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Was this wrong of me?

Before setting-out on my long run today, I set-up S. with The Shadow over Insmouth by H. P. Lovecraft.

She was reading the blog and asked about the "Why vote for a lesser evil" post and one thing led to another...

She was by herself for a while since the wife was out with the other two girls. It is a pretty scary story, but it was a nice sunny day so I think she was fine.

Out with one of the girls but thinking about how boys are

S. and I took the dog for a long walk this afternoon. The day was perfect and we had plenty of time on our hands so we took a long detour. We went through a remote and hilly bit of woods. As we walked along, we came across evidence of improvements to the trails: At first, little embankments to curves and later some small jumps made out of boulders, logs and dirt made it evident that kids were using the trails for bike-riding. As we climbed up the hill and it became more steep, the jumps got to be extreme. One was made of lumber and was a ramp that started from the ground on the up hill side and was attached to two saplings on the downhill side. The drop-off on the downhill side was about 7 feet! I estimated from looking from the end of the ramp that jumpers would be landing around 30 feet down the hill.

S. was aghast. "Boys are crazy" she said, "Girls would never do this kind of thing". She was also kind of surprised that boys would go to such effort to build structures which must have taken much time and organization to complete. When the kids play capture the flag and it is boys against girls, the girls always win. She explained that the girls make plans while the boys just make their plans as they play.

A couple of thoughts began to percolate in my mind, but it took a while for them to fully form.

Boys are not fearless and they really do not like to plan everything out ahead of time, but they can ease their way into both things. The way I envision it is that they started with a small jump that could be made with a fallen log and some rocks and dirt. Now they were used to making things and the thrill of a small jump, so they progressively made bigger and more elaborate jumps and became inured to the risks gradually as jumps became more elaborate. We just saw the end of a long learning curve--they just didn't decide out the the blue to spend weeks building a suicidally high jump and then have the nerve to use it. They got there in a gradual and natural way.

Right up there in the annals of stupidity...

A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this September 18, 2009 9:10 am ET by Eric Boehlert That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.

I was born around the time of President Kennedy's assassination so I am in no place to opine on "right-wing hatred" of that era, but I don't see how such hatred could motivate a Communist like Lee harvey Oswald to act against the target of the "right-wing hatred".

Kennedy may have been liberal for the time he lived in, but he was without a doubt an anti-Communist cold warrier. That is a much more obvious reason why a Communist like LHO wanted to kill Kennedy.

Fall In Brown

A pumpkin, a ghost and a pine tree.

Old dark chocolate on printer paper.

Black Hearts

This piece had all kinds of harsh things embedded in its surface like nails, hammers & so forth. One could only notice this on closer inspection.

Sculpture Fun

We Didn't

Some pictures from before

Manhattan from the head of the Statue of Liberty

A view from the ground

Our reflection in the stainless steel walls of the atrium. (The camera was at our feet and I used the timer)

A small token

The shock of 8 years ago was twofold: There really are people out there for whom no outrage is past them. We had forgotten about evil and allowed ourselves to become complacent.

As a nation, we snapped out of it for a bit and I did too. I was letting the onset of middle age act as an excuse to let myself go soft. I was too old to put back on the uniform--the Marines didn't need 40 year old avionics techs, plus the wife and kids have first claim on me now.

The least I could do, to show some solidarity with actual warriors, is to get back into the habit of PT. (Good for you, good for me.)

I was reminded of the below bit from Melville,

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring-aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more-" He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.

Mamma gets sweet revenge

Towards the end of dinner tonight, my wife glanced into the kitchen, seemed to do a double take, looked around the table and then said, "That was weird, I thought I saw someone in the kitchen".

Me: "Maybe this is the first sign of MS".

Various girls: "What is MS"?

"Multiple skull roaches", I replied. "No really it is multiple sclerosis", I said and then went on at length about wires and insulation and how nerves were like wires and they let you feel things and control your body. Their insulation is fatty material called meyelin and MS was where this insulation breaks-down. The result is loss of ability to control your body and think clearly. I am not sure if hallucinations are part of the mix, but I am not an MD so MS is all that came to mind at the time.

Dinner wound-down and my wife was the first to get up and bus her dish into the kitchen. Just when she was out of eye-shot she exclaimed, "Oh! Hello there"! Even I did a double-take. The kids went into hysterics, ran into the kitchen and even though they saw that nobody was there, stayed shaken for some minutes. I almost couldn't stop laughing.

She got us. Oh yes, she did!

Menu for guest week

Now it is a whole week gone by so my memory may be off but to the best of my recollection, here is what we had:

Wednesday: Arrival day. Slow roasted chuck roast (it has been really tender in the past but this time kind of tough--later in the week the leftovers seemed to get more tender.) Risotto with morels and regular mushrooms and roasted asparagus.

Thursday: Enchiladas that we had pre-made and froze last week and Spanish rice.

Friday: Pasta with red sauce and meatballs.

Saturday: Lamb curry, tandoori chicken, aloo ghobi, rice and raitha. (India night)

Sunday: Leftovers + 4 kinds of dessert from the Cheesecake Factory.

Monday: Boiled baby red potatoes, grilled corn on the cob, grilled salmon, swordfish and scallops, steamed lobster and fresh pineapple.

I think all the meals had salad and we had two meals in the bank: I did not plan on there being a leftover night and I somehow thought they were leaving on Wednesday rather than Tuesday. The missing meals would have been steak and baked potatoes for one and middle eastern for the other: Grilled marinated chicken, falafel babaganoush and Syrian bread.

Things to do with your Mom & Aunt in Boston

Friday: Wife took them and the kids to Rockport--Visited shops, ate seafood, went to the beach and visited shops.

Saturday: Walked around Walden Pond and then tour of the DeCordova museum.

Sunday: Tour of the Christian Science Mother Church,

tour of Faneuil Hall and Duck boat tour.

Dahlia sees our reflection.

Surenna drives the Duck.

Monday: Wife took the ladies to Sleepy Hollow cemetary and later we had a seafood extravaganza (Homemade).

I don't know why I love this bit of dialog so much, I just do.

Jack Burton: Feel pretty good. I'm not, uh, I'm not scared at all. I just feel kind of... feel kind of invincible.

Wang Chi: Me, too. I got a very positive attitude about this.

Jack Burton: Good, me too.

Wang Chi: Yeah!

[pause]

Jack Burton: Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

Her Burden to carry

I got all of this story second-hand, so take it for what its worth...

The oldest daughter was taking the dog for a walk and on this walk, the dog produced a bowel movement. We equip ourselves with plastic bags for just this kind of event and so the girl used one to pick-up after the dog. Then, she tied the bag onto the dog's collar and made the poor pooch carry it home.

Naturally, my wife gave the girl some grief when she found out about this. The girl was her usual self-righteous self: "It was her burden to carry momma"! The dog walked home with her head held low, looking dispirited.

I felt bad for the dog but amused by the girl. A guy I run with thought my daughter was reasonable in this business.

We will only punish her if she does it again.

Getting back into it...

Between one thing and another, I haven't done but two 19 milers since Boston. NYC is approaching fast, so I ran distance today. The pace was slow--about 8:45/mile, but it had been a while and I was more interested in whether or not I could even run that far anymore.

It was quite cool and cloudy this morning and I thought it would stay that way so I decided to run after breakfast rather than before. Right after eating, the sky cleared and it became a beautiful day. A little on the warm side for distance running but not excessively so.

Update: Ran a 5.2 miler today at a pace of 7:37. I had felt achy ever since yesterday's run, so it is nice to see that my body can bounce-back quickly.

Thought provoking

I had seen somewhere on the web about the book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, but not thought much about it one way or another. On the way home today from a company picnic WBUR had the author on (I think) Science Friday and it was quite interesting.

The idea is that cooking food makes it easier to digest and allows our body to extract more useful energy out of a given amount of food. This leads humans to having a smaller digestive system and thus more body mass available for a larger brain & so forth.

All of this got me thinking about eggs. In popular culture we have tough guys showing how committed--to whatever quest they are on--by drinking a glass full of raw eggs. Setting aside the risk of salmonella poisoning, raw eggs actually remove an essential nutrient from your body. Egg is, or I should say would be a really great place for bacteria to grow but birds have found a way to prevent this. There is a protein called Avidin in egg whites which binds very strongly to Biotin (which is one of the B vitamins. The complete absence of Biotin makes eggs a lot less attractive to bacteria. When you cook eggs, the proteins become denatured and loose their ability to bind Biotin.

Tying-up loose ends

Our Main bath had a multitude of little things that needed fixing and we just got through them all in about one week.

The bottom rail for the glass tub enclosure had never mated properly with the top of the tub and hence mildew and water deposits had accumulated below and around the rail. It couldn't really be cleaned thoroughly since you can't get under the rail to clean it or dry it. I took the whole enclosure apart and scraped-off all the mildew, old caulk and mineral deposits. When I reinstalled it, I drilled through the rail into the top of the tub and put in stainless steel screws. Now there is solid mating and no water can get underneath it.

The walls and ceiling constantly got mildew on them--you could scrub it off with bleach but it would come right back. We repainted with special paint that won't allow mildew to grow.

There has never been a blind on the window to this bathroom: Between being on the 2nd floor, distant neighbors and hilly woodsy terrain; nobody could see in anyway. But visitors, which we have from time to time, might mind; so we finally put up a cellular shade.

There is a linen closet in the bath and the door would never latch closed. A couple of minutes with a chisel and an adjustment to the faceplate and now the door latches shut.

Last and easiest: We have had a framed Monet print for a couple of months that we wanted to hang. A nail in the wall and we are good to go.

Meatloaf

I was only half-paying attention when this commercial came on but it drew me in and I loved it.

There is something about that Bat out of Hell album: I wasn't a huge fan when it came out but now it speaks to me. What does it say? "This album represents a sound and sentiment that is totally and irrevocably late 1970's American".

Making an impression