jsbowden | Reading

October 2025 was my slowest month for blogging in years. A few quick stats:

I posted 34 journal entries in October

At a rate of just over 1.0 per day it's the slowest month I've had in... checks spreadsheet... 4½ years.

Yes, I keep a spreadsheet. 🤣

While I averaged one journal per day (actually 1.09/day) I didn't post one journal every day. In fact I missed nine days in October.

I thought that would be my biggest number of missed days in, like, 10 years, but it turns out it's also just 4½ years. Basically, April 2021 was an unusually slow month for me. (I figured that not by looking at a spreadsheet but by eyeballing my monthly blogging by year.)

Okay, those are the stats. But the real question is "why". Why did I experience such a slowdown in my writing in October— especially compared to the relatively high 70 journal entries I wrote just two months earlier in August? Metrics don't answer meaningful question such as that though they at least tell a person where/when to ask.

The answer in this case is simple. I just didn't want to. Oh, I had more things I could've written about. There were things that happened in October I could have written about. There were things in my backlog from months earlier I could have written about. But so much of the time I just didn't care.

Earlier this year I wrote about the power of the phrase DFC— as in, I Don't Fucking Care. Used positively, it's liberating. It's a way to Marie Kondo through your life, filtering out what's not worth your time or frustration.

The downside of DFC, or Kondo-ing, is that when you're disaffected or depressed, everything can start to fail the question, "Does this bring me joy?" And that's what happened to me in October. A combination of factors, from me feeling physically listless, to the changing season signalling an end to our summery outdoors activity, to Hawk's surgery and recovery basically grounding both of us for weeks, have aligned to leave me feeling like I just don't care about doing any of the few options left.

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Tonight is Halloween. Or as I've called it recently, Hallow-whatnow?

I don't celebrate. And not only don't I celebrate, but fewer and fewer people around me celebrate. Oh, the stores are all festooned with "PLeAsE GiVe uS MoNeY!11!" holiday decorations as early as August. But as I do less and less shopping in stores I'm visually assaulted with such things less and less. Plus, by the start of October Christmas decorations are already displacing Halloween decorations even as Halloween is still 4 weeks away. 🤣

Like I said, though, fewer people in my orbit celebrate. Halloween is a nonevent in our neighborhood. We're a townhouse community, so few people living here have kids, and those who do have kids have mostly younger kids— mostly too young to go trick-or-treating. And those who do have kids also tend to bundle them into their luxury SUVs and take them to carefully controlled parties. Most of them never play in the community any of the other 364 days of the year... why would their parents suddenly feel it's safe to let them walk around in the dark and knock on doors tonight?

Even my company hasn't done anything for Halloween the past few years. In the past we'd have a small costume contest. Small, as in only a few people would participate. But at least there was something. Or a few people would act on their own to dress in costumes, and it would be amuse to see them on videoconferences. This year there was nothing. No contests, no announcements, no funny surprises on camera.

I've always been a bit "Bah, humbug!" about holiday celebrations but this year it's disappointing there's been basically nothing.

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I figured that Hawk would want to go out for dinner yesterday after getting her cast replaced with a boot that lets her walk better. I thought that would likely mean one of her favorite sit-down restaurants, Vive Sol or La Fiesta, or perhaps her favorite fast-casual place with great guacamole, Speedy's Tacos. Instead she announced yesterday evening, "I want pancakes. We could go to IHOP, or Denny's, or...."

I suggested we try IHOP if only because I ate at Denny's about 2 years ago and haven't been to an IHOP in possibly 10 years so it'd at least be a newer experience. But alas the nearest IHOPs are a few towns away, and in evening rush hour traffic the novely wasn't worth the commute. One of the remaining Denny's is just 1.5 miles away. So Denny's it was!

I went into Denny's with low expectations. Hawk wanted pancakes, and I figured they'd do a decent job of that. Eggs, too. But I didn't want breakfast all day. Heck, I don't even want breakfast food at breakfast hour. (I hate the taste of eggs and regard pancakes as carbs-and-sugar bombs my blood sugar level does not need.) I figured there may not be much else on the menu except for burgers anymore.

I wound up ordering a pot roast sandwich. It was small though came with a huge portion of fries filing out the plate. The meat on the sandwich was surprisingly tender. Hawk was surprised at how fast it was ready. I wasn't.... I figure it came in a boil-in bag from Sysco.

Toward the end of dinner Hawk's medications started hitting her pretty hard. She was feeling a bit dizzy and rested her head on the table. "It's good we went to Denny's," she quipped. "They're accustomed to people passed out with their faces on the table."

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Oddly, as it turns out, the yellow QR code worked fine for at least one other person's phone, but we did get some of those printed with green instead.

We had a ridiculous amount of food come in given the short lead time* and the direct donations to Capital Area food bank alone had hit $15,000 by this evening and that campaign had only started Tuesday morning.

(This morning, about 48 hours after it was posted, it hit $10k. We did the math. That sounds like so much money doesn't it? SNAP serves 41 million people a month. $10k is 53 people worth. Or 3 seconds of the year. You'll hear that in the live stream below.)

Originally we had confirmed congressman Khanna, Beyer, and Raskin (who had literally a 17 min availability window) but then Khanna had to bail in the morning and Raskin had to bail near go time.

So the event speaking only really went for about half an hour and closed down and then Walkinshaw showed up like 10 min later so he ended up in the group photo op but wasn't on a live stream but I sent someone over to get some video with him I hope it happened.
Edit: he was interviewed by NBC4 and posted the group photo we invited him into over his protest of 'but I only just got here' on his Instagram (I do wish someone had gotten him a better one)

. MSN picked up Fox 5 DC's live stream of the shorter than expected but really good speaking segment . Which is especially good, because the person someone handed a phone to to live stream to Instagram was initially told hold it horizontal and was and then a bunch of people told him to hold it vertical so he changed it so the Instagram live stream is sideways.

Walkinshaw, a new rep from Virginia, didn't seem mad and was really nice and joined our group photo, the one guy in a suit surrounded by the rest of us in high vis, and holding one of the signs, too.

I noticed in some photos that someone posted on Blue sky that Beyer went and joined the crowd behind the speakers after he spoke.

I am especially happy about my part in making this happen.

I'm also pleased that I can see evidence of my process improvements, possibly in these Getty pictures and possibly in somebody else's I forget - things like I taped up a sign that was in amongst the food on one of the tables and it was my idea to use blue tape to identify the people who had just been introduced to the press as people willing to talk to them, and I was part of starting us sorting like with like from the beginning and as it came in.

David told me that anytime he mentioned me people told him how great I was.

It was just astonishing this came together so very quickly. I think the organizing chat started Monday evening. Thank goodness they were afraid that the weather wasn't good enough on Wednesday and moved it to today and thank goodness the weather suddenly got better today.

Long after everybody else was on their way out, a photographer for Somal News showed up. I cajoled the guy who started this to give her a quick snippet, and later this evening sent her some further pictures. I look forward to seeing the article. At one point she asked about what's the deal with fun food not ballrooms and I had to explain the whole Trump ballroom and a swing demolition and found this article which is kind of heartening

We then got back here, went to noise making, talked with some people there, went to all about burger and got chicken tenders (i think I managed to leave my whole soda there which is a little annoying, and boy howdy am I grateful that David was able to come and pick me up and help me get out this morning even though that was the afternoon because oh boy howdy was I scattered), and then I went inside the house and sat down on the floor for an hour making it rather look late to try and deliver something to Laurel but how to really nice conversation with Charles and Lisa for a while in establishing that and now sometimes it's 1:30 in the morning partly because I've continued looking at articles and finding pictures and stuff and stuff and stuff.

I really need to spend some time on life maintenance tomorrow.

I have zero idea what I'm going to do for halloween. There's a house dance I've been kind of meaning to go to in annandale, there's an Acro evening Jam in Columbia, and there's some movies outside and I don't know what to call it but it's sort of 4:00 on the beltway. I guess I have a couple options for clothing but I don't really have the energy.

*I think we sent five cars out split between the two food banks that were not Capital Area Food Bank. I keep kicking myself for not having thought to post to the big mutual Aid Facebook group or the welcome to DC Facebook group or my building link, but there were just so many moving parts and I thought of a little some of that and then didn't get to it in time. And who knows maybe walk in Shaw could have spoken if I had been a little faster at trying to track down additional speakers. But honestly, the food was basically there as bait for the media. If you're going to buy food yourself, that's much more for mutual Aid and community pantries - real food banks can buy food at the same prices grocery stores do; it's so much better to give them dollars to do so. Although yes there's a bunch of stuff that they're less likely to buy, like, say, multi packs of canned chicken from costco. And those that handle fresh at all that's entirely donations.

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Today is Day 14 of Hawk's post-op recovery. At the time of her surgery they wrapped her foot in a half-cast, half-splint with strict instructions to put no weight on it. That made her close to immobile. She could hop around short distances with the help of of a pair forearm crutches— "short distances" being like from the bed or sofa to the bathroom. Going between floors in our vertical townhouse took focus and real energy. She tried to limit herself to one trip up and down per day. Today she had a followup visit at the clinic.

For the trip to the clinic Hawk used a knee scooter. It does no good in the house because there are stairs everywhere. But it's great for covering long, flat distances like from the parking spot in the garage to the clinic's front door, and from the front door to the orthopedic department. She zoomed along on the scooter, going faster than me, walking normally. Though heavy closed doors were her bane as it was difficult to balance while exerting enough force to open them. I caught up to her every time there was a door. 😅

At the clinic today they removed the cast and replaced it with a bandage wrap and a boot.

The boot can be taken on and off. And even the wrap can be removed (by us) at home tomorrow. After that she just needs to cover her foot with a sock. And before very careful with it when it's out of the boot, of course, because it's still healing. She'll need the boot for at least another 3 weeks, possibly up to 6 weeks.

The switch to the boot has made her more mobile. Now she can put partial weight on her foot. She still uses the forearm crutches to walk, but she can move faster with them because she can put her injured foot down to balance instead of having to hop along on one leg.

Hawk celebrated the change today by asking that we visit a local bakery that has her favorite, princess cake. She boldly decided to walk (hobble) from the parking area to the cafe. It was across the street and partway up the block. She was okay getting there though it took more out of her than she expected. So she bought all the princess cake they had in the display (5 pieces) and asked me to pull up the car for her hobble back out.

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It won't work, and I shall be sad after making a large version of your flyer that is all about resources for furloughed feds and then I try accessing the QR and the orange one works and the yellow one (unsurprisingly) does not.

I'd offered to print a bunch on the way up to the food drive/rally, and I guess the really important part is that people can access the resource list, but the fact that the submission QR doesn't work and there's no website at all on here (nor a mention of which org it's from, but it might not be from a specific org? there are SO many different resource compilation documents going around) makes me loath to make a bunch of these if maybe she'll have a chance to get me something less pretty and more functional.

Also I had the bright idea to print an 8.5x11 one pager 'what are we on about?' as 11x17 and that seems to have created a SURPRISING amount of work, and my few minutes before bed turned into an hour.

:sigh:

I guess the good thing about having gone downstairs and done this is she'll see my message in the morning and maybe be able to get someone (it's not her design file) to fix it in time to still print them.

I keep planning to try to get a movement started to push back on how what DC called making the Streatery program permanent is really just going to kill them. And I desperately need to sleep.

But my face is burning and I've got no idea what's going on with that at all. If I wake up sick I shall be very cross. Especially since I'm the one bringing the tarps.

This was supposed to do the click to embiggen but it's being weird and i really want to sleep.

Hm. this can't be a symptom of food poisoning can it? Last couple days have been a "eat the things what need eating"

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And in a turn of dark hilarity, with only like 2 or 3 days of work on it we have so far 3 confirmed congresscritters but we've gotten nowhere finding anyone willing to speak who works in a food bank or mutual aid, who is receiving SNAP and looking at losing it, who is a fired or furloughed fed, or who is with USDA Food Nutrition Service.

But anyway. Yeah, 3-5 in front of USDA HQ on the Mall side near Smithsonian Metro, a rally (and food drive*) and we're sending the physical stuff to probably more the food bank in Arlington and the one in Gaithersburg** and we've raised over 5k in a day or two for Capital Area Food Bank and I feel guilty that I don't have a link that has links for all three.

I have no idea what I'm doing or wearing for Halloween.

I suppose I need to spend some more time trying to track down . . . something.

My phone died while I was in the library printing and I ended up talking with a lady for like 45 min after the library closed who plans to show up tomorrow (yay!) and who was telling me about things DC did to keep people from autofalling off medicaid when she was a case worker, and who also was telling me about some guy who was curing AIDS with herbs in the 80s; I went back to explaining PEPFAR and soft power somewhere in there. I think her name was Latisa. We also saw a desperately cute tiny dog.

I need way more sleep tonight.

*and yes we know generally it's best to just give $ to food banks and food pantries but hopefully the photographers will be really into the congresscritters helping load cars? (well actually I think they each have literally like 17 min windows of available time on site.)

** Manna food bank in Gaithersburg is desperate for additional volunteers the next few days:

"Manna Food Center in Maryland serves a significant federal workforce population. Because of the ongoing government shutdown, they are making emergency bags for furloughed federal workers in our area.
If you are available to volunteer for any of the shifts listed below, please contact Manna's Volunteer Coordinator, Kalandra Thompson, at 240.268.2520 x2520 or kalandra@mannafood.org
Volunteers are urgently needed for the following shifts:
· Thursday 10/30 9am – 12pm – 3 openings
· Thursday 10/30 9am – 12pm (Rescued Produce shift) – 8 openings
· Friday 10/31 from 12pm – 2pm (Frozen Meat Prep shift) – 9 openings
Manna Food Center Warehouse: 9311 Gaither Road, Gaithersburg, MD 20877

I am utterly boggled that 13% of Americans get food delivered DAILY.

Atlantic article aboutThe Innovation That Threatens Restaurant Culture

In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group. The share of customers using delivery specifically, as opposed to picking up takeout or going to a drive-through, more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. In a recently released poll by the association, 41 percent of respondents said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle.” For Millennials and Generation Z—the apex consumers of today, and of tomorrow too—it’s apparently even more essential: More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers. We are a nation of order-inners. A world, really—earlier this year, DoorDash announced a deal to acquire the British delivery service Deliveroo for $3.86 billion; the new, combined company will have 50 million monthly active users, spread over more than 40 countries.

I very occasionally get pizza delivered.

I don't think I've gotten anything delivered if I'm alone since early pandemic. Even during high pandemic I tended to go there to pick stuff up. And I learned early on to maybe search on grubhub or even use the menu on grubhub but actually call the restaurant. (I did that with New Big Wong the night all the restaurants shut down. Because they didn't have their whole menu up on the website. )

I've been "caving" recently. As in, hiding in my cave. Oh, there are outward signs of life. I show up to work, I'm cheery at work, I've gone out for lunch most days this past week. But inside I've felt dead. I haven't wanted to do anything. For example, I haven't even been able to get myself out to the hot tub to enjoy a soak. Oh, I still still make forward plans for it. "I'd like to use the hot tub after dinner tonight," I tell myself. Then when 8pm or 9pm comes around I decide I'm just as relaxed lying on the floor in the house and would rather not change into swim trunks and go outside.

Things have looked up a bit this past week. I got back on the cadence of blogging. I had 7 "skip days" earlier this month, days when I didn't write to my journal. I think the last time I had that many skip days in a month was 10 years ago. But now I've been writing daily for a week-plus, including some days where I've posted twice. Small steps forward.

And this weekend I finally mustered the will to go out to the hot tub! I was going to do it Saturday morning but then the I-don't-wannas hit... but then I did it Sunday morning.

And Sunday afternoon I did a legit, major chore by dealing with the clothes washer. And good news after my check-it-out and clean-it-up efforts: it's not broken!

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It's been a very full week.

It's been a bunch of time with a good friend. Had all my assumptions about another friend dashed later in the week, astonished that that person could be capable of such cruelty*.

Managed to be part of a support system.

Didn't manage to get to one of the parties I would have liked to get to Saturday night, but did reconnect with a social circle some of whom I hadn't seen in years.

I do wish I'd spent more time outdoors today, because I was in a tank top and leggings and more than warm enough in the afternoon before driving all the way to Acro and spending the rest of the nice time indoors.

I'm so tired.

* I really don't have energy to explain and this isn't the venue anyway but even before I knew any more than that divorce papers had been served I was floored by the cruelty of the timing.

Our clothes washing machine has been on time-out since Wednesday evening when it leaked. Since then Hawk has been shopping around online figuring out what washer we'd it with. We were deliberative about buying this one 10+ years ago; we'll be deliberative about the one that replaces it. Meaning, we've bought a short subscription to Consumer Reports (again) and we're checking reviews to select models that have above-average ratings for cleaning effectiveness, water and power efficiency, and low noise, at modest cost.

But before we click "Buy Now" we figured we'd give our current washer another chance. It seemed just barely possible, and an experience plumber who helped us look at it agreed, that water pressure spikes from water main work in the neighborhood that day could've made the leak a fluke. Today I finally had the energy to pull out the washer and take a look at it.

I unplugged the washer, disconnected the drain and supply lines, and taped all the cables and pipes out of the way. Then I trundled the washer out of the laundry closet. I had to unhook a fan-fold door to help get it out. (Little problem there. I've adjusted, removed and installed fan-fold doors in our house before.)

The floor beneath the washer is pretty messy. You can see that in the photo above. The mess there is years of dust bunnies, presumably from the dryer, mixed with water from the washer's leak a few days ago. Once I had the washer out of the way it wasn't too hard to clean it up with a water spritzer and a roll of paper towels.

I took the opportunity while the washer was moved out of the closet to do some additional cleaning. I pulled out the soap tray and gave it a thorough cleaning in the sink, with soap and hot water. We've never done a full cleaning on it, and was moldy. I also cleaned the rubber grommet and around the glass window of the door where it makes a seal, in case dirt or grime there was the source of the leak.

Speaking of finding the source of the leak, I tipped the washer onto its face to see if I could find a leak leak on the underside. No dice; the underside has a metal cover bolted in place with several bolts. I decided to skip it.

Again, our thinking here with cleaning up the washer was not just to clean up the space for a replacement but to give the old washer one more try. Just in case the leak was not a fluke, though— and I've got to admit, the chances it was just a fluke are, like, 1 in 10— I went out and bought a spill pan for the washer. It was $31 plus tax at Home Depot for one that's cheap plastic but fits nicely.

Here you can see the washer moved back into place, sitting atop its new spill catcher. I've got a (light) load of laundry in there. I'll know in about 90 minutes how much of a fluke Wednesday's leak was.

Update: The load of wash completed with no leaks.

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Today is Day 8 of Hawk's surgery recovery. The surgery was a week ago Friday. She's close to non-mobile, with one of her feet in a half-cast and unable to put any weight on it. For 7½ days she's limited herself to hobbling around the house with a pair of forearm crutches— and minimizing even that. But late this afternoon she decided it was time to Get Out.

The occasion was nothing grand. The impetus was that she'd just sold some books on eBay and wanted to get them shipped. I could've taken them to the depot for her. I mean, I'd already searched our Hobbit hole for an appropriately sized box, weighed the books (for postage), packed them carefully in the box, and printed and attached the mailing label. Driving them to the nearest postal counter open on Saturday afternoon— which wasn't even our city's lone remaining post office; it was the print-and-ship desk at an Office Depot store— was not a big ask. But I gather she was getting cabin fever after staying within these 4 walls for nearly 8 days. I understand.

I pulled the car around to the front door for her to hop in. She had her crutches with her for hopping, plus— in the back of the SUV— her knee scooter for wheeling around.

At the Office Depot she decided to hop as it wasn't too far. I carried the books box. It was compact but weighed nearly 20 pounds. Books can be heavy.

The dropoff at Office Depot seemed anticlimactic. All that effort just to hand over one box for shipping. So Hawk suggested again that we go out to eat for dinner. Cabin fever!

Armadillo Willy's Reborn

We agreed on Empire Armadillo. For those familiar with Silicon Valley, Empire Armadillo is Armadillo Willy's reborn. The local chain Armadillo Willy's went out of business a few months ago. One local guy played the Victor Kiam "I liked the food so much I bought the company!" card and... well, bought the company's locations and equipment out of bankruptcy. Apparently he couldn't buy the name because that was held separately. But the restaurant in Sunnyvale is open again, same location, same food, basically the same recipes.

Except it's... also a bit better? The infusion of some new cash has let them upgrade a few interior fixtures that were looking long in the tooth. And the staff seems cheerful now, as opposed to the last time we went to the Sunnyvale location under the previous ownership a few years ago, when all the staff seemed mentally checked out out and the food was haphazardly prepared. That's why we stopped going for a few years. Anyway, now Armadillo is back, and they seem to be good again.

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It's time for another chapter in the ~~story~~ mystery of the church up the hill. This is now part 3 of the story. Originally I had thought I'd be able to fit it all in one journal entry but as I started writing the story it grew. It grew first from one blog to three. Then as I took a slight detour into writing about AI and photography in part 2 I realized the story will take 4, maybe 5, chapters to complete.

As I noted in the previous chapter, my dad lost his job when I was a little kid. The retail chain he worked for went out of business.

Dad's job wasn't a great job. The hours were brutal. As a store manager he was salaried, not hourly, so he didn't get paid for his extra work. And extra work was required every time a store employee called in sick and no substitute could be found, and every time there was a break-in afterhours and the alarm company and the police called. The way my mom told the story, years later, break-in attempts happened regularly, like at least once a month. The store was in a rough neighborhood.

Dad's job wasn't a great job, but at least it paid the bills. I think. Then he lost the job, with little or warning.

This was the mid 1970s. As I noted in the previous chapter, the economy sucked. Technically the US had just pulled out of its worst recession since the Great Depression, but hiring had not yet resumed. I imagine younger folks today who lived through the jobless recovery of the Great Recession in the late 00s understand the pattern.

Speaking of younger generations and modern patterns, my parents in the mid 1970s did something that's familiar to a younger generation today: they hustled. With "real" jobs not really hiring, my parents both took on whatever odd jobs they could find. Between hustling and scrimping and borrowing, they kept a roof over our heads and food on the table.

This is where some of my earliest memories meld in with the stories my parents later told. Oddly I don't remember my parents being stressed around that time, or unhappy. Probably that's because I was too young to recognize such emotions. It could also be that my parents hid their stress and worries well from us younger kids. One snapshot memory I do have from back then is my parents giving each other a high five when my mom said, "We did it! We paid the mortgage this month."

I also have early memories of some of the jobs my parents did during that time of hustling. My mom started selling Tupperware. Many of my earliest memories are of riding with her in the car as she drove back and forth to the Tupperware warehouse. We'd return with a suitcase full of products she'd sell via Tupperware parties.

I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my parents pulled out of the economic nosedive after my dad lost his job. I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my mom built a lasting and fulfilling career as an entrepreneur— which was part of the Women's Liberation pitch Tupperware was making back in the 1970s. Alas, I'm not sure my mom ever made any money with Tupperware.

That's because Tupperware was, for many years, a multi-level marketing (MLM) organization. In MLMs most distributors make very little money. See Wikipedia's Tupperware page, for example.

Mom stopped selling Tupperware after a short period of time. Likely that's because she netted little or no money after a lot of work— work planning and presenting at Tupperware parties, hustling to get people to place orders (remember, in a tough economy), then having to pick up & deliver the orders once they were shipped to the local warehouse. But while the dream of making it a sustainable career disappeared quickly, the Tupperware itself did not. Mom bought a number of pieces herself, because they were useful. And they lasted. The bright, 1970s vintage colors and those fluted lids were a mainstay in our house for many years after.

To be continued....

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Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Anyway, this is a memory: mom took me to the glass flower museum in Boston. And I sort of think I returned there with Joe in 2001 but we were getting sick at the time.

https://open.substack.com/pub/kirkgordon/p/the-age-of-silicon-began-long-ago?

I suppose I should get back to sleep.

I have things I really want to go to today in Manassas and Elkridge and Capitol Heights and argh.

"I'd like to attend as a fly on the wall." It's a line I hear frequently, particularly in sales. People want to join a meeting to listen in and see what's happening— but not be recognized as a participant and certainly not be asked to do anything, including stating an opinion or answering a question.

Having a few "fly on the wall" non-participants generally works okay. But what if everyone wants to be a fly on the wall?

I had a meeting like that yesterday. My sales colleague and I began a sales meeting with a customer. As we opened the videoconference very quickly 6 people joined in. We didn't recognize any of them by name. And they all had camera off and microphone on mute.

We introduced ourselves and asked them to introduce themselves. Nothing. We prompted them with a simple question about how familiar they are with our software— software their company has licensed for several years. Again, nothing. I'd say "crickets", but there wasn't even a chirp. They all sat there silently like flies on the wall.

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When I spotted a new leak in the ceiling of the kitchen pantry yesterday, I was pissed. Pissed, because it was just two days after we'd finished getting another leak repaired. A repair that we'd waited 8 weeks to get started. And this new leak was occurring just 2 feet over from the previous one! Had the repairmen screwed up the repair that badly?

I did a bit of troubleshooting on the problem myself. It didn't seem like it was the same leak as before just 2 feet over. It seemed like it might actually be a problem with the washing machine... which, yes, is about 2 feet over from where the toilet upstairs is! But could it really be such a coincidence that our washer sprung a leak right after the toilet was fixed? And right after plumbers were working on the water main outside all day? I was too pissed to want to run a full troubleshooting process myself. Thankfully the owner of the plumbing company agreed to come over.

The plumber and I worked through the troubleshooting process together. He saw my reason for suspecting the washing machine— dampness on the floor underneath it— and helped me shift it around a bit to pinpoint the problem more precisely. It wasn't a loose hookup problem or a leak in a supply hose or drain hose. It was some kind of leak from the body of the washing machine itself.

So, good news/bad news: It's not a plumbing leak. It won't be another $13,000 job that takes 8 weeks to schedule. But it looks like now we need to buy a new washer.

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Late afternoon Wednesday my ears were drawn to a drip-drip sound coming from the kitchen. The water had been off for several hours as plumbers fixed a leak in a neighboring building. (Some of the mains in our community have broken or missing valves, so sometimes fixing a problem in one building requires shutting off water to multiple buildings.) I wondered if maybe I left the faucet in the kitchen open slightly and now water was flowing again. No... it was a leak. A leak from the ceiling. Water was dripping down from the ceiling of our kitchen pantry. Yes, this is the same pantry where we just got a leak fixed a few days ago! 😡

Instead of creating a bulge in the painted drywall like the last leak, this one was pouring out through the fixture around the fire sprinkler. No, the sprinkler itself wasn't running; water was pouring out around it. That indicated water was leaking somewhere in the wall, flowing along the pipe, and coming out through the ceiling where there's an opening for the sprinkler.

Well, it's a good thing I've been lazy about putting the shelves back in our pantry after it was finished on Monday. If I'd put everything back in there Monday or Tuesday, I'd have had to take it all back out Wednesday.

We called the property management company to report the problem. They got in touch with the owner of the plumbing company that fixed our leak. The owner himself would come out Wednesday night to diagnose the problem— to determine if it's a failure in the repair his team just finished, or some odd consequence of the water shutoff on Wednesday, or a completely unrelated new problem that just coincidentally happened on the heels of the previous problems.

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I began a journey down memory lane yesterday when I wrote a journal entry about how my parents never liked attending the church of their faith that was right in our neighborhood. Instead of a short walk up the hill behind our house to the local church where we might see our own neighbors, we piled in the car and drove 20 minutes each way to a church in the next town over.

As I wrote in that blog, my parents were evasive about why they preferred the one far away. My parents, especially my father, gave only vague non-answers whenever I wondered. After a while I stopped asking.

The truth about the church up the hill came out decades later, not long before my father passed away. He knew he was in his last few months of life. He told me one of his goals then was to square things with relatives who were estranged from him. I wasn't estranged by any stretch of the imagination. I was traveling coast-to-coast every few weeks to visit and support him. During one of our bedside chats he told me the story. Well, not the whole story. He gave me just the one or two missing pieces that allowed me connect up the puzzle from other things he'd told me over the years and from things I remember from as far back as my own early childhood.

The story goes back to the mid 1970s when my dad lost his job as a store manger in a retail chain.

The mid 1970s were a tough time in the US. The country was just coming out of a deep economic recession spurred by the first oil embargo. The recession was probably why his employer folded. And even though the recession was over by the way economists define it, it wasn't over by the way ordinary people might define it. Companies were failing. Those that weren't failing still weren't hiring. The unemployment rate was above 7%. So when my dad's employer shut down and sent everyone to the unemployment line, finding new work wasn't easy. It took my dad months... maybe even a year or more.

By the way, yes, I'm using AI image generation to help illustrate this story. No, I don't have real photos to share from that time. I was too young even to hold a camera then. I mean, I was still filling diapers when this shit went down. And my parents never snapped many photos during my childhood. That always struck me as weird when I was older, because my dad had been a semi-pro photographer when he was in high school and college.

I saw some of his 1960s era work decades later. It was in a box from his mother, who'd just passed away at age 101. It looked good. He could have made it a career. Why did he put his cameras down and then not pick up another one for, like, 40 years? And also, his mom kept copies his vintage work as mementos; he never did. I might've asked him "why?" about either of those facts, but as I already explained early in this story, my dad was famously loath to answer such questions. In that respect he was like a perpetual pouty teenager giving guttural one-word answers.

Anyway, AI image generation. I'm using it here because I think telling the story with some pictures improves if, even if the pics are not authentic. For one, having pictures beats walls of text. Two, I've iterated on the prompts for these pictures to have them reflect, accurately, particular elements of the story. Of course it's impossible to have them accurately reflect everything, even the spotty parts I remember in snapshot memories from my early childhood. I've got a funny story to share about some of the prompting I had to do while creating an image I'll use later in the story. I'll share that anecdote when we get there.

To be continued....

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There's a classic line from the 1975 movie Jaws. After the titular great white shark appears on the screen for the first time, actor Roy Schneider turns to the sailors hunting the monster and dead-pans, "You're going to need a bigger boat."

I'm not sure that line was all that big when the movie was first released in 1975, or even a few years later when it was making the rounds through theaters again and became popular among my childhood friends, but in recent years it has become a meme.

And, OMG, this movie is now 50 years old, and a throwaway, ad-libbed line from it is an Internet meme?

Yes, the line was unscripted. Behind-the-scenes stories tell us that the actors and crew were frustrated about the small boat used for filming scenes at sea. They felt the producers were being excessively cheap because the small size made it hard to work with given all the things involved in filming— the cameras, lights, microphones, and all the crew to operate them. "You're/We're going to need a bigger boat" became a running joke among the film crew, who repeated it every time the small watercraft made their work difficult to do.

Then actor Roy Schneider, playing the police chief in the story, ad-libbed the line during filming the scene where the great white shark, Jaws, appeared on camera for the first time. The cast and crew LOLed. Director Steven Spielberg thought it was funny, too— though without the guffaws from behind the camera. He worked it into the movie with some extra footage to set up the (now classic) line properly.

So, here we are 50 years later now, and this line just became relevant to me, personally. We're going to need a bigger fridge!

That's what I said to Hawk the other night after we'd ordered in pizza. Mine had come in an oversized box (hers was smaller). When I went to put the leftovers in the fridge, using the original boxes for simplicity sake, mine was a few inches too wide to fit into our generously sized side-by-side refrigerator!

Of course we didn't buy a new fridge. 🤣 I mean, the characters in the movie were facing a killer shark, and they didn't buy a new boat. All I'm facing here is half a leftover pizza. 🤣 I stacked the slices on a small baking pan and wrapped it in foil to keep for a day or two.

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(no subject)

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"We're Going to Need a Bigger Fridge"

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