my own feast, I bought a three pound package of Black Forest cooked, sliced, smoked ham. Plus a few sweet potatoes with which to make some manner of casserole. Green beans, sliced carrots, and black-eyed peas with peppers and onion will round out the show.

I'm going to the Home Depot store later to pick up some odds and ends. One thing I want to buy is a box of fire logs. When the chill of evening comes calling, I'll throw a fire log into the fireplace, strike a match to it, and when the log gets burning good I'll turn down the room lamp and watch the flickering light and shadow that the flames cast over the room.

Before I go out, I'll add hot chocolate to the grocery list. Some manner of boozy, Thanksgiving cocktail would hit the spot; like a sangria or a margarita, or just a generous portion of brandy in a rocks glass (because I don't own a snifter and never will), but I swore off the sauce back in August when I realized I was over-indulging too often. 

For now, I'm sitting at my computer and waiting for a roofer to arrive. My house has a leak in the roof and the repair procedure goes like this:

1. Call the roofer.
2. Roofer comes and works on the roof.
3. Pay the roofer.
   
4. Rain comes and the roof leaks.
5. Go to Step 1.

This is apparently an endless loop. The same loop applies when working on 74-year-old plumbing. If you're not careful, this same endless loop can also apply to medical issues.

1. Me: I have a new medical symptom.
2. Doc: Take these pills.
3. Me: The pills worked but now I have another new symptom.
4. Doctor: Take these other pills.
5. Go to Step 1.

These endless loops are prone to arise whenever spending money is involved. I know; I've been on this merry-go-round more than once.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, readers. If possible, be sure to ingest too many calories. It's what Thanksgiving is all about.

Reaction

I was standing in my kitchen making a salad. I had just finished cutting up a tomato for the salad. I use the sharpest knife in my knife block for cutting tomatoes and other soft veggies and fruits. The knife is like a long thin razor. I finished cutting the tomato and turned to the kitchen sink to rinse off the knife. Then I turned to grab a towel to dry it, and the knife fell out of my grasp. My first instinct was a little voice in my head that said, "You're fast—grab it out of the air!" But at almost the same time, before I could move, there was a second voice in my head.

To explain this, I have to go back a way to my last job. Dave, a co-worker, had an unusual habit. If he lost his grip on something—if he accidentally dropped something—he didn't attempt to grab it. Just the opposite—he snatched his hands away as if he had touched a hot stove. One day I asked him about that reaction, and he told me a story.

At one of his previous workplaces, some men were handling a very heavy object. I don't recall what it was or exactly how much it weighed, but it weighed plenty. The men were maneuvering this object from one location to another when something happened—a chain broke, perhaps—and the heavy object fell toward the floor. One of the men instinctively tried to catch it by placing his hands under it. The result was that this massive object fell onto his hands and crushed them. In fact, it more than crushed them; Dave said it flattened the man's hands to the size of dinner plates. The man lost both hands. From that day onward, Dave undertook to train himself to instinctively snatch his hands away from any object he dropped.

Although I didn't do physical practice, I did think about that industrial accident a number of times. Maybe that's why, when I lost my grasp on the knife and an instinct told me to grab it, another voice in my head insisted, "Let it go!" I pulled my hands away from the knife and it fell harmlessly to the floor. I picked it up, rinsed it off, dried it, and placed it back into the knife block. 

This is a reaction that everyone should think about. If you drop an inanimate object, yank your hands back. Don't let your hands automatically grab for it. You won't have time to think about it when it happens. So think about it ahead of time, so that a seed is planted in your brain: "Let it go!"

Thanksgiving Day Minus 6

It is now one week from Thanksgiving Day. Everyone in America (plus a few people in far-away lands) knows about Thanksgiving. The History website has a long article about it here. 

Thanksgiving is celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia, as well as Leiden (a town in the Netherlands), Norfolk Island (an Australian territory), and the inhabited territories of the United States.

I have a friend who lives nearby and he will be gormandizing Thanksgiving dinner with his close family at a family member's home—eight people in all. He has other family who, due to distance, probably won't attend. Last Thanksgiving I dined at his house with his family, and the food was delicious, but not knowing most of them sort of takes the fun out of it. Everyone is talking to each other about family matters, and I can't help feeling like a proverbial "fifth wheel."

The word coming down from the government this year is to cancel family dinner plans or adjust them for a small number of people. The more people who are in a home, the greater the chance of spreading Covid-19 to everyone in the family. 

That makes good sense, but I doubt many people will do it. Thanksgiving is one of those big holidays that people have to celebrate. Many Americans will say, "I'm going to celebrate Thanksgiving if it kills me." For some of them, it will. But what can we do? Sit around the dinner table with our masks on? Or eat by ourselves? Neither sounds like fun.

Normally, I don't celebrate Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or July 4th. Or, you know—holidays. That includes my birthday (which, don't get me wrong, is not a holiday, but if it were I am sure many Americans would celebrate it with some manner of ethanol-fortified beverage. "VirtualWayne? Never heard of him, but I'll drink to his birthday!")

I am planning to have a guest this Thanksgiving, and I am wondering if I should attempt to cook a Thanksgiving dinner beforehand. I am not much of a cook, as evidenced by a number of my blog posts which describe how I have, on occasion, filled the house with smoke, or annihilated a bird, in an effort to produce an acceptable meal. I guess I could go out for Chinese. I've done that on Thanksgiving. The buffets are almost empty on that day—it's just me and a few forlorn stragglers who likewise can't cook. But I don't want to inflict a Chinese buffet meal on a Thanksgiving Day guest. Of course, I could tell my guest it's not really Thanksgiving Day. 

Thanksgiving Day? Oh, I'm sorry, but that was yesterday. Yes, they changed it to Wednesday this year because of Covid. But how about a nice Chinese buffet?

I wonder, would that work?

Unicorn Heads

The song of the day is New Orleans Crawfish Boil from the album On Beach by San Francisco music production studio Unicorn Heads (Grahame Lesh, Kirby Hammel, Jeremy Joenig, Connor O'Sullivan).

Election Fraud

The following account was inspired by a real news story.

I watched an interview with a voter whom the Trump campaign has accused of being dead. She seemed to be a very nice, elderly woman. She admitted she voted and insisted she was not dead. However, a Trump campaign official disputed this and said she wasn't qualified to judge whether or not she was dead. 

"I'm not dead," the woman stated.

The campaign official asked her, "Are you a doctor?"

"No," the woman answered.

"Then what makes you qualified to answer a medical question?" the official continued.

"Medical question?" the woman asked.

"Yes," the official replied. "Determining life or death is a medical question. So, are you a doctor?"

"No," the woman admitted again.

"There you have it," the official said smugly. "Another dead person voting, and she cannot prove definitively that she is not dead. We have only the word of an unqualified person as the sole evidence that she is not dead. Excuse me, now. I have many more dead people that I must complain to the courts about." 

And with that, the campaign official moved on to interview another deceased voter.

I admit to taking lightly this incident. Because that is what this kind of story deserves. All of the Trump campaign's claims of voting irregularities have fallen apart when they got to court and a judge began asking questions. Of course, there could be vote-counting mistakes here and there. People are not machines. People get tired, people make mistakes. However, that kind of mistake is equally likely to happen with a Biden vote as with a Trump vote, so they tend to cancel out in the long run. There has been no evidence of systemic fraud. We will have a new president, unless the present occupant of the White House can find some way to block a legitimate transfer of power.

As this Internet philosopher once famously said (or at least thought): "A loser who cannot accept losing is the biggest loser of all."

BVRNOUT & Mia Vaile

The song of the day is Take It Easy from the 2017 album Take It Easy by electronic dance music artist/producer BVRNOUT (Chris Barnhart) featuring American-Israeli singer-songwriter Mia Vaile.

Quick and Easy Part 2

Saturday's blog post was titled Quick and Easy Part 1. When I was halfway through it, I knew I had enough verbiage to publish. I wanted to write more, but as I said in the post, I was ready for bed. So I published what I had and began this post.

---

America has changed in many ways during my lifetime. "Quick and Easy" has become a maxim for many of us. But life in America wasn't always easy, and I think it bred a different kind of American. As I mentioned in my last post, my grandmother would have to build a fire in a wood stove if she wanted to cook food. It was hard, but you can bet she learned patience.

Now, we want instant this or that: instant coffee, instant tea, instant hot chocolate, instant powdered milk, instant freeze-dried fruit juice, instant oatmeal, instant grits, instant noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant rice, instant pudding, instant soup, instant MRE (meal, ready-to-eat).

Some of us want many more things to be instant. They want life's problems to be solved instantly. They want the nation's problems to be solved instantly.

The answers to the nation's problems can often be boiled down to that age-old predicament: Should we each promote the common good, or should we each follow the maxim "every man for himself"?

Often, issues have two solutions: an easy one and a hard one. We can allow people to live in storm tunnels underground and in tents above ground, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to homelessness. We can put impoverished, desperate people in cages, or we can do the hard work of finding a solution to the poverty, crime, and wretched quality of life that drives illegal immigrants to this country and too often to their deaths.

America has changed, and the world has changed as well. Finding a solution to a difficult issue will not be easy, and there may be no solution that pleases everyone. A solution will require thought and effort and may require a degree of sacrifice from some of us. But I suspect that the "easy way" to solve an intractable problem—a "solution" that is often simply a feel-good, knee-jerk reaction—will not work. If it would, such a problem would have been solved long ago. A problem persists because it's a hard nut to crack. Even so, it behooves us to make the effort.

Quick and Easy Part 1

It's almost time for bed, and I was reflecting upon the meals I've consumed today.

For breakfast: a hamburger. (Yes, a burger, but I ate breakfast at 1:30PM.) I nuked a frozen beef patty for 65 seconds. I put it on a jumbo size bun. I sliced tomato and lay the slices on the patty. I sprinkled chopped onion on it, and lathered ketchup and mustard over it. After another 11 seconds in the microwave, the assemblage was ready to eat. It was warm and tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For lunch: a tossed salad. I began with a bag of chopped lettuce: romaine, green tango, and radicchio. Plus shredded carrot. (There was just enough carrot in the bag to make it legal to list it on the bag.) I drizzled olive oil and cider vinegar over it. It was tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For supper: a microwave dinner. I heated a tray of frozen spaghetti with meat sauce for 6½ minutes and sprinkled Parmesan cheese over it. It was warm and tasty. Best of all, it was quick and easy.

For a bedtime snack, I juiced a pound of carrots and a few ribs of celery. The juice was delicious! Afterward, I cleaned the juicer, which took a bit longer than drinking the juice, but I would still call it quick and easy.

You may detect a theme here. I love things that are quick and easy. And it makes me think of my grandmother. When I was a youngster, my family (Mom, Dad, and me) lived with my grandparents. This was Olden Days, of which today's young 'uns know nothing. My grandmother cooked a "real" supper (and it was called supper, doggone it.) She also cooked a meal for lunch, which was called dinner. And she cooked her meals on a cast-iron wood stove. Was it hard work? You bet. Building a fire in a cast-iron stove on a hot August day, so that your family can have a hot meal, was just a way of life. 

I mention this to draw a contrast between the way things are now and the way things used to be. No one in America has to build a fire in order to cook a hot meal. But there was a time when that was just the way things were. Believe it or not, there was a time before mobile phones—or any kind of phone. There was a time before television. There was a time before radio. There was a time before moving pictures. 

There was a time when houses had big front porches and everyone knew their neighbors. Not only knew their neighbors, but visited them and conversed with them. I have new neighbors across the street from my house and I don't know who they are. I don't know if they bought the house or are renting it. I don't know anything at all about them. Apart from idle curiosity, I have no need to know and I'm okay with that. Even so, it's a little sad to not know your neighbors. I know the man next door is Egyptian, and he speaks with such a thick accent that I cannot understand half his words. Still, we have the occasional conversation, though it's made of verbal fluff. 

I have neighbors, but I don't have connections. There are people living around me and I know little or nothing about them. It's reciprocal—they know little or nothing about me. This is 21st century America. No wonder there are so many angry people willing to fight over something as ephemeral as political winds. Donald Trump said he wanted to "make America great again," but I'm afraid that what really made America great is gone forever. What we have now is the new way of life—the manners, morals, attitudes, and principles—that took its place.

It's almost time for bed, and I will be there soon. I'm not sure what I'll eat tomorrow, but you can bet your life it will be quick and easy.

Our Republic

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I've been thinking about something that I suspect many people have been thinking about. Will President Donald Trump leave the White House when his term in office expires, or will he declare himself president-for-life (or whatever new title he may choose) and remain in the office of president until he dies? Will he arrange things so that his family takes over the reins of government after he passes on? Keep in mind that Trump and his family do not need to control government directly. They need to control America's military leadership.

People may laugh, but our republic depends on having leaders who have the integrity to not do such things. Trump has repeatedly said the election was fraudulent and that he is the rightful president. He has claimed the election was stolen from him. Now he is replacing top leadership at the Pentagon with his pals—"Trump loyalists," as our news media call them. He has just two months left in his presidency. Why is he sacking Pentagon leadership now? Why is he putting his buddies into those important leadership positions? To say it looks ominous is an understatement.

The blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, also known as 'Nostradamus of the Balkans', predicted that an African-American would be the 44th and last US President. When Trump was elected 45th president of the US, people assumed she blew that prediction. But what if she didn't? If Trump was elected President but then, before his term expires, assumes a dictatorial role and stays in the White House, possibly passing his rule to his family, can we call him a legitimate president? Obama was elected, served two terms, and left office—like all his predecessors. I think it's a coin toss, a 50/50 probability, whether Trump stays or leaves.

But whatever happens, I'm not too bothered by it. I hope he honors the will of the people. I hope he rethinks what he appears ready to do and turns over the reins of government to his elected successor. But whatever happens, it's way above my pay grade. I'm a bystander in this drama. I wait and watch to see what happens. I have no control over events, the same as 99.9999% of the American people. All we can do is live our lives and watch the show unfold in Washington. While we watch and wait, I reflect on Benjamin Franklin's words in 1787 as he left Independence Hall on the final day of the Constitutional Convention. A lady asked Dr. Franklin, "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A republic ... if you can keep it." 

Will we keep it? We'll have our answer at noon on January 20th, 2021.

Weather Coming

A cold rain is coming and it's going to knock a lot of leaves to the ground. While that's true of Nature, in this instance I'm using it as a metaphor. I hope I don't have to explain it.

These maple trees are growing about 50 feet from my back yard. Technically, they're in someone else's back yard, but I get to see them and enjoy their colors. I took this photo in the afternoon. The sunlight slanting through the trees seems to bring out their colors best in the morning and afternoon. There are over 100 species of maple tree with fall colors like red, gold, and yellow. In sunlight they seem to glow, something you can't see in a photo.

My friend Butch who lives a few doors down the street from me is doing some work on his side porch on a Sunday afternoon. His Shih Tzu, Lizzy, is watching me and probably wondering what the humans are up to.

The sky is actually blue on this afternoon, but the sky is so bright it saturates all the color pixels in the camera's light sensor, turning the the sky white on this image. This happens especially with inexpensive cameras such as you find built into a phone. Both these photos were captured with my phone, as I rarely carry a camera around with me. It's "good enough for government work," as the saying goes.

At 6:30 the sky is beginning to lighten. It will be a gray sky today. Weather radar shows a big blob of precipitation closing in on central Virginia. The precip hasn't started falling yet at my house, but I expect it to begin within the hour. The prognosticators say that we'll be getting rain for about two days.

Preparations

It has been a sunny and warm early November day in central Virginia. The high temperature was 76°F. In the spring I will have guests from Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country, so I want to brush up on my Spanish which I haven't used since high school Spanish class. I'm using a website called Duolingo which hosts free Spanish lessons. In some of the lessons I listen to someone speak in Spanish and then I type what I hear. There are male and female speakers. The man does a halfway good job of pronouncing the words, but when the woman speaks all I hear is "mumble mumble mumble." So I turn the volume up and play the words again, and I hear "MUMBLE, MUMBLE, MUMBLE." Come on, guys, I could make a better recording with an 88 cent microphone available off the Web. But maybe the problem isn't a poor recording; maybe the woman really mumbles.

The threshold of my front door was in poor condition, looking dirty with peeling paint. So I tried to paint it this afternoon. The last time I painted anything around this house was when I moved into the house 17 years ago. I put three coats of paint on all the walls and ceilings, upstairs and downstairs and the connecting stairwell. So painting a threshold should be easy as falling off a log, right? Nope. For one thing, I could locate few of my painting tools. Most of my paint brushes had disappeared. My paint scrapers had disappeared, leaving me with only a 6 inch putty knife for removing loose paint. Then I got white paint on the cement floor of the front porch. Then I got it on my hands. Then I got it on my pants.

When I finished, there was no doubt in my mind that my painting days are behind me. Although, I will admit the threshold does look better, if you don't look too closely. Ironically, my guests may not even see the freshly-painted threshold because I always park in the backyard and enter and leave my house through the back door.

Why did I not think of that earlier?

It's too bad that my guests are not here now, in early November. Late October through early November is the time of year in central Virginia when Nature is prettiest. Yesterday, I had been visiting a friend a few doors down the street from me, and as I left to walk home I snapped two photos with my phone (images below). You're looking down two streets that intersect where I'm standing.

I am lucky to have a friend who lives in a country with only two seasons: rainy and not-rainy. I see Nature's artistry every day, and sometimes it helps if another person reminds me of the beauty around me. It is easy to take that beauty for granted. I have to stop and look at my world to really see it.

The high temperature today was 76°F. Tomorrow will be another sunny day with a high temperature of 79°. We will have more warm weather, but Nature is in the process of preparing for cold, because cold is coming. The cold has to come because if it didn't, how could we have spring? How could we appreciate spring?

I am preparing my house for guests. Nature is preparing my world for a new cycle of sleep and rebirth. With luck, I'll have an opportunity to see both.

Chores

I have a friend who wants to lose weight. So I sent her a link to a video I watched ten years ago titled "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead" (Wikipedia here, YouTube here) which chronicles the experiences of an Australian man who goes on a juice fast while driving across the U.S. It's an entertaining movie even if you don't plan on a doing a juice fast. She replied that she would like to try a juice fast but had only a blender in her kitchen. She plunged ahead and used the blender and loved the results. She first blended celery and liked it so much she blended carrot and liked it even more. 

I have a juicer and I'm thinking of returning to a juice diet for a while. Setting up the juicer and cleaning it after I make the juice do take time. So I'm thinking this time I'll buy cups with lids so I can prepare my day's juice in the morning and keep it in the fridge for drinking throughout the day. Or I could use a pitcher and put plastic wrap over the top to keep the juice fresh. Or I could use a wide-mouth bottle (from the grocery store) for which I still have the lid. I'll figure something out.

If my friend chooses to use her blender, she will be getting the entire fruit or veggie. She will be eating a lot of pulp. That's not a bad thing. The pulp is good for the bowel and contributes to a feeling of fullness. While pulp is good, juice is better. Juice is where the nutrients are.

You may be wondering about protein and fat. Don't our bodies need those? Of course, but a juice fast isn't something you do the rest of your life. It's a month or two.

I have another friend who natively speaks Spanish. I had two years of Spanish in high school but I never really learned it. However, I like the idea of learning another language and Spanish seems reasonable. According to Wikipedia, Spanish has nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese, and the world's fourth-most spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. I know English, I'd like to know some Spanish, and if I can, I'd like to know a little Chinese. I don't know about learning Hindi, but it would probably help me to communicate with doctors.

So I've been doing a little chatting in short Spanish phrases: simple things like "está bien" and "duerme bien" or possibly "duermas bien" which I'm told is the subjunctive mood as opposed to the informal imperative mood—and there you go, right away we see why people don't learn languages. Even my friend who is a native Spanish speaker has trouble explaining which to use and why, and then gives up and tells me to use either one because she'll know what I mean.

I'm also on a house-cleaning kick at the moment. I periodically go through a lazy stretch—the duration of which grows longer with each cycle—until one day I look around and think, "My house looks like an episode of Hoarders." And then I make an attempt at house-cleaning. I'm going through a cleaning phase now. It's not just cleaning. I have to patch and repaint walls and ceilings where water came through the new roof and caused damage.

I've also been told that I need to walk more, to exercise more, to lose weight. Let me start a list:

• Exercise
• Diet
• Language practice
• House cleaning
• Painting
• Yard work
  

I think it's possible I need to start drinking again. Maybe I should add that to the list.

Pentatonix

The song of the day is Amazing Grace from the upcoming Christmas album We Need A Little Christmas by a cappella group Pentatonix. The album will be out November 13, 2020.

Computer Thoughts

These days, more and more stuff is in the cloud, and I'm glad. I want a-l-l my stuff to be in the cloud.

Notice I said, the cloud. The reason for that is to distinguish the cloud, a noun that means "a network of remote servers hosted on the internet", from a cloud, a noun that means "a visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere."

When my hard drive fails, as all hard drives are destined to do, I want all my important stuff in the cloud. That way when I repair or replace my computer, all my stuff is still available. All I need are my login credentials: my user name and password, which are safely stored on my ... hard ... drive. Yeah, the drive that is now kaput.

I'm kidding. My credentials are safely stored in ... the ... cloud. Wait a minute. I think I need my login credentials to access the cloud to retrieve my login credentials. This is the scenario where pen and paper win.

Actually, you can store all your stuff in the cloud. There are companies on the Web that will backup your computer auto-magically for you. Or you can do it yourself with an external drive, but this will require a bit more technical expertise.

In a way, it's good to not have a backup. Our computers are like slow-moving barges on a river ... they accumulate unused files and fragments of this-and-that like a river barge accumulates barnacles. Once in a while, it might be a good thing to have it all wiped clean. Not the really important stuff, mind you, and I'm talking about the stuff that you back up to a local drive, and to a thumbdrive, and to Google Drive, and maybe to one of those websites like Carbonite or IDrive. I'm not talking about the important stuff, I'm talking about the stuff that you can easily replace, such as program files. You probably have programs you never use anymore. When you start using your computer again, you'll discover you want to do something but don't have a program installed for that. So you reinstall it. Or you never miss it, in which case there's less junk on your hard drive. It's like spring cleaning for your computer.

You may have deduced that I recently had a hard drive go down. I was able to retrieve it thanks to Dell's Backup and Recovery software which was in some magical partition on the hard drive that only the virtual wizard on my drive can access. It saved many items like Pictures and Documents and the Desktop, and it offered to save other things, but I was tired of how long it was taking and decided to forego the Extra Backup and go straight to the Recovery portion of the show. And it did recover a surprising amount and helped me get back to normal operations fairly quickly. And no doubt I lost things that I'll never miss. But I also had an external backup drive which, combined with the Dell Recovery software, let my PC return to life quickly. 

So now I'm pondering: do I clone this hard drive or just buy another PC? I think I've had this PC for 6 years. The previous PC lasted for 6 years. Its hard drive didn't die; something else failed. It might have been the CPU. It might have been the system board. Whichever it was, neither were still available for purchase. And if I could have repaired it, it would have been an obsolete system. I could have used it, in the same way I don't buy a new microwave oven every six years, even though the new ovens are much more advanced and can be purchased with the thought-command option and other marvelous, sci-fi things. None of this ponderation helps me with the decision—do I super-backup this hard drive or buy another machine?

This is the right time of year to be buying a new PC. It's not Black Friday, it's Black November, because the stores don't want Black Friday crowds this year. I'll look around. I'll see what's available. And then I'll ponder it some more.

Zero Day

It's Zero Day. Election day.

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More importantly, it's National Sandwich Day. Many small restaurants and chains are offering freebies today, from sandwiches to doughnuts to pastries and other deals. I was going to list them but there are really too many. Just search "election day freebies 2020." Some of them are all-day deals, and some begin after the polls close. Some offer a free sandwich, some are half-off, some are buy-one-get-one-free. Some are for donuts, some are for other pastries. Chances are, if you live in the USA you can throw a meatball and hit a store giving away something or offering a deal. Do we care who is president? No, we want to know where we can get a free sub and a cola. We'll settle for a free chicken sandwich. In fact, we'll settle for a free donut.

My neighbor's "Trump 2020" sign is back in her front yard. Though really, if it's election day and a voter still hasn't decided who to vote for, they should not be voting for anyone. Like, where have you been for the last four years?

I'm curious to know what the polling place looks like today. In the 2016 election there was a long line of people waiting to vote, and the parking lot had pickup trucks painted in woodland camo with Confederate flags proudly displayed. However, I voted weeks ago and I'm not curious enough to get dressed and drive to the polling place to see what's happening.

I was planning to mow my yard today, but it's already 4 PM and it's starting to look like I'll mow the yard tomorrow. The high was 63°F today, and tomorrow is supposed to be 67°. Thursday will hit 70°, and Friday and Saturday will hit 71°, with all days sunny or partly sunny. That sounds good to me. I believe in the old saying, "Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow." Those Old Ones were wise people.

Countdown: 1 Day

 Vote!

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  Just Do It

This day dawns cloudy and gray. A cold rain is falling. The air is 54°F but the rain is colder. Two years of delivering the morning newspaper on a bicycle when I was a young teen—often in rain and sometimes in snow—gives me the knowledge that falling through air makes rain colder. I cannot believe how dark the day is. At 11 AM, one would think it is twilight.

The rain is moderately heavy. A bird seeks refuge under my front window awning. The window is made of 8 small panes mounted in a frame, and he is perched on the frame looking at me. When I turn my head to study him, he becomes disconcerted and flies down to hide in the bush that grows below my window. Perhaps he has a nest in the bush. My nest is made of brick and block and oak. My nest has electricity and WiFi and heat and a/c. Mr. Bird's nest is not so well-equipped. It is made of twigs. But it has plenty of fresh air and, for the moment, it is probably well equipped with running water.

The day passes uneventfully. I accomplished nothing of significance. I worked on-and-off on this blog post. I napped for a while. I ate lunch: Mexican rice (I have a recipe here), plus a mix of baby spinach leaves wilted in a wok combined with chopped onion sauteed in soy sauce. I added red pepper flakes to the spinach. I would like to have added oyster sauce or hoisin sauce, but the bottles in my fridge were well past their expire date. They went onto my phone's shopping list.

A friend called me and we discussed several topics, including the fact that I need to buy a new keyboard and mouse. My friend uses an ergonomic keyboard—it's curved with a built-in palm rest. That's going to be my next keyboard. Typing on my current keyboard is becoming difficult and I've been making an increasing number of typos. Plus my optical mouse has been giving me trouble and I have to "reset" it periodically. To reset it, I pull one of the AA cells out of it. There's an on/off switch on it, and you'd think that simply turning if off for a few seconds would reset it. But no, and I don't know why. It acts like the switch doesn't really turn the mouse off. Maybe it only turns the LED off. That's what uses most of the battery power anyway.

I watched the national news, and suppertime arrived. I ate one of those Devour frozen dinners. It was Cajun-style Alfredo with smoked sausage and white-meat chicken. I admit I'm not picky, but it tasted plenty good to me. I wish they had put a little more food in the box. I finished dinner with an apple.

Tomorrow is election day. I've already voted—by mail. It was so much easier than standing in line for a couple of hours. I have walked out of a polling place because I stood in a long line for 15 minutes and the line didn't move. I salute those voters who have the stamina to stand in line for hours. And I say shame on those officials who force voters to have to do that. 

Factoid: did you know that polling place refers to the building where you vote, and polling station refers to the room where you vote? A polling place may have multiple polling stations. It's a fact!

My neighbor across the street had a "Trump 2020" sign in her front yard for the past few weeks. On Halloween night, the sign disappeared. Do the spirits dislike Trump? Draw your own conclusions.