From this blog’s beginning in 2011 until the end of the 2019 season, I’ve written about the Minnesota Twins. But not so much since. One post in 2020, about the COVID-shortened season. One more in 2021, about how I seemed to have moved past baseball. That was pretty much it until this year.
A number of things changed this year, and for the first time since 2019, I’ve been watching Twins games.
Unfortunately, they aren’t having a good year.
The previous post, Our Memories, suggested that — in large part because they become faded self-imaginings— we might want to consider not clinging to our event memories as much as we sometimes do. We might want to focus on what we are more than where we’ve been.
Put it this way: What matters is what you are (and can do), not what facts or moments you can recall. Which is likely why I always resisted memorizing dates or formulas I can easily look up.
Which touches indirectly on a counterpoint to what I wrote yesterday…
In another place, someone wrote: “It is memories that make us who we are, that haunt us, that enrich and warm us, that remind us of how to be better.” The place and the someone can be anonymous here because the sentiment is a common one.
In this Brain Bubble, I’d like to push back on that, at least a little. I want to suggest as counterbalance the one memorable line from an unmemorable film trilogy:
“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”
I find myself (almost) surprised that July of 2025 is nearly over. The year seems to be slipping by quickly. One’s sense of time really does change as one gets older [see Perception of Time].
More to the point, this is the last Friday in July, so if I’m to get a Friday Notes post out this month, today is the day. While my notorious pile is much reduced, I still have two ancient notebooks full of very old notes to get to.
So, let’s get to it, shall we?
The last post, Smoke Alarm Saga, concerned the frustrations with my smoke alarms and the service vendor who installed them — a company whose failings apparently put them out of business.
It wasn’t just the service; the product was bad. Three of the four smoke alarms they installed failed after seven months. In the midst of that frustration — after I’d removed the two my ladder reached but was still plagued by the one 13 feet up — I had a rather strange morning.
One that seemed to fit right in with everything else going on…
Almost exactly six years ago — in September of 2019 — I began having electrical problems. Power outages affected half the lights and plugs in the place. Getting an electrician in to fix it led to what became my worst experience with home service — a six-year saga with a disappointing ending.
More precisely, five-and-a-half years. The unsatisfying conclusion came last May with a faint echo in June. Some fallout persists, a task left unfinished, but the stress is thankfully past.
Here’s what happened…
About a month after I started this blog (on July 4, 2011), I wrote about my first and second skydives — which were tandem jumps — as well as my first (semi) solo skydive. A year later, I wrote about graduating my training to a full-fledged solo jumper as well as a particularly enjoyable skydiving “boogie”.
My last jump was in September of 1999 when the owners of the drop zone suggested that — because I wasn’t putting in the time needed to improve — that it might be best if I considered another hobby. They were right, and I did.
At that point I had made 50 jumps in two years. Here is my logbook.
So, if a fortnight is 14 days (but counted as nights), then a fortjuly should be 14 years. I suppose it should really be a fortwinter to align with the counting nights aspect. But that would mean we’re on the 13th “day” (year) of this blog, and this post celebrates the blog’s 14th anniversary, so fortjuly it is.
As in: “It has been fourteen years — a fortjuly — since I started this blog.” By other metrics: 1,438 posts (42 pages); 1,996,695 words (damn, just missed it being a cool two-mill); 287,266 sentences; or 63,337 paragraphs.
As usual, there are charts and lists.
It’s been a while since my last Sidebands post. That’s partly because I’ve been working on a project that I’m sure will become a multi-post series and thought it would be nice to start with #81. But I’m not done (or actually started on the writing) yet, and this one has also been lurking for a while.
Essentially, I needed to figure out how to join a cone to a sphere in a seamless way (as in the picture here). This requires the sides of the cone meet the sphere at a tangent point.
It’s yet another case of actually needing the trigonometry I learned in school.
Today is Juneteenth, formally Juneteenth National Independence Day, a national holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the USA. Here is the official Juneteenth flag:
It uses the same colors as the American flag because the descendants of slaves are Americans. (It has been suggested that these days that any Americans protesting a tyrannical government should wave as many American flags as possible to highlight that they are Americans protesting an unamerican government — unamerican as defined by our founding and 200+ year history.)
Here is a good post giving some background on the flag, and here is another good post pointing to more background on Juneteenth.
P.S. If you’re a science fiction fan and have never read Octavia E. Butler, I highly recommend checking out her work. She’s among the best I’ve ever read, and each book is a unique gem. [see Octavia E. Butler for details].
Stay antiracist, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
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