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Month: May 2020

  • The morning walk…

    A few shots from today’s route:

    These two pine trees live at the church across the street, and I like to spend time here in the shade reading whatever book I’m into at the moment.

    It’s been really wet this last week, so everything is super green.

    Looking west from just west of Hampden Ave and Ceylon St.

    And the local Village Inn is open for seating, so I got to eat my breakfast actually in a restaurantโ€ฆ First time I’ve been able to do that in months.

    It was weird to be the only customer in V.I. who wasn’t staring at a phone… Luckily I had my Kindle to fill the gap between ordering and eating. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I’m still getting some separation anxiety from my iPhone; I leave it home, and then check my front pocket for it 3-4 times while I’m out, but I’m getting better.

    And once again the G12 proves that an actual camera will always beat a cellphone when it comes to pictures. Having physical controls are really nice, and there’s no computer making your bad photos better โ€” you are the photographer, and if the photo sucks, it’s on you. ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Falling down…

    After picking up a couple of sodas at 7-11 on the way in to work this morning, I stepped off of a curb into a pothole and unceremoniously face-planted right there in front of God and everybody…

    I managed to twist my ankle, bang up my right knee, take a big chunk out of my right elbow, mess up both wrists, my right palm is road-rashed really bad, and I tweaked my neck…

    Sigh.

    So I made it to work (and only bled a little on the leather in the Murano), cleaned myself up as best I could, and dressed all of the leaky bits with hand sanitizer and paper towels until I stopped leaking. Hand sanitizer on an open wound will definitely wake you up in the morning by the way.

    After a few hours of limping around the office I left to head home at lunch (I had some stuff to get done before I could go) and stopped by Walgreens โ€” which is where I discovered that because of zombies finding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide is akin to spotting a Unicorn.

    Sigh.

    Luckily the nice lady at Walgreens was able to locate a solitary bottle of made in Mexico hydrogen peroxide in the back. So I’m all antibioticed, bandaged up, and waiting for the naproxen sodium to kick in…

    What a day.

  • Home Improvement

    A few weeks ago I discovered that some of the local steak places are selling ‘you cook it’ steaks, chicken, pork-chops, etcetera to offset the lack of eat-in business. For me this is a nice alternative to going to the steakhouse, which I can’t do thanks to the zombies. 

    There was a problem to this though… The proper cooking of meat requires fire, and the modern electric range one finds in the average townhouse is sorely lacking in the fire department…

    Well, last week I remedied this and bought a Weber “Spirit II” 2-burner grill. It’s a really nice unit and rolls in and out of the garage really easy, is easy to clean, and creates the requisite fire for proper meat preparation.

    Since then I’ve had steak pretty much every other night… I know, I know โ€” I’m really roughing it during this lockdown thing. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Well, with my new source of cooking fire it has meant that I’m purchasing a lot more meat and that’s pretty much filled up the freezer side of my kitchen fridge… So Tuesday I have a small chest freezer being delivered.

    The freezer is a tiny little 3.5 cubic foot thing that will sit nicely at the end of the kitchen counter. 3.5 cubic feet doesn’t seem like much, but it’ll free up my regular freezer for my lunches and whatnot… That and the zombie scare caused a run on freezers so getting one at all is quite the trick currently.

  • Unplugged, part two

    While waiting for the new phone to arrive, I’ve been training myself to not rely on the iPhone quite so much; leaving it on my desk when I go to bed, leaving it at home when I go out, etcetera. I even managed to leave it at work yesterday and didn’t notice until this morning.

    In the interest of doing something far better with my idle moments than cruising news feeds or playing the mobile game of the week, I dug out my old Kindle Voyage with the plan to do some light reading…

    The Voyage had been sitting in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet since before I moved out of my house in Murphy Creek out east, so it had been without power for about four years… I was concerned that this might have caused some battery issues, but I’m happy to say the Voyage charged back up and after a manual firmware update is as good as new.

    Some stylish photography with my Canon G12 instead of a phoneโ€ฆ

    The current light reading is “The Dictator’s Handbook”, which is a fascinating dissertation on the rules of rulership and why bad behavior is almost always good politics… Basically the modern version of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”.

    I’d forgotten just how easy on the eyes the Voyage is. It’s a 300dpi e-ink display, so it’s reflective like regular print versus transmissive like a monitor, and my old eyes are really appreciating the break.

  • Unplugged

    I’m making the move to ditch my thousand dollar iPhone XS Max in favor of a $250 thing called the Light Phone 2.

    The move from a “smart” phone to a “tool” phone is driven by a couple of factors:

    One โ€” I’m not happy with how intrusive and all-consuming my phone has become. It seems like every few minutes there’s some alert, message, update, or text that requires my immediate attention. And even though I want to just deal with the interruption and then get back to what I was doing, I find that once I pick up the phone I wind up fiddling with it instead.

    Two โ€” the level of data collection from folks like Apple and Google has started to cause an arched eyebrow, with “Contact Tracing” being the newest incarnation of them getting to know you better than you know yourself. 

    And again, if a service is free you are the product โ€” and I’m tired of being data-cattle for big-tech.

    The biggest difference with the Light Phone 2 is that it is, quite simply, a phone โ€” you make phone calls with it. It also does SMS and a few other handy things, but every function it offers is designed to be procedurally similar to a screwdriver; one does not pick up a screwdriver when it beeps and then play with for a half an hour.

    The Light Phone 2 also does not have a camera. This has prompted me to clean and tune my old Canon G12 camera in preparation… I’d forgotten just how good the G12 is, and it’ll be nice to get back to some real photography.

  • ็‰ฉใฎๅ“€ใ‚Œ

    Mono-no aware: the ephemeral nature of beauty โ€“ the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life โ€“ knowing that none of it can last.

    It is the sad beauty of seeing time pass – the aching awareness of impermanence. 

    Please, appreciate the moment, because the beauty experienced in it will never be the same. It will pass. It will end. That is okay though, because as time moves ever onward new beauty will appear โ€” and we can always return to those wondrous past moments, if only in memories.