On Her Way

I'm at home and my time is 10:20PM EDT Sunday. Nuria is in Costa Rica and her time is 8:20PM CST. Normally, my time is one hour later than her time, but Daylight Saving Time makes my time two hours later than her time.

She will soon be on her way to the San Jose airport. It's about a ten minute drive from her house. She has to be there three hours before her flight leaves. Tonight, she will be on her way to stay with me for a while. Her flight leaves at 11:54PM Costa Rica time—1:54AM my time. Actually, 11:54PM is gate departure time. Takeoff is scheduled for 12:04AM, ten minutes later. She will fly to JFK in New York City and will land there at 6:50AM. She will arrive at the gate at 7AM. Then she will wait for her connecting flight to Richmond. That will depart JFK at 9AM and arrive at Richmond at 10:33AM Monday.

I'll leave home at 9:30AM to drive to the airport. It should be a 45 minutes drive to the airport. I'll get on I-95, heavy traffic, and drive to Richmond, where I'll take I-64 East to the airport exit, which is South Airport Drive. From there it's a matter of being in the correct lane at traffic lights and paying close attention to the road signs. I have to take the Hourly Parking ramp and avoid Daily Parking and Weekly Parking. I have to stop and get my ticket to park (from the automated parking ticket dispenser) and then drive into the first parking garage. There is usually a parking place near the far end of the garage, but if there's not I will have to enter the second parking garage.

Then I'll walk to the terminal, and go up the escalator, and walk to the waiting area where Concourse A and Concourse B come together. Then I'll sit and wait for her to appear. She will be tired after traveling all night. I don't expect to get much sleep either. We're both excited to be getting back together. 

I've been perusing a map of Richmond, hoping there was an easy way to get someplace interesting, like the New York Deli where we could get hot pastrami sandwiches. But I haven't driven in downtown Richmond in many years, and the city streets are confusing, with so many one-way streets and toll expressways. I've given up for the night. I'll brush my teeth and lie down. Nuria can call me. Even if she wakes me up, I won't mind. I just want to know she's making progress on her trip. 

So now it's 11:20PM Sunday night.

*****************************************

Five hours later:

I slept until 4:20AM. Now its 5:40AM and the flight tracker shows her flight is about to cross the North Carolina/Virginia border. There were areas of precipitation around JFK earlier but they have moved east. Now, the weather at JFK is good.

I'll see if I can squeeze in a Spanish lesson or two, but then I'll have to take my shower, dress, and get the Jeep out of the garage and pull it close to the back door. I'll come back in and maybe eat an apple or a bowl of raisin bran, though I'm not hungry. My body knows this is too early to eat breakfast. I'll wait for the sun to rise, which will be at 7:01AM today. I might apply some Windex to the windshield and wipe it with a paper towel.

I'll track her flight until it lands at JFK. She might send me a WhatsApp text when she gets into the terminal. We might have a short video chat. Her next flight (to RIC) leaves at 9AM and I don't have to leave home to get her until 9:30AM.

It's dark now, at 6AM, and the temperature is 29°F. The high today will be 50°F. It will be chilly when I meet her in Richmond, but the walk from the terminal to my car will be a short one (I hope). It normally is a short walk. Nuria will probably be hungry, although I will guess she will likely have bought a snack and a coffee at JFK. 

When I started editing this blog at 5:30AM, her flight was about to cross the North Carolina-Virginia border. Now at 6:05AM, her flight is close to JFK in New York. 

Just to put everything into perspective:

Remember, JFK is her layover stop, not her final destination. It's about 6:20AM. On the flight tracker I can see her jet is turning to the west toward JFK. 

A few minutes pass.

Now the flight tracker no longer shows the little airplane symbol. The flight is on the ground. Soon it will be at the gate and Nuria will deplane (is that the word?) and begin waiting for her 9AM flight to Richmond.

Note the map below. No little airplane. The flight landed at 6:26AM. Not bad—three minutes behind schedule. It will take probably ten minutes to get to the gate. And then the passengers will have to leave the plane. I estimate she'll require 20 minutes from landing to walk into the JFK terminal. 

I've never flow to JFK. I've flown to nearby Newark, which I recall as overcrowded. I suspect JFK is probably the same. I have no desire to fly through those large airports. 

I sent Nuria a WhatsApp text, so she'll know I'm awake and up and that I want to hear from her. The text hasn't made it to her phone yet, so I know she's still on the plane. 

I'll wait a while to see if she replies, then I'll pop into the shower and bathe. I'll get dressed. I'll get the Jeep out of the garage. I'll do some more waiting.

The time is now 6:41AM. The sun will rise in 20 minutes.

Safeguard

There has been a lot of nuclear saber-rattling coming out of Russia. It's hard to watch any recent news program without hearing Russian leaders threatening to use nuclear weapons. That would be the end of the world, certainly as we know it. Survivors would have to live a Stone Age lifestyle. 

Today's nuclear threats remind me of those days when I was a kid. We school children were taught to "Duck and Cover" and there were designated nuclear fallout shelters. We got used to living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, but we didn't believe it would happen. Of course, it could have happened, but it didn't.

After college, I worked on missile guidance systems for a while. (I blogged about that here in a post written in 2010, when everyone knew that the threat of nuclear war was an artifact from the 1950s that was now long gone.)

The guidance system I remember with some degree of irony was the Safeguard ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) System. We had two missiles called Spartan and Sprint. Let me quote from my previous blog post:

“Safeguard used two types of missiles to protect us from incoming nuclear warheads. The first line of defense was the Spartan missile. If our country was attacked, Spartan missiles would be guided to an intercept with incoming missiles high above the atmosphere. Any warheads that got past the Spartan missiles would be close to their detonation points, so the aptly-named Sprint missiles would be launched for a last-chance intercept. A Sprint missile streaked across the sky almost too fast for the eye to follow. The guidance system had to function after being hit with gamma rays and neutrons from an exploding atomic warhead. That made the design more interesting and more complicated.”

My company sent me to the Air Force Weapons Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for three weeks to learn about the effects of nuclear explosions on solid-state electronics. That was very enlightening. In addition to the education I received, I enjoyed Albuquerque—visiting Old Town, riding the Sandia Peak Tramway to a restaurant on the top of Mt. Sandia. That last link is worth looking at; it shows great views of the tramway going to the top of Mt. Sandia and it shows pictures of the restaurant.

But let me get back on topic. We engineers had developed a great ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) system. It worked. All it needed was funding from Congress to deploy it and have it protecting us from Russia's ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). 

But Congress would not fund it. And here's why. Quoting from my blog again:

“The Safeguard system worked, but our country’s political leaders decided it worked too well. They determined that Safeguard, if fully deployed, would upset the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was based on an assumption that the only way to maintain peace with the Soviets was to ensure both our populations would be vulnerable to the other’s weapons. So Safeguard was scrapped before it could be deployed. Goodbye Safeguard.”

But the weakness with the notion of MAD was that it assumed both the US and Russia were led by rational, sane leaders. What if one country had a leader with an iron-grip on his military, and that leader became irrational, to the point that he prefers to destroy the world rather than admit defeat. Oh, if that happens, won't we be wishing we had that Safeguard ABM system to protect us. But I guess Congress knew that scenario would never happen. They knew that we would never be faced by an irrational dictator leading a nuclear state. Well, they may have been correct, but with each day it becomes a little bit less certain that they made the correct decision. And Russia would now be a lot more hesitant to launch nuclear warheads toward us if they knew we could knock those warheads out of the sky long before they reached their targets.

Pentatonix - Anchor

The Song of the Day is Anchor from the 2021 album "The Lucky Ones (Deluxe)" by five person a cappella group Pentatonix featuring the tenor voice of singer-songwriter Mitch Grassi.

Simple Times

Today. Whew!

Today was the culmination of a sequence of events that began when my mobile phone quit working, about two months ago. Allow me to explain.

My cellphone didn't exactly quit working. It lost the ability to make and receive phone calls over the cellular network. The cellphone company is called Ting Mobile. They have low prices compared to most cellular companies. But for now all you need to know is that the cellphone is Ting and the cordless phones are magicJack. Except ... sometimes the cellphone is magicJack, too. But I'll get to that.

Making and receiving phone calls is pretty much the reason I have a cell phone, so when you take that away, it really puts a dent in the whole reason for having a cellphone. But the phone still worked, so that for a long time I didn't realize it wasn't working, if that makes sense. 

The phone worked for me because I use WhatsApp for almost all my personal (non-business) phone calls and texts. WhatsApp works over the Internet, and the Ting phone could still use the Internet to send and receive data, it just couldn't use the cellular network. I spend a lot of time at home and the phone is always linked to my Internet router, so when it quit working (the cellphone, not the router) I didn't notice at first.

Besides my cell phone, I have another phone. I have a cordless phone on my computer desk, and another cordless phone in my bedroom, and they both use magicJack, which is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone company. With magicJack, phone calls and texts to anywhere in the US and Canada are free. Okay, not entirely free. You have to buy the magicJack device and pay a small amount per year to use the device. The magicJack that I have plugs into my router, and my phone plugs into the magicJack. They assign you a number, and then you can make "free" phone calls from your magicJack-enabled phone(s). Using magicJack costs me about $25 per year for unlimited use.

You may think I'm getting off topic here, but I just want to explain why I didn't notice when my cell phone quit working. But first, I have to explain something else. The company that sells the magicJack is named magicJack, and magicJack (the company, not the gadget) has a free app for your cellphone that lets your cellphone use magicJack. The app, which is called magicApp, connects to your modem using WiFi, or if you're away from your home it can connect to the Internet using the phone's cell network. Of course, if it does that—if it uses the cell network—then you'll probably pay for the minutes you use.

Almost 100% of the time, I'm at home when I use my phone, so I make and receive free calls over the Internet instead of using the cell network. Plus, there's this: I'm in the habit of misplacing my cellphone. When I enter the house, I put the cellphone down somewhere, and then I can't find it, and so I go to my cordless phone and dial my cellphone number. The cellphone rings, and I follow the sound to the phone. It always works. 

But then one day, it quit working. Instead of ringing the cellphone, my call went to voicemail. Very strange. I decided to do some investigation, but I kept putting it off. I had other things to do, they were more pressing, etc., etc. But I wasn't sure whether the problem was in my cordless (magicJack) phone or in the cellular (Ting) phone. So to resolve this question, I went to my third phone number, which is a Google Voice number. Yes, folks, I have three phone numbers.

I called my Ting phone and my magicJack phone from my Google Voice phone. The magicJack phone played its musical ringtone, but the Ting phone didn't ring. So I went to the Ting Mobile website and went to their tech support chat box and ...

This is where it gets exhausting. I spent a long time troubleshooting the situation with their tech support, and they decided my cellphone (which I had purchased from them years ago) might have a bad SIM card. So they Fedexed me a new SIM card, and it arrived in two days. I put the new SIM card into the phone and called tech support again. They had to initialize the SIM card, or whatever you call it when you make the phone work. We spent maybe two hours trying to get the phone to work. I suspected the phone was bad, but I was willing to try various avenues to make it work.

I called back today and got another tech support person, and we worked on it for maybe four hours. The number of things they had me do with the phone was exhausting. Initialize this setting, check that setting. It went on and on and nothing I did made the phone work. After maybe four hours, I knew the phone was bad, though it appeared to be a working phone. So I thanked tech support and tried to order a new cellphone, but I got stuck in a software loop which kept returning me to the previous page. I filled out my name and address, clicked Submit, and I'd be back at the page asking me for my name and address. Over and over. So back to tech support. I ended up using a different browser to place the order. Strange, but we (tech support and I) got it done. The phone is on its way to me—I surely hope.

Upon proofreading this blog post, it's entirely possible that parts of it are inaccurate. I'm not a cellphone expert, nor a VoIP expert. I only know that they work and I pay money. I bought a cheap phone ($100). I don't play games on my phone, I don't watch videos (except for WhatsApp video calls), and I don't need fancy gizmos like a phone with five lenses to take better photos and videos than a $150,000 TV studio camera. I just want to make a phone call and talk. Like we did in olden times. I still miss the lady who always asked "Number please?" when I picked up the phone. I think her name was Mabel. We miss you, Mabel, and those simple times.

Logotherapy

I was reading an article on Quora and I saw that the author listed his occupation as "Evolutionary Logotherapist." My curiosity was piqued. What is an evolutionary logotherapist?

Logotherapy was invented by Victor Frankl. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps.

From Wikipedia:

In 1942, just nine months after his marriage, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and the surviving members of his family were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl spent three years in four concentration camps.

Frankl wrote about his experiences in the camps in his autobiographical book Man's Search for Meaning, a book I read many years ago. He invented logotherapy, which is based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find a meaning in life. 

From Wikipedia (edited):

While head of the Neurological Department at the general Polyclinic Hospital, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning over a nine-day period. The book was released in German in 1946. The English translation of Man's Search for Meaning was published in 1959, and became an international bestseller.  Millions of copies were sold in dozens of languages. In a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Man's Search for Meaning was named one of the ten most influential books in the US.

I don't want to read that book again. I know how inhuman we humans can be. Every day, the news coming out of Ukraine reminds me of the evil that men do. 

If you've never read Man's Search for Meaning, you might enjoy it or, at least, find some enlightenment from reading it. For that matter, you might find meaning in some of the quotes, essays, and books of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,  one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The two men don't see the world in the same light, yet they are both right, in their own ways, about the human race.

Don't ask me about "evolutionary logotherapy." It's only someone's idea of a joke.

Adele

The Song of the Day is Easy On Me from the 2021 album 30 by English singer-songwriter Adele (Adele Laurie Blue Adkins).

Trouble in Paradise

I sit in my home. It has been a cold day. Now it is a chilly afternoon, 46°F, but sunny. I am on WhatsApp with Nuria. I am in the USA, and Nuria is in Costa Rica, at a hospital where she has taken her adult daughter, Mary, to the Emergency Room. Hopefully, it is not something serious, but Mary is in a lot of pain and is weak and probably dehydrated. One time I became unable to eat or drink, and a sip of water would come back up immediately. I went to the ER, and they put me on IV fluids. They had a lot of trouble inserting the IV needle because I was so dehydrated that my veins had shrunk. After I was re-hydrated I felt much better. I left the ER without being admitted. Although they did a CT scan just to be sure there wasn't another problem. A small problem, if untreated, can cause a big problem. You know the old proverbs. A stitch in time saves nine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

(As I chat with Nuria on WhatsApp, the setting sun glints through my front windows, through the Venetian blinds, and through a glass snail that sits in my window. I bought it a long time ago. I had planned to give it to someone, but plans sometimes change. It's an interesting objet d'art—more interesting to view in the sunlight than to see in a photo.)

Americans seem to think Costa Rica is a little slice of Paradise. It has a reputation for being a pretty country, especially the tourist areas. It has a nice climate during the tourist season, with sunny days and beautiful beaches. For added excitement, it has six active volcanoes and 61 dormant ones. Plus, occasional earthquakes. The USA also has active volcanoes and earthquakes. My small city in Virginia had an earthquake and I blogged about it here. In fact, we were hit with an earthquake and a hurricane in the same week.

The doctors have completed their tests. Mary has pelionefritis (pyelonephritis in English). It's a kidney infection and requires treatment in the hospital. So Mary will be staying there for a few days. And that's what is going on in my life. And it's not even about my life. I don't have a real life, I just rent one from my friends.

Do The Right Thing

"Do the right thing."

You hear people say it. Many times they say it about young people. "Why can't they just do the right thing?" They say it about wealthy businessmen. They say it about politicians. "Just do the right thing."

We forget that the "right thing" must be taught, and it must be taught at a young age or it will not stick, it will not be learned. The "right thing" is a way of life that is passed from one generation to the next, and then to the next, and so on, like the links of a chain. And if the chain is broken, the "right thing" becomes lost, becomes forgotten. It's like a secret recipe that is handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, from grandfather to father to son, and if someone along the way doesn't hand that recipe down to the next generation, then it's not learned and it becomes forgotten. It becomes lost. And then people will behave as if there never was a right way to behave. They will do things that would be unthinkable to an earlier generation.

Many Americans today have forgotten that there is a right path and that there is a wrong path. A student gets angry at a classmate so he goes to school with a gun and shoots the source of his anger. In doing so, a number of innocent people may be shot: classmates and teachers. It happens because somebody did not learn that there is a right way and a wrong way to live and behave. Somebody didn't learn that, in the end, there is always be a price to be paid.

Players

 In William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the character Jaques says,

                                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...

So true. Shakespeare was a wise and perceptive man. We're all really just playing our parts here on earth. We come into our lives forgetful of our pasts and unknowing of our futures. We think we're in control, but we are as much in control as lab rats are in control of their fates. It takes a long time to learn this lesson. When I say "a long time," I don't mean years. I mean lifetimes.

We get to be the bit player; we get to be the headliner.
We get to be the artist; we get to be the clown.
We get to be the innocent; we get to be the reprobate.
We get to be the forgettable; we get to be the star.

Everything is as it should be. There is a force guiding our lives. Regardless of what you think and what you feel, your life is on track. 

Your life is a moment in time. You will have many moments in time. All of us will. Those moments are for learning and—sometimes—they are for fun.

Not everyone will get to play the role of the king, but not everyone will need that. There are many ways to learn and many lessons to choose from. 

There are no goodbyes. In reality, there are no hellos, either. Not for people that you know well. You may only have to meet a person briefly to know them well. Or you may know a person for years and still not really know them. That is the way it works.

There was a very religious woman. Her husband died. Her family was sad, but she was happy. Someone said to her, "Your husband just passed away, but you seem happy. Why is that?" She replied, "I am happy for my husband. Because today, he is in Paradise."

Indeed, her husband was in Paradise. That is where we go to prepare for our next lesson. Or perhaps, you think that when you die you will be Perfect and you will therefore not need any more lessons. Silly human. If you really knew all the answers, you wouldn't have needed to read this.

There is a reason for everything. For everything we do; for everything that happens to us. We are players following a script. We often fail to remember that our lives are on track, and that there is a reason for everyone and everything in our life. In the end, everything will be okay. You'll see.

Early Writings

I've always enjoyed writing about moods and settings. For example:

She awoke to the sound of rain on the roof. The early morning was gray and somber. The house was cold, and lying in bed under the blankets felt good. She was warm under the blankets. But she had to get up. Not to go some place, but to do things. She had to start her day; her tasks were calling.

That's an example I just wrote. But here's a little piece I wrote when I was 18:

A Winter Night

Outside the lodge a cloud of tiny, feathery snowflakes settles slowly over the countryside.  Even though night has fallen, the white landscape reflects enough light to enable one to see clearly.  A mile to the west a ragged line of evergreens, now colored a spectral white, stretches from the northwest to the south and back toward the northeast in a great curve.  On the eastern edge of this curve stands the lodge, nestled beneath tall evergreens at the foot of a long, bare hill.  Gusts of wind drive a white plume from the crest of the hill and pile a deep drift against one end of the lodge.

The lodge, a squat, one-story cabin, is constructed of rough-hewn logs and sealed with pitch.  So perfectly does it blend with the surrounding hinterlands that it appears to have grown there with the very trees.  A curtain is drawn back from one window, permitting a shaft of light to penetrate the darkness without.  Snowflakes falling past this window sparkle brightly, but elsewhere are invisible, so that it seemingly snows only in one small spot outside the window.

Though the land outside may be cold and dark, inside the lodge there is warmth and light, and with the sound of laughter and conversation mingles the smell of pine logs and coffee.  At one end of a long, high ceilinged room stands a large fireplace, obviously used for cooking as well as heating.  In this, a blazing fire crackles and roars as the flames are sucked up the chimney. Periodically, a noise resounds like a rifle discharge, accompanied by a burst of sparks which vanishes upward.  Waves of heat radiate outward, pushing the cold air into the far corners of the room.

Ranged about the fire in a semi-circle are several couples, their animated faces awash with a wavering orange glow.  An air of mirth hovers about them as their discourse carries them far into the night.  Finally they are overcome--drugged into sleep--by the warmth of the fire, and one by one each retires to a room in a colder section of the lodge.  As the fire dies low the shadows, once content with playing over the far end of the room, creep closer to the hearth.  Then, with a final flicker, the light fails, and darkness encompasses the room.

There are comments I could make about this piece of writing. If I were to write it today, I would have changed some things. But it stands now as a slice of my artistic history, a one-page manuscript that has entered my historical record through this blog.

Here's another writing effort, also one page, also made when I was 18:

On the Arctic Road

The moon has not yet risen, and the night is singularly dark.  The land consists of barren, wind-blown tundra, conveying an almost tangible impression of desolation.  Even here, though, man has left his mark; a single, narrow road stretches across the tundra—an insignificant scratch across the face of the north.  The road is seldom traveled, however, and a strange quietude pervades the land, the effect of which is somehow heightened, rather than lessened, by the rustle of a frozen wind sweeping from the northern ice fields and across the flat wilderness.  On this night the sky is clear and cold and black; and the stars are bright, distant points of light sprinkled across it.

Far down the road a light flickers into sight and approaches.  It is a car, and it travels slowly and cautiously, for the road is continually glazed with a thick crust of ice, and even a minor accident in this unfrequented land could be fatal.  The land is flat and the road is straight, so the lights point unwaveringly ahead, neither rising nor falling, never deviating toward either side.

Suddenly, there is a glimmer of light miles above the earth, and a coruscation explodes across the sky.  Flaming reds, greens, oranges, yellows--all the colors of the spectrum dance across the heavens, forming gleaming rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon, and shimmering curtains that tower miles above the bleak landscape.  It is an awesome spectacle, one that only this extreme latitude could produce.

The car stops and a figure emerges.  He stands beside the car, oblivious to the frigid wind that pierces even the heaviest clothing, and gazes skyward, his uplifted face colored by the fires above him.  Presently, he absently draws his heavy coat closer about him, but still he watches the panorama above him.

Then, without warning, the performance is finished; the spectacle has ended as suddenly as it had begun.  A strange, luminescent quality seems to cling momentarily to the atmosphere, but then that, too, is gone.  The stars emerge, the icy wind is suddenly colder, and the land seems abruptly even more forbidding. The hostility of the wilderness had parted for a brief moment, perhaps to give a traveler an insight into the true nature of the frozen land, but now it has closed back up.

The figure beside the car continues to stare at the empty sky. Perhaps he is moved by what he has seen, or perhaps he thinks that another performance will follow. Minutes pass without event, and finally the figure turns, steps into the car, and resumes his interrupted journey, possibly with a different picture of the north.  Soon the lights of the car fade out of sight, and the face of the north is once more desolate.  There remains no trace, save in the mind of a traveler, that anything unusual has happened.

I started writing fiction when I was about 14 years old. It has continued to this day. It will never make me rich and famous, but it seems to have kept me off the streets and out of trouble. It hasn't kept me out of bars, though. I have an entire blog that I wrote about a bar I used to frequent and the various people I met there. I don't know why I feel compelled to write about things. It's probably some kind of mental derangement, but a harmless one—at least, so far.

Survival

My brain is already "not all there." The last thing it needs is to be distracted. But...

I decided I would make an easy breakfast: a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. I got the box of biscuits from the freezer, opened it, and extracted a biscuit. At the same time I was listening to the TV news about Ukraine. I removed the biscuit from the wrapper and placed it on a plate. I placed the plate in the microwave oven and then—something happened. The instructions on the biscuit box call for heating the biscuit for 90 seconds at 30% power, then turning the biscuit over and heating it for 55 seconds on HIGH. But I never go by the instructions. I found that heating the biscuit on HIGH for 42 seconds on each side was perfectly adequate, and that is what I intended to do.

But, as I said, I was distracted by the TV and my mind was off in another world. I don't know what happened, but I punched in some time on the oven and went to my computer desk and sat down and watched the TV news. At some point, I became aware that I had been sitting at my desk for a few minutes and the microwave oven was still running.

Uh-oh.

I jumped up and went to the microwave and turned it off. I removed the biscuit from the oven. It was extremely hot. I tapped the biscuit and it felt extremely hard. After it cooled a bit, I tried to bite it. It had the density of vulcanized rubber. In other words, what I now had was not a small brown biscuit, but a small brown hockey puck.

I went to the freezer and pulled the remaining biscuit from the box and heated it properly. It was tasty. 

I shouldn't watch the news. There's so much video from Ukraine, and it is upsetting, and it makes me think that the human race will not inhabit this planet for much longer, because we are barbarians with nuclear weapons. It is amazing that we've refrained from using nuclear weapons for almost 80 years. But the day will come. Eighty years is nothing. A hundred years is nothing. We have enough weapons to destroy most life on earth. Let's see what happens in the next 500 years, the next thousand years. Do you really think we'll last that long without annihilating ourselves? If you do, then I would call you an optimist, a dreamer.

There was a 1967 book titled The Naked Ape. That's us. We are very clever apes who have developed the power to destroy our planet. We're new at this game. Homo Sapiens has been on Earth now for 200,000 years. We've had nukes for 80 years and have already come close to nuclear war. How much longer can we depend on luck and the self-preservative instincts of dictators and madmen?

The only way to secure our survival is to have a world government. That is unlikely to happen, because no one (today) would support having such a thing. But the only way I can see for us to avoid one government attacking another government with nuclear weapons is to have only one government on Earth. The day is coming. It's our choice. The coin is in the air and it is tumbling. Heads, we all live in peace under one government; tails, we all die. Heads...tails...heads...tails...the coin spins and tumbles while we watch and wait.

When I Was A Kid

Hi. My name is Wayne. It’s 1951 and I'm a kid. Someone asked me to tell you about my world. So here goes.

I live in a two story house with my parents and my mother’s parents. They call our house a “double tenement” because a wall divides the house down the middle, from front to back. My family lives on one side and another family lives on the other side. 

Our kitchen has a refrigerator, but a lot of the houses on my street have "iceboxes." The food in the icebox is kept cold by putting a block of ice in the top of the icebox. A yellow truck drives down the street every few days bringing ice to the people who need it.

We have a coal furnace in our house. In the winter the big people send me out to the coal bin near the back alley to fill up a metal bucket with coal and bring it into the house. They call the bucket a coal scuttle. It’s funny, but some of the pieces of coal have impressions of plants and ferns on them.

My room is upstairs near the front of the house. My room is cold in winter because there’s no heat upstairs. The only heat in our house is the coal stove downstairs near the back of the house.

In the kitchen Mom and Grandma cook meals on a wood stove. Whenever you want to cook food you put sticks of wood inside the stove and build a fire. That wood stove can really heat up the house, especially on a hot day in July or August. And especially because we, like all our neighbors, don’t have air conditioning.

We have a telephone in our house. You pick up the telephone and a lady says “Number please”, then you tell her the phone number you want to call. My schoolteacher says that soon, telephones will have a round thing called a “dial”, and when you pick up a phone's handset the lady won’t say “Number please.” Instead, there will be a buzzing noise—they call it a “dial tone”—and then you can “dial” the number yourself. But all that is in the future.

We don’t have a television. Almost no one owns a television. If we had one, we could watch black-and-white programs on the three TV stations in the area. Maybe one day there will be color TV. That would be interesting to see.

In a few years my parents will buy their first TV and find that we can receive all 3 networks, but the stations are located in 3 different cities. Cable TV doesn't exist. We receive TV on an antenna bolted to our chimney. A TV antenna is directional—it receives best from one direction, so we have to choose one station to see clearly and point the antenna at it.

All the good radio stations are on AM radio. FM stations are few and far between. In a few years FM radio will begin to take off, but mostly for classical music. There is no FM stereo radio. In fact, there is no stereo anything.

Phonograph records are 10 inches in diameter and have one song on each side. Some records only have a song on one side and the other side of the record is blank. Records play at 78 rpm on a phonograph equipped with a steel needle. To avoid ruining the record you have to replace the needle after each record you play.

Rock and roll music doesn't exist.

Streetcars and trains run down the middle of Main Street although they are fast disappearing.

It is not unusual to see steam locomotives pulling freight trains. Sometimes at night the train will put on its brakes and the wheels become circles of white fire in the dark. It is an amazing sight. The brakes on trains sometimes start fires. When my mother was a child, a train passing her house started a fire that burned down her home. She lost everything she owned. And so did her parents—my grandparents.

There are no jet passenger planes. Most people travel by bus or train. Sometimes my parents take me to Florida and we ride on a train called the “Silver Meteor.” I love the smell of the train and the sound of the diesel engine when it pulls into the station. I love the soft, cushioned seats, I love that you can push a button and get ice water. One time our train broke in half and my half of the train (which had the engine) had to stop and go backward up the track to link up with the other half of the train again.

Imported automobiles are non-existent. Cars are built by companies with names like Hudson and de Soto. My dad drives a de Soto. The de Soto's windshield wipers are powered by something called “manifold vacuum.” When my dad steps on the gas pedal to make the car go faster, the windshield wipers stop working.

Almost no one has air conditioning. Neither my grade school nor my high school will have air conditioned classrooms during the years I attend school.

A local dairy delivers milk to our front porch in glass bottles. You have to shake the bottle before you drink the milk in order to mix the milk and the cream together.

Milk is delivered by the milk man. Bread is delivered by the bread man. Potato chips are delivered to our house, too, in big, round, metal cans.

There are no shopping malls. All the stores are downtown. One of the stores has metal posts outside its door with “electric eyes”. The electric eyes open the door for you. Amazing.

Transistors are laboratory curiosities. Radios and televisions have vacuum tubes. When you turn on a radio or a TV, nothing happens for a while because the tubes have to warm up.

A computer is a person who sits at a desk and does math on paper or adding machines. Scientists are working to replace those people with electronic machines, but so far it's science fiction.

My doctor works in a room in the basement of his house. If I get sick, I go to his house, but if I'm very sick, he will come to my house to check on me. He carries a black bag with him. His "doctor tools" are in the bag, and maybe some medicines.

All the houses have big front porches and the neighborhood kids can gather on them and play games. 

I have to go now. The house is getting cold and my dad wants me to go out to the coal shed and bring in another scuttle of coal. See you later.

Cars I've Known

I was reading an article on Quora in which a person who was answering a question derided "vintage" cars and complained about a number of problems with old cars. It made me think. Most of the cars I've owned were "old" cars. Not vintage, not that old, but old.

My first car was a used 1958 Fiat 1100 sedan. It was six years old when I bought it for $300. It was a great little car. It was almost like a four-wheel-drive, in that it would go off-road almost anywhere.  I wrote about it here.

My second car was a used 1955 Chevrolet. It was, well, forgettable. The engine was worn out. It burned a quart of oil every 20 miles. I wrote about it here.

My third car was a 1960 Plymouth. It had the "pushbutton" transmission and no "Park" position on the transmission. It had only a drum brake on the drive shaft to hold it on a hill. You may think, a drum brake on the drive shaft doesn't sound very reliable. You would be correct. That brake was a "P.O.S." Yes, that means "Piece of S---." Otherwise, the Plymouth was a plucky vehicle. I had an interesting and dangerous road trip in it. I wrote about it here.

My fourth car was a 1968 Dodge Charger. It was a pretty car and the small block engine, a 318 c.i., would burn a little rubber if I floored the gas pedal. I wrecked it and it was never the same.

My fifth car was a 1970 Oldsmobile. I drove it like a Jeep, across streams, up and down gravel roads, to a few places where there were no roads. It left the factory with a vinyl roof. When sunlight damaged the vinyl, I got a can of acetone and removed the vinyl. (The acetone melted the glue holding the vinyl to the car's roof.) After I removed the vinyl, the roof was metal-colored. So I spray-painted the entire vehicle in my backyard. It was not a great paint job but at least the entire vehicle had paint.

My sixth car was a 1974 Honda Civic hatchback. It had the old-style Honda chassis. It was a small car with a 2 speed "Honda-matic" drive. It would go anywhere, like the Fiat. 

My seventh car was a 1988 Subaru GL wagon. I bought the Subaru new, my only new auto, and I drove it for ten years. It had 4 wheel drive and it really would go anywhere. It held to the road like it was glued to it. I drove it 60 mph through heavy rainstorms where everyone else had pulled off the road, but it never gave any problem with traction. It was a great car, but under-powered with its 88 hp boxer engine. I wrote about experiences with the Honda Civic and the Subaru wagon here and here.

My eighth car was a Nissan 300ZX, a two-seat sports car that was beautiful to look at. It had a front-mounted engine and had lousy real-wheel drive. The car was light on its real wheels, so the road traction was poor. It had T-tops, but I seldom removed them. The seats were black leather which, on a sunny day, would get so hot it would burn me through my jeans. But it was fun. It had a digital speedometer which had two digits, so the display topped out at 99 mph. I could drive it faster but the speedometer stayed at 99 mph. The car handled poorly at that speed, due to its lack of a ground effects package. It felt like it was about to float off the road. I only pushed it to that speed a couple of times, and I made sure no other vehicles were around me.

My ninth car, the car I drive now, was a 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee. Its 4WD works as well as the Subaru's, but the 5.2 liter engine has a lot more get-up-and go on rain-slick roads. It holds four passengers plus has a luggage bay. It had 42,000 miles on it when I bought it in 1998. When I "retired" and moved into my present abode in 2003, it had 78,000 miles on it. That was 19 years ago (8 years after it was built and 5 years after I bought it.) It still looks good and it's been mostly trouble-free. I say mostly because there have been a few maintenance issues.

Shortly after I bought it, I had to overhaul the transmission ($1600), then I had to overhaul the 4WD transfer case ($1800). Those jobs were done in 1999; today the bill would be a lot higher. A few years later, the water pump bearing failed suddenly, causing the serpentine belt to fall off all the engine pulleys. That left me with no power steering and I could only steer the vehicle while it was moving. I had it towed to a dealership for repair. 

The electronic Vehicle Information Center (VIC) developed a bug and I disconnected it but left it in place so I wouldn't have a hole in the dash. I blogged about that here.

I've replaced the muffler on the Jeep at least twice, replaced the radiator and starter motor and solenoid, both front axles, the front sway-bar bushings, and some other parts.  Over the years I've spent over $11,000 on repairs and maintenance. But the Jeep stays in my garage most of the time now. I drive it once or twice a week, usually to a nearby store. The last time I had the Jeep inspected, the shop owner asked me, "Why don't you get rid of that old truck and get a new one?" I guess after driving it for 24 years, I've grown attached to it. Who would sell an old friend? Besides, do you know what has happened to new car prices recently?  The price of a 2022 Grand Cherokee is about $41,000.

The Jeep is starting to show her age, but in that respect, it is like its owner. The Jeep and I are both hanging in for the long haul. I'm not giving her up to be crushed for scrap. As long as I'm alive, the Jeep has a home in my garage. 

Over the years that I've written this blog, I've written a dozen articles about the Jeep. Of those articles, my favorite is one titled "August 14." It's really just half an article because I never finished it, but I published what I had. You can read that article here.