A different Monday

In times like this it is very hard to maintain equanimity and calm. Putin's putting forces on "special combat readiness" considerably ups the ante and takes us into territory we've not been to before. The Cuban Missile Crisis was before my day but I imagine we're in the same ballpark.

The difference now is this sense that Putin is doing crazy things from the position of a wounded animal, which makes him less predictable. Also that he knows now that he must win something to stay in power, otherwise he is gone.

His whiny justification about Russia having been a great power that was brought low through no fault of its own disregards some essential facts. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live. Its implementation of Communism failed to provide its citizens with the more than the barest rudiments of life. Sure, people figured out how to get by. The bread was good. Donuts were cheap. They improvised admirably with what they had. But it was boring as hell, the waste of human potential was immense and it wasn't going anywhere. One of Gorbachev's early reforms was to let city dwellers have little plots of land where they could grow their own food. Many grew potatoes. It was like that. 

The West does not have it all figured out, far from it. Lots of people are left out of the general prosperity and lack the means of getting it. We don't have perfect consensus on how to remedy this. There is and always will be internal tension about the role of the state versus the role of individuals, families and other smaller units in addressing our problems. But there's a reason people clamor to move here from all around the world. We are fortunate that they do. 

Robotics practice

Today finds us in an industrial park in Charlotte at a Robotics practice field operated by the YETI team, a community-based team that has been running for about 15-20 years in the First Robotics universe. I had a good discussion with the guy who runs it while I was working on taxes and he ate lunch. Born in Durham, grew up in Efland. A proper engineering nerd who gives up tons of hours to the cause. Packing up now!

Another all-too-adult dream

Just before waking this morning -- and I really needed to pee -- I had a dream in which I was at the beginning of a Board meeting -- actually a general meeting at which community members would be present -- and we didn't have printouts of all the financials we needed, and it was going to take at least half an hour to get all that stuff. It was really quite embarrassing.

It is ridiculous that these are the kinds of dreams I have. Must get a life.

The promise

I was on the phone just now with a young woman, most likely of more recent African descent judging by her voice, helping her think through how much to save into her 401k and how much to pay down student loans. She had taught in Charlotte and gone to grad school in NC before moving back to Alabama, our loss, their gain.

As I was on the phone I heard texts coming in. Turns out they were parents who will be driving down to Charlotte with me on Sunday for a robotics thing. The teacher organizing the trip has a German/Slavic name, the parents are from East and South Asia.

Which makes me ponder what's going on across the sea and how I feel like I am fundamentally in the right place, however stupid, ham-handed and hypocritical our foreign and domestic policy may be. At its best America genuinely tries to acknowledge its faults and strive to be better over time and maintain first amendment rights so that people can haul us out and criticize us when we fail, time and time again. Democracy is better than the alternative.

Special Valentine

Let me not pretend that the news of Russia attacking Ukraine is not disturbing. It is. 

So I am very much focused on trying to be good in my own sphere. I stopped in to Whole Foods to pick up lunch (and also some soy milk for Graham since I was there) and was particularly mindful of others while there and went out of my way to be extra courteous.

Driving to work I listened not to the book in Chinese Grand Strategy which is the currently assigned reading for the Steve Meshnick Memorial book group, but to a book of dramatized conversations between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama that I listen to on occasion when trying to dial it down. It's kind of silly at times, but still there is much wisdom in it.

Somewhere in there I was reminded of how, on Valentine's Day, the young woman who is interning with the company from whom we sublet brought in some little chocolates for each of us in the office. Probably cost $2 a pop, for all four of us. She is a graduate student and an immigrant to our fair land, judging by her accent and her name (I'll leave it off the blog out of general recognition of others' privacy). I had met and spoken to her exactly once before she brought me a gift. Extraordinary.

I noticed that she used some of my half-n-half when we all had coffee one day last week (unlike my coffee snob office mates who drink it black). So I bought more creamer at Whole Foods to be sure we are well-stocked. I also brought enough pecan Kringle from Trader Joe's for her to partake.

This is the spirit.

Back to the One and the Many

As I may have said, I've been reading the Bible recently. I'm still making my way through Genesis. It occurred to me that all of the passages in which "X begat Y" and "these are the generations of Z" form the basis of traditions in which the enumeration of individuals trumps the drive to aggregate and abstract, something I first started writing about some decades ago: I thought back to this post from April 2005.

But that post referred me back to this post, about which I had forgotten entirely, which speaks of Russians' loathing of Gorbachev, their understanding of Stalin, and their willingness to shed blood in numbers. Which bodes ill in today's environment.

What will the next days and months bring in Ukraine? We don't know. One thing we do know is that Russia's demography is not stellar, though it is far better than it was pre-Putin (I was, frankly, surprised to see when I looked just now that under Putin there have been significant gains in life expectancy and that there's a relatively decent [if still below replacement rate of 2.1 and therefore signaling population decline] fertility rate in Russia -- slightly worse than the US but much better than Japan, South Korea, or Finland). So Russia just can't afford to lose that many people right about now. It has a big land mass to command.

Grinding on

Busy day. A client needed cash to buy a house, just as Putin had decided that he did, in fact, feel like invading Ukraine. Thankfully the markets resisted the temptation to swoon in the morning, and I in any case had a bunch of short-term fixed income out there in anticipation of a possible house purchase. Just not quite as much as was actually needed. Then I had to work on separating some assets for a client going through a divorce, and some complex estate-planning stuff for someone else. Not designing it, mid you, just figuring out how to do what the lawyer was telling me needed to be done.

And then, home. Now I need to call my mom about stupid tax crap. Or maybe that just waits till tomorrow.

I haven't really been watching the Olympics, since I don't have cable anymore. News of the clusterfuck women's figure skating finals did poke its way through to me, and it sounded rather sad and dysfunctional, redolent of the same spirit as the sick doctor from U of Michigan who abused all those US gymnasts or what Alberto Salazar does to young women distance runners out at Oregon. A little lite Googling showed me that I wasn't the first to notice the resemblance. 

Over and out for the day, it's time to clean the kitchen, throw some pecan Kringle in the toaster oven, and watch Schitt's Creek, which I went back to after a multi-month hiatus yesterday night and found to be full of yucks.

Date walks

Even before the pandemic, Mary had been getting bored with her custom of running the three miles around the lake every day. I can't imagine why. As the pandemic progressed and I got to know the various trails around Chapel Hill better, it occurred to me that she and I should really go on a "date walk" both to get quality time together and to expand her horizons. For a long time she resisted, saying that she was too busy sitting with her laptop in her command post in the living room, that she needed to "get things done."

Then we tried it once, then twice, and now she is more or less hooked. Yesterday I took her over into Cedar Falls Park, then down into the surprising gorge that runs along the east side of Kenmore along Cedar Fork Creek. Then we walked up to East (Chapel Hill High School), where I showed her the two ponds back there behind the school, then made our way home via the Dry Creek Trail and the cut through from Weaver Dairy to Sedgefield.

There have been times when we have gone walking or running when we have talked less than perhaps would be expected, when maybe our conversations weren't as good as might be hoped. There are many hard things about being married, amongst them the tensions between egos and balancing out goals that aren't always perfectly aligned, but also just the fact that spouses spend an awful lot of time together.* As we approach empty-nesterdom, or something vaguely resembling it, it's something we need to work on. Yesterday was a good instance.

*My officemate David said recently that a friend of his -- a woman -- said that she had married her husband "for better or for worse... but not for lunch." There is a lot of wisdom in that.

The Idea of Roanoke

This morning I awoke at around 5, having had a dream that someone (not me, exactly) had tried to pass a car though a mountain tunnel to someone down at the other end by getting out of the car and letting it coast, causing a traffic backup, made worse by the fact that it was a pretty big road, perhaps an interstate. I encouraged this someone to go to the authorities and tell them what had happened, and apparently believed it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

I could delve into the whys and wherefores of that dream, but it's really not that interesting. What's intriguing is that roundabout there my mind latched onto the idea of Roanoke. The city has come up a number of times recently. Ted and Kirsten (from Princeton)'s daughter Zoe is in Physician's Associate school there at Radford University, by Ted's telling happily getting to know human physiology by dissecting her very own cadaver. Adam at the office told me that lots of cool little restaurants etc. are springing up there, quasi-Asheville style. Niklaus and Lucy went there to have dinner with Paul Youngman over Labor Day weekend after Spruyt's wedding.

In general it would make sense if some of the Asheville energy moved up there. Same basic idea: smallish city in the mountains. Less than three hours away.

And my waking mind took off. Natalie and Stuart could move there! We could buy a second house near there (I'm sure they could be cheapish)! We could go check it out this weekend! So many ideas. The solution to so many problems, and all before breakfast. Even now, it's not entirely crazy.

Specialization and the liberal arts curriculum today

Just got back from a kidney ultrasound at the UNC Radiology Center. First off, all the credit in the world to them for getting me in right at 10 am and out by 10:30, right on time.

I was attended to by Bethany, the senior radiology tech, and Kylie, a radiology tech student. There was an embarrassing moment for Bethany in there when she called Kylie "Kennedy" by accident, but it turned out to be an understandable mistake, because Kylie and Kennedy are the first two students in a new bachelor's program at UNC for radiology techs. Kylie was new to Chapel Hill, having transferred up after getting an Associates Degree at Coastal Carolina Community College. 

Unfortunately they got me in and out so quickly I didn't get to learn more about the distribution requirements for her program. Will graduates need courses in humanities, arts, blah blah blah? Frankly I don't know much about what UNC's distribution requirements are right now. 

But would it be appropriate for a flagship campus to be issuing degrees in narrow specializations without broader requirements? It's a big question, but at this moment in history my gut is that it probably is OK. If we need people to do these jobs they need to be at institutions with medical facilities and staff to train the kids up. Certainly she was a nice young lady and plenty well educated to understand the merits of whole wheat Goldfish, which we discussed, since I was headed to Walgreens afterwards. She comes from a military family and went to high school in Fayetteville, where her dad was at Camp Lejeune. It's highly likely her politics and culture differ from mine. So it's good for her to be in Chapel Hill and get a taste of Deep Blue living but maybe not have the worst excesses of it jammed down her throat. It would have been nice to have talked further.

Robbed? Or given a huge present?

Our family is in the habit of stopping at a Subway on road trips. We always get exactly the same thing, which makes ordering easy, so we can just concentrate on our respective bio-breaks. So you would think that when I was out on my own this weekend coming back from DC, I might try something different.

But I didn't. Actually, I kind of did. On the way up on Saturday I stopped into a Love's Truck Stop which had a Subway in it. On the way to the bathroom, however, I saw that it also had a Godfather's Pizza. I though I may have riffed in the past on my fond memories of the Godfather's at Kroger Plaza, but I see that I haven't. We'll come back to that in the future. 

In any case, on the way back from DC I stopped at a Subway and got our traditional sandwich, and upgraded it to a combo (drinks and chips), as I always do with family, giving Graham the chips and splitting the Diet Coke with Natalie to give myself a little mid-day caffeine burst. At check out the guy rang it up and it was about $12, plus the tip I put on it. "Holy Smokes!" I thought to myself, this inflation thing is no joke. Later I looked at my bill and it turns out that upsizing to a combo added $2.99 (not really a great deal and very high margin -- note to self for the future) to the $5.99 sandwich, then the guy had charged me another $1.99 for the drink, which pissed me off. Was it a mistake, or was he taking advantage of me? I momentarily thought about getting in touch with the franchise owner but then decided it wasn't worth it. But I did keep thinking about it, and here I am blogging about it.

But even if the guy did it to rip me off, it was more than offset by the $40 the woman at the desk at my hotel in DC saved me by advising that, instead of paying for parking in the indoor parking lot (apparently not affiliated with the hotel), I should park on the street. "It's free" she said "and I'm looking at two spots right now." How could I not love this woman? If I had had a five or a ten I should have tipped her then and there.

In the end, when it came time to check out, all I had was twenties in my wallet. So I left one next to the bed for the people who clean the room because after many years of not tipping for hotel rooms (I didn't know) or even for take out (I'm an idiot) I am playing catch up with the big cosmic bank.

Green Maserati

As I was walking to the memorial service at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church (nice but far from gaudy, as one would expect) from my cheapish hotel near GWU I was passed by a guy slowly circling the cobblestoned blocks looking for a place to park. He was driving a car painted a color green I had never seen on a car. Not the deep racing green of the old Triumphs and Jaguars of the 60s-70s. Not a loud tacky lime green like you sometimes see on Dodge Chargers or Mitsubishi tuners. No, this was like the green of a healthy deciduous tree or bush. To make matters more astounding, the car was a four door Maserati, with its comely low growl.

Now, as I have shared in the past, the Maserati sedan is the luxury car for which I have the softest spot. Not soft enough, mind you. But they intrigue me. But a custom green paint job? (I confirmed that this isn't a stock color. Of course not. Italians have never painted cars green) Who goes out and gets that? In retrospect, I kind of would have like to talk to the guy behind the wheel -- and of course it was a guy. Who goes out and buys the most demure, understated performance machine on the planet and then paints it a color never before seen on a car? OK. Maybe I've seen something like this on an older Volvo. But that's exactly the point.

Release

Driving up 95 today, headed to DC for a funeral, I decided to get back to listening to "The Magic Mountain," which I had left off back in December when I got back from my road trip to GA and SC. You just can't listen to a book this long in the 20 minute chunks that come with commuting.

The plot -- I will refresh your memory -- is young Hans Castorp coming to the sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim is being treated for tuberculosis. In a shocking turn of events, it turns out that Hans too has the dread disease and must stay to take the cure. When I rejoined the novel a few hours ago, his three week stay had been extended to a year.

Of course, driving north on 95 between Richmond and DC I hit -- you guessed it -- traffic. A bunch of it. It was stop and go for 45-60 minutes. Like Hans Castorp and the other patients, I tried hard not to focus on the passage of time.

And then, 18 months into his own stay, Joachim tells the doctor of his firm intention to leave the mountain and go to join his regiment. The doctor hems and haws, but Joachim will not be swayed. Just about then, the traffic began to ease, and I had this full sensation of opening and moving forward.

Are we doing the same with this whole COVID thing? It's very hard to say. I can tell you for sure that in the rest stops along 95 most people think it's done for sure. Only about 25% are opting in to the now optional masks. Here in DC, where Omicron seems for sure to have turned the corner, things are of course different. Indoor mask wearing seems to be pretty consistent and expected except in restaurants and cafes. I'm in one myself now, having my afternoon pickup. We'll see.

Dream of laundry

Right now I have a client who is fighting cancer and is at home after another round of surgery and some chemo (I think. Having a hard time keeping up from Facebook. Must call her).

Last night I dreamt that I was over at her house, having promised to help out. One of the things I had either promised or seemed to need doing was laundry. First I gathered it up and it seemed like there was an awful lot of it. Then we were talking and I got distracted and she got a phone call which was actually an amusing video of some sort from someone on the faculty at Chapel Hill (she lives in Brooklyn, has no relation to Chapel Hill, so it was "random" except it was a dream so nothing is really random). Other distractions happened, time kept passing and I didn't do much helpful though we hung out and amused ourselves. Then finally I gathered up the laundry and found that it had mysteriously shrunk in volume but whatever. I went to get it started but got confused because her living room was decorated with lots of vintage washers and dryers, many of which looked very similar, though actually they were more the size of microwaves.

Border troubles

Last week Facebook told me it was the birthday of Volodya, who had led a section of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or something back at Yale, so I checked in on his feed, remembering that he had not been altogether party line Democrat back during the Trump administration. Don't think he was a flat out Trumper, but he wasn't saying exactly the same things as everyone else. He chairs the Slavics Department at Brown now.

Sure enough, there he was posting some videos of himself as a talking head on Chinese-government sponsored CGTN (their version of RT) arguing that the US was exaggerating the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, grounding his argument on the fact that -- amongst other things -- 100k troops on the border is not much more than the 80k that have been there more or less constantly for the last few years. I fact checked this to the best extent I could using Google for 10 minutes and found that, indeed, in 2018 there had been 80k troops there.

Through numerous channels I am now seeing that the Russians are more or less claiming that the West is manufacturing the crisis in Ukraine for its own benefit. There is some merit to the claim that Biden needs to repair its image after the mud on its face in Afghanistan, but I'm not seeing the motive for Germany and the rest of Western Europe.

Gotta hustle now. In the very big picture, there's no question that the ever-tightening alignment of Moscow and Beijing is not a good sign, and it has been going on for years now. But slow strategic containment is our best approach. Demographic decline and the lack of both Russia and China's ability to generate exportable entrepreneurial ideas in the absence of deep interplay with the West will doom them in the end. But we ourselves need to open up to immigrants to offset our own demographic challenges.  

The Quickening of the Day

It's evening now, but this topic came to me first thing in the morning and then got blown away by the day itself. The quickening. Which happens when I sit down and think about all the things that could be done in the day, which starts to take on a momentum and life of its own, despite the exhausted state in which I so often begin it.

Which is, all in all, a good thing. Though a little too often I find myself getting sucked down into little bullshit systems tweaks and integrations which divert me from the funner stuff. But it nonetheless beats the alternative of having nothing to do.

A highlight of my day today was attending a Zoom AA meeting at Mary's family's old church in Larchmont, a meeting I had gone to many times when the family still owned the house in the Manor. Somehow I had missed my normal meeting on Saturday and I know better than to let too long go between meetings. Thought about attending one in Rochester then lost the URL, then remembered the one in Larchmont and, sure enough, they are running hybrid there, so there were maybe 10 people there in the room in the basement but also another 12 or so online. Which was all good.

In the middle of it my office mate poked his head in and offered to buy me lunch at Sister Liu's if I went and picked it up cuz he had a guest in the house. A reasonable trade, all in.

I guess I might as well head home now, though Mary has a meeting till 8 and Graham has one with a coach too. Modern living.

A calm, trim day

It was actually an odd weekend, in that I made pancakes on Saturday because I planned to be out with a prospect on Sunday morning, fully intending to get a bacon, egg and cheese at Deli Edison on Sunday. All of this in fact came to pass and it was all good, save for the fact that they gave me my sandwich on a bagel -- admittedly a rather good one -- instead of the requested hard roll. As we have all heard, it's hard to hire right now and somebody goofed my order. 

As we grind on towards what we hope will be the close of this pandemic my horizons have obviously slimmed down a little. My days vary little. This weekend was a standout in that I napped not once but twice on the couch in my study. Today's was extra-delicious.

Yesterday there was of course tennis.

With little variety in my life, the fodder for the blog narrows ever further into more or less what I read and watch and what I think. I suppose it has been ever thus, but I'm really feeling it right now. The approach of spring and the seeming fading of Omicron will, I hope, broaden my horizons a bit, which will in turn diversify what I can bring to the blog. For your sake, dear reader, I hope so.

One highlight, just remembered. Was over at Alan Haig's sweet new crib last night for the Duke-Carolina game (let us never speak of it again) and Cashwell was there, natch. He told me that his son Sam, maybe two-three years younger than Natalie -- remembered her from their days together at Gwynn Valley as having been very kind to him. As we roll on through the years, this stuff matters.

TGIF

It's been another of those five day weeks. Five consecutive days. Moreover, earlier statements about Saturday being my sabbath notwithstanding, I find that I have a walk with a prospect scheduled for first thing in the morning tomorrow because that's when he can meet. I will miraculously transform that into play by going to Deli Edison afterwards for a breakfast sandwich. Then I have tennis at 12:30.

But I will also need to carve out some of the foregone Saturday into a lower-intensity Friday, which can easily be arranged with the aid of my COVID-era work attire (to wit, sweatpants, soft long sleeve T-shirt, slippers) and my home office set up.

My car is having scheduled maintenance by the good people of Auto Logic, always a fine feeling. In the evening we have planned Peruvian take-out from the new place on Elliot, Alpaca (no, wait, the interweb tells me it's not open yet, but it's an NC chain with 10 locations at present, so I am all for it).

Today I will work on some new problems: helping a client and old friend learn to manage credit card debt; helping a medical practice 401k client track down a new CPA that can help them select and implement new systems so that the practice manager can start taking things off her plate and downshift over the next decade; scheduling time with mom and some real estate types to help us keep slimming our real estate portfolio up in Roxboro and simplifying our lives; a little continuing education coursework so I'm ready for my late April renewal of a professional credential. Work.

Tired in the morning, a pattern?

Had a fine night of sleep last night after a couple of less good ones. You would think I would awake fully refreshed, but no. I am tired still.

What could it be? Am I a little tweaked from giving blood yesterday afternoon? Possibly. Apparently giving blood impacts various people differently. Am I beat up from playing tennis on hard courts yesterday? Could be. Certainly it is harder on the old joints than clay courts, and Z and I have had to make do with hard ones for the last few weeks as we work through this whole highly objectionable "winter" thing that has beset us of late. Is it COVID that I got while sitting with a mask off at the Red Cross place on University Drive in Durham yesterday, eating Cheez Its and cheap chocolate chip cookies (they had no Nutterbutters)? Probably not. But you never know. Or am I experiencing the cumulative effects of several years without a proper vacation after catching up with a client who was headed to the British Virgin Islands late in the day Monday? This is the most likely culprit, which is why I have set a proper two-week vacation as a goal for 2022. By which I mean sitting in one pretty place, not acting as the logistics and touring manager for my family in some exotic locale.

One thing that seems certain is that I am not worn out from watching the 2013 Muscle Shoals documentary last night. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a pretty amazing story at the heart of R&B, rock and roll and Southern Rock.

Dream of the Cruise Ship home purchase

I was up last night from 3 to 5ish and tried out some of the tricks I had read about for "second sleep," the time when people back in the olden days would wake in the middle of the night and do some work or sit by the fire or whatever before going back to bed. Naturally, I used the time to do so reading, to make a little headway in the Helen Oyeyemi novel that Natalie lent me when I asked for some suggestions off of her shelves.

In the end, however, I had to take sleeping pills. It happens sometimes. Eventually I went back to sleep and I dreamt that for some reason we had sold our house and bought this old fashioned cruise ship which specialized in doing dinner cruises, formal dinners, off the coast down near Wilmington or something. I had the impression that I remembered the ship from another dream. All the rooms on this ship were small, I had no idea where I would put my books, and I completely dreaded the idea of having this nightly dinner obligation. We had to close on the transaction around April 15th. "What the fuck was I thinking?" I thought in my dream.

I was beyond delighted when Mary's alarm went off sometime around 8. Saved by the bell, again.