Termites

Today is February 4th. The year is still 2021. This year is really passing slowly. I'm taking a Spanish lesson every day, thanks to a website called Duolingo. Learning Spanish is easy. After only three months, I have already learned how to say the word "No" in Spanish. I estimate that I will be able to speak Spanish like a two year old in another 75 years. I recently had the following conversation.

Spanish-speaking friend: "VirtualWayne, say something in Spanish."

Me: "Cookie."

Friend: "That's English."

Me: "Hmmm. Let me check something on my phone. Da-da-duh-da-hmmm-hmm-hmm-hmm. Got it. Galleta."

Friend: "That's biscuit."

Me: "Bizcochito?"

Friend: "That's  cupcake."

Me: "Damn it! How about...(thinking hard)...bollito?"

Friend: "Never mind. It was a trick question. Spanish doesn't have a word for cookie."

Me: "Are you sure?"

Friend: "I'm Latina. Have you ever seen me eat a cookie?"

Me: "No."

Friend: "There you have it. Cookie doesn't exist in Spanish."

Me: "What about computer cookies...those short text files that a web browser can save?"

Friend: "They're called browser biscuits in Spanish."

Me: "Ay, chihuahua."

Getting back to reality, today is 50°F and sunny. I went to the grocery store yesterday, and when I came back to my car, I noticed my left rear tire looked a little bit low. So after I got home and put away the groceries, I checked the air pressure in the tire. It was less than 15 psi. Normally, I keep the tire inflated to 30 psi. I pumped up the tire with the noisiest air compressor in the world. It's a little thing that pumps tire pressure to as much as 200 psi, though I have no doubt it would take a week to do it. It took 15 minutes to go from 15 psi to 30 psi. Then I topped off the other 3 tires.

While I was doing that, I noticed termite tubes on one of the 2x4 shelving supports next to my vehicle. This was new. If you don't know what termite tubes are, they are mud tunnels termites make to travel above ground to a new place to eat your house. Wingless termites exposed to fresh air or sunshine will die in a couple of minutes.

Termite tubes look like this: (the hum-Beep is in the audio track. Sorry.)

 

"Why don't I just call an exterminator?" I hear you thinking. I probably will, and I need them to crawl under the house and check for termites there, too. One problem: the last time I had a pest control company check under my house, the guys knocked off the insulation protecting the heating system pipes. Meaning, I would have lost a bunch of heat (read: money) under the house. Not only that, but it is possible the heating pipes could have frozen. The thing that really bothered me was that they didn't tell me. I had to go under the house a few weeks later for some other reason, and discovered the damaged insulation. Damaging it and not repairing it was bad. Damaging it and not telling me they damaged it was indefensible. So now I don't trust them. I'll probably crawl under the house with them.

Once upon a time, people took pride in their work. A job well done was almost a point of honor. Now its all about the benjamins. Get to the job, do it as fast as possible, and get to the next job. Who can you trust to do a good job? The number of workmen who do a good job seems to get smaller year by year.

First Snow of 2021

I got to see a pretty snowfall this morning. 

It is Sunday and the time was already 8am when I got out of bed. I opened the blinds and saw that snow was falling moderately hard. Snow is not unusual for central Virginia, but this was the first snow of the winter. 

During the night, I had difficulty sleeping so I arose from bed and went to the living room. I gathered the frozen-dinner cartons I had saved for the recycle bin, and I fed them one by one into the fireplace and applied flame to them. I had a nice, warm fire going for a while. So these frozen-dinners served me twice, first as nourishment and then as a cheery fire.

I hope your morning was as pleasant.

Snow Job

Years ago, I had to go to a job interview in Burlington, N.C. I would soon be a new college graduate, an electrical engineer, and this was my first job interview.

Virginia Tech is located in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. I had to drive to Burlington, and to do that I had to drive over a mountain range.

All this time later, I can't remember the roads I took. If I speculate, I would guess that I took U.S. 460 east to Roanoke and then U.S. 220 south to Martinsville, and then Va. 87 into Burlington. I remember a few things about that trip.

I was driving my 1960 Plymouth. The weather was snowing. I was in a line of cars going up a mountain pass. At the head of the line was a big black truck. It wasn't a semi-truck, it was something like a big dump truck, as I recall. The road was slippery. Once in a while a car would slide off the road. The road was banked toward the mountain, so thankfully when a car slid off the road, it ended up against the side of a hill. The line of cars slowly grew shorter as, one by one, cars slid away.

Sometimes the wind blew hard and there was a sudden whiteout. When that happened, I could see nothing outside of my car. I couldn't see the vehicles in front of me. I couldn't see the hood of my Plymouth. Looking into my rear view mirror, all I could see was gray light coming through the snow covering my rear window. Visibility was zero. I could only apply brakes and stop, and hope the cars behind me did the same thing. Then the wind would calm somewhat, the wipers cleared snow from my windshield, and there was the hood of my car again, and there was the car ahead of me. Everyone was stopped. 

But not for long. The big truck began moving up the mountain again with the ever-shortening line of cars trailing behind it like ducklings behind their mother. The Plymouth had good traction. I had gotten the car out of places where I thought for sure I would need a tow. The truck continued up the mountain, and the number of cars between the truck and my Plymouth dwindled. The number of cars behind me dwindled, too.

Not every car slid off the road. Many drivers gave up and turned back. Eventually (and incredibly), the only vehicles left climbing that mountain pass were the big truck and my Plymouth. I had pressing business in Burlington. The job interview was important and I had to get there. 

I finally came down the other side of the mountain and onto flat land. I sped along the snow-covered road alone. No other cars were on the road. I couldn't really see the road; all the land was white. But I could discern where, approximately, the road was located beneath the snow. I could tell from the fence that ran alongside the road. I could tell from the bridges crossing over the road. I would aim for the empty space between bridge supports and I could be pretty sure I was on the road.

I made it to Burlington and checked into a cheap motel. The man at the front desk informed me that a night there would cost me eight dollars. I didn't have eight dollars on me, because I was a poor college student and I couldn't lay my hands on more than five dollars. (I had already bounced a check for that amount.) I offered him a check, but he declined. I told him I would pay him when I checked out the next day.

I slept the night in the motel room and the next morning I went to my job interview. That afternoon, as I left the building with one of the employees, I asked if I could get eight dollars from him. He said I could. So I wrote him a check and took the eight dollars and went to the motel and paid my bill, and I drove back to Blacksburg, to Virginia Tech. I got the job. I would be working for a missile guidance system engineering department. I think the pay was $750 per month. When your money is so tight that you bounce $5 checks, $750 sounds like a lot. I was thankful for it. And I was thankful for that 1960 Plymouth that pulled me over that mountain pass, through wind and snow and whiteouts, when the chips were down.

Paul Mauriat

The song of the day is 1968's Love is Blue (L'amour est Bleu) by French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat. The song is his million-selling remake of André Popp's "Love is Blue", which was #1 for 5 weeks in 1968.

Dinner

I blog about a lot of mundane topics, so I may as well blog about my dinner tonight. 

I'm single and I don't like cooking, but I do like to eat nutritious food. I like tasty food. So what can I cook tonight that is healthy and tasty? As I made dinner, I took a few photos with my phone. So here we go.

I prepared veggies for juicing: Carrots and cukes and beets and celery. The juicer makes quick work of them.
 

I put the juice into a couple of clean jars, formerly peanut butter jars. The screw caps seal in the freshness, as they say on TV. I put both jars into the fridge to cool down. One is for today and one is for tomorrow. It's about as easy to prepare two servings as to prepare one serving. So each serving contains approximately 2 ½ carrots, ½ cucumber, 1 beet, and 1 celery rib. (I stir-fried the leaves and stems of the beets last night and ate them with ... well, here I have to take a detour to last night's supper.

So here we are at last night's supper. I have beets, and I chopped white onion. I stir-fried the onion with the beet stems, which turned the onion a pinkish color. I also stir-fried the beet leaves. They're the most nutritious part of the beet. Don't take my word—look it up!

This was the first time I had cooked beet leaves and stems. When I was finished cooking and plated the meal, it looked like this. You see the white onion is stained pink from the beet stems. The beet stems must be cooked until they are tender, although if they are a little chewy you just have to chew a bit longer and they will dissolve to nothing. You will not be spitting out any beet stems. 

The beet leaves are also on the plate, and they are also good. I didn't know how they would taste, but if I had cooked a second helping, I would have eaten it. These are the greens from 4 small beets, and like any greens they cook down a lot. You should, of course, wash the stems and leaves before cooking them, or you may be eating some dirt with your meal.

Now I started cooking some chopped white onion in an electric wok with a tablespoon (or so) of sesame oil. The wok's temperature was set to 300F°. 

This is a medium white onion cut into pieces about 1 cm per side. That's about a half inch for you die-hard fans of U.S. customary units.

 

 

 

 

After I added sesame oil the white onion adopted a brownish color, as that is the color of sesame oil. Toasted sesame oil is even darker brown. I'm not sure what the difference is, or if there is a difference. Maybe the toasted variety has a stronger flavor. Again, something for my readers to look up on Google. 

Stir fry the onion for 10 minutes at 300F. 

Now I throw 8 ounces of spinach leaves on top of the cooked onion. It fills up the wok nicely. The spinach leaves will cook down quickly. Continue stirring the whole shebang for a couple of minutes.

While you're cooking the onion and spinach, get a piece of salmon going in the frying pan. I used cooking spray and it eliminates the oil splatter you get when you put something wet (fish) into hot oil. Later, when the fish is about half cooked, you can add a tablespoon or so of your favorite oil (I used extra virgin olive olive, or EVOO as that woman on TV calls it) and got no spatter at all.

Of course, I could have used a spatter screen but experience has shown me that they are all but worthless. Drops of hot oil pop through the screen; the screen simply breaks the drops into smaller drops.

At first, cook the salmon skin-side down. I say that as if it were important. I'm just pretending to know what I'm doing here. But really, I'm winging it. I'm always winging it.

After a while, flip the salmon over so that it can cook from the other side. Give it another few minutes. Now, I'm not winging it when I tell you this. You have to turn the fish over in the pan, or it's going to be over-cooked on one side and raw on the other side. Trust me.

I start with the skin-side down and cook it a while, flip it over for a few minutes, then flip it again because if it's thick you can get the fish-side too brown and you might burn it. The skin-side is more resistant to burning.

Of course if you burn it, just tell yourself you're eating blackened salmon. Which you are, just not what the restaurant serves.

So here's the salmon skin-side down again, and the cooked onion and spinach beside it. Now that the spinach is out of the pan, I pour about a tablespoon of oyster sauce on it. Oyster sauce is a little sweet and a little salty. I won't tell you what it's made of, but the name of the stuff is a giveaway.

The spinach is ready to eat, and the salmon is ready to eat. Now just put them on a plate side-by-side. That works a lot better than stacking them like hot cakes, but I suppose you could do it that way, too.

By the way, I'm making dinner for tomorrow night at the same time as tonight's meal. So what I'm cooking is twice the amount I plan to have for dinner.

And here we are: dinner. Or supper. Or dinner.

Usually for salmon I'll make up a quick drizzle from melted butter and lemon juice. But this salmon came from the store pre-spiced. It has brown sugar, honey powder (honey and sugar), salt, black pepper, paprika, parsley, red pepper, and white pepper. 

Though I used stir-fried spinach and onion for my side dish, you could use rice and vegetables and lemon wedges. You could serve the fish with mashed sweet potato and roasted veggies. You can serve the fish with chocolate chip cookies. I don't care. I say, go crazy. Enjoy yourself. Just as I enjoyed eating my meal and creating this blog post about it, garnished with lots of photos. 

Enjoy, and bon appetit!

P.S.
Dessert:

 

 

 

 

Luciano Pavarotti

The song of the day is Nessun Dorma ("Let No One Sleep") by Italian operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti. The song is an aria from Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot.

Memories

Running down the beach in the sunshine, feet splashing through surf,

Playing tennis all day, all summer,

Hiking into the gorge, walking beside the river all day, climbing out of the gorge,

Hundreds of feet above, afternoon sunshine inflames colorful autumn trees,

Arising from bed, early morn, gazing at mountain peaks poking through fog,

Nailing tent stakes into the earth, swimming in a pristine lake,

Making love inside a car when the temperature is two degrees,

Windows rimed with frost from hot breath,

Campfires, hay bales, friends, marshmallows on sticks,

Long walks through forest,

Boat lingers at anchor and I lie on deck in the afternoon sun,

Canoe floats through a deep river gorge, trees hundreds of feet above,

Sweat runs into my eyes,

Taking a pretty girl somewhere I can't afford,

Brakes squeal, crash of steel on steel,

A passenger jet lifts off the runway, climbing quickly, homeward bound now,

Places and times I shall not pass again,

But I have them in my head, I have them now and I always will.

Don't Hurry Be Happy

It is quiet in my house. The only sounds are the flickering fire in my fireplace and the tinnitus in my head. The only light in my room is my computer screen and the fading, dancing firelight on the wall opposite the fireplace. I feel content. I live in central Virginia, 132 miles south of the nation's capital, about two hours at interstate highway speed, but there is not enough money in the world to tempt me to drive there.

When I was 19, I had a job in Bladensburg, Maryland. I drove there on Monday morning and returned on Friday afternoon. I drove a 1955 Chevy. It had an inline 6 cylinder engine, and the cylinders were badly worn. It burned a quart of oil every 20 miles. I could fill the engine with oil and drive about 100 miles and the "Oil" lamp on the dashboard would light up. Then I had to stop and add oil. 

On Monday morning, I would drive north on I-95 to the DC Beltway (I-495) and then I would take the Beltway around DC.  I lived in a rented room in College Park, just inside the Beltway on the north side of DC. I worked for a company in Bladensburg, a community you might have difficulty finding on a map were it not for the name on the Bladensburg High School.

Come Friday afternoon, I would head for the Beltway. The on-ramp was always packed with commuters and it usually took 20 to 30 minutes on the on-ramp to get to the actual Beltway. My old Chevy poured out blue smoke from the exhaust. No doubt drivers behind me hated me, but there was nothing I could do about it. The cylinders were badly worn, the piston rings had almost no compression, and the engine needed rebuilding but that required money I didn't have. 

When I got on the Beltway I took the I-95 exit and drove 132 miles south at speeds rarely below 85 mph. I passed everything on the road. I passed cars, I passed trucks, I passed buses, I passed 18-wheelers. Nobody passed me. Nowadays on an Interstate highway, 85 mph is nothing. I've driven to central Florida from Virginia and back at a relaxed 85 mph on I-95, and everyone was going the same speed. But in that far-off day it was not as common.

Although 85 mph sounds fast, it doesn't seem fast after I've been doing it for a while. It feels like I'm going about 35 mph. I find myself wanting to go faster, but I know I'd be inviting a speeding ticket, and maybe a reckless driving ticket, if I did. So I crawl along at 85 mph.

I did have an incident on I-81 in the Shenandoah Valley. I was driving north when a cop came from behind me and signaled a car that was two cars back to pull over. It did. Then he pulled up beside the car that was behind me and signaled it to pull over. It did. I knew he was probably going for a threesome, so I stepped a little harder on the gas. I wanted to give him a choice. He could ticket the two drivers he had pulled over, or he could catch me and ticket me, in which case those two drivers would be long gone when he got back to them. So he could choose: one ticket or two tickets. He chose to ticket the two cars that had pulled over and I continued up the interstate.

There was a time in my life when it seemed to me like I was always driving somewhere. It seems as though for years I lived my life on four wheels. Maybe that is why I don't care for long trips now. I've done enough of them. I'll stay in my house, and visit neighbors I can walk to, and if I go on a car trip, it's two miles to the grocery store for food and two miles home. It's one mile to the hardware store for paint or caulk or plumbing supplies and one mile home. 

That's my speed now: 25 or 35 in town, and 65 on the interstate where 65 is the law. I drive in the right lane and let cars pass me. I've spent too many hours being in a hurry.

Respect

I got up late today—5:30 a.m. It's 34° outside. It's the blue hour, that hour before dawn when everything has a shade of blue about it. This is Martin Luther King day in the US, a federal holiday, so no mail today and federal offices are closed and banks are closed, too. 

I got up and went to my PC. I checked the news and read an editorial. I watched a couple of YT videos. I defrosted a freezer biscuit: a frozen nugget of sausage, egg, and cheese wrapped in tasty carbohydrate. The biscuit had just the right balance of protein and carbs to send my brain back to sleepy time. So I crawled back into bed and drifted into slumber.

Time passed, but I was dead to the world.

My eyes opened again, and I found myself looking directly at the clock beside my bed. It displayed 9:09. For a split second my foggy brain thought I had slept the day away and now it was 9 p.m. But no, it was still morning. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. The day was sunny and 39°. On the way to my PC I grabbed a bottle of Savia Aloe Vera drink from the fridge.

The Savia drink is sweet. You can dilute it with water if the sweetness overwhelms you. A friend in Costa Rica introduced me to it, and later I found it on the Hispanic food aisle at Walmart. Aloe Vera juice is reputed to have health benefits, but I don't know what, if any, benefits might be found in the Savia drink. For what it's worth, you can see bits of Aloe Vera gel suspended in the water in the bottle.

My first order of business is to take an online Spanish lesson. I'm studying (re-learning) Spanish on a website that is multimedia. Sometimes it plays samples of spoken Spanish and asks me to type what I hear. No problem—or, no hay problema. But I do have complaints. For one, when they tell me to type what I hear, and I do, sometimes they tell me I am wrong. How can I be wrong? I typed what I heard, just as they asked. If it isn't what they wanted me to hear, then that's on them. I'm just listening and typing. Maybe their instructors should speak more clearly.

When I was in high school, in those long ago days of yore, I had an excellent Spanish teacher. Her name was Mrs. Pulley, and she had the best diction of anyone I've ever heard. I wrote about her in a blog post here. I never knew her first name. Back in those days of yore, students had respect for their teachers and would never think of addressing a teacher by his or her first name. It is like using Tú and Usted in Spanish, a distinction that also seems to be slowly disappearing. Even my Spanish-teaching website teaches me to say Tú with barely a mention of Usted. It's a distinction that shows respect—a nicety that is, in its own way, dying in my country, too. Small children, who visit with their parents and who don't know me, can now call me by my first name, and their parents see nothing wrong with that. The child isn't taught respect because the parent was never taught respect. And where does that lead? Apparently, it leads to a country where people have no respect for anything—not for lives, not for property, and not for their own government.

If Jesus were still amongst us, he would look at the world and say, "Oy vey!" Except, of course, he would say it in Aramaic.

January Thaw

For the past few days, the weather has been nice. Cold at night, of course, but 50-ish during the day. In fact, some trees are budding out—the beginning of new leaves. The trees think it is springtime. Foolish trees, they have no brains and cannot read a calendar, so they don't know that we are merely going through a warm spell in winter.

At this hour it is dark and 25°F outside. That is -4°C. Very cold, but not extreme. It is not uncommon for outside temperatures to fall below 0°F during winter. But January in central Virginia is a strange month. One week will be very cold and the next week will be mild enough that a jacket is not necessary. The warm spell is called the "January thaw." The cold will return.

February is the colder month, where temps drop to 0° and a gusty wind over the chimney makes the furnace roar. Although I have a boiler, not a furnace. The difference is a furnace heats air and a boiler heats water. Despite the name, home-heating boilers are usually "hot water" boilers and they don't actually boil anything.

My room is lit by the LED monitor on my desk. A space heater blows hot air at my bare legs. It feels good. I feel blessed to have a house around me, with heat and water and food. What more can a person ask for? I don't understand people who travel thousands of miles to break things that aren't theirs, hurt people they don't know, and get themselves put into prison, when all the while a warm house in winter and a cool house in summer is all a person needs to be content. Foolish humans, they can never find contentment because they don't where to look.

You can't find contentment if you look for it in the world. You have to look for it in yourself. If you let your mind wander to the worries of the world, your contentment may be lost. Worse, you may find yourself lost. This life is the only life you are guaranteed to have. Why not choose to enjoy it?