Letting go of hot sauce and salt

My nephrologist team suggested that I dial back on salt in response to my mild hypertension. This, it goes without saying, is a hard thing to do, though I understand the principle and the rationale and I even get it when they told me to cut down on food that comes in boxes, cans, and from restaurants. They had it all tied up in some nifty acronym which I have since forgotten.

In truth, I am trying. I have given up adding salt to anything whenever I can and keep in mind their injunction about hyper-processed foods. Needless to say, it ain't easy and I am far from anything vaguely resembling 100% compliance.

At the same time, I am making an effort to cut back a little on my tendency to put hot sauce on as many things as possible. I don't have a specific health directive around this effort, it has more of a strictly aesthetic/ascetic goal, namely to try to reconnect with and better appreciate quiet pleasures, to find more in less. So far, so good.

Off the Road again

Returned late yesterday from my second ski trip out west with college friends. In many regards, the results were much the same. I had a nice day in Boulder with Leslie (this time augmented by a freshly-retired Walter). I escaped unscathed by injury and didn't even gain weight despite eating pretty freely while out there. I improved my skiing, but didn't push myself too hard.

In terms of hanging, this year's trip was an improvement over last year's because I was more used to being with this bunch of guys and knew more what to expect. We never were able to quite arrive at something to watch after dinner that was perfect for everyone. What was different is that rather than try to go through the grueling work of squaring that circle perfectly, the outliers just peeled off and went to bed. 

It's late now and I've got to get on with the day. I had taken a short hiatus from the trying to jam blog posts in every day but Danny was working hard to convince me that regular practice is essential for any flourishing practice. I'm still not certain if 240 is the right number of posts to target for the year. Does a number like that promote the production of dreck?

Upcoming wedding

I opened Facebook this morning (it tends to happen sometime during your average day) to find a post announcing the engagement of Emily, daughter of my good friend Eric from college. I started crying from joy immediately. I don't know why I was struck so hard. I think that, as an almost 58-year old, we are getting to the place in our lives where we should be going to more marriages to offset the steady cadence of funerals, mostly those of our parents' generation but also, to be sure, of some of our peers. Like Rick a couple of weeks back.

Emily was two or so when we wound up our honeymoon at Eric and Anna's place outside of Rome back in '97. We have very sweet pictures of her running around at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope's summer place up in the hills south of Rome) and being wrapped in a warm blanked coming out of her bath. Super sweet memories.

Really I have nothing else to say. A great way to start the day as I get ready to head out to Colorado to ski with other college buddies.

Of Wisdom Teeth and the Raging Zombie

I had held off going into these details for a little while, but for posterity's sake I think this story needs to be told. As I have mentioned in passing already, Graham got his wisdom teeth out a few weeks ago. The process did not pass without drama.

Graham has never been a fan of needles and having blood taken. Who really is, after all? With him this aversion is a little stronger than average. So when the assistant to the oral surgeon asked whether Graham would rather have his blood sampled before or after he went under general anesthesia for the procedure, he was agitated. Then they put him under and did their thing on his mouth.

When he awoke, he was not in good shape. Mary had taken him, and when they brought her into the room when he was coming out from under the drugs his mouth was all bloody because he was pulling the gauze out (it had evoked a reaction from his choking aversion) and he was banging his head against the back of the dental chair.

Then he sprang into action. When the assistant leaned over him to unhook something he grabbed her, pulling her closer to him. He said he had wanted to grab the pens in her pockets to use them as weapons (which makes me doubt the wisdom of watching all those John Wyck films with him). They called in the whole team to restrain him -- it was Mary and four members of the team.

Somewhere in there Mary texted frantically that I needed to come help her get him out of there. Then she changed her mind. Then again when they were in the parking lot (though had rolled him out there in a wheelchair. He refused to get in the car, later saying that he was thinking it was cold and he wanted them to be cold). Eventually he got in the car and came home.

When he was walking in the house he looked like a zombie. Very pale with blood caked around his mouth. When we were asking him about what he was thinking he said something like: "I just wanted justice. They had hurt me so I wanted to hurt them.". 

We were all gathered in the kitchen, all four of us plus Mary's brother Rob. Shortly after Graham made the above statement, Natalie was walking between the kitchen island and cubbard cabinets when she fell to the ground. She was on her back and her eyes were moving back and forth as her whole body shuddered. I freaked right the fuck out. We were all afraid she was having a seizure. I got up and ran to my phone to call 911 when she came to. Apparently she had fainted. 

Whew. What a morning. Apparently what happened to Graham wasn't crazy uncommon. Maybe 15-20% of people have short-term adverse reactions to general anesthesia. I think it didn't interface well with his autism and anxiety about having blood taken, so his reaction was pretty extreme. 

Mary and I talked and decided not to discuss it with him for a few days, but when she did, he said he recognized that he had been in an altered state and had behaved badly.

Pushing back on self love

Somewhere in my consumption of content the story of Gladys McGarey flashed across my field of vision. She's a 103-year old doctor who is still working. Intrigued, and with a lot of Audible credits to burn through, I snagged her book and started listening to it in the car.

Turns out McGarey was one of the earliest practitioners of holistic medicine, so I've been hearing a lot about that. One of the things she advocates is the power of love and, specifically, self-love. She instructs listeners to do things like hug themselves.

My interest was flagging a little bit and I started listening to another podcast (The Vital Center by Geoff Kabaservice, a guy I went to college with who literally wrote the book about moderate Republicans and is probably as close to the purest-bred RINO that Trump et al could imagine. Really a smart guy) which is interesting, but then I realized that my problem with McGarey's book is not so much that I was bored with it but that I was resisting it. There's a lot of truth in there but not the kind of truth the grinder in me predisposes himself towards. So I've gone back to listening to this joyful old doctor and reflecting on how it might apply to my life. 

Progress report

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was undertaking the project of a financial daily reader. Part of me still thinks that's a good format, because I'm obviously used to writing regularly in short and daily chunks. Another part of me (and I'm not about to say which part that is) wonders if in fact I would be better served to try to write a coherent book-length argument about the nature and practice of personal finance before decomposing it across the span of the year. I have at least begun the process of laying out the daily reader across months. It could be that the process of assembling the thought chunks will instead lend itself to a unified argument.

I have not yet managed to disentangle myself from DuoLingo. In our semi-annual confab in support of my meds maintenance, my psychiatrist confirmed what I had read, namely that there are real cognitive benefits to continued language study. Not that he knows everything, but I'll respect his opinion.

Most importantly, I have begun to settle on some guitar gurus to help me, especially with Travis picking, the very bedrock of all finger-style guitar. I need only take the leap from watching videos to regular practice. Or, rather, I need to stop watching videos and just practice more.

What has suffered from all this, sadly, is my TV viewing. Such is life. But as I watch less, I feel enriched by the way my back queue of potential shows and movies to watch gets deeper and deeper on the platforms.

Me and my big mouth

When Thomas came and built us built in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, we had to fill them with something, so we harvested a great number of books from the overflow of the shelves in Graham and Natalie's rooms. When they were trimmed down, we went to the only place left, the shelves in my office. So now I have a lot of unsightly empty shelves up here, which is dispiriting and, frankly, a little embarrassing. Really there's onlm one solution to this conundrum and it's rather obvious. I need to buy more. I picked up a few at Flyleaf on Friday, but that really only nibbled around the edges of the problem.

So when Mary complained about the boredom of running around the lake every day -- which I understand -- I saw an opening and suggested that maybe we should break out and go for a hike down at the White Pines Preserve down between Pittsboro and Sanford. I also wanted to take a quick gander at the progress of Chatham Park and, obviously most importantly, stop into Circle City Books in Pittsboro, far and away the best used book store on our end of the Triangle. I was able to pop through and snap up eight solid books in about 15-20 minutes, several of which were on my Amazon list (thanks for providing us with such great list functionality, Jeff!), one of which was an impulse buy at the register, a book on Bill Gross of PIMCO which I can mentally characterize as work.

And now there they are, gleaming on my bookshelf, calling out for attention (actually I am making my way through Ted Chiang's Exhalation, which I had found on Natalie's shelves). Problem is, I absolutely, unequivocally promised that I would caulk the upstairs shower this weekend. We even stopped at Lowe's last night to pick up the supplies. I fear there is no escaping this.

(Monday update: somehow I had neglected to publish this. The caulking is 95% done. Turns out getting "all the old caulk" off, as everyone says you should, is practically impossible. Caulk removal is very much a Pareto process, and the last 20% is a vexing challenge)/

Shabbos squared

As I'm sure I have shared before, Martin Luther King Jr Day is perhaps my most favorite holidays, both because it commemorates a great guy and also because there's almost nothing ever scheduled this weekend, which makes it a time of proper rest at the end of the much busier "holiday season." Today I kicked off the holiday weekend properly with a postprandial nap on my beloved office couch. Later I will play tennis.

I am studiously foreswearing anything resembling work, including home improvement tasks. This latter actually takes very little effort for me, as it is something I have rather successfully practiced for many decades now, with little to no negative impact on my marriage. I probably shouldn't even be blogging.

Financial daily reader

For years now part of my morning routine has been reading from a daily reader from Al Anon, which dispenses a page-length nugget of wisdom to help one center. There are three such readers historically and a new one just came out. I'm sure there are many more examples of the genre, because for example Tolstoi compiled one of sayings from others, but it is largely insufferably didactic, which is really no surprise because that's how Lev Nikolaevich rolled in his later years. Nick Murray has one that is dedicated expressly for financial advisors. I have read it for years but may give it a pass in 2024 to let it refresh itself in the fertile garden of forgetting.

I recently listened in the car to Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, a worthy listen and read. It got me thinking that he should produce one of these daily readers of financial wisdom for a general audience. But then I thought, hold on a minute, why should he do it? Why not the Grouse?

So I have stubbed out an outline document for this project and begun the process of thinking about a flow. This may draw attention away from the blog. I may have to beg your forbearance, dear reader.

Graham's mismatched shoes

My apologies to those of you who read this yesterday, I thought I was saving a draft and accidentally published. Let's consider that a trailer for the actual post.

We took Graham back up to his dorm room Monday night, after I had left work on the early side to take him to Nordstrom at the mall to buy him a nice shirt and pants to match his nice jacket so that he'd be ready for any interview that might come his way this semester. Along with the syringe for irrigating the spaces left by his removed wisdom teeth (another tale yet to be told), he left his good black shoes at home. For some reason he had decided to bring them home for the holidays.

Because Graham hates shopping, his shoes are an old pair of my shoes. In the morning I was gathering them up so Mary could take them to him, I was looking at them and remembered how comfortable they were and actually admiring how passably fashionable they were, especially as I'm in my 50s and don't have to give much of a fuck about what anyone thinks of my fashion sense any more. So I put the left one on.

Strangely, it didn't seem well molded to my foot. Then I looked at it and compared it to its pair mate: it looked much newer. Then I turned them over. This is what they looked like.

Clearly, this was not my shoe. It was, rather... AN IMPOSTOR. But a clever one at that. It is the same model, the same size, just a whole lot younger (not unlike the relationship of Graham to me). 

Did his roommate have the exact same model shoe in the same size? Did they get confused with a team mate's shoe on some Quiz Bowl trip? When asked Graham, not surprisingly, had no idea. We may never solve this mystery, Dear Reader, but we will appoint a Special Counsel to dig in and get to the bottom of it and report back, in the fullness of time.

Pets in the lifecycle

A quarter of a century ago, I thought about pets primarily as means of young adults getting ready to be parents. Learning to deal with other beings' excrement and need for food, recreation, etc. Learning to manage one's temper when another being gets riled up out of an understanding that failure to do could have feedback effects on the other. Etc. etc.

Our cats are getting older. In recent months Rascal had been puking a lot, more or less on an every day basis. I had discovered that some seltzer did a pretty good job at getting it out of almost everything, and indeed may have underreported this to Mary while she was away in Alaska just because she would have freaked out a little. By November it was getting old, so Mary took her to the vet and discovered that Rascal was hyperthyroidal and that there was a treatment for this: rubbing a cream on the inside of her ear for every day FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE. Fortunately, it seems to be working for now and we are now on a vomit-free streak of a week or so. Also, the cats are being much more productive in the litter box of late, I'll leave it at that. There's a clear understanding around the house that the cats are old (14 or 15) and may not be with us forever. 

All of which leads me to believe that pets have the additional function of normalizing the over life arc within families. Watching pets live out their lives prepares all of us, and kids in particular, to experience the deaths of loved ones. 

Not a particularly deep insight, but one that was drilled home this morning as I scooped the litterbox and carried out a bag that had been filled up in two days. Of course, there's also a positive interpretation of that. Rascal had lost a lot of weight due to her hormonal imbalance and may just be eating more to regain weight. Also, both the cats have been drinking heavily from the sweet sweet piney water of the Christmas tree, which will soon follow its own lifecycle and exit the home.

Grinding and Building in the age of generative AI

Generative AI tools have been out there for over a year and, in my typical not-so-fast-follower fashion, I haven't really engaged with them. Instead, I continue to grind on building competencies the old fashioned way. I keep studying languages on DuoLingo, reading books and magazines, and writing this blog, instead of upskilling myself on various tools that could perform these linguistic and intellectual functions for me.

There's a fundamental dichotomy here. Is the task to figure out how to avail oneself of various functionalities the most efficient way or to build strengths for ourselves? We approach this problem differently based on the type of tasks we need to perform. As far as transportation is concerned, we long ago pretty much gave that up and decided that we'd adopt tools (trains, autos, planes, boats) to get us from place to place rather than cultivate the competencies that would allow us to do that better under our own power (walking, running).

That decision has facilitated modernity, but it has come with many many costs. Traditional communities and cultures have been shattered as it became easier to visit distant people and places. As local cultures have slipped away people have struggled to reconstitute them, sometimes rather farcically. The overcoming of distance has also caused us to overconsume carbon with our cars, trucks, planes, asphalt and deforestation.

Much will be gained as people outsource more and more tasks and functions to AI, but much will also be lost. We just can't clearly envision what that will be.

Conservation and consumption as forms of prayer

As the holidays draw inexorably towards their end (Graham returns to campus this weekend), we continue to chip away at their bounty in the kitchen. We have a lot of bread and sweets (many of these rather mediocre) to work through, moreover largely without Graham's participation since he is still eating a constrained diet while his mouth recovers from the removal of his wisdom teeth last Friday.

This week I am working at home instead of going in to the office to spend more time with Graham and nudge him towards a little greater proactivity in his search for an internship for next summer. As a side effect of that I am mindfully working through our surplus of baked goods, bearing in mind what I wrote about a post or two back, namely that I could stand to lose a few pounds.

This morning for breakfast I made a one-egg omelet with a sliver of smoked salmon and put it on a piece of toast from the batard that Mary had brought home to supplement some festive meal a week and change back. This loaf had spent some time in the freezer, mind you, when our surfeit was particularly large. Now it is being whittled down.

As I sliced it I was transported back to the early days of the pandemic, the really good times, when we were all sequestered together in our homes and worried whether there would be enough of this or that sort of food or paper product in the store. That condition rather focused the mind and aided appreciation of what we had, so that every meal was perceived as an occasion for gratitude. It is a good place to be. 

Family time with boo boos

Just now I accidentally placed a check mark on my task list on the place that indicates I have blogged for the day, when in fact I hadn't. So, let me quickly blog.

Yesterday evening, with our family now whittled down to just Mary, Graham and me and with no parties to go to, we were quietly determined to have a proper family evening at home. It did not go off without mishaps.

First off, the spoon bread. With Graham's limited tooth capacity and also his dislike of mashed potatoes, we're a little limited in what we can feed him. I thought of spoon bread, which had been one of the many specialties of my aunt Francis, AKA The Bread Lady from the early days of the Carrboro Farmer's Market. I grabbed her cookbook from off the shelf and set to work. 

Unfortunately, when it came out of the over and I tasted it, I knew at once that something was amiss. A quick glance back at the recipe brought me to the culprit: I had put dramatically too much baking soda in it, having mistaken the quantity of sugar called for for the quantity of baking soda. It was inedible. Being greatly disappointed, after dinner I tried again, this time doubling the recipe because I wanted there to be enough for me while also leaving a bunch for Graham. This batch came out much better.

Later, we went through the old "find a movie that everyone can agree on" two-step. The first couple of movies, sourced from a NY Times 10 best of 2023 list that featured a number of holiday season releases, were not yet available for streaming or not at a reasonable price. So we tried a recent Wes Anderson release: Asteroid City. In short, it sucks. Wes Anderson has gotten too much validation from the world and descends deeper and deeper into self-indulgence, supported by A-listers such as Tom Hanks and Scarlet Johansson and many others who agree to participated. Don't waste your time.

Still, it was nice to have all of us together watching. It would have been even better if Natalie was still around, but she is off visiting friends around the lower 48 already.

What I'm doing here

The most eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that my pace of blogging diminished in 2023 and I did not make my 20 posts a month target. OK, in fact only one of you likely noticed, aside from me myself. I could see where it was trending and could surely have pulled it out in the last week, but I decided to let it go because nobody really cares and nobody should really care.

First and foremost, I need to stop caring about little crap like that and need to get back to focusing on what's important, not bullshit little metrics like how much I post, how many points a day I get in DuoLingo (I maintained a roughly 400 points a day pace since I fell into the app's dastardly clutches. Again, with focus and effort I could have dragged myself back up to that target, but for what?).

Overall, I need to let the numbers go, unless they are important. I have and make enough money, within reason I need to not get caught up in tracking that, though it's a nice game.

My weight and my blood pressure are probably numbers to keep an eye on. I went to a party last night at a neighbor's house and ate like a motherfucker because the food was so good. This afternoon I'll get out and burn some of that off and in upcoming weeks I'll dial things down. My nephrologist told me to keep an eye on my blood pressure so I'll work on that. Similarly, getting to be early and sleeping enough should continue to be foci. Giving enough money away and figuring out how to balance between politicians (to help bend the needle of policy and governance back towards reason) and charities (for more direct impact) -- that's worthy of attention.

For now, back to this mystery novel (Elizabeth George's A Traitor to Memory), which at 800 pages clocks in rather unnecessarily on the long side. If I didn't care about the arcs of the characters running throughout the novels on the detective team, the smart thing to do would have been to skip it. But since I see that observing these arcs -- as I had failed to do when I read Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series in the order in which I found them in used book stores rather than chronologically -- adds to one's appreciation of the books, I soldier on.