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.

Politics

When I was young, the difference in America's two political parties wasn't so large as it is today. Consequently, to win an election a politician might adjust his views to incorporate more of the "middle views" and fewer of the extreme views of voters. 

Today, the difference in our two political parties is so large that to win an election, politicans perceive that they need to win more of the extremist votes, and therefore they move their position further from the center. Republicans become more right-wing and Democrats become more left-wing. This gives us two parties that are farther apart than ever and also gives us the daily bickering that we see between the two major parties in Congress. 

That leaves Independent voters in the center of the political spectrum with influence that surpasses what one would expect from their numbers alone. Independent voters have become more important, not because they're going to budge the bulk of either of the two main parties closer to the center, but because throwing their much smaller weight to one candidate can decide the outcome of an election. 

Of course, a candidate still must win the votes of the "regular" voters, so he can't change his positions in a major way. But it's to his advantage to gather some Independent voters if possible. The Independent voters today are more important than ever, because Republican voters and Democrat voters are a given—we know how they're going to vote—and so the outcome of an election often depends on getting as many Independent votes as possible.

On the other hand, one could argue that, given that the nation's voting districts have been gerrymandered to hell, it might be in a candidate's best interest to ignore Independent voters and appeal to the extremist voters. Gerrymandering has, in effect, rigged the outcome of our elections to the point where voters can be forgiven for asking if casting a vote has much meaning anymore. Just pick an 'R' or a 'D' and roll the dice. 

Night Thoughts

I knew what I was getting into. I really did. And yet.

Long ago, long before I was born into this life, I was told what would happen. But, my advisors told me that this life was for the best. I would learn things I needed to learn. If I didn't learn them in this life, they would face me in another life. One way or another, I would have to learn them. They told me that this life was the right time to do that.

So I stepped into this lifetime. It took me a very long time to understand that my life wasn't merely happening to me. My life was what I chose. There were stones in my path: large ones, small ones. I needed them all. And finally, nearing the end of my life, I understand at last. I don't complain. I'm only getting what I need, and what I agreed to experience. 

The soul has goals and needs that transcend earthly lifetimes. "Why did this happen to me?" you may ask. The answer is: because you needed it. Maybe you needed poverty. Maybe you needed oppressive wealth. The list is endless.

I finish my glass of wine and go to bed, but not to sleep. I lie in the darkness and think. My companion lies beside me. I roll over and put my arm over her warm body. She does not awaken. She has chosen her life just as I have chosen my life. And now, as we both experience the final chapter of our lives, we have chosen to be together—a choice we made long ago, in that timeless epoch before we were born and to which we will return.

Young spirits will be puzzled at my words. To them I say, go and have fun, but remember that your destiny awaits you. Do not be surprised when it comes to you when you least expect it.

Tonight, sleep will not come for me. I rise and return to my writing task. I decide to finish the bottle of red wine that I began hours ago. It's the first wine I've tasted in three years. It's good and it warms my body and soul. I used to drink vodka. But vodka is mainly good for getting drunk. Wine is good for reflection, at least it is for me. I wish it would help me sleep. I sleep very little these days, and I lie awake in bed, in darkness, for far too many hours. But it's a part of the life that I chose.