Andrew's View of the Week

As The Pizza Cooks — Episode 27

Posted on 07/14/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

Here in the high desert we’ve had record breaking heat. We’ve been over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for about eight days. You may have heard other desert dwellers says, “But it’s a dry heat.” Well that’s true, humidity has been around 15 %, but that’s a dry kind of dry. The simple fact is that anything over 90 is hot, too hot.

My only surprise has been that we’ve not seen more wild fires start up. We’ve had a whole weekend of thunderstorms with dry lightning — a basic recipe for burning forests, but so far, only a couple of fires and so far very little smoke has reached us.

What hasn’t surprised me is that our A/C died just after the heatwave started. I’ll take the blame for that one. I knew the unit was 22 years old and on it’s last legs. I had researched an HVAC company to call and get a quote for a new one, but you guessed it — I hadn’t made that call. So a week ago Friday we came home from an evening out to sense that it was warmer in our house than should be. After checking around I heard a sound kind of like an electric transformer shorting out. Last time I heard that sound, I was working in a factory and let’s just say we maintenance techs had a bad day and long evening doing repairs.

So I shut the system off.

Now, don’t cry too hard here, it’s a big house and there are two A/C systems here so at least half the house has been keeping cool. Just not the side we sleep in, but a few well placed fans and life’s not too bad. Not great, but not horrible.

I did finally call the A/C company I’d selected and their tech confirmed my suspicions that the compressor had seized up and the whole thing is a write off. Now, you should understand that it’s me and maybe two thousand other people in town with the same problem and all calling the same few A/C companies. That means, I’m still waiting to hear when they’ll be out to replace the A/C units. Yes, at least I’m smart enough to get them both done.

This would be a good time to mention that my writing office and sewing room is in the non-A/C side of the house so I’ve not been back here writing too much. There hasn’t been much blogging from here as a result. I have been able to make some progress on my writing projects thanks to a new creative practice Heather and I have started. One of the bigger problems with doing something creative is distractions and the home you live in has plenty.

What we’ve come up with is doing an “artist outing”. This is where we get in the car, drive to a local park. I take my laptop computer while Heather takes a sketchbook. Normally we pick places with a great overlook of the city or mountains. We also take chairs, water, hats, and so on and go early in the morning before it heats up to boiling point. I’ll set a timer for 30 minutes and then I free write while Heather draws something. We then take home our work for refinement. It’s a great way to force yourself into doing some creative work. Heather’s got a couple of nice water colors in progress and I was able to start and finish a poem for one of my poetry collections.

I’m finding it a valuable way to focus and keep the projects moving.

I do take one distracting thing with me on these outings — my cell phone, just in case the A/C company calls to say they’re ready to install my new system. Come on, there are priorities here.

Posted in As The Pizza Cooks | Tagged A/C, As The Pizza Cooks, creativity, heat wave, HVAC, writing process | 27 Comments

The Calendar

Posted on 06/27/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

This month the church’s writers group had three words to choose from: Dance, memory and the calendar. Here’s what I wrote for them:

I’m sitting here looking at the three words, “dance,” “memory” and “the calendar.” Dance is off the list. Nobody should be subjected to watching me dance. The next word, memory, has possibilities and I thought about what I could write about it, but I can’t remember what I wanted to say.

Which leaves me with “The Calendar.” First there is no one, “The Calendar.” There’s a ton of them: Roman, Julian, Gregorian, Jewish, Lunar, Islamic, Hindi, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Mayan … I mean are we talking an arithmetical or astronomical calendar? Are we talking about just keeping track of days or are we including concepts like months, years, and centuries. What about the time of day? Is that including in this mythical, “The Calendar?”

I suppose we could just narrow things down a bit and say we’re talking about the Gregorian calendar that most of us use. I could spend a lot of time diving into the history of the Gregorian calendar and how it is really just a Julian calendar with some better corrections for the fact that it’s an arithmetical calendar trying to be an astronomical calendar that maps to the solar year. Of course it doesn’t — never has and won’t. Currently the solar year is 365.2422 days long while the Gregorian year is 365.2425 days long on average. We only get to that number because we sometimes have a leap year. The obvious problem is that the numbers don’t match and over the next million years or so the solar year will likely get longer as the earth starts spinning slower and we’ll need a new calendar.

Not that it really matters because most of us won’t be here then and honestly these days the only use I have for a calendar is to know if I have a doctor’s appointment. It’s also useful to know if it’s July or December so I can decide if the heater or the A/C should be on.

Of course all of this makes me think about leap seconds and the havoc that caused in my computer lab in 1998, and again in 2005. I’ll grant you it’s more about time in terms of minutes and seconds like you see on a watch rather than whether it’s Tuesday or Friday, but it’s a similar concept to a leap year — correcting between the time on a watch and observed solar time. Did you know that there are three kinds of time keeping methods? There’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which is used as the reference for the civil time displayed on your cell phone. In the past this was also called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Then there is International Atomic Time (TAI) — the acronym based on the French spelling, but that’s not important. Lastly we have UT1 which is the observed solar time which you get by observing when the sun crosses its highest point in the sky at around noon.

As you can imagine these three times never quite match up. Earth’s rotation is erratic and varies due to a lot of factors you don’t want to hear about. Which brings us to the problem that the Atomic clock never varies (it’s Atomic) while the observed time bounces all over the place caused UTC time to often be wrong by plus or minus a second.

So a leap second is added every so often to correct the whole thing. This process causes an untold amount of grief to us computer engineers for little no real value. Computers have enough trouble with leap years and daylight savings time. Try to add an extra second to a minute in a random day just causes a computer to have the computer equivalent of a nervous break down. Not all computers, some are better at not caring what time it actually is than others. About half the ones in my lab did okay while the others had a problem with NTP configuration but I’am reasonably sure you don’t want to hear the details of that.

Well, after thinking about all three words, I think I’ll just skip writing this month and do something for next time.

Posted in Writing | Tagged calendar, february, gregorian-calendar, history, leap-year, writer's group, writing, writing prompt | 14 Comments

As The Pizza Cooks — Episode 26

Posted on 06/24/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

So this morning I had this really great idea for a blog post. Yeah, can’t remember a bit of it now. It was something to do with how this one word could mean two very different things. I promise that if I could remember what the word was, you’d be very entertained. I knew I should have written it down when I thought of it, but I was driving at the time and didn’t want to pull over. I had paper and two pencils so I could have, I just didn’t.

Thinking about it now, I suppose I could have recorded it on my cell phone as a voice memo. Could have, but I’ve never done that before and I only just thought of it now. That thought would have been more helpful eight hours ago when I was thinking of the word and all its meanings. Of course there was the whole, “I’m driving and don’t want to stop to look at my phone.” I didn’t have my phone plugged into AppleCarPlay so I couldn’t ask Siri to help. Actually I’m not really sure where my phone was while I was driving — mostly I was thinking about the word and the tailgater behind me.

Have you noticed that as you get older you forget peoples names, movie titles, books you’ve read and so on? It’s happening to me more and more. I don’t worry about it too much as most of my friends have the same thing. We have conversations like this:

“Remember that movie with that famous actor.”

“Yeah, the one where he arrested the son of the rancher. Rio something.”

“Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about.”

It can take a few minutes to fill in all the details and often requires the use of a cell phone and google. By the time we figure out what movie we were talking about, we forget why we were talking about that movie.

It seems to happen a lot. Just the other day I was in the backyard and saw this stack of irrigation parts and started to organize them to take them into the shed. After a few minutes I realized that I still had open trenches in the lawn and these parts needed to go there, not back to the workshop.

Yes, I’ve been digging trenches again. It’s just part of having a garden in the desert. Plants need water, water freezes in the winter so you burry the water pipes so they don’t freeze. If you want plants, you dig.

But I didn’t come here today to talk about my memory or gardens. I wanted to talk blogs and writing projects. Hang on, I think I made notes about this, be right back …

Nope, can’t find ‘em. I’m not even sure I made them.

Well, I’m a big believer in following the creative energy and doing those things that energize you and drop the things that don’t. I’ve written a lot of posts on this blog over the years, 1,327 to be exact and in the last few months I’ve been feeling less and less energized about writing here, but I don’t want to drop it completely. I have been enjoying the “As the Music Plays” posts so likely I do those irregularly and the occasional pizza post, but not much else. This Friday I sat down to do a post with a my assortment of Friday jokes, but honestly it started to feel like I’ve told all those before. I didn’t really have the creative energy to slog though another set so I didn’t do it. I’ve done 381 of those “wisdom” posts and it’s now time to stop that. I might start up again, but for now, I’m done.

I have a few other writing projects I’ll be devoting time to and for now I won’t be posting here as much as I used to. How often? Not sure, maybe a couple times a month and likely more about my other writing interests.

This would have been a more fun post if I could have just remembered that word, sorry.

Posted in As The Pizza Cooks | Tagged As The Pizza Cooks, blog, blogging, creative writing, memory, writing | 24 Comments

As The Music Plays #14 – Cat’s in the Cradle

Posted on 06/22/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

This is a series of posts about the music I listen to while writing. This time I’m up to a Harry Chapin song, Cat’s in the Cradle. This song was released in 1974 as a single and was on Chapin’s album Verities & Balderdash. It topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in December 1974 and was nominated for a Grammy in 1975. I was a freshman in high school when I first heard it and it immediately resonated with me in kind of a weird way — I didn’t particularly like the music of the song. The lyrics seemed a bit obvious, but still I knew it was an important lesson and figured a lot of people didn’t understand.

For those who’ve never heard this song, it’s the story of a father who’s too busy to spend time with his son. The song ends with the father as an old man and the son being too busy to spend time with his father. A bit of a morality tale – don’t have time for someone, they won’t have time for you. This is the exact opposite of the relationship I had with my father. My father was always there and I can’t think of a time when I needed him that he failed to do his best. He didn’t always do what I wanted and sometimes his help was more of a burden, but if I called, he showed up. We always managed to find time for a phone call or visit. I’ve heard from many people that this song speaks to them because it speaks to the pain and feelings of abandonment they have with their parents.

Still there is something about this song that makes me always want to listen to it again and again. Chapin doesn’t waste time getting into the story when in the third line we hear, “But there were planes to catch and bills to pay.” The last verse of the song is a turnabout when we find that son now is too busy to spend time with his father. This is foreshowed in the first verse when the son says, “I’m gonna be like you dad …”

Interestingly Chapin based this song on a poem his wife, Sandra Gaston, wrote about an awkward relationship between her first husband and his father. Chapin then turned this into a speculation about his relationship with his young son, Josh. Gaston and Chapin often shared each other’s writings and often inspired each other. In the research I’ve done, I can’t find anything to suggest that Chapin was anything but a good father. Chapin is quoted as saying that this song scares him to death.

That’s what attracts me to this song — the notion that how we treat others is exactly how they’ll treat us. That’s kind of scary if you think about it too much. The other thing that attracts me to this song is the quality of the writing. It’s good solid poetry. Take the chorus. He starts with two lines that reenforce the feeling of childhood with the lines, “And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon / Little boy blue and the man in the moon”. All four phrases are childhood things, cat’s cradle — a game, silver spoon — a gift given to babies (and a hit at being a privileged child), little boy blue — a nursery rhyme and finally man in the moon — a reference to things we tell children about the moon. Note that some covers of the song change “man in the moon” to “man on the moon”. The last three lines tell the whole story and make it clear that the son wants the father to come home, but everyone knows this is never going to happen, a classic case of dramatic irony. “When you comin’ home, Dad? / I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then / You know we’ll have a good time then”

That good time never comes. The chorus stays the same until the last two when dad and son are reversed and we hear, “When you comin’ home son … we’ll get together then Dad …” and then the circle is completed.

Chapin has plenty of other places in this song when he has a way of telling volumes with just a single phrase like, “What I’d really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys.” Here the son is clear that he doesn’t want to spend time with his father and is likely acting in just the same way his father has. You can feel the hurt in the line.

This song ends up on my writing playlist because of the quality of the writing and it’s strong story telling plus the way it disturbs my mind when I hear it. It’s a reminder to me that not all stories are happy and that in writing we have to confront the disturbing and uncomfortable aspects of our world.

Sadly, Chapin died young in 1981 as the result of a car accident and a lot of creativity died with him.

Here’s a YouTube link to Chapin’s original version of the song:

Not too many people have covered this song, Johnny Cash did one along with a few others, but interestingly the most popular cover was in 1992 by the hard rock Band Ugly Kid Joe: