Getting local news at the drug store

Not long ago I was talking to the woman at the register of the Walgreens I go to most frequently, the one at Franklin and Estes. She's an "older" (i.e. probably my age but I'm in denial) woman with a British accent and, most recently, hair died Blue. A good egge.

We were talking about small-time looting and she told me they got a lot of it. People came through, jacked stuff off the shelves and hopped on bikes to go down to fence it at the apartment complex across from University Mall. The cops, she tells me, know which apartment it is but can't really do anything about it. She has orders not to engage with the looters but she yells at them anyway.

Then just last week I was at another Walgreens, over at East 54. The woman at this register had a New England accent, Boston most likely, and she told me that she had left working at a convenience store out on Airport Road because it was too dangerous. There had been a shoot out while she was working there.

Now I will confess that I am not the most devout consumer of local news. I don't go every day to ChapelBoro.com or The Local Reporter though actually now that I look at it I see that the latter does have a section for crime, so maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention...

That most recent discovery has taken the wind out of the sails of this post a little bit. I'm glad there is at least some coverage of basic local news and it makes me happy that, for now at least, my financial column continues to be carried at The Local Reporter. Change, however, may be afoot, due to recent conversations with a certain Art Chansky. Also, I need to make time to write the column. This blog is a bit of a hungry hippo. I love it nonetheless and thank you for stopping by.

The End of an Era

I am gutted this morning. Yesterday we had to put Leon to sleep, after having to do the same to Rascal about 10 weeks ago. Yesterday at this time I was petting him. Now he is gone.

He was a darling cat, though he spent the first half of his life being super shy. Of course we could never figure out why. Up until Natalie went off to college, Graham and I were only able to pet him very rarely. Even if I tiptoed across the room towards him as lightly as I could, he'd tense up and then take evasive action. Natalie had gained his trust and he would come out at about 10pm when Mary was sitting in her chair and demand attention from her. Beyond that, he was a ghost. So much so that Graham's friend Ronen, who had hung out with Rascal plenty but never Leon, declared that Leon was a myth.

When Natalie left he realized that if he wanted attention he'd better take it where it was offered, so we developed a very good relationship. He spent a lot of time next to me on the couch being petted. Though even there he had the annoying habit of setting up on the couch six inches too far away so I had to strain a little to pet him. He very much liked being pet on the belly and would use one of his paws to hold my hand in place while this was going on, as shown in the photo below.

He also liked to sit on his sister Rascal, as shown below.

He was the softest cat ever, and he had the most expressive and graceful tail wag when someone was giving him some love. Natalie (thank God Natalie and Mary are better photo takers than I am!) has a video of it on her Instagram. Somehow I never thought to take video.

While Mary was taking him to the vet for the last time it occurred to me that we have never been together without some kind of small creature to tend to. When we got together in 1995 Mary had Story, a rambunctious mix of collie and shepherd ill-suited for residence in a West Village studio who, as a two-year old, considered it absolutely reasonable to stick his nose in for some action the very first time Mary and I kissed. In 2000 Natalie was born. In 2003 Graham joined the family. In 2009-10 we got Rascal and Leon. Mary and I have never lived all alone. 

Predictably, this changed dynamic came to a head last night in the process of fixing dinner when small sparks flew around food preparation/dishwasher-related issues. We got through it. We have learning to do. We can also go on trips now without thinking about finding somebody to stop by to do cat-related tasks.

We started the process of removing some cat-related stuff from the household yesterday, but not all of it. This weekend I will make space in the basement to store the stuff together. I am not getting rid of it just yet.

Reflections on another social booboo

A lovely night last night in Raleigh. After the Governor's inaugural ball was cancelled due to winter weather, a friend of J's threw a small party at his house and invited the core Glen Heights crew to join a bunch of Raleigh and Dartmouth folks, after which we all traipsed over to the gubernatorial mansion and had a peak around, simultaneously ooing and aahing and indulging our inner home decor critics. 

While we were still at the initial party I sat down to catch up with J's girl L -- whom I hadn't seen since a wedding in 2022 -- and we chatted for a bit. Before long I found myself touting my blog. On the one hand, who else but me is going to promote it? On the other hand, I walked away from the conversation not really having learned much at all about what was up with her.

All of which leads back to a couple of theses:
1. I do have more than a touch of the autism that runs in the family which in my case leads me to driving conversations along familiar rails which, in my case, all too often revolve around me. Which leads me to not learn as much about other people as I'd like when I talk to them.
2. Being around J, particularly in situations where we are celebrating his accomplishments, dredges up the old competitive urges from childhood, which again leads me to toot my own horn.

In any case, I ended up texting L my blog's address, so this could be easily remedied if she ends up reading my blog and then uses the phone functionality of her phone to give me a call.

The discipline and pleasure of leftovers

Inspired by Rob's sometimes seemingly obsessive but clearly principles-driven focus with not wasting food, I had amassed a small army of Tupperwares and Ziplocs at the office to grab food at the end of the day, and especially on Thursdays when there is happy hour with larger food spreads, to keep it from entering the greater waste stream without first transiting through a human. Yesterday, for the first time in months, I happened to be leaving just as the community managers were about to throw out a tray full of delicious cured meats (yes, I know, carcinogenic) and also some fruit. 

With that said, we are still working through leftovers from Christmas, including a not yet opened brie and some nuts that mom bought for a gathering at her condo. Also some juice/lemonade that we bought for Graham's New Year's Eve get-together (since he drinks neither alcohol nor carbonated beverages).

There is something that feels almost ascetic about working through this process, indeed about the ongoing practice of eating all leftovers no matter how boring, although sometimes they prove just too boring. Overall, it is amongst the deepest practices of enhancing enjoyment through deferral.

Self-Healing Clutter

In the last week or so I've been reading a book that Natalie had bought and left on the coffee table How to Keep House While Drowning, by KC Davis. Apparently it's a bestseller. It's a solid book written by a therapist which promulgates the idea that "self-care is morally neutral" and that people need to keep their houses as clean as they need to and no more. I get that. Certainly her play-by-play of what it's like to try to keep dishes clean while managing toddlers and the pressures of making timelines with them lest one miss nap time ring sublimely true and hearken back to a much earlier time in our lives which is now fully enclosed in sentimental amber but was at the time its own sort of crucible.

Then just this morning I noticed that Mary was managing her day-to-day tasks out of a small ring-binder notebook. For many years, she preferred an organizational system of a paper calendar but task lists written helter-skelter on a random, recycled pieces of loose leaf 8.5x11s which were strewn across her end of the counter like some madwoman's den. It drove me a little crazy and I advocated for some sort of little notebook or notepad like I used for task lists but she resisted with her trademark aplomb.

But now she's using a notebook. I will not make any sort of comment about it to her, because I certainly don't want to get involved in the dynamic of "winning" a spousal argument. Every such publically acknowledged victory is Pyrhhic at the absolute best. Let me say no more on that score.

No, what I need to do here is to consciously look for something to do better at that would make her happy and not make a big point of doing it.    

A Hazy Shade of Winter

We're looking at a grim week of weather here in NC, pretty sure it's the same up and down the East Coast. Frankly, we can use it. Time was, we had more of four seasons and -- as with most things -- it's only the absence of sun and warmth that allows us to appreciate their return.

I had other thoughts initially but somehow the title phrase brought me to the Bangles song, which is a little masterpiece. I had no recollection of the gauzy 30-second intro nor the fact that it was associated with the Less Than Zero film, which I never saw, just like I never read the Ellis novel. 

None of that detracts from the spareness of riff and drums, really one of the greatest of all time. And then the organ. The harmonies are maybe a little overproduced but still sumptuous. I'd love to see them do this live, maybe in a Tiny Desk or KEXP-like studio format so there wouldn't be a lot of crowd noise. 

A trip to the museum

At the recommendation of Mary and also, in absentia, Natalie, Graham and I took a trip to the NC Museum of Art today and took in a couple of temporary exhibitions that are about to fly the coop. We were not the only people to have the idea of going to the museum on a cold day, so it was rather crowded. Some thoughts:

• Venice and the Ottoman Empire. From this exhibition we learned that the two empires who were neighboring in the Eastern Mediterranean for a long time but with peaks in the 14th-17th centuries who alternately fought against and traded with one another. We also learned that people from both places as well as contemporary bourgeoisie like things that are exotic and luxurious.
• The Samurai. There was a lot of detail about the armor of the Samurai but I've never really been interested in that and I'm still not. There was a good timeline of Japanese history. The most intriguing thing was a discussion of different variants of Buddhism, a topic I know almost nothing about. It would be good to take a course on the history and development of Buddhism

Afterwards we sauntered over to the main building to check out the permanent collection, which I hadn't had a look at for a long time. It's a pretty good collection with some interesting stuff, the most compelling of which that we saw today is perhaps this painting of "The Worship of the Golden Calf" by Jan Steen.

To refresh your memory, the Jews got caught up worshipping a Golden Calf while Moses was up on the mountain picking up the 10 Commandments. It was not their most shining moment. Moreover, it sets up one of the recurring themes of the Old Testament, in which the Israelites again and again establish  hill shrines to one deity or another and then get their ass handed to them by Jahweh in a battle or a plague. It was a lesson that took a while to internalize. 

So this whole Golden Calf incident was not a high point for the Jews. But Steen makes it look not so bad here. People are dancing around, having fun. Yes you can also kind of tell that they are being a little naughty, and you can imagine some prim Dutch burgers looking at this and sensing that something is not right, but it's also not all bad. It has that Rabelaisian carnival charm. It's not unlike mercantile Renaissance porn. It's not like Brueggels or later Hogarth where the impropriety fairly flies off the canvass at you. 

Alignment against Apocalypse

Returning to the AI theme for a second, Mollick rightly points out in his book how important it will be for AIs to be fundamentally aligned in their values with us to safeguard us against the most apocalyptic scenarios envisioned by the many prophets of AI doom. I don't think he's altogether wrong.

The problem is that we humans are ourselves far from aligned in our values. Both between and within societies there's a broad gamut of opinions on the relative import of freedom and basic economic security, for example. Lots of people in the West see no contradiction between the two and think that freedom and general wealth production are highly correlated. Elsewhere in the world the link between the two seems far less clear. Even within the United States, there are plenty of people who don't see the connection and cry bullshit.

What we lack most sorely is credible leadership to build consensus. Until we get that, who the hell knows how AIs will set priorities as they keep getting smarter?

AI and cognitive decline

Last week the Journal published a story about research showing that cabbies and ambulance drivers had low incidence of Alzheimer's Disease, presumably because they are using their brains dynamically much of the time to problem-solve on the fly and figure out how to get from place to place quickly under changing conditions. This basically accords with my thesis about the deracinative effects of using Google Maps all the time, how one's ability to remember directions and think spatially is gradually eroded by the disappearance of a need to do so.

So what the heck do we think AI is going to do? There is broad speculation about how AI will help us solve ever more complicated problems and think more dynamically, blah blah blah. I for one ain't buying it. I think it's just like muscles, you lose them or lose them.

I do basic math all day even when I don't have to. The Schwab trading interface has a handy little calculator to figure out how many shares of, say, Gamestop one can buy for $10,000. I don't use it. I look at the price and then estimate the number of shares and then refine my guessing as I go till I'm close enough. The point is not to have the math done, but to be able to do the math.

I could use an AI to write blog posts. But what would be the point of that? I'm not trying to produce text but to do the thinking that allows me to write something interesting. To keep thinking and think better. I'm sure there are ways that I could partner with an AI fruitfully, eventually I may go there. I just listened to Ethan Mollick's Cointelligence in the car after seeing it pop up on a bunch of best of the year lists. Good book, smart guy. He has learned to use ChatGPT in interesting ways and he challenges his students to do the same, to the point of mandating that they use it. I'm just not feeling it. I feel a deep Andy Rooney thing coming on.

Maybe in 2025. Talk to you then.

The New New Year

With Natalie having returned to Brooklyn and then after we went to a party yesterday evening at some neighbors' home, it feels like we are on to 2025 already. I was up at a reasonable hour today and had a decently disciplined morning routine including meditation, sit-ups, push-ups, readings, Duolingo (back to Japanese after a couple of slack weeks in Italian and German, which I really feel like I should replace with Polish for freshness and challenge). And now here I am even blogging.

Perhaps I can even turn the corner on my general feeling of seasonal lethargy. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting there feeling pretty tired and decided to revivify myself through the obvious step of giving myself a haircut and the much less intuitive one of sitting down with my tax planning spreadsheet and doing some year end analysis to see where we stood vis-a-vis the wisdom of itemizing deductions and whether it made sense to pull some additional income into 2024. It actually felt good to do the work.

But in fact there are two days left to get stuff done in 2024. I have some work that has to be done this year but not that much, which leaves time free to take care of year-end organizational kinds of things which will let me start off 2025 in good shape. 

I feel not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, noting that the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future got so much done all in one night.

Limping home

A grey day today, kicked off by the sadness of putting Natalie on a train back to New York. She picked the train, mind you, though it was a good thing on this leg at least because it allowed us to send her recently refurbished bike and matching new helmet with her to help her get around Brooklyn.

It has been a slow couple of weeks, but good ones. After finishing up the book on the Caucasus, I made short work of Hernan Diaz's Trust, which I'm pretty sure Beth had given me last year. A nice solid book with a nifty twist, some but by no means all of which was foreseeable.

And now it is grey. The Christmas tree shines on here in the living room. It will no doubt be the last to go. After Natalie. After Graham. Most likely before MLKJ day, we will take her to the curb or down into the ravine out back where perhaps her needles will pester the large herd of deer that pass through every day, certainly in the morning, to drink from the creek out back and see what kind of goodies I tossed into our compost pile for their delectation.

Ode to Castorp

The second half of last week I was confined to the home nursing some sort of a bug. I was pretty sick for a few days, very sore throat, stuffed up nose and chest, headache, the whole nine. Spent a lot of time on the couch, under a blanket. At some point in time it occurred to me that I might well start taking my temperature. On my first reading, it was a little high. Sometime later, it was a little higher. Meanwhile, I was reading a novel (Hernan Diaz's Trust, a pretty good read so far and I'm guessing it just gets better) in which characters spend time at Swiss sanatoria.

And there it was. Sitting under my blanket, taking my temperature, thinking of Alps while looking down at the grey of winter, I was the spitting image of Hans Castorp, our hero in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I was lacking only a coterie of fellow-sufferers with whom I could discuss the finer points of one type of thermometer vs the other, the various factors which might influence one's temperature and/or its measurement, the nature of freedom, the dimensions of time, and so on into infinity.

Then I remembered my blog.

High Caucasus

I just made my way through Tom Parfitt's 2023 book High Caucasus, which recounts a journey he took on foot through the Russian part of the Caucaus (i.e. not Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Armenia) in the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in 2004, where he was present as a journalist. A little refresher for those of you who (like me before I read this), were fuzzy on the details: Chechens led by Shamil Basayev seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia and kept 1100 people hostage, most of them students. Eventually 334 of them died, most of them students.

Parfitt was there. It was traumatic. He decided to walk across the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. This involved going through a lot of places with names we hear infrequently: Abhazia, Adygea, Ossetia, Kabarday-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. I think that's it. It's a beautiful place (see below), so I get why he'd want to do it.

It's also a pretty rugged place, with not a ton of creature comforts. That said, the hospitality traditions for the region are sacrosanct. Pretty much every night he gets invited by someone whose house or town he's passing by to stay with them and he rarely pays. He ends of eating a wide variety of meats, many of which sound unappealing to the naked ear but would totally hit the spot if you had walked 20 miles in the mountains that day.

The reader learns a lot about the history of the region, most importantly I think about how the Russians deported pretty much everybody from the North Caucasus to Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan) around '43-'44 for some trumped up reason. They got to come back after Stalin died but it was a pretty massive shared trauma. Ironically, it also allowed much of the region to rewild itself, turning it into a great spot for Soviet hunters and outdoorsmen, and I do mean men.

If the book has one fault it is its repetitiveness. Walk. Recount some history. Come to a village. Get invited in. Eat some wierd stuff. Sleep the sleep of the just on a couch or an iron bed. Now and again get hassled by some security forces and be accused of being a spy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But these are mild criticisms and I'm well aware of how repetitive my blog is and therefore how this is the pot calling the kettle black. Part of me is just jealous of Parfitt and admiring of his courage to undertake a journey like this. I never quite got that adventurous, but am grateful for the people who have (see also Itchy Boots). 

Also, admiring though I might be, I also remembered getting to the point where I felt my adventuring, mild though it was given that it ran its coure within the staid boundaris of academic programs and conferences, had run its course and that it was time to settle down and get ready to embark on the new journey of parenting. I was hoping Parfitt wouldn't deny himself that transition. As he writes in his epilogue, he did not.

Theory of mind deficit

Twice in recent weeks I've been in situations when people I know have asked very good open ended questions in conversations that really opened things up in a way that felt utterly beyond me (Caroline at GI Board meeting, Ken talking to Carolyn at dinner at Dave and Betsy's). All too often I find myself trapped in the mire of performing myself and looking for points of intersection with the person I'm talking to that I am unable to step back and open things up or ask questions in a way that lets them move in a different direction. 

I think this is why the early films of Atom Egoyan so resonated with me and why I've come back to them in my mind so often. Egoyan's characters repeat themselves endlessly to others, albeit with slight variations, as they perform theirselves into being.

Experts say that one of the characteristic traits of autism is that the autistic lack a theory of mind, that they cannot easily put themselves in other people's shoes and imagine what the others are thinking. I definitely have more than a little of that. So I have to focus on just trying to be good natured and doing the right thing to the extent possible but also by memorizing and internalizing social rules and aping them back to others. Not entirely unlike what an LLM does.

I have probably said this before, but because I am relatively social and our livelihood to an extent rests upon my sociability Mary can't admit that I have a fair number of autistic traits. But in fact I have just to some extent engaged in brute force (in the computing sense) social learning.

The final countdown

Prepping for a colonoscopy first thing tomorrow morning, I am at the tail end of the liquid diet day and have begun the truly fun stage. I will spare you further details. Most of you will have gone through this before. The rest of you, if you haven't, likely will some day soon. Or at least you definitely should if you are fortunate enough to have decent health insurance.

I will comment only on being where I am in the cycle of consumption. On Friday I began the low fiber diet which forces one to eschew vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, etc. but allows one to eat white bread and pasta, cheese, eggs and meat. Sounds great. But in fact, even for someone predicposed to the diet of a 12-year old boy, it's more restrictive than it sounds. I've gotten used to eating a little fruit and a lot of nuts and at least a pro forma vegetable a day. Being without it is pretty wierd. But I did get an arguably gratuitous chicken biscuit from Sunrise after tennis yesterday and enjoyed the hell out of it.

Today, the liquid diet day, during which I've subsisted black coffee, apple juice mixed with seltzer, and bone broth, is a whole nuther trip. By now I am a little spacy but surprisingly at peace with the whole thing. All in all it feels kind of good for me, like a heightened state of consciousness. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Admittedly, when Mary's alarm went off at 8:30 this morning my first word was "fuck!" -- because I was definitely planning to sleep in.  I'm not proud of that, but I did at least get back to sleep. But thereafter I have been pretty chipper. Even Mary would attest to that.

Graham and I plan to watch a couple of episodes of season 3 of "The Lincoln Lawyer" this evening. It's not a great show, admittedly, but it very much fits the bill.

The Mormons

I've mentioned a number of times that I've read and appreciated Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People after seeing it on my mom's shelves and snarkily sneering at it for years, in the capacious comfort of my own mind. Even though it does seem like the apotheosization of Boy Scoutism at times, he makes a lot of points which resonate with me. Which should surprise no one since I am the fricking WASP from central casting.

I had never bothered to Google the guy. So this morning when I was reading another of his books which I must have picked up at a thrift store or when mom was trimming her library for a move, I was only slightly surprised to read that he taught in Brigham Young's business school. A quick Google informs me that he was, not surprisingly, a Mormon.

Leslie has told me that, back in the day when she was at Bain, there were a lot of Mormons running round there. Per Wikipedia seems like Mitt Romney was probably one of them but Bain's confidentiality policy and culture might have inclined her not to say. I can't recall if she said that they were in fact all as moral as their PR would lead one to believe or if there was a little bit of hair on them. I will have to investigate.

Anyhoo, this other book of Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, appears to pretty much bundle up and extend the Seven Habits stuff and apply it more specifically to corporate contexts. Which is all good. We're all just more or less recombining our own or someone else's greatest hits all the time anyway and once someone strikes a vein of gold they are absolutely entitled to mine it till all the gold is gone.

Some notes on DuoLingo

I listened to an interview with the founder of DuoLingo on ACQ2 last week and he said that the firm has lots of specialists in language-acquisition on staff. If he says it, it must be so. Certainly they are changing the game on language learning for all of us, and in a good way.

But one thing that frustrates me as someone who has studied languages in a traditional way is the complete and utter obeisance to the ideology of usage and repetition and the lack of any reference apparatus. So, for example, DuoLingo teaches numbers, family member terms, and days of the week solely by using them in sentences and there's never a list of all of them in order or in relation to one another. Certainly learning them in order has been a powerful mnemonic device for centuries.

Of course, one may rightfully argue, one has the whole internet on which to look up these kind of lists, I will not dispute this. Or one could snag dictionaries, textbooks, what have you. But having this kind of thing available within the app (click on a day of the week to hyperlink down to the list of all days?) would be useful.

Anyway, a minor quibble. DuoLingo owns 20-25 minutes of my day for now and, as the CEO has noted, its primary competitors are Facebook/Insta/YouTube and that's pretty much true for me. I am benefiting.

The darkest days

As we hunker into the year's darkest days -- which are, not coincidentally, the most brightly lit here in Greater Suburbia and throughout the world wherever electricity is cheap -- I find myself managing myself through a number of slow situations. First and foremost, Mary's reconstruction, which I commented on earlier this week. But also a temporary dental implant, which has prompted me to give my incisors a holiday while I await the arrival of a permanent implant Thursday. Which means my molars are working harder and more consistently than ever.* Plus tennis elbow to manage around.

Then there's work, where I'm slowly working up a buy in strategy with my firm while we consider outsourcing functions to others to help us focus on the most important stuff. And clients, where there are annual (year-end tax review, asset allocation framework review and true-ups), quadrennial (assessing regime change implications for tax code and investment strategy) client lifecycle (retirement and succession planning, new companies and jobs, deaths, job change, college application, college graduation, car replacement, house renovation [or not?]) and global macro shit to think about.

Plus exercise. It's all a bit much at times to balance.

Honestly I didn't have a clear plan of where I was going with this post but knew I was overdue to post to keep up even my reduced target cadence of fifteen a month for 2024. I guess where I was headed at the beginning is that the darkness, cold, mortality nudges and reflectivity they foster make it harder at times to create entertaining blog posts. Ah well.   

*I should note that the process of bypassing my incisors has instilled in me a degree and brand of mindfulness in the simple act of eating that hearkens back to the time of the pandemic when we were more attentive to and appreciative of little things like our food. Right now I am feeling grateful for the food but also I am pretty much about ready for some pizza and a burger, if I'm honest. And I want to pick those dogies up and snarf them. 

Feeling the burn

A quick review of the blog shows that I have written surprisingly little about Japanese stilt grass over the years. I won't go into a big discussion of this invasive plant, there is plenty of English-language interweb warbling about it and there's lots around here. Mary doesn't want it in our yard, and I get that.

She pulled a bunch of it out on the LFA property that abuts our lawn just before it went to seed (she's pretty sure) and then left it on a tarp on in our yard. She doesn't think it would be right to have the town haul it away and resisted my putting it down below where we haul our excess leaves each year despite thinking she got it before it started generating a lot of seeds. 

I had been thinking of burning it in our pandemic-era fire pit for some time. Yesterday, while out raking, I decided to give it a go. It burned nicely, but slowly. It took a fair amount of effort to burn the stuff in small quantities and to keep it going. But boy was it gratifying and also warm. I thought about Leslie, our family's truest and purest pyromaniac, and how much she would have enjoyed being there and watching all of this flaming and somewhat evil biomass. 

As I burned it, I wondered to myself "is this legal here in Chapel Hill?" After I went inside after burning maybe 25-30% of it, I consulted the interweb on this question. It turns out that burning yard waste is not governed by a Chapel Hill ordinance but a North Carolina statute, which does in fact ban it. Whoops. Moreover, burning it is not even considered a good way to manage stilt grass since viable seeds could be scattered to the wind by the fire itself. Of course, Mary was pretty sure (but not entirely so) that she had pulled the stuff in time.

And so ends my little experiment in burning stilt grass in my back yard. It was illegal and probably not even a good idea. But it was fun.

 

Breaking out a little

After the holiday, we were back up at the hospital for the continuation of Mary's reconstruction process, which was deferred after the lingering infection of early summer and then her show at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, which remains open for viewing until February 28. We left the hospital by a little after 2, more or less on schedule, though the procedure really didn't seem all that minor.

Because I've got a temporary crown for another week or so I am under orders to not bite down hard on things with my incisors. "Molars only!", they told me.

So around mid-day I found myself in the cafeteria enjoying a hearty baked spaghetti, a dish that is not really part of Mary's repertoire or anything I am encouraged to make at home. The seating in the cafe area off the main atrium was a little crowded, so I sat at a four top where there was a container with a hardboiled egg in it. I didn't look closely at it, I though someone had neglected to bus and I didn't really care, I just wanted to power down some food before returning to my mission of picking up Mary's prescriptions.

As I was eating a Black woman in her 40s came up and sat down with me. Turned out it was her egg and she had been trying to make sure she had a place to sit and the egg was definitely uneaten. A very nice woman. She had grown up in Newark though her dad was from Durham and she had moved back down here in her 20s. She worked in food service, taking patient orders and making sure they got served correctly. 

It was lovely, the kind of casual social interaction outside of normal social circles that happen a little more often in cities and on public conveyances but we get too little of in our heavily siloed suburbs. I look forward to my next one.