Cat pictures!

I don’t usually post family and cat pictures much, but I can’t resist these two from M’s weblog:

<3 :)

Night Life

I so need to get into Peekskill more! Terrible how many years I’ve lived right down the street from this artsy little town, and gone to barely a handful of events.

Or to reuse a Facebook posting and put it more positively:

So I am sitting here in the Beanrunner Cafe in Peekskill (good crowd!) ordering soup and a sammich and mocha for dinner, listening to the music while the performers (including my little son, of whom I am wildly proud) set up, and Suzanne freaking VEGA is apparently performing down the street at the Paramount, and I am having my iPad here and I am reading my mail and buying digital books on the innerweb which instantly appear to be read, and now I am posting here, while sitting at this little table with a candle an’ everything.

Woot!!

and then I put up a Facebook photo gallery (my first!) of (dark, blurry, cellphone) pictures of the whole experience.

It was an absolutely wonderful time. The owners and lead performers were elated that they managed to pack the house even playing opposite Suzanne Vega (I would guess that having six High School students in the troupe and therefore drawing in parents and uncles and aunts and grammas and grampas may have had something to do with that, heh heh, although objectively speaking it was in fact a great time). The overly talkative people at the table behind me (why would you come to a live music performance and then TALK NONSTOP, LOUDLY SO AS TO BE ABLE TO HEAR EACH OTHER OVER THE MUSIC for half of the second set?) even partially redeemed themselves by asking me on their way out if the bass player was my son, because they’d thought I looked like him.

I had a big glass of wine (in addition to yummy soup and a wrap sandwich and a big mocha coffee), and while it didn’t hurt my driving-home any I feel somewhat hung-over this morning. (Or maybe it was just the kitten being all excited and/or sleeping on my legs much of the night.)

But it was so worth it…

The sound of buzzcuts

So I used to get my hair cut at John’s Barber Shop up on Route 6. It was a slightly cramped and slightly antique little place off the parking lot, tucked behind the stores that face the road. John was a small energetic barber with an Italian accent and a small staff of sub-barbers, most of them as far as I remember female, John and the staff and many of the customers at least as old as me, maybe even one generation back.

It was a fun place to go for my once-or-twice-a-year haircut, because they would always tease me about the amount to be removed (most of the other male customers being in for short conservative cuts to their lightly oiled black hair), and because it felt like a piece of reality in a way that the Family Salons in Malls never quite did.

(And the one time I got my hair cut at the Family Salon in the Mall and casually told the guy “oh I don’t know, maybe like yours is!”, it was John’s that I went to to have the resulting rat-tail removed. Not that I have any moral objection to the vaguely Hell’s Angel guy I saw in the mirror afterward, but it was profoundly Not Me.)

Eventually John stopped being there very often, and the sign changed to “John and Frank’s” I think it was. And now the sign is just “Frank’s”, and I like to think that John is retired with good wine and lots of Italian grandchildren running about.

Frank is a young guy, maybe thirty, tall and thin, vaguely Russian, but not the pale Caucasian Russian; something darker and hardier. He’s expanded the place, put in nice wood flooring, a glass-fronted case with plants in pots on top and containing some random Salon supplies that no one ever looks at, a rack of old magazines, a refurbished Ms. Pac-Man game, and some extra chairs.

Today as I’m sitting there watching the little boy have his hair cut (“Just him”, I said as we came in, “mine’s still short”, and everyone laughed because they tease me about my hair here still), there are three of them working: Frank, and a shorter guy, maybe Italian (one of John’s grandchildren?), with a buzzcut and a Yankee’s cap worn backwards, and a big muscular chocolate-brown guy with a shaven head and tattoos on his upper arms. Frank is doing the little boy’s hair. Even though he’s having it cut so short that M will be surprised when we get home, it’s still the longest cut I see them give anyone while we’re there. Everyone else is buzzcuts, or shaven sides with a modern not-Mohawk in the center, or something along those lines. (I don’t remember ever seeing a woman in the place since it stopped being John’s.)

It still feels more real-life than the Mall, and everyone is joshing and “how are ya man”ning each other, and being all “I can’t believe we had snow, I was pissed off!” and “You get caught with a suspended license it’s worse than not having a license at all, that’s crazy shit, bro”. I’m sitting with my iPad reading Charlie Stross and listening to Chicks on Speed and electronica on my bluetooth earphones (when I sit up and stretch Frank says “Wake up! You’re playing with that thing too much, is why”, meaning the iPad), and the TV on the wall in one corner is showing soccer as I think it usually is (more evidence that Frank is some sort of European, or maybe just that it’s the XXIst Century now).

And I put a quarter into the M&Ms-for-charity machine, and it gives me a nice handful of good old-fashioned milk-chocolate M&Ms.

Frank always charges us extra, I think, because the little boy and I never come in until our hair is longer than any other four of his customers ever let theirs get between them. But it’s probably no more than the Mall, and it’s more interesting.

On the way out, I say that I’ll be back once my hair’s long, and they laugh.

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Having said that the longer I stay away from WoW the less I miss it, I have now naturally started playing it again. :) I picked up a (human male) Warlock that I’d rolled up a long time ago, who was sitting at like level 28 or something being bored in Westfall, and looked to see what they’d done to Warlocks lately, and started leveling him, and now he’s like level 83 I think, doing Cataclysm quests and instances and stuff.

It’s been fun, I’ve been RPing him very lightly (it’s an RP server) as an Evil Necromancer type Warlock, enjoying going around drinking any souls that come to hand, consorting with demons, making diabolical (although in fact actually beneficial) alchemical potions, laughing maniacally at the Light-sucking fools RPing around the Stormwind Cathedral, and all like that.

But wow, WoW is easy these days. :)

Continuing to think how very very painful it must be to be an intelligent Republican these days, with all the anti-science and religious purity-tests and things that seem to dominate the party. Not that the Democrats are all that wonderful, but they are at least not so incredibly blatant.

Also in politics, fascinated to see the Administration coming out rather strongly against the whole SOPA/PIPA “let the music companies censor the Internet” thing. Brief speculation Twitter that maybe someone had just hacked whitehouse dot gov and put words into their mouths seems to have been unfounded!

Right now I am listening to some live music streaming in SL, with lil Dale standing at the back of the crowd swaying subtly while I do things in other windows.

Oh! Question for readers: there is an old movie, I think it is an old movie, although I’m pretty sure in color, and in this old movie there is an aspiring actress, and at one point the aspiring actress has this script that she’s going to use to audition with, and she goes over the scene with a friend or another aspiring actress or something, and it’s a relatively ordinary conflict between two people like yelling at each other, and then later in the movie she goes to actually audition the scene with some older and maybe famous and maybe slightly has-been (I’m not sure) actor, and the scene goes completely differently, still conflict between two people but this time extremely intense and passionately charged, with them snarling at each other with their lips like an inch apart, and although it’s the same words it’s amazingly different from the earlier runthrough.

So! Anyone know what movie that is? :) I have no idea. I’m pretty sure I didn’t just dream it though.

Drove the little boy up North into the colder and further-apart parts of New York, for an audition for the Music School of a College that he’s already been accepted to (we’re two and zero so far!). That was a fun little expedition; we got to stay in a Hotel because it was a bit of a drive, and the audition was in the morning, so we drove up the day before and drove back after.

We ate dinner at the Cracker Barrel next to the hotel. Cracker Barrel’s got quite a thing going there! There aren’t any very near us for some reason, but we’ve been to a few now. They’re all basically identical, they have big porches with rocking chairs and checkers sets (all for sale), and big stores inside selling all sorts of classic Old Fashioned Country stuff (did you know they still make Moon Pies and Cracker Jacks that come in cardboard boxes rather than metalized plastic bags?), and then big dining rooms with old-time ads and farm implements on the walls, and menus with lots of classic and high-calorie and not very expensive food.

(Humans were intended, I think, to eat the meals that they serve at Cracker Barrel, but only after having spent at least four hours in hard physical labor.)

I had the Chicken and Dumplin’s, the little boy had something with macaroni and cheese and shrimp, and we got the free corn muffins, and I had a Stewart’s Root Beer, and we both bought little candies in the store (malted milk balls for me, huge Smarties for him), and it all came out to just about twenty dollars.

There was snow on the sides of the road starting about halfway there, and on any cars coming from the north, but it didn’t snow on us at all. There was a detour on the way back, but we only got slightly lost. :)

Watched another episode of Buffy last night; I’m still somewhere in Season Three. Willow is extremely cute; I’m looking forward to the season where she becomes like a scary evil super-witch (although sad about the reason).

And now The Magnificent Seven is on the teevee, and I’m listening to CelticMaidenWarrior Lancaster doing a live set in SL (currently doing shoutouts to the people she recognizes in the crowd and anyone else obvious, and about to launch into “Lay Lady Lay”), and we’ve had our bagels, and I’m just sitting here relaxing. Maybe I will go make level 84 with that warlock…

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Off to Florida for a memorial service for Dad at his church down here. It will be good to talk about him to more people who knew him, and to hear from people who knew him in this part of his life.

I decided to bring only the iPad, because it’s just a few days and it let me travel very very light, just my Christmas present messenger bag. Bringing the big laptop (and therefore the cooling pad) would have at least doubled the space and weight, and bringing the work laptop would probably have meant doing work, and I’m still on vacation, dagnabbit!

(I did do work email on Monday; fortunately it looks like basically nothing significant happened after I wrote the triumphant “we’re all done for the year!” email and teleported away.)

So I miss SL, and to an extent I miss WoW (although with WoW the longer I don’t play it the less I tend to miss it), and I even miss Portal (stayed up late Monday night installing it on the big laptop via Steam, and getting I think about halfway through the post-chamber-19 section; having played through it before on the playroom computer definitely helps).

But I’m catching up with Twitter and the news (How about them wacky Iowa Republican caucuses, eh?), and here I am writing in the weblog even. So that’s all good.

Fascinating to see the Twitterverse getting Verizon to back off of a new nickel-and-diming fee, just like the Bank of America one last month, and the whole splitting-up-Netflix thing (“Qwikster” lol) before that.

Keep an eye on the “Paypal forces destruction of antique violin” story; maybe the next crowd-driven policy change.

(How is that even legal? If Paypal doesn’t make the payment, presumably the object is still owned by the almost-seller, so how can they make the almost-buyer, who doesn’t own it, destroy it? Very odd…)

I need to write more sometime about my disillusion with the big-L, and to some extent the small-l, libertarians, and with Ron Paul in particular. Pains me a bit now that I once voted for him for President, although I’m not entirely unhappy with the message that I intended that to send.

Government truly is pretty bad at various things. Some of those are things that therefore the government shouldn’t do. But significant ones are ones that we need the government to do, and that therefore our only option is to have them do it, and keep a really close watch over them (over ourselves) at the same time.

Even if we take the libertarian line that the only proper role of government is to prevent force, theft, and fraud (and I’m no longer sure that I do), it turns out you still need a significantly large government, because force, theft, and fraud can be big, subtle, powerful, and very well organized. However much we might want to believe it, Sheriff Taylor isn’t going to keep either Organized Crime from terrorizing the countryside, or Big Business from polluting the water, or Wall Street from stealing billions of dollars from its customers, with just his smile and a comical deputy or two.

It’s bright and sunny and unusually cold in Florida this morning; frost on the car windows! Pretty though. I’m sitting looking out the big windows, typing with my thumbs and wondering how differently I write with this tool than with other ones. Another interesting question…

New Year Update

It’s the New Year! 2012! Time to go out and buy a new Mayan calendar!

(Actually one has until December until the end of the current B’ak’tun, it seems. I wonder how Mayan Calendar vendors remember to stock up before the rush every 394 years or whatever it is.)

This year we made a mere 159 New Year dumplings (餃子, WordPress permitting), which is about the same number as in 2005, considerably more than in 2007, but significantly less than in recent years. We had somewhat more meat than dough (the kids are speaking of dumpling-meat patties), which traditionally means we will have enough food but not enough clothes in 2012, which is better than the main alternative.

Search o’ the Day: arrow in the meme. (You’re welcome!)

So I asked on “Facebook”: “How do you decide what to want?”.

Didn’t get much in the way of (substantive) answers (although I admit it’s fun that the two answers I did get were from a co-worker and a childhood friend who live on like different continents). It seems like a very important question. As questions go.

On some piece of paper somewhere, maybe not in digital form anywhere, I wrote something about some part of Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider” I think it was, about how soldiers returning from war could find the ordinary world meaningless or arbitrary; I think I wrote that this is likely because they had been in a context where they had to spend alot of time just thinking about survival, and when that need then went away they were left with only less compelling reasons for action.

So (I’m writing very stream-of-consciousness here) we can think about ascending ol’ Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where it’s more or less obvious what to do when we’re down at the Physiological level (find air, find food), and for that matter the Safety level (get further from the tigers, put up walls), and as we get higher up it becomes sort of less obvious, more arbitrary, less compelling. And if we make the mistake of thinking about what to want, rather than just wanting what’s expected, we may find nothing to speak of under our feet.

How do you decide what to want? Your ancestors all wanted to have children who would in turn have children, or at least they all did that, or they wouldn’t be your ancestors. The intellectual ancestors of your beliefs and attitudes all wanted to pass their beliefs and attitudes down to later generations, or at least they all did that, or they wouldn’t be the intellectual ancestors of your beliefs and attitudes.

So there’s a strong (what?) evolutionary tendency to want to have and raise children, and/or to pass one’s beliefs and attitudes down to later generations. But we don’t necessarily want to follow that evolutionary tendency. Or, we don’t have to want to follow that tendency; it’s not mandatory or required, it’s merely easy and obvious. (Easy and obvious to make that choice, that is; the actual doing of it may be hard and subtle.)

Somewhere when I was even younger :) I wrote down “the is-ought connection is choice”. And I think that’s true; choice, or the lack of choice, the slipping into the default choice. But how do you choose? How do I choose? How, especially, if one of the things that we’re choosing is the deepest basis for our own choice-making?

It seems like the choice must either be arbitrary, or (which may be the same thing) must be based on things that are so fundamental that we don’t get to choose about them however hard we might try (ingrained preferences that we can’t get beyond, or can’t want to get beyond, intrinsic tendencies that are too deep down even to represent as preferences).

So, hm. Am I an Existentialist now? :)

I think I have probably written all of this down before, and it’s not clear what there is to say about it next, or what to do beyond writing it down and mentally putting it in your pocket, for the next time it comes up. So now I’ve done that again.

Tamara de Lempicka. Just sayin’.

Happy Christmas to All!

A Happy Christmas and greetings of the Season to all of my good Readers! The Queen’s Message has just finished, and we are sitting by the Tree, listening to Traditional Carols being played upon the stereo-phonic system, with a pie crust heating in the oven for Chocolate Silk Pie in the French mode later on, with the Ham Dinner.

This year I have received Gifts that spring from the Profligate Bosom of Technology! M has given me a bound copy of Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia”, as published by the Royal Society in September to General Acclaim. It is quite an astonishing volume; I admit I have been “looking at the pictures” primarily, rather than reading the text, but it is clear just how revolutionary a piece of work this is, opening whole new worlds to human examination, and whole new channels in the human psyche.

From the Little Daughter, a selection of knit “sweaters”, including two open ones in the style of the Earl of Cardigan, that she assures me are popular with the “hipsters” in her set. I am wearing one now, and if I say so myself it is both agreeable to the eye, and significantly Warming.

In my “Christmas stocking”, I also found an Eight Gigabyte USB Key, in the style of Swiss Army Knives (from Victorinox, the Original Makers). This offers enough “memory”, I should think, to contain a detailed narrative of my own Life, and for that matter most of the History of the Universe. Quite an amazing bauble for one’s key-ring!

And less Technologicially, I also have a new Messenger Bag for carrying things in, and a Quantity of Chocolate, as is traditional. :)

As it says in Clement Moore’s verse, which also in accord with Tradition I read aloud to the family last night (notwithstanding the eye rolls of the teen-agers): Happy Christmas to all!

(And to all, after Dinner, a Good Night!)

Solstice

The longest night, the shortest day. When we gather around fires, and around evergreens, and tell stories about death and rebirth, to celebrate that it’s the darkest time again, and so it’s going to get lighter now.

And as well as to celebrate, we cuddle up to reassure ourselves and each other that it is, in fact, going to do that getting-lighter thing again. And maybe to have company while we worry, a little, that this time it might not.

But it always does. :)

A pendulum is fastest at the bottom of its swing, and pauses at the high points at the ends. But the year, I think, is slowest at the bottom of its swing, and down here at the Winter Solstice we feel everything pause in the darkness and the cold, everything holds its breath, motionless for a moment.

We hold our breaths, long enough to look around, make sure that the warm place, the bright place we’ve secured in the darkness, is all ready, all warm, all bright. So the moment of most-dark can pass easily, quickly, smoothly, with us quiet and watching, and after that breath-held dark-quiet pause, motion can start again, and later the sunrise, and not too long after that the Spring.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

So, another lovely family Thanksgiving, the four of us sitting around the table feasting and being thankful. A bit of a story inside it, and I’ve finally cried for Dad some, which feels good.

Everything was all bought and planned for the Thanksgiving Dinner, everyone home and being snug as bugs. I had the turkey all stuffed, extra stuffing waiting to be cooked (’cause everyone loves stuffing), sitting by the oven. I turned on the oven to pre-heat, and a minute later it turned off again. And so did the clock on the oven, the light above the oven, the ceiling light nearby, and various televisions and things in the next room.

Okay, so the breaker tripped, reset it and try again. But it tripped again, before the oven had got very hot at all. Something wrong with the oven, we thought. Unplugging all the things that we’d noticed turn off along with it didn’t help. Called the neighbors next door, who were out of town having Thanksgiving with family, and they said we could use their stove, which sounded plausible until we all realized that their son had come over and borrowed the extra key to their house that we keep for emergencies, the other day, and hadn’t brought it back yet. The little boy went next door and searched under all of their doormats and stuff, just in case, but no other keys.

I took a couple of Ativan ’cause I was feeling stressed, and everyone was telling me that it was okay and we could just go out to a restaurant together this year. I was down on the kitchen floor peering into the oven with a flashlight in case there was anything obvious, and then I was clinging to poor M’s knees and sobbing, because it had suddenly hit me that I couldn’t call Dad to complain to him and ask him what to do.

I did alot of crying there, more than a turkey dinner warranted, and then I went and flung myself down on the Maid’s Room bed and sobbed there for awhile, taking deep breaths in between crying, tears streaming down my face, the whole thing. Opened my eyes and realized that I was on the bed that Mom and Dad had gotten for me when I was little, and cried more.

Eventually I felt all calm and peaceful, and came out again, and told the kids what-all had been going on, and we had a big family hug.

And then when I went down into the basement to reset the breaker one last time so we could at least use the lights and stuff, I heard a click from the other side of the basement, and thought that I had heard that click at least one other time resetting the breaker, and developed the wild theory that the washing machine (which had been going all this time) is on the same circuit as the oven, and a few minutes after that the washing machine was all done, and I turned the oven on again, and it stayed on.

(Neighbor who knows things about houses and appliances and stuff says that probably the circuit breaker just needs replacing, and has been on the edge of not allowing both the oven and washer to run at the same time for awhile, and just went over the edge. And/or that we just haven’t tried to run both of those for awhile!)

So then everything worked (except I overcooked the not-in-the-bird stuffing just a little bit, but it’s fine as long as it has gravy on it), and we had the abovementioned wonderful family Thanksgiving feast and lounging around afterward being thankful and playing video games and suchlike.

And I didn’t really mean to go into quite that much detail about it all in here, but I have, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Happy Saturday After Thanksgiving! Or local equivalent.

Sunday, 6 November, 2011

Did I actually write nothing on Day Four or Day Five? How lazy! I believe the tally now stands:

Day One: 3,018 (3,018)
Day Two: 3,014 (6,032)
Day Three: 2,038 (8,070)
Day Four: 0 (8,070)
Day Five: 0 (8,070)
Day Six: 1,981(10,051)

Which, by no coincidence at all, is almost exactly On Target for finishing at 50K words on November 30th, because that’s when I decided I could comfortably stop for the evening. :)

Things have been busy. There was a memorial service for Dad at the church (it’s always been “the church” to me, even though Dad’s been active in the other church for the last several years). It was lovely, lots of various old friends, and the Minister, saying nice things about him. I got up and said some I thought rather confused and mostly ad hoc stuff (although I’d been thinking about stuff to say for a few days now). And coffee and finger-foods afterwards, and lots of good feeling and community.

One of the things I said first was that that community had always been very important to Dad, and to the whole family, and it has. Something very comforting about going back to the church that you grew up in, and seeing the building basically the same, with some changes, and the people basically the same, with some changes.

I also drove nostalgically from the church to the house, which is still there, and even presents the same red side in the same old shape to the street, through what looks like more or less the same tangle of woods. There’s a driveway now, rather than just a halfheartedly gravel-strewn dirt road shared with the next-door neighbors (and leading back and back into the woods). And the front looks fancier; I wonder if it is a doctor’s office or something now (the consensus of the Web seems to be that it’s still a single-family home, but You Never Know).

Proud of myself for being able to find the way on nothing but old memories, I drove out to the Nanuet Mall from there, looking at what had changed and what hadn’t in the meantime. Ralphie’s Diner is still down at the bottom of Remsen, on Route 59; I think it moved in there just about when I left, which means it’s been there for a good 30 years.

(It doesn’t seem to have its own Web page, but amusingly there seem to be about three zillion web pages about it, all pretty much identically empty as far as I can tell.)

And my old High School is still there, and the utility company opposite it, and various familiar music stores and bicycle shops. Lots of new things, mostly bigger than the former old things, even more than before with Hebrew letters next to the old-fashioned American ones. Funny how things linger as they change; where the old Hub Bowling Center used to be (it was old and on the way out even when I was little, as I recall), is now The Monsey Hub, a shopping center with something (perhaps “The Monsey Hub”?) in big Hebrew letters on the facade. Completely different, but still with that “Hub”.

(Great old newspaper page from maybe 1960 prominently featuring a picture of some cool kids at Hub Bowling, and the XXIst-century Foursquare page about the Monsey Hub.)

After the service we drove up to the top of Bear Mountain for the scattering of some of Dad’s ashes.

It was a place that he loved, and that I remember vividly from being little. Haven’t been up there in far too long!

It was a gorgeous day.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

So in one of those “Welcome to New York!” moments, we popped out of the Astor Place subway station (the 6 line, downtown from Grand Central), next to a crowd of chanting, sign-waving, and generally admirable looking people, many of the female persuasion, constituting (as I found out after I got home) the New York Slutwalk 2011:

(Click through to flickr for a whole photoset not taken by or containing any of us, but of some of the same people that we saw. The mobile poledancer bringing up the rear of the march is not pictured.)

We discovered that we needed to go against the flow of the march to get to Shimkin Hall & the Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center, so we slipped along on the non-march side of the line of watching police officers, up 8th Avenue (“Consent is Sexy! No Means No!”), smiled at the mobile pole dancer, and turned south onto Broadway.

Turns out that if you go to the NYU Undergraduate Admissions Visit page, and it says that all of the tours for the day that you’re planning to go down are full up, you can just show up anyway, and they will with no fuss at all sign you up on the spot, and you can listen to the Admissions Officer person talk, and ask questions and listen to other people ask questions, and then go on an hour tour of the campus (which is mostly all around Washington Square Park there) with a Genuine Student, who will show you a Genuine Dorm and classroom and an enormous library and some other stuff, and (at least in our case) you’ll only be rained on a little.

So that was a good time.

(And NYU is very large. Not to mention pricey!)

Then since we hadn’t done any research in advance and I couldn’t find an open WiFi hotspot that would talk to my iPad, we didn’t manage to find an actual Dim Sum place that wasn’t occupied by a private party or not open at the time, but we ate at Kens Asian Taste, which was basically empty because it was too late I think for Dim Sum (“No more dimsum!”), and too early for most people having dinner, and the food was good, and it was nice to be sitting down and eating and out of the rain.

And on the way back to Grand Central (note: the 6 train uptown seems to be missing at various stations, including Canal Street; but you can take the N or Q or whatever that is uptown from Canal Street to Times Square, and take the S shuttle to Grand Central from there) we stopped at the Tai Pan Bakery (which was fun and bustling and chaotic and everyone but us spoke Cantonese) and got little Egg Custards for the train, and some Pork Buns for breakfast tomorrow (probably).

And now we are home!

Four thirteen-year-olds

That’s how old I am today! Doesn’t sound very old at all when you put it that way, eh? As old as four thirteen-year-olds: I think I can deal with that. :)

(Do those boys up there look thirteen at all? I’m terrible judging people’s ages. And of course by now they’re probably all considerably older than thirteen. That was perhaps not the most youth-reminding picture I could have chosen offa the Interwebs, now that I think of it…)

Of course it is also National Wear a Tea Cozy on Your Head Day, so I am like those people born on December 25th or whatever, and have to share my celebrations with the NWATCOYHD festivities. But it mostly works out okay.

For my Deck of Cards Birthday, I took the day off (except for a couple of hours doing email and a customer call from home), and went out to The Diner for lunch with M, and she got me a replacement for my Keurig coffee machine (it started leaking water all over the place, and I ‘descaled’ it with vinegar to see if that would help, and now it leaks water all over the place and also makes coffee that tastes like vinegar, which is really quite bad; but now I have a new one!).

Oh, and a nice chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting mmmmm.

Lots of people are wishing me Happy Birthday via Facebook and other evil social media; including at least a couple people that I’m not sure I actually know, and various people that are not actually people but rather just computer programs (I think IMVU, which I think I visited once, and LinkedIn or something, and maybe Plaxo, and one or two random phpbbses that I apparently slipped and gave my right dates to).

What’s the point of having computer programs send people “Happy Birthday!” messages automatically, anyway? Does anyone enjoy getting those, or find them anything but annoying? I mean…

So anyway! Four thirteen-year-olds! How youthful! How full of potential!

Maybe this picture is more appropriately uplifting…

:)

Home again

So Dad passed away a little after midnight, on Wednesday (the 14th). He was the best Dad ever, and his passing was as gentle and as undemanding on his loved ones as one would have expected. I was there, down in Florida with him and Stepmom. I think maybe he was waiting for me to show up; one of the last things he said to me (along with some discussion of Linda Ronstadt and Alan Watts) was “you got here just in time”.

And now I am back home, and while my usual witty and ironic commentary here might be a bit subdued for awhile, I figure Dad is the one who gave me at least the good parts of the wit and irony, and I shouldn’t let it be suppressed on his behalf. I have been remembering all sorts of things about him (pretty much unreservedly positive, because I am the luckiest son ever), and some of them may get written down here eventually, but probably not right now.

It makes you think, in a more serious and concrete way, about consciousness and death and what might happen to the one after the other. (I’m listening to a course that touches on the subject, but I think it’s going to stay pretty abstract and theoretical.)

As far as I know there’s no particular reason to think that the usual suspects have it at all correct; they are just, layers of complication aside, taking a bunch of very old guesses far too seriously. Those guesses might be right, but they’re no more likely to be than any of millions of similar guesses that didn’t happen to get written down.

It could be that nothing happens, that consciousness just goes out at death. That would be awfully boring, though, and it’s not clear there’s much more to say about it.

There’s a theory, which somewhat hearteningly I can’t find on the Interwebs at the moment, that consciousness, mysterious and amorphous as it is, quantum-tunnels among the available possible world-lines, and always finds one in which life continues. So although other people may experience a world in which one dies, one’s own consciousness avoids those, and one is always, in one’s own world-line, immortal.

It’s not clear what it would mean for that to be true or false; it’s not obviously falsifiable, at least from here. But that’s okay.

Dad lives, in various senses and to various degrees, in the state-spaces of various brains, mine and Stepmom’s and lots of others. Does that mean anything about his consciousness? No idea; consciousness is hard.

A friend told me, a week or two ago, that when her father died, a friend had a dream that he was waiting in line, all excited because he was waiting to find out what he was going to do next.

I like that thought.

I know Dad would want to be doing something interesting. I’ll be sure to arrange that at least the parts of him here enriching my own state-space are.

Thanks, Dad, for everything.

Dad

William Bernard Chess, 1927-2011

Saturday

So I am sitting here writing this as a passenger while the little daughter drives her car, if you can believe it.

Many many things have happened, and even are still happening; some of them I will write about later when they are more culminated. I spent threeish days of Labor Day week in airports-and-hotels-and-raised-floor land, sitting around waiting for something to go wrong that I might be needed to help with, and nothing did, which was good but extremely dull, because for much of the time I had no network connection nor any of my computers, and not enough printed out on paper to occupy the time.

The little daughter, as suggested above, now has her very own car, a natty little 2007 Nissan Sentra that we saw sitting at our local Nissan dealer with used-car price-numbers on the windshield, but when we made up our minds to probably buy it, and went there, the dealer had no idea what it was doing there, and said it wasn’t one of theirs, and didn’t we want something more expensive instead. (This is a good story, so I will continue it into a whole nother paragraph.)

We didn’t want any of the more expensive ones, and went home, but someone not me remembered there had been a URL on the license plate frame of the car, and we went there and the car was actually there on the website, and eventually we bought it. (For anyone in the area, Hudson Auto Traders is a very nice two or three vaguely Slavic young guys in a clean little shack by the side of the road, with a couple of desks and computers and lots of cars sitting around for sale, and they handle all the license and registration stuff, and wash the car very nicely for turning over, and the reason it was sitting at the Nissan dealer was that a service light had come on and they’d taken it to the service department for a new transmission, which is a good thing in a used car.)

So anyway now we are taking the little daughter back to school for her Senior Year of College, and M and the little boy are driving in the big car with most of the stuff, and the little daughter is driving her car with the fridge and the old TV and the beer and some shoes and things, and I am sitting here writing in my weblog, and helping her with her highway driving by gasping and making panicky little motions whenever she does anything dangerous, like driving on the same road as other cars. We are listening to Spanish music on th’ car radio.

There is a thirty-foot dumpster in our driveway back there at home, from Mr. Cheapee Carting, and it is surprisingy (and almost entirely) full of stuff that we have and don’t want. A fair fraction of the stuff was rendered (even) less desirable by being soaked in six inches of water in the basement; the rest is just stuff we realized we don’t want even in a dry condition, and Julian and Antoine hauled out and tossed in. It’s supposed to be removed on Monday.

In one of the ancient decaying cabinets that are now in the dumpster, M found a cache of books, mostly paperback SF, presumably placed there by me in the distant past. Once we’re home again maybe I will type them in, ’cause we like lists of random books here. M’s comment was that in the one place she would not have expected to find books, there were books.

(This is fun! says the little daughter, zipping down Interstate 287 South.)

There are a couple of industrial-strength fans in the basement, drying out the last few wet patches on the amazingly empty cement floor, and Julian and Antoine and their boss (boss-of-the-moment, perhaps) Manny have applied professional-strength disinfectants to discourage mold and fungus and other microorganisms that flourish in dampish basements.

My trip into airport-and-hotel-and-raised-floor land was complicated rather by the storms and tornadoes around Atlanta, in which city’s airport I was originally to change planes. After the airline drove me at their own expense from one airport to another one an hour away, I discovered that I was still not scheduled to arrive at my ultimate destination until the next morning, which was not According to Plan. Fortunately when I wailed about this to the gate agent, she said “oh, well, there is a direct flight to your ultimate destination leaving from that gate there in fifteen minutes, do you want to take that?”, and I did, and that simplified things considerably.

I have my third over-80 character in WoW (did I already say that?), a sore-faced Dren paladin named Spaenorus. “Sore-faced” is a joke, referring to the notional rolling of the face across the keyboard that WoW players invoke to imply that something is easy.

And WoW is easy! I think it’s that they’ve accelerated their “make everything easier, to increase new-user retention” policy, rather than that I’m just an awesomely skilled player haha. But, just for a fun-story example, there’s this semi-boss that’s level 80ish Elite, and after doing a quest chain you get the ability to set off these runes that he is foolishly walking around on, which do him lots of damage when activated. So I decided to see if I can vanquish and/or defeat him without using the runes, and I was able to do it handily, finishing with full health and mana, and the only reason I even had to use my Lay On Hands cooldown was (this is the good part) that halfway through the battle I got disconnected from the server, and when I got back in he was at full health again and I was at like 1%; but I had no serious trouble recovering from that and winning, still without using any of the runes.

If you made a graph of how hard WoW is now, it would stay flat at “push two or three buttons repeatedly until you win” all the way from level 1 to level 85, go up to “have some idea what you’re doing” in the last few level 85 instances, hit “optimize your gear and think about rotations” in heroic level 85 content, and then “actually be in a well-prepared and skillful and well-geared group, and do the right things” only at the very highest level 85 large-group raids.

Which means that hitting the advanced 85 content is quite a shock for people who’ve just been facerolling for their whole WoW lives, and random PUGs (pick-up groups) can get pretty ugly.

But presumably that effect doesn’t hurt user retention or revenue, or they wouldn’t do it? It’s a funny world!

Anyway, the little daughter is now all safely installed at school, and after a great sushi and tempura dinner, I have driven the rest of us home in the big car, and we are watching the second men’s semifinal of the U.S. Tennis Open, which involves tennis.

Ah, and here are the random books M rescued from the basement!

Star Trek: Vulcan’s Glory. A Star Trek novel, likely involving a Vulcan or two. And some glory.

The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West, by Mary Stanton. “If you loved Watership Down… this is the book for you”.

Piper at the Gate, by Mary Stanton. “The exciting sequel to The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West.”

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. Famous!

The Loud Halo, by Lillian Beckwith. Apparently stories about life on a Hebridean island, with complimentary jacket-blurb from The Daily Scotsman, and an old sticker saying “PF50″.

“How to Parent”, by Dr. Fitzhugh Dodson. Hahaha a bit late there. Given my general disdain for parenting books, I’m especially baffled by this one.

The Teachings of the Mystics, by Walter T. Stace, a Mentor Book, 1960.

The Celtic Twilight, and a selection of early poems, by W. B. Yeats. (I wonder if there’s a digital edition of that.)

Beneath the Wheel, by Hermann Hesse. His second novel.

Mars, by Ben Bova. Many many pages.

The Peter Principle, by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his [sic] level of incompetence.” Bantam edition published February 1970.

Dayworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. A SF novel.

And finally, not a book, “Joy to the World, Three Dog Night, their greatest hits”. This is a primitive plastic device, with many moving parts, called a “tape cassette”. Ancient legends say that they were once used to record audio tracks, like a strange mechanical iPod; but if so, the method of extracting the recorded sound is long lost to science.

A satisfyingly odd collection, I’d say… :)

Offlining

It’s odd being offline. Not that I’m entirely, or even primarily, offline. But I am significantly offline, and that’s significant.

(Hm, I don’t know how to control emphasis in this WordPress iPad app; pretend “significantly” is in italics, or HTML emphasis tags, in that previous paragraph, ‘kay?)

Sometime on ummm Sunday? Yeah, M confirms that it was Sunday, at about fourish PM, just when we were getting smug about the Enormous Hurricane having passed us with minimal damage to anything but a few hundred leaves forcibly removed from trees, the power suddenly went out.

And it’s still out! Many minutes, even days, later! And so is the Internet connection!

Meanwhile, in the basement, the half-inch of water that I figured would be our tenuous bond with people who had actual problems from the storm, got a bit over five inches deep before it started down again, and there’s still a good three inches down there. Which means, among other things, no hot water. And lots of very wet basement-stuffs.

And we still don’t have actual problems. :)

I mean, no trees fell on the house or cars, no one was injured in any way, no one is sick, and Panera has power and Internet, and work has power and Internet, and for that matter our cellphones have power (as long as they get to work or Panera now and then) and Internet (annoying and probably sneakily expensive and tiny-screened as they are, being nice primitive low-function cellphones), and there’s no water in the house anywhere but the basement, and so on and so on.

The iPad has a nice long battery life. (Especially given Panera, work, etc.)

And I’m getting pretty good at Sudoku.

I’m also reading some old-fashioned paper books, by flashlight and atmospheric candle-light, as well as some of the books cached on the device here, by the intrinsic glow of the screen. And getting to sleep (much) earlier.

But I do miss Second Life, and WoW, and all of that there virtual online stuff. (I did sneak into SL for a couple of minutes on my work laptop, during a boring conference call, to check on my virtual plants; the virtual sprinkler has been working fine and they are virtually healthy, and producing little virtual cuttings for virtual hybridization, although I could swear that I ought to have had another second-virtual-generation virtual hybrid by now and I didn’t notice one, grumble grumble.)

I’ve keeping up with virtual events to an extent by reading Dale’s Twitter feed; but it’s not really about the events. It’s more about putting one’s feet up at the end of a tiring day, and falling through the screen into a place where there is no PowerPoint, and no office politics, and you can fly, and fight the bad guys (ha, I can’t even remember that big Bad Guy group’s name; the Cult of Something, I think), and create a zeppelin with your mind and all.

And in the case of Second Life getting to talk to all those fascinating friends and not-yet-friends, and in the case of WoW getting to be pretty much completely antisocial, except for groups of random strangers and now and then a group of vaguely-known guildies to gang up on the unsuspecting and infinitely reborn evil monsters. (Some people get very social on WoW (see for instance the very funny and memorable “The Guild” web video series that I would link to if I weren’t offline), but I’m not one of them; SL is my virtual social, and Zeppelin-creating, place. WoW is for introversion!)

And (what’s with all of these “and”s?) I can’t do any of that stuff right now. But really it’s not too bad. Fasts of all kinds are good for the soul, in moderation, and this way I’m forced to enjoy the good old-fashioned offline things.

Well…

Good old-fashioned offline things including this iPad, that is. :)

(P.S. Weird Al’s “Genius in France” is a (begin emphasis)very(end emphasis) odd track. Is there some back-story there, or is he just being… weird? Maybe I will look it up next time I am in Panera…)

(P.P.S. “Twilight’s Hammer”, that’s it!)

(P.P.P.S. And the health club also has power and Internet, and now the water is just over one inch, but the water heater still won’t stay lit…)

Expedition

So for the little daughter’s birthday we went into New York City (again! just a few days after last time! probably some sort of record for us!) on the train, and took the New York City Subways down to SoHo (the area South of Houston Street, whence the name), and idled patiently about while said daughter indulged her unaccountable taste for clothes shopping (even though, as I pointed out, she already has clothes).

Whilst idling about, the little boy and I went to the Opera Gallery New York which had some fun stuff to look at (I do not remember seeing the comfortable-looking sofas in that one picture on the web site, or we would probably have sat in them; unless they were part of the art). And then later M and the little boy and I all went over to the Evolution Store, which also had fun stuff to look at, much of it consisting of the remains of dead things.

After all that when we were hungry, we wandered around Little Italy a bit looking for a restaurant, and the little daughter’s telephone told her about one called “Peasant” that was nearby, so we went there.

It was very good!

They did not have the Razor Clams (which sound dangerous anyway). I had the Risotto with Veal Sauce; or at least I think it was risotto. For some reason I always forget what risotto is, and I may have it confused with something else. Sort of like arugula and that other thing. But anyway, it was very good! And the waitress was absolutely adorable (maybe about the little daughter’s age? I am a terrible judge of such things) and discussed in depth the terroir of the available by-the-glass wines, and the composition of the various sauces, and so on, at the slightest prompting.

M and I had a nice light red; the little daughter had a somewhat heavier Primitivo. Since it was her 21st birthday, we all noted that this was her first taste of alcohol, and then laughed uproariously (since she’s been in college for three years and all). We skipped dessert at Peasant, and stopped at Zero’s Grand Central (we’d checked on the way in and determined that they’d be open until 2am, which was far later than we needed them), and picked up a small red velvet cake (mmmmm) and a little fruit tart, and when we got home, happy but exhausted, we used our last dregs of energy to sing Happy Birthday and have cake and take pictures of candles being blown out and all.

I am not posting any pictures for some reason, but M has posted a number of historical little daughter pictures in her lovely and much less ironic-sounding post about the birthday.

A great time was had by all, and we are very proud and extremely astonished by this grownup that we have somehow produced. It will be very restful now that she will be taking care of all of her own affairs, although we hope she will allow us to give her little bits of advice and aid now and then.

hee hee.