August 3, 2003

  • Bugs


    Okay, none of them are bugs. They are all invertebrates, though, and they are all pests that annoy me. How do you deal with snails, ants and spiders?

July 29, 2003

July 23, 2003

  • Food Poisoning


    When Cathy flew back from Panamá, the airline starved her. She was trying to lose weight, but to go in excess of 14 hours with just one small package of pretzels is ridiculous. Due to airline foulups, when she reached Miami she had to sprint from the International Terminal to the Domestic Terminal (in her high heels) with only 22 minutes left of what was supposed to have been a four hour layover, making it impossible to pick up a snack between flights. She vowed she'll never fly American Airlines again.

    She left last night, by Delta, for a Panama Canal Reunion in Orlando, Florida. With memories of near starvation still fresh in her mind, she decided to carry a sandwich to the airport. We stopped at the local Subway and we each ordered the Italian BMT, varying our two sandwiches only in the veggies added to them. There are many vegetables I have to avoid and a few I can eat that Cathy doesn't like, so the vegetables on our two sandwiches were completely different. Only the meat, cheese and bread were the same.

    I dropped Cathy at the airport about 90 minutes ahead of her scheduled flight time, but the airline pushed the flight back an additional 15 minutes, giving her plenty of time to eat her entire sandwich while waiting. I returned home and ate mine with Rocky sitting in front of me, staring at me, not because he was hungry but because Cathy had vanished again.

    At 2:00 this morning I was wakened with an urgent need to visit the bathroom, a need that was to be repeated through the night and well into the morning. When Cathy eventually called, at 11:00, to report that she and her luggage had arrived safely at her destination and that all was well, I mentioned my gut problem. She told me she had been visited by similar upsets during the morning hours.

    That and the timing, a little over three hours from consumption to symptoms, led me to believe the problem was food poisoning.

    Cathy had asked me to drop her car off for servicing while she was gone, so I stopped at Subway on my way to the dealership to report the problem. While making it very clear that I didn't blame them and that I had been pleased by the steps they had been taking to produce a healthy product, I warned them that there was a distinct possibility that some of the meat products they were using were contaminated.

    I never got angry. I never raised my voice. I went out of my way to be helpful and friendly.

    I got results.

July 12, 2003

  • Contrariness


    When I was young, in my teens, I was somewhat of a social outcast. Well, I had always been a social outcast, mostly by choice, but as a teen people began pointing it out to me, sometimes with malice in mind. I gravitated to what became known as geeky endeavors in later years. Naturally the girls I was attracted to were my polar opposites and I had no chance in the world with them ... or so I thought, and was told, at the time. Later, when it was too late to do anything about it, I was advised otherwise ... but that is a different story.

    In my third decade, the girls I was attracted to always turned out to be either nurses or teachers (or students of those arts). Both are occupations for people who can tolerate frustration and unpleasant working conditions. In that period I was working at geeky things but hanging out with two different groups, one of musicians and the other that could loosely be described as highly individualistic loners who somehow banded together against all odds. Convinced I was a poor fit with society in general, I failed to make any close friendships. By the end of that decade I had been living on a desert island for two years and was being asked to leave, to take employment in a land I had been avoiding because of the tales my father told of his misadventures there, Panamá.

    I never planned to stay in Panamá. When I arrived I expected to leave within thirty to sixty days. I kept trying to leave for the next two decades.

    I found myself speaking Spanish, a language I had never studied and never expected to have to speak, almost more often than I spoke my own native tongue. I had studied Latin in high school and had briefly flirted with trying to learn French in college. With my background in Latin and French, I enjoyed my brief study of Chaucer more for the language than for the literature, although that was fun, too. I dealved into the roots of English and, in my Anthropology studies, spent some time studying their version of the science of linguistics.

    The Spanish of the capital city of Panamá is relatively pure, much like the language you would expect to encounter throughout Spain. The Interior of the country, however, is occupied by immigrants, many from Europe, especially Eastern Europe, for whom Spanish is a second language. Even among later generations, the language spoken in the Interior has taken on a flavor that is distinctly different. Speaking it is not for the faint of heart, as even the sounds and cadences are different from what is heard in the capital. It was like an Oriental having to learn both English and Cockney. Eventually, after many mistakes, some embarassing, I learned well enough to get by.

    Somehow I acquired a new family during those years. It wasn't something I had planned on doing but the result of seeing something I wanted come available and acting before the opportunity passed me by, a series of events that, in hindsight, I had very little control over.

    People who work with computers are, necessarily, masochistic. That is, you have to either enjoy pain and frustration or have in incredibly high tolerance for it to continue working with computers. Computers are as contrary as anything else in my life has been. My threshold of pain must be shifting, though, because I've begun to enjoy it less. Perhaps that's a sign that my passtime has indeed become an addiction.

    My wife and daughter are away. They are in Panamá with the family we have there. There's nobody but me and the dog. So I decided to have a night out.

    I went to a KPLUG (Kernel-Panic Linux Users Group) meeting to listen to a two hour presentation on tape backup software.

    At each meeting, certain goodies are raffled off. At this meeting, three of us whose combined ages totaled two centuries were among the winners. I walked off with a book on C++ programming. I don't do programming and especially not in C++, one of the most frustrating languages devised. I could have had one of the two Cisco routers that were available but I have no idea what to do with one. None of the three of us had previously won anything at these meetings. Two other people each won twice, including one who was attending for the very first time. They always seem to win two prizes when they show up for the first time.

    I have arranged to dispose of my prize and I've been thinking about bus drivers and the holidays they take. A normal person would have gone out to see a movie, would have hit the bars or the casinos or would have gotten a decent meal. I spent my time with misfits like myself, people who spend significant amounts of time banging their heads against the wall because computer work, done correctly, is terribly frustrating.

    As a further example of the contrariness of life: I dislike Windows. I resent the Microsoft corporation and their attitudes towards their customers, including the fact that their profit margin exceeds 80%. I don't much care for Apple and don't use their products although they are superior in many ways. I do like Linux and have two different Linux systems at the moment. But both of my Linux systems are so badly screwed up that I find myself using Windows about 95% of the time ... and that is going to increase because I'm about to drop my dial-up ISP, leaving me with only the high speed link. It doesn't work with either Linux system.

    I know that compatible WiFi cards exist to connect my Linux systems to my router. I spent a good part of the day today visiting computer stores, trying to find one. All of the stores in the area seem to stock the same three brands of Windows-only hardware. To get something that will work with my Linux systems, I'll have to special order it through the Internet using my Windows system. I've tried to compile the modules that are supposed to work with my Linux systems. So far, my efforts have amounted to total failure. I'll keep trying, of course, but the odds are against me.

    If it worked, I wouldn't get my dose of frustration.

July 4, 2003

  • Simplifying Making Soup


    When I was young, making soup was a project. I would accumulate bones in bags in the freezer for months. When I had enough, I would boil them, often in multiple pots, for up to five days, until they were reduced to a milky liquid, after straining, and a pile of grit that no longer resembled bones. I would use the liquid as the base for a series of soups, adding meats and vegetables each day. The last day I would add turnips or parsnips, after which you can't store the remainder because it becomes too bitter to use. Later I got a pressure cooker and reduced my boiling of bones to a single day. I also stopped adding ingredients after the initial batch, keeping the soup for two or three days instead of a week.

    I have either become more efficient or have gotten a whole lot lazier. I now make my limited edition soup in under two hours. I start by boiling my meat (yesterday it was eight chicken wings) with a small amount of grain.

    I don't believe in stripping my meat of all its natural fat. The fat carries a number of nutrients as well as a good portion of the flavor. However, the meat and its accompanying fat and bones should be marinated. A marinade is any combination of an oil and an acid. For some unknown reason, this combination works enzymatic magic on connective tissue to tenderize and break it down while making it more flavorful. The acid also helps extract calcium from any bones that are present. I usually use extra virgin olive oil or a nut oil and a sweet vinegar, roughly a tablespoonful of each. I don't measure.

    At the same time I start the meat, I throw in a couple of tablespoons of grain: barley or rice, or both, but you don't want very much. It's there mostly to thicken the soup. If you want to add some flavor to the soup, gently fry the grain until it starts to turn brown before adding it to the nearly boiling water. Add it slowly; it will sizzle and may spray hot liquid. You can also add a few beans if that appeals to you. Just don't add too many. A tablespoon is about right.

    Let the meat and grain simmer up to an hour. Add a finely sliced celery stalk if you want a bit of saltiness, a finely sliced or grated carrot for sweetness, if you want. I add a large coarsely chopped onion, a pinch of cayenne pepper and some anise seeds. Let it cook another half hour or so, until the onion is soft and sweet. Chopped, peeled tomatoes or sliced mushrooms can be added near the end. I don't use salt but if you must use it, add it at the end, just before serving.

July 2, 2003

  • Madhouse


    Our home could never be said to be a center of calm. Things go wrong on a regular basis and I long ago gave up on expecting anything I planned to do to work out. My plans for yesterday -- originally for Sunday but I was forced to postpone them a few days -- were only to barbeque a couple of kielbasa sausage for the three of us.

    Things started to derail with -- as usual -- an early phone call. This call was a signal from Panamá to call Delia's sister Stella for a longer talk. We do the calling because we get much lower rates on phone calls. Anyway, the signal only gets used for emergencies and the emergencies usually have to do with the health of Delia's 93 year old mother, Carmela. Delia was almost in tears when she made the call, before getting any information, because she was afraid of what might have happened.

    Her fears were justified. Carmela was in the hospital, in the emergency room. She had gone five days without a bowel movement, something had gotten strained nearly to the breaking point and had gotten infected, Carmela began to swell up and things went downhill from there. The doctors were afraid to operate, for a variety of reasons, but were able somehow to extract over two kilos (five pounds) of excrement and are now treating Carmela for toxic shock or something much like it.

    Delia became more hyper than normal. She wanted an immediate flight to Panamá but she kept getting in the way of our doing anything to arrange it. We finally came up with four options: last night's American red eye flight, this morning's early Delta flight or flights on Thursday or Saturday. I reminded Delia that Friday was July 4 and that she should avoid trying to fly the day before or the day after. She agreed, which eliminated the last two options. Delia decided to take Delta, so Cathy opted to go on the red eye flight. Cathy knows better than to consider sitting next to Delia for extended periods when Delia is near hysteria.

    For Cathy, packing was easy. She had done her laundry last week. She dumped stuff into a couple of suitcases and was ready to go. I had to do three batches of laundry for Delia and she was packing up until the last minute ... and still managed to delay our departure half an hour beyond the deadline I gave her.

    Fortunately the people at Delta were very good to Delia. When they learned of her situation, they took her out of the check-in line and brought her to the front of the first class check-in line, then put her in a wheelchair to justify taking her to the front of the security line, which was as long as I have ever seen it, a double queue extending half-way back across the pedestrian bridge over about six lanes of traffic. I had to leave her at the security check, even though it was still an hour before her flight, because I didn't have a ticket and couldn't go any farther.

    She should have left two hours ago. I haven't heard anything, so I assume she's on her way. Cathy should be landing in Panamá just about now. Hopefully she will send me an email in the next couple of hours to confirm her safe arrival.

    Now, suddenly, it's just me and Cathy's dog. Relative calm is beginning to settle in.

June 27, 2003

  • Finding Gold in Cuyamaca


    Looking east from San Diego on a clear day, you will see a series of three peaks, the Cuyamacas. They are, from south to north, Cuyamaca Peak, Middle Peak and North Peak. They are at about 6,500 feet but don't seem that high because the surrounding area is also high land. If the day isn't so clear and you can't see them, then they have lived up to their name, which means "beyond the clouds" in the Cumayaay Indian language.

    Gold was discovered in those hills in 1870, near the town of Julian. Very near the town of Julian. Within five months the first mine had been dug. By 1910 about six million dollars worth of gold had been mined from the mountains. No gold worth mining has been discovered since that time. Almost all of the old mines have either burned down or been filled in by bulldozing.

    The gold from the area took the form of a very fine flour or dust, not nuggets or wire, and it was found in clusters of quartz crystals in the schertz typical of the region. Because it was so fine as to be almost invisible, much gold was lost and placer gold mining was difficult -- you can't recover what you can't see.

    A typical mine started with a vertical shaft, the deepest going only six hundred feet. When promising materials were encountered, horizontal drifts were constructed and the quartz collected from the walls and ceilings of those areas by blasting. The quartz would then be raised to the surface by bucket, crushed in a mill and treated chemically to aggregate the gold.

    Miners received about $2.50 per day for this dark, dangerous work. For comparison, ordinary laborers of the time received between $0.50 and $1.00 per day wages. The work mostly consisted of drilling a pattern of holes in the rock with hammer and drills, then filling the holes with black powder or other explosive and setting it off, then moving the rubble to the surface by bucket. At first the only light was candles; later they had acetelene lamps.

    Six million dollars may not seem like much of a gold rush. There are many houses in the San Diego area valued that much or higher. But the real value of the mining is not the gold that was removed but the tradition that was created.

    In October it is almost impossible to find a place to park in or around Julian. The place overflows with tourists. They come, in part, for the annual apple festival ... but Julian, the apple festival, the whole frontier atmosphere of the area, all exist to a great extent because of the mining that was done there. You can actually tour one of the old mines, the Eagle mine, for about $8, inside the city of Julian, and it is a tour worth taking if only to impress upon you the hardships those old miners endured.

    They are still mining gold in the Cuyamacas, but the gold is tourism.

  • Being Cheap


    The class today at Oasis was about being cheap. Really! Seniors need to know how to live cheaply in this modern world, particularly with all of the scams going around.

    Ms. Sally Gary was our instructor for the class. She has written a book about the best deals and steals in San Diego. Her eighth version came from the printers on Monday and we were the first to receive copies.

    Sally is a recovering (that means retired) teacher. Having nothing better to do one day, she wandered into a book store where she found a book on how to get things cheap or free in and around the Bay Area. A few days later, in another book store, she found a similar book that covered goodies available in Los Angeles. It immediately occurred to her that she could produce a similar work for the San Diego area.

    But why do all of that tedious research for yourself when other people will do it for you and pay you in the process? Sally went to the administrators of the local community college and asked if they would like her to give a series of seminars on finding local bargains, with the students expected to contribute heavily to a list of bargain sources to be published later.

    The list grew to book proportions, so Sally took a class on how to get a book published, a subject she now teaches in seminars. The first slim volume attracted a questionaire, which she filled out and returned and which resulted in a newspaper article being written about her.

    Then, early one morning when she was still in bed, the phone rang. Would she consent to a telephone interview? She tried to refuse, but they insisted, so she said, "Just a moment," and went to get her calendar. When she got back to the phone, she heard someone say, "Go ahead, you're on the air now". That interview went so well she soon had the local television station asking if they could film one of her seminars. She had a seminar the following day and it was televised.

    The publicity didn't hurt sales of the book a bit. The book has grown a bit over the years despite removal of volatile sections like the personals. Singles are still mentioned but they get about half a page ... and another book. Other sections may soon become independent documents in their own right for similar reasons, such as the section on travel bargains, which can be expanded as it becomes something resembling a magazine.

    At least one man credits this book with saving his marriage. His wife was going to leave him because he was boring and never wanted to go anywhere. He started through the section on "101+ Free & Bargain Things To Do" (chapter 3) and the one on "Cultural Events For Less" (chapter 4), showed his wife a good time without breaking their budget and mended their relationship.

    I got off to a bad start this morning. First, both of my big toes are swollen and sore because the podiatrist cut them up a bit Tuesday morning when he worked on my feet. I don't have much sensation in my feet anyway, but with my feet hurting I walk funny. As a matter of fact, because my balance is shot to hell I stagger like a drunk.

    Then when I went to shave I didn't notice a pimple on my chin until the razor passed over it and it started gushing dark blood. I thought I had controlled the bleeding. Delia and Cathy had both left by the time I came upstairs and I never looked in the mirror until I got back from class. When I did see my reflection, I discovered a big black scab, nearly a centimeter wide and more than a centimeter high, in the middle of my chin and, worse than that, a thin line of pale amber stuff leading from the big scab all the way down to my neck. I guess it wasn't my imagination that people were avoiding me today.

June 24, 2003

  • A Fix For My Book Addiction



    After my class on Forensic Investigation at Oasis today, I decided to drop in at the nearby local B. Dalton Booksellers to watch the feeding frenzy among Harry Potter fanatics. Alas! The books were all gone. Except for some audio books on cassette and CD, the only thing left was a signed deluxe boxed copy, originally priced at $60 but sale priced at $36. It lasted mere seconds.

    As disappointed customers mobbed the counter, one customer braved the rush to return a copy of the catch of the day. It was somebody I know, somebody Delia works with. I advised her she could get more for it selling it just outside the store but she insisted she was content just to return it for what she paid for it. It was sold again immediately.

    All of the other books in the series were there, too, at 20% discount, generating zero interest. Other Harry Potter merchandise was doing poorly, too. People didn't want toys, they wanted the book.

    I wandered back into the nearly deserted inner recesses of the shop. There, in the greatly diminished science section, between "The Science of Harry Potter's Magic" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein's Theories" -- no, I'm not making those titles up -- I found a couple of treasures.

    The first is an Irish teenage mathematical whiz's autobiography. Gals with brains turn me on, I guess. How does a sports-loving sixteen year old girl gain nation-wide recognition and an international reputation for her discoveries in Internet cryptography? I suppose it helps to have a father who lectures on Mathematics at Ireland's Cork Institute of Technology. For the rest of the answer, I guess I'll have to read the book. That is, after all, what I bought it for.

    The second book has to do with the universe, no less. The back cover calls the author, Timothy Ferris, "the greatest science writer in the world" -- a considerable claim -- which, if even close to being true, is reason enough to get the book. I've seen the book before, though, as a couple of my science teachers at Oasis have recommended it ... and carry dogeared copies of their own. It doesn't have as many pictures in it as the first book does, but it still looks like what I consider a fun read.

    I did get another book later. I went to the Costco store on Friars Road. When I walked in there were about nine ... eight ... seven ... six Harry Potter books left on the counter, along with a few CD audio books. The people grabbing the books didn't notice the two pallets of books being wheeled in as they fought for the last few. When I left (with my copy) I noticed that the remaining pallet was half empty and the crowd around it had grown.

June 14, 2003

  • United Nations Class


    The class at Oasis this time was lightly attended, perhaps because of the subject, whether or not the United Nations was relevant in our modern world. Mr. Bush has been presenting a case for their being ineffective, based primarily on their not carrying out his will. His propaganda machine is well oiled and his government exerts great control over the news media, with the result that most Americans have come to view the United Nations as ineffective and indecisive.

    Since Mr. Bush couldn't get the U.N. to rubber stamp his war efforts, he bypassed them and went to war without their approval. The fact that the war was unjustified and unnecessary doesn't seem to have bothered his people, who seem to think they have somehow improved the world by their military action.

    But military action is only the beginning. It is simply the opening of the bag of worms. The really hard and expensive parts are yet to come and will probably take decades or centuries to sort themselves out.

    But an easy military victory doesn't make Mr. Bush right, or his opponents wrong, about the role of the United Nations. About 80% of the efforts of the U.N. are devoted to improving the economies and health of the world rather than to military or political matters, and it is these programs that will make a difference in the world in the long run.

    Our instructor for the class was involved in supervising several of the elections in Kosovo. She has also been involved in other U.N. activities. She has close friends working in relief and education efforts in Afghanistan who report that the elected government there still exists, despite armed tribal warlords, and that it is safe to travel about anywhere in the country.

    I have heard in several classes lately that the biggest health threat in areas like Afghanistan is ignorance of sanitation. Even measures as simple as the washing of hands would save large numbers of lives, one estimate being about two thirds of those now dying. But it is hard to teach someone to wash their hands when their daily supply of water is limited to the amount we use in one average flush.

    East Timor is a brand new country, thanks to the efforts of the U.N. After 25% of their people were slaughtered, they, with no experience at administration or government, had to be taught everything about the process before they could hold municipal elections and, later, decide on a constitution for themselves. They now have a functioning government of their own.

    Organizations like the World Health Organization and UNICEF were mentioned only briefly, partly because a small number of highly vocal members of the audience kept asking inappropriate questions having little to do with the topic at hand.