Just A Quick Placeholder

     I'm spinning my clock to cover an early shift and this is my bedtime -- or a little after, really.  I'll try to post more tomorrow.

Up Early/Slept In

     Yes, I did both.  I need to turn my days and nights half around to work a vacation fill-in shift next week.

So, It Didn't Work That Way In 1949?

     Or maybe it was 1975.  Or 1996.

     I spent spent far more time that I would have chosen yesterday being argued at by a guy who insisted that events that I had witnessed and been involved with that very morning, and the mechanism of which had been confirmed by the electrician who helped wire it up, could not possibly have occurred.

     In support of this, vague memories of past performance of the device -- I have those, too, and of management deciding it needed to work differently, in the exact manner I had observed only hours before -- to which he added a detailed description of an earlier generation of equipment, gone more than twenty years.

     There's a point where you just give up.  Sure, the entire staff and I hallucinated it.  That must have been what happened.

Working On Writing

     The class I took recently was a "writer's group:" every week, we'd turn in 1500 to 5000 words of fiction and the other writers in the group would go over it, looking for and commenting on the things that needed work.

     When the class ended, six of us decided to keep going.  Weekly was a bit much -- I don't know about the others, but analyzing and critiquing was taking nearly all of my free time through the week -- so we chose to meet monthly, with our manuscripts to be submitted no less than ten days in advance.

     Today is the deadline.  I'm over 10,000 words into what I am hoping will be a (short) novel and I've got maybe 2,000 words of new material to pull out, reformat and submit to the group.  So I've got to get on it.

     Wish me luck; if I can get this work done, it'll be a look at the Hidden Frontier back when Earth (the United States Space Corps) and the "Far Edge" rebels of the Federation of Concerned Spacemen were trying to wage an interstellar war.

On Presidents, Investigations, And The Gen. Pop.

     So the Mueller Report has been turned in and it's got a little something for every side to cheer and/or bemoan. This should be no surprise -- muddles are something politics and government both do very well -- but the pundits are all making hay of it while the haymaking is good, hammer and tongs and sharp words and cash that check from Fox or NBC or WaPo quickly, while the story's still in progress.

     Because people will become bored by the details, no matter how juicy.

     Americans like to believe their Presidents are something special -- especially bad, especially good, and quite often, both especially clever and especially stupid at the same time.  Heaven forbid he should merely be mentally normal and roughly as moral as politicians in general, muddling his way from one crisis to the next.  Oh, no, we hear, Pearl Harbor cannot possibly have come as a surprise to FDR and Dick Nixon probably had a 1000-year Imperial Presidency up his sleeve, not just the next election.  And so on, at James-Bond-film levels of intrigue, and on and on.  If you like a President, they're a genius of benevolence; if you don't, they're idiots -- but idiot-savants when it comes Doing Bad Stuff.

     These extremes strike me as doubtful.  The smart money is on "muddle."  There's an unlimited supply.

LibreOffice

     I admit it, I'm not a huge fan of doodad-heavy Windows software. At least we're to the point where most of it actually does something instead of merely looking fancy and cluttered -- but it's still glitzy-looking flabware.

     WYSIWYG word processors, Word in particular, use a whole lot of icons and menus to accomplish what PerfectWriter did in 64k with embedded "dot commands" and a small assortment of keyboard shortcuts on a CP/M luggable.  I'm not a fan of the flashy stuff, and prefer to compose in Q10 (which can be made to look like an old, simple word processor)  or Notepad, which at least has slightly less junk on the screen.

     Apple's "Pages" has a cleaner user interface, but it's very much a creature of its world and doesn't share files comfortably with the more widely-used Windows software.

     I went looking for something else and found LibreOffice.  Its word-processor UI is slightly less cluttered than Word, it reads and write .doc and .docx files -- and there are versions of it for Mac, Windows and Linux!  They all look and work the same, too.  So I've got it on my MacBook, my Windows desktop and the little Raspberry Pi I've been playing with.  The cost?  Well, I kicked in a few dollars but it's all honor system -- and none of this hitting you up for a monthly fee, which is how the latest versions of Word want to run.

     The downside is, you get what you get; there's no version for IOS (Word has a subscription-based IOS version but it's not completely compatible) and the very latest version usually comes with some caveats and glitches.  Still, I'm liking it so far and if I change my mind, the files are are compatible with the Word 2010 I already own.
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* The Pi doesn't seamlessly integrate with Dropbox -- I can download .doc and .txt files but uploading involves convoluted workarounds, so I'm better off e-mailing the finished work to myself.  It's not a big obstacle and the well-behaved little computer is worth the additional effort.

Saturday Brunch

     Tam and I took a long walk to Good Morning Mama's   It was full and running over, people waiting outside.  So we walked on around the corner to Gallery Pastry Shop.

     They were busy too, but they're fast. Oh, it's a high-end kitchen, very high end; they make pastries the likes of which are hardly to be believed, food art that is as pretty as it is delicious.

     Weekends, this level of skill and organization is applied to omelet, crepe and scramble brunches.  I could watch their kitchen crew all day long. It's really amazing -- the work space is very well organized and their prep is fantastic, but the smooth coordination of effort and clear chain of command is simply remarkable.

     It's not really a large kitchen, given that a chef de cuisine, sous chef and one of the chefs de partie are presiding over a row of nine single-burner countertop "stoves" that face a bartop from behind clear barriers, while at least three more chefs de partie work at a huge square table in the background.

     Filled-out orders come to the chef de cuisine, who lays them on a set-aside section of countertop in chronological order and parcels out work to himself or the other two front line chefs; ingredients are staged between the burners and clear barrier, a full set taking up just three burner's worth of space.  Behind them on the work table, stacks of clean plates and crepes are ready to go, and a couple of big chef-grade blowtorch-like gadgets are stashed where they're out of the way but reachable.  Ingredients are cooked, omelets made, and plated; the three back-row chefs compare orders to plates, load and torch-crisp crepes, and do any prep work that needs done.

     Fresh skillets are kept in under-counter bins in front of the front-line chefs, and they swap out as needed.  Everything is within arm's reach, including a fridge full of prestaged ingredient containers to replace any as they are used up; a dishwashing setup at the very back of the room (on the other side of a row of specialized pastry ovens and other mysterious machinery) is in frequent use by any chef presently at loose ends.  

     Waiters and waitresses dance in and out on a route that takes them in to the chef de cuisine's incoming order area and out past the row of filled plates ready to go, out of the way of the routine motions of the chefs.

      --And the big boss chef chef de cuisine is not at all above rinsing out a pan or four if he finds himself temporarily free of other duties. There's a definite heirarchy but there's a lot of trust, a real feeling that everyone in the kitchen is a professional who can be counted on to carry his or her share of the work.  It's a pretty "flat" power structure.

     There's really a lot to be learned by observing the staff do their jobs -- rapidly, efficiently and to a standard very few can achieve.

Breakfast Fried Rice

     I can give you the recipe for today's breakfast; that's easy.

     It's just applewood-smoked bacon, cold cooked rice fried in a very little bit of the bacon fat with a drizzle of good soy sauce, some freeze-dried diced onion and chives, parsley, a tiny hit of garlic, chopped black olives and three eggs scrambled over high heat in the middle of the wok after the rice is well-cooked and pushed up the edges.  (Set the bacon to one side and crumble it back in at the very end.)

     What I can't do is tell you everything you need to know about the rice: it's left over from Tam's portion of yesterday's Indian-delivery dinner.*  It's basmati rice, delicious when it arrives and even better after a night in the fridge.  But it's not just rice; it's has a little of this and a little of that in it, whatever spices the very best sort of Indian grandmother puts in the good rice, and I haven't got the least notion what that might be.†

     But it makes the best fried rice I've ever tasted.
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* Our local Indian restaurant is outstanding.  On Saturdays and weekdays, they set out a lunch buffet full of wonderful, tasty dishes.  "Indian food" covers a broad range of cuisines and they offer an excellent sampling of North Indian dishes.

† Online recipes include fresh onion, salt, cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, cloves, and cumin seed.  Good luck!

So, I Survived

     But mind that third step -- it's a doozy!

     Went in for a cardiac stress test.  Since I have that bum knee, the treadmill was out and that left chemistry.

     To start with, they plumb you with a nice IV and shoot you up with some nice thallium, from a syringe that lives in a nice lead-lined container.  That percolates around a good long while and then they stick you in an X-ray machine, where (if you're me), some part of the process sends interesting lines of white light through your closed eyes.*

     So far, so good.  Heck, you can even get a warmed blanket for the X-raying if you'd like one, which I did.

     But that's just the baseline state.  They need to see what it looks like when the blood's really getting everywhere.  If you can't accomplish this with exercise, you're going to have to get a vasodialator drug.

     Here's a fun fact: do you know what happens to the pressure inside a closed space if the enclosed volume suddenly expands?  It decreases.  Dramatically.

     For this step, they put you on a hospital bed, elevated like a chaise lounge.  You're wired up to an EKG and an automatic blood pressure cuff.  A computer keeps track of the data and spits out a classic EKG chart as it goes. 

     They would not put you in that bed if it wasn't going to be necessary.  At the beginning, my blood pressure was markedly higher than usual -- I have white-coat syndrome and, look, I was scared, okay?

     There's a cute plumbing attachment for the IV with two syringe ports at ninety degrees and a tiny valve.  The nurse has two sets, fully populated.  They check the IV and hook up the first set, one full syringe, the other, and disconnect it and hook up the next.  That one's got one plastic syringe like the first two and another in a thick, science-fictional metal jacket, which is more thalliu--

     BAM!

     The world suddenly got very small and far away.  I got very dizzy very fast.  The blood pressure cuff cycled about then and I was about aware enough to glance over and get the numbers, 125 over a ridiculously low figure.

     The nurse finished the final two syringes and looked at me.  The other nurse (yes, you get two, though the secondary one is helping everyone else, as well) leaned in and asked, "How are you feeling?"

     "Disassociative."  It might not have been the right answer, so I tried again.  "Distant.  Disconnected."

     She told me, "It'll pass pretty soon,  Just lay here a bit."

     I did, and passed the time by watching my blood pressure go up every time the cuff cycled.  When she came back, she asked, "Coke or Diet Coke?"

     Yes, there are refreshments: your choice of Coca-Cola.  Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor and a good one.  They could hand out pills but Dr. John Stith Pemberton's concoction is inexpensive, shelf-storable and delivers a consistent, patient-metered dose to reverse the effects of the vasodilator now that its work is done.

     Once my blood pressure was back to normal, they sent me out with a hall pass and told me I could have lunch if I liked, just be back in forty minutes.

     Tam had come with me.  There's a cafeteria in the basement of the place (the lobby smells wonderful!) and we lost no time in going for food.  A cup of hot coffee and a lean grilled low-sodium hamburger later, I had my second trip through the X-ray machine and they set me free.

     I was exhausted.  I came home, sat down, nodded off, went to the computer, sat down, nodded off, and then it was almost sundown.  Tam hauled me out for supper and I managed to stay awake through it but I was asleep again not long after we returned home.

     I hope they don't have to do this to me again soon.
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* I noticed this when they did a 3-D CAT scan of my head, looking at the hole(s) in my left cheekbone.  When the beam passed though the right spot, it made white circles in my vision!  This is not a superpower -- zap energetic wavicles through the visual system and you will get a reaction.  Apollo astronauts reported seeing occasional "white streaks" with their eyes closed, as cosmic rays passed through their eyes.

"It's Medical Experimentation For The Lot Of You"

     Off for some medical tests today.  And fasting. 

Have To Post And Run

     Last night, I was up late making a retirement trophy for a co-worker who's taking early retirement.  Look for a photograph of the thing later.

     This morning, I am running late.  Tomorrow's post will be better!

Can It Be?

     It's getting light earlier.  It's staying light later.  It's not quite as cold.

     I'm still not certain, but it could be that winter might be almost over.