Cat pictures!

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

<3 :)

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.

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

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.