Mexico (part three)
In case you missed the first two days, here's a quick update on our vacation so far:
Let's move through a few events quickly. First, the house maintenance guy comes over (with his mother) and argues that it's not bedbugs, it's mosquitoes. This conversation is entirely in Spanish (C speaks excellent Spanish), so I amuse myself by making dramatic hand gestures at what seems like appropriate times. My point was no matter the cause, it's still an awful lot of blood.
After a quick discussion with C ("Are we staying here?" "Your blood is on the bed. No."), we decide to walk to the hotel district, which is a bit over a mile away. The sidewalks have enormous, deep holes, ankle or tibia breakers, for sure. The neighborhood is extremely gritty, even though it feels totally safe at the same time.
"Have you heard the pony story?" C asks. "A father takes his boy to the farm, and there's a giant pile of manure beside a barn. The boy immediately runs over and starts searching through the manure with a huge grin on his face. The father watches him dig, then asks how he can be so happy when he's looking through manure. The boy says, "With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!"
Indeed.
We found a beautiful, reasonably-priced hotel (Fiesta Americana), walked back to Wal-Mart (fortunately not far), bought clothes and trash bags, and returned to the hotel. As soon as we were inside the door of our room, we stripped, put the clothes into trash bags, double-knotted them, and took showers. After showering, we put on our Wal-Mart clothes, which we'd wear for the next six days. Well, I replaced the shorts after three days because the pockets were so shallow my phone barely fit. Otherwise, shower time was also laundry time.
Day three concluded with us in a hotel, wearing clothes from Wal-Mart, with C covered in bites and me only having a few. On the positive side, though, everyone in Merida was incredibly nice, we'd walked to a small museum that had an exhibit about a minor archaeology site, and we had a good dinner at an outdoor restaurant.
Meanwhile, just over a mile away, bedbugs were drowning.
The hunt for the pony had begun.
Mexico (part two)
Waking up the next morning before I did, C went to sit by the pool. When she came back in, she said she had some bites.
"Some," in this case, meant 40+.
Displaying the blithe disregard of medical professionals for anything short of imminent amputation, she said it probably happened while she was at the pool, and it was nothing to worry about. We hopped in the rental car to go to Wal-Mart for supplies.
About the rental car: a vintage Toyota with 270k miles. It was an Avanza, the most popular car in Indonesia from 2006-2019, and it looked like a Tercel with a commercial pizza oven welded onto the back:
The image from the professional illustrator makes it look like a large vehicle, but it was not. It also rattled ominously at any speed about 90 kilometers an hour, as we'd find out later.
We came back from Wal-Mart and I went into the bedroom, where I saw five swaths of blood on the bed, seemingly the result of a wolverine attack or some other large predator. "We have a problem," I told C, and she came in and gave me a look of horror.
"Bedbugs," she said.
It was either bedbugs or mosquitoes, and in such a case, we had to proceed as if it was bedbugs. As two extreme over-functioners, we proceeded to over-function with enough combined energy to rival the sun. Research, research, research. Every method we looked at was sure to kill almost any bedbug.
The problem, though, was Die Hard.
What if you ran into the Bruce Willis of bedbugs? What if you just couldn't kill one, or a handful? Then you might as well have let a thousand through, because they'll multiply soon enough.
Then I had a thought. "I bet the bastards can't swim," I said.
As it turns out, they can't. So we proceeded to dunk every single piece of clothing and luggage we bought in the pool. Here's a candid photo of me looking unreasonably happy, both because of C's presence and because we outsmarted small parasites with no thinking capabilities whatsoever:
In 24 hours, according to the Internet, it would all be fine.
As it would turn out, though, there are many degrees of fine.
TOMORROW: C tells me to find the pony.
Mexico (part one)
My companion (who from now on will be referred to as C, for "companion") had a family member with a villa in Merida, Mexico. She suggested we go there for a week to escape the winter depression of Grand Rapids.
Note: to document this trip, I hired a professional illustrator.
Where is Merida, you might wonder? In the Yucatan, roughly here:
A few facts about Merida:
--almost a million people live there
--if it was in the U.S., it would be its safest major city
--it's not cold
What else did we need to know? So we bought plane tickets and headed down on January 19th.
When we got to the villa, we were in for a few surprises. We expected a borderline luxury experience, based on the pictures C had been sent. Instead, we were in a very gritty neighborhood, with a "villa" where pieces of stucco were falling out of the ceiling, and there was a hole in the mosquito netting, which meant there were mosquitoes inside.
Many, many mosquitoes.
Well, we'd make the best of it, and we settled in, killing mosquitoes and trying to unravel the mysteries of the curious villa. There was a pool in back, which was nice, and would play a pivotal role in the proceedings less than twenty-four hours later.
We went to bed that night, still believing we were in for a simple, relaxing week.
We were so, so wrong.
Mystery Set Three
#1 A Wonderful Place to Learn About Music
#2 Second Verse, Same as the First
#3 Legends
Additional Mysteries (to be explained on Monday)
#1 "Weigh this purchase against the price of going back on Bumble."
#2 The New Lasko Stack
#3 Quite the Place to Walk Around
In The Crease
Eli 22.5 played his arch rivals (you know who they are) on the road Saturday night.
They were outshot 64-16. Tied 2-2.
His save percentage for the league season is .961, and if it doesn't drop, it will be the highest save percentage in the history of the association.
He reached behind him in the second period and made a blind save with his glove on a back door shot. All three coaches on the opposing team had their hands on their heads when he looked over, and the crowd went completely silent. He said it was one of his favorite saves ever.
Three Mysteries
#1 Don't Even Think About It
#2 If Melts You Have To Iron It Again
#3 Invitation-Only Social Club
Writing and Process
There are so many great authors I've never heard of, even though I try to keep up.
Donna Tartt, for one. Even though she's won a Pulitzer, I'd never heard of her until recently. Eli 22.5 pointed her out, actually, and once I read five pages of her first book, I was riveted. She's written three books over a period of almost forty years (The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch), and they're all brilliant.
One quality that defines her work is her brilliance at structure. Many writers have only a loose grip on the structure of their work, but she's meticulous. Her novels are long, intricate, and immaculately structured.
She's also an unusual person, and a slow worker (both of which I can personally identify with).
Reading her work made me think about writing in general, and the process of drafts and how they evolve. Most of the best novels have almost a wave structure (not exactly, but similar), a sequence of peaks and troughs which vary depending on their location (the difference from peak to trough generally grows as you progress through the narrative).
Like I said, many writers struggle with managing this at a single level, but Tartt always has a big wave (the central question or theme of the work) with smaller waves inside them (something in every chapter to drive the reader forward, even if the central question doesn't progress). It's beautiful.
Reading her work made me think about how I construct narrative. In early drafts, I construct the wave sequence, but many of those waves tend to be the same height. It's not until later drafts that I add amplitude to distinguish them.
That was how I wrote The Man You Trust, anyway. For This Doesn't Feel Like the Future, I'm more aware, and I'm going back and adding amplitude to the first sixty pages, even though I have the rest of the second draft still to write.
If I have the second draft finished by the end of the year, I'll be pleased. I'm still pokey, but marginally faster now. If you're a turtle, though, it's hard for anyone else to tell.
PCs and Seniors
Mom 93.10 uses a regular desktop computer, and has for the last 30 years.
It's becoming more difficult, though, largely because of the way software as a service has evolved. In the early 1990s, when she started using a PC, they generally left you alone. Now, every program is constantly asking questions, or wanting you to upgrade to something more expensive, or just updating multiple times a week.
It's overwhelming.
I've tried to find a simpler system for her to use. Something without Windows (which is annoying as hell now) and significantly more user-friendly.
Much to my surprise, I've come up blank.
The computers advertised as being specifically for seniors all have entirely sketchy reputations and terrible reviews. One was so locked down you literally couldn't install anything on it, not even your web browser of choice.
You'd think there would be a significant market for a simpler computer, but surprisingly, not so much.
I've considered switching her to a tablet when her aging computer finally bites the dust. Tablets seem to have fewer notifications and aren't updating constantly. They're calmer, for lack of a better word. And they're easier to support, because I'm tech support for Mom, which can get tricky when you're halfway across the country. I'm able to take over her desktop, but in certain situations, I can't do that, which makes troubleshooting impossible.
I'd like to improve the user experience for Mom so she can still enjoy going online. Here's the question: have any of you who have senior parents successfully converted them to a tablet? And if so, what was their experience, and yours? Thanks for your feedback.
Cold
It's hard to think about much else when the temperature drops below 15F, especially when the wind drops the wind chill below 0F.
I couldn't imagine what it's actually like when I didn't live here.
I didn't know the humidity is below twenty percent for weeks at a time, both indoors and out, because the heater runs for most of the day (and night). I didn't know the roads have snow and ice on them for weeks at a time because it doesn't get warm enough for anything to melt. I didn't know it can take 10-15 minutes to get out of your driveway, and that's if your car starts. The cold was an abstract notion, really.
Not any more.
Oh, and add 20" of snow in the last four days. Listen to me: never live on the east side of a Great Lake.
It's also not entirely miserable, though, because the power's still on. As long as the power stays on, everything is livable. Michigan's grid is rated 45th, though, so we seem particularly vulnerable to storms taking out the power. Not this time, though, at least not up to this point.
Here are two more pictures taken while Eli 22.5 was in Switzerland:
New term starts today, so he's back to the grind, but what a trip. It's hard to believe anywhere on Earth could be so beautiful.
MLK Day 2024
I started making this post over a decade ago, and I'll be making it every year for as long as I do this.
__________
Today is a national holiday in the United States to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's easy to forget the kind of hatred and stupidity that King was fighting against, but a good place to start is here:
What was Jim Crow. The Wikipedia
entry for Jim Crow laws also has detailed information. And the Wikipedia entry for
King is here.
We're still fighting against that hatred and stupidity today.
Also, here's a link to a 2006
post when Eli asked me about Martin Luther King for the first time. It's still one of my favorite posts.
Friday Links!
As the blizzard approaches (bum bum bum), a long and fascinating read to lead off: I thought my great-aunt was just a gentle oddball – then I discovered her secret role in the Austrian resistance.
From Chris M., and it's stunning: Footsteps in the Snow.
From Chris P., and it's a cover that improves on the original in every way: Pour Some Sugar On Me - Def Leppard (1960s Early Soul Style Cover) feat. Kyndle Wylde.
From Ken P., and it's remarkable: Diabetes Breakthrough: FDA-Approved Drugs Regenerate Insulin Production in 48 Hours. This makes sense: A discovery in the muscles of long COVID patients may explain exercise troubles. This is promising: Can you see the northern lights in California? Light show expected to peak in 2024. Amazing, really: The 'world's first AI powered grill' can cook steaks in as little as 90 seconds — and it's the hottest thing at CES 2024. Terrific infographic: Infographic shows how the PC has fared against other platforms over 50+ years of gaming. This is so depressing, but not surprising, as the era of stupid people continues: US verges on vaccination tipping point, faces thousands of needless deaths: FDA. Always a thoughtful writer: Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? This is stunning: Flowers ‘giving up’ on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, say scientists. An incredible achievement: 34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”.
From Wally, and it's darkly comic: Francophone Belgian couple caught in bureaucratic struggle to prove they speak French. A long and interesting read: Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader smoking pot: AI image generators play fast and loose with copyrighted characters.
From C. Lee, and it's a riveting read: Here's the Civil War History They Don't Want You to Know. So much irony here: The Covenant Parents Aren’t Going to Keep Quiet on Guns. This is a kind and heartwarming story: Couple provides homemade meals to support families of sick children. An excellent read: “Wabi,” “Sabi,” “Yūgen”: The Surprising Changes in “Traditional” Japanese Aesthetics. This was inevitable: AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans. This is absolutely fantastic: How Brits went soft on toilet paper. This is excellent: Timezone Wars: The Windows 95 map that shook the world - Raymond Chen Interview.
Omen the Third
Not long after the first omen, and having forgotten the second, there came the third.
I did a load of laundry and put it all in the dryer. Included were some clothes Eli 22.5 had left when he went back to school. He's not coming back, and everything has to go somewhere before the house is sold, so I looked through the piles of clothing, because we're the same size, mostly.
I picked out a few shirts and shorts, which were all nice upgrades for me, and they went into the laundry, too.
Like I said, I put it all in the dryer. I forget about it, as I do, and came back down two hours later. I opened up the dryer.
I couldn't understand what I was seeing. The entire dryer looked like a writhing mass of snakes, all knotted up together. It was impossible, and yet, there it was.
It took me a while to piece together the bizarre sequence of events, but eventually, I figured it out. A pair of shorts with an endless drawstring (not cut into individual lengths) somehow wrapped itself around the very edge of the lint filter. Then, every time the dryer turned, it twisted the drawstring one more turn, tightening it.
By the end of the cycle that drawstring had been turned hundreds of times.
Somehow, other clothes were somehow captured by the drawstring and shorts, and they started tightening with every turn, too. It looked like a portal into hell, that dryer.
It took twenty minutes to unwind and separate everything. Unreal.
I made a crucial error in not documenting the scene immediately, but here's a picture of the sleeve of a sweatshirt that was trapped and infinitely knotted up:
I realized what the omens were for when I checked the weather forecast today. 12-18 inches of snow forecast from noon tomorrow to noon Sunday.
That portal into hell isn't looking so bad right now.
Excursions
Both of us went on excursions today.
I went to the grocery store. Eli 22.5 went to Switzerland.
I'm sure you're disappointed that I didn't take any pictures of my trip, but Eli did take pictures of his. He's with his team at preseason training camp, which is a bit of a misnomer, since they've already played four games.
Here's a photo of the Swiss Alps:
All right, that view is marginally more dramatic than my views today. Oh, and here's the outdoor rink were they'll be training and playing:
That's unreasonably spectacular, and playing in an outdoor rink is a special experience, too.
Get Your Sugar The F--- Away From Me (thanks very much)
I'm working out at Planet Fitness in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Winter has descended.
In the process of riding an exercise bike to absolutely nowhere, a song comes on over the facility-wide speakers. It's "Pour Some Sugar On Me," by Def Leppard.
You know the song, the one with Dylan-esque lyrics like this:
I'm hot, sticky sweet
From my head to my feet, yeah
It's not that this song is bad; it's that it is egregiously bad. The lyrics are what a thirteen-year-old imagines sexy people talk like, and if this was the first song ever played on guitar, the inventor of the instrument would have destroyed it in a fit of rage.
I'm not asking for a curated soundtrack or anything. I don't need Lester Bangs AI to select songs for Planet Fitness. It would just be nice to avoid hearing the worst songs ever recorded.
Looking at you, Foreigner. I don't want any ice, either.
The Omens, They Come in Threes (omen one)
I finished writing yesterday and started typing the day's work into Microsoft Word.
I was in the middle of a sentence, tap-tap-tapping along, when Word closed suddenly. No warning, just poof.
Odd.
I tried to re-open Word by double-clicking on my document file. I received the "this file is not associated with any program" message.
Upon further investigation, I found that Microsoft Word had deleted itself from my computer. Spontaneous combustion. It wasn't just a brushfire, though. It was a raging inferno, because the rest of Microsoft Office had deleted itself, too. Spontaneously.
It's the strangest damn thing that ever happened to me while using a computer.
It's impossible, right? That an entire suite of programs would just disappear from computer? Not so, my friend. Every trace of Microsoft Office was gone from my drive.
I started researching. Incredibly, this has happened to more than a few other people. One possible culprit was Windows Defender (or whatever they call the Microsoft-included anti-virus now). Not surprising, really, but the combination of circumstances didn't match my situation. However, since I don't like Defender anyway, I turned it off and installed Bit Defender instead.
Second possible cause: in a case where Windows is installing updates for both Windows and MS Office at the same time, Office applications "can be lost." Never mind that it's pure idiocy for Microsoft to be doing that simultaneously. I checked the Windows log and updates had ben installing, though I couldn't tell if Office was included.
No matter. I reinstalled Office and immediately turned off auto-updates.
Now it's working again. For now. Allegedly.
Brownian Motion
Brownian motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) resulting from their collision with the fast-moving atoms or molecules in the gas or liquid.
Someone described their goal for 2024 as reducing the amount of Brownian motion in their life.
That was incredibly helpful, because I feel the same way about my thinking. I want to reduce the scattering of my thoughts and become significantly more focused.
To help me do that, I'm trying something new. I'm going to stay off the Internet on alternate days, with as few exceptions as possible.
I tried it today, and the effect was substantial. Instead of spending 10 minutes on hour scanning news, etc., I just didn't. It felt very calming, and I was able to work through a long list of tasks because there were no interruptions.
The problem when I'm reading news every hour or so, especially political news, is that I feel responsible in a way I can't explain. It's not my fault that the country has millions of people worshipping a madman, but somehow it feels like it.
Believing that, though, doesn't make a substantive difference in anyone's life but mine. It's a trap. So I'm trying to reduce the anxiety, particularly in an election year.
I'll let you know if this continues to have a positive effect.
This Doesn't Feel Like the Future
I finished the next draft of the first section of
This Doesn't Feel Like the Future last week.
It took three months to finish 56 pages. Lots of rewriting, because it's still just a second draft. It's moving in the right direction.
To finish a complete second draft, it should be another six to nine months.
The third draft will probably take six months. Three months for each succeeding draft, with a few weeks in-between. It could make it out in 2025, but 2026 is more realistic.
I wish the process wasn't so slow, but I don't know how to work any other way.
Stress Test
I often title posts as some weak attempt at clever wordplay, but in this case, it's literal.
Because of the cardiac issues discovered last year during the calcium CT scan, my cardiologist sent me for a stress test last week. I was having a bit of indigestion, and they wanted to make sure it wasn't cardiac-related (cardiac stress can have a million symptoms, all of which are annoying, because they're usually caused by much simpler issues).
In case you've never had one, here's how it works.
This was a nuclear stress test, so they put in an IV and took some initial pictures of my cardiac region at rest. Then I was hooked up to a dozen or so leads and put on a treadmill. The goal is to stay on as long as you can, as they raise the speed and incline in three-minute intervals. They want your heart to reach 80% of max, at least, so they can measure if there are any abnormalities under load. About twenty minutest after you finish, they take another set of pictures before they let you go.
As I was walking into the room, I noticed the door across the hallway was labeled "CRASH CART." Eli 22.5 said later that I saw that and thought "Challenge accepted."
It's strange, to have all those leads connected to you while you're trying to exercise. Plus, the inclines are extreme. My heart didn't get to the 80% range (135) until the fourth segment, and the incline at that point was fifteen degrees. The last segment, which I finished but didn't continue past, was at five MPH and eighteen degrees incline. I felt like I was climbing a wall, and by then, my heart rate was in the high 160s. I thought I could go onto the next interval, but wouldn't have made it for more than fifteen or twenty seconds, and I didn't want to fall on my face, so I signaled that I was done.
As a reminder, I'm very competitive, or used to be, and I was fighting to stay on there as long as I possibly could.
It was fifteen minutes in total, and the last three minutes definitely loaded me up on lactic acid. And sweat. It's been a long time since my heart rate was that high, too. It felt like I'd just finished a 10-k after sprinting the last quarter mile. What I remember of that, anyway.
The measurement used on this test is something called METS, which measures exercise capacity. For my age group, I needed roughly 9 METS to be considered in the above average category. High would be 11, and Elite would be over 13.
Good news on that front: I was over 17.
That would be in the elite category for any age, even Eli's group. It was nice to get a positive measurement that my exercise program is working, even though it never feels like I'm working out hard enough (because I'm not, compared to when I was younger).
It also really annoys me that my exercise capacity is so high and yet I still have some arterial blockage. The body is a strange beast.
The Scent of Death
"I ran out of toothpaste," Eli 22.5 said, "so I went upstairs to use yours."
"No problem," I said.
"Until then, I didn't know you used cinnamon toothpaste."
"It's great, isn't it?" I asked.
"My mouth felt dirtier I brushed my teeth. It was revolting."
"Maybe a little hyperbole," I said.
"It's foul. It's something a serial killer would use."
I decided to do a quick image edit for him. It's not very good, but it did the job (you might need to click on it to enlarge it enough to see the text, which is the last line below CINNAMON).
