Stuff and nonsense

One of my "daughters" called me today, standing in line in the post office with her friends. They were going out for a drink afterward. She just wanted to say hi and tell me she loves me. That's a wonderful feeling. She will come visit in two weeks. She's cute as a button, of legal age and newly single after her nitwit boyfriend of exactly a year disappeared after their "anniversary." She seems to be dealing with it well, but I'm disappointed for her - it's her first real relationship and for it to end so suddenly, with no closure or big argument or sweet goodbye or anything, seems to be very hurtful. It reminds me of all the bad things that I have done, and that have been done to me, and I wish she didn't have to suffer the same way.
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The People's Republic of New Jersey is beautiful, but I REALLY hate these no-left-turn laws. "Jug handles" (right turns that sweep out and then cross the road that you're on at right angles) seem to be a moronic solution. How about a left turn lane, people? This is the land of eminent domain, where you can just take someone's house and give it to a mall developer. How about taking someone's front yard and widening the road enough for a center turn lane? But noooooooo.
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I talked to my dad tonight. He just turned 79. I insulted him by misremembering it as 80. He sounds really good. He has resumed walking and has traded tap dancing (a lost art, now that actor Gregory Hines has died) for ballroom dancing. Someday I might learn how to dance. Until then, I will tread on my darling wife's feet at New Year's Eve dances, and be envious of my friend who has signed up for lessons (like she even needs them - she was on the ballroom dance team in college, and competed). Ah well.
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I am missing my friends that I made at my last client. One of them is going through a tough time of career indecision, not knowing which way to turn next, and having no one to talk to about it. I know it will sort itself out though. It always does. ;-) Whatever happens, will happen, because it is supposed to.
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I am going to resume exercising at 5:00 AM, even if it kills me. And it may very well kill me. We shall see. Now that I have my friend and co-worker back with me, I can make him exercise with me. It's always easier to torture yourself when you have a buddy to motivate you.
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Microsoft unveiled their magic table today, called... Milan? It reminds me of those old Galaga video games in bars, that were built into the table. Except this one is smart. It can read the touch of your hand, or read barcodes on cards and labels that you lay on the glass. You can drag and drop images on the glass just by touching them. It reminds me of a kludgy version of the holographic control panels in the movie "Minority Report." Those floated in midair, and Tom Cruise "manipulated" them and the images on them with special gloves. We're only a few years away from that, I think. Now THAT would be cool. But I'm still waiting for a phaser. It would nice to be able to shoot someone and only stun them, instead of killing them. I'm not a fan of blowing holes in people, but it's the best defense we currently have, until we have personal electronic shields and phasers.

A friend tells me that scientists have actually developed a lightsaber, but the power requirements are astronomical, and the apparatus to generate the saber beam fills a building. Ehhhhh - the first digital computer, ENIAC, took up 1800 square feet, the size of a middling house. That was 60 years ago. I expect if civilization survives, we'll see something like lightsabers within the next 100 years. Of course, by then, everyone will have phasers and personal shields, rendering lightsabers irrelevant (because phasers are a ranged weapon that can be fired from a distance, whereas lightsabers are a melee, up-close-and-personal weapon).
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Haiku -

Sunflowers strive to
rise above the gnawing teeth
of hateful squirrels

Spreading petals to
the sun, they bloom bright and wide
following the light

First day of school

So I had the first-day-of-school jitters over the weekend, but it's getting better. New client, new place, but what's hardest of all is the (sort of) new product that we are to produce. I have a vague idea of what it should be, and my friend/co-worker is helping me figure it out. It's a product that we've been trying to perfect for years, but we've always been sidetracked by one thing or another from truly making it what it could be. This time, I think the tools, the scope and the willingness of the client to accept direction will make it work.

And that's the other thing - for nearly two years, I've been a do-er, not a lead-er. Now I'm supposed to lead, and it's an effort to switch hats after so long. I'm getting back into it, and thank goodness I can pillage documents and decisions from previous projects where I've led. But it's funny how out-of-practice I feel. I'm sure it will come back quickly. Until then, I will feel unsettled, which is an unusual feeling for me.

Taking their toys and going home

It's an interesting coincidence that two of the loudest mouths on the airwaves (anti-war figurehead Cindy Sheehan and perennially-loopy Rosie O'Donnell) should choose to quit within a day or two of each other. Cindy Sheehan, who's been absent from the news for awhile after hanging out with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and other America-hating folks, wrote a "f*ck all of you, I'm going home" post on the left-wing blog site The Daily Kos, blasting left-wingers as well as right-wingers for, well, whatever she's upset about. Rosie, after losing a shouting match with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on "The View" on May 23rd, announced that she was quitting a month early and would not be back on the show.

I don't pay much attention to television, precisely because morons like those two abound in that arena, but I'm certain that their absence can only improve the medium.

Thank you, America's soldiers...

...for putting your lives on the line every day to ensure our safety and security. You are brave men and women, and I (and millions of other Americans) are very proud of you and thankful for your service. It's important that we remember you today, and all the many hundreds of thousands who have died for us since this great country was founded. Because of your sacrifices, we enjoy the freedom we have now.

I made a point of thanking a friend of mine today for his service. He defended his fire base from a Viet Cong attack one day in... 1972, I think, running from bunker to bunker to direct his comrades' machinegun fire into the jungle, from which the VC were pouring heavy rifle and RPG fire into their base. After half an hour or so, the attackers were driven off, and later, my friend earned a Bronze Star for his actions. I'm very proud of him, and of all our soldier men and women.

Thank you.

A hard, noisy day's work.

Take one eight-horsepower, 15 cubic-feet-per-minute (CFM) air compressor, which weighs approximately four thousand pounds (it required two men to lift it into the truck, but really requires four - I thought I was going to die)...


Add one fifty-pound "air scaler" (also called a "pogo stick," which is really just a jackhammer with a bent handle to let you attack a surface from an angle, instead of from straight up, so you can chisel up tile and linoleum from a floor)...

...and you have a hard day's work ahead of you, chipping off the horrible poly-pebble on the back lanai. Back in the 1950s, this surface was originally intended for pool decks, to create a quick-draining, non-skid surface for walking. What it really does is create a filthy, dirt-retaining, sharp-to-the-feet surface. So up it comes, with the help of the jackhammer.

I had spoken to the rental lady about doing this a couple weeks ago. So when I went to rent this equipment, she had completely forgotten all about this, and suggested that we just rent a chipping hammer and whale away at it by hand. Which would take about three weeks. We wanted to get it done in one day, so we rented this stuff. It works like a charm. But it's very noisy. And our hands swelled up the next day from the continuous vibration.

It's best to cut long straight swaths, then crosscut to pop up bigger chunks of the stuff.

It's not snowing - that sparkly stuff is dust reflecting the flash. Hence the face masks.

These are love bugs. They fill the air like swarms of locusts, twice a year, mating and dying. The large one is the female. The small one is the male. They are harmless and don't bite, but they leave acidic splotches on your automobile. You have to wash your car every day for the couple of weeks that they swarm each year. It's horrible. I don't know how motorcyclists deal with these things. Lots of mouthwash, I suppose.

A green anole inspects our work from a safe distance.

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Sunday we ran errands and slept in front of the TV, listening to the Indy 500 race, which fails to hold my attention the way it used to. Apparently actress Ashley Judd's husband won the race. Whatever.

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Today we went and had a pool party/picnic at our neighbors' house. I played with the dog and their little girl, and had a nice chat with our friends. It was a pleasant afternoon.

Posts from Friday that I didn't get around to posting

Friday was my last day at my current client. It was quiet and anti-climactic. My client manager apologized for not giving me a bigger send-off than dinner out the other night. I told him that it was quite all right - I am quite used to stealing away like a thief in the night. One day I am there, the next day I am gone. That's just how it is. But, on my last day there, I did get to see one of my friends, who had just returned from an extended period working in Alabama. I had not seen her since December, after she had just gotten pregnant, and had not told any of her friends yet except me (because I am an outsider, people often feel safe in confiding in me). She looks wonderfully, joyously pregnant, and it looks like she's carrying around a little volleyball on the front of her otherwise rail-thin body. She even let me feel the baby kicking, and I rubbed her taut belly for luck, like Buddha. I spoke to the baby, saying, "Hello in there!" and the baby kicked. It was an amazing thing to feel, and I was honored that my friend chose to share that with me.

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I spoke with my adoped "daughter" today. She has been without a phone for a long time since she broke it. Today she got a new Motorola Razr for her high school graduation. It is baby pink, she said. That's funny, because I was looking at the same phone in the store, thinking of getting it for my wife. I myself will not own a Motorola phone, since I had a T720 a few years ago and it was the worst piece of sh*t I have ever owned. It wouldn't hold a charge more than four hours on standby. "Buy a bigger battery," said Verizon. So I did. It held a charge for eight hours. So I eventually got tired of keeping it on a charger all the time, and instead ran over it with my truck. It didn't do as much damage as you would think - fat tires on a truck do not apply much pressure, especially to a phone that is packed solid inside its casing. So I threw it away and got an LG VX6800, which I have been happy with. But I am quite over flip-phones. Captain Kirk's communicator finally became reality, but nobody bothered to put the little "chirp" in any of the flip-phones to make it sound like a Star Trek communicator when you flip it open. Oh well. Later I heard from other disgruntled T720 owners that the problem lay in the phone's software and how it managed the battery power. Odd that Verizon didn't bother to tell me that. And Motorola was moronic to release such a product to market without thoroughly field-testing it. I sent hate mail to Motorola' president, at the time. He never responded, unsurprisingly. But my money speaks, and I will not spend money on Motorola products anymore.

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In the Atlanta airport, CNN blares from every TV. Few people watch. But it inspired me.

Barack Obama
smiles earnestly at me on
the airport TV.

CNN loves him.
Apparently they think he
can walk on water.

Joseph Goebbels said,
"The more you repeat the lie,
the more it is truth."

I am unconvinced.
The more they loudly praise him,
the less I believe.

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Today, Monday, is a holiday. It is Memorial Day, the day that we remember all of our fallen soldiers who have fought to make our country great.

I will post pictures from our hardworking weekend tomorrow.

Thursday haiku

Psycho lesbian
shouting at her co-worker
on daytime TV

She proves what we all
already knew - that she is
certifiable.

Springtime winds howl through
cracks in the psych ward windows
Dull eyes gaze outside

Thank goodness only 26 percent...

...of Muslims in America who are between the ages of 18 and 29 think that it's okay to blow themselves up and kill people around them. That's such a relief. It could be so much higher! says the mainstream media.

Based on a first-quarter-2007 Pew Research Center poll of 1050 Muslims (who each were paid $50 to participate, isn't that strange?), 26 percent of those polled who were between the ages of 18 and 29 said that it's sometimes or OFTEN justifiable to commit a suicide bombing.

The New York Post estimates that number to be 117,000 people. One hundred and seventeen THOUSAND potential suicide bombers. More, actually, because a smaller percentage over 30 years old also agreed that it's justifiable to blow themselves up and kill other people.

The news media and the Pew Research Center itself trumpet the results of the poll as "well, MOST Muslims think it's bad to blow themselves up, and gee, OTHER countries (like France and England) have HIGHER percentages of willing suicide bombers than we do, so we're doing pretty good!"

It's folly to ignore these warning signs. Yet inevitably, the warning signs WILL be ignored, until the bombings start here. Then the other million or two peaceful Muslims in the United States will suffer because of the actions of their fanatical kin. It's not fair to them.

But, they have a duty to police the fanatics in their midst, or the infidels will have to do the policing for them.

I really enjoy Iowahawk's take on the whole thing.

Had a nice dinner...

...with the client manager for whom I am working now. He is a tall, intense, loquacious man. I have never spent any time with him other than having him as a student in my classes, so I didn't know what to expect, one-on-one with him. It was a very nice meal, and a nice conversation. We went to an entertainment district called Buckhead in north-central Atlanta. It's a mishmash of seedy college-style bars and upscale trendy eateries full of beautiful people. We went to a Southwestern-style restaurant. I had chicken breast with some kind of spicy sauce, guacamole, and blue rice. It was very good.

On the way back to the car, we passed one of the seedy bars that we had assumed was closed/out of business. Now it was open, with a portable metal railing across the sidewalk. A doorman/bouncer/valet was slouching around in the street, and two young women were lounging on the metal railing. The women were apparently employees of the bar, dressed identically; tight white halter tops, blue plaid Catholic-school miniskirts, and knee-high black Doc Marten boots. Their bored, semi-erotic poses and the dull look in their eyes made me avert my own. The word that sprang to my mind was "meat." It seemed like a soulless job for them, a spirtually-deadening job, a job with no future but dissolution and decay, to be "bait" on the sidewalk to lure customers in, and then to serve drinks or to dance with the customers inside. They radiated that same feeling that I get from casinos, that sense of bored resignation, bordering on despair, leavened with desperation.

I shuddered and walked faster, thankful for the life that I have, and thankful that I was going somewhere else.

Found a possum, found a possum, found a possum just now...

My day started strangely when I stepped out the side door of the hotel and heard something rustling in the tall cement trash can/ashtray outside the door. I peeked in, thinking it was a chipmunk, and saw that it was a young opossum, staring back at me with big round eyes in its triangular face. I think it had climbed in to look for food, and could not climb back out again. So I pulled the metal ashtray off the top of the garbage can, then gently laid the can over on its side, and stepped away. I could see the opossum peeking out from behind a paper bag, but it was too frightened of me (and of the morning light) to come out. I was afraid to reach in after it, because I knew I would be bitten. I didn't have a broomstick or anything to shoo it out with. So I got in the car and went to work. I hope that he eventually came out and scampered back to his den safely. I didn't want him to be collected and thrown out with the rest of the garbage.

When I came home, the garbage can was back in its place, and there was no sign of the opossum. I hope he made it home safely.

But I still remember its pale, triangular, alien-looking face and its big wide fearful eyes gazing at me from the depths of that trash can. It moved me, somehow.

A tragic death and a strange coincidence

We are blessed with wonderful neighbors. Jack and Sue, a couple in their 60s, live across the street with their two yappy Pomeranian dogs. They have a beautiful home. Jack's obsessive about keeping his lawn beautiful - he fires up his gas weedeater and runs it for an hour or two every Saturday, trimming each and every blade of grass that dares to sprout along the edge of the driveway. Jack likes to drive around in his new PT Cruiser convertible with the stereo blasting. He rides his Vespa scooter around the neighborhood for short jaunts.

Jack was killed last night on his scooter.

He was riding off to the beach to watch the sunset. He never came home.

Sue woke up around 10 PM and noticed that Jack wasn't home. He should have been home shortly after sunset.

The police found him lying on the road three blocks from the house, near the wreckage of his scooter. It wasn't clear if someone else hit him, or if he had crashed. He wasn't wearing a helmet. They took him to the hospital, where he died after midnight.


Today, my co-trainer Pam called me from dinner after work. Her husband had been in a motorcycle accident, she said, and she was leaving for the hospital. He has bad road rash and a broken ankle, but he was alive because he wore his helmet. I told her to do whatever she needed to do, and I would take care of teaching classes tomorrow.

Is this a coincidence? I don't think so.

Pam said this accident wouldn't deter her or her husband from riding their motorcycles.

I think that God only gives you one warning, if you're lucky. Most people don't get a warning. Once you get a warning, you had better heed it. Hopefully she and her husband will. Or the second warning will probably be the last. Helmet or no helmet.

Ninety-nine percent of what we worry about -

Fails to happen. I had worried that training was going to be a massive clusterf*ck, because of the poor shape of the training environment. But, I must say, our core team has done a bang-up job of getting most of the stuff to work. And what doesn't work, we can talk around. So training is going actually rather well. It's sad, because I'm winding down a year and a half of history at my current client. I've made some friends here, whom I hope to keep in touch with in the future. It's rare to make friends in my line of work, because you swoop in, do what needs to be done, and up-up-and-away again. You come, you do, you go. But it's been a nice couple of years for me, and I have learned stuff about my work and about myself while I'm here, such as how to keep a healthy separation between work and home, and how not to get sucked into manufactured crises.

So. I feared training would be rocky. It has not been. Once again, I worried for no reason.

And they feed us GREAT here. I will definitely miss lunches provided by the client. But then, I will embrace the opportunity to once again choose what I eat, and perhaps, with exercise, I will lose weight. Won't THAT be nice.

Entirely too much gardening

The flight home Friday was fun. This was the beginning of the security line in Atlanta. There were about 3,000 people in line, from my count. It took over an hour to get through it. Atlanta Hartsfield can do better to alleviate these crowds - there's no excuse for lines like this. I haven't seen a mess like this since September 11th, 2001. It certainly makes flying to Atlanta less desirable, since flying back out of it is so nightmarish.

These are "lookdown fish" (Selene vomer) at the aquarium in my jungle airport. They are members of the jack family. They are called that because of the way they seem to look down their long noses.

\

A leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata). I love sharks. They are so animalistic, so primeval. Speaking of, we saw 31 turkey vultures feasting on a dead armadillo today. Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me. Thirty-one big birds hopping around, bickering with one another, is quite a sight.

It was a short weekend, one full of gardening. On Saturday morning, we worked from 6:30 to 10:30 to plant a butterfly garden.

My darling wife and I were told to stop planting, because we were working so fast, that we would have it done before any other volunteers could plant. (There were about 120 plants to put in the ground, but it's just sand, so you scoop and plop, scoop and plop. It's not terribly difficult.)

Break time.

Laying a path of boards for a walkway.

Another crew nearby was raising part of a metal barn, which is made of ribbed sections. I think the Amish could have given them some pointers. I'm fairly certain that steel is not supposed to bend and sag like this arch is doing.

I'm also fairly certain that I saw this in a safety video on a client's site, showing you how NOT to do it. Ladders standing in the bed of a pickup truck are never a good idea. The driver nearly backed over three people while getting the truck into position. That was exciting too.

The crew is done by 10:30. Actually, planting was done by 8:30. Sooner, if we had been left to our own devices. Alas, the garden will die soon anyway, because the powers-that-be decreed that it should be planted in a sunny, open area that is devoid of water, and which is constantly blasted by hot winds. That's why only sage grass (shown behind the group) grows there now. Oh well, whatever. Not my problem.

Our back lanai is nice enough, but it would be nicer without this horrible poly-pebble on the floor. It's a rough surface which stubbornly refuses to yield up any dirt, sand, cat puke, or other icky stuff that is dropped on it. When you walk on it, it turns your feet black, it's so dirty. You can't hose it out because it just keeps the water in it, and that doesn't get rid of the dirt. That's why we're renting an air chisel over Memorial Day weekend, and we're going to chisel it up, leaving smooth bare concrete floor behind. We'll paint the concrete, and it will be MUCH easier to keep clean then.

These are cat's claw tubers. The nasty cat's claw vine grows up from these nodules that are under the ground. The tubers grow in huge nests that can be ten feet across or more. You can dig them up, but you just keep finding more and more and more, and when you pull them all out, you have a big depression in your yard left over.

A nice new white bird of paradise plant. We took back our half-dead chinese palm, and got this one instead. The nursery was not happy with us making them honor their warranty. No matter.

Yuccas are very hardy plants. This is a chunk of a yucca tree, chopped down and thrown on the ground. From the chunk of yucca log, new yucca trees are growing, even though the dead log is only laying on the ground.

There was a hibiscus show. All of these blooms were cut off the bushes this morning, and placed on pins for the show, which runs only one day (because the blooms die quickly, of course).

They come in all shapes and sizes and colors.


Pretty hibiscuses. Hibiscae?

We also had a nice dinner Saturday night at our friends' house up on an island in a more civilized part of the jungle. Their house is on a bay, one of the last 1960s ranch-style homes amid a crowd of new McMansions. The land the house sits on is worth millions now. The owners were going to bulldoze the house, but then the real estate market tanked, so they rented it to our friends instead. Now our friends are spoiled rotten and can imagine living nowhere else. It's nice enough. But I like my little rural home in the jungle, better.

It was a nice weekend... just too short.

Irritation and daughters, though neither are related

I am sick of f*cking around with MP3 players and blog widgets that don't work. There are dozens out there. None of them work. I'm guessing that I just suck at HTML. My darling wife the other day suggested that I become a programmer. I explained that it takes years of schooling, and I'd be happy to go back to school if she'll go back to work. ;-) And who knows, I may indeed go back and get a computer science degree, or something. I'd much rather be a business/systems analysts or an integrator or something, if I couldn't do what I do now.

Anyway, I have a feeling that if I knew a bit more about programming, I would be able to lick this MP3 issue. Alas, I don't, and I haven't.
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My two 18-year-old "daughters" are coming to visit us! I can't wait. One is my niece, who came to visit recently, and is coming back for two weeks in July. Another is my adopted "daughter," the daughter of a family friend who is a single mom, and she's coming for two weeks in June. My adopted "daughter" has never had a real dad, so she glommed onto me, which has been very rewarding. They're both smart, talented, beautiful young women. I am blessed to have them in my life. We are "as thick as thieves" when we are together, says my wife. I'm sure I'm a bad influence on them. And they're both better shots than me.
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One of my friends has been drawn into the orbit of her alcoholic boyfriend. I am concerned for her, as she tries to maintain her independence and her boundaries while simultaneously trying to help him straighten out. She gets points for trying, but alcoholics usually will never straighten themselves out because of anything anyone else can do. It has to come from within, like a fire. A fire, similar to spontaneous human combustion, which is a phenomenon associated with alcoholism. Most victims of spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, catch fire while seated or while sleeping, and burn to ash without setting their surroundings on fire. Sometimes they'll burn their chair and a hole through the floor. Usually the torso and head are burned to ash, but the limbs are left untouched. Usually they are ignited by a cigarette or a pipe. Alcoholism is usually a factor in helping the body become a "wick" and enabling it to burn slowly like a candle. SHC is one of my pet phenomena.)

How's that for a random free-association segue? Got whiplash yet?

A manufactured emergency

My co-workers and I were told early last week that we would not be allowed to train in the system environment that works. Instead we are to train in another environment, which did not work. The core team was ordered to fix up the non-working environment in time for training this week. This has almost happened. But there hasn't been enough time to get it together, test everything and make sure it works before we train with it.

No matter. We will train with what we have. If something doesn't work, we'll skip that part and move on. Most of the trainees are not people who will do the actual work, anyway. (Don't ask why. I don't.)

In the past, I've literally had to hold up the training manual, point to pictures of the screens on the pages, and explain how the system would work, if it actually worked, which it wasn't. This is a bit better than that.

Not a whole lot better, but a bit. We'll see how it goes. At least I'm among friends, people I know, people I've met, people whom I've met and forgotten but will remember again, and others. I'm here for two weeks. After that, who knows. That's why I'm a consultant - I thrive on uncertainty. The only certainty is that eventually I will leave wherever I am, and move on to someplace I have not been yet.

Meanwhile, I will work through this manufactured emergency, and remind myself that this is not MY emergency, nor is it my co-workers'. I will not feel pity, or remorse. The only people who will suffer are the trainees, and they are used to suffering.

Surf's up

It was a nice weekend. Mostly we laid around, or hung out with friends. We also replaced the nasty plastic coach lanterns on the outside wall of the garage with nice metal-and-glass ones.

We also went to the beach.


Surf's up! Waaaahooooo!!!


Pelicans.


A fossil shark's tooth, from a mako shark. Sharks often have 8 or 10 rows of teeth in the upper jaw, and another 8 to 10 rows of teeth in their lower jaw. A tooth lasts roughly a week before it falls out. Their teeth are easily broken off because they don't have roots. This is why after a shark attacks a boat or a surfboard, it leaves teeth embedded in its target. When that happens, the tooth behind the missing one moves up and takes its place in less than a day. A shark can lose several thousand teeth in a lifetime. Although the shark itself is made of cartilage, and therefore doesn't get fossilized, its teeth are bone, and DO fossilize. The ocean is full of shark's teeth. I just happen to live in a place where they wash up on the beach.

I saw a two-foot blacktip shark about three feet from me as I waded today. I wasn't quick enough with the camera, but I didn't even see him until he was already past me, leaving nary a ripple in the water as he undulated away.


Don't bother looking for the shark's teeth. I already picked them all up.


My fishing buddy was telling me that he likes to fly-fish in the ocean. This, I thought, was absurd. Fly-fishing is for tiny, icy mountain streams, with hip-waders and a twin-beer-can baseball cap. But no, this man is fly-fishing, so clearly my fishing buddy is not the only crazy person. Then I read an article in the paper about fly-fishing in the ocean. Its advice was to not stand in the water, because the casting range of a fly rod (about 10 meters) means that you are aiming for fish in knee-deep water. If you're standing in the water, you're standing ON the fish that you are aiming for. So, stay the heck out of the water, said the newspaper. Besides, there are sharks in there.


A yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea), hunting something on the beach.


A school of fish, probably glass minnows or something.


This toad comes out at about 9 PM every night, and sits next to our front door, eating bugs. When I come home, I fear that he will follow me inside, but he never has yet.


We had another garage sale. We got rid of a LOT of stuff, but didn't make much money ($280). Back in the big city, a good day was $800-$1000. Oh well. It's not the big city.


A cheap Chinese 49cc scooter leaves our garage sale. Our deadbeat tenant whom we evicted left it behind. It didn't run, as far as we could tell, and it was missing some bits here and there, so we sold it for $30.

The sun had a hard time peeking through the smoke from all the forest fires.

A meeting of one of the local garden clubs. The fact that I was even present to take this picture indicates that all semblance of masculinity has been stripped from me. I feel an intense need to go blow something up. Nevertheless, it was a yummy potluck.

I believe this bike in Winnipeg, Manitoba is a 2006 Harley-Davidson FSXTB Night Train, with lots of custom stuff on it. I thought it was very pretty because it's got a lot of matte black metal, and a custom headlight shroud. I could be wrong. I don't know Harleys. I prefer Hondas - they're quiet. Generally, people who ride Harleys (a.) are seeking to impress other people, and (b.) have too much discretionary income, I think. (This bike is about $17,000 USD, without modifications. For that price, it ought to keep you dry in the rain.) I don't want to impress anyone. I want them to leave me the **** alone. Which is why I prefer to drive a large, rusty pickup truck with realistic bullet-hole stickers in a ragged pattern down the side. It's amazing how quickly people will get out of your way when you drive such a vehicle. Especially when you steer right at them. Not many people will get out of the way of a Harley, sadly, which is why several hundred motorcyclists in my state die on the roads each year.

This is a wrought-iron three-panel "screen" that is meant for photographs. It stands about five feet high. My darling wife found it out on the curb with the garbage, so she liberated it. Instead of pictures, we picked out some pretty glass at our local glassblower's shop, and had it cut to fit. Isn't it pretty? I like the nearly-clear pieces - they are molded in the pattern of an alligator's skin.

An abrupt goodbye

I felt it coming; the client's project manager was complaining about being out of money, and he even asked his own client employees who have company credit cards, NOT to submit their expense reports to their own company, because they would be automatically rejected. (They use Extensity software for their expense reporting. I have never seen Extensity work well at any company that uses it, and every Extensity user I have met hates the software with a passion.)

Anyway, I figured the axe was positioning itself above my neck. Gratefully, I awaited its sweeping silver pain, because I am quite over and done with cross-border travel. And the axe fell on Friday. I am not going back to Canada. I will not see my friends in Toronto again. This makes me sad. I miss them already; they are wonderful folks.

However, I DO get to see some friends in Atlanta this week and next, as I assist one of the client's divisions with their training. Atlanta is but a short hop, skip and a jump from the jungle. I actually made it to my hotel before 9 PM tonight. That hasn't happened in a couple years.

It's a relief to be back in America, land of insane drivers. (I saw a blonde woman outside the Hertz rental-car lot tonight who'd managed to rear-end a cab while exiting the Hertz lot with her brand-new rental Ford Explorer. [Insert knowing smart-ass remark about female drivers in the South here.]) At least I can HAVE a car. My last client manager made nine of us share two cars. It felt like kindergarten. I've volunteered to share before on other projects, with one other person; two, tops. But five? That's a bit much. Of course, it was Manitoba. It's not like we'll be fighting over the car to do something at night.

A restaurant that doesn't take credit cards?

I had some fair pesto pasta at an Italian eatery tonight. My wife hated her pizza, but that's not the point here... the point was that the place DIDN'T take credit cards.

No credit cards. Cash only.

There wasn't a sign on the door, nor over the cash register, nor in the menu, nor ANYWHERE, saying they don't take credit cards.

This is a restaurant that can seat at least 75 people, in what passes for the downtown of my little jungle village, in the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. And they don't take credit cards.

Apparently they haven't heard that cash is a dying medium for funds transfer. It's all about credit cards, or stored-value cards, or eventually biometrics where your thumbprint equals money.

Now, I expect the provincial In-God-We-Trust, All-Others-Pay-Cash attitude in a hole-in-the-wall place, where the sign for the restaurant is usually under, or behind, or on the back of, the sign for the more reputable business next door. I expect that in third-world countries like Canada. ;-) But I don't expect it in a tourist town in a first-world country like mine.

Luckily I happened to have the cash on hand. But I'm very certain they surprise several guests each night with their inability to take credit cards, and I'm sure at least some of them DON'T have cash. I wonder what happens to those guests. The kitchen isn't big enough to handle more than two dishwashers at once.

If the restaurant proprietor (an obnoxious man from New Joisey) doesn't want to expand his business, the best way to do that is to refuse credit cards. I will be happy to assist his desire to keep his business small by not going back. It's not that the food was bad, or the service was bad, but to not take credit cards implies that they're a fly-by-night operation. Or that they have bad credit with the banks, who therefore won't sell them a Point Of Sale credit card meter. Or that he's just too cheap to pay the 3 percent transaction fee that most credit card companies charge to process the transaction. I would be surprised by any of those reasons, actually.

Regardless, pfui. I don't need to spend money in any form at a place that doesn't make the terms of the transaction clear at the outset.

More pix from the last two weeks

At some point, my connection at my hotel in Winnipeg got so slow, it could not upload photographs anymore. Very annoying.


Sunset in paradise.


More sunset.




Baby MacKenna, the daughter of our friends.


Three girls on the beach.

Two mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) on the beach. Apparently this is the lesser-known saltwater variant of the mallard. They were just wandering around, and eventually wandered up and over the dune into the tall grass.

Two great blue herons (Ardea herodias) on the beach. They are territorial, so it's unusual to see them together like this.

Four great blue herons. Very unusual.

Great blue heron.

Great blue heron in flight, away from nasty scary homo sapiens wielding a camera.

Two fishermen (homo piscator). They are territorial, so it's unusual to see them together. That's why they're on different outcrops of rock.

More homo piscatorae (the boating variant).

A rocky outcrop barren of fishermen.

The view from the floor underneath my glass sink in my hotel room in Winnipeg. Kohler's got nothing on this sink. And, they used Delta Faucet fixtures, which are among the best, in my humble opinion (they are one of my clients, so I'm obliged to say that).

The view from my hotel room in Winnipeg.

The same view at night from my hotel room in Winnipeg. I like this night setting; not many digital cameras will do that. If only I had a shutter hold-open feature where I could make the exposure as long as I wanted. I could do some beautiful things with that.

The moon above my hotel in Winnipeg.

The Children's Museum across from my hotel in Winnipeg. I'm not sure what kind of children they keep there.

The park across from my hotel in Winnipeg.

The F4F Wildcat fighter piloted by Lt. "Butch" O'Hare, the first World War 2 ace in the Pacific theatre. Chicago's O'Hare airport is named after him, and that's where this plane is. Singlehandedly, in a matter of minutes, O'Hare shot down five Japanese "Betty" bombers who were attempting to sink his aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, on February 20, 1942. To be fair, though, "Betty"s were easy targets, since their lack of self-sealing fuel tanks made them flying Chinese lanterns. O'Hare was lost later in November 1943 in a confusing nighttime action where he was perhaps shot down by his own men who mistook him for a Japanese bomber.

Letters

I was sorting through letters from people, from ten years ago or more. I have three boxes of memorabilia for my entire life. Other people have more, I know, and some have less. I sat down and weeded through one. Lots of letters and pictures from the 1990s. I threw away many of them, because they were either from people whom I could not remember, or from people with whom I don't have any contact anymore, or from people who have died. I kept some, for sentimental reasons, not for any particular content.

The thing that occurred to me though, is that the art of letter-writing is gone. Now our emailed thoughts are so much more fragmentary, so ephemeral. To hold a letter in your hand, to read the handwriting, to feel the paper and the indentations of the writing between your fingers... there's something so concrete, so precious about it. It's as though they are little crystallized gems of a time and a moment and a thought, so much more indestructible and everlasting than the cheap sequins of glowing phosphors on a computer screen. Even though the thoughts and feelings behind those words on paper have passed, and sometimes even the life has passed from the hand that wrote them, those little bits of paper are still precious diamonds, compared to the massless stream of sparkling electrons that bridge the divides between people now. I will miss one friend's spiky penmanship, another's gentle curlicues, a third's thick pencil scratches. My handwriting has always been illegible, so letters from me were more of an exercise in cryptography than anything else. I have no illusions.

Ah well, it's done. The feelings in me are no less real. The people with whom I keep contact are no less real. My life and my memories are no less and no more real than they were before, now that I have thrown away some paper. The paper would be worthless without my memories to supply meaning, and when I'm gone, my memories will be also, and the paper will still be worthless. So I'm just saving some future relative the time of throwing it out then, by throwing it out now.