Power Outage

It was Thursday, just before 11PM, when the electric power went off and the house went dark. Nuria and I had been watching a movie when the TV screen went dark and the lights went off. After a few minutes I phoned the electric company and reported the outage. Some of the houses on the other side of the street had their porch lights on, so it was my side of the street that was without electricity. Nuria and I went to bed. 

Friday—early morning. When we got up, we were still without power. The time was 7AM. Nuria walked to McDonalds and got coffee for herself. She has to have coffee in the morning or her head will explode. Or something similarly terrible. Later she drove to Walmart and bought a sub sandwich for each of us

The power came back on at noon. The refrigerator started running, but it had been warming for 13 hours so I didn't want to warm it further by opening the door, so I let it run for a while.

I have a new neighbor next door; he just moved in. So I decided to walk over and meet him. It was a sunny morning, and I climbed the steps to his front porch and knocked on his door. After a few seconds, the door opened. I introduced myself. He was a young man, mid-20s, who spoke with a slight accent. He said he was from Brazil. I told him that I had come over to see who my new neighbor was. He was holding a paint roller, and I didn't want to interrupt his work too long, so I cut the visit short. I told him not to let the electricity outage worry him, because they rarely happen. It's a "once in a blue moon" kind of event, I said. Then I came back home.

Nuria and I ate a late brunch, and went on with our day.

Saturday—early morning—arrived. The electricity went off again, around 4:30AM, thus making a liar out of me. Nuria walked to McDonald's around 7AM and bought sausage McMuffins for our breakfast and hot coffee for herself. Our electricity came back on about 10AM.

This isn't the first power outage that the neighborhood has had, but usually they occur after a hurricane or a bad storm, when a falling limb or a falling tree brings down power lines. This time there was no storm, no strong wind. Just sudden darkness. It reminded me of death—light, then sudden darkness. Perhaps my death will come for me that way. Then, reincarnation will be when the power comes back on. 

Oh, don't tell me you didn't see some kind of twist coming at the end of this post.

Now it's Sunday afternoon, 4:30PM. The tornado siren across the street sounds. Ten minutes later the sky grows dark, the wind blows hard, and the rain comes down hard. It's a gully washer. 

At 4:40PM, the electricity goes off.

Nuria Returns

Today, Monday 9/19/22, is the day my lady-friend Nuria begins her trip from Costa Rica to Richmond, Virginia. (She flew from the US to Costa Rica two weeks ago to visit family.) I use FlightAware to track her flight. Not constantly, of course, but I look now and then to see her progress. I think it is interesting.

I used to fly a lot, when I had my first job out of university. I flew on lots of different planes. Mostly jets, including the 747, which was fairly new at that time. I flew on the twin-engine 737 mostly. It entered airline service in 1968. The 747 entered airline service in 1970.

I flew on the Beech 99, which has different models carrying different numbers of passengers, but the Beech that I flew on had 12 passenger seats. There was no door between the passenger compartment and the pilots, so you could see the pilots and hear their conversations.

Beech 99

I also flew on the de Havilland Twin Otter (below) a number of times. It carried 18 passengers. There are still over 500 Twin Otters currently in operation worldwide.

de Havilland Twin Otter

I liked flying so much that I began taking flying lessons. But life interfered, as it often does, and my career as a student pilot was short. But sometimes on a weekend I would drive to the local airport and if I saw someone I knew preparing a plane for a solo joyride, I'd bum a ride along with him. The flight might last 30 or 40 minutes and we'd be flying at a thousand feet. It was fun. 

Nuria just sent me an audio message. She has passed through immigration in Orlando but the immigration officer didn't stamp her passport. She is wondering if it matters. I don't think it matters; everything is going digital. I'm sure that somewhere a government computer knows that she is in the country. Big Brother is real. (I refer to the Big Brother of George Orwell's classic novel, 1984—not the group of people who live in a house with 94 cameras and 113 microphones recording every minute of their lives 24 hours a day. Probably not even George Orwell could have imagined such a world.)

Nuria will wait in the Orlando airport all night for her flight to Richmond. I'll be at the airport at 10AM to pick her up. I figure it will take 15 minutes for the plane's passengers to disembark, then 15 minutes to pick up her luggage and get to my Jeep, then 45 minutes to drive to my home. On the way, we will probably stop and eat. I haven't been to the grocery store in two weeks, so food is scarce in my house. I don't mind eating tuna fish from a can, but Nuria will probably prefer a meal that civilized people eat. And after she has traveled all night and half the morning, who could blame her?

Tempora Mutantur

After my parents died, I was left with cleaning the house of decades of junk. My mother saved everything, so eventually I came across the hospital bill for my birth many decades ago. The bill was written on a small slip of paper similar to a restaurant check. My mother spent three days in the hospital, for which she was billed eight dollars per day: $24. The cost of my delivery was $26. So the bill totaled $50. Three days in the hospital and delivering a baby, just $50. Today it would be thousands. 

Earlier this year, I went to my dermatologist for my annual skin cancer inspection and she found a small cancer on my back. She removed it and the procedure took about three minutes. The bill was $245, which is $150 more than the regular, no-cancer visit. 

I remember going to see my pediatrician when I was a few years old. He lived in a big house (at least, it seemed big to me) and his office was in the basement. If I was really sick, he would come to my house with his black doctors' bag and examine me.

Today, doctors practice—mostly—in fancy offices that make you feel like you just stepped into the next century.

As a Roman poet supposedly said, "Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis."  Meaning: "Times are changed, we, too, are changed within them." Though, I feel like it's the world that is changing but I'm not changing with it. Time is a stream, and I'm a rock in that stream. Time flows around me like water flows around that rock. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's how I feel.

Is reincarnation real? If it is, then when I pass on, maybe I'll come back to this world. My birth date might be in the 23rd century, or the 24th, or the 25th. To the reincarnated version of me it will just be my world; I will remember no other. But when I get to the end of that future life, I know I will be amazed at how the times have changed during my life, and I'll probably think about having another lifetime to live, in another century or two.

Maybe in my next lifetime I'll get some things right that I didn't get right this time around. Maybe I'll be a little smarter, a little wiser. I hope that's how it works.

Wondering

I'm just wondering: Why is it that so many Americans want to make a woman's right to have an abortion illegal, while at the same time those same people want to have the right to own and carry weapons of war such as the AR-15 style rifle?

To be clear: opponents of abortion say abortion should be illegal because it kills a human fetus, but many Americans, including opponents of abortion, say that a weapon that can take the lives of two dozen school kids in less than a minute must be made accessible to 18 year olds. Thus America continues to be the world leader in homicides while politicians cry crocodile tears.

Mass shooting children (or any humans) is evil, so why do so many people want to make it easy? Why do so many people want to make tools of carnage accessible to anyone with cash in their pocket? Answer me that!

Pentatonix

The song of the day is My Heart With You sung by a cappella group Pentatonix.

The Way It Was

This is the way it used to be in America.

I was 14 years old. My family had been vacationing at a beach in North Carolina for a week, and we were on our way home. There was very little traffic on the road. As my dad drove the car along the road, we came upon a U.S. Army base that hosted a Nike-Ajax air defense system. My dad, being an Army veteran of World War 2 (he served in the Pacific) swung his car into the entrance to the base and told the guard at the gate that he wanted to see the missiles.

I don't know what would happen if you did that today, but in those days, everything was more open. So they let us onto the base and told us where to go. An officer met us and took us to see the missiles. They were underground, below huge steel doors. The missiles were in their launchers and pointed skyward at about a 45 degree angle. If enemy bombers flew over, the steel doors would open and the missiles would be fired.

What amazed me was how they opened up the gates just because a passing car's driver wanted to see the family jewels—so to speak. And they took us right down to them. There I was, standing just a few feet from actual anti-aircraft missiles. They didn't ask us any questions, like "Who are you?" or "Why do you want to see them?" We could have been Soviet spies, for all they knew. But I imagine there wasn't any classified information that we could discern from merely looking at the missiles.

I bet times have changed. Go to an air defense base now and ask to see the goodies and I bet you'll be asked more than a few questions. But in the end, it wouldn't surprise me if you got to see what you wanted to see, as long as your request was reasonable. Americans have a history of having a very open society. Only the threat of terrorism has made America a more cautious country than it once was.

Flying Home

It's September 4th, 2022. My partner Nuria left this morning for a two week stay with family in Costa Rica. We got up at 3AM. We prepared and I put her suitcases into the Jeep at 5AM. We drove in darkness up I-95 to Richmond, then I-64 to the Richmond airport exit. We drove to the parking garage and parked, grabbed her suitcases, and entered the terminal. We went up an escalator to the 2nd floor to the American Airlines counter. Nuria checked in, they weighed her luggage and gave her tickets. Her first flight was from Richmond to Dallas/Fort Worth, leaving at 7:10AM. Her second fight was from Dallas to San Jose, Costa Rica, arriving at 4PM. 

I drove back home, still in darkness. The traffic was thicker but still not bad. It's a Sunday so regular workday traffic is much less. 

I can track her plane's progress on FlightAware.com. It shows her plane is flying 500mph at 35,000 feet. It hasn't begun its descent yet. On the map, DFW is Dallas/Fort Worth and SJO is San Jose International Airport. Her journey began at RIC—Richmond International Airport at 7:10AM, but that leg of the journey isn't shown because it's in the past. You can see that her flight took her across the Gulf of Mexico and thirty five thousand feet above Cancun.

I just looked at the map again and her plane is descending. She's at 21,900 feet and 451 mph. The plane descends fast. Of course, it has thousands of feet to descend to get to the airport, so it has to come down fast. It's just fascinating to watch it online. Now it's at 18,500 feet going 450 mph. Now 17,200 feet going 420 mph. Now 16,000 feet going 400mph. 

Now the plane has turned 90 degrees and is headed to the runway. 

By the time I can wrap up this little blog post and publish it, her plane will be on the ground. It's at 6,500 feet going 200 mph. I spent a minute looking up something and when I looked at FlightAware again, it shows her plane at 3800 feet going 197 mph. She's almost at the end of her journey.

Her plane has landed. Either that, or it is stuck at 3800 feet going 197mph. There are no more updates coming through. It's 4PM my time, 13 hours after she got out of bed for her trip. I'm sure she's tired. It has been a long day for her. Right now, she's probably at the baggage carousel, watching for her suitcase. In two weeks she will make the reverse trip, back to Richmond, back to her second home.