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31
Oct 25

Happy Halloween

There is a metal bowl of candy on the bookcase nearest the door. The kids are coming up at irregular intervals. I can hear the entire transaction, which seems a lot faster than I recall as a kid. They are up the stairs and off the porch briskly, though each comes with a “trick-or-treat” and also a “thank you.”

One pair of kids came up to the porch, one stumbling up the stairs in their costume. And the the other stumbled down the stairs in their costume.

Maybe those miniature pumpkins we put out are really crash buoys, and I didn’t realize it.

I think we missed at least one kid in the sugar distribution process. Maybe she came back around later. Surely she did not do without.

This ritual gets out of control in some places. Once we lived in a neighborhood where people literally bussed in their kids from afar. They’d deplete your candy stores right away, and that was before the chainsmoking teens showed up. Here, we had one set of young teens, the neighbors we may never otherwise meet, but the rest were fairly young from the sound and looks of things. That’s nice, some of the older folks in the neighborhood have noticed, with a sigh, that the place is aging around them. The sigh comes because they realize it is aging with them. But lately there’s been a youth movement, witness the Halloween traditions! And maybe people are coming from afar.

There may be leftover candy.

We played our part in tomorrow’s sugar coma until about 8:30, and then the door was closed, the lights were off, and the ninjas were deployed from their barracks out back to return to their evening surveillance.

There is leftover candy. No, the ninjas can’t have any. We need them hungry and light on their feet, just in case there are any tricks over night.

Before all of that, I took the recycling to the inconvenience center. When we first moved here I had to take the garbage there, to the place across town, hence my clever little nickname. After a year we got curbside garbage delivery, finally. And now I just take the recycling. Today I loaded the car up with a repurposed outdoor garbage can, an oversized storage bin, a kitchen-sized garbage can and two big armfuls of cardboard.

I tried, and failed, to remember the last time I went there. Maybe it’s been a month. That’d be great. And it would also make sense. The recyclables were threatening to push us outdoors.

Anyway, it’s easy there. You drive up, back in. There’s a great big bin for cardboard. (Break down your boxes! Sometimes I do.) There are two bins for garbage. Another for scrap metal and one for mixed use stuff. This is where the plastic and glass go and I assume it’s all just melted in a weekend bonfire down past the tree line. But it makes me feel better. I have saved the earth. I have dispensed and disposed of all of that, so that some of it may be reused again.

I think we now send out almost as much recyclable waste as garbage, which is … good? We’re pretty streamlined on both. And the cats help with repurposed cardboard.

On the way back home, I was stopped at one of the two red lights right by this temporary installation.

This was set up right in front of the bank. Across the way is the little local performing arts center, and the store front of a nice guy who makes high end fountain pens. He’s currently selling 10 pieces with wood and copper that came from Old Ironsides. You can purchase one for $1,250. As much as I appreciate the novelty and historical heft that you can apply to that, I don’t understand that income bracket. I don’t understand how anyone could lay that out and then put a pen on their desk, or in their coat pocket. Or use it. Or put it in a display case some way. Or even a safe.

One day I hope he’ll let me come in and bring non-historical wood and turn a pen of my own. He invites students to see the process, because junior high kids are always ready throw down big bills for fountain pens, why not the rest of us? Surely he has slow days. Surely this could be an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Surely that chunk of wood I picked up that one time, from that special place, can make a nice, personal piece in no way approaching the price of a mortgage payment.

Maybe I could compensate him with leftover candy.

Happy Halloween!

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24
Oct 25

It stings

Well, that hurt. I went back to the dermatology center today — I think that’s also the name of the place. It’s about a half hour away and it is clearly a front for some jobs program. I have been there three times in less than three months and I have seen five different people in their exam rooms. First was the woman who did the summary inspection, a nice young woman already washed out before her term, staring at people’s skin all day. She had an assistant who excelled in not being at all visible or memorable. Two weeks ago, another person did the operation. Firm handshake. No real sense of humor. Michigan man. The woman who assisted him was delightful and kind, the sort that seems to have an irrepressible sense of good cheer about her. She’s probably been reprimanded about that before. I liked her immensely.

Today, which I have been looking forward to for the better part of the last two weeks, is when the sutures came out. I’ve been looking forward to it so, naturally, I was eight minutes late. Also, I had to go alone, because my lovely wife was out of town.

I was very brave.

Once, several years ago I was in a hospital waiting room and a mom and her young child came through. It was some sort of visit for the kid, and the staff at the admissions desk made an appropriately big deal about him. I was still there when they were through, and the woman at the desk remembered him and she asked, in her adult voice, not the patronizing kid voice, “Were you very brave?” And, of course, the little boy was, and I think of that from time to time. Today I was very brave.

This is what it was. I stuck my head in the at the desk. The woman there said they’d be right with me. I sat down just in time to be called to the back. A woman walked my around a byzantine set of hallways to an exam room. I asked her if she would be the one dealing with me today (because see above). She was the one that was dealing with me today. I asked her my series of carefully memorized and rehearsed questions. I got satisfactory answers to all of them. And then she proceeded to rip this industrial strength cable through my tender, delicate skin.

This was, again, just inside my shoulder, so I couldn’t see it but there were several sharp burning pulling moments. I wanted a local for this. When I got back in the car, in a few minutes later, I realized this was the worst the thing has felt since it was a thing. But Tylenol took care of that later in the afternoon.

So I had five stitches. Now I have none. And I went from a gauze pad to a Band-Aid. And, in a few days, it’s back to normal.

I have to have another checkup in a few months though. Standard procedure. I have been assured that the tests came back from the lab in fine order. The humorless man from Michigan land must know what he’s doing.

These have been sitting in my phone for a few days, and I don’t know why I keep forgetting to share them. So let’s share them. The last color of the hydrangeas, in the warm bath of a flood light.

They get bent over in the late summer rains, and never really recover their posture. But, aside from that, I enjoy the changing colors of these petals a great deal. There’s just a lot of character and nuance there. Like the bush is trying to tell me of the season, or the longer, cooler nights. I don’t know.

For another week or so, I’ll have that to ponder, and then soon it’ll just be sticks and twigs and waiting until it bursts back to life in March and April.

I could make that a metaphor, but my entourage of dermatology experts have told me I still must avoid heavy lifting for a few more days.

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10
Oct 25

Cutting pieces off

I went in for a little medical procedure today. This was planned. I am fine. We scheduled this several months ago. There was a mysterious spot no one liked on my back. (I, however, was fine with it. Couldn’t see it. Wasn’t bothering me.) So they did a biopsy. The lab work determined it was the sort of thing that’s not a danger today, but you don’t want it around tomorrow. And so today was that day.

There was bleeding and stitches. I’m calling it a surgery. There was not enough anesthetic. There is never enough anesthetic. For the record, should you be with me when I need medical attention, it is general anesthetic or bust.

The guy asked me what I would like, as I had had time to peruse their generous offerings on the menu, accessible by QR code. I said I’d take the local, and then two regionals, please and thank you. Oh, I played it tough. I said I don’t want to feel the sensation of you tugging on my skin, even in the areas around the professional butchery. In truth, I want to be down the hall, around the corner, and across town at the mall. I don’t want to remember any of this.

Especially when the local begins to wear down. Which did happen. And I don’t want to hear you and your assistant discussing the finer points of the size of the suture material. Get the good stuff. Get it fast. Let’s stop the bleeding and have a blast.

I tried to enter into a discussion with the guy — hey, he let me stay conscious and that was his choice — about all of the things I can and can’t do in the next several weeks of recovery. I think he came to think I was arguing with him, but I saw it as a negotiation. What if I do this, but not hard or well? Finally his colleague laughingly said I can’t do the dishes for two weeks. And yard work, that’s right out. I guess the new phalanx of ninjas will see their training delayed, as well.

I am told the incision was the size of a couple of quarters. And I’m sure it will not feel pleasant tomorrow. I am to treat with alternating dosages of Ibuprofen and Tylenol.

What in the wide world of medicine is going on with these orders?

The dressing has to get changed twice a day for the next two weeks. Stitches come out in 14 days. And, supposedly, I am to take it easy for three to four weeks, though even the derma-guy said, “But you have to live your life.”

So I’ll milk it as long as I can, I guess? Or until I go stir crazy or feel guilty about not pulling my share around here.

Hey, at least the local stayed with me for much of the day. Operating under the idea that I’ll be equally uncomfortable wherever I am, we went to watch an Army-Navy doubleheader. Women’s soccer, and then men’s soccer. I even saw the Goodyear blimp.

The Middies won the women’s game. And before the men played The Leap Frogs jumped onto the field.

You can wind the week down with a lot of work

After a day of committee meetings, and email, and grading, and a bit of class work, I realized that every Friday is like that. Most days are similar. Some days have classes. Not every day has committees.

For a while today was so full, though, that I wrote a To Do list for the afternoon. I’m not a big To Do list guy, but I find that, from time-to-time, it’s an actual productive way to do a bit of cognitive offloading. Plus there’s a little satisfaction of having it all laid out in front of you. Fridays have become a lot of that this semester too: just a big block of uninterrupted time to take on what needs taking on. And, finally, there’s the muted pleasure of scratching a thing off a list. I didn’t use check marks. Didn’t draw a line through an item. I scratched it out aggressively. I don’t know why that is.

Speaking of cognitive offloading, I do a thing in my classes now where I show an AI fail each day. Usually it is an image. I try to find the sports-related one since those are my classes. And I try not to make them all about Google’s AI, which is unrepentantly terrible. If I just showed that thing every day I’d look like I was piling on. Some of these are funny. And sometimes my students ignore them. It is either, I’m not as funny as I think I am — which is not true — or they feel like I’m shaming them about lousy technology that has been marketed to them and they’ve fallen for — which is true, for the most part.

Here’s my next example. The perils of letting AI plan your next trip:

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.

“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”

What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

People will trust the weirdest things.

This is lousy op sec, and of course silly on the face of it, and catty to boot. Great reporting from the Star Tribune.

After the day’s work was done, we hoped on our bikes and rode up the road for a miniature group ride with our neighbor. Here I am, out front. Or, rather, here is my view in the one moment when no one was in front of me.

I’m riding with two All-Americans here. One of them a rather recent All American. I’m just trying to stay close to the drafting lines.

Near the end of the ride, on a false flat, there was a tease of a sprint. And then there was a sprint. My lovely bride spun it up, and the many years and thousands of miles riding with her told me instantly what was happening. So I sat on our friend’s wheel. She went to the inside of the lane and tried to take on the three-time Ironman. I was right in her slipstream, waiting. I figured if she got over I was going to counter attack. It would be beautiful. And then she sat up. Our neighbor is pretty new at this, and probably a bit stronger than she realized, but the other person in that photo is pretty fierce.

So I finished third, which is a perfectly fine way to start the weekend.

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26
Sep 25

Happy Friday

We have a new art scheme on the front page. This is the general theme. I think we can use this one through autumn.

The photos are from a delightful little road I like to ride on from time to time. I’m sure you can understand the appeal. And it occurred to me that I could just ride through there every so often and take photos as the season progressed. We’ll see how it goes, and, for a time, enjoy the brilliant colors of the season.

When it gets down to sticks we’ll have to change it up again, but that’s not for a long time yet.

Right?

I was out wandering about in the southwestern part of the property and happened upon this white rose which is growing near one of the garden arches. I don’t think I knew we even had a white rose out there.

I’m not sure the white rose knew it was there, either. But it’s given a lovely early fall surprise to the yard, and so I suppose we should thank the previous owners for putting it there, or for the bird or wind that did the job.

It amuses me to still find and learn new things about the place. We’ve been here 27 months or so, and I just recently found that rose. (Maybe it was a bird or the breeze.) But there are still things to learn, little dents and divots to uncover in odd little corners to try to understand. A family of five lived here, and three of them spent their entire childhoods here. It’s a lovely thing to think that this mark or that scratch is a small part of some story, an accident they remember or don’t, a lasting scar from a beloved pet. Some things are just done for expediency, of course. And when you find them, you roll your eyes and wonder why. And then you wonder why you still haven’t found bags of cash they conveniently forgot when they moved out. Because they conveniently forgot one or two of those, right?

After all of this time, these sorts of discoveries are obviously smaller. But no less fun to think on.

So it probably was a bird or the breeze.

Whether you’re looking for birds, putting your nose in the breeze, or doing some other thing this weekend, I hope you have a good one. We’ll see you here Monday; maybe there will be something of substance coming our way in this space next week.