Random Rant

I watched a TV "cause"  commercial yesterday.  The subject about starving children.  The host showed a child at his side and said "She won't eat today".   Wait, WHAT???

See something wrong here?  

That child was starving, and on camera.  And they wouldn't feed her?  That made no sense.  I HOPE they actually fed that child.  But that's not what they said would happen. 

I DEPISE people who make NO SENSE in order to influence others.

Yardwork Sunday

What with one thing and another the past month, I haven't been keeping up with yardwork.  But the weeds never relent. 

So as I walked by part of the yard today I just sighed.  Grass among the flowers and a nearly invisible garden path!

So I got down on my knees and got to work.  At least there is a path again.

But still SO much more to be done...

Scammers

I love scammers, they are SO stupid.  I've mentioned before that they are endlessly amusing. 

Today I got three calls from "Jake" at "Microsoft" about a problem with my software.  I needed to update it "right away"...

Hint, if a company calls you, its fake.
Hint, if they want information they already should have, it's fake.
Hint, actually, if they call you at all, it's fake.
Hint, if it's "urgent", it's fake.

Companies don't call you.  They don't know you you exist..

Hint, if they speak bad local language, it's fake.
Hint, if they speak AT ALL, it's fake.  Microsoft isn't going to call you even if they knew a huge asteroid was about to land on your city.

Hint, if they all are named "Jake", its fake
Hint, if they call several times in a day and are too stupid to stop calling after you laugh at them, it's fake.

Hint, see above about "if they call at all", its fake.

I received a 3rd telephone call from "Jake" at "Microsoft" today (in different voices) and I stated to him clearly "Sir, you are an obviously liar and should be the victim of an honor killing".  THAT set him back a bit.  He asked how I knew. I just laughed and told him I sure wasn't going to help HIM learn how to scam others.

How did I know?  Well, all those hints above.  Plus dirty little secret; I don't HAVE a microsoft computer attached to the internet. 

But not like it would have helped him any if he had claimed to be calling from Apple...  I mean, obvious is obvious.  Apple doesn't know me from Adam either.  Maybe I'm running a Unix, LOL!

And there was the emails.  "My Microsoft email had exceeded it 20Gb limit, it said".  Three times in one day!  Straight to trash along with the emails from the Nigerian Prince. 

Remembering Dad

I just received The Call from my sister yesterday.  Dad is dead; my sister was pretty upset, but she’s been keeping the vigil there.  I've been expecting this call for months, but it doesn't make the reality any different.  For whatever it means, I am suddenly the oldest person in my immediate family. 

How to you interpret news like that?  It's not like I'm the patrirach or anything.  Sister is the executrix of dad's estate but mostly because she was nearest to him in his last year at the assisted living home, and she has some experience at this stuff.  According to family traditions, there will be a cremation.  I suppose as eldest, I might get his ashes.  Well, I have Mom's, they might as well be together.  Each of us kids have our own lives.  I mourn of course, but it wasn't unexpected.  I even expected it earlier.  Dad was physically incapable, in diapers, and demented.  I think he no longer knew who he was.  I consider his dying a relief from the struggle to continue living.  He didn’t want to keep surviving, himself.  It was kidney failure at the end.  He was 92.

But beyond that, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, if anything. We don't have a family tradition of funerals.  Dad will be cremated, and since I have Mom's ashes, I will probably receive Dad's.

I wrote the obituary.  Its hard to pack a life into a short space.  So that’s why I’m writing now.  He deserves more than an inch on newspaper column space…

Where to start?  Well, when I was a child, Dad was the most perfect person (next to Mom, of course).  He was the fixer of things, the person who built things, the person who just taught me how to DO stuff.  He knew EVERYTHING, until I was about 16.

Fast-forward some years...  Dad wasn't the genius when I was 30 that I thought he was when I was 10.  Well, who is?  I had my own thoughts at 30, and they weren't Dad's.  Some guys have the same political views as their Dad.  I didn't.  Mom and Dad were at my house when Barrack Obama was elected in 2006.  I cheered while Dad declared Obama "the most dangerous man on Earth".

I won't discuss our different political views other than to say Dad said "sink or swim" (and he meant it) and I said "I won't watch someone drown".

For all my adult life, I have had imaginary arguments with Dad in the privacy of my own home.  I always won those arguments of course.  But there will be no more even imaginary arguments now.  He's gone.  It is hard to imagine that.

He had great strengths and talents.  I feel stupid trying to even list them, and I can't do him proper justice.  He was an engineer and could build about damn near anything he wanted to build.  My early life was enriched by things Dad built.  30 years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the house we lived in in the 1950s.  The stone wall he built was still standing solid and proud (and I’m sure that, at 8 years old “I helped”).  There was no one home, and I decided not to trespass.  I wish someone had been there to talk to.  But I did look at the yard through Google Earth and some of the 1950’s work is still there.  My friends joke about me that I "over-enginneer" everything I build.  Well, I have a tradition to maintain.

Dad built ships during WWII and started college when he was 20 and met Mom at the Univ of NH when she was a freshman (freshwoman?).  She said she didn't date men who didn't play golf.  So he learned to play golf.  And with his usual determination, he was a 0 handicap golfer in a few years.  Damn he could hit a golf ball perfectly.  It would start off low and then rise as it went straight down the fairway as if drawn on the golf map with a ruler. 

He succeeded in almost everything he turned his attention to but he failed at some.  He was a terrible gardener , for example – Never paid much attention to the soil because there was FERTILIZER!  I learned my organic habits from Grampa.  Dad was bad at most cards, too.  You could practically see his tail wag when he had a good poker hand.  His Mom was a demon card-player; Dad didn't get those genes (so neither did I).  But he was a killer at any game that involved logic.  You could not beat him at Clue, for example.  He had a SYSTEM for showing cards (took me a year ta figure it out).  And we both got so competitive at stadium checkers together that we could call every marble drop for a full 360 degree ring rotation. Ruthless at cribbage, but I finally got about even with him by the time I left for college.  

Logic isn't strategy though.  Mom taught me chess and when she couldn't beat me at it anymore at age 10, she turned me over to Dad, who, when he couldn't beat me by age 12, decided it was a stupid game and never played me at it again.  Yeah, some Father/Son dynamics there.  Dad never had any sense of board strategy.  Hey, he was a engineer.  He wanted RULES to figure out, and strategy isn't about "rules".

But I owe him so much.  I know guys who can't drill a hole in a board because their dads didn't know how or never showed them.  But I do.  Yet he was better at it at 30 than I am now at 64.  Engineers study “perfection”.  I was a Political Science major and “What Works” was good enough. 

He hated the way I played golf.  He was methodical and I "went for it".  Golf course cards show straight lines to where par shots should go.  He lived by those lines.  I didn’t.  Sometimes MY ball went into the deep woods, but sometimes I could slice a 5 iron 200 yards and it landed on the sweet spot of the green while he did his usual methodical single-digit handicap round.   Drove him crazy...  But in 1988, I had the hot round of my life in the rain, and we won his Club's Member/Guest tournament.  Proud moment for us both.  Literally, “different strokes for different folks”, LOL!  Also the last time we ever played golf together.  He couldn't stop trying to "improve" my game (make it like his) and I was done letting him try.

I'll never be an engineer like Dad.  But he taught me enough that there is darn near nothing I'm afraid to try.  There's a fence surrounding the whole back yard, a 2 layer deck, and a toolshed (among other stuff) to prove that.  And he taught me a basic rule.  "If you need a hole in the ground, you dig one".  Which means, do what needs to be done, and sometimes plain hard work is important and pays off.

He taught me how to hunt.  I don't anymore for personal reasons, but I know how to.  Because of Dad, I can follow a trail of faint drips of blood every few yards through the woods.  If things went bad, I would not starve.  But there is more to the hunting story.  When I was 15, Dad decided that shooting deer with guns was “just too easy”.  So we (Dad, Me, and Matt) took up using bows.  I wasn’t really good with a bow (can’t recall about about Matt and I apologize for that). 

They say you practice something 10,000 times and you get good at it.  Dad did, I didn’t.  Hey, I was having more fun playing football with friends.  But he had an advantage.  In 1966, he was 44; I was 16.  He used a 60 LB bow with a 30” draw.  I could only use a 45 LB draw bow at 26”.  At 16, I was smaller and weaker than he was.  He was 5’10” and 170 pounds, I was 5’4” and 125.  Stronger bow and longer draw makes the arrow trajectory flatter and faster (meaning way easier to aim).  He could hit a 10” paper plate 80% of the time and didn’t miss the other 20% by much.  I was lucky to get 30%.  But I was game and decent in the woods (Matt was better in nature).  But it was also because he just practiced more.

Dad could always get a deer the first time we went out.  But I did have a talent and there were raised stands at some places we hunted.  I could stand silently for hours.  I did well on those.  One spot where I stood in the rain all morning, a single deer came by right under the stand.  I almost (REALLY) jumped on it from above holding a arrow to spear it.  I still regret I didn’t.  It would have been a family story for 2 generations.  But I shot straight down and it drove the deer to the ground.

And it got up and ran away and we never found it.  I was shocked, and so was Dad.  And while searching for it, I lifted a leg over a fallen tree and stabbed my self deeply on my very sharp 3 bladed hunting arrow head.  End of hunting for that year.

The next year, I was hunting with a friend of Dad’s, had a long shot at a doe, hit her right in the heart and she dropped like a rock.

But this is not about me.  I’m telling you that so I can tell you this about Dad.  When Dad decided we should start bow hunting, he went all the way.  Well, almost, we didn’t make our own bows.  But we made our bowstrings and arrows.  And Dad designed and built stuff to do that from scratch.  He made an adjustable bowstring maker with knobs to twist the bowstrings in 2 directions, a metal spool holder to twist heavy thread around the bowstring at the nocking point, a cutter template for making leather bowstring silencers, a gadget to attach feathers in a very slightly curved arc around the arrow, and even a heated metal wire to burn off excess feathers down to an aerodynamically perfect shape.  I came up with the idea of heating arrow nocks in hot water then squeezing them on a popsicle stick so that they barely held on to the bowstring but released easily. 

Yeah, there’s a “like father like son” thing going on too.  But the point is, he created ideas in his mind and then just casually went and BUILT them. I have to work HARD to do that, and I don't do it as well.

I recall Mom saying a few times that Dad endeared himself to her parents.  He would visit for a date and would spend an hour just “fixing things around the house “.  Bad light switch, radio antenna, leaky basement pipe, etc.  Drove her crazy at first, and apparently they arrived at movies and dances late sometimes.  And while impressing “the parents” is not the usual way to win a woman’s love, it WAS “some guy who was not her Dad or my brothers”, and seems to have worked.

And there was some religion involved.  Mom’s family was ferociously French Catholic.  As she used to say she was taught “If you were BAD, you went to Hell.  If you were worse, you became a Protestant"  But she didn’t like that idea very much and Dad was a Protestant (of no particular group – I think his Mom was a Quaker).

So in spite of the fact that her parents liked Dad a Whole Lot, they threw her out of the church for marrying a Protestant.  And amazingly, they were happy all their lives in spite of that.  And I mean, as close as I can tell as a child living at home, and as an adult afterwards, they were happier together than any 2 people I have ever met.  Things worked out VERY well...

One thing I can say for sure; I wouldn't be the person I am today without both of them...

So ends the story of Burdell Dodd Spencer and Doris Ursula Beaulieu, loving husband and wife for 61 years, both now gone from this world forever.  Unusual and special people both.  Their descendents remain to have our own stories, but we will never be them.
 

Dad

Well, Dad died this morning.  Technically, it was kidney failure, but at age 92, there wasn't much that WAS working.  He was basically comatose for the past week, but before that he had expressed a desire that all the difficulties "would just end"...

I wrote an obituary a couple days ago, but those are so incomplete.  I will summarize his life a bit more tomorrow.  We kids are sad that both Mom and Dad are gone now, but neither death was a surprise and my family has never been big on serious mourning.  Tomorrow, we will get on with the rest of OUR lives.

Impending

I got an email from Sister saying the doctors guessed Dad would die early this evening.  He hasn't, and I'm not surprised; he is tenacious...

My siblings and close in-laws have been holding vigil when they can.  But Dad is in a coma and he's not aware of their presence and they have jobs. And I am hours away.  There is little good I could do there, so there isn't much point in driving there.   He might not make it until I arrive, or he could live a week.

My understanding of Mom's death was she was aware right to the last moment.  It mattered that Dad was right with her all that time.  But this is not one of those times.

I have written the obituary.  That was singularly weird.  I probably won't write another in my entire life.  I think it is a good one, but not adequate for his total existence.  So I've written a longer post to place here after he dies.  Its not like there will be anything new to add in a few days if he lives longer.  He;s in a kidney-failure coma after all.

He was a special person to ME because he was my Dad, but he was a pretty unusual person on his own, so he deserves more than just an obituary notice.  We weren't identical people (well some Fathers/Sons are, (and they worry me)) but most aren't.

I expect The Call Sunday, but if Dad wants to stay around a few more days, I won't be terribly surprised.  He never gave up easy about anything.

I've spent hours tonight unspooling his life as I know it.  And its not like he told me everything.  But I'll mention the good things I know.

Everyone deserves that!

Politics

I try to avoid politics here.  Everyone has their opinions and I don't really want to upset my friends.  But I just have to say something today. 

I've voted both Republican and Democratic over the years; "party" hasn't historically mattered much to me.  I'm not especially liberal or conservative.  What I AM is "progressive".  I believe that government has a legitimate function in organizing society to advance The General Good.  I believe in empowering the will of the citizenry to improve the lives of as many people as possible.  I believe that democratic (small "d") government is a protection against the sometimes overwhelming influence of the very powerful.

And I have a degree in "Government and Politics", so I know a little about the inside game.  And heck, when the local newspaper  is 'The Washington Post', you can't help but stay informed about the political games. 

But some things are going on politically that just baffle me.  FLOTUS (First Lady Of The United States, Michelle Obama) is being attacked for (please don't snort milk out your nose) "supporting healthy lunches for schoolkids"!  What a shockingly outrageous idea...  How DARE she!

Well, that's how current Republican politicians are reacting anyway.  "Governmental over-reach", "Nanny State", "Regulations", they are screaming.

OH COME ON...  Now its a political crime to suggest that kids should eat healthy lunches?  This is a controversial idea?  For many children, the lunch they get at school is the best meal they get all day.  Who can be against healthy meals for children?  I probably don't have to tell you (except by mentioning I haven't voted Republican lately)...

And then the MSNBC (yeah I watch that a lot) host mentioned something I had not thought about.   Those kids who only get their one healthy meal at school have been getting them there during the Summer too.  Never occurred to me (and I am embarassed not to have realized that).  Now Republican politicians want to stop THAT too.  For URBAN kids...  Wait, don't all children need healthy meals equally?  They want to continue it in their rural districts of course.  Where they consider government support contemptible...

I want all children to be fed well enough to grow and thrive.  Children are growing brains as well as bodies, and healthy children grow up to be more productive and skilled adults.  Even if I just looked at it selfishly, healthy children today are going to support the world I live in tomorrow.  Of course, I'm not just looking at it selfishly.  Children should be helped to a healthy adulthood for their own sakes.  I cannot conceive contesting such a basic premise.

But I want to close on the politics of this idea.  The proponents of this idea of reducing the schoolyear quality of childrens' lunches and the idea of eliminating their lunches during Summer vacation are all conservative Republican polititians.  Can't we at least agree that children are not to blame for the poverty or lack of parenting skills of their parents and agree to feed them enough decent food to help them become mentally and physically healthy adults? 

I don't even care what political views they have when they reach adulthood.  I just want them to be healthful and mentally clear-thinking adults. 

Some Background

I mentioned being well off and know many of my blogger friends arent, so I thought I should explain a bit.  It wasn't easy at first.

I failed out of college in the early 1970's because I was screwed up.  I worked years at minimum wage in some department stores.  I took a government exam in 1976 and scored a perfect 100% in several categories.  "Screwed up" doesn't mean stupid. 

And all THAT got me was a temporary summer job as a GS 5.  At the end of the 3 month job, I was offerred a permanent position as a GS 5.  In 1976, that was $8,000 annual.  At the time, I was kiting checks to pay the rent, had 4 other really crazy roommates, and could barely get a decent night's sleep. 

My job was to keep track of furniture, and purchase carpet and drapes to other government offices at the General Services Administration.  Which meant I was at the very bottom of the heap.  But we also purchased those things for Congressmen and Senators, and Presidential Committees and Commissions.  There were 4 older guys who had been doing the same thing for years before me.  

I did it a LOT better!

And believe it or not, geometry does have some practical applications.   I could calculate office space areas better than my co-workers, deal with drapery contractors better than them, describe available government equipment better, and as minor as it sounds to me today, just process the daily paperwork faster.  I realized I was in "my right place". 

I was quickly assigned to the Congressional and Committee offices.  I probably talked to more Congressmen and Senators than some professional lobbyists. 

From that, I was assigned to write telephone orders.  No idea why.  Maybe I was just good at finding out what people needed.  Maybe because my resume' included programming in Fortran and Cobol.  That stuff was easy.

From there, I went into telecommunications policy management at the HQ.  Well, I always could write instructions clearly.  And I spent 20 years doing that.  Bought my house with that promotion. 

I'm no computer genius, but I figured out ways to translate vendor telephone records from proprietory and damn secretive files into Windows Access and then Excel spreadsheets.  Created an entire video Conference network and records-keeping.  Much acclaim.

But in the last 3 years, top-down decisions sent me into an office that didn't have the slightest idea of the program I was managing.  Worst 3 years of my career.  Fortunately, the last few months involved a new supervisor 2 levels above me from private industry.  He invited us to describe what we were doing.  My co-workers had 1-3 items.  I had 25.  He was shocked.

He talked to me privately in his office a few days later.  He had talked to folks at his old company.  They told him they had 5 people doing what I did.  Well, I sort of knew that, but the statement was very satisfying.  He asked me a very interesting question "how do you manage it all"?  I answered honestly "In constant desperation, its just me and I have to".

I'll give the private industry guy some credit.  He said I needed some serious support, but he didn't have the funds to do it.  To which I responded I was retiring March 2006 (in 3 months).  I had told my immediate supervisor that I was retiring then, a year earlier but apparently she choose not to tell him that.  I did not know that.

I am told that I was replaced by 3 FTE (Full Time Employees) and the program fell apart in spite of that. 

Sorry, but I'm kind of glad about that.  I offerred to stay employed as a contract employee at my current salary to train my replacements and they just dismissed the idea.

I do often have nightmares where I am still employed in the various offices I worked in, but mostly because the jobs I held are done so badly.  Nightmares are weird.

I WAS offerred the job of my immediate supervisor because she rather suddenly retired 2 months before I did (gave a week's notice).  But her job was really stupid and I did not want it.  To be precise, her job and the job of all the other people in my last office was to coordinate policy among the other offices.  Nothing to do with what I did.  Oh sure I could have done it, but I was already on my my to retirement.

Just wanted to explain all this.

Reorganizing

Every couple of years, I get this thought stuck in my head that I should move.  I'm tired of the stairs, the garden is too shaded by neighbors' trees, I've lived here 27 years, etc.  What I want is something more modern-wired (or communicationally wireless), one level, half-walled rooms (except for bathrooms and bedrooms, of course), on a few acres of sunny land.  Ridiculously expensive...

It may be almost genetic.  My paternal grandpa used to design homes to be built into the side of a hill for environmental reasons.  Long shafts of mirrored skylights, massive passive temperature control, wind turbines for electricity, he was ahead of his time.  He never built any of his designs of course, they were all impractical in the 1940s and 50s

Dad was a very practical engineer.  The closest he got to radical ideas was a "Yankee Barn" in NH, and only then because the structure was standard in the planned community he bought into in 1979.   But even then, he redesigned a lot of the structure (and did lots of the actual work - you just can't stop an engineer from building stuff).

So I have this idea of a house I would like for myself.  I found a basic layout on the internet that I'm adapting (because really, I have some ideas but also, you have to stick with professional water supply and toilet connections close together.  Some things just have to go together, and the basic water-stack is one.

I'm going to start diagramming my "perfect house".  I could buy a CAD program, but quite frankly Excel offers sufficient line drawing for the basic design and I would need an architect to turn it into a real design anyway for the details. 

What holds me back is a fear of actually packing stuff up and moving.  I've mentioned this before and gotten good advice and I appreciate that.  It's just scarey to contemplate, is all.  And I have the thought of buying a new house outright and THEN selling this one after I fix it up after moving when it is empty.

I don't want to sound morbid, but I am practical and realistic.  Dad is 92 and entering hospice care.  My inheritence will be about the cost of a new house.  I neither consider that something I am due or that I have "earned" in some way.  But it is going to happen soon.  Its not something to  ignore.  Just as I will die someday with a similar estate and pass it on to my siblings or their children some 20+ years from now. 

And, for the record, "yes I know I am exceedingly fortunate to both have some accumulated wealth of my own plus anticipated wealth from my parents".  If I'm being too honest, feel free to complain, borders are not my strong point.  I lived much of my life "hiding my candle under a bushel basket" (as my paternal Pennsylvannia Deutch gramma would have said). 

But I wrote all that to explain why I am rearranging the house to get rid of excess junk...  I'm a pack-rat.  Not a hoarder; there are not stacks of newspapers or weird stuff in the house.  But after 27 years, you just collect a lot of "stuff" you would not really need in a new house.

I double-stacked the bookcases in the computer room and packed 7 boxes of books into wine boxes.  I filled the recycling bin with "useful stuff" that I never use.  I filled 5 bags of trash.  I cleaned all the living room bookcases and arranged "decorative stuff" in them.  Looks great.

Next week, I will attach plywood sheets to the attic joists to store good moving boxes up there.  No books or old clothes, the humidity is too high.

But I spent 12 hours working in the house today and accumulated enough stuff to get rid of, that makes the flat rate landfill fee reasonable.  All I have to do is fill up the car as much as possible to take advantage of the flat rate per car.

I'll probably regret saying some of this, but Dad was big on honesty and I think  talking about reality is important.  Not everyone has the same situations, and in my life I've gone from roach-filled apartments shared with 5 other guys to a decent home.  So I can say "been there, done that".

Back To Work

I spent the last week getting over the 2 teeth extracted.  But I got back to yard work yesterday morning.  One thing I read about was growing corn in bins. Well, guess what, I just happened to have some!  THe County recycling system changed from carryable bins to one huge one, and they didn't want the old smaller bins back. 

So now they are 3'x2' x18" planting containers!  So I'm recycling recycling bins, LOL!  I'm goin to use them to empty out soil in the raised framed beds and plant corn in them in the sunniest part of the the yard.  But thaose bins needed soil, AND I had to clear some space in the old garden for new raised beds.

So first, I had to level the old box with a butternut tree and some roses.

It took 30 minutes of hard chopping and digging to clear the first framed bed out.  Here is just part of the butternut tree and roots.  They actually spread 10' in all directions.  Digging and chopping them out took most of the time.

Then, it was on to the old lost herb bed. 

There were still herbs in there, but things had gotten so confusing that I decided to just start again.  I dug that right to ground level.  I'm any herbs survive that I recognize, I'll save them.

Then I started emptying the old trellis framed bed into the bins.  Which I discovered were WAY too heavy to carry.  I tied a hand cart, but even with a strap around it, it was too awkward to move (with all the dug-up carpet, there was no path out of the garden area). 

So I switched to 5 gallon buckets to carry to a wheelbarrow.  That works, but it was slow work.  And quite frankly, after staying up all last night and doing this hard work in the morning, I went to bed.  Best I could do was strapping the bins to the handcart, and that was too awkward to move around.

Mowing The Lawn

Sometimes mowing the lawn is not so easy.  In early April, I pulled up some chicken wire and laid it to the side of the garden.  I wedged up some 4'x4' posts to and set them on the chicken wire.  On top of that has come a series of dug-up carpet (still solid after 25 years) black plastic, landscaping fabric, and at the lowest level there was synthetic burlap (also un-degraded).  I can't imagine I ever used some of that stuff.

The removal of all that stuff has been brutal!  Each layer has required spade work under each layer to pry it up then yank it away from the intruding vine roots by hand a few inches at a time.  Each exposed layer has had tree roots running through from the neighbor's yard.  It terrible!

But the grass was growing throught the chicken wire and I had to do something about it.  I pulled the chicken wire up, and it was like ripping asphault off the driveway.  Each 25' piece took 15 minutes of hard pulling up from the grass.  And then there were all the previously pruned pieces of thorny rose bushes and tree trimminings.

It took 45 minutes before I could even mow the overgrown lawn area.

And then it took multiple mowings over the overgrown area to get them down to height.  The grass won't like that.  The rule is never remove more that a 1/3 of a grass height.  I removed 4/5ths .  I'll have to tend to them kindly for a few months.

I am so far behind this year...