Trace Adkins

The song of the day is The Wayfaring Stranger performed by country music singer and actor Trace Adkins. The well-known American folk and gospel song likely originated in the early 19th century and has been recorded by many artists.

Woodpecker

This is a reminder of how dangerous electricity can be. Don't be like this woodpecker. And no, I don't know if this video has been edited for effects.

Modern Speech

How times have changed.

There is a hospital in my area called Central State Hospital. It is a hospital for people who are ... how shall I put this? ... not quite right in the head. But in 1870 when the hospital opened, it was not called Central State Hospital. It was called the Central Lunatic Asylum. And no one had a problem with that name.

"Hey Joe, what are you doing today?"

"I'm going to visit my father. He's in the lunatic asylum."

"Oh, I didn't know that your dad is insane."

"He's not insane! He's merely a lunatic."

I'd better stop now before I offend more people than I already have. But I do approve of not calling people lunatics. It just doesn't sound like a medical diagnosis. It sounds more like an angry insult. 

"You're a lunatic!"

"Oh yeah? Well, you're a crazy person!"

Yes, times have changed. This whole asylum/hospital issue reminds me of the days when people of sub-Saharan ancestry were called Negroes instead of the more modern "melatonin-enhanced humanoids."

Oh, did I say "sub-Saharan?" I meant to say African Transition Zone. "Sub-Saharan" sounds so racist. Don't you think?

Digital Signatures

Do you remember the talented and prolific singer Prince? Sure you do. In the '90s (1993, I think) Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. This was his name:

Many people probably remember that name change. But not many people know that this writer also changed his name.

When I read what Prince had done, I decided to change my name into an unpronounceable symbol. If Prince can do it, why not me?

This is the symbol I created:

(The difficult-to-read text below the symbol says, "The engineer formerly known as Wayne.")

Prince's symbol is a mashup of the gender symbols for man and woman. My symbol is a mashup, too, but of what, I've long forgotten. The symbol is still on my PC. I think it was created at about the same time Prince created his. I've been through several PCs since then, yet I still have the symbol on my hard drive. Even more amazing, I was able to locate it.

My mashup symbol was brought to mind by an experience I had today while trying to e-sign a document. To be technical, there are electronic signatures and there are digital signatures. Electronic signatures are simpler and less secure. Your digital signature doesn't have to look like a handwritten signature. It embeds information into your document that proves your document could only have been created by you. If you do a Google search for "digital signature" you'll find that a lot of companies are offering the ability to e-sign documents.

I guess there's a need for that kind of thing. But I've lived a long, long time without needing it.

The Screen Door Confusion

My house had an old, metal sliding patio door (and a sliding screen door) on the back of the house. The door was old and I had to replace it. I bought a new patio door from Home Depot.

The installers came out to replace the old patio door, and they did. But the new screen door had two holes in it—two punctures. They installed it as a temporary door but they said they'd return and replace it.

They didn't return.

I called Home Depot and I was told they would order a new door for me. Time passed and one day Home Depot called and said that they could not order a warranty replacement. They said I had to do that, and that I had to do it right away because there was only one and a half days left in the warranty. I went online with the door manufacturer (Jeld-Wen) and filled out a form to get a replacement.

Home Depot called me a week later and told me Jeld-Wen had declined to replace the door, but they (Home Depot) had another door and they would bring it to my house and install it.

They brought the door but it was too tall and didn't fit the opening, so they left. They took both the original door and the replacement door when they left.

They repaired the screen on the original door and brought it back, but they couldn't install it because of a bad roller on the door. The roller would not retract into the door as it was supposed to do. The installer left and took the door with him.

The installer returned a day or two later with the original door—the one that had been re-screened. This time, he was able to get it installed. That was on September 3.

On September 19, I received a call from Jeld-Wen, the door manufacturer. I was told that the replacement door would arrive the next day. I told the person on the phone that I no longer needed the replacement door because the original door had been repaired and installed. The caller thanked me and said that the order for the replacement door would be canceled.

On September 20, the replacement door was delivered to my house.

So now I have two screen doors. One is installed and the other is wrapped in cardboard. What should I do? 

Should I call Jeld-Wen? Should I call Home Depot? I recalled the old adage, "Let sleeping dogs lie." I've been on this merry-go-round one too many times. I'll put the replacement door in my garage. If Home Depot or Jeld-Wen can figure this out, they're welcome to come to my house and get the door.

Meanwhile, I'll hang onto that replacement door because I have a feeling that the flimsy screen door they installed is just not going to last all that long. Of course, if I have a backup screen door, the screen door they installed will probably last forever. 

Because, as we all know, that is how reality works.

Little Light On My Mantel

<< This is my front yard at night. And this isn't all. If you stood in the street and faced my house, there would be several more glowing orbs along the front of the house. 

This is Nuria's doing. She bought the lights and stuck them in the ground. The sun charges them during the day and then they shine all night. 

The photo doesn't do them justice. They look much prettier and more eye-catching when you see them in person. They glow with an intensity and crispness that doesn't come across in a photo. 

I was using my string trimmer tool near the lights and I accidentally destroyed one of them. So I picked up the little solar-light thingy and put it in my pocket. Then I went to the garage and looked for a glass. I found a yellow-colored glass with white lines painted on the outside. Perfect.

I put the solar-light thingy on my front porch and let it sit for a few hours in sunlight. When I brought it into the house, the slightly yellowish LED turned on, powered by the solar-charged battery inside the doodad. I put it into the yellow glass and put the now-glowing glass on the fireplace mantel. It glowed for hours. It looks like this at night.

It's really difficult to see what the glass looks like in the photo, so I took a flash picture of it (below). You can still see the glowing doodad inside of the glass, but now you can see the design on the glass, which I think looks kinda pretty. 

I don't think Nuria has much use for it, but I like it, so it sits on my mantel, glowing its little heart out every night. It's like a nightlight. When your eyes are dark-adapted, you can see fairly well by it's little light. 

So the heart of the small plastic flower lives on, resting on my fireplace mantel and casting its light into the darkness every night. Gosh, it's almost poetic.

Lunch

Nuria and I ate lunch at an Italian restaurant today. I'd never been in it before. Their lunch menu had no prices on it. The Wraps section of the menu looked like this:

The waitress came to our table. "You ready?"

"Yes. We'll both have the Crispy Chicken Fiesta Wrap."

"With what side?"

Nuria said, "Fries."

The waitress turned her gaze to me. "Chips."

The waitress left.

Time passed.

The waitress brough our meals and drinks and placed them silently on the table and left.

Nuria and I munched our meals and talked. Finally it was time to pay. I left cash on the table, enough for the bill and the tip.

My little city isn't NYC but, with everything getting more expensive, it pays to have a few large bills in one's wallet—in case you want to eat lunch out.

I'm afraid to eat dinner out. My wallet might catch fire.

The Roof Leak, Chapter 1000

It rained hard last night. Lying in bed in total darkness, I heard it pounding the roof. Then I heard Nuria say, "The roof is leaking."

"No way," I said. I listened closely and I heard the drip of water near me.

I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up. I turned on the bedside lamp. The top of the dresser beside the bed was wet. The base of the lamp was wet. The roof was leaking and it had come through the bedroom ceiling. I could not believe it.

My roof, installed 15 years ago, has been a constant source of leaks from Day One. Every room in the house has had rainwater leaks, both upstairs and downstairs, except for my bedroom. I thought it had been spared, but now the Leak God had come for it.

Nuria put down a folded towel, I put a cooking pot on the towel and positioned it to catch the leak. We went back to bed and I turned off the light. Damn. I'll have to hire someone to attempt a repair. I feel I'm too old to be scrambling up and down ladders to and from the roof. A mishap could be the end of me. As the English say, it would be "penny wise and pound foolish."

But at the moment, I must take my Jeep to a service station and get it inspected. It's that time of the year, again. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it passes and gets a new decal without a major expense.

My Life

Looking back on my life (and my previous post) I can say that, truly, my life has been an adventure. Not like climbing Mt Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, nor like crossing the Pacific Ocean with Thor Heyerdahl on the Kon-Tiki. But it has been an adventure in its own way.

Oh, I was going to cross the Pacific. I went to a business that sells sailboats and bargained for a 27-footer. We came to within $500 of making the sale, but I wouldn't go any higher and the seller wouldn't go any lower. So that failed negotiation doubtless saved my life.

I was trapped in a freight elevator while trying to erect an antenna for a pirate radio station. A walkie-talkie saved me. (This was long before mobile phones.)

I was a design engineer for a company that created an ABM (anti-ballistic missile system). The project ended when we were stabbed in the back by the government.

I was a design engineer for a company that created mobile, self-guided, security robot systems. The company ended when we were stabbed in the back by the government.

I was—wait a minute, do I detect a trend here?

I've been to the top of the Empire State Building. (But then, who hasn't?) I've been to a show at Radio City Music Hall. I ate a meal at one of the Automats in Manhattan. (They're all gone now.) 

I bought government surplus electronic equipment and repaired it and sold it by mail-order. (Remember mail order?) Large tractor-trailer freight trucks used to pull up in front of my house. I'd be waiting with a wooden crate and a bill of lading.

I spent a winter in a cabin on a lake. The cabin was without heat and without insulation. Wide cracks between the floorboards allowed icy wind to blow under the house and blow the carpet off the floor. The shower stall was sheet metal and the faucets always froze at night so that in the morning the faucets wouldn't turn. The house was so cold at night that a glass of water would freeze solid. I slept under an electric blanket turned up to maximum, with several more (non-electric) blankets piled on top of it. An igloo would have been warmer. Seriously.

A friend and I built an electronic "bug" (radio transmitter) and a receiver for a man who was convinced his wife was plotting to have him killed. He wanted to eavesdrop on her conversations. The bug worked far better than we had hoped. I don't know what the man discovered about his wife. I left that town and drove a camper van around the country, and never returned to that town.

I learned transcendental meditation while on a trip to Hilton Head Island. I drove over the Rocky Mountains. I drove across the Great Plains. I rode an aerial tramway (video) to the top of Mount Sandia. (There is, or was, a restaurant up there.)

I drove from Crescent City, California, to Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway. 

I've flown on big jets, twin-engine puddle jumpers, and single-engine Cessnas. I've had adventures in boats on the James River and on the Chesapeake Bay that I don't want to repeat.

I've done much, much more—including things I can't write about. Okay, maybe my life hasn't been an adventure. But I can't help feel that it's been different. Very different. I think this life was supposed to teach me a lot. And I think I've learned a lot. I hope so, because I really don't want to repeat this life.

Were that possible, of course.

Life

What I know:

You have a life in order to learn. 

You can be rich or poor, happy or sad. It's your choice. It's how you want to direct your energy. It's free will. 

Your life is like an adventure book. 

Why are you here? What are you here to do, to become?

When you are living your life the way it is meant to be lived, your life becomes an adventure, a journey. Magic happens. If your life isn't a journey for you, then you're not living for your true purpose. 

If you're not happy, then you are not fulfilling your life's purpose.

Think about these things. You can change if you want to, if you need to. It's never too late.

Bonobos

Some scientists say that given the size of the Milky Way galaxy, there are surely other planets with intelligent life. Because...there MUST be!

That's not a good reason. There's the famous Drake equation, of course. It looks like this:

N = R4 x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

According to Wikipedia, the problem with the Drake equation is ...

"... that the estimated values for several of its factors are highly conjectural, the combined multiplicative effect being that the uncertainty associated with any derived value is so large that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions."

In other words, the existence of alien life is anybody's guess, wrapped inside a fancy formula. It could well be that there is no other planet with intelligent life. In fact, it may well be that there is no other planet with any kind of life at all. We don't know.

If we are the only intelligent life that our galaxy has brought forth, I think it's a pretty sad state of affairs for intelligent life. We've got one planet that is livable and we've screwed it up pretty badly.

Maybe intelligent life is an experiment that is now beginning to fail. Maybe in a million years, bonobos will have evolved to our level of intelligence and will take our place. That is, if we don't kill all of them first.  According to Wikipedia, bonobos "seem to prefer sexual contact over violent confrontation with outsiders." That pretty much dooms them, especially around humans. 

Sorry, bonobos. You had so much promise.

Car Tools

Suppose your car broke down on a highway. You're in the middle of nowhere and all you need to get going again is a screwdriver. But you don't have a screwdriver. You'd be kicking yourself, no doubt.

Automobiles are very reliable, but "sh*t happens". We all know it does. We just hope it doesn't happen to us. But is there any way to ameliorate the consequences if it does happen to us?

Yes. Carry a few simple tools with you in your car. A few simple, inexpensive tools might be able to get your car going again—if only you had them.

So I ordered a small, inexpensive toolset to put in the back of my Jeep. It was about $24 with tax. It took 10 days to get to my door, but shipping was free and I was not in a rush to get it.

<< This is, of course, the case that the tools are carried in. Click for bigger image.

<< And this is what the toolset looks like when it's open. As you can see, nothing fancy. Just some basic tools that one might need in a road emergency. Click for bigger image.

After I placed my order, my partner Nuria ordered one, too. For some reason known only to the Delivery Gods, her order arrived at our home before mine. Go figure.

So, $24 including tax. I hope I never need to use them.

Oh, I almost forgot. I know someone is curious. I bought them from temu.com.

199

In mid-July (8 weeks ago) I weighed 215 pounds. My best weight, according to the online height-weight charts, should be 155 pounds. Of course, no American male adult will weigh 155 pounds, but if I got down to 185 pounds I would be happy. I'm just going to continue this diet thing and see where it takes me.

So in mid-July I began my "diet". This morning, almost exactly two months later, I weighed 199 pounds. I'm very happy and I'm going to celebrate by eating a bucket of ice cream for lunch. Not really! I'm going to have my usual lunch. It's about 300 calories. Breakfast was 100 calories. I'm not hungry because I'm eating few carbs and no bread. 

Changing the subject, Nuria is going to donate some food to the Food Bank. Her Senior Center is having a food drive, and Nuria says that so far, only 3 or 4 cans of food have been donated. Nuria is going to correct this lack of enthusiam tomorrow, with this donation:

She has also invited everyone she knows here to pitch in and donate some food. Nuria has a very strong feeling of civic responsibility. She wants to "adopt a highway" but she doesn't want to be committed for two years (their requirement) so she may not do that. She donated blood until they told her she couldn't. The reason she can't? Because she has been in her home country (Costa Rica) within the past three years. Costa Rica has malaria and for some reason that makes her ineligible to donate blood here in the USA, but she can donate blood in Costa Rica. I don't understand the reason she can't donate here, because if you get malaria you will certainly know it, and she hasn't had that illness. Meanwhile, there is a blood shortage here and the Red Cross is begging people to donate.

People. Sometimes I can't figure them out.

Nuria

Nuria, my Costa Rican lady friend, is like the Eveready Bunny. She goes and goes and just won't stop going. 

She got up early this morning—around 5AM. She worked on some kind of project on her laptop. I don't know exactly what she was doing, but she helps some of her American friends manage their property in Costa Rica. She's their interface to a Spanish-speaking lawyer that is involved in the property management. There's a little corporation, and Nuria is the Treasurer, and the owners of the property are using Nuria to interface to the government agency that is trying to make Nuria's employer tear down his handyman's family home because he (the American) won't pay the expected bribe to the government people. Or something like that. I've probably gotten something wrong here, so I'll have to let Nuria explain, if she feels like doing it—but she's not here at the moment.

She left the house for her morning walk at 8AM. She usually walks for about an hour. 

Where is she now? She's going to Walmart to buy canned food items for the local food pantry. She also took the empty gas can I use for lawn tractor gasoline and she'll get some gas so that I can mow the lawn later this week. After that, I don't know. Probably, she will prepare lunch, wash and dry the laundry, and so on. She's always moving.

She's not here, so I prepared lunch for myself: two scrambled eggs, two crisp slices of bacon. I don't know what she wants to eat. I'll leave that—preparing her lunch—to her.

Oh, she just got back home. I opened the door and she handed me a container of gasoline. Then she returned to her car two more times to bring in six bags of canned food items—to be donated to the local Food Pantry.

She's also trying to collect donations for the local animal shelter. The only thing standing in her way is, ironically, the local animal shelter. But that's another story and you can guess the problem: managers who can't manage. At least, that's the way it seems from this blogger's desk.

Diet

I have a digital body weight scale. I bought it many years ago. I use it frequently to track my weight, and so I know that my weight has been going up, up, up. Two months ago, my weight was 215 pounds, so I decided to go on a diet.

Now, after two months of dieting, the scale says my weight is 201 pounds. I thought that I would put on a few pounds after the trip to Roanoke and after eating a lot of carbs (Subway sandwich, Brambleton Deli sandwich, spaghetti (twice), but my weight held at 201. I've lost one or two inches around my waist. The pants I've bought over the past year were size 40 waist, and I'm probably a size 38 now, because without a belt my pants fall to the floor. And yet I'm still overweight so there's more to go.

"What is my diet?" you're asking. Mostly, I'm staying away from carbs. Did you know that there is a diet called the "carnivore diet" which consists of eating only meat? It sounds unhealthy, but there are people who are on that diet every day and they are healthy by any medical yardstick. Their weight is good, their energy level is good, their cholesterol is low, and so on. 

I started off on the carnivore diet, helped by Nuria's birthday gift to me of a freezer full of Omaha steaks. But I am too old and too "programmed" to eat nothing but meat, so I added a salad. Then I added a green veggie, like broccoli or asparagus. Sometimes Nuria has a baked potato with her dinner, and I may eat half of her potato. I may even put butter or sour cream on it, which are fats, not carbs. I also skip a lot of meals. If I'm not hungry, I don't eat. If I am a little hungry, I'll eat an Atkins bar, which is very low in carbs and satisfies my appetite.

I try to keep my daily food intake at or below 1200 calories. The fewer calories I consume, the faster I lose weight. I want to burn body fat ("old food"), not burn "new food" that I just put into my stomach. When I eat, I don't continue to eat until I feel full. I decide what I'll eat and I stick to my decision. Sometimes I'll get a little hungry, but I never get very hungry. That's because I avoid bread and simple carbs. 

Simple carbs consist of long chains of sugar molecules. When you eat simple carbs, your stomach acid quickly breaks those long chains into individual sugar molecules, which your stomach immediately absorbs. That quickly raises your blood sugar, which is not good, so your body dumps insulin into your blood to force the sugar into fat cells. Unfortunately, that causes your blood sugar to quickly drop below the hunger threshhold, so after two or three hours you are hungry again, even though you just had a meal. Go to a Chinese restaurant and order a rice dish. Eat the rice and you'll feel full, because your blood sugar rises. But soon, you'll feel hungry again.  On the other hand, if you eat meat and green veggies, your blood sugar rises more slowly and not as high, so you don't feel overly satiated and you don't get hungry two or three hours after you've eaten.

So low carb/no carb and eating small meals is my plan, and I'll let you know how it works out. Good luck to all you dieters out there, and keep to the plan. It's so easy to give up, but you can succeed, and you will feel better and look better, and you'll be healthier, too.

Roanoke Trip

My lady friend Nuria and I visited Roanoke this past weekend. (It's Monday now.) I saw friends that I had not seen in twenty years. (I moved from Roanoke in 2003 and now it's 2023.) I still have the same car—my trusty 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee—which makes me wonder if there is a Jeep Museum that might want it. I should check into that. On the way home from Roanoke, the odometer flipped past 104K miles, which isn't a lot of miles for most cars. 

I met up with some friends (Linda and Claudia) whom I had worked with when I lived in Roanoke. Claudia made dinner for us, which consisted of meatloaf, sautéed zuchini and squash, and steamed broccoli (a word I will never learn to spell properly). For dessert we had fresh fruit cocktail—pineapple, mango, and grapes. No canned fruit! Mostly we sat and talked, from 3PM until well after darkness had fallen. It was a very pleasant evening.

The next day we went to visit "the Lesters," a family that Nuria has long known and spoken of frequently. They were a nice couple, very affable, and we had lunch with them (a salad and the world's most delicious sphaghetti—the sauce was made with buffalo meat. Or is it bison meat? Whatever, it was very tasty!) I greatly enjoyed meeting them and spending some time with them in their home.

That afternoon we went to a "nursing home" to visit an elderly woman that Nuria has known for a long time. She was 88 years old and had fallen in her home. She had been in the hospital, and now she's in a nursing home. Her home has been sold. She believes that she will leave the nursing home and move into an apartment, but looking at her lying in bed, I find it difficult to believe that she will ever resume an independent life. Her home now is a destination that awaits too many of us.

My impression of Roanoke surprised me. I lived in Roanoke for 17 years. But on this trip, it seemed very different. The streets were in bad shape. I crossed an intersection, going perhaps 10 mph, and the bottom of my car slammed into the street. I hope nothing was broken, but now my Jeep has a new squeak that I have never heard before. Traffic going into Roanoke was horrible, partly due to road work. But the streets were in worse shape than I remembered, more narrow than I remembered, and the houses in southeast were old-looking. A house can be old without being old-looking. The trick is partly upkeep and partly decorating to make the house attractive. Nuria has put in a lot of work to make our house look nice from the street, with a brick circle containing flowers and solar-powered decorative lights that shine at night. We keep the bushes in front of the house trimmed to look neat. So it's partly a little work and partly a few dollars here and there, and I don't mean dollars for home repairs—which can cost a lot—but rather a few dollars for decorative things. It makes a diffence. 

On Monday morning we checked out and drove back to the Heights. The trip took about 3½ hours. Unpacking took 15 minutes, which was considerably less time than was required to pack for the trip. All-in-all, a nice weekend, and I'm blogging about it because I want to let everyone know that I appreciate their kindness and for sharing their time with Nuria and me. It was a treat!

Birthday

Yesterday was my birthday. It was one of those double-same-digit birthdays, like 11, 22, 33, etc. Because of my age, I suspect that this will be my last double-same-digit birthday. My age is also divisible by the number 7, so now you know my age, assuming you can perform basic reasoning. I suspect most people under the age of 20 will simply ask, with furrowed brow, the monosyllabic, all-purpose interrogatory: "Huh?"

I received a WhatsApp birthday greeting at 7AM. I also received a lot of birthday cards this year: three, counting the one I got from my insurance agent. I also received a birthday email and a phone call, and get this: they were from different people! I told my partner Nuria that I didn't want her to buy me anything, but she got me a box of Omaha steaks anyway. It makes planning dinner easier. She always makes a salad, and the rest of the meal consisted of a ribeye steak and asparagus. Because it was a special day, I went off my usual diet and ate half a baked potato, topped with butter, whipped cream, bacon bits, and chopped scallion. I even ate a super-delicious dessert. (I ate a quarter of it ... it was so sweet I'm going to spread it over four days.)  And for a libation, I consumed a glass of chilled Moscato. Don't raise your eyebrows—it came from Walmart.

Today is Friday, and the temparture at noon is a comfy 76°F. The sky is sunny and after I eat lunch I'm going to mow my yard. I think there's just enough gas in my riding mower to mow the entire yard, but I'll mow the front yard first. If I run out of gas cutting the back yard, it won't be a big deal; no one will notice except my immediate neighbors, and they couldn't care less. Both of them do the partial-mowage thing all the time. 

I'm driving with Nuria to Roanoke next weekend to visit friends. Yes, I do have friends, contrary to what one might think if you've read this blog for a long time. Not a lot of friends, mind you, but the kind of friends that are hard to find, rather like a few pearls amongst a bed of barren oysters. I try to stay in touch with my friends, but alas, I'm rather deficient in my efforts. My last trip to Roanoke was in 2021. I took Nuria and her sister Iri to Roanoke to spread the ashes of Nuria's late husband there. He was a "Roanoke boy," though he was born in California. I lived in Roanoke for 17 years, but I never felt that Roanoke was my home. I always felt like I was a stranger just passing through the city. I was stuck there like a fall leaf stuck on a tree branch, just hanging until a strong gust of wind blew me out of town and back to where I live now. Ironically, I'm not that fond of my hometown, but it does feel like home to me, and it always will.

It's 1PM and I'm going to make my lunch now: three eggs and two slices of bacon. "What's that?" you say. It doesn't sound like lunch? Okay, call it an afternoon breakfast. My first meal of the day consisted of an Atkins bar of the chocolate and peanut butter variety, which I ate around 8:30AM. Now I need some energy so that I can drive that mower around the yard. Hey, don't laugh. Steering that little tractor is hard work. Plus, there's a throttle and a gearshift and a clutch and a brake to operate. Gone are the days of pushing a lawn mower around the yard. Those days ended not long after my next-to-last eleventieth double-digit birthday. Nowadays, I believe in letting machinery do the hard labor if at all possible.

Until next time.