Wednesday — Where Have You Been?

Posted on 07/31/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

I’ve been away from working on the blog. Here’s a couple of pictures of what I’ve been up to:

On Sunday, 7/21 we had a thunderstorm that dropped three inches of rain, with hail and wind in about an hour. It looked like this from my back door:

The result was flash flooding, mud and blocked roads. The good news is that it didn’t affect my house, but a few houses down the street ended up with water and mud in garages and yards. Some folks had their whole landscaping washed away and a small number of people had water in their living spaces. The county emergency services reported that about 100 homes were affected. Here’s the view from my yard about an hour after the rain stopped:

I live at the top of the street and this is the downhill side of the road up to my place. You can’t really see it in this picture, but the fire department responded and out in that mess are two firefighters trying to unblock the storm drains. At the height of the flooding the water was about a foot higher than this picture shows.

The county sent out road crews and this is what they had to deal with on Monday:

It was up to a foot of mud in the deepest places. There was no damage to our house, but roads have been a mess since. The county has had trucks and equipment out every day since and the roads are passable — dusty but passable. Our neighbours have had to hire private crews to come out and deal with the damage to their property. Sadly, not many people here have flood insurance. It will be a long road for some.

Two days after the flash flood Heather and I went to the beach:

and:

This is lighthouse point in Santa Cruz, CA. It’s one of our favorite places to visit.

The trip was planned long before the flood, but we saw no reasons to not to get out of town while they fixed our roads.

I you need me, I’ll be washing the car — again.

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As The Music Plays #15 — Homeward Bound

Posted on 07/21/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

This is a series of posts about the music I listen to while writing.  This time I’m up to another Paul Simon song, Homeward Bound.  This song was written by Simon in 1964 while in England.  He had been performing around the country and often taking a train somewhere.  Homeward Bound was first released by Simon and Garfunkel as a single in 1966 by Columbia Records.  It reached number five on the pop charts and later was included in their album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

Simon wrote this at a time of uncertainty in his career.  He wasn’t widely known at the time he wrote it, but now who could imagine not hearing this song when thinking of Simon and Garfunkel.  It’s a simple tune and straight forward lyrics and like most Simon songs, it stands alone as good piece of poetry.  This is one of the things that draws me to artists like Simon.  I have always felt that in the heart of a great song writer is a great poet.  In just two and half minutes Homeward Bound tells the story of a lonely disillusioned song writer.  The loneliness and self-doubt just drip from each verse.

These feelings are just strengthened by the chorus with its strong call home.  Home, that place in our hearts where things are good, peaceful and comforting.  How many of us think about just going home when confronted by hardship or obstacles?  I know I’ve said it often enough at the end of a bad day of work, “I just want to go home.”

It’s in the third verse of the song where I often feel just like the singer in the song.  It’s classic self-doubt with: “But all my words come back to me / In shades of mediocrity / Like emptiness in harmony “.

I can’t count the times that the critic in my head has looked at something I’ve written and just thought that it’s not even good enough to be mediocre.  I imagine that many artists and creative people feel this way from time to time — that horrible feeling of things just not being right and we’re not good enough.

This song ends up on my writing playlist for just that reason.  While Simon is expressing doubt and feelings of not being good enough, he manages to create a masterful work.  Simple, clear and to the point in a most poignant way.  This is the kind of poetry I aspire to and hearing these words, tell this story are oddly inspiring to work to find the creativity in even the most bleak situation.

Here’s the song for you to listen to again:

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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.

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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.

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