Well, Graham's early applications are in and we watched the first three episodes of season 3 of Bosch, while I got Mary out of the house to a party and spent 4 hours on the tennis court. All in all a fine weekend, despite my restricted diet.
As per usual, we got almost no trick or treaters though I had scored the perfect pumpkin last week and I even carved it. It is the nature of our neighbohood.
Called Marvin yesterday to let him know that David Young had died. Rob had called him the day before. We also talked about Kelvin's recent cancer update, which was not encouraging from the cancer perspective but very encouraging from the Kelvin perspective because the man has gotten to that place -- as many cancer survivors do -- of understanding that while cancer is well beyond his control, his attitude is not, and he is resolute in embracing the life he has.
I have a ton of stuff to do today but this reminded me that I needed to get by Durham to visit with my cousin Neva and her husband Tim, who is himself fighting off some type of leukemia and got a bone marrow transplant a month or so back. They too are rocking the attitude thing.
Meanwhile, I am on day 2 of colonoscopy prep, the longest colonoscopy prep the internet has ever seen (6 days of limited diet!). It is pretty odd because I am not supposed to have so many vegetables or nuts or even whole wheat bread, much of which is stuff that doesn't come to me organically but is now very much a part of my life -- thanks to the decades'-long efforts of our house's Chief Health Officer (hint: it ain't me). I am forced to eat like a middle American. So far I am surviving but it is a significant shift, to be sure. Honestly I'll be glad to get back to the normal regime.
Once more fought the fight on court with Zinn, ultimately falling 7-6, then retiring down 4-3 in the second cuz I had to get to Raleigh for lunch. As per usual, Adam was present while I beat myself, hitting all too many double faults. I was up 4-1, feeling both footloose and also fancy free, but then I collapsed as the inner demons swarmed around my brain, which relentlessly searches for negative things to think about. --
Like, for example, how at Jack Pringle's dad's funeral the other day I grabbed a baklava as I hustled for the door and kind of pushed right past Jack's little brother who was standing there alone. I don't know him, but I knew who he was because I had just seen him speak at his dad's funeral. I should have slowed down and at least said a kind word to him. His dad just freaking died and it was his event. Literally this is the kind of stuff my brain throws at me in the middle of tennis.
I regained a little momentum late in the set and may even have had a set point.
Then, in the second set, Adam was up 3-0 after 15 minutes and we had 15 minutes before I had to leave. Adam was trying to hustle things along so he could nail me 6-0 in the second set and I was like: fuck that. So I concentrated on keeping the ball in play, making the points as long as possible. And I started winning as he made mistakes. We were tied at 3-3 and the last game was taking a while and I needed to go so I went for some winners and missed.
But I got home, showered, and hustled up to Raleigh for lunch with Jen Mangrum.
A recent post to the neighborhood listserv linked to an NYT article claiming that half an hour of using a two-stroke leaf blower was as bad, emissions-wise, as driving a big pickup truck across the country. I had never seen the impact stated so bluntly, but if it's true, it's damning. Even if it's off by a factor of 4, it's damning.
Then there's the problem of noise pollution, which is very real and very impactful on a lot of people's productivity with a big chunk of the population working from home. Lord knows I hate me some leaf blowers something fierce, as I have shared with you over the years, gentle reader.
Which makes me think about our lawnmowing arrangement. Right now we use our neighbor Caroline's old mower, with Graham at the helm. Maybe it's time we investigated an electric one. I will email her now.
But I also think there's a huge opening for green lawn care services, particularly in places like Chapel Hill. Yes it will cost more money. But right now people literally have more money than they know what to do with and everybody talks a mean game of being green. But will they put their green where their green is when the push mower comes to shove?
As a coda, of course this exists Green Energy Lawn Care
Graham had math tutoring with Cliff earlier than usual this morning, and since he is still in his license interregnum I had to run him over there. Which is 115% cool, because anything that takes me over to Carrboro on a beautiful Sunday morning is fine. Frankly it may be a net loss when he gets his license back, or I may start having him drive me over there just to make the trip and get out of the house.
While there I was reminded of Whitey, who had called me up to touch base earlier in the week while I was headed to Carrboro to meet with some people from the Arts Center. Turns out they were fundraising in what had been pitched as a "strategic discussion." Nice people, but a different conversation than I had been expecting. At any rate, remembering about Whitey on a sunny day in Carrboro naturally led to thoughts of lunch, so we are targeting Thursday 11/4 for a guys' lunch (put it on your calendar, Z).
As for the rest of the afternoon, that is burning up fast as I move towards a 4 pm court time and then an early evening get together in a neighbor's yard. It seems the whole world is on the same wavelength right now: "let's get together while it's still warmish outside and the pandemic seems to be headed in the right direction, because it may change up as the weather grows colder and people's risk tolerance moves backwards." I know I'm feeling it.
Meanwhile, I have a couple of home improvement type tasks on my list for the day. In principle I should get on them because doing so increases harmony in the household. The biggest spousal win I could get would be if I recaulked our shower. But honestly that feels better saved for the darker days of winter when we are nesting more tightly. Really I'd like to hang some art upstairs after lunch, which I'd better go eat.
After all, I did fix the garbage dispos-all yesterday evening, which should get me some real brownie points. And I stopped in to Weaver Street for Mary's favorite bread.
Greg Ip published a typically thoughtful article today in the Journal on the supply chain crunch and its impact on globalization. I won't recapitulate the whole thing here, but at the end he makes the interesting statement that the new post-COVID, less globalized world will be "less able to delight consumers with ever more choice at ever lower cost."
This surprised me a little, because as Ip well knows, behavioral economists long since established something that we all intuitively know, which is that we are exhausted by more choice and operate better in contexts where we have fewer things to choose from. Which is why people order combos at Mexican restaurants and sushi platters and why we approach display cases at supermarkets more or less knowing what we want. Most importantly, it's why modern 401k plan design limits the number of funds available to plan participants to 10 or 12 at most, so people don't work too hard making decisions that are more likely to harm than help them.
Which isn't to say that we don't take some pleasure from the sheer cornucopia experience of going into the grocery store, but for the most part to diminish the cognitive load on ourselves we seek shelter in brands. Brands do need to grow and adapt, no doubt, which is why failure to listen to customers leads brands to fall into disrepair, as Kraft Heinz learned all too well when it adhered too zealously to Zero-Based Budgeting and its brands got dusty.
I suspect that in the product development world there are people who run numbers on the marginal return of investments in innovations. Variants and flavors get thrown out there and test-marketed. I am often quasi-impressed with the sheer range of Triscuits available in stores, though I've long since gravitated back towards the center, to a lower-sodium non-flavored one. So the Nabisco people made a slight innovation and found me.
But lots of brand innovation is desert blooms, trial balloons sent out and then retracted for failure to catch momentum. Because we can't be trying new shit all the time. It's exhausting. Ultimately most people want to limit the number of decisions they make in a day, like Jeff Bezos, who famously aims for one or two good ones.
The most exciting news of recent weeks is that we will be joined for Thanksgiving by Natalie's new boyfriend. Gosh, what else is there to say? He got rave reviews from Mary's visit with him in New Haven. I won't delve deeper into deets out of respect for her privacy, but you can certainly ask when you see me next.
It's that time of year again, when first thing in the morning a truly magical mist drifts along the lake. I'm only 55 now. In a few years perhaps I will be comfortable enough in my age to call it "glorious." On the best days, the perfect fall colors that gradually come into view as the sun rises and the shadow from the trees on the lake's eastern shore drifts down the trees on its western shore, illuminating their colors, and all of this is reflected through the mist on the lake.
This all happens pretty early and quickly. Right now it peaks somewhere around 7-7:15, depending on the day and the weather. I really need to just force Mary to get out of bed and come check it out, but she enjoys a bit of a sleep in. The video below is from December, 2020, so it's fairly late in the color season. Right now it's early. I'll try to capture a peak color morning.
A friend of mine suggested I talk to the Executive Director of a local arts organization about its strategic plan, with the rationale that I am "good at these kinds of conversations." I'll go talk to the guy this week.
But I'll need to tell him that I am quasi-Scroogean about art. It's not as if I'm always poised to reach for my revolver, but I also don't have loopy-eyed romantic visions of the civic virtue of people doing pottery.
I do think there is room for the guy to work on putting butts in seats by programming fare that people will come and see, and that he could be creative about it. Honestly I think he should try to bring in people from a broad range of walks of life (public servants, executives, athletes, chefs, entrepreneurs etc.) to talk about the complexity of what they do. Maybe with questions from the audience.
I think the Monte has been a huge success.
It's been a long week, what with all the writing and all that, then I made the mistake of scheduling two client reviews today. In the end one of them was pushed back, but that didn't stop me from working late yesterday getting ready for it.
Up early this morning to rejoin the battle with Z. I had took him earlier in the week 6-3, 3-2 before we had to break. He was by no means happy with that state of affairs, and spanked me this morning 6-1, 3-2 before I had to go.
Dinner time. Here's what I was listening to. Sierra Ferrell is a genius, if not a guitar hero.
As everyone my age knows, the holidays are just around the corner. Meanwhile the presents which traditionally help us mark the holidays are stuck in containers off of Long Beach, straining to find their way onto our shelves. Logistics people the world around are sleeping poorly, if at all.
Early in the pandemic everyone developed a newfound appreciation for service workers: waiters, delivery people, the people who restock shelves, nurses, etc. We realized how at risk they were and how much we needed them. People tipped more and were more supportive of higher wages.
The global supply chain snarl offers us another opportunity to appreciate how utterly interconnected everything is and how everyone has a place. Small COVID outbreaks in ports or factories 12,000 miles away now are impacting whether or not a toy or a sweater makes its way to your tree this December. Or maybe it's not the outbreak itself, but the policy response to the outbreak or even the extent to which the local population complies with masking rules/norms. We really don't know. It is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, or Kazahkstan, or somewhere in the Pale of Settlement. Wherever and whoever it is, we now know we depend on them too.
And the absence of new things to purchase very much brings home the import of tending and mending the old things we already have, so we appreciate anew those who can do that and those things that allow themselves to be fixed. The one thing that is really hard for us to understand is that we need more people, which means immigrants, and that we need culture and means to bring them into our fold, which means schools and community colleges that are nimble and responsive and places for them to live, amongst other things.
We all yearn for life to get "back to normal." The problem is that there is actually no normal to get back to and there never was. Life is always in flux, there are just times when it's more apparent than others.
I was at Harris Teeter yesterday and noted gaps in many of the same categories as I had seen them last time: there were fewer varieties of Triscuits and also what we call "shelf juice," V8 products and the like. We are particularly keen on things like Carrot-Orange and Peach-Mango that we put in our OJ in the morning just for a little variety.
And yet... visitors from almost any other place in the world at any moment in history would be astonished by the breadth and variety of what's available to us. This was most marked in the responses of people visiting from behind the Iron Curtain back in the 70s-90s, but it remains true. There is so much stuff available to us. For me at least, the slight constraints put on the fulfillment of the most granular of my heart's desires serves to remind and reinforce my appreciation of what I have.
Same thing with Christmas. There is all this hand-wringing and fear about major retailers not being able to get in presents for peak shopping season. Oh well. Let it remind us and small children everywhere of what they have. Perhaps they will give more and more thoughtfully.
There are real problems for sure. Major backsliding of literacy rates amongst lower-income kids throughout America and the world from remote schooling. That's a real problem. Let us be thankful for our schools and teachers, and I'm proud that it looks like Natalie will join them.
It's one of those rare weekends when Mary is away -- up in New Haven seeing Natalie and her friends from grad school, also celebrating Rob's birthday in Valhalla with the Larchmont clan. Long story, don't ask.
In any case, that makes it a guy's weekend, in which we indulge in manly pleasures like polishing up Graham's UNC application... OK, actually that's just something we had to do.
But what we did do is hit the all you can eat Chinese buffet hard. Oh yes we did. Of course, I prepared for this assault by heading out on my road bike and putting in a solid 22 miles (about 1,000 calories burned) late in the afternoon, followed by zero snacks.
The buffet over by what used to be known as South Square is the best one ever. Not necessarily in the quality of its food, mind you. It's all pretty much the same stuff. But the variety. There was a reasonable selection of all you can eat sushi, much of it with cream cheese and fake crab meat and avocado snuck in there as filler, but nonetheless there were things for the mildly discerning eater. There was also a noodle soup area in the back where you got to pick your noodles and protein, in my case udon and duck. It was perfectly fine. On the steam table there was the same motley assortment of everything, but that included a reasonable assortment of seafood and some green beans so I did fine -- though I also snuck some a little sesame chicken and finished up with the Chinese donut thingies.
As always, it was interesting to observe the tables across from us. Directly across from us sat a largish young couple, late in their meal. The woman was finishing up with a mid-sized plate of basically unadorned white rice. That was pure profit for the proprietors. However, in the next booth sat a somewhat country couple who were concentrating almost entirely on steamed crab and shrimp. Those are the people who will break a buffet's business model if too many show up at once. Interestingly, though they looked like they fit the vaccine-skeptic demographic, I happened into the men's room at the same time as the male of the couple, and after he washed his hands he shut off the faucet with his elbow. Clearly he had not been convinced by the clear consensus that COVID is not spread by touching objects.
America remains a fascinating tapestry.
Also, we watched Blade Runner, which really would have been a better compare-and-contrast candidate for Graham's essay on Frankenstein than Twelve Angry Men, though somehow Graham made the latter comparison work.
Worked from home yesterday because I was having lunch with Bobby and had a meeting with another engineer regarding the dam. Each time I meet with another engineer I learn more about dams and engineering in general. By the time I'm done, I'll be in shape to pretend I'm a dam engineer, just like I used to be able to convince people that I spoke Italian.
In between updating and running financial plans for clients and nudging Graham on college essays, I went out for a run. In general I've grown a little soft on my exercise in recent months as I've been traveling more and Adam has too. At the end of my circumnavigation of the lake I tacked on an extra loop that added on hills -- as do any additions to runs in our nabe. As I came up Rolling Road I was reminded of a moment in the pandemic when I was actively seeking out hills to run up -- just like we used to when training in track or cross-country -- and I was getting better at it.
Not so much more recently. Along with exercising less regularly, I've been eating out a bit more, so there's been some general softening. It's part of a general wearing down process.
Economists speak of a "lump of labor" fallacy, which assumes that there's a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy, and therefore letting more immigrants in or automating things will subtract from the amount of work available to be done by the existing workforce. In fact, as more value is produced, new needs and possibilities emerge.
I wonder if I and individuals might fall victim to an analogous "lump of energy" or "lump of attention" fallacy, wherein we convince ourselves that we possess a fixed quantity of one or the other. In fact, if managed correctly and in concert with good delegation and teamwork strategies, we can often surprise ourselves by what more we can do.
We just have to keep moving. And sitting still.
I've been watching Bojack Horseman, which at its best is brilliant, though at its worst it's definitively not. Last night's episode featured Bojack self-sabotaging himself savagely with negative self-talk ("you are a horrible person") which leads him to stop into a bar and spend the whole day there while out to get milk for his dementia-imparied mother (herself a shitbag piece of work who put these voices into his head) and his teenage daughter from a one-night stand who surprised him by showing up on his doorstep at the age of 18 or so, herself tortured by voices.
My situation is not so bad, though I do let things pile up and oppress me. there had been some gouges in the wall down beneath my bedside table from, apparently, moving the bed sometime many years before. They stood out white against the green of the wall and had been torturing me for sometime. Yesterday I finally went down to the basement, found the paint, went to the hardware store, bought some drywall spackle, filled them in, and painted it. Not perfectly, mind you. A professional would laugh at the job I did. But walking across the room if you're not looking for the defect, you won't see it. And nobody but us comes up here anyway.
Also, I've been attacking the fat stack of New Yorkers piled up on my chest of drawers, cutting it down to size. I just discovered that Peter Hessler has moved back to China, where he did what to my mind has been his best work. Admittedly, I haven't read more than a few articles of his work in Egypt or any of his work on Colorado, so maybe I just need to track that stuff down. Still, I'm excited.
As the season turns and it chillier in mornings and evenings and more pleasant in the middle of the day, I am ever more maniacally focusing on doing as much eating, drinking, reading and yes, blogging, out on our screened in porch. The colder months are coming for sure, and we don't know what comes with them. Maybe the Delta variant will continue to fade, letting us feel freer to socialize indoors, or maybe we'll have the flare-up that some anticipate as we shift back indoors.
One thing's for sure, no matter how many people we're hanging out with, we'll be spending more time inside, and it won't be as nice out here. So here I am.
I am also pretty mindfully focusing on setting up as many lunches, coffees, and walks as I can with other people right now. It's NC, so it will stay nice through November, more or less. Unless it doesn't.
Because of the long walk from the new parking lot to my desk -- going around the construction site for a new building -- in recent weeks/months I've been picking up a sandwich from Whole Foods many days. Of course I should be making one at home, but that would call for too much coordination and planning. It just hasn't been happening.
