Friday Notes (Mar 22, 2024)

The last two weeks have been (by my lazy easy-going retirement standards) unusually productive. Two big and long-standing items off my TODO list — a huge relief. As a good friend said, getting stuff done feels so good you have to wonder why we let things go so long.

For me, a lot of it is sheer laziness. Often, something needs to break through to Urgent Level before I’ll get around to dealing with it. (I’d rather read and doing stuff cuts into my reading time.) There is also the subliminal fear things won’t go well, or will be a pain or, as has often been the case, a disappointment.

But regardless, time for another edition of Friday Notes.

One of the big items was finally getting my 2010 Ford Fusion in for its 33,000-mile service. No, I didn’t forget a zero. My 14-year-old car only has 33,000 miles on it. I was still working when I bought it, but my drive to work was only 12.4 miles. (Only 7.6 miles if I were a crow.) I retired in 2013, so that 24.8 miles per day dropped off my odometer.

I’m not one for going out a lot (don’t like crowds (or even people, really)), so most of my driving involves local errands. When I lived in Los Angeles, it wasn’t unusual to drive 50 miles to a venue, but around here driving all the way across town is only 30 miles or so. My most distant friend is only 17 miles, and that’s going the “long way” (to make it mostly freeway driving, which after almost 20 years in Los Angles is autopilot for me).

And I’d also been sitting for far too long on two recall notices from Ford that felt a bit Sword of Damocles, so I was feeling the pressure.

Even after 14 years, it still looks almost this nice.

My problem was that the dealership I bought the car from, which until last fall had my high regard and continuing patronage, seemed unwilling to let me make an appointment for service. Their webpage was unhelpful, and after battling it trying to schedule service, was never acknowledged in any way. Texts weren’t sent, nor were emails. Calls to the service department went to voicemail and weren’t returned. In frustration, I gave up.

The place is halfway across town — a pain — but the local Ford dealership gave me a very bad experience with their sales department back when I was shopping for a car in 2010 (whereas the place halfway across town was all aces). The experience was so bad that I wrote to Ford about it (and never heard anything back). A few years later, I tried their service department (because they were so convenient) and had a less than ideal experience there, too.

So, now what? I spent months dithering and finally decided to try the local place. Turned out that now they’re the aces. Website worked great, let me enter the info about the recall notices (which the other place hadn’t), I immediately got a text and an email. And someone there called me the next day for details on the recall notices (so they could make sure they had the parts). The service was done faster than I expected — in on Wednesday morning, expected back Friday (maybe), but it was ready Thursday afternoon. And the service guy called me about what they found.

It was $2400, but I couldn’t be more pleased. They’ll be my go-to now, the hell with those other guys.

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On the other hand, my experience with Enterprise car rentals was a disappointment. Firstly, I’d reserved a small-to-midsized car, but when I got there, they only had a red pickup truck and a minivan, neither of which was to my liking. I picked the minivan, and when I drove it away, I couldn’t get it to go faster than 20 MPH (and that was with the pedal to the metal).

I turned around and (slowly, oh, so slowly) drove back and complained. Of course, when the guy tried it, it worked fine. And worked fine when I drove it away again, but there was an engine check light on the dashboard the whole time I had it.

I complained when I returned it the next day but all they offered me was a handwritten note on a calling card that supposedly would grant me a free upgrade. Which I couldn’t care less about and will never use because the hell with Enterprise car rentals.

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I didn’t mean this as a rant, but stuff like this is exactly why I tend to be a homebody. I can’t tell you how many nights out and concerts have been ruined because people don’t know how to behave in public. The two concerts I saw last year, Al Stewart and Peter Gabriel, were the only two in recent memory that went perfectly [see Gabriel Lights Up the Room].

A lot of it has to do with retiring. Being in the rat race had me constantly a bit on edge. I’m more resilient now, but I think, in some way, people seem to be taking service more seriously (except for the big tech companies). My restaurant outings have almost always been aces, and all my recent dealings with the service industry (Enterprise car rentals aside) have been very satisfactory.

Case in point, the other big item on my TODO list, my kitchen faucet. The gasket wore out, but I didn’t feel my plumbing skills were up to dealing with it. Over time, because I have hard water, the faucet became unusable (unless you also wanted a shower).

Kitchen faucet, before. (And, yes, I suck at housekeeping. So boring!)

I called the plumber who fixed my toilet a while back (quick, friendly, professional), and they were once again quick, friendly, and professional. Quick to respond and quick to do the job. I’ve had good luck with plumbers. The guy who replaced my water heater years ago was aces, too.

Kitchen faucet, after! So tall. So shiny! So exciting!

I’m still getting used to how tall it is. The hole where the old spray hose lived now has a soap dispenser, and the spray hose pulls out from the faucet. Apparently, this is common, but it was new to me. (I’m not what one would call a “with it” guy when it comes to stuff like this.)

Nice to have a working kitchen faucet again. The dishes go in the dishwasher, but I’ve been washing my plastic stuff in the laundry sink. I’m throwing an Equinox Party this Saturday, so I’m glad this is off my TODO list. At my Solstice Party, I had to warn people not to use the faucet.

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An aside:

The only thing that stays the same is that nothing stays the same.
The only thing that is absolute is that nothing is absolute.
The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain.

That said, there are always exceptions. (Except, sometimes, there are no exceptions.)

This is the Yin-Yang tension that makes life ever and always interesting.

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The fluorescent tubes in my laundry room needed replacing, and I was able to find LED units that don’t require rewiring to eliminate the ballast (many do). Nice and bright and will probably outlast me.

Builder’s Emporium didn’t take the old ones for disposal, so I had to take them to my county recycling depot. Not a problem and perfect time to get rid of an assortment of electrical gear that was taking up space.

Remember these ancient monsters with the Big Orange Switch? And the quaint 3.5″ floppy drive (and CD-ROM drive below).

Like my old 386 desktop PC and my old Pentium desktop tower PC. I’ve hung on to them just in case I ever wanted to play the only video game I ever really got into, Descent. But enough time has passed that I think that ship hasn’t just sailed but is over the horizon.

I’m not a game player. Games with people IRL can be fun for their social value, but my hobbies provide the mental challenges and puzzles many get from games. I dislike war and war-like games, but in Descent the enemy were virus-infected robots, not living beings. It was also a 3D flying game — I never liked shooter games where you walk around.

Lotta fond memories of the hours playing Descent, though. There was a Descent II and Descent 3, but they increasingly required strategy and tactics, which I never cared for. I just wanted some mindless fun. That damned Thief Robot in Descent II kinda ruined the game, and Descent 3 was, on my PC, a bloated sluggish mess.

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As pet peeves go, this is truly ant-sized (or even mite-sized), but I was at Target the other day and just had to snap this photo:

Proper (left) and improper (right) cart storage (IMO).

It’s not even a peeve so much as a curiosity. My cart is the one on the far left. When I got there, the middle cart was at the end just like the one on the right.

I always push my cart as far in as it will go, in part to make room for more carts, but also, to be honest, because it’s fun. I’ve never understood why people leave their cart at the edge like the one on the right. Is there a reason, an intention, to this, or are people just mindless and/or lazy?

Whatever. More fun for me!

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After some lower-back (or hip or spine or whatever) issues killed my daily walking program (I was up to five miles a day), I spent over a year losing muscle mass in my legs and completely losing my wind. Recently, after that time off, I decided to resume walking again. I really miss being outside on a daily basis.

I’ve been doing okay so far but figure I shouldn’t walk every day. Five days a week, is my goal for now. It would be nice to do 10,000 steps a day, but that’s about five miles. For now, I’ll settle for getting my wind back and working on getting my walking speed up to 4 MPH.

There are some nice paths that run alongside our local freeway. A chain-link fence protects the freeway. I’ve noticed how trees grow through the fence and recently saw an amazing example of that:

Here’s a close-up:

The tree said, “Fence? What fence?” It’s literally on both sides of the fence. Which it has absorbed into itself. There are smaller examples all along the path, but this one takes the prize.

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I read recently about a new film, The Arc of Oblivion, directed by documentarian Ian Cheney, and produced by Werner Herzog. It explores why we try so hard to hang on to the past.

From the above link to the film:

“The Arc of Oblivion” is an unexpectedly playful search for an answer to a deeply existential question. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield — to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara — to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.

Something we face in the digital era is that our digital media is far more transitory than the media of the past: stone, paper, and even celluloid. (Remember 8” floppy disks? Of course you don’t. How about 5.25” floppy disks? No? Does anyone remember 3.5” floppy disks? Even CDs are giving way to streaming and thumb drives. Truth is that magnetic media generally won’t last more than two or three decades. Even CDs decay. Compare that to the clay tablets from millennia ago.)

So, the question: is it sane to imagine we can preserve the past? Without constant maintenance, even our infrastructure decays over time. Entropy always wins. And our memory is famously unreliable. History is fiction.

One point of the film is that the idea of collecting the past, whether books, paintings, or statues, is simply a pleasure.

I’ve often claimed I don’t look in the rearview mirror — dealing with the present usually fills my plate. I’m more prone to looking around or forward than back. But I have things I cling to, mementoes and whatnot. This blog is, in some sense, a document of my life.

But after that article, I’ve vowed to divest myself of as much of that as possible. I recently tossed my old skydiving VHS tapes, something I thought I’d never do. I have other “treasured” mementoes that, honestly, have all but lost their meaning. In a few cases, I don’t even remember what they’re from.

Spring cleaning this year is gonna get serious!

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Lastly, some quotes from another recent article in New Scientist, this one about awe and spiritual apprehension:

Should we describe these kinds of epiphanies – born from science, rather than religion – as spiritual experiences? That is the conclusion of a new paper from Jesse Preston at the University of Warwick, UK, and her colleagues.

The author is referring to something shared by many of us who pursue science. There is a sense of awe and connection to reality, a sense of how you fit into the universe, a small understanding of “how it all works.”

“When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual,” wrote Carl Sagan.

The work was inspired by documented links between religious belief and better psychological well-being. It may be that the sense of awe and meaning and connection to others helps to combat stress.

People with higher scores had higher life satisfaction. This, the researchers argue, suggests that finding spirituality in science can provide the “existential support” typically experienced by religious believers.

One more reason to study science!

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Stay awed, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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