I’ve spent hours the last couple of days trying to unravel the mystery of “what happened to the thousands of dollars I spent on airfare to/from South America in 2021 and then cancelled?”. Faulty memory, crummy airline accounting systems, a few records on my old laptop’s hard drive and not on this one, and the complication of having used a travel agent for half the travel are all roadblocks. So far I’ve accounted for half the funds, and the other half I should unearth today. Moral of the story…try not to cancel a big, complex trip. Thanks, COVID.

In the previous post I featured my absolute favorite Cult song, Then Came the Last Days of May. Pure genius, that one, from the lyrics to the soaring guitar. I can listen to it over and over. Turns out I’ve done that, for 50 years!

I’m reading yet another of Peter Cawdron’s First Contact series. Cawdron has written 20 (!) books with variations on humanity’s first contact with alien life, and they’re quite good. He has an easy-to-read writing style and a superb imagination. Right now I’m reading Deja Vu, and I’m captivated. What a story. The dude has some amazing work ethic – he’s published at least 30 books in the last 11 years. I need his secret.

Why are college tuition costs so out of control? Here’s a surprisingly simple explanation. Talk about unintended consequences…

Blue Öyster Cult, 1972

Parched land, no desert sand
The sun is just a dot
And a little bit of water goes a long way ’cause it’s hot it’s hot
Three good buddies were laughin’ and smokin’
In the back of a rented Ford
They couldn’t know they weren’t going far

Each one with the money in his pocket
To go out and buy himself a brand new car
But they all held the money they had
Money they hoped would take them very far

Sky’s bright, the traffic light
Now and then a truck
And they hadn’t seen a cop around all day what luck
They brought everything they needed
Bags and scales to weigh the stuff
The driver said, “The border’s just over the bluff”

Wasn’t until the car suddenly stopped
In the middle of a cold and barren plain
And the other guy turned and spilled
Three boys blood did they know a trap had been laid?

They’re OK the last days of May
But I’ll be breathin’ dry air
I’m a-leaving soon
The others are already there all there
Wouldn’t be interested in coming along
Instead of staying here?
Its said the West is nice this time of year
That’s what they say

On Memorial Day, it seems appropriate to dig further into our ever-growing body count due to US gun culture. Those victims deserve remembrance.

Our tragic national misunderstanding of the 2nd Amendment goes way back. From Digby:

“The Second Amendment has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” said Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger in January 1990.

The Burger quote continues, “The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”

The NRA’s “twisted interpretation” has warped the court majority, twisted people’s minds, and maimed and killed uncounted thousands. We are all less secure as a byproduct.

When you think about it for a minute, it’s so clear. The Constitution’s authors wanted a check on the Federal government’s power, and decided that state militias would be that check. “Well-regulated militias”, in fact. Teenage depressed malcontents with military-grade weapons are NOT a “well-regulated militia”.

And how in the world did the Supreme Court with its “originalists” get hijacked by the NRA into their perverse interpretation of The Second? It’s clear as day, that phrase “well-regulated militia”. How can they continue to ignore it?

We need a national movement, an awakening, to reverse the cultural brainwashing we’ve been subjected to. It’s not about taking away ALL the guns. If you’re a gun lover, sure, you can likely own and fire a gun – just join your state’s “well regulated militia”. And get some training. And get evaluated. And be subject to regulation.

We’ve fallen so far down the “everyone has a right to own a gun, lots of guns, and carry them all the time” rabbit hole that it will be very hard to find our way back. But we managed to break the national cigarette smoking habit – there are still smokers, it’s still legal, but we changed the culture and the norms. So it can be done. Maybe the next generation will have the willpower and the vision to tackle gun culture successfully. (I’m not just kicking the can down the road, but I have to be practical about the amount of runway my generation has remaining. We Boomers are on our way out, leaving this awful legacy for our children.)

TX Governor Greg Abbott tells NRA in taped message that there’s no point in having any new gun laws. “Thousands of laws on the books … have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts.” Let’s test this with an analogy: “Laws against guns drunk driving don’t work. The only thing that stops a active shooter drunk driver is more good people with guns willing to drive drunk.”

Gun ownership and deaths is the one place where America is truly exceptional. We have more guns than people (?!?!?!?) and 5-10 times as many gun deaths as other “civilized” countries.

UPDATE: I read this today, written by a westerner in Cowboy State Daily (!), and I love the idea. Regulate Our Militia, And Regulate Them Well.

That’s the right answer!

I wrote a rather direct letter to the Board members of one of my companies today, with lots of (hopefully) constructive criticism about how we conduct ourselves in meetings. We’ve started to talk over each other a lot, interrupting each other, and generally acting without a lot of respect and decorum. Not my idea of a thoughtful Board. We’ll see how my criticism is handled by the others – I’m as guilty as any of them, and I tried to be clear about that. But I don’t like being in the midst of unruly debates when I’m trying to get something done.

And I don’t know if this is more prevalent now than years ago, but I find that I express myself so much better in writing than I do in real-time verbal jousts. In writing I’m focused, and the constant editing of words happens at just the right speed. In person, verbally, I blurt things out before I’ve had time to really consider if that’s what I want to say. Particularly if there are multiple people in the conversation. My attention shifts from person to person, point to point, and I never seem to land on the “right thing” to say at the right time. With writing, I’m in control of the conversation. Guess it isn’t so hard to understand after all.

Here’s an audiophile nightmare. Imagine you bought a cheap-ish tube amp, hoping to experience the mellow, warm sound of tube amplification. Then you discovered that what you’re really driving your speakers with is a Rube Goldberg design that doesn’t use tubes for amplification at all, and there’s a cheap solid-state amp buried inside the case. Yikes!

From the Neils Bohr Institute, stars are heavier than we thought. And I thought they were pretty damned heavy…

Closer to home, Jessamine seems to be doing fine post-broken arm. It’s great to see him happy.

Second day back in Socal. Great weather here, timezone / jet lag almost gone, and more COVID outbreaks among the family. Cases all around K and me, but so far it hasn’t touched us that we know of.

The big news this week was grandson Jesse falling off the couch and breaking his arm the day after we left. It was a bad break, and for a while it looked like he’d need surgery to repair. So far, they’ve just set it with no surgery. Poor little guy, his outgoing personality and climbing ability exceeds his sense of what is safe in this gravity well. We were all pretty beat up about it while he was at the hospital, but he seems to be OK, albeit with a big cast on his arm. Little boys will be little boys; it happens.

I need to add one more foodie note to the Louisville trip. We visited Mesh for dinner, and I’ll give it a good but not great. Good atmosphere, great company (Chris and Marci), and good-enough food. We’ll try it again sometime. In retrospect, the unlikely food star of our trip were the Pepperoni Bombs from Parlour. Those are now on my must-have list every time I’m in town.

if you are like-minded, please share this post on your social media accounts. We need to get the word out.

Yesterday’s tragedy in Texas causes us to ask, once again, how did we get here? Historian heather Cox Richardson has the surprising answer, in today’s Letters From An American essay. All it took was one evil NRA leader in 1975 (Wayne LaPierre?), one actor-turned-politician (Ronald Reagan) in 1980, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the NRA post-1975 to change the country’s culture and “norms”. So if we see how we got here, can’t we see a way back?

In 2022, money influences politics, law, and culture. Perhaps it always has, but it’s more overt these days. I would join and contribute to an organization that had some or all of these goals:

• Require training, registration, and certification for gun ownership.
• Make penalties for illegal ownership harsh.
• Rescind the idiotic “open carry” laws of many states.
• Pass and enforce Red Flag laws in every state.
• Educate parents and teenagers on the dangers of gun culture and what they can do about it. Create a voting bloc that can offset the gun lobby.
• Form an actual militia, with training and service, for those who want to own and use a gun.
• Require some kind of public service and/or civil education for 18-year-olds, particularly males. The most dangerous person in the world is an emotionally immature, lonely or angry 18-year-old young man with no purpose and no guidance. Over and over, these are the shooters.
• Halt the sale of guns at ALL retail outlets except for tightly regulated and licensed outlets. Why should Walmart or Cabela’s be selling guns to Americans?

It took a generation for the Second Amendment to be perverted into the madness it is today (sadly, it was my generation). It will likely take an entire generation or two to find our way back. But we should start now.

It’s Moving Day, in which we leave the Kentucky home and return to the Socal home. I’m sad to leave.

After 80 miles on the e-bikes, I learned a lesson the hard way. Don’t try to dismount a bike on the downhill side of a slope. Gravity and angular momentum can cause an unfortunate collision between self and pavement. And pavement always wins.

It seems the Southern Baptist Convention has a sex abuse problem similar to that of the Catholic church. Can’t say I’m happy about that, but I’m not surprised. I grew up in that smug, repressed, ignorant, pastor as infallible gatekeeper culture. Being spiritual is a good thing. Being part of an “organized” religion with rules and gatekeepers, not so much.

Anecdotally, it seems COVID is on the rise. In each of my circles – family, friends, co-workers – I know one or more people who have very recently tested positive. Moral of the story – get vaccinated.

Cousin Donnie, MD, told me about another weird outbreak here in Louisville. It seems he’s treated three ER patients this spring for wounds incurred during bird attacks. Hawks, buzzards, etc. He’s never seen it before, and now there are three in a short period. Hitchcock chuckles from the grave.

From The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we find that modern industrial farming has a dinosaur problem. Unsurprising. I’m no fan of chemical-heavy industrial-scale farming, and here’s yet another reason it’s the wrong approach. I’d like to see millions of small-medium-scale farms instead of hundreds of Farmensteins.

This could be big news. The first human trials of an engineered virus that attacks cancer are under way. Sure would be nice if the grandsons grew up in a world that wasn’t afraid of cancer.

This is a movie I’m excited to see: Three Thousand Years of Longing.

The Aventon e-bikes continue to deliver fun and exercise. We’ve been out on them every day, in hot weather in which we would normally just avoid being outside. Getting out of the house and moving has to be good for us. A morning spent biking around Anchorage, gawking at the giant estates, was great fun. As was the IPA and elk chili afterward at The Anchor Bar.

There are a lot of reports lately that Vladimir Putin is ill, very ill. I can’t say I’m broken up about that. Perhaps the Ukraine war will have a sudden surprise ending.

And I watched a bit of the PGA Championship this weekend. Great players, a tremendously hard course, and the walking wounded Tiger Woods. He looks world-class fit, but the pain when he walks and swings is so evident – his right leg isn’t up to the task. It’s hard to watch. He definitely has will power, but no amount of will power will allow him to play through the kind of pain he seems to be experiencing. It’s a tough end to a legendary career and a weird, tragic life story.

Just announced, Kentucky plays UCLA this winter in the CBS Classic on December 17. Hope springs eternal.

In investing, sometimes you win big and sometimes you lose big. Why do people think that past performance guarantees future performance? Cathie Wood and Ark Innovation ETF are learning that lesson right now. And Warren Buffet is still the king.

Latest additions to this week’s foodie list: The Anchor Bar, Chik n Mi, Barn8, Ciao, and CostCo. Yes, Costco – their deli spinach salad with all the fixings is really, really good.

This is a nightmare, something out of a Kafka story. I’ve seen this shunning dynamic in action lately, and it’s ugly. There’s no empathy, no room for thoughtful discussion of one’s actions, no sympathy and no forgiveness. Once accused, the unfortunate person (99% men) can lose everything.

Of course there are sexual predators in the workplace, and they should be dealt with decisively once revealed. But that wasn’t the case with David Sabbatini – he was just a guy who had a consensual relationship with someone else in the company. How many people in America have met their mate in the workplace – I would guess millions. But no more, if the workplace Puritans have their way. In Sabbatini’s government-funded and university-driven culture, accusation=truth, there is no due process, and once accused, you’re done.

And in other crummy news, this sure didn’t take long. Oklahoma just passed a ban on abortions effective at the moment of conception. Next it’ll be effective on the first kiss or the first lustful thought, I suppose. So now a fertilized egg has more rights than an adult woman. And for extra fun, OK has adopted Texas’ plan to deputize the population and offer bounties for anyone turning in those who participate or assist, in any way, in a woman getting an abortion. That should make for some interesting neighborhood pot lucks.

This deserves its own post – it may be the most creative travel advertisement ever. Go to Iceland and outhorse your email. Love it.

The fact that Voyager1 is now in interstellar space blows my mind. It’s 14.5 billion miles away, or almost 21 light-hours. This is the first object humanity has ever pushed outside our solar system, and the fact that it’s still working (more or less) after 45 years blows my mind again. NASA doesn’t get everything right, but they sponsored some great engineering back in the day. And inspired a weirdly-detailed Star Trek character.

Following the space theme, this collection of Milky Way images is pretty great. Awe-inspiring, otherworldly. Literally.

I really wanted to attend the Kauai Writers’ Conference this year. This conference has been on my radar a long time, but work always got in the way. Then COVID. And now the Norway trip we’ve scheduled is on the same dates. One of these years…

Instead, I’m attending and sponsoring Imaginarium. I wanted to support a Louisville-based writing event, and this year’s event looks good. It should be a confluence of creative people from all walks of life. It also occurs during my birthday weekend, so that’s fun. That means I’ve only got 60 days left to polish some of my work and get it ready for workshops.

Got some nice pictures from our last couple of days.

Here’s a leafy tunnel that is the sidewalk in front of our house. The lushness of everything this time of year makes me feel good.

And here’s a colorful spring basket outside Volare.

Hudson’s kiddie soccer practice last evening, at Beckley Creek Park.

And another action shot.

And finally, the prettier-than-expected railroad tracks along Frankfort Avenue.

My Dad has a new, upgraded phone to make it easier to reach him – what a great idea! But he can’t hear the default ringtone on the phone, so now no one can reach him. Unintended consequences. When I get there (soon) I’ll have to set his ringtone to something within his limited range of hearing.

The foody list from this trip is just the usual suspects so far – Parlour, Con Huevos, Joella’s, Red Hog, and Green District. I have aspirations for Barn8 and Porcini (or maybe Volare), but we’ll see how it goes. I have to say, the pepperoni balls from Parlour are some of the finest snacks ever.

The weather so far on this trip has been perfect. Rain at night a couple of times, and sunny and mild during the day. Humidity mostly on the low side. San Diego weather in Louisville – go figure.

I’m running two parallel calendars these days – one for my work/consulting gig, on their systems, and my personal calendar on my Mac app. So far I haven’t found a way to synch those calendars via software, so I try to do it manually and end up doing a shitty job of it, missing appointments. How hard would it be to release a simple-to-use calendar synch tool? I can’t be the only person with this need.

My big plan for today is a long walk somewhere. Pretty ambitious, I know. But that’s the kind of person I am these days – aim low and be happy when I exceed expectations.

***

Update, post-walk. I realized something on my walk. Living in Socal has made me lazy and cynical about getting outside and doing something when the weather is nice, because the weather is ALWAYS nice. Why go now when tomorrow will be just the same, day after day?

In KY you have 3 months where it’s cold and wet, maybe real cold. And the other 9 months it may rain at any moment, so when you get a beautiful morning your mindset is completely different – you can’t tell yourself “I always have tomorrow”. So you go for the walk. It’s probable that this fits my personality better because this is the rhythm I grew up with. The eternal sunshine of Socal just feels weird to me.

After two days and 25 miles, we like the new e-bikes a lot. Great way to see the area – so far we’ve ridden the riverfront park and Cherokee Park. Two parks down and at least 20 more to go. Louisville’s park system is pretty great.

The Supreme Court today reinforced the idea behind Citizens United, that corporations have the same free speech rights as individuals and cannot be limited as to their donations to candidates. Basically, public offices are now a very, very lucrative gig – more than ever. Bribes to elected officials are now pretty much legal.

And now Sweden plus Finland are joining NATO. I don’t imagine this was the outcome Putin wanted. Russia versus the civilized world.

And another grand jury has convened to investigate TFG, this time for the possibility that he stole classified documents for personal profit. In any other time, this would be the story of the decade. (It still should be, but who the hell knows why certain stories get traction and others don’t.) The investigation is gaining steam, and who knows, this might be the one that leads to a conviction of TFG for something, anything. Yeah, and unicorns.

Here’s a great article on cryptocurrency and why it’s a terrible idea. My favorite quote:

This is a virus. Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire.

Yeah, what he said.

We’re looking at buying some e-bikes for the KY place. Here’s the front runner – an Aventon folding bike. We won’t pay for them via cryptocurrency.

At least the Russians are doing something useful in their war in Ukraine. They’re proving that private, encrypted comms links are better than cell phones in wartime scenarios. Your cell phone – a tracking device that allows you to make a phone call.

Christopher Walken would definitely be in my top 10 nominations for Emperor of the Universe. And for Dune part 2, he got the job.

We made it to Louisville yesterday after a shorter-than-expected flight to Chicago and then a longer-than-expected flight from Chicago to Louisville. That 45 minute flight turned into a 2.5 hour flight due to a very long wait on the runway after pushback. No explanation, just a hot wait. Upon arrival, a sublime dry-aged cheese burger from Red Hog made the travel day worth it.

A CA congresscritter (John Cardenas, Democrat) is being called out for paying his wife $424K of campaign funds for “wellness support” or somesuch BS. Campaign funds have become slush funds for politicians and their families – it’s corruption, pure and simple. Should be a crime.

Missouri decides to compete with Texas and Florida to become the dumbest state in the nation by passing a law forbidding pharmacists to dispute the efficacy of ivermectin against COVID. The Daily Beast’s tagline is classic: “Beating a Dead Horse”.

Heart of Darkness: Astronomers have published the first image of the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Turns out that most galaxies (all?) have a similar black hole center. That actually makes sense – given a black hole’s massive gravity well, it makes sense that over billions of years stars would cluster around them, forming galaxies.

As much as I love Kentucky, I really despise KY’s US Senators. Here’s what the execrable Rand Paul is spending his time on lately.

And after all that shitty news, a joke is needed. “I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes… so she hugged me.”

Here’s who I want running the US election system: Lawrence Krubner.

He’s done the math, and there’s hope for a fair system.

Sleep deprived. It’s a terrible feeling – bleary eyes, a heavy mental fog to contend with, physical fatigue, trouble focusing – it’s right up there with a hangover as the worst way to spend a morning. And I’m definitely sleep deprived this morning. Was awake for a while almost every hour last night.

It began when we watched Matrix Resurrections and its run time took me well past my normal bedtime. I was pretty disappointed in Resurrections. It had some great nostalgic moments, but in general it was way, way too dependent on no-gravity fight scenes and massive amounts of bullets. You’d think that in the 60+ years of Matrix time that had passed, and the real-world years (at least I think this is the real world) since the last movie, that new modes of shooting people would have been featured. Lasers. Disintegration rays. Mental disruptors. Something. But no, we got old-fashioned guns and bullets. Lots of bullets.

We’ve seen it all before, and it got boring. The best parts were seeing how well Neo and Trinity have aged in the real world. Even given movie effects and makeup, they’ve aged gracefully. That part of Resurrections worked. But in general, it wasn’t a movie I would recommend to anyone. Kind of meh.

I don’t think all the weird dreams I had and the too-frequent wake-ups had anything to do with the movie, but who knows. Maybe one of the scenes contained a neural infection. The weirdest dream I had involved a round of golf where no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the ball off the first tee. In this dream, I was helpless and hapless – nothing I tried worked. I ended up roaming through the course without clubs, wandering through a nightmare landscape involving caverns, cliff faces that had to be climbed and a huge lake/waterfall covered by some plastic substance that you had to crawl over. Like I said, weird. And the fact that I remember this dream and others is unusual.

OK, on second thought, maybe a movie about the way-too-uncertain nature of reality did contribute to my restless night. All I know is right now the morning coffee isn’t working and sleep deprivation sucks.

Another day, another unhinged quote from The Former Guy (TFG), discussing Mark Esper’s new book in which he describes the crazy shit TFG wanted to do.

“This is a complete lie, and 10 witnesses can back it up. Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military,” Trump said. “I took out ISIS, [Iranian commander] Qassem Soleimani, [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, rebuilt the military with $52.5 trillion, created Space Force, and so much more.”

Via Newsweek

He had to run the military!? Right. He’s the poster child for megalomaniac narcissism. He should never, ever again be allowed any governance role in the US.

In less maddening news, I have a new watch/health monitor – a Garmin Vivoactive 4. I like it so far – it fits, feels, and looks better than the Apple watch. It’s a bit more complicated to set up and use, but that part never worries me. I think I got the 45mm version (it’s hard to know for sure, the Amazon and Garmin sites don’t make it easy to determine), so it’s a decent size on the wrist. The Apple’s display is brighter and better, but the Garmin has more features, hugely better battery life, and the aforementioned better look and feel. The watch is part of my latest “get back in shape” plan.

Aaaand…just realized that Friday this week is a Friday the 13th. Yikes. Have to be extra careful that day – I’m not generally superstitious, but something about that date freaks me out a bit. Maybe I have triskaidekaphobia.

Here’s part of the Biden celebration of Mother’s Day:

First, today First Lady Jill Biden celebrated Mother’s Day with an unannounced visit to western Ukraine, where she visited Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska at a school currently being used to house internally displaced Ukrainians. Before going to Ukraine, Biden visited displaced Ukrainian mothers and children in Romania and Slovakia, telling them that she wanted to come to “say the hearts of the American people are with the mothers of Ukraine.” On her Facebook page, Biden posted: “On this Mother’s Day, my heart is with you, First Lady Olena Zelenska, and all of the brave and resilient mothers of Ukraine.”

Pulled from Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson

And here’s The Former Guy’s Mother’s Day tweet:

Quite a difference, eh? You couldn’t make this shit up…

More old photos. This is what we wore to work in the early 1980s. Here’s a picture of our engineering class upon graduating from a very tough statistics seminar taught by Dr. Thaddeus Regulinski, far left.

We wore suits and ties every day, even when we worked in the lab. Compared to today’s ultra-casual, even sloppy, dress code, we were fashionable. And funny in hindsight.

It’s Mother’s Day (or is it Mothers’ Day?), and in honor of my Mom I’m cleaning out my home office today. It’s a chore. I’ve found several nice pictures of her I forgot I had, so that’s a win. And creating order from disorder is something she would have liked.

I won’t say happy Mother’s Day, because I’m seldom happy on this day. It’s been something like 40 years since she died, but it still hurts. You’d think I would grow out of this. But it is a good day for reflection, and for doing something good or productive that honors her memory.

The Wheel turns, and things from long ago repeat.

I spent the night at the Sheraton Harbor Island last night as part of a company event. Spending the night allowed me to skip 2+ hours of brutal freeway driving, so it was a good choice. The last time I spent the night at this Sheraton was exactly 40 years ago, in 1982. And as it turns out, that was the very event that brought me to San Diego.

I was living in Akron OH working for Goodyear Aerospace as an engineer in their high-performance computing group. Yes, there was a Goodyear Aerospace and yes, we built very high performance computers for NASA, the Navy, the NSA and others. We used a technology that one of our group invented, called SIMD, or single instruction multiple data architecture – a parallel processor. Joining that group was the reason I went to Akron after graduation, and it was one of the best experiences of my life.

That spring in 1982 I was part of a team that was charged to take our latest machine, a small version of our computer, to the submarine base in Point Loma to be tested aboard a sub. We had to shrink our refrigerator-sized machine into a two foot cube so that it could fit through the sub’s hatch. It was a modern marvel, 2000 custom processors fit into a tiny, intricate cube.

So on a February morning I dug my car out of the ice and snow (a typical Akron morning), drove to Cleveland and boarded my first flight for west of the Rockies. I had never been anywhere; I was unbelievably naive.

We landed in San Diego and they rolled up the departure ramp. In those days you still departed onto the tarmac. I couldn’t believe my eyes – it was sunny, warm, and beautiful. Five hours earlier I had been in the Arctic, and now…wow! I took a shuttle just a half mile or so to the Sheraton Harbor Island, this same hotel, and my mind was blown again. The hotel sits next to a beautiful harbor full of boats.

This weather and location shock had a big effect on me – it was a true inflection point in my life. The trip and computer test was a success, and two years later I had transferred to our new San Diego office. Forty years later, here I am again.

Well, I completely missed the annual Star Wars pun day, May 4th. Atypical, but I had a down day yesterday in which I read a book and tried to ignore the world.

Why would I ignore the world, you ask? Just a brief skim of the news this morning reveals that Ukraine is still under attack; Ohio has elected a cryptofascist asshole (JD Vance) as their GOP Senatorial candidate; the US has now tallied at least 1M COVID deaths; the US Supreme Court is a horrific dumpster fire; and social media is still a cesspool that’s rewiring the brains of young people. Managed to get all that in ten minutes.

So I’d like to read another book today, but I have a lot of meetings scheduled out in the world. At least I’m heading out there with a positive attitude.

UPDATE: Wow, what a day. Spent about three hours and 200 miles on the freeways at 80+ mph, multiple stops and multiple meetings. Really takes it out of you. Started the day interviewing someone for an executive position over a breakfast, then we all four got up and left. Without paying the bill. I ran back and tried to pay up, but the waitress said our interviewee had circled back and paid. Funny in a way, but rather bad form on our part. Dude probably expects a job offer now.

My formal, scheduled meetings with people went really well today. I’m good in a room, if I say so myself. But after it’s all over I’m wiped out. Setting my introvert tendencies aside and being sociable with people is weirdly tiring.

Did I have a long, strange dream? This morning I awoke to the news that Russia is our mortal enemy and threatening nuclear war, that abortion will be illegal in America, that inflation is a huge concern, and that we are about to send people to the Moon. These were the headlines of 1972, and they’re the headlines today, 50 years later. At least I think it’s 50 years later.

Is it simply the Wheel turning, a cycle to be repeated over and over? Or was it all just a dream?

Yesterday was a rough day for the family back east. My ex-father-in-law, Bob Cottage, died unexpectedly in North Carolina. While he has been sick a while (leukemia), he was doing better lately. He died a few minutes before EMTs showed up at his house to take him to the hospital.

And then we received the news of a COVID case in the immediate family, in Kentucky. Our family has been largely untouched by the pandemic, but I guess that’s over. We’ll be watching over this person anxiously.

On the Left Coast, yesterday we ended a two and a half day camping trip on Silver Strand State Beach, just south of Coronado. We “camped” in a blacktop parking lot next to a busy road, where we and two other friends parked their RVs right next to us. This campground is a traditional one for one of my friends; they’ve been coming here since childhood. So I suppose they could ignore the road noise, the press of humanity, the smell and noise of the sewage pump truck running up and down the aisles, and the plethora of Let’s Go Brandon flags on the big rig RVs. But I couldn’t. Add to all this the fact that I failed to bring a comfortable outdoor chair, so nowhere to sit, and it was a pretty miserable weekend.

In all fairness we did have some great meals and conversation around a little gas firepit by one of our RVs. It was good to see old friends. But there’s gotta be an easier way to accomplish that.

Final thought, there’s a LOT swirling around in my world all of a sudden. Some destructive chaos in one of my Board companies that I have to try and sort out, a death and a COVID case in the family, one of my brothers making a life-changing move, the ongoing saga of an old friend of mine fighting cancer…it’s a lot. Kind of makes me want to hunker down and just read books.