Personal effects

Installing my old Riven on Windows 7, 64 bit machine ... and running it without swapping CDs

2011-09-14T00:20:00.001-07:00

I could find no way to get it to install on Windows 7, 64 bit machine directly. (Plenty of websites confirm it just won't work.)

But, I have a second computer with Windows XP on it and was able, with a bunch of extra steps plus USB memory, to get Riven onto my Windows 7, 64 bit machine. Sweet.

Normal installation on XP

I did a normal install of Riven on the Windows XP machine. That's the easy part (except, sometimes, for the QuickTime part of the installation, and perhaps the steps at the end of this post regarding "Skip" help in that).

Tweaks to enable running Riven without CDs

Then I enabled that machine to run Riven without my having to swap CDs:

- I opened two Explorer windows: one showing my Program Files\Riven\data folder, and the other showing the Data folder of CD 1.

- I copied the MHK file(s) from CD 1's data folder to the computer's data folder.

- I similarly copied the MHK files from the other CDs' data folders to the one data folder on the computer.

- I opened the riven.cfg file (Program Files\Riven) in an editor. About half way down is a comment that says "Data file sets". There are groups of *spit. Each has its own "Disc =" a number line. For every one of those, I changed the number to 0. That's it for Riven. It worked fine on the XP machine without the CDs.

Transfer to the Windows 7 machine

I moved the Riven folder from the XP machine to a USB device (I didn't have a big enough memory stick, so I used... my camera's memory!) and from the USB device to Program Files\Riven on the Windows 7 machine.

Install the ancient QuickTime

I viewed CD 1 on the Windows 7 machine, drilling down into QTWSETUP\WIN32\CUSTOM.

I ran QT32INST.EXE and selected Install and Start. It fails with "QuickTime for Windows has stopped working." I selected "Close Program".

I restarted the same QT32INST.EXE program and selected Complete and Start. It, too, fails. But stuff is being or has been installed.

I restarted and selected Skip and Skip All. (Is it checking for newer versions of the QuickTime pieces? Is that what's failing?) Skipping let me get a new Install button, and I progress, obtaining the desireable "red filmstrip" style progress bar and then a message of success.

By golly, my old Riven now works on my new Windows 7, 64 bit machine.

Multi-core machine?

Riven doesn't do well with multi-core. So, each time I start Riven, I have to view Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), right click the Riven process, select Set Affinity, waaaait for the window to appear, and unchecked all but one core. Then it doesn't crash randomly.

Where we planted geraniums

2011-04-16T22:45:00.001-07:00

Each red dot represents where we planted a cutting. After my first pass at adding dots to the photo, I went with pen and paper to the slope to tally how many between curves (along the fence) and along the curves. I was stunned to discover that the count was more than double what I'd drawn. So, I added dots between the existing dots (a convenience for me compared to redrawing from scratch), a few dots short of reality. Man, what if all of these survive till next year and all bloom? That would be so cool.

See the upper right red dot? It's just beyond the wire fence. I was able to get one hand through a narrow gap, pound a hole and insert a cutting. Even if the rest get cut out, that one will remain beyond reach. :)

Another Thai soup recipe

2011-04-13T15:11:00.001-07:00

I think I like this recipe better than the version I posted a few years ago.

FOR STAGE 1
1 can coconut milk, then 2 cans water (or 1 can water, 1 can chicken broth)
1/2 t pepper,
1/2 t salt
1-2 chicken breasts
fistful of mushrooms, sliced

FOR STAGE 2
something hot-spicy (e.g. habanero sauce; 1/4t cayenne; 1/2 serrano, diced)
two med carrots, slivered or bias cut for visual
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2t (or more) fresh ginger, chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, slivered for visual
1/4 c lemon juice
2T cabbage, coarsely chopped

WHILE THE SOUP IS SIMMERING
fistful fresh basil, coarsely chopped
fistful fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped

---

STAGE 1: Start heating a skillet to high. In a large saucepan, add the coconut milk, water, pepper, salt, turn up the heat to boil while you move to the chicken. In the hot skillet, sear the chicken on one side till it has some dark brown, flip briefly for slight cooking, but do not cook through. Cube and set aside for STAGE 3. Dry-sear the mushrooms in the chicken fry pan to reduce mushroom moisture, then brown with a tiny bit of oil or butter.

STAGE 2: While the mushrooms cook, do this for each of the stage 2 ingredients, in the order listed: prepare the item, then add it to the soup base. Reduce to simmer.

STAGE 3: Add the chicken and mushrooms to the soup base. Taste. Increase spiciness, lemoniness or saltiness as needed.

Right at serving time, stir in the basil and cilantro. Serve.

Creating and editing webcam videos with Windows

2011-04-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

So, you have a webcam and you want to create some simple videos and post them to youtube?

Recording with your webcam software

Your webcam probably comes with software that lets you record a video. Look for it.

Recording with (free) MovieMaker

If you couldn't find a video recorder that came with your webcam, let's see if your MovieMaker program lets you record video. First, see if you have this program: C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\moviemk.exe. If you do, run it and see if the File menu has the option named Capture Video. If it does not, you cannot record with MovieMaker.

Recording with (free) ManyCam

Download and install ManyCam (http://download.manycam.com/)

After you start ManyCam, you see an Effects tab. It has "Text over video". Uncheck the little box by Show ManyCam Logo.

Under the Sources tab, click Cameras and select your webcam. (Or, if you want to record what's visible on your Desktop, click Desktop and experiment with its options (Full desktop, partial desktop, custom desktop).)

Just below the video display, do you see a red "Rec"? Can you click it and start recording?

Editing a video with MovieMaker

[[to do: add basic split/delete steps]]

Adding words/titles

Split (Ctrl-L) where you want a title to be added. Highlight the segment after the split.
Tools > Titles and Credits.
Select "title before the selected clip"
Put text in the top portion if you want it big. Put text in the bottom portion if you want it to be a subtitle of the upper part or all on its own if you just want the smaller text.
Click Done
Click-hold-drag the right edge of the resultant clip to increase its duration upon playback.

Fading out

Right click the segment you want to fade out at its end.
Click Fade Out. (Similar works for "fade in" at the start of a segment.)

Adjusting the length of a segment without further splitting of it via Ctrl-L

Click the segment. It is "highlighted" as evidenced by the darker border on it.
Click-hold-drag either end of the segment and drag toward the middle of the segment to move that end inward. You can later drag that end back to its original length if you want.

Saving the project

File > Save Project
This lets you save the editing facts but doesn't actually create a movie.

Saving the project as a video/movie

File > Save movie file
My computer (next)
Provide a first name, and set the second box to Desktop
Either leave it as "Best quality" OR select Show More Choices and select High Quality, either Large or Small
Next or Finish...whatever it takes :)
Soon you will have a wmv file on your Desktop and you can upload that to youtube, email it, whatever

Geranium outing - part 2

2011-03-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

Mom and I tromped through the weeds on this cold, soggy, rainy day, to enjoy blooms on some of the cuttings we planted in the last few weeks. With my additional weekend and midnight plantings, we're now up to 140. About 10 of those have bright blooms.

There remains a 30 foot stretch along the top end of the fence with no cuttings yet. Opportunity.

Geranium outing

2011-03-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

A week ago, I went out at midnight and planted seven geranium cuttings near the Cupertino bridge walkway. It had been raining and the soil was softened--a bit. Using my palm, I would try to push a piece of rebar about five inches into the soil. The soil is hard there, and my palm hurt. I failed in several spots before finding seven places where I made decent holes for the cuttings.

A few days later, Mom announced she'd pruned a bunch of her geraniums. She had filled a couple of buckets with cuttings that I could plant.

Today, we headed over to the bridge with the cuttings.

Mom prepped cuttings (trimming off lower leaves, etc) and laid them out every few feet.

This time, I brought a small sledge hammer to help me drive the rebar.

My technique was this: whack a hole with the short length of rebar, slip the cutting down the hole, whack the dirt next to the cutting (to collapse the hole and press the dirt more tightly around the cutting).

In an hour or so, we had planted 72 cuttings along the fence. We'll be back with more cuttings.

I think the abundance of grasses and weeds there right now will provide a helpful shade while these get started. I'm looking forward to seeing how quickly these bush out. Even more satisfying will be the pink and red blooms in the summer.

How to record a computer demonstration

2011-02-24T01:09:00.000-08:00

I wanted to create a video of a computer-based work task and show it to teammates. A picture is worth a thousand words--the video would convey the concept way faster than my trying to convey the value via text like this.

I used these tools :

MovieMaker (free on many Windows systems... look for C:\Program Files\MovieMaker\moviemk.exe)
ManyCam (free to download and use; see http://download.manycam.com)
A microphone (if you want to narrate)

Here's the basic concept. MovieMaker records videos. It asks for a "video source". ManyCam makes the computer think it is a video source. ManyCam lets you choose whether to use a webcam for video OR to display a portion of your Desktop. (So, if you do not have a webcam and all you really want to do is record your Desktop, you can.) Now, put these two together: tell MovieMaker to record whatever ManyCam is showing. Finally, MovieMaker has a Narration menu selection: if you prefer, you can add a voice track AFTER you create and trim down the video shots (I like that; I'm not skilled enough to narrate at the same time that I'm capturing the desktop activity).

ManyCam acts like a webcam substitute or a webcam middleman. Once you start and set up ManyCam to show your webcam or your Desktop, you can then fire up any other program that wants a video source, and you pick ManyCam as the source... and it works.

Okay, so what are the actual steps for recording your desktop activity?

[to be provided soon]
[how to turn off the ManyCam logo]
[how to start ManyCam and tell it to view your Desktop]
[how to setup for recording and select the ManyCam source]
[how to record; advice on motion; how to stop the recording]
[tips and tricks for refining your video's visuals before you narrate]
[how to add narration]
[how to save as a movie file; uploading to youtube]

How to remove and replace a circuit breaker

2011-02-06T01:10:00.000-08:00

For those who are here just to get the answer, it's this:

1. After you have removed the panel and turned off "main" (something there is a switch for the rest of the panel), pry out the circuit breaker that you want replace. It is just wedged in there, really. Fiddle with either end of the specific circuit breaker.
2. Detach whatever wire was connected; reconnect that to a new circuit breaker of same amperage and style/form, and press it back in place.

Oh my gosh, that was easy. What a relief.

And here's my story leading up to those simple steps.

For the last few months, lights have dimmed a little when the anything on the kitchen circuit was turned on, such as a little coffee grinder or plugging in my laptop. When I had measured with a voltmeter, outlets yielded AC voltage between 109 and 114 (in contrast to other circuits which were between 115 and 125).

Yesterday, lights flickered, dimmed, went out. After a few minutes of appliances off, I could measure a full 115 to 125 on this circuit that had been bad for months ("Yay! Is it back to normal?!") but if I turned on anything on that circuit, whoop, it would drop to 0 volts.

Sigh. I got out the phone book and looked up electricians. I didn't like the prospect of calling, seeking estimates.

I called our electric company and asked if they could come out to measure the "drop" to the house (the voltage coming to the circuit breaker). To my surprise, they sent someone out about an hour later. The guy called me on his way to the house and asked for symptoms, facts. When he arrived, he flipped the switch of the circuit breaker I pointed out and immediately said "It's broken!" I needed to replace it. It was a relief to know that the cause was known AND great that I had gotten this information for free. I asked if it was something I should hire an electrician to do or could I do it myself. He warned of some odd style of screw head that I would encounter inside and off he went.

Today, with daylight, I stared inside the open box. I am used to taking stuff apart. Having taken stuff apart since childhood, there are just "standard things" to look for, typical ways things are assembled that you know to consider first. And I couldn't find those. Instead, I saw these metal bars above and below the circuit breakers and no screw heads were visible. I started to wonder if, for safety reasons, special tools and knowledge were required to (1) move those metal bars out of the way so that I could then (2) find out how to get the circuit breaker out.

Man, the internet is cool. I searched the internet for "how to I replace a circuit breaker" and was offered several videos made by kind folks out there sharing their knowledge. I picked the first one.

The video started off with a guy showing his two golden retrievers in the snow. Over the next few minutes, he repeated how easy it would be to remove and replace a circuit breaker. He turned off "main" and all the lights went out, as he had alerted, AND then we watch another scene of his dogs in the snow.

Back in the basement... He lights up the box with his flashlight and repeats how easy it is going to be. And then he gets a screwdriver and pops the skinny breaker out of the bank of breakers. A bit later, he repeated that it was easy to replace.

No way. It's just wedged in? Oh my gosh, that IS easy. Funny that he spent way more time showing us his dogs and talking about how easy it would be than to just take 30 seconds and show him removing it. (Thus my brief instructions as the top, to balance out the efficiency universe.)

I rushed to my circuit breaker panel, turned off main, found a simple place to wedge my flathead screwdriver, and confirmed that, sure enough, that bad boy would just slip right out with a tweak or two. Soon I had it in my hand and was off to the store. Bought a replacement. Came home, squished it in place and attached the wire and was done. Lights don't flicker.

Oh my gosh, that's satisfying when stuff's that easy.

And it's nice to not have the extension cord going from the family room to the kitchen to keep the refrigerator going.

Rose grafting, part 2

2011-01-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

It's been about a year now since my failed rose grafting.

I ended up grafting again two weeks ago (Jan 16), rather by accident:

I took this photo on Jan 30 so I can observe any change in the coming weeks.

The rocking of the moon

2011-01-26T22:20:00.000-08:00

I am watching Sagan's "Cosmos" series from decades ago and just learned about a wobble in the moon.

I recall that the reason we always see one side of the moon is that the moon is not round, that it is "heavier enough" on one side that the mutual gravity between the earth and moon keep that heavier side pulled toward the earth. (Mind bender: to the rest of space, the moon is spinning; to us, it doesn't look like it's spinning because it's pointing toward us we make our way around the Sun.)

I recall that humans put some special mirrors on the moon so we could aim lasers at them and measure how long it takes for the laser light to get there, bounce off the mirrors and arrive back home, and thus measure the distance, since we know how fast light travels through space. The principle behind the mirrors is just like your car's reflectors. You've seen your reflection in a store whose corner has a mirror on each wall: as you walk by, you continually see your reflection in that very corner, albeit reversed. The reflectors of a car--and the mirrors on the moon--have three surfaces (one more than the store) so that the image bounces back for up and down motion, too. So, no matter where you are, if you shine a light at that corner mirror, the light bounces straight back to you.

In the Cosmos program, Carl noted how scientists used lasers and those mirrors on the moon to measure our distance from the moon with amazing accuracy ("only in error by about one millionth of a percent"). Picture that the moon's heavy side is facing us, like a bell out in space that always "hangs" directly away from the earth. Scientists measured the distance of the moon from us over quite a long period of time and observed a wobble, back and forth. Some concluded that this was evidence of the moon having been struck long ago by a comet or meteor, making it rock back and forth as it restabilizes toward not wobbling, toward simply facing toward us with no wobble. Cool.

Water goes boom in microwave

2010-12-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Sure enough, water can "explode". I was heating 3 or 4 ounces of water in a juice glass in the microwave. I was tending to some other matter (and I'd forgotten about the water) when I heard what sounded like someone loudly clap-popping a medium plastic bag of air. "What was THAT?" Spinning around and seeing the microwave, I peered in and saw the glass was nearly empty. What was most fascinating to me (besides finding out personally that my water can blowing up in the microwave) was seeing how evenly distributed the water droplets were on the walls and ceiling of the microwave. The glass was still whole.

I remember reading about this phenomenon a few years ago. The writeup had suggested that water could be ready to explode (my words) and just waiting for the glass to be jiggled to release the energy. Makes me that more willing to poke my superheated coffee with a spatula behind the safety of my welding mask.

Don't forget to look in the washing machine

2010-11-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

"The good news is we have one fewer rats around here. The bad news is that we have yet to find it," I called across to Mom from my ground-level view. I had been looking for the last 15 minutes under and between and behind the rows of boxes in the garage, trying to find the source of the smell.

Two nights earlier, Mom heard the rat trap snap out in the garage. I had placed it near the birdseed supply after seeing a rat departing from that area earlier. But it was empty when I inspected it.

Today, I smelled an odd smell. Mom and I agreed it "had the smell of death," and thus began my exploration, my seeking the little frame that had only gotten so far.

As each of us circled the paths in the garage, we observed the smell was strongest at the end where the dryer and washing machine and freezer are. I looked yet again under each of these with a bright light. Then Mom sniffed the kitchen rags she'd lain in the washing machine. Whoa... Note to self: rags used for cleaning up after cooking fish should be washed a tad sooner.

We're probably not down one rat afterall.

Nov 8, morning: Caught/disposed of one rat last night. Reset trap. Fresh rat this morning. Reset trap.
Nov 8, evening: Put the trap out on our awning. Snap! Three in less than 24 hours. Cool. (Okay, except for the creepy disposal part.)

Using Skype without a webcam; using ManyCam

2010-10-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

It is not true that you need a webcam to use Skype. (Why Skype says on their web page that you need a webcam--that confuses me.)

It is not true that you need to show video of yourself to use Skype (in case you assumed that that is a requirement).

It is not true that you need to have a microphone to use Skype (in case you assumed that you needed to).

(Hey, you can simply type messages to others, if you want. Most of my use of Skype is simply typing messages to others. With that said, it IS great to have a simple mic/headphones set (such as "headset 33-1187" which you can find on Google for around $20.) You can talk for free with an individual or with a group of friends regardless of the distance between all of you in the country.)

Is it a pain to install Skype? No. I think the two most challenging parts of getting started with Skype are (1) deciding what your nickname will be and (2) initiating your first text-only contact with someone else on Skype. And even those are not very difficult. I'd say the easy up-front part is downloading and installing Skype.

So, even if you do NOT have a microphone yet, you can still be up and running with Skype in just a few minutes. It's free. So, go here and get started! http://skype.com/download/

You might also like ManyCam. It's free, too. ManyCam acts like a webcam substitute or a webcam middleman. You tell ManyCam whether you want ManyCam to show your webcam (if you have one) or show some part of your computer Desktop, or show a movie clip, etc. ManyCam is a switching mechanism. You decide at any instant what it should display.

This is nice! I can use ManyCam, then, to broadcast a card game I am playing on my computer--I can broadcast it over Skype video or on Ustream. And if I am currently displaying my Desktop over Skype or Ustream and want to show my actual webcam instead, I just bring up ManyCam and click the appropriate button in ManyCam to switch from Desktop to Camera.

Here is another use for ManyCam: if you need help on your computer, you can turn on ManyCam so your friend can see your computer screen (they cannot actually control anything on your computer, though; it is simply a picture of your screen), and your friend can ask you to click here, click there, while watching your screen via your Skype call with your friend. I have used this approach many times to help friends find solutions to their computer issues.

Want ManyCam? http://download.manycam.com

How do I add a Java classpath in Eclipse?

2010-10-16T19:37:00.001-07:00

Ugh. I needed to include a folder in my classpath. I didn't need to include a jar file--that's easy in Eclipse. There are so many answers out there on the 'net about "how easy it is to use Eclipse," that "you don't need to set classpath because Eclipse does it for you." I disagree. If it were so easy, there wouldn't be all of these explanations that still come up short.

Hours after experimenting, fiddling, I finally got it to work the way that I wanted.

To include my folder in the classpath maintained by the Eclipse project, I had to (1) exit Eclipse and (2) hand-modify the .classpath file for the project.

I included this line, where C:\jed is the folder that I wanted in my classpath:

<classpathentry kind="lib" path="C:/jed"/>

For my fellow Java programmers...

Her ear was in front

2010-08-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

Way back at my sister's memorial, person after person insisted in jest that, no, THEY were her favorite. Resounding evidence that Jan grasped that notion of "look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others" and "in humility, consider others more important than yourself." She valued you with her ear. Time might fly by before you realized you hadn't heard anything about her. She chose well.

Adobe vs Macromedia

2010-08-20T00:31:00.000-07:00

In 2004, I was browsing through my phoons website statistics, and I discovered an unfamiliar web page address, something about "upcoming events". Tracing it, I discovered that someone had created a web page to advertise some Adobe training session coming up the next week. And their web page was linking directly a photo on my Phoons site that I had taken of my friend phooning in front of the Adobe headquarters. With some HTML magic, they were displaying my site's photo at about 1/4 scale on their site. (If you click the image to the right, you can see MY page and see what photo they were "borrowing".)

They had contact information on their page, so I emailed them and left a phone message to the effect, "You're using my copyrighted image without my permission. Please remove it."

After a time of them having neither responded nor taken action, I decided to have some fun. I made a backup copy of my original photo. Then I replaced it on my site with the logo of a key competitor of Adobe: Macromedia. I added the word BUY. Yep, sure enough, when I visited their web site, my BUY Macromedia image shone prominently.

I had expressed to my brother in my original email to him, "For the time being,
if people visit the Adobe ad page, they'll see what I've attached. :) Hey, that oughta get a few more emails coming in to their group to change the picture :)"

Ha, I wish I could've heard the behind-the-scenes scrambling. Imagine if the folks who discovered it had no idea how to change their web page because they'd hired someone else to set up the web page for them and that person wasn't available over the weekend.

I also sent my brother the second version I had created. Its origin? I already had a photo I had created of Dad and birds. My sister had taken a photo of Dad standing in her patio doorway with a BB gun, shooing away pesky starlings. I had photoshop'd it to add starlings all over him--plus a huge one in a rocking chair nearby. It was easy, then, to use that as the backdrop for the latest BUY Macromedia picture. (Note the big bird, lower right.)

Before I could substitute in this second version, I discovered that those folks had fixed their web page. Never any communication with me. Sigh. No opportunity to use version #2 on their web page!

Fun memory. Thanks, David, for finding this treasure in your old emails!

Is it a Happy Father's Day?

2010-06-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

What do you say to someone on Father's Day when

their father is dying in the hospital? or
they never knew their father?
they lost their father at a younger age than most of us? or
their father was far from the right kind of man? or...

It's easy to say Happy Father's Day to those who are clearly connected as father-child.

I just returned from the hospital. The neighbor's driveway had been predominantly empty this couple of weeks. We knew the husband was facing a serious illness. Mom had suggested last week that we might cruise by the hospital to see if perhaps that's where they were.

I went. As I followed the hallway directions to the room number I was given at the desk, the "message" of the particular room became increasingly clear as I followed the signs; first the department name, then the sign on the door itself. Critical care.

The door was closed. I figured it best to not join them, even though the nurse said, "Oh, just knock." I found a quiet waiting area and set my things down. Nearby was an unattended work counter. I figured I could find some writing material and pen there. I knocked over a brochure display while reaching over the counter for a pad of paper. Back at my quiet seat, I scribbled various thoughts of what I want to express to them in absentia; I'd leave a note for them, I figured.

A little while later, the wife walked by, on her way out. What do I say to someone who has just left a closed door room where it's been just family?

People have different approaches, some of them helpful, some quite hurtful (out of not knowing what else to say, even though their heart is right in wanting the best for the other).

In my better moments, what I "say" varies but it basically has the meaning "talk to me" or "tell me your story." And in my better moments, I clear the way for them to talk. I convey that I am indeed going to listen. I convey that their feelings of embarrassment or fear about talking are feelings are okay, that they'll soon be past those, that it's okay for them to be open. Sure, I talk, too. In my better moments, the talking I do is shaped to communicate understanding of what they're saying and to return to their story. I hope that this moment with my neighbor was one of those better moments.

My opening line: "Hi." and "I found you." That worked. She started opening up. She told me her husband didn't want visitors. I said I understood that (even though the nurse had said "just knock"). She was obviously heading out. As she talked, I told her I'd join her out to the parking lot. She set the pace. I knew she'd get deeper if given the ear, if given the time, if I "stayed out of the way" by sticking with her topics and conveying permission to talk about tougher stuff. I suspect that part of that "permission" was her knowing I'd lost my father. She and her husband had joined me in the street a few hours after Dad had passed way. They had acknowledged my loss and shown love in that simple gesture. (That's an important aspect isn't it: those of us who have the same kind of loss are most likely to have a kind of permission to enter into such conversation; the further we are from sharing such experience, the more likely we should keep our mouths shut and let others enter such conversation. With that said, a simple "hello" can be vastly superior to maintaining a distance from the person.)

We reached the parking lot and she stopped in the shade; I didn't want to delay her in her traveling to her home for the present task she'd already identified and hinted at continuing toward her car. But she lingered, and there was that subtle signal. Soon I was hearing her deeper story, initiating a sideways hug that tripped her into releasing a few pent-up tears, retreating again to listen to her details.

Oh how her daughters don't want to lose their father on this of all days. Understood.

I joined her to her car, parted.

I wandered back into the hospital; found a quiet place; scribbled a few thoughts of what I could express to the grieving family via note. After six pages of drafts of idea, I abandoned all of those. In the end, I wrote something about praying for them and their father, something about being glad to hear that they were all able to be together and talk, to be together to hear each other's thoughts in this dark moment. To be together. I folded the note, wrote their names on it, left it with the attending nurse.

What do you say to someone in their loss...

---

Many hours later, after Mom and I had dinner out, I suggested we could swing by, see if we happened to cross paths with any of the family. We hung out in the empty waiting area. I read aloud some article from a magazine. One of the few footsteps we heard was one of the daughters arriving. Arriving? Ah, they'd decided to do "shifts".

I'm not the one needing comfort, but it brought me some, from the thought that the daughters would get their wish to not lose their Dad on Father's Day. I thanked God in my heart. Simple love given, connection made, we left.

---

June 21: The neighbor's cars were in the driveway. Hm, yes. I hugged the wife; found out he'd slipped away at 4 am. I mentioned I'd prayed that God would "keep her husband" longer for the sake of her daughters. She said she had, too. I'm thankful for that little light in the darkness.

---

Part of my brother's tribute to my father: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyWpwn1QC-A

You can find the other five parts on youtube; search for "A Tribute to my Father, Robert Darrow".

Kentucky Fried Salad

2010-04-28T22:44:00.000-07:00

What's open after 10 pm? After staying late at work, I was heading home. KFC, a place I rarely go to, sounded fine. They were out of potato wedges, so I doubled the other side I usually settle for: side salad. So, I now had two chicken parts, two garden salads with ranch, and a biscuit with honey.

Apparently this branch appeals to those with a hankering for jalepenos. There was a huge jar. I poked at the change from having just paid for the two piece two sides. Twenty two cents. "Will you sell me a jalepeno for 22 cents?" "Sure."

Back home. The salad is basically shredded iceberg and a handful of tomato bits. Not very nutritious, "so how can I improve this?" There were four sprigs of leftover broccoli in the fridge. And a big jar of shredded parmesan cheese.

Caesar salad has croutons; you can add chicken. Hmm.

I dumped the salads in a big mixing bowl and threw in a pile of parmesan. I chopped up the jalepeno and the broccoli and stirred those in with the packet of ranch dressing. The greasy skin slipped easily off the chicken; I chopped up the chicken (okay, and just a wee bit of tasty fried skin) and mixed that in.

Bisquit. Hm. Sure, why not. Chop, chop, mix. At this point, I have the entire meal blended in a bowl, plus broccoli, parmesan and a jalapeno--everything except the butter and honey. Sure, why not. I added the honey.

This is a really big bowl of chicken salad now. And I'm working my way through it. Not bad! (Do you have to be from California to be okay with such a salad?)

Rainwater

2010-04-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

Look at all that water exiting the rain gutter and flowing out to the street. Look at all those porch plants that could use that nice nitrogen-laden rainwater.

I stuffed a rag into the top of the rain gutter exit, used these huge red clamps to hold some tubing in place in the now-filling gutter and, voila, I'm filling a garbage can that I've put onto a skateboard (so I can move it to the next porch plant) and I have a second siphon tube from there to the plants.

A neighbor stopped his car to pause and stare at the ladder and the bright red clamps on the light gray house. He called a bit later to joke that he thought I was doing some sort of electrical experiment.

I'm just glad to be accepted by the hippies in California.

The $15 echinacea weed, revisited

2010-04-05T23:35:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I highlighted my disappointment with the performance of my new echinacea. I admired the hardy echniceas I saw while at a backyard wedding reception, and the host said the first year's growth was disappointing. That gave me hope.

And so, I've been watching that spot in the yard, waiting for the echinacea weed to break through the ground for the first time this year. And today I saw it. "Yay, the echnicea weed is back!" I announced.

It's off to a good start.

Well, it was. After taking the photo, I decided to transplant it to a better spot in the yard. (Duh, I'd planted it almost _under_ the lily, and the lily is a snail breeder, and last year's growth was tackled by snails, slugs and pill bugs.) With a post-hole digger, I made a hole; then I used it to grab the soil containing this growth and yanked it out and moved it. That means I just shocked it by breaking its roots. But it'll do fine. (Hey, it's already looking better than what I first received in the mail last year, its root system is more mature, its roots are in native soil, AND I'm hitting it with the pill bug treat that'll knock those buggers out in the early growth stage, way sooner than last year's growth.

Jury duty

2010-04-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

This was day 2 of filling the jury box and interviewing the prospective jurors. Oh, we were so close. They had excused only a few folks from the box. It was just about lunch time. They called my name to come fill the newly vacated seat in the box. Sigh.

When you tell friends, family and coworkers you're called in for jury selection, you're likely to hear stories and ideas on what to say to be rejected. Two folks had said that announcing their particular profession seemed to get them out of service. Several joked about what ridiculous things I could claim about my background or come up with some extreme beliefs. My brother said his artist friend would show up unshaven and start sketching the lawyers and then be dismissed.

So, they had called my name. I was seated by the wall and needed to sidestep in front of my whole row in the gallery. In that time, I pondered what was the best timing. As I approached and made my way through the swivel barrier between the gallery and main court area, I quietly mimicked (though loud enough for the court to hear), "The Price is Right! Come ooonnn dooown!"

In the span of hours in the gallery, I had jotted notes about what I might say about my background. I had observed the routine: jurors were asked the same set of printed questions; they were given the chance to bring up issues at the start. When asked if I had anything key, I went into my speech. I spoke the truth; I was one to keep watch on the neighborhood; I'd been a key witness to a street crime a few months back; I was a process engineer / tech writer / programmer with a drive to find better ways to do things. I was also truthful about how I most definitely understood the rules about the burden being on the prosecution yet had my attitudes and feelings about how I wish things might go. I praised the American justice system over other countries' systems yet noted I would follow all the rules even if I ended up feeling quite frustrated with the rules.

Oh my gosh, was I nervous. My voice cracked frequently; I choked up; I was jumpy. (Almost without fail, my throat tightens up if I have to speak in front of strangers AND have a mic on me...or whatever represents "one shot at sounding right". Probably some kind of perfectionism/fear thing.) Maybe to others I sounded fine. To me, they all sounded way cooler and more collected than me.

I poured out all this information to the judge and lawyers. The judge asked at each key point whether I understood and would follow the rules. "Absolutely!" I felt I sounded fair.

Each lawyer is given a chance to ask whatever questions may reveal whatever secret thing it is that the lawyer wants to gauge or know. The other prospective jurors had received lots of questions. But when the judge gave the opportunity to the lawyers for my interrogation, they basically passed. Had I explained everything so well?? Had I pre-answered questions they were lining up?? Had I made myself out to be so off-center that they were ready to dismiss me with no further information? I did not know; I had to wait for the next formal leading of the judge for dismissals.

We broke for lunch. A fellow juror (one of the earliest to be selected) said, "YOU'RE stuck." Drat. Had I been so thorough and fair-sounding that I eliminated all doubt for the lawyers and they liked me? Well, okay, then. That helped me settle into the notion that I'd be on jury duty for the next month. I fired up my laptop and connected to work.

I cracked up in seeing my boss had written a haiku about jury duty in honor of me and coworker Curtis, also on call for jury duty, and had emailed it to the team. We have a long-standing semi-tradition of using pointless opportunities to communicate via haiku, just for our amusement as writers. Oh, and invariably, someone would come up with lines that did not even come close to fitting the 5-7-5 syllable rule, much less the point of capturing nature in some way.)

Her haiku:

A higher power

summons juror candidates.

Curtis, John, who's next?

I replied with my sobering status:

I am in the box.

Selection continues, but

I think I am stuck.
Newt.

(I added on the "newt" part because I failed to work newt into my haiku like I usually do, a silly signature of mine, so to speak.)

We were all called back in from the break. There was a seating issue: not enough seats in this new venue. They were now asking gallery folks to come sit in seats close to or even in the jury box. I offered loudly, "Hey, I'm willing to give up MY seat..." Nice to see even the judge and lawyers chuckle. (Nice try, buddy.)

Jury selection resumed. I settled into my comfy swiveling seat and listened to the repeat of all the questions for each new juror candidate. Over the next hour, they dismissed person after person. I broke out my little notebook and started sketching a couple of lawyers. At one point, I observed the lawyers passed around a post-it note and thought I caught them glancing my direction. They asked for a sidebar and chatted up there for a while. Hey! Had this "sketching the lawyers" thing paid off--were they moving to dismiss me? On the other hand, was I about to get in trouble for "recording" court action in this way? Recording devices had been expressly forbidden. Well, nope. Turns out they were having a side bar about the guy next to me who they had been interviewing while I sketched away.

They continued dismissing jurors, most of them the ones called since I'd been interviewed. (In a couple cases, I thought, "Hey, I could've said the same thing and gotten immediately dismissed...") Plenty of interviews were conducted of folks next to me. (I resisted the urge to joke that I wanted to move into the chair to my right--a reference to the nonsensical statistic of that chair position resulting in dismissal.)

One guy they interview at length was next to me. He reminded me of a key character on the TV show "LOST". When the lawyers and judge gathered for a little sidebar, I leaned toward him and asked if he was the stunt double for the Asian scientist. He smiled and said he knew who I was talking about. "You get that a lot?" "No." "Oops, I guess I'm the only one rude enough to say it!" I said. We smiled. The lawyers returned to their seats.

Last week, the judge had said we'd go from 8:30 to 3:30. Just before 3:30, the judge gave us a break and announced we'd be there till 5 pm. Big gasp in the audience. (I thought gasps like that were reserved for poorly directed TV dramas.) It was clear from that gasp that many people had planned on the clear 3:30 ending time. The judge then said that his reason for doing this was with the hopes of being done with this and folks not having to come back the next day. In response, there was a collective delighted "Oh!" and then laughter as a few of us in the jury box reflected on the quick reversal in emotion we just observed.

Well, that kinda sealed it for me. It had been a few hours since I had been interviewed, and others who seemed to me to be pretty middle of the road were being dismissed. I was still there, and the clock was approaching 4:30. And the judge had set the context of "almost done".

It was the prosecution's turn to dismiss whomever he might wish. I heard my number come out of his mouth. It was a strange dreamy moment. I thought he said my number. It had been a long time since they interviewed me, so there was that additional lack of connection. And why would *he* say my number? I figured he would've liked me and wanted to keep me for "his side" of the case. The judge then used my number in a complete sentence about "juror number such and such" and looked at me. Oh my goodness, it was indeed me. I calmly rose (the judge had earlier cautioned the jurors against departing with joyous high-fives, to the laughter of the gathering) and picked up my items; at the same moment, the clerk called out the number of the next gallery person to fill the seat I was vacating. (Efficient, that one.) I paused and turned back toward my fellow jurors in the box, looking particularly at the one who'd declared "You're stuck". I twisted my expression into a partial smile, partial raised eyebrows of sympathy, partial "I don't know what just happened!" and then headed on down the center aisle. A few folks in the gallery smiled at me. I think they were communicating a mix of envy and congratulations. I, unlike them, was free to go. They were still there, with the prospect of returning the next morning.

Had I been the last person to be dismissed that day? I considered that possibility.

I wasn't far beyond the exit from the courtroom when I started speaking my glee. I was basically talking to myself and God to congratulate myself. In hindsight, the joy I was feeling was the joy of the fresh taste of freedom. As I made my way down three flights of stairs, cheers kept falling out of my mouth. They kept coming out all the way back to my car in the parking structure way across the street.

Invigorated, I made my way over to the San Jose airport and put my energy into taking this self-portrait.

When I got home, I fired off a new haiku to my coworkers to correct my prior guess that I'd be out for a month:

I didn't have to

mention my insanity;

they just dismissed me.

In hindsight, I'm considering that might not be far off. The prosecutor might've been annoyed from the start with my drama. The price was right.

Molly the owl and Alf

2010-04-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Last night, a few thousand of us were watching Molly and her hatchlings. Her bedding material is entirely pellets--that is, coughed up rodent fur and bones.

Somebody pointed out that it looked like there was a pig snout in the picture (see the bottom right). I said it was Alf, and that stuck. What you see below is my (obviously) tweaked version of a screenshot. At least you still get to see the "snout" and speculate what it is.

Two nights later, we got the Neverending Story character. (Sorry, kids.)

A poem to accompany the Mouse Escape video:

The mouse was live when it arrived, and Molly planned to eat.
She'd held it in her beak a while and stretched her pointy feet.
The mouse got loose and slipped behind the chicks that we adore.
While Molly looked down to the right, the mouse ran out the door.

A poem about CBS' Molly interview error:

Six hours' recording a few days ago
(and all for three minutes in CBS' show!).
Molly fans watched and are now calling 'foul':
the idiot editors showed the wrong owl!

A poem about the egg sitting in the corner, and that's just about all we could see with the new camera angle:

We had high hopes we'd someday see a lovely little owlet;
instead, our Dudley rules the roost as Honorary Pellet.

Looking for true love

2010-04-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

A re you my dream woman? My dream woman is well-educated, has long hair, not only knows how to cook but frequently entertains, can drive stick shift, owns her own tree pruning cherry picker, is not afraid of snakes or spiders, just says no to prescription glasses, can start a fire without matches, wrote a novel in high school and won an award for it, is able to live out of the narrow backseat of a pickup, organizes files for the U. N., has memorized two poems by Robert Frost, buys and sells condos in Belize, likes to cuddle even on a tandem bicycle, remembers to lower the seat, can play the theme music of "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the piano, uses only environmentally friendly solvents when hosing down garbage men, spreads wildflower seeds while singing songs from Broadway, knows the difference between chelated calcium/magnesium and Belgian chocolate, creates her own wine labels and sneaks them onto friends' bottles when we're visiting their homes, uses programmable crochet needles to write social networking software while simultaneous creating fashionable rayon swimwear, likes me, makes oboes for charity, attends book clubs, studies the feeding ranges of whelks, can separate out egg whites with ease, can show me the best shoe stores at the mall, and can explain Oprah. She is able to find (and retrieve, as needed) things I've lost (e. g. car parts under the middle of the car, parts of her sewing machine I've dropped under the bed, parts of her food processor that I left in the car, her entire Precious Moments collection that just magically disappeared when I was there), and she is graceful even when standing on the top rung of the ladder while hanging Christmas lights or raking lemons off the back awning.

I'll gladly give you the local tour: there's the Methuselah Tree on Skyline Blvd; there's the Sections of the Berlin Wall "hidden" in the corner of a small business parking lot in Mountain View (both easy to find on internet); there's the Elizabeth Gamble Gardens, the Yoda statue in San Francisco; there's the stench of Alviso and of Shoreline Park, worth positioning ourselves downwind. Maybe we'll hang out by the railroad tracks, downtown, at night, and collect returnable bottles.

I tend to write math equations on walls, using broad felt pens. I invite friends over in the middle of the night to review these equations, finish off whatever beer is left, and add color wherever they find Greek letters. I like to attract the neighborhood cats into the garage by dribbling the oil from a can of herring in lines radiating from the garage door to a block or two away. If my fingernails had been shorter, I could have typed all of this; thankfully, though, someone typed this up from my dictation so that I continue to be free to pursue my dream of breaking the Guiness record for long fingernails. I wish it weren't so, but I tend to react negatively to Doppler radar. I am a licensed mountain lion breeder but thankfully have no experience. I am humble.

If you're the woman for me or I am the man for you, well, that's the way it goes.

Posted as my description on an online dating site, Apr 1

Great Scott! I'm grafting!

2010-03-27T23:36:00.000-07:00

I think it's fair to say that I've been afraid to reattempt grafting since my failure in 8th grade science.

I don't remember whether it was a B- or a C+ I got on my project. I do remember that it hurt, since it was, I felt, "considerably lower" than what I was used to getting as a science-minded youth.

I suspect it was November when we were told we had a science project due in January. The choice of project was ours. It was now December (and I think it was even during the Christmas school break) and high time to pick a project. I thought of the wild citrus my folks had let grow in our front yard. Someone in the family nicknamed it a "limerine" (LIM-uh-REEN) as in "lime crossed with tangerine." That was far too kind of a name for what a fruit that, though appealing with its bright orange skin, was nasty sour-bitter. The project I chose was grafting, to graft a good lemon branch onto the limerine. Wouldn't it be cool to redeem this plant with at least one branch producing something of value!

We lived along the coast near Los Angeles. Winters were cool but there wasn't frost. I figured that might work in my favor. I reviewed the gardening book. My brain readily received the messages about how to cut into the main branch and how to shape the part to graft into it. My brain ignored whatever information there might have been about timing. I made the cuts, stuck this in that, tied stuff securely, gooped it up with pruning tar.

A couple of weeks later, the report was due. I could see no change in the graft. I had nothing to write about except to describe what I had done and what I hoped would happen. Well, I shouldn't have been surprised to get the disappointing mark nor see the teacher's note about how unreasonable it was to expect results in such a short period.

The graft never did take.

On reflection, I have been fascinated by grafting my whole life. I have remained interested in the topic, despite my failure in junior high. When flipping through gardening books, I'm likely to pause on the section about grafting and review the illustrations on the various ways folks graft plants. (Readers' Digest produces such wonderful line drawings of how to do things. One of their drawings influenced this cartoon I drew in 1982.)

The failure of my grafting experience in junior high lodged that little doubt in my mind that I could ever succeed at grafting. I have tackled and succeeded at so many other gardening concepts that I'd think I would've been more willing to experiment. But I haven't been.

Today, I grabbed a book off my shelf, a book on Bonsai. My brother-in-law Scott mailed a couple of these treasured books to me before he died (just two years ago) knowing I shared his interest in trees and pruning. Making my way through it, I came across a section on grafting. I lingered on that for some time, backing up, rereading, trying to make sense of the photos plus the inadequate descriptions that accompanied them. One phrase caught my eye: "...February or March, while the buds are still dormant." Hey, I was in March. In an instant, I was thinking it was prime time I tried a graft.

Mom has had few-years-old rose plant among her rose bushes that shoots out these really long branches before producing one or two blooms. Her other rose bushes are standard height and pump out blooms. That one rose bush is just stupid. She also has a new rose bush planted last summer. I chose the stupid rose bush as the base and snipped a fresh twig from the young bush.

Out of all of the grafting styles, the one I chose was the T cut with a bud shield. (Coincidentally, this is the same approach I used on the limerine.)

The cambium layer for a branch or trunk is "the only living tissue" through which the nutrients are passed. And for a tree, the outermost part is called the "cork cambium". Picture a banana still in its peel. If I'm understanding right, the peel would be the cork cambium, and the surface of the edible part of the banana would be the cambium layer we care about. For a branch, supposedly the center stuff is dead tissue. So, the really important thing in grafting it getting the new graft's living cambium layer touching the living cambium layer of the base plant.

With a razor blade, I cut a T shape through the bark...through the cambium layer. I couldn't tell, from any feeling I got through cutting with the blade, how thick the cambium layer was. But I knew that I should be able to peel it back from the inner core of the branch, kind of like there is that difference between the banana and its peel. With my little knife, I poked and pried until I found that separation.

The bud shield, if I understand right, is to be carved from where a bud would naturally form along the twig: where a leaf is or has existed along the twig. So, I chopped the twig down to just the portion containing the bud location. Successful grafting involves the cambium layers of the base and of the little graft thingy coming into and remaining in contact so that the little graft thingy is adopted by the base, forming plant cell this and that, and the bud grows. Well, at least that's what I'm hoping for. And, so, I need to expose the cambium layer of the little graft thingy. I split the stem with the razor blade. There it was. Fresh "shield" of a graft thingy, ready to insert into the T cut on the base rose bush.

After jamming the shield into the T cut, I pressed the T flaps a little more snuggly onto the shield a few times, a symptom of my being new at this and wondering if I should expect something different. Well, the book said the graft needs to be tight and free from getting water in it. Years ago, sister Jan talked Mom into turning some old nylons into a big source of little flexible garden ties. I cut a little strip and tied it tight around the flaps.

As for water-tight, I went for the old pruning spray.

Well, the graft is done.

My gosh, I did it! It's been 36 years since I last attempted to graft something. Will this work? I have no idea. But I'm hopeful. And when it starts growing, I will shout with joy and relief or vindication or something and will update this blog post with a photo.

[Day 2: Drat. It appears I did it wrong. You can see I only slipped it in partway. I thought that was right. But that means that the top end is not touching the inner cambium layer. I should have trimmed the little thingy down so it could fit entirely under the flaps, with the potential bud part of it sticking out in the center. I now wonder if an "I" cut would've been better than a "T" cut, for the resulting "double doors" would have let me seat the little graft thingy better and I could have tied tightly above and below it. But I didn't. So, on Day 2, I added a bit more pruning tar on the top end to ensure no more moisture slips out the top end of my cutting.]

Chin face

2010-03-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Christmas 1985. I had shown brother David the "chin face" video I recorded at friend Jim's bachelor party (I'd painted a goofy face on Jim's chin and he laid on his back for a video camera to capture him lip-synching Beethoven's Joyful Joyful). David, an illustrator, was ready to take it up a notch. He painted faces on several of our chins, and I did his chin and Mom's. We sat comfortably upright in front of a video camera mounted upside down, hooked to TV so we could see what expressions we were creating. (Poor Dad: we assigned him some funky Michael Jackson song he didn't know. Made us all laugh.)

Watch the video on YouTube

Hi!

2010-01-15T16:08:00.000-08:00

The broken bird is back!" I called out to Mom, upon hearing one note in the back yard.

Every mourning dove I've ever heard has a call that sounds like "HI...lo lo lo". Except one. And it returns every year to court in Mom's yard. "HI" is all it gets out. "HI". There it is again. (Where's the "lo.. lo.. lo.."? Cracks me up.) This has come to be a kind of alert to Spring returning (albeit January), akin to parents calling to their children, "Kids, kids! The robins are back!" (or the Far Side, "Kids, kids! The slugs are back!").

I make a great mourning dove call by tightly cupping my hands and blowing through a little opening. "HI.. lo lo lo." In their mating season, I can spot a bird up on a distant wire and lure it my direction.

I joked to Mom "in the voice of" a lovesick female mourning dove, "Ahh, he knows the whole song..." and she gave her own dreamy female dove response: "He knows the words..."

HI! The bird's back.

So you think you can dance, part 3

2009-09-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

West coast swing. That was to be tonight's one hour lesson at the community center. They have a calender online that tells us what styles of dance will be taught each night of the week. They typically mark them with (B) and (I) so we know which style will be taught at the beginner level and which at the intermediate level. Tonight's had no such marking--just the mention of some special guest instructor and lots of exclamation marks.

I didn't know what west coast swing was. I was pretty sure it would be nothing like the beginner's level east coast swing I had learned. A quick poke on youtube and I saw some beginner steps that looked vaguely like what I had learned for east coast swing. What the heck, I'll go.

I sat like most folks on the perimeter of the gym-now-dance-floor. Catchy music was blaring. Folks continued to slowly stream in from the ticket line. Twenty feet out from me was a couple who were clearly experienced at whatever dance they were practicing while we all sat or milled about waiting for the event to start. I felt a thump in the wood floor. I watched the feet of the couple. Was it her big heels? Was that part of the dance move? No, it was the wirey-haired gal to my left who thudded the toe of her bulky shoe roughly in time with the music.

A guy walked; I recognized him from my distant past.

I stared for a long time at the foot work and spins of the dancing couple. Was this west coast swing? I had trouble picking out a pattern. Eventually I wandered by them and asked what style they were doing. "West coast swing," she replied. Wow. Was I up for that? I was thinking No. I continued my wandering, heading in the direction of the exit. I crossed paths with the guy and said he looked familiar; had he worked at IBM? He remembered my name and told me his. Yep! Fun to chat with him and get caught up. I told him I was having second thoughts about this dance, that it looked more complicated than I was up for. But after talking with him, I thought I'd stick it out.

Shortly after, the announcements started and we were split into beginner and intermediate groups. The gal leading the beginner grouped asked for a raise of hands of those of us who had never learned west coast swing. I was one of the 15 out of about 40 of us there who raised my hand. Another of her beginner questions got my hand up, too. Then she said, "This is one of the two most difficult dances for newcomers to learn." She went on about how it took her three times (lessons, I assume) till she was able to remember the moves herself.

She grabbed her male partner, called out, "Here's what we'll be starting with," and did a highspeed set of dance steps. From her mannerisms and style of speech that she'd used minutes earlier to have playful interaction with the gal leading the intermediate team, I first thought she was just doing that to freak us out and make us laugh with tension--that's something I would have done as an instructor, then reassure students that, no, we weren't really going to do that.

But then she repeated some steps in slower motion and asked us to follow. I followed once. Simulteneously, I thought it through. The full thought was "I really don't want to expend the energy to learn this thing which looks confusing to me already." The short version was "I'm not up for this." And so, as she repeated the instructions and asked us to repeat the steps, I stepped out of the ring and headed back to the ticket table. "After seeing what what they're doing tonight, I realize I'm just not up for it!" We had a pleasant exchange with my assuring them I'd be back another time. Got my money back and headed on home. I was already sleepy enough to pull over somewhere and take a nap. Yep, not the right evening for west coast swing.

The $15 echinacea weed

2009-09-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

I wanted a couple Cecile Brunner climbing roses and found a company that offered them online at a price better than the local nursery where I got the last one. There were a couple of echinacea that caught my eye. I don't know that I'd ever seen them in a garden before. They were brilliant in the online photos. Okay, I'll get a couple of those, at $7.50 a piece.

The roses came first. They've done well. Nice stuff.

The two echinacea showed up a couple of months later in dinky pots, new growth just starting to emerge. I planted them the next day in good soil.

I had expected more growth up front. Then I observed that what growth there was was getting consumed. Snails, or what? I put out some killer bait and identified the culprit: sow bugs. Wow, a lot of them. I was in time to save one of the plants, but not the other.

The one that remained was really slow in developing leaves. After several weeks, I saw a bud forming. A bud. I pinched it off and pinched off some of the top growth, assuming that that would encourage branching and more buds (as I've seen happen on my cosmos, etc). Weeks later, it barely grew new growth and put out one new bud. Okay, I'll let that one bloom, I told myself.

It was colorful. But there was just flower. And then from there it was downhill to what you see here. Will it come back in amazing form next year? They certainly won't be using this for their catalog photo.

Elizabeth Gamble garden

2009-08-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

Last year, I had the urge to get out and see a garden I hadn't seen before. I did a simple online search for gardens in this county and came up with this garden, a gorgeous place where one of the Gamble daughters (of Proctor and Gamble fortune) lived.

[Click for a larger version.]

It sounded interesting. Mom was up for the adventure, so we got some Starbucks and hit the road. I've gone back many times since, enjoying the ever-changing plants (though I'm still partial to the explosion of color in the Spring and Summer).

That time of year, revisited 2

2009-08-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

That car radio. I thought I was done with it. All that work I've put into getting its time right, as I have previously documented...

There are just two more days before the Cash for Clunkers program ends. If I take in my car, they'll just squish it after destroying the engine. I dunno, maybe someone at the scrap yard parts it out and makes some money on the parts. That radio. I originally bought it for Mom's car, but that car's speakers turned out to be blown. The notion of scrapping that radio after all of these blog posts...

So, this evening after work, I got my tool box and pried up the dashboard and center deck and rear hatch panels and removed the radio and four speakers. My hope is that I can get this functional set to work in Mom's car.

If I don't trade my car in, I'll have a hole in the dash. Can't set the hole to noon.

Fortunately, my hobby will continue... resetting the county's sundials for Daylights Savings.

[Update Aug 23: looks like I missed my window of opportunity for the Cash for Clunkers program. I get to keep the hole.]

Yahoo Cares

2009-08-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

Yahoo's IM window enables you to listen to music stations. And they have audio commercials. Before several of the public service announcements, they insert a subdued male voice saying "Yahoo Cares". But the result to my ear is a bored male saying "Yeah who cares..." and I completely miss whatever the important message was.

It's for you

2009-08-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

My friend Tom posted this photo of me today in Facebook. Ha, fun for me to see and remember. I'm guessing it's the only photo record of this school antic.

In 10th grade, I found a dial phone in the garbage. I took it home and disassembled it out of curiosity. I liked seeing why the dial mechanism spun at a constant speed when released and how the amount of rotation was converted to a pulse for the selected number.

Hey, there's my best friend from high school, my constant sidekick, Paul Morgan. On a rainy day in high school, I found a damaged umbrella. I yanked all the fabric off so it was just a wireframe and handed it to Paul. It was lunchtime, and folks had poured out of classrooms and were now crowded in the sheltered outdoor walkways, waiting for the rain to break. Paul made his way around to the far end of the courtyard and then calmly walked the longest diagonal across the yard, wire frame over his head, rain pouring down like it rarely poured down. Laughter all around the yard. Someone threw food his direction. Paul plodded along, unswayed, soaked.

The internal bell mechanism looked like what I had seen on the outside of alarm clocks: two inverted brass cups or bells with a ball hammer between them. Though the main mechanism was an electrical-coil solenoid, a structural member nearby, if tapped right, would bang the hammer into one bell, and the spring action would ring the other bell. With rapid taps with my piano-trained finger, I could make the ring sound like someone was calling.

Hm, an idea. I severed the handset from the base, with coiled extension intact. I secured the cut end in my left pants pocket and fed the handset up inside my coat and hooked the handset in the pit of my left sleeve. I put the bell mechanism in in my right coat pocket. And so began a long period of my carrying this gag phone in my coat at high school.

In college, I soldered an 1/8" jack to the end of the extension and put that in the earphone jack of the mini-tape recorder I used to capture college lectures. I put some classical music on a tape. Now I could listen to music through the handset--a ridiculous substitute for the popular Sony Walkman tape player/headphones (the iPod of the '80s).

The typical setup was this: I'd have my hands in my coat pockets, get near someone who didn't know I had this phone (including complete strangers) and hammer the mechanism to ring the bell. Heads would turn a bit as folks reacted to the familiar sound that was out of place. (Hey, remember, this was waaaay before cell phones brought noise outside for everyone to enjoy.) Shortly after, I'd reach down into my coat and pull the handset from my armpit and say "Hello?" (which would help them know where to look to finish their thought). First timers were still forming thoughts about a phone cord connected mysteriously inside my coat. "It's for you" worked well (I'd extend the phone to them, stretching the cord). Or I might say things that made little sense when you don't know what's being said on the other end, like, "No, not today, I left it at home". Or declare "Wrong number." Hooking the handset back inside my coat and bringing my empty hand back out and going about my business--it was always wonderful to observe reactions.

I was in a school play at the end of that school year. In the last performance (the "oh who cares what anyone thinks" performance), I stuck the handset into the armpit of my outfit. I was at the front center in one particular singing/dancing scene and found a time that I could pull the phone out and put it to my ear briefly and put it back away without any fellow dancers having a clue. Family members were there for that last performance and I heard my brother's shout from the darkness, over the music, "He's got his phone!" Satisfying.

So You Think You Can Dance, part 2

2009-08-16T21:40:00.001-07:00

A week after the swing dance lessons, the pain in the arch of my left foot is nearly gone. On the schedule for this week: intermediate waltz. Cool. I like waltz because, well, it's the only dance style I've ever felt successful at. (I recall how my attempts to dance with rock music actually drew pointing fingers and covered mouths. Hm, won't do that again.)

There was a lot of time between evening church and the start of lessons. I went to the nearby Walmart for some unsuccessful shopping for stuff I thought I needed and was growing nauseated from not having had enough food. I bought a couple of protein bars at a cash register in the middle of the store and, with receipt in hand, wolfed down the bars right there. I tend to favor peanut butter stuff. One of the bars left grit in my throat. Its irritation led to hacking and coughing for the next 45 minutes. Excellent.

Fast forward. I'm in the dance hall and have joined the 30 others who indicated they wanted intermediate waltz over beginning or intermediate salsa lessons. The male instructor asked a series of questions about who had waltzed less than 6 months? a year? 2 years? I was the only one who raised my hand for the less than 6 months query. The instructor said that in the next hour we were going to learn to do "this" and grabbed his partner and stepped and slid and spun and paused and spun the other way and another travel and then hesitate and, oh, now the lady is plunged backward and looking blankly into space as for a photo op and then the twirl out of that. The guy next to me and I spurt out expressions of disbelief.

My great skill in tapping my foot to music continued to prove ineffective in my learning new moves. Hey, waltz is supposed to be a 3/4 thing. I learned the box step 20 years ago. One, two, three, one, two, three. That's groups of threes. Simple math says that if I do two groups of threes, whatever was my starting foot will be the foot that's ready to move after two groups. Oh, but Jim the Teacher is now on his other foot. What? Watching, watching, listening, aha! He snuck in an extra step right there. I seek confirmation: "Is there a skip at one point?" The teacher, mic'd to project his voice to our section of the gym through large speakers, points out that, no, skipping is hopping on one foot. He was sacheing, he said. ("Oooo, sacheeeeeeing. You can say sacheeeeeing." I didn't actually say that or think that, but I think it makes for good reading.) I watched again and AHA, he had an extra SKIP in there (okay, on a different foot) that resulted in the change in final foot. Okay, progress for me; I was soon able to complete the first twirl thingy on my own and then with whatever gal was now paired with me from the ongoing rotation.

I tended to introduce myself when moved to the next gal in the circle. Maybe half of the ladies told me their name; not a big tradition there, I guess. "Dude, just assume The Frame and do the your dance steps so I can learn my bit," I imagined them thinking. So, in the handful of times when I heard my name called by a woman, it jarring because it felt out of place. It was always used as part of playful conversation but also when I think I looked clueless. Yeah, nice to have my name remembered, and I hope it was an expression of comfort in playfulness and not simply ease in identifying the dancing rag doll from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

And so I made it through another one or two moves, with only minor brain damage. Then they got to the plunge part. Okay, I'm not happy now as I write this. I left the evening having not understood how to plunge right. What I was consistent at was tipping while the gal leaned back and continuing to tip off balance. Yeah, that's rewarding. Yeah, I'm sure the ladies like watching their upside down view of the gym wall now start to include the floor. My tempo-oriented brain wanted counts! What should happen on one? on two? on three? Sure, he explained it a dozen times and demonstrated it, but... I don't know... I missed something, obviously. That put a damper on things. In the subsequent multi-style free dance period, I was willing to try anything but that plunge bit; unfortunately, we were taught these moves in a particular sequence, so it was like a puzzle piece that had to be fit in or the rest wouldn't work. When they started the free dance period and a waltz piece came up, I spun around by myself on the floor, attempting and reattempting the moves I'd learned, attempting to get the steps right. Nope, try again; again; again. Pretty inconsistent.

A chinese woman who was not part of our little class zipped up to me, ready to go. Sure, why not. Ballroom dance is supposed to be led by the man. In this waltz lesson, little was done to encourage us to mix up the handful of moves we'd learned. Noooo, we did all of "random" moves in a particular sequence through the whole lesson. Good for teaching several moves in one lesson, but not good for teaching me to be a bit more random. In that moment, I decided that I would just lead. I'd do the basic no-brainer box step. I'd try to dig up some of the stylish yet simple waltz steps I'd learned 20 years ago. And I'd try to insert some of the moves I learned tonight. I'd just go for it. And I did! Yeah, I mangled several steps, but by golly, she followed and we twirled and I got her walking backwards sometimes and forwards other times. Hey, that worked. And when the music ended, she said she'd never taken waltz lessons, that she just followed. YES! I took it as a positive and went and ate grapes and brownies and drank liquids in the break area. I went back in and sat all cool-like on a side chair. But reality was that I didn't want to take the risk that one of the actual waltz students would want to do the scripted routine and get me into the plunge predicament again. I went and had more grapes.

So You Think You Can Dance

2009-08-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

That's probably what I was thinking that kept me from high-tailing it out of there. After Saturday evening church, I mosied on down the street to a community center where they teach ballroom dancing. I'd been there before--wow, 20 years ago?--to learn waltzing for my college roommate's wedding. I knew to expect a big gymnasium (they bill it as the largest wooden dance floor in the USA) with lots of singles and a few couples, constantly being rotated to new dance partners (certainly a kindness to my partners when I'm clueless).

After two hours of lessons and another half hour to get home, I'm finding my heart beat still elevated. I'm writing this while nearly horizontal to aid in easing my nausea from exhaustion. The ceiling fan is set to puree to maximize cooling of my feet, one of which wants to cramp into an arc, and it's on the same leg as the shin splint. But it's still fair to say it was fun.

Officially, the man's supposed to lead, but I'm tellin ya I'm glad at the many tips and corrections the ladies (of a big spread of ages) gave me. It was probably a bit of smart sales work on the instructor's part to get me to come back, but nonetheless I liked that she told me should could tell I was determined and inquisitive and trying to get it right--in contrast, she said, to the folks who show up "who watched So You Think You Can Dance and think they should be able to learn it all 'right now'".

Holy cow, that East Coast Swing is a lot of fast steps. I am OUT of SHAPE. I had to sit down while everyone else kept learning because I thought I was going to pass out. My heart rate was elevated (a good thing for the heart that's used to that) and sweat was dropping onto the floor off my forehead. But it was fun, I keep telling myself!

A treat for me was getting to watch those who knew their stuff. I'd put them in two camps: those who were skilled with the moves and those who also looked like they were really enjoying it. I remember one couple (formed, as these pairs are formed, simply by a guy approaching any gal on the side and drawing her out to the floor) who, just like that, were into these elegant, precision moves that were new to my eyes--like well-tuned machinery. Yet I don't recall seeing either of them smile. Soon, they were off dancing with other partners.

The evening had two halves: class time (learn steps for one style) and music time (for folks to freely dance a variety of styles). In that second half, I'd shuffle around a bit, watching the footwork of dances unfamiliar to me, to see what I could mimic. (Not a high success rate there.) A courageous lady approached me as the song style changed. I told her I'd just taken my first lesson in swing. She was glad to be of help in answering my barrage of questions. It was funny to me how difficult it was to learn some of the footwork advice she sought to give, difficult because she had one of those flowing dresses that, with just a little spin of her body, would flare outward. No chance of my seeing her feet! I appreciated that, at one point, she clutched a bit of her dress upward so I could see her footwork.

It *was* my first formal lesson in swing--BUT I thank folks for putting all those videos on youtube so that, last night, I could try out the steps in the comfort of my home and try to burn that odd 6-beat pattern into my brain and limbs before wrassling with the ladies tonight. Me and my long legs--I'm so used to taking big steps that I carried that over to swing. Doesn't work. The vocal ladies would keep reminding me, "Smaller steps". I shake my head now in recalling all the things I have to try to remember at once. As one of the youtube instructors noted, it's complicated to learn at first, but then it becomes natural. Hm. Becomes natural. That's still future for me.

Skateboarder Ground Hog Day

2009-08-06T02:05:00.001-07:00

I so much want to know what that guy was thinking.

The background details escape me, but I remember that, for some reason, my folks' car was parked a couple of miles from their home, they were away on a trip, and I wanted to get their car to their home. I had my own car. And in my car, I had my skateboard. I figured that I could drive my car part way, skateboard to their car, and drive then drive their partway, and repeat until I got both cars home.

I have my limitations with skateboarding. One leg is my standing/squatting leg, and the other is the kicking/propelling leg. I'm good for about 15 kicks before my standing leg thigh is burning from the series of one-legged squats while my kicking leg smacks the road over and over. With this in mind, I drove my car within what I figured was a reasonable distance of my folks' car. It basically worked out right: I'd propel myself to a point of weariness, arrive just in time at my folks' car to collapse in it and regain some leg strength (and reduce my heart rate) as I drove the next portion.

For you to understand the rest of the story, you have to be able to picture how the cars were doing a sort of leap frog in the direction of the house and my skateboarding would take me back the opposite direction. Let's say my folks' car was now furthest from home. I would drive it beyond my car and then park. I would hop out, ride my skateboard back up the street to my car. I'd drive my car to a point beyond my parents' car and park it. I'd ride my skateboard back to my parents' car, and repeat this until both cars were home.

There was this guy walking along the same road on which I was doing this leap frog thing with the cars. He was walking the same direction that I was moving the cars. Think about it: when would he see me? He would not see me as I drove past him. He could only see me as I rode my skateboard in the opposite direction of his travel, on the other side of street.

It just so happened that the pace of this whole cycle of drive, park, skate, resulted in my skateboarding past him at four times. I would park far ahead of him, out of his view (blocked by other cars, trees, etc) and then propel myself on my skateboard back the long distance to the car in the distance.

Consider that this guy is making decent progress down the road. He is steadily arriving at new block after block. And every few minutes, I keep reappearing ahead of him and and skating off into the distance behind him. That must have caught his attention that I would reappear on the same road, travelling the same direction, yet having a starting point further back from where he'd last seen me start. (I'm reminded of that goofy scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knight keeps re-galloping from the same starting point.) I remember that the guy's stare was extended on my fourth pass by.

Eventually, I got both cars to my folks' house. I think of that event and that guy nearly every time I have driven down that road in the 20 years hence. I wonder what he was thinking.

Claim your prize

2009-08-06T01:57:00.001-07:00

I once lived in a house on a bluff with a nice view of Marina del Rey and of a cheap market area with a payphone. My brother and I could tell, with the aid of a telescope, whether that was a man or woman on the path approaching the payphone. My brother, whose voice had deepened enough for him to fake a radio announcer voice, would call the payphone and declare to the person that he or she had won and instruct the person to walk to the Marina Mart (wow, what good fortune for the winner! why, that was right down the street!) and instruct the person to say some secret message to the cashier to claim the prize. My brother would pick some odd word or phrase as the secret message (and we'd grip our faces to stifle laughs). Off the person would go to the market. We'd watch him disappear into the mart and within a minute come out just as fast as he went in.

Fish mocha

2009-04-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

That's what I told Mom I got when we tasted our drinks at Peet's Coffee. She'd ordered an iced peppermint mocha with whipped cream. I'd asked if they had something like that hot. They did, so I ordered that. I have no idea what it was that contributed to my mental interpretation, but my first reaction on smelling/sipping the whipped cream on the drink was "fish". I didn't feel comfortable telling them or asking for an exchange. I mean, imagine their pause and stare of disbelief if I chose to describe my experience: "I thought it smelled like fish." I've asked for new drinks when they weren't as hot as I'd requested or weren't as sweet as what I'd normally experienced. But "I thought it smelled like fish"...I'd just be embarrassed to mention that. So, all I can figure is that there was something about the combo of ingredients that tricked my brain.

Reminds me of the other night when I lifted up my laptop to smell if there was some electrical problem; I thought I smelled funky overheating plastic. Turns out my brain couldn't make sense of the perfumey jasmine bouquet on the table a few feet away.

I don't think I had fish mocha. But I'm thinking I won't reorder that drink "just to find out" if it still reminds me of fish mocha. What a waste if the answer is yes. I'll stick with what I know works.

TurboTax TXF specification for stock trades

2009-03-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

For those who are looking information on the TurboTax TXF tax exchange format, scroll down...

For years, I have downloaded my stock trade information from my trading institution, manipulated it into pairs of buys and sells, and transferred that information into TurboTax. Initially, I had copy-pasted the information into the TurboTax fields. That took hours. In later years, I developed Perl and AutoIT programs that automated the data entry. (It was satisfying to sit back and watch the cursor jump from field to field and click button after button, as if I were operating the mouse and keyboard. But then, this year, changes in TurboTax prevent my AutoIT program from finding the entry fields. Ugh. Would I have to enter the data manually again? Please, no. And I do not want to pay for and manually enter stock information into Quicken.

TurboTax had an option for importing stock information. I only had to have a file in TXF format (Tax Exchange Format or Tax Export Format). Surely, TurboTax/Intuit would have some description of that file format somewhere? Nope.

I found this description on a Russian site: http://www.softhelp.ru/fileformat/txf/txf.htm . Well, that page was difficult to read, so I connected online with a TurboTax/Intuit help agent and asked where I could learn about the TXF specification. After 45 minutes, the Intuit agent reported that she and her supervisor could not find any information. Wow. I gave them the link to the web page I'd found and thanked them for their time.

I gave the web page another look and started putting the pieces together. That page describes far more finance-related details than I needed; I just wanted to know about stocks. And it turns out that the format for stocks is straightforward.

With a little bit of programming, I manipulated my stock info into this new form, and TurboTax readily imported it.

--------------------

Here is the basic form of a TXF file for stock trades.

Lines of a TXF start with single letters or with ^ or $. Start your txf file (e.g. myStocks.txf) with lines that identify the version (V) of TXF spec (036), a name (A) for your solution, the date (D) of the "export" of information to the file, and the record-ending symbol "^":

V036
AMy stock data
D 12/31/2008
^

For each stock buy/sell, provide these four lines (the N321 informs TurboTax that it's a short term trade; use N323 for long term trades):

TD
N321
C1
L1

Follow those lines with the trade description (P), the sell and buy dates (D, D), the sell and buy amounts ($, $), and the record-ending symbol "^":

P100 shares of IBM
D4/3/2008
D2/1/2008
$4000.00
$3000.00
^

I recommend that you create two dummy records and try importing your txf file into TurboTax to confirm that it works. In my experimenting, I discovered that the buy and sell rows were backwards from what I thought the spec said.

No longer that time of year

2009-03-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of you, without prompting, recalled that I might have to disconnect my battery to fix my car radio time, what with this being Daylight Savings Time in California. Thanks for remembering the saga!

Soon after correcting my car radio clock last Fall, my car wouldn't start. Turned out I needed a new alternator, and so I replaced that. Oh, man, that was nuts. I couldn't figure out how to get the alternator out of the small opening on the top in the engine area (see D) so I tried pushing the alternator toward the ground. Great, I got it stuck down there on top of the muffler, wedged against essential tubing. (See A. And B and C serve to show just how low that part was, how close to the ground, yet blocked from removal out the bottom.) The muffler bolts were completely rusted, so I HAD to find a way to get the alternator out the top. It took a lot of wriggling, twisting, pushing to find a way to get that bulky thing out the small gap at the top, near where the alternator is normally mounted. D shows the new (smaller) alternator in place.

For relevance to the original story, note that replacing the alternator meant I had to disconnect my battery which meant I needed to find a noontime when I could disconnect it again to reset my car radio clock.

Soon after replacing my alternator, the car died again. Turned out the battery couldn't hold a charge anymore. Great. So I replaced the battery, which meant I needed to find yet another noontime when I could disconnect it again to reset my car radio clock (everyone, sing the ending "I don't know why she swallowed a fly--perhaps she'll die" and let's move on to the next verse).

In the same period, I'd yanked out Mom's car radio because all that worked was the cassette player. I found a factory 1992 radio on eBay (matching her car) and it turned out it was busted (couldn't get a cassette back out of it and mailed it back with the cassette tape). Bought a 2008 radio and connected it and could get no sound. Dug into wiring diagrams, got out the voltmeter, no luck. Tried a test familiar to speaker technicians: touch wires from a battery to the speaker wires to get a scratchy sound...and got no sound. Could all speakers really be shot? Then I thought to try the battery test on my car's speakers. The test worked on my speakers. I bought a radio wire harness from BestBuy and hooked it up and heard a car radio in my car for the first time in, what, 6 years?

I set the time correctly on the radio via the radio buttons--without disconnecting the battery--wow, what a thought. Coincidentally, it was just a few minutes before midnight.

But I had hooked up the radio in haste; I didn't have the necessary mounting gear to fit it properly in the different-sized hole in the dash. While the radio played, I shoved the radio further into the dash. I heard a fzzt sound over the speakers. Some kind of wiring issue. Made me nervous. Disconnected the radio so I could think about it.

Drat, now the clock was off again.

I bought the necessary mounting hardware on eBay, got the radio all wired up properly and got the radio in place. I set time.

"Now what?" My dash lights behind my speedometer went out. I checked the fuses and found one was fried. I checked the fuse for the radio; it was fine.

Darn it, unplugging the radio fuse reset the clock.

I've become quite adept at setting the new car radio's clock. I can set it in under 3 minutes in the comfort of the car interior, while enjoying the sound of the radio.

And so ends an era of touching stories about battery cables and Daylight Savings Time and my car radio clock.

The dash lights are still out.

Much better than oink

2009-03-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

A Russian family was visiting. Something I might ask someone of another language is what sound a cat makes or a cow or a rooster, just to find out what they say in their language. American English might say meow, moo and cocka-doodle-do while Chinese might say neow for the cat, etc. So, I asked the Russians about pigs. I illustrated that Americans might say "oink oink" for the pig sound. They laughed at the oddity. They said pigs said "nif nif" (or, if you're familiar with German, it's more like nöf nöf), which make us laugh. I said we had a story of the Three Little Pigs. They conferred with each other and responded that, oh, that story was called Nöf Nöf, Nof Nof, and Nuf Nuf, which made us laugh even more. On reflection, Nöf Nöf makes a LOT more sense than oink.

Making the digital TV signal transition

2009-02-16T20:54:00.000-08:00

Over and over on TV for the last year, stations have told us that we should get ready for Feb 17, the date when stations would switch from analog to digital signals.

Eventually, I started researching my options. We have an old TV and two VCRs (and no cable or satellite subscription), and I wanted to be able to reuse as much of our old equipment as possible.

A friend of mine (a sharp guy who had hooked up his old TV/VCR/antenna in the past) was now stumped at how to hook up his VCR and TV to his digital signal converter. "How do I record? What channel does the VCR need to be on? Can I still record one program while watching another?" I had the same kind of questions, and I sketched up some ideas and poked some more on the internet to find out answers.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard the tail end of a news report that the government had just pushed the conversion deadline out to June. I went online to learn more. Apparently, 10% of homes in the USA have done nothing to be ready for the transition. They were on track to end up with blank screens on the February cutover date. One author attributed this to inadequate information on how to made this change.

I most definitely agreed with that author's assessment. I feel pretty sharp about connecting and programming devices, and I was finding it difficult to get answers to many of my basic questions. I was left to speculate. I wanted to be of help to you by passing on a few things that I have learned. Let me know how else I might help.

Wiring ideas

Pick the diagram that best matches your situation. On the left is the setup without the digital signal converter; on the right, with. Notation: CONV is the digital converter box. "CH" marks the device that you would change to see a different channels. "3" means that you set that device to channel 3, and something else controls which channel you watch. In our setup, all the lines in the diagram represent coax cables, except for the one between the DVD and VCR which is audio/video cables (which David D. notes is not preferred or even a workable solution in many situations because of Macrovision DVD content protection). You might choose to use a different set of cables, but the principle is basically the same: the flow is from the antenna, through the CONV and the VCR to the TV. Look for "IN" and "OUT" connections based to fit that flow.

An essential concept to grasp is that the CONV becomes your only channel changer. If you previously changed channels on your TV (diagram A) or changed channels via your VCR (diagram B), that is not how it will work anymore. Again, the CONV is what you change.

Diagram "A": Is your TV currently connected directly to your antenna? With the CONV in the flow, the CONV becomes your primary channel changer, so you need to set your TV to channel 3 and leave it there so that it simply displays whatever image is sent to it from the CONV.

Diagram "B": Is your VCR currently connected directly to your antenna? (In this typical setup, you change channels via your VCR. The VCR has a built-in TV tuner. You set your TV to channel 3 to display whatever signal the VCR sends to it. It is the VCR, and not the TV, that determines the displayed channel.) With the CONV in the flow, the CONV becomes your primary channel changer, so (just like your TV) you need to set your VCR to channel 3 and leave it there so that it simply displays whatever image is sent to it from the CONV.

So, then, what happens to your VCR and recording different channels? With this new setup, your VCR is a recorder only. It records channel 3 only. It is the CONV that determines what is on the VCR's channel 3. You must change channels on the CONV to record different channels with the VCR.

Diagram "C": This is the configuration in our home. Before adding the CONV to the flow, we were able to record different programs with each VCR. To enable this, we split the antenna signal so that each VCR would have its own antenna signal. A slider switch between the VCRs and the TV lets us choose which VCR's signal we watch. With the CONV in the flow, VCR1 has been reduced to simply a recorder, as described previously for Diagram B.

While we wait for the cutover in June, VCR2 will continue to pick up whatever analog signals are still being broadcast (which, according to the news, may only be the major networks like ABC, FOX, NBC and CBS), and we can therefore record one analog channel on VCR2 while we watch and/or record one digital broadcast on VCR1. (During this period, the TV would still be able to view analog channels on its own, so we could record a digital broadcast on VCR1 and switch the TV to display an analog channel of its own.)

After June, VCR2 will basically become a doorstop, for the only thing it knows how to display are analog airwaves and prerecorded tapes. If we want to record two different programs, each VCR will need a CONV of its own in its flow, for--everyone repeat together--the CONV is now the channel changer and the VCR (set to channel 3) simply displays whatever signal is fed to it.

Changing channels

I know of three converter models that you can program to change the converter's channels for you. If you decide to use one of those converters, you would program the VCR to record channel 3 at a specific time (so, program it like you normally would...except the channel would always be 3, now), and separately program the CONV to change (at the same time as the VCR) to the real channel of interest. That's a bit of a hassle, but that's basically your only option if you have an older VCR that is not capable of interpreting digital airwave signals on its own and thus cannot switch between digital channels.

If you cannot program your CONV to change channels, you would program your VCR to start and stop recording, and, before the time that your VCR would start recording, be sure to change to the right channel on the CONV.

Who does NOT need a digital signal converter?

You do not need a digital signal converter if:

you subscribe to cable or satellite signal; those feed your TV a digital signal already
your TV has a built-in digital airwave tuner
your VCR has a built-in digital airwave tuner

Transition options

After poking around the 'net a bit, I concluded that these were my options:

buy a new TV and try to sell the old one (all new TVs have a built-in converter/tuner); we would only be able to record whatever channel the TV is set to
buy a VCR that has a built-in converter/tuner; we would only be able to record whatever channel the VCR is set to
pay for monthly cable or satellite service (we could record separate programs with the two VCRs, depending on subscription)
buy a digital signal converter and use our current VCR and TV; we would only be able to record whatever signal the converter puts out; buy additional converters for every TV or VCR that we want to be able to pick up its own channel; I found several videos on YouTube made by folks who went this route, and they were all delighted at how much their TV image had improved
optionally, pay for a monthly "program guide" service to tell us what shows are coming up

I learned of a few more options:

buy a TV tuner card and software for your computer; with it connected to your antenna, you can record one channel at a time to your computer's hard drive; some TV tuner cards have two tuners
buy dish.com's digital video recorder; it has two tuners and can record two programs at once; it is fairly new and many buyers are reporting bugs and telling nightmare stories of Dish customer service and product returns; those who haven't run into problems love the product; I will watch and see how if user opinion of Dish's digital video recorder improves; this product looks very interesting to me
(TIVO: I don't want to pay for its services now that I know about Dish's products, so I didn't check it out; someone tell me if TIVO has a built-in digital airwave tuner)

I decided that I would start by buying one digital signal converter in hopes that the YouTube guys were right about image quality. Although there are many cable programs I'd love to watch, I've certainly gotten along fine with just the air-broadcast channels. Moving to digital airwave reception would no doubt bring in a handful of new options.

Converter options

There are many differences between converter models. I found a report that compared 30-50 models. In reading that report, I learned that some converters resulted in high quality pictures and others poorer quality. Many offered a "program guide" (to see what other programs are on or will be on) and, again, some were very useful and others were really a pain to use. I've seen a lousy program guide on a friend's converter; yes, it was a pain.

The feature that caught my eye, the one that only three models had, was a programmable timer. You can program the converter to change to a particular channel at a certain time.

Of all of the aspects presented in the report, the ones that appealed most to me were cost, picture quality, quality of online program guide, and ability to program the converter to change channels.

The three models that were programmable didn't have the best picture quality rating, but I felt that programmability was a requirement--and reporters had noted that picture quality for the moderate devices was still an improvement over what many of us were used to with old analog signal. Two of these three models are made by Dish and their online program guides are highly rated. I was willing to pay a bit more for the quality of program guide and to get the timer programming ability (so I could continue to use at least one of our VCRs).

My one reservation with the Dish units was customer comments in 2008 about encountering bugs in the Dish units and about hassles in returning products purchased from Dish. Then I found out that Sears sells the Dish DTVPal Plus. When Sears confirmed that they had a 30 day return policy for defective products, I was ready to buy. If the product had problems up front, I'd have the ease of returning or exchanging the product.

I bought the DTVPal Plus and had it up and running with about 15 minutes' effort, just in time to watch "24" on channel 2, clear on our TV for the first time. The program guide was beautiful--and free (no monthly subscription)!

The DTVPal can show a meter for signal strength. For many of the clear programs I can now see, the strength is down as low as 62 out of 100.

Don't buy a new antenna yet

Several reporters reported that we would likely see a much better picture (compared to the old analog signal) simply by using a digital converter box--without changing anything related to antenna. A guy on YouTube said he was picking up distant broadcasts with great clarity. They were all correct.

With no change to our antenna, we're getting much better picture results than we did before, and we are picking up a bunch of new channels (several of which are being sent by the same broadcaster--for example, FOX broadcasts 2.1 for what used to be channel 2 and also broadcasts 2.2, 2.3, ...). At this point, $25 out of pocket (thanks to the $40 government coupon) has bought us more channels and clearer channels with NO monthly fees, period. Sweet.

I agree with my brother's speculation that the signal strength may increase as broadcasters turn off their analog signals and put their costly energy into the digital signals. I wonder what additional channels we'll then pick up?

Cables - courtesy of David D.

Some TV sets that are antenna-based have, for at least 25 years, had more than one set of "component In and Outs" also known as RCA jacks. They are traditionally Red, White and Yellow color-coded and have universally been Red=Right (remember the Rs), White being Left audio channel or Mono (if you only have one audio cable, use the Left/White/mono and the internal processor will send the signal to both channels), and Yellow being reserved for video.

The weak link in the analog TV signal delivery system is the two-lead, flat antenna wire which was replaced by a better, but still weak "coax," (pronounced 'CO-acks') which is an abbreviation for "coaxial." Coaxial cable traditionally has been the black or white cable coming from the wall, about 1/4" (6mm) diameter, with a copper "needle-like" center wire, and a threaded, screw-on "nut" at the end which attaches to a threaded matching male post on the TV. This coaxial connector has traditionally delivered all the signals your TV is capable of handling, video and audio.

As signals have improved over the years, manufacturers of VCRs, Laserdisc Players, DVD players and the like separated video and audio for increased performance and quality, making use of the RCA or Component connectors for superior video and audio quality vs, the coaxial input. While many users still connect their VCRs' coaxial OUT to the TV's coaxial IN, usually a superior picture quality can be achieved using the RCA/Component connectors instead, and switching the TVs system to a "Video" input. (This also allows the user to instead choose to run the VCR's output to a stereo amplifier for enhanced audio)

With the coming/arrived digital-only, the coaxial cables are now delivering digital content through he same coaxial port that WAS the weak link in analog delivery, now making it the only/best option. As cable and digital companies upgrade to fiber-optic to deliver more and cleaner digital content to more homes, signal quality will still "bottleneck" at the coaxial cable in the walls, which will technically be less efficient and lower quality than the new HDMI connections that go from some devices to HDTV for the clearest sound and picture, but which few people will even notice.

What else?

Interested in telling your friends about this article? Click the title of this post to get the URL of just this post (and not the entire blog).

Have tips to share? I will give you first-name-last-initial credit for whatever I include from what you say.use.

Have questions about something not mentioned here yet? Let me know--perhaps I can help.

[[additional article ideas...

[[what the converter does; what it doesn't do

[["does a converter show HD?" (only if the broadcaster transmits HD and if you have a TV capable of displaying HD format, etc) "Are broadcasters transmitting HD signals?" (some are; not all are; HD is a lot of information: a broadcaster can transmit 1 HD signal or 4 non-HD signals in its places; it's up to the broadcaster) "How will an HD signal appear on my non-HD TV?" (a wonderful image that just isn't as sharp as on an HD screen) "How will a non-HD signal appear on my HD TV?" (lower quality than an HD signal)

Porcelain berry

2008-11-09T19:04:00.001-08:00

Mom and I had never heard of the Elisabeth Gamble House (and garden) just up the road from her place before my online search for "gardens Santa Clara County". I was in the mood for a visit to a garden.

A large gazebo in the garden had several climbing plants. I had never seen this plant before and was delighted by its many-colored berries. I thought out loud with Mom nearby, "I wonder if this might not be such a good plant to have, dropping berries, perhaps reseeding all over the place..." An online search since our visit reveals that this is one of those plants that many states wish they could get rid of because it takes over.

That time of year, revisited

2008-10-31T01:14:00.000-07:00

Letterman was on. I was flipping between him and Charlie Rose while doing some late night programming. The little time in the corner of the laptop screen was 12:29 am. Aha! I remembered the significance of the half hour! And what a luxury to have all of this time to prepare for the top of the hour...and correct my prior car clock reset attempt. I opened the hood and disconnected the battery cable and did the camera thing and went back inside.

I watched for the laptop clock to read 12:59:30 and then dashed out into the drizzle and cold wind, counting "29, 28, 27...".

I'm always a little tense messing with a battery cable. I steeled myself for the little spark/fizz sound that would happen when I connected the cable on "0". What I hadn't anticipated was the bright light that came on, right next to my face. That hood lamp. Hadn't noticed that in my daytime clock resets.

Two more days of clock confusion left till Daylight Savings Time.

That time of year but not that hour

2008-10-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

For the last week, my car clock has confused me; I have put up with it being off by an hour and have been looking forward to this weekend when Daylight Savings Time would officially happen and my car clock time would end up being on time.

Mom and I were out on the road and she asked, "Which direction are we supposed to change the clock?" (with an upward tone that suggests "Are you sure?") I started into my confident explanation and then halted as I did the math in my head again while processing her saying, "spring forward fall back." Oh man... I had changed the time an hour in the wrong direction.

She started laughing and covered her nose and mouth with her hands as if to hide her delighted laughter from me. I laughed and shook my head. Note to self: watch for 12:50 pm or 12:50 am and try this again.

That time of year

2008-10-25T15:09:00.001-07:00

I am ahead of schedule this time.

For me to photograph the actual time-changing event, several conditions must be met simultaneously:

I am near my car with a wrench.

I have my camera and tripod.

The time is right:

I remember that I need to deal with the car clock.

It is a convenient time for me to mess with the car.

I remember this before the time I need to deal with the car clock.
I remember this just before the time. Otherwise, I will go back to my business and forget that I wanted to deal with the car, and I will have to wait for the next time all of these conditions are met.

I have enough time to get to my car, pop the hood, disconnect the battery cable, attach my camera to the tripod, set up the timer on the camera, compose and take the shot... and then connect the battery at the top of the hour.

Sure, it would make a lot more sense for me to just add an Event to my computer calendar. I could eliminate the most difficult part of my car clock ritual. But, if you understand the oddity that is my car clock ritual, you know that that would be a sort of conflict in principle.

On this day, I was indoors, working on my laptop in a semblence of clothing that was stuck somewhere between right out of bed and ready to go to work. I glanced at the little time at the bottom right corner. 10:55. "10:55..." I thought. Why did that seem familiar?

Last week, thoughts of Halloween reminded me that we were approaching the time when evening would abruptly thrust itself into the daylight I so prefer. Oh yeah, the opportunity to change my car clock time for another blog post. I remembered that I had had considerable trouble getting the time right last Spring. So, I thought for a while about what time I would need to pay attention to clocks in this particular season: 11. I wasn't thinking about my car clock at all until the 10:55 on my computer screen brought back that faint memory from last week.

"10:55!" My mind now raced through details of what I would have to accomplish in 5 minutes. My car was inconveniently outdoors. I slipped into presentable clothing and shoes while getting my camera out of its pouch and attaching it to the tripod and extending the legs on the tripod, while I made my way out to the car and popped the hood and glanced to see no toolbox in the car which meant I needed a wrench from the garage. Propped up the hood, loosened the bolt, disconnected the battery cable, ran to the lawn where I'd left the tripod, switched to camera timer mode and got into position for a couple of shots and then reconnected the cable.

I slowed down, slipped into the driver's seat and turned the key in the ignition to see the fruit of my labors, the only time the clock could show at that instant: 12:00. Mission accomplished. Okay, my clock will be off by one hour for a week, but that's cool.

The postman and Polonaise

2008-07-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

I was 15 years old and playing the mini-grand in our beach house, a house with big windows and with a mail slot in the front door. The front door was open on this warm day. I wasn't surprised when I saw our regular mailman making his way to the door, big mail pouch hanging off his shoulder. He paused in the doorway and looked at me and Mom. I stopped playing. "I play the piano," he cheerfully announced. He asked if he could play for us.

Our mailman, Norm Maillet (cool name for a mailman), had a special talent and wanted to share it with us. We invited him in immediately. It was an other-worldly experience, seeing our 1970s bushy-headed, mustached mailman in official blue postal shorts making his way to our piano.

He promptly sat on the piano bench and banged out all of Chopin's Polonaise with vigor and accuracy. What an incredible treat. And soon he was off to deliver mail again. I had just listened to a man play masterfully. He was amazing. And he was a postman, and he had resumed his route.

After eight years of piano lessons, I had learned some grandiose pieces. This guy's skill clarified in an instant how puny my skills were. It would take years and years of hard work for me to reach his level. I decided then that I wouldn't learn Polonaise, that I wouldn't expend myself in lessons and practice to achieve that great skill yet end up in a job that had nothing to do with music. That's what went through my mind as a 15 year old.

Crazy Colorado

2008-07-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

Colorado Springs. At 8:30 pm, I took the sunset shot and turned the opposite direction for the shot of the house. My sis checked the weather report: severe thunderstorm approaching. A couple of hours later, hail fell like crazy, clogging the rain gutter downspout. Two hours later, I went out to see pretty much clear skies. What a change. The next morn, I took the bottom right photo.

The better half

2008-05-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

Lawrence of Arabia. I'd never seen it. When I saw the DVD set on the shelf at the library, I grabbed it. It had been a long work week. I put a disk in the DVD player and plopped into the recliner.

Long sequence of music at the beginning. No picture. Ah, I'd seen that done in a few other old movies...a big overture that was probably cool in the big theater. Eventually, there was transition music and the picture appeared.

Lots of action and drama. I was having trouble "getting it"--whatever I was supposed to enjoy about the movie. Okay, I was distracted with a laptop computer, too, and I replayed many scenes.

Then the movie ended. That sure felt shorter than I expected, and I could tell that the writer wanted me to think it was a profound ending, but I just found it odd. It was The End. I went to bed.

This morning, I ejected the DVD to put it back in the jacket and saw the other disk. What is this, special features? Nope. Disk 1.

That time of year

2008-03-29T20:06:00.000-07:00

Drat, time to change the car clock again. As always, it's about being near the car at the time that I happen to remember my clock needs resetting.

For two weeks, every time I remembered my car clock, it was either not near enough noon for me to deal with the clock or it was not convenient. And so my clock had remained an hour behind for two weeks.

On this day, I was cruising to work just before 11. My clock said "10:55" and somehow my brain did the necessary stunt to tell me that "10:55 is just 5 minutes before noon," that is, when it comes to resetting my car clock.

I had only five minutes to pull over, get a wrench out of my trunk, unhook my car battery and set up the camera on the tripod and attempt to look relaxed. Done.

That time of year

2007-11-05T23:23:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been a year already?

Big improvement this year: I wore a watch which I set an hour earlier to internet time with an alarm that got me out there early enough to relax with coffee for the special moment. (Last year, I looked at a clock on the wall inside, then ran out to the previously disconnected battery cable, counting down in my head.) It's important to do these things.

The traditional Irish meal

2007-03-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

Mom and Jan cooked the traditional boiled dinner with corned beef. I thought today, "What can I cook for today?" I wanted to try cooking something I hadn't cooked before.

I decided against squid. Passed on the live clams. Ah, of course. Yellow tail snapper, garlic and rosemary olives, red onion, spinach, garlic, calamonsi drink...

Update, 3/19: So much for good plans! I thought I had a sharp knife, but trying to cut through this fish was like trying to write on a Coke can with a ball point pen. When I finally got through along the top and bottom of the fish, I tried a technique I saw on a cooking show and got one good fillet from one side of the fish. But now that the fish was half as thick, it was half as stiff as it used to be, and it was tougher for me to cut straight. Those commercials make it look so easy. The second half of the fish ending up as a pile of fish bits. Eventually, I seasoned and pan fried what I had, scales and all, and the little bits tasted pretty good. I took the rest to work and fought bones and scales. So, now I have the plate of goodies minus a fish. And smelly fingers.

Macro

2007-01-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

TTexture, Color, Reflection and Newness...things to capture with the macro setting of the camera...

Texture: With atypical lows in our area, the water in the aggregate rock birdbath froze over. These 3/4" long airpockets adorned the outermost ring of the ice, like short spokes aimed toward the center.

Color: No, that is not a grapefruit and tomatoes! Those are the small red berries of a heavenly bamboo plant, the mature, half-dollar-sized tart fruit of the calamondin, and the blooms of a statis.

Reflection: These pen tops caught my eye as I was shopping.

Newness: In my hand I hold a tiny container that I have hidden "somewhere in town" for those who enjoy the GPS-based sport called geocaching. Those who find it can then sign their name on the rolled up sheet of paper I put inside.

Do food critics look this bad?

2006-11-26T01:34:00.000-08:00

I don't remember getting such good treatment at a restaurant as I did tonight at the Saravanaa Bhavan.

It was about 9pm. I headed out to get something to eat, looking for a place I could settle down and scribble programming notes while eating.

My first restaurant choice had just closed, so I headed across the street to this Indian restaurant. At 9 pm, there were about 30 people outside, waiting to be seated. (That's typical for this place: families show up at 8:00 pm or later.)

I slipped in and waited for the seating hostess to return. Had I been at another table and seen the likes of me being served so quickly, I might've scrunched my eyebrows at the event. As she approached, I said "How long for one?" She walked right past me and took the names of some others standing by the podium. Had she just ignored me? I asked about "How long for one?" and she said something while grabbing menus. Not understanding what she said, I asked again, and this time heard her say with a pleasant smile, "Come." I think I remember babbling something in my surprise as I tried to comprehend that I was being seated immediately at a table that had room for two, when I had just seen "2" in several spots on the waiting list. I did what I could to thank her and express my amazement.

A server approached within 20 seconds and I told him what I wanted. He offered coffee? tea? which I declined. I started writing some programming notes on my sheet of paper. In two or three minutes, my meal arrived. I was amazed again.

Would your stomach have turned, too? The other night, I asked for a refill on my glass of water. Minutes before, I noticed a couple of waitresses bussing tables, with one of them picking up several glasses at once by sticking one finger in each glass and pinching the glasses together. I had noticed that waitress coughing as she walked all over the restaurant.
When I asked the hostess for a refill, I followed her signals across the room to the waitress who would bring me water--that same waitress. I watched her grab a big clear plastic pitcher, sticking her thumb on the inside as she handed it to the guy at the bar, a guy who I had also observed sticking his fingers inside glasses. He returned the filled pitcher to her.

I'm above this, I told myself. The water will not have touched where she grabbed, she'll pour me the glass of water and I'll be fine. Ah, but wouldn't you know it, she tipped the pitcher sideways to pour out its side instead of out the spout. "Umm," I said with a squint, about ready to ask for another glass of water, but when I thought about how many details I'd go through and how this appeared to be a rather systemic problem, I just said thank you and pushed the glass over to the side.

A party of five next to me that was still waiting for their food. They looked over at me and my food. And there was more reason to look at me. Just 20 minutes earlier, I had showered and towel-dried my hair but did not comb it. I had about three days' beard stubble. I was the only white guy in the place, and I was scribbling on paper. Had I been at another table and seen the likes of me being served so quickly, I might've scrunched my eyebrows at the event.

I suspect my hunger affected my perception: as I ate, I thought the portions looked slightly smaller than I was used to. But on I went with my programming on paper and wolfing down Indian food.

Then a well-dressed man approached and asked how everything was, and, with a gesture toward items on my plate, asked if would like some more of anything of those things. I don't remember being offered more of anything except soda and coffee, so I was taken aback. I told him the food was excellent; I mentioned that the portions did seem just slightly smaller than I was used to. He noted that perhaps the food was served hastily since they were very busy at the moment. But, hey, I didn't want to be a whiner, so I quickly shifted to tell him the story of my being seated immediately and how thankful I was for that and amazed. He again made the gesture and comment about the food. "Which would you like more of?" So, sheepishly I pointed; "Uh, this one?" As he left, he told me would bring three things.

One of the items he brought was not a regular in the traditional dinner I ordered, and it was quite a treat. I began to wonder if they thought I was a food critic. When I was writing programming notes on paper, did it appear to them that I was taking notes about their service and the quality of the food for some restaurant review article? I tell ya, that motivated me to keep programming!

At the end, I was really full, what with having eaten three extra items on top of the normal meal. The only thing left was a little tin of pickled lemon, a powerful item that I knew better than to add to my cauldron of a stomach in my semi-queasy state. I asked the server if I could get a little container. He came back with a little container full of pickled lemon. There wasn't room for me to fit in the tinfull from my plate.

After walking out of the restaurant, I realized I'd left the little container on the table, so I headed back in. The server met me and understood what happened. And then the well-dressed man approached and asked, "Is everything okay?" My gosh, yes! They exchanged words in their dialect to bring him up to speed, and off went the worker to get me yet another little container of pickled lemon.

So, the moral of the story is...I have no idea. But I got to program while eating Indian food without having shaved, and that's cool. Thanks to Saravanaa Bhaven in Sunnyvale for a wonderful meal!

A-traditional Thanksgiving

2006-11-24T23:07:00.000-08:00

In the years of this last decade, Mom has asked what we want to do for the Thanksgiving meal. I got the impression several times that she was wanting a break from the work. And just about every year, I've suggested that we do something completely different and far simpler: just go out for Chinese food. I picked Chinese because I wanted to make her squirm; I was after the laugh.

Clearly, next best to a home cooked Thanksgiving meal would be going to a restaurant that serves most of the items found in our typical Thanksgiving meal. Next after that would be going to some American cuisine restaurant that we frequent. Nowhere near the top of the list would be going to a restaurant with no connection to Thanksgiving or American cuisine. But I still kinda liked the idea. Chinese food is great, it would relieve everyone of the burden of cooking, and, by golly, why are we so tied to tradition? Wouldn't some stretching do some good, some relaxing of rules? I suggested Chinese food every year. It was rejected every year. Though the words were different every year, they all basically meant, "No! John, you're goofy." And I laughed every year.

This year, Mom accepted an invitation to hang out in Colorado with my sister Joanne for Thanksgiving. I stayed in California. Alone! I decide where I eat this Thanksgiving! Chinese it is!

I packed a few goodies in the car: a flashlight for some last-minute geocaching and some reference material on programming.

Yay! I found the cache! That's probably the sixth time I've visited this location. And it's the smallest cache I've found, too. (Yes, that's the "log" in there, fan-folded to fit. And there's still room for another 20 people to write their names and date, like I did.) A nice victory before dinner.

I drove around, looking for places to eat. Most restaurants were closed. I came across an Indian place that I've enjoyed and pulled into the parking lot. But I backed out when I thought about how I wanted to check "had Chinese food for Thanksgiving" off my list. I made my way back to a Chinese buffet place that had quite a spread, for a bit higher of a price.

Ok, the place is Korean, and they serve a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Korean food. I was the only white dude there at the start. Perhaps at the end, too. Lots of black hair in the room. I loaded the plate up with sushi (including squid and baby octopus to test my nerves--no, I wouldn't do well on Fear Factor) and expected to fill the plate up with more stuff I encountered along the buffet bar. Then I came across a pan of meatballs. "That's just wrong," I thought. This photo op and accompanying caption immediately came to mind, and I headed back to the table.

Seafood and a meatball

I read a bunch of programming documentation and kept packing in the food.

Now that I think about it, I kept one Thanksgiving tradition: I packed myself to the point of discomfort.

Hard grapefruit, soft grapefruit

2006-11-16T19:12:00.000-08:00

Mom's neighbors dropped off a bag of grapefruit from their tree. Last week, I juiced three of them (you decide: the neighbors or the grapefruit), poured the juice in a sterilized bottle, added a teaspoon of yeast and corked it with a glass tube and a rubber stopper. By morning, there was a steady stream of gas pockets rising through the column of water in the tube. I tossed around the idea of blogging about "hard grapefruit" to see if anyone else had made such.

A couple of days ago, Mom's old furnace quit, and Mom had a new one installed. The next evening, when we walked into the house, we picked up the faint smell of something like paint. I speculated that we might be smelling the gasses coming off of my brew. Mom thought it was a good smell, a smell of newness that came with the new furnace, something she was delighted had restored the warmth of the house in this chilly season.

Continuing to smell this "new furnace" today, a little bit stronger now in the family room, I sniffed around and found the culprit in the fruit basket.

Mom, I'll see if I can round up a better "new furnace" smell for you.

That time of year

2006-10-30T12:33:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah, I've got to do that again.

When I looked at the clock in my car, I remembered what I had to do. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read last April's post.

A phooning adventure - the foothills

2006-10-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

Click for an enlargement and then come back here for the story.

I had good intentions and simple plans: I was going to go to a park in the hills and enjoy some time reading. What unfolded was far from that.

Hey, I thought, why not do a quick search on the internet for geocaches in that area (read my brief description of geocaching here). I found the satellite views I decided it was better to just carry the chainsaw in plain view. for a couple of caches. One of them included a huge water tank and a prominent curved footpath. A marker on the map placed the cache between the tank and the path. It looked to me like a simple walk from the parking lot to the top of a foothill. "Surely, it won't be that difficult."

Hey. Water tank = hill. Hill = nice view. Geocache location + interesting view = good chance this would be a good Phoon photo opportunity. So, now you know the reason behind the location of the Phoon photo.

About the chair. I knew I would be standing in dead grass on a hilltop. I saw this as a chance for a tongue-in-cheek tribute to those phooners who have incorrectly concluded that getting up onto something is a requirement for Phoon photos (I elaborate on this problem here). So, I figured I would take a chair with me and stand on it. I had wanted to take a nicer chair to emphasize the absurdity, but the metal fold up chair sounded easier to carry on the upcoming hike.

With my brain already in absurd mode, I grabbed Then I noticed a white truck making its way from the house on the nearby foothill. some hedge cutting shears, figuring I would hold those in the air while phooning on the chair. I opened the trunk to toss them in and saw that I had left my chainsaw in the trunk. Hmm. A chainsaw in a panoramic view of a Phoon on a chair. That would definitely be more interesting than gardening shears, I told myself. So, that explains the chair and the chainsaw. (Maybe not to your satisfaction, but that's all I have to offer.)

Reading was no longer in my mind. I was off to bag a Phoon while geocaching; two birds, one stone.

The rest of this story is about the unexpected, about the challenges of phooning with a chainsaw on a chair on a foothill within view of the house of the park ranger who has a nice white truck.

Someone had tacked up a homemade sign at the entrance to the park; there was some special event at the farm in the hills. It was obviously well advertised: the parking lots were full of families with kids, heading for the major hiking trail. Hmm. This would be trickier than I thought. Carry a chainsaw with me through the parking lot? Even though the geocache was nowhere near the trail to the farm, I still had to get through the parking lot. I decided it was better to just carry the chainsaw in plain view than to carry a covered-up chainsaw. And off I went, camera and tripod and fold up chair dangling from my left hand, chainsaw in my right hand. In the parking lot, I saw a mother looking at posted maps. I asked if she was looking for the farm and steered her in the right direction. A helpful man with a chainsaw.

I headed for the less-used nearby entrance to the open space. Passing the bank of parking lot trees, I got my first glimpse of the foothills that hid the cache. I liked the satellite view: it made the foothills look much flatter and more reasonable. In reality, they were fairly steep. I had not even reached the foothills yet and the muscles in my chainsaw arm were burning from the weight, my heart was racing from the effort, and I was sweating from the activity and from the unusually warm weather. I put everything down and hunched over. I thought of competitions on TV, like in Survivor, where the winner is the one who can hold the heavy stuff the longest. Vote me off the island. Oh my gosh, my goal was the top of this big foothill ahead of me.

I didn't want to take the regular public trails that easily wound their way up the hills. First, they were public and I had a chainsaw. Second, I now was keenly aware of how soon I wanted to stop carrying this heavy chainsaw. So, I followed trails left by deer (and mountain lions and rattlesnakes and geocachers) that were more direct and, accordingly, fairly steep.

What looks like little bushes next to the red path are about 6-10' tall or taller.

I stopped so many times in that hike to recover from the heat, my high heartrate and muscle pain. I finally reached the water tank, a massive multistory structure nestled in the foothills, way bigger than I would have guessed from the satellite view. Nearby was the sunbleached remains of a twisted old oak that had toppled long ago. I made a mental note to come back to the oak tree in a bit for a Phoon photo.

The geocache page mentioned something about a "caged" area. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the map and was now going by memory. (I stopped using a GPS device some time back because satellite maps pinpoint the location far faster for me. However, this was the first time I was trying my GPS-less approach in an open field.) I had found the water tank. I had not yet found the curved footpath. But I did find something that matched the "cage" hint: a young tree with deer-blocking wire fencing around it.

My memory told me that I was too close to the water tank for the cache, but it was the only "cage" within view and certainly worth a quick look. Near the base of the tree was a rock and large portions of broken painted pottery. That fit geocaching: Kyle Buller / It's not so bad / 7-27-83 5-21-17 an odd place for pottery, and something simple to cover the cache, perhaps. The fencing could be peeled back, enabling me to get inside, another good sign. There was nothing under the rock or pottery. Then I found something flat and hard, obscured by dust and dead grass. "Aha, a lid to a buried container!" I pried it up. Nope, it was just another piece of pottery with an inscription. It had Kyle's name on it and some dates that didn't make sense. Had I stumbled upon some memorial made by someone?

After all of this hiking with a metal chair and a chainsaw, I found that I couldn't take more than 50 steps before I'd need to set everything down again and rest. It took me another 10 minutes of staggering up and down through the thorny weeds on the slopes to find the footpath and then find another caged tree. There I quickly found the cache, a nice plastic container wrapped in camoflauge tape, crammed with trinkets and a logbook. After additional resting, it was time to consider how best to capture geocaching and phooning in one photo.

I had not anticipated the difficulty I would have in setting up the chair. The first 10 or so places I set the chair, it would break through into one of the many old gopher tunnels as I climbed onto it. But finally I found a solid spot. I practiced climbing onto the chair and getting the chainsaw up. I then began taking a series of photos that I would later stitch together into a single panorama.

Then I noticed a white truck making its way from the house on the nearby foothill. I recognized the style. Park ranger. The ranger's house. You can see it in the panorama, too. (Until then, I had no idea who might've lived in the house.) I wouldn't be surprised that he had seen me while looking out of the house. I figured he had binoculars in his truck, so I moved back to my tripod and made the motions of looking through the camera, trying different angles, looking all photographer-like, hoping this would address any concerns he might have. He kept moving. I was a human near enough the major water tank to garner the attention of an official.

I concluded, from the speed of his truck on the distant road, that I had plenty of time to take the rest of the panorama photos. I grabbed the chair and chainsaw and started making a quick exit off the hill toward my car. Then I grabbed the tripod and headed toward the fallen oak to get that shot. Through its branches, I saw the ranger on foot near the distant entrance to the water tank area, headed my direction. That was enough for me. I grabbed the chair and chainsaw and started making a quick exit off the hill toward my car, the opposite direction from the ranger.

Now, why should I make a hasty exit? Had I done anything wrong? No. Hey, I even reviewed the formal "do not" sign on the way into the park. No bicycling without a helmet. No dogs. No fires. There was nothing about chainsaws. And I wasn't going to use the chainsaw, much less start it. But think about it: would you want to be detained by a park ranger, in the heat of the sun, having to explain that you were only there (1) for geocaching and (2) to take a panoramic photo of you in the foothills, standing on a metal chair holding a chainsaw? I had nothing to hide but a lot to try to make sense of with a guy who is there for our safety. Conversation or no conversation? I liked the idea of no conversation and continued my scurrying down the hill.

I covered far more distance moving downhill than uphill before having to stop again, but my arms and heart would still require that I put everything down and catch my breath.

I reached a point where a paved road crossed my path back to my car. If the ranger hadn't found me atop the hill, he might now be cruising around looking for me. And part of his road network came right by me.

It wasn't far to my car. If it were any other day, it would be easy to get there, if it were cooler, if I weren't out of breath, if I didn't have a tripod, metal chair and chainsaw, and if there weren't the crowd I was now looking at.

As quick as my weary body allowed, I made my way down and across the road and paused nearer the crowd. The area didn't look familiar, I now realized, because I had ended up near the busier entrance, not the entrance I had come in. With the condition I was in, the shorter, busier path back to my car was what sounded better. I watched for a larger gap in the stream of people and timed my merge into that traffic from my separate trail.

On the footbridge near the lot, I overheard a mother saying something about the chainsaw to her kids. With a few more of her words, I understood she was joking with them that I was able to juggle a tripod, a chair and a chainsaw. Cool mom!

Back at the car, I got everything back in. I saw a black shirt in the car and was glad to get out of the one I was wearing that was sweaty and spotted with weed thorns.

About 10 minutes later, Click for an enlargement I was taking another Phoon photo near a second geocache by the entrance to the park. A ranger drove by and stared at me. I was glad I didn't match the description of the guy by the water tank.

Messing with nature

2006-10-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

In college, I had a very cool bonsai tree. I had grown it over several years from a seedling that was 1 inch high to a 1.5 foot tall, fat and rugged trunked canopy tree.

College. They have a journalism department. They are probably desperate for articles to fill their pseudo newspaper. Maybe they'll write about my little plants. I contacted them and they sent someone over a few days later.

Fortunately, they misspelled my name, and the picture of me and plants ended up as silhouettes against a white background. My comments to the journalist about enjoying working with what God had created to make new things ended up being rewritten as if God didn't do well enough and I was glad to improve things.

Today, I added moss to a bonsai pot. Nothing new or amazing, but for those of you who have never seen something like this, it might be something you want to try sometime.

I found some moss growing under a tree at a park. I scraped a bunch up and brought it home. I sliced the pieces so they were thinner and laid them in place.

Here is one I did last year, so you can see how the moss really greens up nicely in the fall and winter.

Prickly Pear

2006-10-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I saw a plastic grocery bag with one avocado-sized fruit in it on the little table in the break room at work. On closer inspection, it had little areas with spines. I was pretty sure it was a Prickly Pear. I'd never had one before, and I was daring enough to try it. (Hey, someone basically said "trust me; take this" by putting it on that table.)

I figured you were supposed to cut off the outer skin, like a pineapple, so I did that. I now know that it would've been wiser for me to hold the thing with a paper towel while cutting the outer skin off with the knife, for I ended up with really tiny barbs in my fingers. They wouldn't pull out, so the best I could do was snip them flush with my skin with a fingernail clipper so that at least they wouldn't snag on whatever my fingers brushed against.

The fruit was quite tasty. I'm glad I tried it.

Later, I felt a little discomfort on the roof of my mouth. I thought maybe I'd burned the roof of my mouth with coffee or something. Eventually, my tongue was able to isolate one little barb up there. Dang. It's not like I can get fingernail clippers up in there. Nor can I figure out how to get two mirrors at the right angles so I can attempt a self-tweeze. And I wouldn't ask a coworker to try it. And I wouldn't pay a doctor to try anything. I'd just have to let it heal in its own time or flush itself out, which it did by evening.

Prickly Pear. Good name. Won't do that again.

Forking

2006-10-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Forking: Sticking white plastic forks in your friends' lawn for them to discover later.

A gal was telling Mom and me this story last night. I knew partway through that I had to start capturing details so I could repeat them here. Let's see if I can decypher my napkin notes... She asked that I not use her name, so I'll just call her Edgar.

I had never heard of forking before. I was familiar with teepeeing. (In fact, I'd just seen toilet paper in someone's graceful diodar tree the day before while out geocaching. The storyteller noted how teepeeing was now illegal in our area. Forking, apparently, wasn't. Yet?)

Edgar and her friend (also named Edgar) went late night to the home of friends from church and started sticking plastic forks in their lawn. They had covered half the lawn when they ran out of forks or the neighbor showed up with a flashlight--I forget if I'm mixing separate forking stories--but regardless, they left with half the lawn forked.

The next morning, the residents pulled out of their garage, went off to work or wherever, and completely missed the lawn decoration.

The gardening crew arrived. They saw a lawn with forks in it. Half the lawn. Why had the residents done that? What were they supposed to understand? Well, they just mowed the part of the lawn that had no forks.

The residents returned home later. They saw a lawn with forks in it. The part that had no forks had been nicely mown. The part with forks had not been mown. Why had the gardeners mowed part of the lawn, left part of the lawn unmown, and placed forks in the lawn? Well, the gardeners were not there for the residents to ask. But the gardeners would be back in a week. So, the residents left the forks in their lawn.

Edgar, who I'll call Samantha, ended up seeing these people and got to hear all of these details. Samantha explained that they'd been forked. "Been forked?" They were like me. They only knew about teepeeing.

"Aha!" They thought they knew who had been up to no good. So, they went and forked the lawn of friends of theirs from church, one of whom is an elder.

And that's where the story stands as of this posting.

Samantha told me she put 2000 forks in someone else's lawn.

"Have you ever Saran-wrapped a car?" she asked.

What in the heck is this?

2006-09-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Four things caught my attention about this tree...

It has big tropical-looking flowers. It has big wads of fluffy cotton stuff in it with seeds.

It's Autumn and it's loaded with all these flowers.

It has pointy things. I would not want to land in it while skydiving naked.

The fluffy stuff is reeeally soft and silky. I wasn't there to see where the fluffy stuff came from. But I'm guessing that the green pods are packed tight with this stuff and burst out like popcorn. The wind easily carries a 3" ball with its packet of seeds.

I tossed my camera up into the tree to knock some of these wads out (yes I did, several times, though in its soft protective case) and collected about 30 seeds to try to germinate. (Here, hand me your camera.)

Anyway, if you know the name of this tree, tell me! This is just so bizarre. I've never seen one before. It's beautiful.

Transportation

2006-08-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

Mom and Dad bought David and me skateboards in 1970 when our family made the 3 week round trip from west coast to east coast in our new VW bus. This is it, and it has the same wheels David bought for me in the mid '70s.

I have kept the vintage skateboard in my car since the late '90s, breaking it out for whatever short jaunt I needed it. For example, I ended up in a parking spot far from the entrance of the grocery store on a hot day. Why walk the distance when I could cut the travel time to about a third of that? So, I got out the board and starting pumping toward the building. A sharp-eyed teenage girl saw the board at a distance and called out, "Hey! Old school. Cool!" Old school. Loved that.

You can't miss hearing me coming. The board is 3/4" thick and has no flex like today's boards. It is a sounding board that pronounces every crack in the sidewalk.

In 1996, I sometimes took the train to work...and often went in late enough to miss the shuttle ride available to earlier risers. I'd ride my skateboard for the half mile or so, dress pants and shoes and all. One time I had a spill in such clothes. I'm sure I looked goofy enough riding the skateboard in nice clothes before splatting on the ground.

It would be a safer ride if I got a new flexible skateboard with larger, softer wheels. But I like the old skateboard because of what it is. I'm now at eBay whose buildings are spread over a long narrow campus. The meeting is in the furthest building? Dang. But, hey, I get to ride the skateboard. It catches people's attention; "Hey, you could sell that on eBay!"

How not to make a mask

2006-08-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about how to make my face, I had completely forgotten about a crazy event from the late 1980s, a time when I got Paul's help in making a plaster-of-paris casting of my face, a time involving peanut butter, blood, eyelashes, a bathroom floor, and a laptop.

My brother David was given an assignment in art school in the late 1970s to create a mask. He created a mold of his face and then used that to form a flexible latex rubber mask that fit his face. He then added hair and paint to that to come up I heard a crunch inside my head. with this great Hollywood-like mask.

That inspired me to make a mold of my face, but my goal was far simpler. I would (1) make a plaster mold of my face and (2) make a latex rubber mask from that mold and be done with it. I would then have a mask of myself that I could wear to a Halloween party. Sounded straightforward enough.

Way back then, I asked Paul if he would help me make the mask. I wanted him to apply the plaster to my face while I lay on ground.

I explained to him that I would insert some straws in my nose for breathing, Dramatic recreation mix up some plaster of paris, and lay on the ground; he would then spread the plaster on my face and I'd lay there until it set.

I wanted to be able to communicate while he was applying the plaster but didn't want to move my facial muscles, so I planned on typing on a laptop on my tummy for him to look at and respond to.

I had a mustache and didn't want it to get stuck in the plaster, but I couldn't find Vaseline. Hmm...what else was available that was greasy or oily that could fill in the gaps in my mustache and prevent hairs from getting stuck? I thought of peanut butter. Soon, I had worked peanut butter into my mustache.

Next were the straws. Here comes the blood part. As I stood at the bathroom sink, I cut some short lengths of plastic straw and inserted one on one nostril. I cut the next one and was reaching up. My hand caught the edge of the first straw. I heard a crunch inside my head. Oh MAN that hurt. Soon, blood was dripping out the end of the straw. This was a great opportunity to make Paul laugh, so I maintained my composure and calmly said to him, "Hey Paul. Check this out." Yep, he burst out laughing. (And that was the memory he brought up the other night, when I showed him the paper mask.) Not wanting to experience that again, I cancelled the straw idea. Paul would just leave my nostril area open and I'd figure out how to close that part off after the mold had solidified and I'd removed it from my face.

Okay, down to the bathroom floor, laptop at the ready. Paul spread on the goo. It was rather warm. Plaster of Paris heats up when mixed with water; there's a chemical reaction. He applied it over my eyes at some point.

The goo was soft enough that some seeped into my eyes. It's gritty. So now I had grit in my eyes and it was uncomfortable and all I could do was let my eyes water and yell via laptop. I typed a lot. I told him what I was feeling, what I was guessing, how I didn't know what I was going to do, but to keep going. We'd gotten this far.

I think I lay there for at least 15 minutes with the grit in my eyes, all the while wondering aloud via laptop whether the material was stiff enough for me to remove. I had had Paul apply a first layer of goo, then apply strips of gauze and then apply more glue, with the idea that the gauze would hold pieces together in case cracks developed.

Eventually, I decided it was time to lift off the mask. As I lay there, I lifted lightly on the edges of the mask near my jaw. I felt the mask tugging on not only my mustache but also my eyelashes and eyebrows. Now able to speak, I described this new predicament to Paul.

I got onto my knees with face toward floor so that gravity might assist as I tried to figure out how the mask would come off. Earlier, my eyes ached from the grit, and I found minor relief from not moving my eyes. Now, my tear ducts kicked into action again as my eyelashes were being pulled, mustache was being pulled, eyebrows were being pulled.

I paused. "What am I going to do?" I felt a bit more panic. I've got this big chunk of stone for a face, anchored by many hairs.

I tried tugging again. Perhaps, I thought, each peanut-butter greased hair would eventually slide free from the mold if I kept up consistent tension, like pulling corks out of wine bottles.

After a few minutes of not getting far, I considered how women tweeze their eyebrows. Geez. They pulled hairs out of the follicles. I was willing to pull harder, even pull out hairs. But I had no interest in yanking, though. I wanted to give the mask a chance to let go of its ends of the hairs. So, that's what I did. I started pulling on the mask. My eyelids, eyebrows and upper lip stretched.

For the most part, the mask won the tug of war. I was missing about a third of my eyelashes, a third of my mustache and a third of my Many of the dark spots are hair follicles, rich with DNA eyebrows. It wasn't evenly distributed thinning, either. There were places with no hair, no eyelashes.

My first action after getting the mask off was to put my face over the sink and splash my eyes with water, attempting to bring relief from the grit. Soon after, I had slight swelling in my eyelids from eyelashes being yanked.

The white plaster mask had its own hair! It had eyebrows, eyelashes and mustache! We laughed. I got some tweezers and began pulling the hairs out of the mask. Wished they were still on my face.

Eventually, I did clean up the inside of the plaster mask, painted uncured latex rubber on it and baked that. And then I had the rubber mask I could put on over my face.

The plaster mask, by the way, easily illustrates the effect I was trying to create with that paper mask I Click for enlargement made in the make my face post. You know how it is with some photos of craters: your brain makes you think they are sticking up instead of going down? That is true of this image: the nose is NOT sticking out towards you. Look at this image upside down. The plaster mask is leaning against the lamp on my desk.

Treasure hunt

2006-08-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

This morning, Paul and Alta informed me that they'd left their camera here last night and would be coming by to pick it up. I wasn't sure that I would be around when they dropped by, so I told them I'd leave their camera in a gold box in the large wooden toy box on the front porch.

It dawned on me that they would not be there for some time. I thought it would be fun to create a treasure hunt for them that would lead to their camera, I was sooo looking forward to taking a picture of tall Paul riding the kid's bike down the street. so I spent the next hour creating a 15-clue treasure hunt that would lead to them finding their camera under an abalone shell in the same toy box, inches from the gold box (where I left their first clue in place of the camera). Mom and her friend Anna learned about what I'd set up and were the most excited about this event, looking forward to finding out what the clues were, etc.

As it turned out, Paul and Alta were behind schedule and needed to hurry off, so they needed a shortened version. While they were figuring out a clue elsewhere, I swapped out one of the other clues so that they would find their camera within 3 or 4 clues. After they left, I gave Mom the clue that they would've gotten next. She had a blast completing the rest of the hunt, finally finding the original clue that mentioned the final location of the camera, and she knew she was done.

I hid their camera under the abalone shell. I then wrote "Look under the abalone shell in the toy box" on a slip of paper.

I hid the clue about the abalone shell under a plastic orange pot on the porch. On a new slip of paper, I wrote "Look under the orange pot on the porch." (There are several such pots, so that was a simple "complication.")

I looked around for a hiding place for this new piece of paper and then wrote a clue about that hiding spot, etc. After about 15 of those, I had a piece of paper I could give them as their starting point...and since I'd already instructed them to "look in the gold box," I just put that note in the gold box where they expected to find the camera in the first place. Then I waited for them to come so I could see their reaction. (Okay, so it didn't work out because of the time pressure, but they got their camera.)

Most of the clues were pretty straightforward (to keep the feeling of success high and not associate frustration with what was meant for good):

Find the electical outlet on the front of the house. [It was under the spring flap.]
By the front lawn sprinkler is a hole on wall. [It lined the inner circumference of that hole.]
Above the hummingbird feeder. [There are two. It was sticking out of a crack in the board above one.]
Find the shovel in the side yard. [It was slipped into the little gap where the wood handle fits into the metal spade.]
Under the gravel by the firehydrant. [They had to scoot gravel out of the way.]
Find the gray sewer access on the side of the house. [It lined the inner circumference of the hole in the lid, sticking out slightly to ensure it was easy enough to see/grab.]
Find the flamingoes on the front porch. [There is a windchime that is ornamented with little flamingoes. I curled up a note and inserted it in one of the tubes.]

Some were a bit more complicated:

Find the naked lady at the edge of the front lawn. [I added a small sketch of the flower of that name. I curled up the note and stuck it inside the bell-shaped flower.]
By the street side gate are blue flowers. Near those is a smll geranium under a tall bush. Dig it up to find something that doesn't belong there. You'll need the shovel. [A foot and a half of digging later, they'd find a squished coke can with the rolled-up note weaved through the pop-top tab.]
God provided what when Abraham was about to kill Isaac? It is within eyesight. Look in the back. [Nearby was a Dodge RAM pickup. The note was floating around in the truck bed.]
Across and down the street is a black Volvo. On the way are poppies. There is a tennis ball nearby. [The note was under the tennis ball.]
Ride the little bicycle (found in the side yard) to the nearby school tennis court driveway and find the No Exit sign. [At the base of it was an empty soup can with a note in it.]
Near the front porch is an extension cord with a trouble light [a lightbulb in a protective case with hook]. Hook the light onto the flag pole mount on the front of the house. Stretch out the rest of the cord down the driveway. As you walk West with the cord, the end of the cord follows an arc. That arc lines up with a short plant. [Wrapped around the base of a little oak sapling was a note.]

When Mom started tackling the treasure hunt, I took off with the little bike to fetch the distant clue, not wanting Mom to suffer the task I'd aimed at Paul. (I was sooo looking forward to taking a picture of tall Paul riding the kid's bike down the street.) A neighbor, driving out of the neighborhood, pulled over near where I was and called out of her car to point out how silly I looked riding that little bicycle. We laughed.

Making a treasure hunt
Starting with whatever it is you want the person to find when the hunt is over, repeat these steps over and over: (1) hide the thing; (2) get a slip of paper and write a clue about the thing you hid; write the clue number on it, starting with 1 for the first one you write.

Thus, the second thing you hide is the clue you wrote about what you just hid. When you're all done, you will have a piece of paper with a clue that you can give your friend. (The numbers help your friend know how close he or she is to finishing.)

Knowing Mom would eventually get to the task involving the shovel, I then went and grabbed that and was heading to go dig for her, once she discovered the geranium location. When I rounded the corner, there was Mom, bent over a one foot deep hole she had already dug with her bare hands! She was into this! But she acknowledge shovelling was needed now, and I took over. Soon, the dusty coke can appeared and she grabbed it and worked on its clue.

Mom says her favorite was finding the note rolled up inside the flower. (She also kidded, "Naked ladies. I figured you'd work sex into this puzzle for Paul, somehow.").

I do hope that this story--and perhaps the mere mention of "treasure hunt"--motivates you to create some fun for a parent or niece or nephew or grandkid. And come back and tell me about it! :)

Blue Jr.

2006-07-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

~ The appearance of Blue ~

Several weeks ago, Mom told me about a blue jay (western scrub jay, officially) that had started visiting. "There it is!" she said. I turned to see it in the backyard, its neck long and alert, staring at the sliding glass doors. Mom had bought a quart-sized bag of pinenuts from CostCo for salads, but now it was becoming blue jay food, too. She sprinkled a handful on the outside mat and then backed away. He'd come grab one and toss his head back to swallow it whole. Or he'd take one, two or three in his mouth and fly off to bury them in the yard or in potted plants.

Mom speculated that it was the same blue jay that her neighbor and dear friend Marilou used to feed by hand.

There were times that the jay would show up at the glass doors, looking for a handout. It would back away when Mom dropped off the goods and move in when she stepped back. With time, Mom was able to stay with seeds on palm held at ground level and the bird would skittishly grab a seed and bolt away. [Click for larger image.] To my delight, the bird quickly extended the same trust to me and soon was taking seeds from my palm.

Mom nicknamed the bird Blue.

~ Lofty goals ~

Mom observed the jay flying to a particular tree repeatedly and concluded that there was a nest. I eventually saw a slenderer blue jay, slightly more grayish, keeping its distance, staying pretty close to the tree. The female.

In the meantime, Blue was getting braver. If the screen door was open, he'd stand on the threshold. Mom was away when I tried tossing some nuts on the floor. What a crack up. His claws would click-click on the hardwood floor as he did his blue jay hop toward the food. As soon as he grabbed the seed, he'd do his best to bolt out to the safety of outdoors, which invariably started with sliding on the slick floor until his wings gave him the lift he needed.

Mom soon was inviting the hopping bird into the house to fetch nuts, too. Blue was also beginning to hang around for more seeds in her hand, not just quickly flying away.

It was on the trip to Canada in 1980 (when I first started phooning) that I saw a ground squirrel duck back into its burrow (no, not a duck, a squirrel) and I slowly approached the area with a handful of nuts and, after about 20 minutes of patient squatting, and slow motion placement of nuts, had the little guy sitting on my knee munching on a nut. Satisfying to build that trust. Also on that trip, we arrived at some Canadian mountain lookout and Mom told me to hold my palm high with a nut in it and wait for a whiskey jack to come swoop and take it. (Yikes! It came from behind, so I didn't see it coming and it startled me.) So, I set a new goal: get Blue to take food from my hand, held high.

~ The appearance of Blue Jr. ~

Mom mentioned one day that she'd spotted a baby blue jay. I carefully
walked around the area under where the neighbor's pepper tree hung over Mom's yard. Yep, there was the baby peering through a bush.

Whenever I have been near the baby, the mother bird screeches. Early on, if the baby was under the less-protective rose bushes and I showed up in the yard, either parent bird would fly to a nearby spot and give out one of two sounds: an upward shriek (the annoying one we most readily associate with jays) or a quieter cluck-chirp. It was a treat to observe the baby's understanding of the cluck-chirp, as it would bolt in the direction of the parent for cover.

When I feed the papa bird, I make a clicking sound with my tongue or squeaking by sucking between my teeth and lower lip. Not that those mean anything whatsoever in bird language, but he must by now have a strong association of those sounds and Food.

I and several others were watching monkeys leap around playfully in a cage at the San Francisco Zoo. I tried patting the guard rail, said "C'm'ere" a few times to try to get them closer. A Vietnamese lady next to me called out to the monkeys, also vying for their attention. She called out in Vietnamese. My immediate thought was that "monkeys don't know Vietnamese; you're supposed to call to them in English!"

If I was close to Jr., the papa bird was less likely to come take food from me. But he just loves pinenuts, so he's ready to do a snatch and run if a seed is tossed nearby. Thus I started feeding Blue in Blue Jr's presence, hoping to show Jr. I was okay.

And July 6 arrived. Time to fly to Oregon for my niece's wedding and catch up with Mom who'd headed up earlier.

~ Progress ~

The next morning after returning home, I rushed to feed Blue. Yep, he was interested in being fed. Working toward the goal of hand held aloft, I held my hand up off the ground a couple of feet. Blue would fly, grab the nut and kick off of the side of my hand. After many repeats of that, I held my hand at birdbath height. Blue would fly to the bath and peer, then fly to my hand and do his grab/kick off thing.

Blue now recognized the little measuring cup in which we kept the pinenuts. Showing or shaking that would bring him closer from across the yard. So, I sat cross-legged on the ground and put the cup in my palms and covered over the top of it a little with my fingers. Blue couldn't just grab and run, I thought. Are all jays curious creatures? He seemed to wriggle at my having this hidden treasure. To my delight, he hopped up on my arm. A significant first! And then he stood on my hand and grabbed a seed out. Excited, I got my camera and tripod and recreated the moment. In the pic, you can see how he grabbed one seed then grabbed another, stocking up. (This is what he does when seed burying will follow.) The next step toward my hand-aloft goal was to hold the cup out, still covered with fingers. More progress: Blue flew to my hand and poked between my fingers to get to the cup. Still not officially meeting my goal, but a good step in that direction.

~ Extra nourishment ~

Blue Jr. was up and about more. While I couldn't feed Jr., I could get nearby and hang out without him running off, most of the time. Eventually, a parent would cluck-chirp nearby and off he'd go. But there were many times I was able to get close to Jr. and feed the father. I observed that the father was taking many seeds directly to shove down Jr's throat. If I offered Jr. a seed, he didn't find it of interest.

When I told friend Greg about the birds, he told me he used to have one in his house as a pet. He'd raised one from a chick, feeding it ground meat and milk. Hmm! So, the next day, I cut up some raw chicken and offered that to Blue. Blue readily pulled it apart and flew over to Jr. to cram that down his throat.

A heat wave hit. Jr. didn't look so good. His eyes would close. He was not as responsive to his parents' squawks. I got a plastic syringe with water and gently grabbed the bird and worked water into his system. The next day, he looked better, thankfully. [Later, I read that I shouldn't have done this. The bird's breathing passage is under its tongue and I risked getting water into his lungs.]

This is the time of year when June bugs come buzzing out at dusk. I had noticed that morning that Blue was very eager to be fed. I opened the sliding glass door and then headed for the kitchen to get more pinenuts, hoping Blue might comfortably follow me in. I observed Blue peering to his right, inside the glass door. I figured he was just hoping for stray pinenuts. But when I approached the glass door, I saw a dried up June bug. I picked it up and offered it to him, and he readily crunched and swallowed it and then flew to Jr. and gave it to him. Aha! That night, I captured a live June bug, a juicy miller moth, and a black beetle. The next morning, I jiggled the jar in the air for Blue. "Look what *I've* got!" When I put the June bug out, BANG, Blue was on it. I held the miller; BANG, Blue put that one down, too. I tossed the black beetle out and it crawled away. Blue looked elsewhere. Note to self: Pinenuts are candy for blue jays; black beetles are Brussels sprouts. I gave him a pinenut. He flew off to Jr.

~ Success! ~

Scott and Joanne were in town after the Oregon wedding. Scott heard about my technique of holding the cup with fingers covering the seed and got Blue on his hand, too. Scott told me of another time when Scott was just sitting there with no food and Blue hopped up on him in search of food.

That brought to mind a few more ideas. I held up a seed so that Blue could see it and then made a slow motion of placing it on my head so that Blue knew exactly where it went. I also held my hand nearby as a familiar object. He jumped from nearby awning to my hand to my head.

I had joked the day before about getting him to eat one from between my lips. Why not? I laid down and put one pinenut on my chest and one between my lips. Blue was fairly quick about getting the one on my chest. I could feel his tentative little steps forward as he determined how far from my face he could stay and still reach the pinenut. And he grabbed it.

Gee, if the bird was now that comfortable with being on humans, might it be comfortable enough to fly to my raised hand and stand there to eat food? At ground level, I shoved a pinenut in the crotch between two fingers and showed it to Blue. I held my hand near the birdbath. He flew to the birdbath and then jumped to my hand, stood and ate. Good.

I repeated, this time holding my hand high above my head. He flew up and stood there, eating the seed. Success!

Cathy was visiting. I asked her to take a photo of this milestone. She had a better idea. You can see the result here.

~ Instinct without a clue ~

Each day is fun right now with Jr. showing some kind of advancement. Where he did not recognize a seed before, now he had the instinct to grasp. That's good! Unfortunately, with seed now in mouth, he had no clue what to do with it. Blue swung by, took it from him, then crammed it down his throat.

But the next day, he had the instinct to tear a bit from the pinenut as I gripped it, and he worked the bit down his throat with his tongue. He didn't yet know about the toss-the-head-back motion. But he'd eaten something without having Blue shove it down his throat. Yay!

Unfortunately, he had not yet developed adequate pecking ability. He showed ability to peck, but it was pointless pecking. He'd start off right, grabbing a bit of seed from me and dropping some of it. To pick up the bit that fell, he'd start pecking at whatever was nearby. Chunks of dirt, mainly. The bark of the rose bush. That was my favorite: wham wham wham on the rose bush, like a woodpecker.

Next, he realized his foot was one of his tools for eating. He'd take a whole seed from me and, being an oily seed, it would get stuck on his beak. He leaned down and used his foot to pry it off and to hold it while he tore bits off. And then he'd be back to eating dirt again. He had not yet learned to find a clean place to eat his food. So, I got out a metal pan and crushed up some pinenut so he could just stand there and eat, eat, eat. Invariably, a parent would show up and chirp him away to some other area. I'd leave the bits for whichever bird got to it next.

Blue has the pinenut swallowing thing down, jerking his head in a way that gets the nut airborne and then lunging to bypass tongue and get the thing right into his throat. Jr. has done that perhaps 5 times, as of July 22. Most of the time, Jr. smashes the pinenuts. Seems to me that he is still learning how hard to chomp down on the pinenuts, for bits often shoot away from his beak and he's not aware that his meal shrank. Another typical problem is that the pinenut, an oily item, gets stuck to his beak and he has to pry it off with his foot.

Blue Jr's take-from-another instinct is strong. When presented with a pile of pinenut bits and some bits between my finger tips, he'll go for the bits between my finger tips.

~ Recognized provider ~

By July 16, Blue Jr. had clearly had made the connection between me and food. He was more likely to come to me, instead of the other way around. I opened the glass door and Jr. ran, with wings raised, across the lawn to me. (He cried out with wide open mouth and fluttered his wings, begging for food.)

July 20 was a scorching day. I left the windows open that night to cool things off. I was awakened at 6 am by the screeching of the jay parents and of Blue Jr. What the heck, why not feed them. So, I opened the glass door and went to the kitchen to get some more pinenuts. Blue hopped onto the threshold. I tossed a nut onto the floor and he came and got that and flew out. His flying out drew Blue Jr. from his "feed me!" spot at the edge of the grass. He ran/flew to the doorstep to take the pinenut from papa bird, but papa bird had no plans of giving it to Jr. Jr. then quickly turned to run/fly in and, to my surprise, hopped directly onto the footrest next to me, squawking the entire time. He had never been up there and I had not even put a pinenut up there, so I don't know what he did that! Man, he must've been really hungry. He was in a frenzy, squealing the whole time he jabbing at the nuts, trying to pull bits off ones he stood on. I added to his frenzy by dropping a few extra nuts at his feet. Fun to overwhelm him. He continued his squealing.
Click for movie

~ Flight ~

If you consider chickens to be able to fly, then Jr. flew some time ago. This was after I had started following him around the yard and also before he started eating pinenuts. I cornered him and picked him up. Once he was on my hand, he didn't do much but sit in a contented-looking way (was his heartbeat racing, though?). At some point, he hopped off my hand. My guess is that he'd never tried his wings before this. He was good at hopping, but that's all I'd seen before, hopping. He flapped his little wings and the best he could achieve was a downhill line. It would make chickens proud.

His ability has improved. He is more likely to combine flight and running to traverse the yard quickly. His jumps upward are assisted by wing power. On July 20, he gave flight a good effort, taking off from lap and heading for the roses against the fence. The flight path was steady and not downward-chicken-like, so that was good, but it was also straight at a blank part of the fence. He didn't descend to his normal spot under the roses nor rise to the top of the fence. He just plowed into the boards--thud--and, plop, he was back on the ground and made his way to his favorite spot under the roses.

On July 22, he followed a similar flight path. This time, he swerved upward and landed on top of the fence. Yay! Oh, but now he was that much closer to disappearing into the neighbor's yard. I ran to get some pinenuts to lure him back. When I returned, he was in the neighbor's bush next to and above the fence. But pinenuts are candy, so he was soon back on this side.

~ A new discovery: water ~

The temperature has been around 95 to 100 for a few days. A couple times before, I'd used the plastic syringe to feed Jr. water. This time, I thought I'd put him in the birdbath and see if he'd drink water on his own. Remember: his normal nourishment and hydration would otherwise be completely via parent bird regurgitating nuts and bugs. He had had no practice drinking water.

I remember reading that pigeons are one of the few birds that can completely drink via suction, that is, without scooping up water and throwing the head back to get the water down the throat.

Jr. was now standing in the birdbath and staring blankly (as if I know what a blank blue jay stare looks like). So, I tapped my finger on the water to break up the reflection and show there was a surface to this thing. Jr. stared. Jr. finally bit the water, I suppose because of my now-familiar motion of tapping where I'd placed food. He stood upright and moved his beak like he was nibbling a nut. He bit the water again, chewed that and swallowed. It was about the fifth time that his natural drinking ability awoke. He plunged his beak into the water and held it there, then lifted his head to swallow the bigger mouthful. Either he was parched or he was delighted at his new ability (as was I) for he must've done that twenty times. (Ok, he was parched.) In my excitement, I said "That's right...good job!" (In Vietnamese.)

I was excited that he'd drunk water. That would have been enough! I was treated to more. It *was* a hot day. This *was* a birdbath. Jr.'s wing tips hung down enough to touch the water. I'm trying to think of how to describe the transformation I got to observe. It was like a scene from a movie where the character's memory is coming back and life is becoming beautiful and joyful again. This bird seemed to stare and think as it was sitting in the water. It was mainly working on taking more drinks. But it also seemed to be becoming aware that there was something good about feeling water on its wings and on its face. It lowered its wings and flipped its wings a bit. It went for another drink of water and also put its face in a bit deeper. I was watching the bird morph from taking a drink to taking a bath; right now it was the blur in the middle between the two. It wasn't long before Jr. was flipping his wings a little bit more, plunging his head again, flipping his wings a little bit more. I was all smiles. He had now gotten to the point of squatting to really get wet and rising to shake his little body and butt to expel the water. I had the camera in movie mode by now and laughed at having water flung on me. At one point, his newfound spin cycle tipped him onto one leg, to his surprise.
Click for bath movie, part 1
Click for bath movie, part 2

Hey, this guy still has a bunch of chick fluff. Bathing for him turned him into a miniature soggy down jacket. Dusk was upon us. The squawks of his parents compelled him to leave the birdbath. He didn't leave too well. He weighed more; his wings didn't work the same when soggy. He was back to chicken flight, landing several feet short of his target.

~ Where Jr. goes at night ~

There were at least four nights before when I'd gone out with a flashlight to search the ground and bushes for Blue Jr. Where on earth did he go at night? He'd be an easy target for cats if he just crawled under a bush. But I never found him.

This was the first time in a while that I'd been home before dark. I was about to find out where the little guy went at night. His soggy wings were part of my finding out.

Jr. hopped across the lawn to the base of a young tree whose lowest branch is about 2' off the ground. He tried to jump-fly up to the branch. Weighted down, he only got about 4" off the ground. He kept trying, though. And his parents kept squawking. To me, these squawks sound the same as all their other squawks. The same-sounding squawk might send Jr. scurrying for cover, or running to meet the parent at the end of the yard. Now, it compelled Blue Jr. to get into the little avocado tree. But he couldn't get into it, so he wandered around through other bushes. I remained seated on the lawn, adjusting my position as needed to observe where he went for the night.

Jr. came out of the bushes near the glass doors. He looked at me on the lawn. I didn't click my tongue or pat my leg to call him over. He skittered over and hopped up on my leg. Then he checked out his options and scrambled up onto my shirt pocket and then up onto my shoulder. Ha! What a surprise.

He was still thinking food, I suspect. I turned my head to look at the funny guy on my shoulder. He gave a light peck at the corner of my eyelid. Yikes! For a little while after that, I kept that eye closed tightly when turning his direction. Hmm...that also made it a wee bit harder to see him. But he figured out quickly enough that my eyelid was not a pinenut and didn't do it again.

His parents continued their squawking. It grew darker. Eventually, they stopped squawking. I thought it was as if they were yelling, "Bedtime! Bedtime!" all of this time and then finally went to bed themselves and gave up on Jr.

I figured if Jr. had tried to get into the avocado tree, that was probably where he wanted to go. So I took him over and set him on a branch about 5' off the ground.

A couple of hours later, I went out with flashlight to see what he looked like. He was fast asleep, with beak tucked into armpit (or maybe his head slept elsewhere). Occasionally, he'd stretch out all claws on his left foot and then regrasp the branch. A little while later, he'd straighten the claws on his right foot and then regrasp. He did this a few times over several minutes, without showing signs of being awake.

~ Departure and arrival ~

July 22. Blue Jr. disappeared for the night over the back fence. Right now, that's fine: the neighbors are gone. That means that Blue Jr. has not yet had to risk being near the young boy and the dog.

July 23. The birds were back. But they remained hidden most of the day because of th heat. They'd sit with their beaks open, aiding their cooling system. I put a tray of water in the shade near Jr. Both he and Blue drank from it on occasion.

Mom returned from her 2-3 weeks in Oregon and we took off for the mall to get a break from the heat. We returned later in the day while there was still light and Mom got to feed Jr. by hand.

We talked about what we might say to the neighbors when they return from their trip for Jr's sake.

~ Bury stuff ~

A new instinct is kicking in for Jr.: bury things. I gave him a pinenut and he shoved it into the dirt so that half of it remained exposed. Then he stared blankly elsewhere. Huh?

Later, I saw him pick up the half shell of something (kinda looked like a pistachio shell) and toss it around to get it reoriented in his mouth I guess, and then he shoved that in the ground partway, and that was that. Ok then!

~ Injured ~

July 24, near midnight. I was working on this post in a room whose window was open to the backyard. I heard a long wild shriek which I immediately knew was Jr. in trouble. I rushed outside with flashlight to find Jr. sitting on the cement facing the garden. As I approached him, he tried to fly over the lawn to the bushes. His flight was weak. I searched around the yard for a cat or anything, finding nothing. Jr. worked his way through the bushes, attempting to gain height, occasionally. I crawled back behind and found him on a branch just a half foot off the ground. Constantly speaking calmly, I moved in closer, often shining the flashlight on myself in case that helped him recognize me and somehow feel better. He fluttered to attempt to get to a better branch but didn't get far. I was able to get him onto my finger and lift him to a higher branch in that bush. I didn't see any evidence of injury. I went back inside. The branch I had selected was a compromise: I was concerned that if I tried to take him to a better branch, he might bolt and end up over the fence or in whatever more vulnerable location. I didn't like leaving him there. So, I headed back out to the bush.

The branch I'd put him on enabled me to check under him; I found a cut. Sigh. I coaxed him onto my finger again and was able to get him across the yard and into the avocado tree, which to me felt far safer than other options. I heard rustling in the big bush that I suspect he had been in when injured. Sounded like a rat up high near the phone line. Do rats attack young birds? That would be fitting, if so. If it had been a cat, I don't think I would've found Jr. sitting out on the cement.

Now it's just a waiting game. An internet page notes that a bird may look fine 24 hours after injury only to succomb to bacterial infection soon after. Sigh.

1:15 am. The internet page also talked about use of antibiotics. When I remembered that there was some antibacterial ointment in the cupboard, I wondered whether to just let things be or to try something. I guess this was like the time earlier when I felt the little guy needed water; I thought that at least *I* would feel better about having applied ointment to the wound. So, I went out and got the bird on my finger. I slowly made my way to the smallest room in the house, the bathroom, and closed the door. Maybe I'll add more detail later, but basically I got some goo on and took the bird back out to its perch.

~ Waiting ~

July 25 morning. I couldn't find Jr. I heard a parent jay squawking a house away, so I wandered that direction. Eventually, I heard the normal faint reply of Jr. to his parents' call and followed that to find Jr. on the roof of the house next door, hopping about, even flying to a nearby tree. There's a darker area on Jr's underside which I am pretty sure is just the ointment having darkened the feathers, like the mark left on a piece of paper from a cookie crumb as the oil spreads.

July 25 later morning. I saw Blue feeding Blue Jr. Glad to see the parent still showing great care for the young one.

July 25, 9:30 pm. (Yay! Nice to be home. It took about 3 hours, start to finish, to get to a store and back and replace the radiator hose that had blown this morn just before I pulled into work.) Mom reported that she fed Blue and Blue Jr. Blue Jr. stayed primarily in the bush area, not flying. My guess is that he's minimizing the flying to let his chest heal up. I was glad to hear that she'd gotten to enjoy feeding Jr. again and to also hear that Blue was continuing to feed Jr.

July 26 morning. Jr. was on the ground...but after being fed and approached, he hopped up into branches quickly, even flew to a nearby fence. So, strength is returning, perhaps. Last night, I caught a miller moth. I offered it to Jr. He pecked it and it fell to the ground and he didn't know what else to do with that. Later, I guess. So, I gave it to the father bird.

July 29. In the last few days, we've seen Jr. perched in the tree of its birth for bedtime, drinking from the bird bath, running around the rose bushes by the edge of the lawn, and flying here and there. So, he has increased in flying strength. He also looks skinnier, which I hope is just part of becoming a gawky teenager.

However, he has been very reluctant to come get food. I only heard/saw the mother jay at first (it squawked continually for an hour from its perch on the top of the utility pole). Finally, I saw Jr. way back in the bushes and when I made my way toward him, he kept his distance. Seems like either something happened this morning with predators or Jr. is just more skittish after being injured. Mom found a little bird, belly on the ground. We figured it was injured (by something?). I approached it and it flew away. Didn't look right. So, again, I wonder if a predator had hit the area and all birds were on alert.

~ Enter the peanuts ~

Mom and her sister-in-law thoroughly enjoyed a peanut dispenser that my brother-in-law Dan had made and hung at his place in Oregon while Mom was there after the wedding. Dan surprised Mom and Charlotte by making feeders for each of them to take home. So, it was time to try it out.

I didn't know if Blue would recognize peanuts in a cage like that, so I figured we should do this in steps, like put out a peanut by itself, then put a peanut near the cage on the ground, then see if Blue takes from the cage on the ground, then hang the cage and let Blue have at it.

We tossed a peanut out on the cement. Bang! Blue grabbed it and flew off. Marilou must've fed it peanuts before. He knew its worth.

We put the cage on the ground with a couple peanuts on the base of the cage. Blue didn't quite get the cage thing, but he gladly took the peanuts laying on the base.

A couple of days later, Mom saw Blue on the hung cage, tugging with all his might on some peanuts. So, he gets it.

~ And the days go by ~

July 31. Blue Jr. isn't too bright right now. He carried around an empty snail shell and worked on burying it.

He now sleeps high up in the big pepper tree from which he fell several weeks back. His parents are back in charge. :)

Aug 2. We don't see the birds much now. Yesterday, Jr. found a spot in the sun and stretched his wings out. I took photos while walking toward him. He flew off when I got this close.

Aug 8. In the last 5 days, I have only seen one blue jay once, and it flew quickly to the pepper tree; I don't know which one it was. Kinda sad for me--I'd hoped to have two birds hanging around now. But it's basically zero blue jays now--and about 15 nervous finches that bolt as a noisy group when you look at them. So, it was a treat to see a note from Mom today that Blue Jr. had come all the way in on his own to get seeds. Of course, I wish I could've seen that myself, but good news is good news.

[check for new movie links above, in the sections on Recognized Provider and Water]

Queen of the Night tea

2006-06-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

Yep, I made some.

The fragrance is unique. It's not as strong as a gardenia, but it is just as memorable. So, last night, when folks were hanging out because of the flowers (see Flower Power), I joked in saying that I wanted to try making tea out of it. A Chinese friend chimed in that they do make tea with it in China, like Jasmine tea. "What, just put the petals in hot water?" "Yes."

So, after midnight, when everyone was gone and the flowers would be wilted by morning, I cut one off and put all of its petals (and a bit of sugar) in a cup of hot water. It was good!

Oops--I put it in a Starbucks cup.

Flower Power

2006-06-28T00:51:00.000-07:00

Last Summer, I observed that the football-shaped buds of the Queen of the Night appeared to open on the day that they reached a certain length. I got all scientific about it, measuring the length of several buds day after day and, blah blah, I now have a little chart that I can hold up next to a flower bud that tells me how many days before that bud will explode into one of these amazing blooms.

The heat wave early in the month triggered the formation of this Summer's first wave of flower buds. So, I got out the chart and determined that they'd bloom around June 27...

Powerful. That's one year, exactly, from the day Dad died. What wonderful timing for Mom and me to have this explosion of life on such an important date.

We have had such enjoyable times around these Summer flowers. These flowers had, since they first bloomed in 2003, been something to share with others. Last Summer was no exception. By word of mouth (okay, and a huge sign I stuck on the lawn, days in advance), people came from blocks away, even from nearby cities; people brought over guests who were visiting them, just to find out what this thing was. The flower became a point of connection, a place for community of friends and strangers who would become friends. It made for long evenings for Mom and me, but we loved it; we loved being with others who wanted to share some new adventure and drink in this wonderful flower.

And that's what we set in motion again this year. The sign was far smaller: "Night-blooming flowers blooming soon! See phoons.com/news". And it did the trick. It was good to see faces from last year and to see new faces, people who'd seen the sign and were just curious (good for them! and they were rewarded!).

It was tough to narrow down an evening's worth of photos. "Do I show the photo with the most people? Show how people are clustered in groups, talking about whatever they enjoy talking about at the moment? Show the variety of people studying and smelling the flower?" I settled on this one that included Mom zipping about, joyfully offering cookies and tea.

The power of a flower. A reason for community, relationships, celebration, life.

My heritage

2006-06-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

Mom and I went to Outback tonight, this night which is a year from when Dad died. We had a nice time at dinner. And then we went back to her place and enjoyed an evening with friends and newfound friend-neighbors who saw my signs and web page to come see the exotic Queen of the Night flowers on her front porch that open after 7:30 pm and last for one night. My interest in sharing the beauty with others--even strangers--comes from Mom.

The last time I was at Outback was on Father's Day of 2004, I snuck this photo, capturing one of the most beautiful things in my life: my parents' love for and commitment to the Lord, here reflected in yet another not-from-script thanking God for the food before us, for loved ones, for caring for us. "Caring for us"--he regularly expressed that, even knowing his life was being shortened by cancer. I remember choking up when taking the photo, drinking in the beauty of the moment and also knowing what a precious thing I was capturing for a time such as right now.

In searching through Dad's collection of photos on his computer, I came across an old Phoon photo. I also came across this photo I took of them while we were next to each other at a stop light in Oct 2003.

They didn't always look like that or behave like that...but they knew I'd probably laugh if they hammed it up just for me. They were right. And with as many painful things as there are that could be remembered, many of our making, it's good to remember the good stuff and to forgive. That's something they taught us, too.

I love you, Mom and Dad.

Make my face

2006-06-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

If you have gone through Disneyland's Haunted Mansion ride, you may remember the talking head statues. As you walked past them, it appeared as if they turned to follow you. If you looked closer, you observed that the statues didn't stick out toward you like normal statues but were instead concave, carved inward. [I made one of these. See the very end of this post for a short movie.]

A couple weeks ago, my brother showed me a color drawing of a dragon head on a flat piece of paper and showed me a movie of the dragon head.

I followed instructions on where to cut, how to fold, where to tape, and soon I had my dragon head. It followed the same principle as the heads at the Haunted Mansion: the dragon face was on the "inside" of the 3D shape. And if you shine a light just right and close one eye and walk by it, it looks like the dragon is turning its head to follow you. Creepy.

I thought why not try to make a creepy 3D thing with my face?

Here is the folded object:

And here is a movie (click the triangle) that shows the resulting optical illusion (hmm... I look like a balloon with a really bad nose burn):

(Thanks, David, for converting this from my camera's movie format!)

You can make it, too, as if that's exciting. Print out the following six images. Instructions are on one of them.

If you succeed, leave me a comment! I'm curious if anyone else (1) tries it and (2) succeeds. I uploaded my movie to video.google.com.

So, how did I make it, you craftspeople wonder...

I took a big piece of paper and smashed/folded it against my face and applied tape all over to hold the folds in place and retain the basic shape of my face in all of the wrinkles in the paper. Then I cut the mask down the middle.

I made cuts at various places to enable the half to flatten out. I traced the flattened shape and created a mirror image of that.

I folded and taped those pieces together and tried them out on my face. The nose part didn't work at all. I had to make a little nose by hand and tape it in place. But the rest looked pretty good.

But...the original tracing had far too many cuts. I wanted to simplify the pattern to make it easier for you to cut out and put together. So, I cut this current mask down the middle, flattened it with new simpler cuts and made one last tracing.

I then took photos of myself from various angles so that I could transfer key features from those images to the cutout patterns.

Oops. The nose didn't work out. Too complicated.

I used the same technique several years ago to make a pony out of chicken wire because I wanted to have a cool starting point for a topiary. I'd fold paper to form a pony-like shape, apply tape liberally, then cut it and flatten it out and trace a new pattern and repeat until I had a simple pattern that, when joined together, looked pretty much like a pony. I laid those flat patterns on chicken wire, cut it up and wired it into the shape of a grazing pony. And that's how I came to have a chicken wire pony in my garage. Hmm.

John Darrow's Thai Lemon Ginger Fudge Chicken Soup

2006-06-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

I threw together these ingredients last night without thinking about measuring. I also used 2 serranos and, man, that was insanely hot, but it was wonderfully delicious. Tonight, I wanted to try it again and write down amounts and tweak the flavors. I tried 1 serrano, and it was still too hot, but still very yummy. So here's what I propose for "just right." Enjoy!

Want to print this or tell someone about this post? First click the title of just this post and then you'll have just what you need.

Serves 4. Side dish: fresh fruit topped with (fruit) yogurt. Peach ice
cream afterward is pretty nice, too.

== Prepare the ingredients

4 c water
1 T garlic salt
juice of 1/2 lime (or whole lime if you like it more sour)
1 T fresh minced ginger
1/2 small serrano pepper, minced (wash your fingers thoroughly after messing with serrano..or, if you prefer, rub your eyes so you more readily appreciate my advice next time)
3 boneless chicken thighs, cut in 1/2" strips (not too long to fit in your mouth)
2 T lemon pepper seasoning salt (McCormick)
1 T dried basil
2 to 3 cups brown mushrooms, sliced thick (in 3)
1-1/2 T butter
oil
8 pieces of fudge
1/2 can of coconut milk (after first shaking the can for a while to mix)
enough uncooked green beans or sugar snap peas for a typical side dish for two people
1 package Top Ramen shrimp flavor, broken up while still in its package
2 medium tomatoes, cut in eighths
1 large handful of cilantro, coarsely chopped

== Start the soup base

In a 3 qt saucepan, add the water, garlic salt, lime juice, ginger and serrano. Bring to a boil.

== Start the chicken

Heat a skillet to quite hot, pour a 2" circle of oil and immediately pour in the whole pile of chicken pieces (to minimize hot splatters). (Don't clean the bowl--you will be using it for the chicken again shortly.) Spread the pieces out evenly and let them sear on one side (get some good color there!). Then flip the pieces over to lightly cook them. Goal: leave the middles uncooked. They will cook more later. Transfer the chicken back to the bowl.

== Cook the mushrooms

Put all of the mushrooms in the hot skillet. Let them soften and darken. Then mix in the butter and let it darken again. Then mix in all the chicken and drippings and take the skillet off of the heat.

== Continue the soup base

Add the coconut milk, the ramen and the contents of the spice packet that came with the ramen. If you are using green beans, stir them in now (don't add any sugar snap peas at this time). Return to boil. When the green beans are nearly done, you're ready for the next step.

== Set places and call everyone to the table

Mix the chicken and mushrooms into the soup base. If you are using sugar snap peas, stir them in now. Stir in the tomatoes. Mix in the cilantro. Serve.

Enjoy the fudge.

I wish I could've seen Joanne's reaction

2006-06-20T00:56:00.000-07:00

My sister Joanne isn't fond of bugs.

If I make a high whine sound, imitating a mosquito, then slowly move my pointing finger toward her cheek, I can expect to get a strong backhand from her.

So I wondered how she would've reacted had she experienced what I experienced this morning. I was looking at something on the front porch when out of nowhere a crane fly (mosquito hawk) landed on my face, with legs spanning my right eye. Hello!

David's humor

2006-06-16T01:40:00.001-07:00

I came across a photo that David had taken in 1983 and sent to me as a postcard. That's my old Volkswagen Fastback in the foreground.

So, some dude was slowly cruising down the street and trying to figure out something about his car. David saw the photo opportunity.

And that, in turn, inspired him to spin a story, which he wrote on the back of the photo and mailed to me.

Freeway sign generator

2006-06-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Carly who dropped in out of nowhere and alerted me to John's assignment for us all to generate freeway signs like the ones I just made, below. (Visit the generator web page, fill in the four textfields, click "Make my sign", rightclick the image + Save As; add the pic to your blog with instructions like these.)

Here's another option for those who want to make a freeway sign but do not want to go through the hassle of saving, etc., just to send something to friends: (1) go make the sign, (2) copy the resulting URL/address to your email or blog. That's it! The drawback is that the URL says exactly what the words are, so the reader will have a bit of a clue before visiting the URL and seeing the image.

Happy 78th, Mom!

2006-06-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

Shall we go get a picture of you near the pony, like when you were 74?

Last year, many of you participated in Mom's birthday cosmos fun. Click this for the memories.

Many of you have asked how the cosmos are doing this year. Well, over summer and fall, Mom and I gathered (piles of) dried/drying cosmos and then later harvested the seeds into a bucket and dispersed many of those in the same plot. The rest we dispersed elsewhere in the yards (no sharing with any neighbors--no way!).

Here's a shot of the plot today. All of the cosmos started from seed, so by midsummer they should look even better than last year, me thinks.

(Click for a larger view.)

Well, in keeping with tradition, I played Happy Birthday on the piano for Mom, several hours after she'd already awaken. She enjoyed it. Okay, the reality is that her tradition is quite the opposite: seems like she'd pick some time waaaaay before we'd normally awake (when I think God is also still asleep) and rouse us with that loud tune.

Mid morn, we went to a memorial service for one of Mom's past walking partners. (Another was Dad.) It was good to reconnect with her sons (btw, there's a historical Phoons connection there), and certainly emotional to also remember our own losses as well as their family's.

In the afternoon, we headed to the hills for a hike. I showed Mom the hidden-from-the-path grotto at which I had phooned a couple of weeks ago. I noted how I had had to run from the camera, along the fallen tree and up a distant branch before the timer went off. Now on that branch again, something caught my eye: a geocaching cache, of all things (where you use a GPS device to find stuff hidden by others, all around the world).

Evening was quickly upon us. A late-arriving guest delayed our plans for dinner. Finally on the road, we thought it too late to cram a big meal into our bodies ("we'll have trouble getting to sleep"). I joked about just going and getting dessert at BJ's Pizza. Mom said "Yes!" "So, dessert instead of dinner?" "Sure, it's my birthday!"

We each got one of these. Brownie baked in the tin, topped with ice cream and covered with whip cream. Ohhh, yeah.

Okay, now we're nauseated. We could each only get through half; we brought the rest home.

Queen of the Night / Night blooming Cereus to bloom soon

2006-06-09T04:02:00.000-07:00

Do you live within decent driving range of Sunnyvale? You've got to come check out this flower on our front porch. Read more about the flower here.

If you have seen and smelled this amazing flower that blooms in the late evening, you know what an incredible treat it is. And there are at least 17 buds that will be blooming some time in July, so you have plenty of opportunity to enjoy them. (These flowers can bloom anywhere between July and October. Each one lasts only one evening and has withered by morning.)

Would you like to be notified by email when a flower is going to bloom? I have just started a free Queen of the Night newsletter. Just sign up and I'll let you know as the day approaches and when the day is here! Perhaps you know someone who you think should check out the flowers? Either send them the link to the newsletter...or sign them up.

The flowers begin opening around 7:30 pm. Some people come twice in an evening: once to see what the blooms look like when they are beginning to open from the compressed "football" shape and again when the petals have opened fully, revealing inner delicate pistels and stamen, and the fragrance is strongest. This occurs around 10 pm.

The big gangly plant is on the front porch, and we will keep the lights on; just drop by without notice; you will very likely find others like yourselves who have dropped by to smell the flowers and take photos. Bring the kids!

Cookbooks for Tech Writers

2006-06-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

As a tech writer (one who writes documentation/instructions for programmers), I am supposed to be alert to variations in the process and present those to the reader. "If such and such is true, then do the following."

So, when I was cooking breakfast and both eggs I cracked had two yolks, my tech writer brain filled the time by considering how cookbooks should be repaired. Should there be "if/then" steps for situations like this? I know a great hollandaise sauce recipe that calls for three yolks and no whites. Is it three visual yolks, or is it whatever yolks happen to fall out of three egg shells?

Garage door opener

2006-05-31T16:33:00.000-07:00

My garage door is one of those that tilts up and horizontal when opened. After years of use, the remote for the garage door opener wasn't working as well as it used to. Changing the battery helped: I could open the door from a couple of houses away (which was certainly better than 5 feet, when the battery was weak). But it used to be better.

I asked my electronics wizard friend, Jim Peisker, if he had any ideas. He opened up the remote and receiver and pointed at a couple parts. He said we should replace the electrolytic capacitor because those can degrade over time. ("Of course!")

After he replaced those, I was amazed at how well it worked, even from 10 houses away where I'd first round the corner.

That left such an impression on me that I've oft thought of including those details in a movie and then make some additional upgrade to the garage opener that would make it even more powerful, which in my mind means the door would violently blow itself off the face of the garage when I tested it from the far end of the block.

The trouble with parking

2006-05-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

There's a high school about a block away. Kids park all along the streets nearby. I shook my head at seeing someone back into a spot so that the car behind them had, at most, two feet of clearance on both ends of their car. Good luck getting out of that spot.

You know how it is. You park, you go into the store or restaurant or wherever, and your shoulders slump when you come and see that some impossible parking situation has developed. (Click)

[After I took this photo, I laughed when a guy (with his buddies) started to pull his car into the spot to the right of my car. The expressions on their faces...you could tell they were trying to make sense of consequences of parking their car.]

Jelly is still stupid

2006-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Yes! That was blog-worthy. Falls apart at the end, but still brought me a smile. Thanks, Mom! Jelly bothers me

Me and my hotpants

2006-05-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

I was walking back to work, grasping a burrito in one hand while a finger of my other hand hooked the to-go bag with green hot sauce. Occasionally, my hands would cooperate to work more foil off the burrito or get sauce out of the little lidded cup. At some point of my brisk walk back from the little shop, I noticed a cool sensation on each of my thighs.

What amazes me is how perfect all the conditions had to be--lid slightly ajar on the hot sauce cup, bag dangling open, bag swinging with my stride--to accomplish what I still can't comprehend: the even distribution of green hot sauce down each pant leg. Cool. Great way to arrive back at work.

Lucky brake

2006-05-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in this story how my brakes didn't sound quite right, so I didn't even want to touch that steep San Fran hill. I did the proper thing until I could work on the brakes: avoid hills, minimize fast stops, shift to lower gears to help slow the car when braking.

I wasn't expecting to see this stuff fall out when I took the rear wheel apart. It requires no knowledge of brakes to know that "that ain't right."

The righthand pad had completely come off of its shoe.

Am I glad I fixed it now! (And I think I deserve extra points for fixing my own rear brakes. Those things are complicated.)

How to become a man

2006-05-15T00:36:00.000-07:00

I'll never forget with what pride I wrote in a journal at age 12 that Dad had told me I was becoming a man. This was in response to my having "repaired" something in the house.

You see, my bedroom door, in this Los Angeles beach house built in 1906, was rubbing on the barewood floor in one portion of its arc. I took it upon myself to fix the problem. I got some sandpaper and sanded the floor until the door didn't rub anymore! "Fixed!"

I still laugh and shake my head about that bad solution today.

It's Mom's day

2006-05-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

"Happy Mother's Day," I said to the gentleman working at the fast food restaurant. Then I added, "Is she still alive?" That's part of my thinking now, having lost Dad--sensitivity to the possible losses of others. I'm so glad to have enjoyed another day with Mom. To plant flowers and ferns for her. To try fixing her car door lock. To squirm with her in watching the finale of one of our many shows we look forward to watching together, "Survivor." To share with her how good it was to find healing in a relationship and hear her say that she so enjoyed hearing me laugh on the phone with that friend again.

A gal at church, in greeting me with "Happy Mother's Day," added that I was being such a good son to my mother. I guess those kind words didn't have too deep of meaning because "how difficult is that with a Mom like mine?" I reflected on the strained relationship I recall her having had with her mother. Who wouldn't want a sweet mother like mine...and know the curiosity of the phrase "being a good son" as if that were hard.

This morning was the first Sunday for me to help out in a 1st-5th grade class. (They'd asked for more volunteers so that they could start up this class again.) A fun time. At the end, with kids gone, the adults were chatting about what worked and didn't work. For some reason, one asked if I played the piano. Yes. And what did I think about leading the kids in music some future Sunday. Instantly I was talking excitedly about what Mom had done for so many years--well before I became her fourth child and on through my 6th grade--how Mom made bid posters with the words written out and she'd play piano and kids would excitedly want to be selected to stand in front of the crowd of kids to hold the posters and all would sing. And Mom had her cool ways of helping kids memorize scripture, such as writing out the verse and they'd read it, then a kid could come erase a word and write an underline, and they'd repeat until there were just lines and everyone was saying the verse together. And they'd get a pack of gum next week if they could repeat the verse from memory. She kept kids engaged through lessons she came up with. She handled the age range with ease.

Oh how I longed for such to have happened today. What a stark contrast. Kids drawing pictures on paper bags while we're supposed to get them to answer questions about who was out to kill Paul in the book of Acts. A bit of mayhem. No music. Kids not clear about who's in charge in the room with there being four of us...instead of a sharp lady like Mom. As I shared some of what Mom did, the others chimed in how they had liked similar in their experiences, or how they looked forward to such.

Thanks for your example and leadership, Mom! Great job, all those years. How cool it has been for you to hear from adult women now who remember the love you had for them as children in Sunday School, how you cared for them in the years since... Your flock has sure expanded, hasn't it?

I love you, Mom. Thanks for your friendship, your thoughtfulness, your never-ending kindness to me and others.

Two cars and a skateboard

2006-04-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a crazy event from my college days...

I don't recall the exact circumstances leading up to this, but I do remember that I was a mile and a half from my folks' house with my car and one of their cars, and I needed to get both cars to their house. I also had my skateboard in my car.

So, I drove one of the cars a ways, parked it, and then made my way back to the other car on my skateboard. Since I had driven the car a fair distance, it took me about 5 minutes to pump my way back to the other car via skateboard. As I skated back, I exchanged glances with some guy who was walking on the other side of the street (and heading in the same direction as my folks' house).

When I made it back to the furthest car, I'd repeat the process. I'd hop into the car, now more sweaty and weary than on the prior trip, and start driving. It felt odd to pass the other (parked) car, as if I were leaving it behind; I was also alert to how far I was driving past it, because that's how far I had to skateboard back (and very slightly uphill). I'd park this car down a ways and skateboard back, and I'd see that guy again, continuing his long walk in the same direction as my two cars.

After a handful of these trips, I finally got one of the cars to my folks' and rode my skateboard one last time to the remaining car and drove it home.

My favorite part of this whole thing was watching the guy on the other side of the street each time I'd skate by. He definitely looked more intently at me on subsequent trips. Try to imagine what he was thinking. How could he make sense of what he was observing? "The same guy keeps skating by on the other side of the road...and each time, he's further back than the last time I saw him..."

Happy Birthday, Dad

2006-04-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

Miss you.

I felt I needed to do something on Dad's birthday. I'm still not able to dwell on more current photos or memories...too heavy for me. But this altered photo from years ago came to mind; it's a good memory for me, something that made each of us laugh.

About the picture...
A few years ago, Mom and Dad visited Jan and Dan in Oregon. Starlings were considered a pest there, as they shooed away other birds and snorked all the food. Dad enjoyed the opportunity to try his hand at startling them away with a BB gun and someone forwarded a photo of him; there were no starlings within view. I fixed that, after a trip to the 'net to find some pics of starlings. Beware of starlings that fill up a rocking chair.

The rings of a fish

2006-04-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

When I cut through my fish with a fork tonight, I saw these rings. I've never seen rings before...I've seen fish flake in sections, but I didn't know there could be rings. So, I thought I'd pass on what I found interesting.

Mmm, it was yummy, too. A quick version of hollandaise sauce + lemon pepper + garlic salt + parsley + fresh basil, poured on top of pan-fried grouper (lightly coated with flour + cornmeal) and baked. Dang, gotta try that again!

Daylight savings time and my car

2006-04-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

The power and volume knob on my car radio busted a couple of years ago. Well, at least the clock part of it still worked.

When disconnecting the battery for various car repairs, I noted that the clock would reset to 12:00. Oh, maaan... So, it might actually be 9:32, but the clock might say something like 4:06!

I'd barely endure that until the next time I happened to remember that the top of the hour was coming (any hour would do) and I had the opportunity to get to the car to disconnect/reconnect the battery. If it was not noon or midnight, I'd then have to remember how many hours off the clock was, subtracting or adding whatever the number was, to figure out the actual time. I'd be tired of that from the start, and, again, if I happened to remember my car clock as noon or midnight approached, I'd go do the battery thing.

Well, the clock's been correct for many months. Then daylight savings hit us again a few days ago, so my clock was off by an hour. (If I don't have any car repairs, daylight savings all by itself means I have to unplug the car battery twice a year.) Yesterday, I happened to be on the road just before noon (or just before 11, according to the clock), so it was convenient to pull over and capture the moment of my setting the clock to the right time. (I know, you're thinking, "Just get a new car radio, already!" But would you have enjoyed a blog about "I bought a new car radio"?)

I was thinking about helium

2006-03-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

Helium is the second element in the periodic chart of chemical elements. Sixth is carbon, and eighth is oxygen. Helium has an atomic weight of around 4, carbon's weight is around 12 and oxygen's weight is around 16. So oxygen weighs about 4 times as much as helium.

You can put a bunch of pencil lead in a bag and toss the bag on a scale and weigh it. How did they figure out that helium weighs "4"? Picture a scientist filling a bag with helium and putting it on a scale and watching the bag go to the ceiling, and then repeating this. (A senior scientist then ties the bag to the junior scientist's wrist with a string.)

There is probably some place that helium exists naturally, like in some part of the rain forest. It seeps out of certain logs or large bugs. And there are certainly natives in that area. Wouldn't those natives have a great time, I thought. They'd never have a serious conversation. Tony the Elder would try to bring up some serious matter with Frank, like how he's being kept awake by Frank's kids beating on logs late into the night, but then they'd both burst into laughter because Tony the Elder sounds like a chipmunk and they'd be wiping their laughter tears from their eyes with the backs of their hands and then go back to blow-darting tree snakes. But then I realized that that's what they grew up with, and what you grow up with is often what feels normal. They would have always sounded like chipmunks and it would not have occurred to them that they might sound different from other humans. So, they wouldn't laugh because of the helium.

What would be interesting is taking these natives out of their part of the forest, say, to meet another tribe. (The first challenge would be for the host who arranges the trip. As desperately as the host wants to talk the natives into the idea of traveling for this social experiment, he can't get a complete sentence out because he's laughing at himself sounding like a chipmunk.) There would be some point in the travels at which the natives would first hear each other talk with low voices. "Tony the Elder, you sound like a rotted log!" they'd laugh. (They wouldn't say he sounded like a tiger or other big animal because in their part of the rain forest those animals would also sound like chipmunks [and, come to think of it, I don't know what chipmunks would sound like there]). And they'd laugh again when they heard the neighboring natives speak in low voices. The neighbors would be totally serious, but the helium natives would just not be able to keep a straight face. Trying to suppress your laugher in a serious setting, when you know your buddy Frank has the same silly thought--that just leads to outbursts and snorts that can't be contained. And when they got back home and tried to imitate low voices to their families, they just couldn't describe it well enough, so it wouldn't be that funny.

That's what I was thinking about helium.

St. Patrick's Day

2006-03-17T20:30:00.000-08:00

In 4th grade, Mom persuaded me to go to school with green food coloring in my really blonde hair. I had a good case of stage fright, but I suspected it would end up being fun, and it was fun.

I repeated that again in 10th grade and perhaps once during college.

9:45 Today, I'm doing it again, but my hair is a lot darker now, so the green isn't as obvious. So I smeared it all over my face. Time to go in to work now.

If you're from some nearly-all-caucasian city, you live a completely different life. I'm pretty much a minority in this tech center of California where most of the workers in my area are Indian or Chinese. So, going to work means crossing paths with many people who are not likely to automatically think "Oh yeah, an Irish tradition" when they see me with a green face. I was not wanting to walk around much at work.

10:45 I slipped into my work cubicle with no one seeing my decoration, though I greeted those nearby and received greetings back.

10:55 The coworker on my right rolled back in his chair to see around the cubicle divider and ask me a question. A great large-eyed double-take was followed by a burst of laughter and "John, don't scare me like that!" He looked at his watch, "It's not April Fools yet. Why did you do that?" A reminder of St. Pat's was sufficient. He recalled a Seinfeld episode in which Kramer made himself look sickly green as part of a test for doctors.

11:45 I called to my coworker, "I wonder if I need to wear a big shamrock or something." The coworker on my left called out, with a glance that wasn't intended to meet eyes, "John, you ARE a shamrock!" (I have no idea what that meant) and turned back to her work. She glanced around again and saw my face and burst into laughter, with face flushing. My face flushed, too, and I asked what color that resulted in.

12:15 A workmate of Chinese descent swung by with a technical question. Her look suggested a bit of fright or concern. I quickly mentioned the "day with green" and she was okay. "Will it wash out?" and later "You're fun."

1:45 I overheard a coworker telling her boss how her child had expressed "a requirement to wear green to school" and the fallout from that. I stood up to show my face over the cube walls to her boss who glanced up and recoiled with a "Whoooaaa!" (and that was the end of that).

2:00 An Indian walked past our cubes with his department mates and caught me staring back at him with a little smile. He stopped in his tracks and, in all seriousness, said, "What happened?" I just stared and waited for his caucasian workmates to assess the situation and fill him in with some head shaking. I followed with, "It's a March 17th tradition."

4:00 As I left a breakroom, an Indian gal looked at me and I'd have to describe her eyes as holding a bit of shock. A few steps later, I happened to catch a glance of her starting to talk to a workmate with a smiling expression that looked like the kind of try-to-hide-it expression some people have when gossiping that meant to me, "Oh my gosh, I just passed a guy with a green face..."

I had brought the food coloring to work because I suspected my face might need some touch up at some point. As the day went by, I made two or three trips to the washroom to touch up...and to increase the green.

4:30 I crossed paths with a workmate who had seen me just a little bit earlier. She exclaimed, "You're more green!"

5:30 One of my three workmates who had chosen to work from home today (drat! I wanted them to see this!) instant-messaged, "Is it true?... It's not easy being green" (a reference to a song sung by Kermit). Ha! Earlier, I'd considered singing that line (with my best Kermit impression) to get my manager's attention. When my manager later swung by my cubicle, I recounted this story her and did sing the line...

Mom called. She was cooking corned beef and wanted me to pick up a head of cabbage. Great...that meant I had to walk through a grocery store. That's one of the faster trips I've made through a grocery store. When I arrived at Mom's, she was wearing a green tangerine grocery net on her head like a hairnet, waiting for me to see and laugh.

8:30 My index finger is still green from applying food coloring during the day. Probably a good thing I have a weekend to deal with any problems...

Boy, was that meal delicious.

They made things better in the old days

2006-02-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

Going through the folks' old stuff to see what might be worth selling on eBay, I came across some pencils from the 1930s. I tried one out. It still works!

Towel folds

2006-01-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I found a hole in the stiff wire screen of a small under-house air vent, I stuck a rock in that hole. When I found the rock dislodged the next day, it confirmed my suspicion of mouse traffic.

Mom folds her towels in thirds when hanging them in the guest bathroom. Towels are definitely easier to fold in half or quarters. Have you ever tried folding a long towel in thirds? It's harder to get both ends of the towel to work out. But that's how she folded them. And as a gesture of respect, I would go through the effort to get them back into those nice thirds after using them. Did that for years.

One day, Mom asked why I folded the towels in thirds. "Because you do." "Oh, I just do that so that when people hang them back up, folded in half, I can tell the towels have been used and need washing."

Finishing nails

2006-01-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

For decades, my folks' garage has accumulated stuff. One section in particular is stacked high with materials and tools related to projects. It's easy to look at those and remember projects completed and also know my parents readiness to tackle whatever the next project was.

In that corner is a workbench whose frame and top were built by my father's father. It is a rugged bench, well worn from generations of use. For over a decade, its top has barely been visible under accumulated scrap, wood dust, screws, washers, odd project remnants. In Dad's last months, I found I couldn't hang out for long in the workbench/shelf area. I'd quickly choke up, knowing he wasn't going to be using all that stuff anymore. It became a symbol of unfinished projects. I knew I'd have to clean it up someday, along with the rest of the garage. It has been a stronghold for months, a symbol of loss. So many months have gone by with my avoiding that corner.

Yesterday was a good day. I was two days beyond a flu that had given me a body temperature over 100° for four days. I was once again enjoying being up and about. I had been gardening outdoors under a gorgeous blue sky. At one point, I walked by the workbench and realized I was up for tackling it. Soon, I was down to final dusting and that's when I saw the little nails.

Each was bent over and smashed into the surface, nearly the same distance apart, in a line that extended across the bench and even on to the separate wooden vice piece. I wondered why on earth anyone would've (1) put nails in a workbench (disrespectful) and (2) left them there (disrespectful).

I chuckled and shook my head as I remembered that, oh yeah, I did that in my late teens. The best I can remember now is that I was experimenting with these very fine 1" nails to see if it was possible for me to drive one completely into the table in a single hammer blow. When I didn't succeed with the first, I tried with another, and another and another. And instead of pulling out the nails, I just pounded them in an attempt to make them flush with the surface. Duh.

The bench isn't beautiful. No one else would ever notice or even care if the nails were there or not. But it seemed fitting to pull those nails out now, a time to show the table a little respect, a time to correct my errors, a time to honor Dad.

Mom came along about this time, wondering what I was up to. When she saw the clean workbench, she burst into tears. "Bless you. I had no idea how to even start the task of cleaning up that workbench." A stronghold for her, too.

The Aviator

2005-12-29T20:37:00.000-08:00

I just watched this movie about pilot and innovator Howard Hughes. He was one smart dude who went through a lot of kleenex.

When I was 15, I got a brilliant idea related to flight.

We lived in an old beach house up on an open hillside in Playa del Rey. Since then, rich people have built houses all around that 1906 house. The following photo will help put you in the right place for the following story. In particular:

Find the hillside between the big reddish building (by the beach) and the whitest "cube" house back on the hill (the house we used to live in now dwarfed and squished in the tiny gap between the white cube and the house beyond it)
Find the telephone pole at the top of the hill, next to the quaint little house
Find the road at the base of the hill

Some trivia...

My Dad once worked for Hughes Aircraft, and there is a Hughes airstrip in the flat area just to the left of the cliffs.

Okay, while you're distracted by photos, let me toss in another one that's unrelated to the current story. Our house overlooked Marina del Rey (my gosh, what a view). The opening scenes of Gilligan's Island show their boat making its way out of a harbor. That was filmed in that harbor.

So, at 15, I was a brilliance factory. Like tossing kleenexes out of the upper floor window to watch the wind carry them way up to the houses on the hill behind us. Or throwing dirt clods down the cliff toward cars on the road below and inadvertently hitting a cop car and running back to my house in time to see the cop pulling into my driveway.

On this particular day of brilliance, I looked at the pile of scrap wood and peg board by our house. I thought of the cliff with its steady updraft, perfect for an excellent stadium-quality paper airplane that my brother taught me to make. (Paper airplanes would hover really well and slowly make their way forward. I even got one to land in the parking lot beyond the road. Planes that landed on the slope were easy to retrieve with a quick run down the slope and back.) Having actually learned some key principles of aeronautics from my own experiments with the excellent paper airplane, I considered that I might be able to make a small glider out of some of those wood scraps.

So, I slapped together the basics (2x2 for fuselage, long rectangle particle board wing, little tail and aileron) and tossed it in the yard. Okay, so it looked like a grade school drawing of an airplane, except that it was uglier. And it didn't fly. But I didn't expect it to fly on first attempt. I anticipated that I'd need to add wood here, bend particle board there, etc.

I took it to the cliff, near that telephone pole, and released it into the updraft. It went pretty much straight down, a few feet in front of my feet. I rushed back to the house to tweak this, chop that. I made three or four such round trips. I delighted in observing how my adjustments were improving the plane (Frankenplane, albeit).

The updraft at the cliff was steady. I held Frankenplane over my head with one arm and began a gentle motion forward to establish some momentum while helping the plane find its balance in the updraft. As much it could be called "flying," the plane flew. While prior attempts had invariably resulted in nose dives just ahead of me, this time, it didn't dive. Now, understand that my recent tweaks of the plane were never designed get this thing to *hover*. No! I was merely trying to solve the immediate problem, that of a plane nose-diving into the slope.

So, congrats to me, the nose was up. The plane was now flying parallel to the slope and picking up speed. The limit of my brilliance became instantly clear. It was irrelevant whether I was able to get the nose up a little or get it up a lot: the whole time, I had been directing this thing toward traffic. My wooden creation was now heading swiftly toward lane #2.

I now watched helplessly with sheer panic in my gut, the plane now about 2/3 of the way down the long slope. I suspect I made several heartfelt and every-last-cellfelt pleas of God at that moment. He was kind to answer in a way that I approved of. The plane lowered from two feet off the slope to a foot, then finally skimmed along to a stop on the slope, about 10 feet from the traffic. I rushed down the hillside with thankfulness bursting out all over, fetched Frankenplane and made my way immediately home where I tore up the plane. I didn't try that again. (Other brilliant ideas came along to keep me busy.)

I remember that story every once in a while. A story of momentum. A story of momentum of my making. A story of thoughtless momentum of my making. GASP--I could have trashed some car, something that was never in my mind at the start. How is it that I never considered the range of space between the distant lot and the nose-dive slope surface? I was spared of consequences.

Can you see it?

2005-12-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

"Can you see it?" said Mom tonight. "Huh?" I responded. She added something about showing it to people on a past trip to Hawaii to see if they could see it. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Then she turned a piece of paper toward me. It looked something like the following. In my handwriting below it was the note "Success!"


yuiopasdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMqwe
sdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.co
MqwertyuiopMsdMqwertyuiopMsdMqweryuioopMsMqweryuiooopMsMqweryuiooopM
iopasdMqweMtyuiopasdMqweMtyuiopasMqweeMtyiopasMqweeeMtyiopasMqweeeMt
yuiopasdMqwerMyuiopasdMqwerMyuiopsdMqqwerMyuopsddMqqwerMyuopsddMqqwe
sMxqwertyuiopasMxqwertyuiopasMxqwrtyuuiopasMqwrttyuuiopasMqwrttyuuio
MqwertyuiopasdMqwertyuiopasdMqweryuioopasdMqeryuuioopasdMqeryuuioopa
iopasdMqweMtyuiopasdMqweMtyuiopasMqweeMtyuioasMqqweeMtyuioasMqqweeMt
Mphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.
iopasdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoon

"Oh yeah!" I said with delight. I went over to join her in staring at each page in a stack of pages. These were a copy of my notes and sketches from the early '90s as I attempted to figure out how those "sterograms" worked, those colorful posters we saw at all the malls, where people would gather around and stare, waiting for their eyes to relax enough for them to see the 3D images. (So, can you see it, too? Let your eyes relax as if looking beyond the screen. The goal is to get any two M's to drift toward each other until they merge into one. An alternate approach: tug ever so slightly at the outer corners of your eyes to merge any two M's.)

After several more trips to the mall, I observed that every pixel was a repeat of a pixel off to its left. Pixels that appeared to be closer to the eye were copies of whatever pixels were a slightly shorter distance to the left. I figured the principle had to apply to something as simple as characters, too. Sure enough.

The example above is a recreation of that past experiment. I typed 14 "random" letters on each line and then repeated those 14 for the rest of each line. That established the "background depth." When I wanted to create the left edge of something that would appear closer to the eye, I typed whatever letter was 13 characters to the left and kept copying whatever was 13 characters to the left until I reached a right edge, where I'd resume copying whatever character was 14 to the left.

Soon after, I created the sphere (first diagram below) and more recently created the Phoon stereogram:

Try creating your own text stereogram. Share your success with me :)

So, which was the tough day?

2005-12-27T20:31:00.000-08:00

A friend expressed a few days ago that she would be thinking about me and my family as today approached--6 months since Dad's death on June 27th. My brother David gave an account of the impact on him in his blog; Mom added some of her experience as a comment there.

Friends checked in on Mom today, knowing the calendar day (what a thoughtful thing to do). Mom and I reflected this evening on how today hadn't been much different from other days. I do recall Mom noting on Monday that "it was 6 months ago today"...Dad died on a Monday, so Mondays are more of an impact for her.

For whatever reason, I haven't been one to think about this in terms of weeks, months, anniversaries. So, was I impacted in any way? David's blog got me thinking back. Christmas dinner, Sunday the 25th, comes to mind.

Mom and I went out for a nice meal. We'd kept things generally light the whole day as well as on the long drive there and during the wait to be seated. After being seated, we looked around at the nice atrium setting; we enjoyed the beautiful koi gliding in the indoor waterway. Then there was a still period. Our eyes met. It was a moment to not shove thoughts of Dad out of my head. It wasn't "wrong" for us to reveal our grief to each other. In silence, we gave each other knowing nods and were tearful. We didn't know exactly what loss the other was experiencing at the moment. But we knew we both missed having Papa there.

I don't want to remember the details of the day Dad died. I was there--there's much I want to forget. But I'm not unwilling to grieve my loss of his friendship.

This discussion has reminded me how everyone's pain is their own and how they process it is different. I appreciated my brother's observation well before June that there weren't rules, that everyone would face Dad's death in their own way. I remember how helpful it was for me to connect with Patty in Australia a good year before Dad died. Her father had just passed away and she wrote about it in her blog. I wrote to her and she shared more about her experience, admonishing me to make the most of my time with Dad. Over the next year, she gave me additional glimpses into her own journey of dealing with the loss of her father. It was so helpful. Am I now doing the same for someone else? I hope so.

Soon, Mom and I inhaled, looked elsewhere, changed topic or whatever. I suppose this Phoon activity was in part a distraction for my mind, one of the ways I seek to "resume normal life." (Dad would've shaken his head and, with a slight smile, chuckled at the activity.)

Amazing Grace

2005-12-25T20:30:00.000-08:00

This day...a reminder of a birth brought about for a death, a death that would make life possible for me, one undeserving of such a gift. Thanks from one who wrestles to comprehend the full significance of this.

Seagulls and junior high detention

2005-12-24T20:30:00.000-08:00

The shrieks of seagulls in the mall parking lot took me back to junior high where I did after school detention for a few days and then agreed with an administrator in Mom's presence that I wouldn't be involved in this sort of activity again.

The outdoor lunch area was huge, full of tables and benches packed with students every lunch period. Twenty to 30 seagulls would line up along the edge of the tall auditorium next to the lunch area, anxiously watching for us to leave so that they could pick from among the scraps we left behind. What you couldn't tell was that there were easily another hundred gulls behind them on the roof.

Rusty knew exactly where to throw an apple from a less visible spot on the side of the auditorium and startle the whole hoard of seagulls off of the auditorium and directly over the lunch area. When I heard he was going to do this deed again, I wanted to see how it was done--and most definitely be out of range of the impending mayhem.

I knew well what it was like to be out there when the gulls bolted from the roof and unloaded their tanks, midflight. You'd hear screams from all directions as kids frantically sought cover that just couldn't be found in time. Soon after were groans and pointing toward who and what got hit. This time, I wasn't at risk of getting hit. But I ended up in detention.

I'll bet kids are still carrying on the tradition.

Loved you, Papa

2005-12-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

I printed several of this last year's status reports in preparation for the current dreary task of forming a self-appraisal for company evaluation. I squared up the pile of printouts and flipped through the stack, skimming the "Issues and Notes" section at the bottom of each status report in search of a particular set of work details. I wasn't expecting to see one of the entries:

Loved you, Papa.

It's been nearly 6 months now. And yet how quickly that lump still forms in my throat. A week or so after my father died, I had written up my status report, giving an account of my time. Accomplishment this, accomplishment that, a handful of meetings. Yet my mind and heart had been elsewhere; my life had been changed. I wanted to say *something* about that in my status report. Status reports are cold, impersonal; not a place to spell out life issues. Who would care? I didn't expect any coworkers to comment, didn't expect any sympathy. It was just something I needed to do, to not forget, to not gloss over the event. In that moment in July, I stuck a symbol of my life into that status report, a detail about what really mattered, like carving my initials and date on a tree: "All this other stuff doesn't matter, Papa. I loved you, and you loved me. I'll remember."

Digital signature

2005-12-12T20:27:00.000-08:00

My airplane seat was next to the window...with a view of a steady white light on the wing. All I could see in the dark. Booooring. And I wanted something to do. I had a camera.

I knew the camera lens would remain open for a bit longer due to the lack of lighting. How much of a squiggle could I create with the wing light during that time? Hmm...could I draw a circle accurately? How about a square? (Okay, so the lens was only open long enough for me to make a hangman shape.)

Hey, why not try my signature! 7809 and 7812 show bad squiggles of "Jo". Increasing exposure to 5 seconds, and with lots more practice, I was able to write the names of people I had just visited on a trip. (My real handwriting is better...but not much!)

By the way, when you do this, your signature comes out upside-down in the camera. I'd "write my name" in space, then turn the camera upside-down to see the results. (These images are right-side-up because I flipped the images over for you. Alternate approach: turn the camera upside down before writing your signature.)

Then I got bored with that and snuck back to the stewardess area to do this.