"Creeper Culture"

     A precise label eludes me.  On the one hand, you've got TV talent with remote door locks, pervy doctors, and film directors or producers who have taken the "casting couch" cliche to boggling extremes; on the other, you have doddering, clumsy or juvenile types who sometimes put their hands where they oughtn't.

     Both are bad but surely there are different levels of badness, and different appropriate responses?  Often there is a drastic power imbalance inhibiting the right response to low-level creepering -- if your boss or a county judge pats your bottom, you're a lot less likely to give them hell (cold stare, shocked comment, a good slap) for it that you would a random guy in line at the five-and-dime; and once they've gotten away with the low-level stuff, some of  them don't stop there.

     In all the denouncing and firing, I notice a few who might've have been shoved towards proper decorum if they'd been backhanded by their chosen victims early and often; others seem, at least in hindsight, to have been utterly predatory, as set on their path as a shark. Many of the latter appear to have exercised a predator's judgment in their choice of prey, going after the weakest.

     Some kind of tipping-point has been passed; a series of high-profile arrests (Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser, Jared Fogle) may have been the earliest signs, followed by accusations against Bill Cosby and the UK's Jimmy Saville.  Or maybe we just passed some kind of "critical mass" of women in management -- nothing personal, guys, but I have been on the receiving end of too many "I'm sure he didn't mean it/he's just a diamond in the rough/think of the team" chats with managerial higher-ups, men who simply can't (or won't) conceive that such misbehavior was seriously meant.

     Things have changed.  It's too early to tell if this first big shift points to greater concern for such things in workplaces generally, or if it will trail off in tabloid-headline trivia.  I'd like to think the good old-fashioned withering glare, stern comment and stinging slap will stage a comeback in response to creepy comments, worrying situations and wandering hands.

That Was Interesting

     Once the computers had decided my insurance card was okay -- don't ask me, it was perfectly good for my previous visit to the same doctor -- the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist was brisk: "I can't tell how you're pulling air through your nose at all, Ms. X."

     Some of my sinuses aren't there (the frontal sinus, roughly behind your eyebrows, develops as you grow, except sometimes it doesn't.  This is not uncommon).  The rest of them are either full or blocked.  The lovely labyrinth of passages you never notice unless you're outside on an extremely cold day and feel parts of it freeze together and unstick on every inhalation and exhalation?  Mine has a lot of dead ends.  My septum is curved to one side. 

     This does explain why I occasionally wake myself by snoring, not to mention the recurring sinus infections.  It may even help with my headaches and dizziness.

     Some of it -- most of it, I hope! -- can be ballooned clear, literally sneaking in with some kind of inflatable widget and opening things up.  Some of it may need whittled on.  Insurance permitting, I am scheduled for surgery on the 20th of December and should pretty good by the 25th.  The days in between don't sound like fun.

     Other than one ENT correcting an irritated nerve left by a previous surgery, this is the first time in my long history of sinus woes that a doctor has come in with definite problems and a plan to address them.  So I'm feeling hopeful.

"Bzzz...This Is A Recording...Click...Beeep!"

     Yeah, yeah, Roberta X here, live and direct from last night, because today, I'm off early in the morning to see my Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, who is going to read the auguries of my sinuses to me -- and without even having to hack them free and lay them out on the table, which is a considerable improvement on the old Roman model.

     What do I expect?  Nothing.  I've danced this dance before and it has come up empty every time; but it has been more than fifteen years since the last round and who knows, maybe there's something to see or some improvement to be made.  It's highly unlikely either of those will be the case, so I'm not looking for anything more than a guided tour of my sinus cavities, led by an expert guide who has hunted many similar caverns and knows what to watch for. ("I'll remain here in the van while Jim ascends the nasal concha to search for the entrance to the frontal sinus and whatever strange creatures dwell within....")

The Country Is Still Purple

     Despite remarkably polarized rhetoric (and the usual conflicting characterizations of the President, who no one seems to remember is just the guy we hire to shake hands with kings, deal with high-level personnel and keep the various branches of the Armed Forces from excessive spatting), the country is still purple.

     Your neighbors are who they are and they're likely going to keep on being who they are, just as you will.  And those revealing purple maps?  That was originally invented as an exercise for a freshman programming course.  It's not rocket science: we live in a remarkably assorted nation and elections for political office are just one day.  How you get along with your neighbors for the other 364 matters quite a lot -- the guy next door doesn't run the economy any more than you, but he's a lot better situated to lend you a hand (and you to him) than anyone in Congress or your state legislature.

So Early...!

     It was "so early" when I got up for work -- and somehow, it still feels way too early.  But it isn't.

Why...Hello!

     Yes, I am here -- kind of caught in the gears of a transition between a late-evening shift and an early-morning shift.  Automation lets my employer do more -- a lot more -- with fewer people but the downside is that when someone is out on extended sick leave (the Ops side is down one) or vacation (one from Ops and two from Engineering), scheduling people to cover what needs covered gets complicated.  With three sets of schedules -- Engineering and IS now babysit one another's kittens -- under two supervisors and one foreman, who are not on the same shifts themselves, "complicated" may be an understatement.

     Could be worse -- maritime watchstanding schedules aim to screw over everyone equally while ensuring the ship gets looked after, and you end up with patterns that are far trickier to adjust to, especially if you don't start it young and fit.

Roseholme Thanksgiving Dinner

     The menu was a little less elaborate than it has been in past years; we're trying to eat in a healthy manner, even on "cheat" days.  Still, Tam and I did well:

Tamara Keel photo

     A small turducken roll (3.25 pounds of turkey, duck, chicken, andouille sausage and stuffing), mashed cauliflower with bacon gravy,* small green salads (and cornbread for me). Add beverage of choice and, if desired, eggnog for dessert.  It worked out well, I think, and didn't leave us too full to move afterward.
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* Yes, bacon gravy.  Not too difficult to make, though it is easy to make too much roux and weaken the flavor if you don't watch yourself.  Bacon fat and flour to make a medium-dark roux, then you turn off the heat, stir in milk and water or (better) good stock, put the stove back to medium heat and cook until it thickens, with the heat off while the cooked bacon crumbled back in after the gravy is cooked and allowed to sit over a very low fire for at least five minutes for the flavor to "marry."  From starting the roux (sift small amounts of flour from your fingertips into the hot fat until there's enough -- remember, stirrer in the pan, not fingers!) to right before you crumble in the bacon, your stirrer never stops moving -- I use a small, plastic spatula.  Salt, pepper and so on as desired.

Thanks!

     Thank you for being out there, and for reading and sometimes responding!

About That Rand Paul/Neighbor Thing

     GQ has a little more insight.  A little snarky near the end but the basic tale as they construe it rings pretty true to my ear.

     Tl;dr version is, "neighbor-type dispute over lawncare methods, between a couple of quirky guys."

The Day Before The Day

     Be careful out there, please?  Here in the Midwest, we've got a snoot-full of Winter, or as close as you can get without snow up to your tailbone.  Jack Frost has had a nip or two already; it's just freezing and while we'll claw up out of that today, we're not going to get far.

     Roads are already jammed, so mind how you go, as you head through the river and over the woods (oh, dear) for Grandmother's house.

     Here at Roseholme Cottage, Thanksgiving will be the usual quiet, gustatory event, with turducken and some kind of bacon gravy -- mashed cauliflower will likely replace the usual mashed tatties (despite my tears: I grew up thinking potatoes in every form were an essential nutrient and you'd probably fall ill if you didn't have them several days a week) and there may even be salad.  Possibly a libation or two.  What wine with turducken -- or do you take a small whiskey, instead, while hoping the patchwork beast doesn't break free of its restraints?

     I hope you and yours find many good things for which to be thankful.  As for me, it's the season of Holiday Specials and I'm off to a bit of a rehearsal today, with the real thing to follow come Friday.  I'll be thankful if we get through it with the minimum of fuss and bother.

No. Just No.

     I dug around over at CNN this morning, looking for something to comment on.  It's just depressing.  I don't mind a deadlocked Congress or the Press yapping at the heels of the White House: all Presidents ought to be closely watched (alas, some are watched less by the mainstream media than others, but I'll take it when I can get it) and a Congress that can't get much done is a Congress that can't make things much worse: like Enrico Fermi, I have reached the conclusion that most political change is for the worst, no matter who's pushing it or how much I admire their intentions.

     But politicians are such children -- no better than their contemporaries in Hollywood, who they resemble more and more with every passing year. We're wired up to live in small groups, without a whole lot of socioeconomic distance between the fat cats on top and the losers who haul out their trash on the bottom; we're wired up to breed young, get the kids raised, and be out of the way as soon as the next generation doesn't need babysitters for their offspring.  We're wired up to live on fairly short rations and to hanker after the stuff that's not so easy to come by -- rich meat, salt, fats, sweets.  We get too much of the last four and almost none of the rest; most people go through life riled up about one part of the shortfall or another and never understand why.  It's why we get creepers, and envy, and all manner of abuses of power and such badness, and not a bit of it is quickly fixable if it can be fixed at all.

     But money and power are amplifiers.  If you're a little creepy or obnoxious at minimum wage, just wait 'til you're managing the fast food joint -- or when you own a whole string of them and wind up on the City Council.  A good many of the dull, boring, old-fashioned and/or arbitrary rules of society are roughly aimed at keeping our worst impulses in check (or, perhaps unfortunately, well-hidden) and when you throw off those "tired old strictures," you're damned unlikely to wind up building a paradise on Earth.  We're much better at building our own Hells and purgatories -- and we have.  This is a hell, at least, and some of the biggest demons are on campaign posters and in movie ads.

     And we don't even get a seat next to fire near Mark Twain. 

Education

     I took another class at the Indiana Writers Center Saturday: "Finishing Your First Novel (and your second)."  Pretty good stuff, with due attention to plotting and structure.  I am hoping it will help get me off top dead center with Dropping In.  Presently warming up with a top-to-bottom rewrite of The Veteran, intended to move it from a detailed character sketch to more of an actual story.

     Time, as they say, will tell.  Plenty of people would like to write; some of them do write; some write pretty well.

     The same instructor taught a course on self-publishing, in the general Kindle Direct Publishing model.  He's making fair money at it, which is as good a recommendation as can be had.  The class will likely return next year and I'll be looking for it.

     The Writer's Center itself is moving, or at least its main classroom space (etc.) is moving.  While the occasional class sets up at charming Marian University, IWC has mostly been renting space at the Indianapolis Art Center, a 1934 WPA survival that outlasted its Federal funding by pluck, luck and the contributions of members to become a charitable foundation with its own splendid classrooms and gallery space...and is now so busy with its own work and so sought-after as an event venue that rents have gone up.  The new IWC location will be in a new artist's workspace opening up on downtown's Massachusetts Avenue, the Circle City Industrial Complex.  Seems to have a brewpub, which means there's a good chance of at least soft drinks and munchables -- possibly even coffee, which is sadly lacking at the present space, a smallish classroom/office building on the Art Center campus.  Alas, no longer a quick bicycle ride for me, but it will be well within motor-scooter distance.

"...An Aerial Flood Watch..."

     When Alexa said it, I goggled.  An aerial flood?  Was I being gaslighted by a robot?  Were my radio antennas in danger?  Was the sky about to turn to water?

     The answers are, "Not exactly," "No," "No," and "No," and I should have Googled instead, but it wasn't great news.  The National Weather Service has issued something that is the approximate opposite of a Flash Flood Watch: an Areal Flood Watch, a sort of creeping, relentless rising of water than can follow prolonged heavy rain.  Ugly bureaucratese aside -- and what would  you call it, in the near Twitter-sized character allotment of a weather alert? -- it's accurate enough and we have certainly had rain enough.

     Today, all we get is cold.  And colder; when I awoke at 5:00 (not oh-dark-thirty but you can still see its fading tracks), Indianapolis was already as warm as we're going to get today: 38 degrees.  Winter is sneaking in.

Robotically Trucking Ourselves

     It's probably a good thing, and not nearly as icky as it looks.  It's almost certainly inevitable: robots are going to start doing more and more big-rig driving, especially on freeways, especially when conditions aren't challenging.

     The good news?  They don't fall asleep.  They aren't going to be texting or Facebooking on smartphones.  They won't even be yelling at one another on CB radios.

     The bad news is that they don't cope well with the unexpected.  So far, they don't like snow, rain can be problematic, and as for ice on the road, they have more trouble seeing it than you do.  They -- and more to the point, us, including the people who are testing them -- aren't hugely comfortable on busy city streets.

     But they are coming.  Listen -- my line of work once took a lot of people, mainly doing kind of dull jobs that occasionally got very busy but mostly consisted of setting things up ahead of time, pushing buttons on precise cues, and putting the material back into storage, over and over.  The busy times, each job ran very close to as much as one person can reliably do at one time.  Busy or slow, the work required attention at all times. Scheduling what happened when was a complex game, like three-dimensional Go.  And then, we got computers.  Scheduling got them first; you still needed a human to double-check and adjust, but a job that took five or six people eight hours now took one person (or two, if you needed to cover vacations and sick time).   And step by step, the computers started running more and more of the, well, drudge jobs.  The equipment changed.  The jobs for people changed.  One day, what used to take three or four people could be done by one person and multiple computers -- who still is, at the busiest times, doing as much as one average person can manage to do at one time.

     That's the model for trucking.  We're liable to have drivers behind the wheel for many more years -- but increasingly, they'll be managing the machines that will do most of the work instead of doing the work themselves.  Truck "trains" are a distinct possibility.  And the routine parts of the job where a human fails -- the long, dull stretches of highway -- will be handed off to a machine.  You can count on it.

     The question is, where does the human fit in?  Can one person behind the wheel of one truck manage multiple trucks?  (It certainly works on rails -- though there are usually two or three people, and the traffic and its management are an altogether different process.)

     Automatable jobs will be automated eventually.  Me, I moved to fixing the automatons

     The other side of this is what powers the trucks.  It's easy and fun to sneer at electric vehicles -- after all, the power plant is most likely to burn coal, hundreds of miles away from the vehicle itself.  The flip side is, it's a lot easier to hang a really effective muffler on one big coal-fired generating plant than on ten thousand scurrying cars and trucks.  Some heavily-used truck routes are looking into overhead catenary cables to power trucks, an ugly but very mature technology you can find running trains and buses in many cities, and a system that can pay off in states with restrictive emissions regulations for vehicles.  I think you can count on it.  (Personally, I've always liked Robert A. Heinlein's open linear induction motor truckways -- one of the better descriptions can be found in Starman Jones -- but they're inefficient and expensive.  On the other hand, they're a lot less ugly than overhead wires, which would help with NIMBY concerns.  On the other other hand, the infrastructure would be considerably more costly to build, even before you get around to putting truck-analogs on it.)

Continental Breakfast

     Juice, coffee, buttered rye toast, a few Castelvetrano olives, a couple of caperberries and sneering at politicians.  Could not just one of them be conducting a torrid, illicit affair with a grown-up adult-type person (and the two of them married, but not to one another), rather than leering after teenagers or immaturely groping sleeping women?

     A little bit of old-fashioned adultery -- emphasis on the "adult" -- would be a blamed relief.

     I kind of expect politicians to be creepy, lecherous, larcenous and two-faced, but I thought they were adults.  Wrong!

Structural Failure, A Success Otherwise

     This morning's omelette was a disaster, if you measure success as turning out a perfect golden half-moon of egg mixture around a savory filling.  The blamed thing stuck and shredded when I folded it, then fell apart when I tried to flip it over a few minutes later.  There were Words.

     Taste without looking and it's a triumph: the eggs were beaten with smashed up Lavosh Seed Overload flatbread mixed with water; the filling is applewood-smoked bacon and sliced fresh mushrooms that I cooked in truffle butter.  It's gooooood!  Appearance bedamned.

Wednesday

     It looks as if there are a number of interesting pools I could leap into this morning -- a (so-far) bloodless revolution in Zimbabwe! Judge Roy Moore's alleged predilections! -- though at least one of them is actually a cesspit.

     The fact is that right now, Roy Moore is Alabama's problem and Alabama -- both the government and the citizens -- has demonstrated profoundly mixed feelings toward the man on issues far wider in scope than the current horrible ickiness: this is the fellow who famously hung up a copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.  That could be unremarkable; you'll find Moses holding a couple tablets in a sculptural grouping over  the back entrance to the U. S. Supreme Court building where he's hanging out with Confucius and Solon, and inside the courtroom in a frieze with the likes of Hammurabi, Mohammad, King John(!), Solomon and Napoleon. Nope, it was Judge Moore himself who made the Commandments a problem, by specifically stating he had a religious purpose in posting them.   This was not unpopular with the voting public; he rode the publicity to the office of Chief Justice of the state's top court and installed a much larger version of the Commandments in the court's rotunda, in granite.  This, coupled with his public statements, roused the ire of ACLU and others and resulted in further legal action culminated by the removal of the monument and, eventually, Judge Moore -- who then managed a comeback via the ballot box! And then got crosswise again over an issue of judicial authority in a controversial matter and was, once again, removed from office.  Yet it's a creepy habit of getting involved with High School girls that is the big issue with this guy?  There are lots of folks still saying, "Better him than a Democrat."  Personally, were I an Alabamian, I'd even take a flippin' Communist instead, if the commie understood and followed the laws of the state and the nation, pledged to do an honest job of representing his constituents and didn't cheat.  In fact, Judge Moore himself was a Democrat until 1990 and you still don't see a whole lot of communism among Alabama Democrats.

     And speaking of commies...!  Too soon to tell if Robert Mugabe's actually on the outs in Zimbabwe or if the government there will see much change, but one can hope.  They'd've been better off with an honest commie, too, instead of the crappy strongman socialism that has impoverished and starved a country that used to export food.  It's too much to expect that the government will dip much of a toe in democracy, but if ever a place was ripe for it, Zimbabwe is.  It's about time the people there got a break.  Will they?  If past history of even freely-voting people is any guide (see above), they will not; they will opt for more of the devil they know.  Still, sometimes you flip a coin and it stands on the edge.

Off

     I'm taking a few days off -- well, they're making me take a few days off; I had deferred some vacation time earlier in the year and it's not as simple as "use it or lose it;" it cannot be carried over and we are required to use it.*  So here I am.  I'll have to work a half-day tomorrow (a thing that can't be rescheduled) but the rest of the week is free time!  I'll be able to stay off my bad knee and work on getting better.

     Celebrating with a nice bowl of sausage, fried potatoes and mushrooms plus scrambled eggs.
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* Vacation and sick leave polices at my workplace are byzantine and I'd say they border on punitive, except I have worked many jobs where there was no such thing as "paid sick time:" if you were too sick to work, you didn't get paid.  Compared to that, five paid sick days a year and a requirement to burn vacation days for any extended medical absence past that point plus three-quarter pay for really long medical leave is actually pretty decent. And individual sick days once you're over the limit can be taken as unpaid leave or vacation, which I think is fair.

...But My Rights...!

     Imagine the howl and outcry if you had to show ID, fill out a Form 4473 and wait for the FBI background check to be completed before you could join a church (or start one), buy a book, write for a newspaper, or vote.

As Expected

     Yesterday, I had to take care of the fallen leaves.  My knee has been acting up. but Tam's got a torn intercostal, and is working a lot, so it was my job.

     The new electric lawnmower has a bagging attachment and does a pretty good job.  The lawn needed mowing anyway, and so -- I mowed 'em.  Filled three big leaf bags (all I had) and got all of the front yard and about a third of the back.

     Didn't do my knee any good at all.  It started to hurt and was hot by bedtime.  I slept with a cold pack on it -- heck of a thing, thin sweat pants, cold pack over that, a hand towel wrapped over that and an electric blanket over all of me -- but it is worse this morning.  I'm off to soak in the tub, then try to get some things done.

Armistice On The Hidden Frontier

     The Agreement of 1989 ended the war between the Federation of Concerned Spacemen -- the non-government of the Far Edge -- and the U.S. plus selected NATO members. But it almost did more than that--

     There's a new story -- more a vignette, really -- at I Work On A Starship!

Armistice Day/Veterans Day

     Let's talk about people -- starting with the people who, 99 years ago this day, managed to put an end to the First World War and who thought they were going to be able to fix the peace in place, like a beautiful moth on a collector's display.  It didn't work.  With the war over, six months of peace negotiations were entered into with the highest of hopes -- the first three of Wilson's Fourteen Points are a libertarian dream -- and the parties built a peaceful Europe that carried the seeds of its own destruction.

     But they had hope.  The weary soldiers had hope -- and for nearly eleven years, that hope soared.  Don't lose sight of that.  People fail; our institutions fail on a grand scale -- but we get up and try again.

     As time -- and wars -- have passed and piled up, the focus of this day has shifted, from the agreement that ended the War To End All Wars, from politicians and their fine words to the people who have fought all wars and the peace in between: the veterans.

     You can, I suppose, look at the sidewalk and mumble, "Than kew for y'service," like you were tipping a waiter.  A little recognition is better than none.  But better yet, make eye contact, listen -- maybe the veterans you know spent four years, or twenty, as a glorified filing clerk in uniform; maybe they did brave or dangerous things.  They served.  Lend them your attention for even a little time.

     I have worked with a guy who did comms on a big SAC airplane, with an African-American commercial artist who would smile sadly and look off in the distance when his service in WW II was mentioned, with Army, Marine and USAF vets who fought in Vietnam; with a man the army spent a few months teaching high-speed Morse Code and then sent off to radio in radar plots to fighter bases in the Pacific -- by voice.  I had an Uncle who served on a tiny Naval patrol craft in the Med (that once bumped into an Italian submarine with a crew bound and determined to surrender and figured a Chief Petty Officer was as good for that as anyone), a brother who served as a chaplain in the Middle East and a great, great grandfather who got through Army training, was kicked on a hip by mule en route to his first assignment, and sent home after (mostly) recovering.  They all stepped up.  They all had hopes -- and put themselves at risk to preserve them, and yours as well.  Thank them and know who you are thanking, and why.

Jack Woodford On Writing

     Jack Woodford was the pen name of a prolific writer of fiction and film scripts.  His fiction, I'm told, was largely ephemeral, what might be called "airport books" today.  But he also wrote several books on how to write, and they are highly regarded.

    Robert A. Heinlein found Woodford's Trial And Error of use.  An expanded version is available from Amazon as Write And Error.  I'm reading it now, and it is indeed full of good and useful advice.  Some of the information on markets is out of date; there's barely any market for short fiction these days and unless you are really amazingly extra-special or well-known -- or better, both -- it's no way to make money, but that's just one aspect of a multi-faceted book.  If you write or would like to, it's worth your time.

A Story About Crutches

     In response to my recent report of trouble with my poor, abused right knee, one piece of online advice was "get a cane."

     Get?  I've owned a cane since the late stages of my recovery from the 2006 motor scooter wreck* that damaged my right knee (and broke the thighbone, an ugly spiral fracture).  And a knee brace, and the crutches I used and came to loathe for months before (and then a little while after -- my immune system took issue with the plate and screws used to hold things together while the bone healed, so I had to go back in and have all the metal bits taken out).

     Loathe?  Oh, yes.  Crutches and canes are perverse, annoying things.  Other than the four-footed cane -- with its own problems -- they won't stand up on their own and yet if you need them, you're probably not in shape to bend or kneel and pick them up.  They get caught on things.  There's rarely a good place to put them when you don't need them.  Driving, dining, desk work -- it's all made more difficult by having to mange those blamed sticks.  But try to cross a room without them, and--  So you come to resent the darned things.

     Decades ago, I worked with a man who'd suffered polio in early childhood, well after the vaccine was available but before he'd received it.  It got his legs and left them weak and spindly.  He had braces, but still needed "elbow crutches" to get around -- the kind with a loose cuff for the upper arm and a grab handle that sticks out at ninety degrees, about as small and light and "convenient" as crutches ever get.  They're tricky to use, which is why hospitals send you home with old A-frame full-height crutches, but if you're a long-term user, the smaller ones are better.

     He hated them.  He was a big, muscular guy of Scots-Irish ancestry, with a bushy blond beard and a volcanic temper.  A good man, good at his job, but perpetually short-fused and never more so than at the frustrating behavior of his crutches, always in the way, often out of reach, and when stowed, occasionally falling over unexpectedly.  A storm of profanity would follow, often accompanied by a door slamming and the thumps and clicks of a man moving rapidly on crutches.

     Time passed and he was offered a better job in a distant state.  It was a big step up and he went for it.  That meant finding a new doctor in his new city--

     About a year later, he showed up at the business where we'd worked for a visit -- walked right in the front door, all smiles.  Walked in!  He had been going to his family doctor for years, keeping the same hardware he'd used in High School; his new physician had taken one look at his old braces and half-crutches and sent him to a specialist.  The state of the art had advanced considerably, and before he knew it, he was up on his own two feet (with a little technological assistance) and shopping for a tasteful cane for occasional use.

     Hearing his tale that day, seeing the light in his eyes and the persistence of what had been a rare and fleeting smile, I thought I knew how frustrated he must have been before.  Twenty-five years later, I broke my right knee badly enough to put myself on crutches (and in a knee brace) for six months -- and only then did I begin to have a glimmering of how he must have felt.

     I own a cane.  I keep it in my car (and there's a backup stashed in the garage) so that I can always get it no matter where I am.  I've been using my cane this week.  I don't much like it -- but there's way worse and I'd like to avoid that as long as I can.
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* A wreck, mind you, for which I have no one to blame but myself.  I'd owned the scooter for a couple of weeks and had commuted to work on it.  I was on standby for the ABATE Rider's Course. Went out to pick up lunch and on the way back to work, got the shifter stuck between gears on a bumpy stretch of road.  Fought it back into gear with the throttle open, hit a bump, got the front wheel briefly up and came back down turned to one side.  Loss of control was immediate and irreversible and as the scooter wobbled, I stuck out a foot.  It went road, sky,  road, sky and then I was on my back in the road, a little way from my scooter, which was on its side and idling.  I tried to get up, felt blinding pain, wormed over to the scooter and turned it off.  This was right outside work; coworkers came out, called an ambulance, and some of them were walking my scooter off to the building by the time the ambulance arrived.  The ER was sure I just had a bad sprain, so I lay there on a gurney and ate my lunch.  I was just finishing when the X-rays came back: "Okay, looks like you do have a broken leg.  You'll be going into surgery in a few hours-- hey, is that corned beef?"  It was, and I was off the surgery list and off food until the next morning.  That evening my cellphone rang: "Miss X?  We have an opening for the ABATE class this weekend...."  I replied, "How do you feel about irony?"  Turned out they weren't so keen on it.  Six months later, I took the class. 

Stupid Trick Knee Tricks

     My right knee is not happy.  Sleeping with a nice sealed cold pack on it helped -- the swelling is way down and it is not as painful -- but it still hurts plenty.

     Sunday, Tam and I walked about two-thirds of the width of the State Fairgrounds and back again, with the slow Gun Show Shuffle through the Indy 1500 in between.  It was a nice show, nice they way they often are when I go without any fun money to spend, and the elfin young woman who has taken over the knife-sharpening work at these shows did a wonderful job with my Japanese carpenter's knife.  But the hard-floor slow walk at these events is always rough on my bad knee and the long walk before and after does not appear to have helped.

That's It, I'm Officially Over With This Day

     Not, mind you, that it is unlikely to get worse.  But I'm not endorsing any of this day as it has gone so far, a farrago of small frustrations from having so much going on at breakfast that I failed to preload the thermal carafe with hot water and then melted a notch in the handle of one of my good spatulas by using it, propped up on the edge of the skillet, to try to keep a breakfast wrap for Tamara from unrolling.

     My own breakfast was cold by the time I got to it and as I sat down at my desk to eat, Tam's cat began to throw up on my bed, where I had left the covers thrown back.  Tam was kind enough to deal with that...but once her effort was underway, the cat walked down the hallway and horked just outside the door to the office and that was clearly my job.

     Tempers are now short all over (including the cat, who is not at all happy about her tummy) and thus prepared, I sat down to write.  Maybe it helps to talk about it.

     Update: By the time I got to work, my right knee, which was hurting a little yesterday, had started to swell and hurt like the dickens.  Hurts worse if bent.  After an hour, I fetched my cane and avoided walking as much as I could.  It still hurts.  I'm going to try an icepack.

Unfitting The Narrative

   --And yet impossible to ignore.  Sunday, a cowardly and evil man shot worshipers in a church in Texas; when he emerged from the building (and here's the money quote): 

A man who lives next door to the church grabbed his own rifle and engaged the suspect[...]. The gunman dropped his "Ruger AR assault-type rifle" and fled.

     Yeah.  This is the usual behavior for this kind of murderer: confronted with effective opposition, they flake out.

     I expect this story to drop out of sight quickly, or to be accompanied by a lot of pushing for "gun control;" but it was Texas state law forbidding firearms in churches that gave the killer a sanctuary full of unarmed victims, and* the Texan gun culture that meant an armed citizen was able to respond in an effective and timely manner.

     At least for now, the oldstream media has to sit up, swallow their bubblegum and report the facts: to stop a spree killer, you need a citizen with a gun.  And it doesn't make a bit of difference if that citizen has a spiffy uniform, a badge and the sanction of government or not.  I'm only sorry the killer wasn't stopped more quickly, by one of his intended victims.
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* Not so!  This was true until 2015, when the law was changed; since then churches must post specific signage forbidding the carriage of firearms openly and/or concealed, or it is allowed.

Heinlein Wanders In...

     Not the man himself, of course, or his shade, either; but I became curious about a book of essays to which had contributed,* and looked it up in the massive two-volume biography by William H. Patterson, Jr.,† which lead to reading around in the book (I am bad for following footnotes backwards into the text, in a "Hunh!  What prompted that?" sort of way).  Heinlein's an interesting writer and an interesting man, never terribly comfortable with his public image and rarely in as good health as he liked to have people think.
  
     Love him or loathe him, his influence looms large (and somewhat misunderstood) over SF, which he helped legitimize as literature while writing for a living and without even a hint of an MFA degree.
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 * I could swear he also contributed to a book on writing SF in the later 1940s or early '50s, which I located years ago at what was, at the time, a ruinous price; but I can't run the title to earth and it was about three desktop computers ago.

† Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialog With His Century, a marvelous and very readable effort, for which Patterson's reward was to unexpectedly fall ill and die.  This is the kind of thing that leads to nihilism in the survivors.

Lazy Day

     I admit it -- I have done nothing today.  Nine and a half hours at the thing yesterday, followed by an end-of-the-week dinner at A Real Grown-Up Restaurant left me all wrung out.  Slept eight and a half hours, made a very small breakfast, and have wandered the house ever since, midly dazed.

     Huck the cat and I played "chase and be chased" (you take turns; most cats will play this game) for awhile about noon and that's been the extent of my exertions so far.

Yearly Engineering Conference

     Today, I'll be going to a statewide Engineering Conference on the kind of engineering for which I am a technician -- and if you think that's confusing, ponder that most of the Chief Engineers (it says so right on their door) who will be there aren't officially "Engineers" in the hang-out-a-shingle legal sense, either.  About half of them have some form of EE degree, maybe more than half, but it's not a line of work where regular big boss engineers need to be Certified Professional Engineers, so they're not.  They hire 'em for projects when needed, and if a CPE is not needed (or if there is any sort of heavy lifting), you get soldering-iron jockeys like me.

    And tomorrow, the whole lot of us -- techs and Chiefs and Assistant Chiefs, plus the occasional CPE (usually teaching the rest of us) get to go hang out, learn stuff, attend a big rubber-chicken lunch and awards ceremony with non-technical people in our business, and then go learn more stuff while trying not to fall asleep.

     It'll be fun.

First Of The Month, End Of The Week

     Hooray!  It's bill-paying time!  At least I can pay the recurring utility and house-payment bills; the days of deciding who gets a wave-off until the disconnect notices arrive are behind me, at least for now.  You never forget those times if you've been through them, and not having to play Stupid Deadline Tricks is a relief.

     My Poetic License is up for renewal, too, and I let a good magazine subscription slide that I shouldn't.

Now It Can Be Told

     Finally warm!  The weather turned cold last week and the furnace at Roseholme Cottage needed to be checked out -- but our service guys were booked solid 'til Halloween.

    We dug up a 750 W (on low) forced-air space heater and kept the house at 58 (with occasional dips to 57 and that last degree is brutal), and a little warmer in whichever of three rooms in the back of the house it was aimed at.  Between it, electric blankets, comforters and cats, we did okay.  I simmered big pots of stew over the weekend, which kept the kitchen nice.  (When I moved in, I added two new electrical circuits, one for the washroom and one for my bedroom.  That's two dedicated circuits for just this kind of use.  The washroom opens off the middle of the hall, so the heater sat just outside the door and I did without a blowdryer.)

     Still, it was not entirely comfortable.  When Tam called me Tuesday afternoon to report the central heating was back, I was greatly relieved.  68 degrees F is wonderful!