A Strange Occurance

We have a porch at the side of our house where we like to read, eat a meal and sometimes take a nap. In the winter I usually put together a good sized cage which we call the Winter Palace. I put the chickens there where it is easier to feed them, collect the eggs and take in their antics. I was late putting it together this year, just getting the walls up late on the 23rd. Sometime that night a group of little people set up house keeping right there on our porch. I couldn’t believe it. Not only were they short, they were oddly dressed, some kind of like royalty and others like peasants or shepherds or something. Anyway they claimed there were no rooms available in all of Seattle, if you can believe that. They didn’t seem to offer much trouble so I let ‘em stay. They tied their ass out in the backyard which was fine with me cuz I didn’t want a bunch of donkey dung to clean up along with the chicken manure. And then the next night in the wee hours of the morning my wife and I were woken up by some neighbors singing religious songs; on and on and on with the alleluias at the top of their lungs. They must have been pretty drunk to be making that much noise at that hour, but I will say they sounded pretty good and whoever their lead soprano was, she has a voice that is out of this world. But that’s not all. In the morning we found out that a woman among the little people had actually had a baby in the night- no OB, no drugs. no nothing for her. Right there on our side porch. You can imagine our amazement. Well I must say the baby is a calm little fellow. Doesn’t seem to mind the chickens throwing straw in his face or even kicking him right out of his bed from time to time. I don’t know how long they intend to stay, but I guess not too long. One of the men, a guy named Joe, said they’ll be leaving soon. Going to Egypt. Go figure.

Year End Letter 2011

2011 might be the year I lost my memory. I have been trying for about a week to recall something of what transpired without much success. On the other hand maybe nothing actually happened.


In letters of condolence to friends who have lost a parent, I have sometimes suggested that the deceased person lives on in his or her progeny. I guess one’s DNA does so literally. I realize now that for some of us the “living on in one’s children” can commence even before reaching one’s own end. Thus it is with us now. Much of our lives and therefore our news is that of Nat and Meredith.

Mere bore a son in March. As a second born, Marcus Patrick Reinhart, has the advantage of an older brother to lead him through the early stages of life and to absorb, to some degree, the attention of surrounding adults thus leaving Marcus to develop on his own. He’s doing nicely. In the same week he was born his parents bought a house in their new hometown of Charlottesville VA where they moved in late spring due to Paulie’s work. Except for oppressively humid summers and 3,000 miles of separation from Seattle, Charlottesville seems like a great place to live. Their other important news is about next year. This year they learned that in January Paulie will deploy to Afghanistan as a civilian employee of the Defense Department. Naturally we are somewhat worried for his safety, but the real regret is his absence, especially from their 2½ year old. He’s a great dad and Theo will surely miss him. They have all come here for the holidays. Mere and the boys will stay on until July. They were also here in this past summer and we were back in VA three times. To their grandparents the boys are really dear little fellows.
We see Nat, Tracy and Phoenix on a regular basis. Their lives are absorbed in dealing with Phoenix’s autism. They do a great job. We are on the periphery lending a hand as much as possible. As with all kids his long term future is unknown, but his diagnosis is real and for Beth and me at least it is still difficult to accept. He is almost always pleasant and fun to be with and he is very easy to love.

We are basically well, though some components are showing wear. Beth continues her weekly walks to town, several miles over a serious hill and she is quite good at solving Sudoku puzzles. I continue my activities of the recent past, but even slower. A treat for me this year was to go with our neighbor, Simone, to an open audition for the TV show, The Amazing Race. We thought we did great, but since we have not had a call back I guess you will not be seeing us on the air. I also had the last great afternoon of my life when a young woman who was doing an oral history of the Arboretum came and listened to me talk for 3 hours and 17 minutes. She even feigned enough interest to ask some questions - and she was good looking. I like to think about it and when I do I try to forget the fact that she was getting paid.

Following are titles of my blog posts this year, along with an indication of the content. If I had any interesting thought or idea you would probably find it here.

Cultural Voyeurism (The Super Bowl)
A Pretty Good Rat Trap
Rat In A Trap (A picture)
Why My Wife Is Pissed Off At You Guys (A puzzler submitted to the Tappit Bros.)
Here’s An Idea (International policy)
Here’s An Idea (Continued)
33 Flavors, Ha!
The Story of Crumpled Anna (Fiction)
The Application (Somebody else’s)
The Debt Crisis
Here’s Looking At You Babe (Curious stuff)
Is Democracy Viable These Days
The Rest of the Story (A rental story)
All Water Is Not The Same (Everyday life)
To Forget or Not To Forget, Is That The Question? (911)
Advice (Financial)
To Text: An Unhappy Consequence (A cranky rant)

To Text: An Unhappy Consequence

Really.  How the hell did we get saddled with the word text as a verb?

How do you pronounce the third person singular?  He, she or it texts.  Does that rhyme with Tex or Texas? 

To this problem there's a nexus
Every day my daughter texts.

Is that how it is said?

I believe that there are some languages that have only the present tense, maybe Aluete or French or something.  Unhappily in English we also have a past tense which in the case at hand leads us to

Yesterday my son texted (?) me five times.  How are you supposed to say that?

I wonder how this has worked out in Spanish where there are two past tenses.  How do you suppose that works? 

Present tense (if text happens to be an er verb):

Yo texto

Tu textes

Elle texte

Nosotros textemos

Ellos texten

Past tense (if its an ar verb):

Yo texte or textaba

I can't go on. Not even sure these are right.  But I'm pretty sure the verb to text is going to vex us for a long time.

Advice

It's quite common for my wife and me to receive dinner invitations from purveyors of financial advice.  Since these events are generally at pretty nice restaurants it is also common for us to accept.  Since I have a pretty strong conviction that it is unwise to pay for anything as ephemeral as financial advice we have never availed ourselves of anything more than the dinner.  Such a dinner about a year ago led to the composition of the following paragraphs.

Thank you very much for dinner. It was easily the best I’ve had since I quit eating animals about two years ago. I must nevertheless decline your offer to help manage our assets. On the other hand I do have some advice for you. I offer it in descending order of importance.

Quit your job and find a new one that is done on your feet, preferably outside. Millions of years of evolution prepared homo sapiens to be hunters and gatherers. For only 10,000 years have we even been stationary on the land and for only about 100 years have most of us been professional users of desks. We are evolved to work outside, on our feet.

Get an average bike and really good rain gear. Leave you car at home as much as possible.

If at all possible reconcile with you wife. I’m confident that splitting up was the most costly thing you’ve ever done in both monetary and personal terms.

Live within your means, humble though they may be in your new job, (see above). If you must own a car, let it be a very modest model.

Place any financial assets you have in a no-load fund that tracks the S & P 500 and forget about it. The “forget about it” is the most important part.

I will conclude by expressing my deep respect for three things I am aware that you have accomplished. I would be proud to say that I had done any of, playing division one football, getting an engineering degree or flying a jet plane. I wish you the best.


The letter was never sent.

To Forget Or Not To Forget, Is That The Question?

Never Forget! 

What does that mean?  I mean when a person puts it on a poster, or T shirt, or bumper sticker, what is he or she meaning to say? 

It might mean, do not forget the sacrifices of the first, and second, and third responders.  I can buy that.  But I have the feeling that it also means, never stop hating the perpetrators, and their kind.  Or never stop feeling damaged.  In these cases I'm not so sure this is good advice.  Wouldn't it be better to just get over it if you can. 

I think I'll look for a bumper sticker that says, "Forget!"

I'll put it on my bike.

All Water Is Not The Same

I had finished brushing and was moving on to step two in my oral ablutions. The floss, in its nearly new plastic dispenser, was in its usual place, a small basket at the extreme right side of the medicine cabinet. When I opened the mirrored door I saw that it had migrated, as it occasionally does, to near the bottom of the collection of small items that share the basket, making it a little tricky to get a good grasp on. As I tugged it out from its surroundings, with fingers grown clumsy with age, I dropped it. Onto the counter top it fell, dribbled off the end, careened off the toilet tank and landed in the water waiting, exposed below. Did I say it was nearly new? It wasn’t easy consigning 39 yards of perfectly good plastic ribbon to the trash, but there’s water, and then there’s water. If I hadn’t, there’d be no more kissing for me – ever.

That, dear children, is why the toilet seat has a lid.

The Rest of the Story

On March 27th of last year I posted a note about renting our little cottage in the University District and described three candidate couples.  I did not report that ultimately I chose the bike riding woman with the semi-monk boy friend who was away on a six week silent retreat.  She had stayed nearly an hour looking over a place that can be adequately evaluated in 10 minutes or less.  My reason was that I found that she would have been the hardest to turn down.  She seemed to want the place the most.

It was not a bad choice.  E and B stayed about a year and a half, paid their rent on time, and left the place as near ready to rerent as any tenant ever has.  There was however one little matter that makes this update blog worthy.  Quite often if I am going to be entering a rental space to do some chore while the occupants are not present I will say in a very cute and charming way, "Hide your marijauna plants, I'm going to be working on the X today."  It's not much of a line, but I've said it to quite a few renters over the years.  In fact it turns out that I once said it to E, although I had no specific memory.  On the next to the last day, just before they departed, I asked if I had said something like that and indeed I had.  We had a good laugh at that point, in my case imagining,  and in their case recalling, just how that line went over.  You see, as was only revealed by the state of the house at their departure, the little cottage had actually become quite a little farm for the past year or so.  Remember the long long period of scrutiny on the first visit?  Ah so.  Maybe I am missing a bet by using this place as a residential rental.

Is Democracy Viable These Days?

Several decades ago, when I spent a few years studying and teaching economics, I recall telling students that they need not worry about the return of another Great Depression because by that time, (the late 60’s) we had learned enough about how market economies work that we would always be able to avoid troubles of such magnitude. I now have much less faith in that statement. How tragic it is that Economics is such an impoverished area of study. Apparently the most fundamental problems are just too difficult for a consensus to develop among professional economists. Take the current situation. We seem to have two big problems. We know we have a high degree of unemployed resources, especially workers. And we fear that we have too large a national debt. These are very elementary issues. An equivalent medical question might be what to do if someone is bleeding to death from an open wound. An equivalent question from the realm of physics might be about the relative rate of fall for two objects of different weight. You remember, Galileo worked on that one. Yet there is apparently no consensus among economists on these most fundamental and important questions.

Of course, if there were consensus there is no reason to expect that the voting public of this country would be persuaded about what should be done. Evolution seems pretty well settled in the scientific community, but millions of our countrymen have no trouble disbelieving. Ditto global warming. So even if there were agreement among economists that what is needed in times of high unemployment is for the federal government to run deficit budgets, like the way the budgets of the second world war period got us out of the depression of the 30’s, and that budget balancing and national debt reduction should be undertaken during periods of vigorous economic growth, there is no reason to expect that the public would get it or that the Congress would act on it. It is enough to rattle fifty years of optimism.

Here's Looking At You Babe

I wrote the short paragraph below a few weeks ago. Although a quaint observation, I didn’t think it rose to the level of a post. Then I was presented with a companion piece that when added to the earlier one made the grade. Here they are.

A Peculiar Intimacy

Imagine passing a lifetime mere inches away from something and never seeing it. That is what your eyes and ears do. Of course your ears don’t see anything, near or far. But your eyes go on for decades, mere inches away from your ears and yet they never directly see them. Your teeth too. And a bunch of other stuff that’s out of sight. It just seems odd.

A Peculiar Sight

I sleep naked and when I go to the bathroom in the morning I walk right in front of a full length mirror. As I get in and out of the shower I look at my naked self in another mirror. (There’s some mild disgust with what I see, but it is short of self loathing.) I am used to seeing myself naked. Recently my wife and I passed a few days as house guests in California. The place we stayed had a half bath on the first floor in which the toilet stands at the right side of the sink. Behind the sink is a mirror, presumably to allow for modest grooming before returning to the company of others. The odd thing in this bathroom is that the mirror extends to the right, behind the toilet. This is something I had never seen before. A mirror behind a toilet. I have a hunch that no woman has ever or would ever notice this situation, but for guys it is different. It presents a new view. There you are, standing fully clothed, (Once I was even wearing a coat and tie.) with your dick poking out of your trousers and in your hand as you hose down the toilet bowl. Ladies, I’m telling you, that is an odd sight.

The Debt Crisis

The United States and Greece are similar in that both countries face the possibility of default on their debt obligations in the relatively near term. They are different in that in the case of Greece a default would be caused by non Greeks deciding that future Greek income will not be sufficient to pay their debts, whereas in the case of the U.S. a default looms on Aug 2 entirely due to a choice by the U.S. Congress to default. A decision to not raise the limit on the national debt is a decision to default. At this time there is no threat of default due decisions by anyone else. The reason offered for maintaining the debt limit is that if we go on as we have been we are going to find ourselves in a debt crisis like Greece. In other words by not raising the debt limit we are choosing to be sure to default now in order to avoid the possibility of a default at some later time.

In my view it is only an irony that most of the present debt was created during the administrations of Reagan and Bush II. There were Democrats in control of one or the other legislative branches during these times. What everybody learned in the 20th century was that having government services and paying for them are two different things and given that knowledge we have collectively gone along with providing services while refusing to tax ourselves to pay for them. It may be that democracy does not work, because they can not make themselves be fiscally responsible. Where the Republicans are dangerous in these times is in their economic religion.

What the United States needs in order to balance its budget, is pretty full employment of its resources. It is indisputable that the first effect of cutting government expenditures is that people lose jobs. The Republican faith states that raising taxes results in loss of private sector jobs that would otherwise be created. This is not nearly as certain as the job loss from decreasing government expenditures. But Republican preference for small government dictates that while it is ok to cut expenditures we must not raise taxes. That is a very weird, lop sided and faith based approach to balancing the budget.

The Application

I flew across the country recently and because I used some kind of “miles” the trip from Seattle Washington to Charlottesville Virginia went through Dallas Texas where I had a lay over of about four hours. Time enough. I used the rest room. I found my departure gate on a big screen. I rode the inter-terminal train. I found a seat in the appropriate waiting area and then had to move because someone had left their luggage unattended. I moved three gates away and found a new seat among a bunch of folks about to depart for some place other than Dallas. And it was sitting there that I heard the young man on his cell phone. You know in such a setting you don’t need to listen in order to hear.

It was clear in a moment that he was talking to someone about a job. He was about 30, dressed in clothes that spoke of blue collar work. He spoke well and steadily. He had done some work for his listener and he wanted to make clear that he had enjoyed it and was up for more. He would be willing to hire on for more work even knowing there would not be much to do in November and December. With the holidays and such, a little more family time would be fine. He could take private flying lessons if that would make him more valuable. He was aware there was no specific need for a pilot, but maybe that would just be an extra skill he could bring. The call lasted around ten minutes in my presence and had begun before I arrived. He would stay in touch just in case.

It had sounded pretty good to me and the person on the other end had stayed on the phone for some time apparently not brushing him off, but when he hung up the young man’s body language changed completely. His shoulders sagged and he slouched in his seat as he tucked his phone into his pants. I wondered how deep his despair ran, how much he owes, who else in this world is dependent on him. Soon his flight was called and off he went to face his particular reality, just one in millions.

The Story of Crumpled Anna

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When Crumpled Anna was born her limbs were straight and strong. As soon as she was old enough to walk it was clear that she was blessed with the gifts of speed and grace and the heart of a thoroughbred. She loved equally to run and dance, but her destiny was fulfilled on the day she first saw a bicycle. It was on her bike that all of her physical gifts found their fullest manifestation. She was able to ride at her very first attempt and once she started she never stopped. She rode at every opportunity. The combination of constant practice and natural gifts brought her to ever greater riding prowess until at last she could nearly make her bike fly. She found that she could build her speed to the point where, by jerking up hard on the handle bars, she could cast her bike up into the air and onto the top of a one story building. Once up she could traverse the city just riding the roofs, sailing from house to house to house. And that is what she was doing on the afternoon of her accident. It was a cruel wind that caught her by surprise just as she was about to touch down on the ridgeline of a small bungalow. It blew her off her mark and despite her extraordinary skills she could not recover. In a flash she tumbled down the slope and onto the ground.

That was Anna’s last ride. Now, as you see, she is twisted and bent. She passes her time near the entrance of a Garden of Faux Art where she greets each visitor as he or she arrives. Visitors should not be dismayed by Anna’s story. She now concentrates on dancing with the same constancy that she once rode. Despite what happened she still loves the wind. She pirouettes in the gentle breezes and grows quite animated when the stronger winds find her at her place in the garden.

She once was asked if she regretted the exciting way she lived before with the high risks that it entailed and if she didn’t hate the wind. “Oh no”, she said quietly, “The wind and I both, were merely acting according to our natures. It is far better for me if I forgive her. And besides we all decline over the course of our journey to the final worm bin. My decline was just a bit more sudden than most. I was given a gift. I used it as best I could. Now I am here, still in the company of the wind, the rain and even some occasional sun. It is enough. I am grateful.”

33 Flavors - Ha!

Late next month I will be 73.  My grampa lived to 93.  My aunt to 94 and my dad to 96.  I'm feeling like I can match my grampa.  Suppose I do and that I have a bowl of ice cream every other day.  That means I have only about 3,650 bowls left.  With so few remaining I can't afford to waste any time on butter brickle.  If it ain't chocolate, vanilla or chocolate chip mint, I'm afraid I have to pass.

In life it is important to keep your eye on the bowl.

Here's An Idea - (Continued) Read the previous post first

6,000 US and more than 1,000 from allied countries.  That, according to a web site called icasualties.com is the number killed in Iraq and Afghanistan - so far.  So we have we have now done approximately twice as much harm to ourselves in our reaction to 9/11 as was done to us on that day.  Hmmmmm.  What if we forgot about countries of origin and just counted all innocent people including Iraqis and Afghans who have been killed or maimed?  Do you think we are at 100,000 yet?  We are responsible for this suffering in the sense that it would not have happened had we not chosen to respond with a military invasion.  Although our actions were not a sufficient condition, they were a necessary condition.  We could have unilaterally avoided these casualties.

Of course we have to consider the counter factual hypothesis, that is, what would have happened had we not done what we did.  Al Qaeda operatives or affiliates have had successes in Spain, London and Indonesia.  I don't think there is any way of knowing how many, if any, attacks were frustrated by our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it seems to me that it has been our defensive response, TSA etc, that has limited other attacks.  I do think it is a little naive to believe that we are going to frighten suicide bombers by successfully killing folks from their side as many pundits have opined this past week.  They are suicide bombers!!!!  Think about it.

And we did lose two tall buildings as well.  I read that they  approximately equaled the vacant office space in Manhattan on that day.  I made no attempt to look up the figures, but I have a hunch we could have built several replacement buildings with the money we have burned up fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In what way has this been an intelligent response?  Oh yeah.  It has made us feel tough, not like a bunch of pansy whimps.  Well, that's worth something I guess.

Here's An Idea

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“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19) Maybe there’s a reason for that.

Sometimes the smart thing to do is not the satisfying thing. Galling though it may have been, bailing out the large U.S. financial institutions in 2008 surely reduced the severity of the hard times we have faced since then. To have treated the bankers as they deserved, by letting them live by the market, would have crushed many many more innocent people, even more severely and for far longer than has already happened. We face a similar unpleasant choice in the so called war on terror. Viscerally satisfying as it may be to execute those who have killed and maimed innocent people, before doing so we should always ask the question, will this increase or decrease future terrorism? We have recently killed one famous terrorist to our apparent great satisfaction, but how many new terrorists will be created by our action? Perhaps the big fish who is gone was more of a threat to us than the many minnows who will now come forward to replace him, but that is certainly not clear. Satisfying though it may have been to wreak our vengeance, it might not have been so smart.


Is there another way? I wonder how much it would impair the recruitment of terrorists if the U.S. were to act like the Christian nation that so many of our citizens fancy us to be. As I understand the New Testament we are implored by word and deed to “forgive those who trespass against us”. It is there in Jesus’ most famous prayer. We are told that on the cross he said, “Forgive them Father. They know not what they do.” He healed the severed ear of one of his Roman guards at the time of his arrest. When asked directly how to respond to offense, did he not say, “Turn the other cheek.” How about, “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone.” And then I think it was probably Paul who said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.” It seems to me that forgiveness is pretty much the central doctrine of Christianity.


Be assured that I am not recommending that we become a Christian nation and follow these precepts because God wants us to. I am doubtful of the existence of a caring god and I certainly don’t think we should establish any national religion. I am suggesting that if we want to minimize the harm done to us by terrorists, the smartest way to do that might be to forgive those who trespass against us, do our best to forestall attacks with passive measures and never strike back. Or else we can continue to try to beat a billion or so Muslims into submission.

Living In A Wooden Tent

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The Antecedents:

I’ve been going to bed pretty early lately. I’m about to tell why, but it is a rather long story that begins with some disassociated thoughts.

My dog has a very nice coat of medium length fur, similar to a collie. It is a variegated reddish brown with highlights of black and some white on her belly. But more pertinent for the present cogitation, her coat seems to warm her, or not, as needed. She never takes it off and appears to be equally comfortable in a house that it heated to around 70 degrees or lying on the porch for hours at a time in temperatures in the 30’s. Her range of comfortable temperature appears to be at least 40 degrees.

My comfort range is probably something less than 20 degrees. If I were dressed so as to be comfortable sitting quietly at 70 degrees and the temperature were to fall 10 degrees I think I would soon feel cold and if it rose to 80 I believe I would be uncomfortably warm. I’ve never tested this idea, but my hunch is that my temperature comfort range is something less than 20 degrees.

From time to time as I have passed my life here on the shores of Puget Sound I have paused to reflect on how a given moment might have felt to the indigenous population living here before European contact. It might happen when Mt Rainier is particularly spectacular, or during an intense rainfall, but most often I have such thoughts on one of those few days each year when the temperature drops below freezing so that ordinary clothing and shelter might be less than desirable. How, I have wondered, did the native people cope with such days?

Through forty some years of marriage my wife and I have had a little disconnect on the subject of the proper thermostat setting, she preferring a bit more warmth, I a bit more thrift.

To the best of my recollection I have never felt chilled while vacuuming.

The Inception:

In the middle of one night early in March, I got to thinking about the spot in my bed that slightly stings my flesh with cold at the moment I slip between the sheets, but within a couple of hours feels like some kind of soft, malleable oven gently toasting my body. But of course the bed and blankets are not warming me. I am warming them. With the aid of their insulation my body keeps itself warm. As it happened my aforementioned wife was in Washington DC at the time. The above thoughts and others came together and formed into the realization that I had an interesting opportunity at hand. There was nothing stopping me from turning off the furnace and living for a few days without its benefits. How would that be? Could I come up with some combination of personal insulation and activity that would keep me comfortable? Apparently sheets, a bed spread and a down comforter were adequate to insure my warmth while lying still for eight or more hours. But what would it take during a day of normal activities? Did I have clothes at hand that would keep me comfortable, but not interfere with whatever it is that I do all day? When I arose in the morning I opened the windows and turned off the furnace.

The Event:

I am now in about the 7th day of this exercise and I must say I am a little disappointed. My objective is not to live a few days in some hardy fashion demonstrating personal resolve, but to live in normal comfort by a combination of dressing warmly, - and more warmly still as my activity level drops. Though I have quite an array of clothing lying about the house I have not yet fully achieved my aim. From head to toe my options include:

A polypropylene fleece head band

A knitted hat

A collection of neck scarves and knitted ski masks – not yet resorted to

Arm warmers

Long and short sleeve light weight polypro shirts

Cardigan style fleeces and vests, one of which is supposed to be wind proof

Two heavy-weight polypro pullover fleeces

Some wool and cotton sweaters

An array of coats and jackets - one heavy wool, one light cotton, several rain coats, three biking jackets, and several jackets made of Tyvek (a wind proof material used to insulate houses)

A cotton and a polypro sweat suit

Light weight polypro long underwear, 2 sets

Leg warmers

Carhart work pants

Two pairs of sports warm-up pants

A pair of Coast Guard issue heavy polypro long underwear

Wool, polypro and cotton socks

Running shoes, hiking boots, work boots, after ski boots, Keene sandals (open but actually pretty warm) and some street shoes

About 300 pairs of gloves – but that’s a different story

And a sleeping bag modified some years ago to be worn like a moo moo – not resorted to yet

                                  The author modeling his sleeping bag moo moo

It is now about day nine. My wife will return in two days and this little adventure will be over. The reported temperature in Seattle over the period has ranged pretty consistently between the low 40’s and low 50’s. However for the first several days the temperature in the house stayed mostly in the mid 50’s. At first I didn't bother to reprogram the thermostat so twice a day the target temperature would go from 50 to 58.  The furnace would then come on until I manually lowered the target to 40.  Eventually I reset it to 45 degree at all times. I think the other factor in keeping the house temp above the outside temp was that the walls, furniture, floors, ceilings, etc. held their heat and released it slowly thereby maintaining the ambient warmth for a while even with the doors and windows open. The latter day temperatures have been down around 50 degrees in the house and at the very end 48.

Conclusions:

It is now about day 11. Activity, is very important. It did not take very much movement to stay comfortable using reasonable amounts of the clothing listed above. The heavy underwear and a couple of fleece tops and the knitted cap or head band were pretty adequate and way more than adequate during vigorous activity. At times just standing up was sufficient. But to be comfortable while being still, watching TV or reading required at least a blanket over my legs and perhaps a jacket. Living without home heating does create an odd reversal of behavior that took me a while to get on to. When a person is outside he or she is mostly active. Sitting still tends to happen indoors. Therefore the right thing to do is to put on additional clothing when coming inside and to take some off when going out. This feels very queer. Surely if one were to live without heating for an extended period of time, an entire winter for example, useful accommodations would be discovered and old habits and expectations would erode. Some lined pants with zippers up each outside seam, in the style of basketball warm up pants that eliminate the need to push one’s feet down the pants legs, would be a great garment. I presume that eventually what was an unusual experience for me, and something that was constantly on my mind, would become routine.

Long ago I was told by someone whom I thought credible that the common cold is not caused by being cold, (name and folk wisdom not withstanding). I feel I should report that I slept naked as is my usual habit, until about the 5th night during which my bed covers let me down and I felt chilled the whole night through. In the morning I arose with a head cold. After that I’ve slept in long underwear.

If I could heat only one room in a house I’m pretty sure it would be the bathroom. That’s the place where in order to accomplish the mission one must become at least partially undressed. I had no rule against taking a hot shower and fully intended to do so on my regular schedule, but the thought of getting out of a hot shower into a 50 degree room kept me unshowered for nearly a week. As for the other, I can testify that at 50 degrees a hard surface such as a toilet seat is chilling to the touch.

I must admit that in general wearing less clothes is more comfortable than wearing more, so even though I was able to achieve reasonable comfort without the help of a furnace, it might be a little much to expect my beloved to put up with an unheated house. For prospective guests, I think it will be safe to visit us anytime she is in residence. As a matter of fact, her plane will be arriving in about two hours. I think I’d better do something to warm this dump up.

Afterword:

All this thinking about temperature caused me to go on line to read about such things as metabolism, body temperature, etc. There’s research that indicates that rats whose body temperatures were artificially lowered lived longer than their brethren who were left alone.

Live long. Kill your furnace!

A Bit of Duckerel

Racoon crept out on a rainy night.

He needed no moon to give him light.

Had less than a mile to go, that’s right,

Before he reached the pen o, the pen o, the pen o,

Less than a mile to go, that’s right,

Before he reached the pen o.



Then sure enough he got to the pen,

Where the ducks and chickens were kept therein.

He said, “One of you critters gonna grease my chin,

Once I get in that pen o, that pen o, that pen o.

One of you critters gonna grease my chin,

Once I get in that pen o.”



Now Gramma Beth was tucked in her bed.

With nary a care in her ol" grey head.

She knew within her perfect zen,

All her birds were in their pen o, their pen o, their pen o.

She knew within her perfect zen,

All her birds were in their pen o.



Good dog Kodi was in bed too,

Dreaming she was named ol’ Blue

She was chasing raccoons all night long

While making up a song o, a song o, a song o.

She was chasing raccoons all night long,

While making up a song o.



Now Racoon is a wily beast

And on his mind he had a feast

He was not worried in the least

When he got to that pen o, that pen o, that pen o.

He was not worried in the least,

When he got to that pen o.



He started going around that pen,

Up and down and back again,

And once he found a hole in the wire

The po’ duck’s future was dire o, dire o, dire o.

And once he found a hole in the wire,

The po’ duck’s future was dire o.



He did not bother with a knife,

When he ended good old Donald’s life.

Because he is a cultured coon,

He ate him with a spoon o, a spoon o, a spoon o.

Because he is a cultured coon,

He ate him with a spoon o.



Now Racoon isn’t very tall,

But he ate up Donald feathers and all

And though he’s just a little twerp,

He finished with a burp o, a burp o, a burp o.

And though he’s just a little twerp,

He finished with a burp o.





Donald had a wife named Daisy,

Who’s lonely now and going crazy.

She’s pines away for her old beau,

Who’s never on the pond o, the pond o, the pond o.

She pines away for her old beau,

Who’s never on the pond o.





Now if you think this story’s sad,

There one thing more that I could add.

Though nature’s hard and life is mean,

Racoon goes well with vino, vino, vino

Though nature’s hard and life is mean,

Racoon goes will with vino.

Why My Wife Is Pissed Off At You Guys

.
A Letter to Click and Clack & A Puzzler


A senior couple accepted an invitation from old friends to come for an overnight visit. When they arrived and took their things to the guest room, which they knew very well from past visits, they found that it had been remodeled and the furniture rearranged. It was very nicely done and on each side of the bed was a bedside table with a reading lamp, reading material, and other appropriate items. The bathroom across the hall was also redone and featured a new, very artistically designed and tasteful sink.



The visiting husband often wakes in the small hours of the night. Perhaps it is due to his age, or perhaps it is the fact that during the day, at the slightest sign of fatigue, he immediately flops down for a nap. This usually occurs about four times a day. As usual that night, after a few hours of sleep, he awoke and opened his eyes. He lay still on his left side for ten minutes and then rolled over and shook his wife awake saying in an excited whisper, “I’ve got a great puzzler to send to Click and Clack. I’m going to be on the radio.”



What the fellow had thought of was the following series of letters and digits. The puzzle is, of course, what comes next in the sequence and for extra credit how did the series occur to the dunderhead.



SEE                 A verb

9EE                 A shoe size

LEE                A name

8EE                A shoe size

6EE                A shoe size

OhE                An exclamation

IhE                Nothing

5hE                Again nothing, but you should have it by now.

EhE                A Canadian expression with a bonus E









The Solution



Ehh                Come again



The critical clues are that he knew exactly how long he lay thinking about the puzzle and that he had to roll over to wake his wife. That he had to roll over means that he was lying facing away from the center of the bed, that is, toward the bedside table. There his eyes fell upon a digital clock. He saw that the time was 3:35. Because he was on his side the digits of the clock were turned 90 degrees from normal. Instead of running from left to right in his field of vision, they ran downward from top to bottom. This led him to notice that upside down at 3:35 the block numbers of the clock formed the word SEE. An inverted three is an E and an inverted 5 is an S. The rest of the series is the times between 3:36 and 3:44 each turned upside down.



Get a digital clock. Check it out.

Rat in a Trap

The pictures in this posting pertain to the posting below this one which was done yesterday.

 

Here's a fellow who went out to eat at the wrong restaurant last night.

Now he's waiting for a paint job.

And here he is about to go to his new home.

A Pretty Good Rat Trap

We live in a port city, in a house adjacent to about ½ an acre of woods.  In addition we keep and feed chickens and ducks in an enclosure that, while picturesque, is hardly rat proof. Rats therefore are a constant presence. Besides eating a significant amount of poultry feed, if they move into the house, as they occasionally do, they are quite smelly and never clean up after themselves. Because they are very smart and very agile, getting rid of them is a real challenge. Snap traps are effective somewhat less than half the time. Mostly when I return to them I find the traps sprung, but no sign of either rats or bait. Glue trays have never held an animal long enough for me to get there and dispatch the creature. Usually if Mr. Rat does tread in the glue the ensuing struggle ends with the tray stuck to a wall or chair leg or bed spread with no prey to be found. Poison disappears soon after placement, but the general rat population never seems much impacted. Following are pictures of a trap that works pretty well for me. While the trap captures the rats, it doesn’t actually dispose of them. That part remains to be done in step two.

The boot is just there for scale. The cage is 12" x 12" x 24".

The cage open for baiting.  2 x 2's add weight and stability to the unhinged edges of the cage.  The base was once a door on a kitchen cabinet.

 

The bait basket is mounted on wire legs and connected to the trip mechanism by a stiff wire.  When the basket is disturbed the trip mechanism fires.

 

The trip mechanism is a conventional snap trap

The firing pin is a 9" bolt.  It supports the cage in a raised position.  The bottom of the pin is within the path of the snap rod on the snap trap.  When the bait basket is disturbed the snap trap releases and the firing pin is displaced allowing the cage to fall.  The rat survives, but is trapped in the cage.  (See photos above posted on January 31.)

The Set Trap

Step Two: Disposition

A rat dumped into a large garbage can will die of exposure in a couple of days.  They can jump about 18 inches and I'm sure could pull themselves up if they got hold of the lip of a bucket.  Water at the bottom of the garbage can would no doubt speed up the rat's demise.  Although my wife doesn't like it, I prefer to take the captives to a nature preserve a couple of miles from our home and let them go.  She thinks they might return to us so now I spray paint them green before the release.  I am allowed to practice catch and release until such time as we see a green rat around the house.

Cultural Voyeurism

My wife and I have now lived about 7 decades each. In that time expertise has been developed by only one of us, in only one field. My wife was a better than average pediatric occupational therapist. Except for that we have lived totally superficial lives. As an example of our lack of knowledge neither of us could say if merlot is white, pink, or red. Rather than delve at length into anything we have sought variety in our experiences. We have skimmed lightly over the surface of activities. We are dilettantes. We think of ourselves as cultural voyeurs. We have played bingo on a Saturday night at the fire hall in a small town on the Oregon coast. We have been supernumeraries in a production by the Seattle opera company. We have passed a New Year’s Eve putting flowers on a parade float in Pasadena, CA. In two days we will host a cultural voyage for some friends into the realm of professional American football. People not often found at sporting events are coming to our house to watch a playoff game between the Chicago Bears and the Seattle Seahawks.



From the participants' perspective professional football combines strength, speed, agility, conditioning, honed skills, and brains. Not withstanding the myth of baseball as the intellectual’s game, football is clearly the most cerebral of American sports. I would guess that the average football play takes 10 or 15 seconds to run. The teams then have 30 seconds to plan what they will attempt next. Though they seldom use all 30 seconds, it is clear the actual time that play is going on is less than half the minutes in the game, not counting time outs. Football is mostly a planning activity and of course the planning that goes on between plays is nothing as compared with the planning, and study that happens between games and between seasons. This is true for both offense and defense. Football contains a very highly refined intellectual component.



Football is also the king of the team sports. In baseball where there are nine players on the field only one or two are doing anything most of the time. The rest are just waiting. Even when the ball has been hit and is in play many field players will not really have anything to do while at least five members of the team at bat will necessarily be seated on the bench. Always. Basketball is the same. Most of the time not more than two or three players on each team are involved in the action. Frequently only one offensive player is active with only one or two defensive players opposing his efforts. In football every player is active on every play and the actual outcome of any given play is dependent on the success or failure of most of the players on both teams. What players know in a deep visceral way as the game advances and what fans barely glimpse is how each guy is doing against his immediate opponent. Are you mostly winning those small battles or are you mostly getting beaten? Football games are won and lost by the blockers and those who would be blocked, or not. The spectators, with their eyes on the drama of where the ball is, miss most of the real show.



Our cultural voyage on Sunday will not be into the realm of players and coaches. It will be into the realm of the fans. From the fan’s perspective football involves sitting (mostly), snacking, and vocalizing. We can surmise that the intensity of the fan’s experience is substantial given the time and money devoted to it. That intensity is related to two things. One is identification with the team. It is apparently possible for people of ordinary intelligence to ignore the fact that nobody on “their” team has ever even heard of them, let alone actually cares about them. There is a curious asymmetry between fans and players. While the fans know something about the players, the players know nothing about the individual fans. Somehow fans manage to overlook the fact that they have almost nothing to do with how well the team does and instead feel personally fulfilled by success and chastened by defeat. This remarkable suspension of disbelief underpins the modern sports industry. Billions of dollars are spent on account of it, I am sure.



The other pillar on which the sports industry stands is gambling. In this case caring about the outcome is at least sensible. My father was a lifetime gambler, mostly on sporting events. Although he had a couple of good scores over the course of 70 or 80 years he must certainly have been a net loser in the long run. In any case he never got into trouble from his gambling. I now see his gaming as a savings program which paid a negative interest rate and provided random withdrawals. Almost every night he had a handful of “tickets” on one or more games. Each ticket had possible scores for the competing teams and when the end result of the games matched his ticket, he won. Buying the tickets was his “savings account deposit". Winning represented a “withdrawal”. Though the effective interest rate was negative, the randomness of the withdrawals made it way more fun than any bank account. Typically when a withdrawal occurred he would use the money to buy something he wanted. Thus he saved up for many of the tools I now have.



Our friend Ellie, who knows a lot about a lot of topics, including that brevity is the soul of wit, replied to our invitation as follows. I will come “as long I don’t have to either KNOW what a tight end is, or HAVE one.”