Of the Firehose and Steady Drips

A friend of mine in England deals with personal health issues, much of them derived from a long-known but little-understood virus, and blogged about life during the early stages of the Coronavirus pandemic:

I keep thinking to myself that I could manage all this better if only the world would shut up about it for a bit. There is constant chatter and no real news and for people like me who are anxious and readily self-isolating, far too much frightening stuff designed to rein in the cavalier and the rebellious.

A while ago in talking to a friend about the mass media and the internet I mentioned that the difficulty isn’t finding information, it’s dealing with the firehose of messaging coming at you and filtering out that which is not only useful but true.

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Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, and Time

You, small male child: build things!

I got these Tinker toys as a Christmas gift, perhaps in the hope of encouraging my engineering skills. And there I was, with my nose stuck in a book.

Looking to pare down possessions, I look at this stuff now and wonder if anyone might want it, before I toss it out.

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I feel like it’s December 7 and the enemy warcraft have lifted from their aircraft carriers

The difference is that on this still, wintry day I’m not caught unaware and I suspect the enemy planes are enroute.

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Radio Silence

Only one day left of this ridiculous campaign. Much as I love to have NPR on as I potter around the house, today I think I will maintain radio silence.

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darned socks

I took a year off from college once and traveled around the country. For a while, I stayed out on the farm where my grandmother had been born, living with my great-aunt.

I was helping my grandfather paint houses. I came home one day to find that my great-aunt had darned a couple pairs of my socks.

Really: she took needle and thread and created these deft cross-hatchings that patched holes. I remember I was touched.

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Changing Time

Time has morphed since I left the court. Perhaps metamorphosed? Or as Calvin (of Hobbes) had it:  transmogrified? When I was still working, there was a need to get done what I could when I could with the free time I had. I was often focused on time efficiency, and all too often at a certain point had to leave some aspect undone until later. Now there is the concept of plenty of time, which inflates the expectation of how much I can get done.

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Freezers and Thawing Out

We have two freezers: the bottom compartment of our kitchen refrigerator, and the larger one in our downstairs garage’s side-by-side fridge.

Containers abide in them so long we might well be preserving mammoth meat.

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Tiring and Retiring: In which I remove myself from the workaday world

It’s time. I’ve saved for years. I bought five extra years’ service with the state, bolstering my pension. I don’t have to work in the court system any more. The judicial process is painstaking, and as a citizen I appreciate the serious efforts of the courts to apply the law, to resolve conflicts, to get things right — at the same time, I don’t have to take those pains myself any more.

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Really, why did the infamous “they” fix what wasn’t broken?

I just sent this email to my coworker, who wants to go get coffee this morning:

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God’s Own Gadfly

 On my walk in to work in the mornings, I sometimes pass a Goodyear tire store at Turk and Larkin streets, Kahn & Keville, which maintains a large signboard out front, often with amusing or thought-provoking messages.  Up through the election it had something from Voltaire, on how uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.

Before that, it had a note on the passing of Gore Vidal which I found poignant.

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