Catching the worm

I woke up this morning at 5:30, not because of anything so rational as a cat meowing at my door, but really just because of the weight of client issues that I can't solve on top of everything else, including, as a bonus, the fact that our other cat Leon decided he was tired of Rascal getting all the attention so he did a little puking on a rug himself last night. In short, if I am honest with myself, most of my struggles right now are about aging, entropy and lack of control. What else is new?

With the Premier League season completed, it's easier for me to carve out time to continue on with our friend Noralee as she makes her way down the West Coast of Africa. In last night's episode she entered into Guinea-Bissau from Senegal. The episode proceeds largely at a mellow pace till we reach the last seven minutes or so, when she walks around the seemingly well-manicured streets of the old part of the capital Bissau and tells us that there's a ship out in the harbor burning what sounds like bunker fuel to generate electricity which is the only centralized source of electricity in the whole country. Beyond that it's all private generators. The World Bank promises hydroelectric but nobody believes it.

Small wonder that people in countries like this could really give a fuck about what's going on in Ukraine and how we think they should feel about it. Though the President of Guinea-Bissau was received in Moscow by Putin and also visited Zelensky in Kyiv.

Wikipedia tells us that Guinea-Bissau, like other places in West Africa, has been adopted by Latin American gangs as a favored place for the transshipment of drugs to Europe.

Not our best day

Frankly, today was a bit disheartening. We had a follow up with Mary's plastic surgeon, who let us know that a little cellulitis Mary has been experiencing but has not fully resolved needs to fully resolve, so she'll be staying on an antibiotic for another week. It's not that continuing on the drug is bad, it's just that we want to see progress. If in a couple of days we don't see progress we may need to try another antibiotic lest something more drastic be needed...

This comes after a somewhat dicey moment on Sunday when Mary was doing some range of motion activities first thing in the morning while I was making pancakes. When hers were ready, she put her head down on the table saying she felt lightheaded, then asked me to help her walk over to the couch so she could lay down. When she was about three steps from the couch, I felt her knees buckling and I helped her lie down on the floor. We took her blood pressure and it was super low.

It being the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I knew we weren't going to no emergency room, so I did the only rational thing and called the cardiologist who lives next door and asked if he could come up to our house. He came over and took Mary's pulse and blood pressure, which was closer to normal. He decided that Mary had had a "vagal" event, basically a psychosomatic freakout, a theory which Mary was also by then touting. He told the story of how his wife had fainted not once but three times at their wedding, including when they were proceeding out of the church ("I wasn't sure what the protocol was in that situation, do you step over the bride or around the bride?"). Mary got through the day.

Really the main thing is that three weeks after surgery we want to be entirely on the good foot, but we're not there. Particularly as we have another "procedure" coming up next Tuesday to make sure no cancer has made it to Mary's lymph nodes.

I wasn't really sure if I needed to write all of this, but honestly by now I think I will be happy in the future to have a real record of where we are at right now, as opposed to some random paragraphs I grind out pro forma to fulfill my implicit contract with my many, many devoted readers. I know from looking at past posts that I actually prefer the real ones to the writerly ones. 

That personal touch

In earlier posts I have described our situation with our cat Rascal, how we have to titrate servings of food to her (and therefore to Leon, because she will totally raid his bowl, as he will hers if the mood is right). Rascal lets us know when she wants to be fed by meowing vigorously. In recent weeks and months, she has taken to meowing first thing in the morning when her breakfast is due. And we feed her.

When we were at a fundraiser and Perri and Carter's a few weeks back Mary saw that they had a machine to feed the cats and a light bulb went off inside her head. She did extensive research on features and ordered up a couple of programmable machines from one of the companies we all love to hate but which exerts such an inexorable pull on our dollars.

So now we have a couple and have programmed them to feed the cats at various points in the day and night. The first night it worked like a charm. The second night... despite having a hearty portion shot out of the machine at her at 4:30, Meow appeared at 6 at the top of our stairs, moaning through the door. Eventually I got up so she wouldn't wake Mary. I was supposed to be on the tennis court at 9 for a little mixer and wanted to have eaten and gotten all coffeed up. I went downstairs and looked at her bowl. There was plenty of food in there.

What's the problem with this cat? Is it that she wants the "fresh food", straight out of the air tight container? Possibly. I think it's just as likely that she wants food served by human hands, that personal touch, just as I longed for cafes au lait made by baristas rather than machines when I was in France last summer. Ah, modernity, in all its splendor.

Growling engines at night

Of late when I go out on our porch late at night, all too often I'm hearing loud engines gunning in the distance. It's hard to tell where they are. All they way back on Franklin? Over on Weaver Dairy? Just across the lake on North Lake Shore?

It's apparently quite a thing out there in America. Jackasses driving around in their trucks, on motorcycles, trumpeting their would be penis size through their tailpipes. The worst of this we've heard, undoubtedly, was in Houston two years ago when we were there for the national robotics championship we were on the 6th floor of our hotel, I think, but it was on a pretty major thoroughfare and 6 was nowhere near high enough to get us outside the range of the cacophony of Texas masculinity growling up at us from the streets. I think I didn't fall asleep till 3 am one night, which is super late for me.

The other night I heard the engines after having a rather apocalyptic conversation with a local tech billionaire type about some work he's been doing on global warming issues, though he fears the horse has long since left the barn. It was hard not to hear the roaring engines in the distance as confirmation of his fears.

Fretting woes

For some years now I've been playing on this beautiful old Gibson that had been rescued from the attic in Larchmont. Not sure if it was originally George's or Beth's. I had never changed the strings because I'm ridiculously lazy about some things. Eventually I decided the thing to do was to take it in to the shop in Carrboro (Twin House Music) to have them not just change the strings but give it whatever forms of TLC it needed.

When I went to pick it up they were super-enthusiastic about it, telling me it was a 1966 Gibson something-something and that it might be worth $3500-$4000. Being well-schooled practitioners of the art of sales, they suggested that a guitar that valuable should really have a higher-quality case than my flimsy one.

I was very happy when I got it home and started strumming and picking, except... when I was finger-picking on the B string, something I do a lot of, as do most people who finger pick, I started hearing a fair amount of feedback. WTF? I thought. It's an acoustic guitar. What's with all this buzzing?

At length I decided to take it back up to the store to ask what was going on. One of the repair guys asked to check it out and then played his way up and down all the frets much more dexterously than I typically do. "Sounds OK to me." He said. "Show me what's happening when you play."

Somewhat sheepishly, since I never play in front of people, I picked it up and started playing and showing them what was happening. "Well that's just because you're putting your finger right on top of the fret. You've got to slide it back a ways to get a cleaner sound" he scoffed. User error, apparently. The other guy said much less judgmentally he really couldn't hear much buzzing. So I replaced the guitar in its case and slunk off to have lunch with Greg Bell.

Back at home, am producing feedback even when finger is further back from fret. Maybe the issue is the way my right hand is picking and/or I have have my head too close to the guitar in my Quasimodo playing posture. Really I need to see if I can reproduce the error on another guitar.

In any case, I need to get a harmonica and one of those things that holds it in front of your face like Dylan had so I can to two parts of songs. In the privacy of my own room.

A lot of pizza

On Monday evening a teammate of Graham's from UNC's Quiz Bowl team -- an East Asian young woman named Yvonne -- appeared on Jeopardy and barely lost to the reigning champion but acquitted herself quite well. Graham invited a bunch of the Quiz Bowl kids over to our house to watch the goings on. Of course we had to feed them and of course the natural candidate for dinner was pizza, which we of course had to get from the venerable Sal's out on Homestead.

There has long been a debate in our home about how to feed guests. I have always espoused the theory that if you don't have too much food, you can't be sure you have enough. Mary, having been raised a Berridge, hates to waste food and therefore is inclined to try to order just the right amount. So I was quite pleased when I pulled into the driveway Monday evening right about the same time as Mary returned from Sal's (their proposed delivery fee seemed extravagant). We were expecting maybe 9 kids plus the two of us and Mary had ordered five large pizzas. Well done!

But of course, as is often the case, the kids ate less pizza then we thought they would. One of them had already had dinner. Others of them were, I suspect, just shy about feasting. Or maybe they're just not gluttons like me. At any rate we ended up with a lot of extra pizza, a surplus we are currently eating through. I would be willing to eat the stuff breakfast, lunch and dinner until we polished it off, but Mary looks askance at this practice. We may have to invoke Rob, who leans vegan but will eat anything if it is about to go to waste, to work through the surfeit.

Another productive day at home

I stayed home today because, frankly, we had a lot of pizza in the fridge (still do) and a friend from down the street was planning to have lunch with me. It just seemed stupid to leave the house. As per usual with days when I don't leave the house, I actually got a lot done due to fewer distractions and also my ability to slide over to my office couch -- on which I am sitting now, gentle reader -- and do a little reading.

And yet the day nonetheless feels incomplete. I feel like one is supposed to leave the house during the work day, to get out there in the world and see other people. Yes, somebody came to me and yes, I did spend about 3 hours between Zoom and the phone talking to team members and clients about both this and that, but something is missing.

I will, for sure, go for a little walk before hanging it up today, which will get me my pro forma leaving of the house. Perhaps I will even sneak out to buy some kitty litter, because we are running low.

The Holdovers

We matched The Holdovers over the weekend. I guess I hadn't read many reviews because I thought it was going to be a light-hearted comedy, a lark. And in truth, there are money moments of mirth to be had in it, but it is nonetheless a serious film. Turns out it had stuck in my mind over so much of the other dreck that barely rises up to my attention because it had been nominated for a number of Oscars and had even won one.

I'm not sure the movie was all that good, in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't. But it was a very rare attempt to be an earnest and entirely character-focused film, a total throwback to the 70s in which it is set. For this reason alone The Holdovers deserves some kind of prize, despite the entirely syllogistic progress of its plot.

And yeah, they did a great job with the sets and the cars and the ambience and the performances and characters were solid. I wanted to like the protagonists and in the end I did. I hope the machine makes more such movies and I will try to patronize them.

Parking Prii

My apologies for the consecutive car-related posts, but this is -- after all -- the US of A, car culture central. Except for those subversives amongst us who huddle in our "little" (for by European or Japanese standards they're not really small at all) hybrid things.

At any rate, I've been driving Prii for a full twelve years now, starting with the 2010 Prius C (now known as Beatrice and driven primarily by Mary) we acquired in 2012, followed by the V (the middle greenish-blue car in the picture below). This comes to 29% of my driving years on planet Earth, or, more precisely if you exclude the years I lived in NYC and Moscow -- much of which I lacked a driver's license because of trouble with drinking, driving, and NCDMV -- north of 33% of my driving. Despite this, I have still never quite accustomed myself to consistently pulling as far forward into parking spaces as the snub nose of the Prius permits.

So I was very happy to see this morning, and of course I realized this only after I had gotten out of my car, that I had once more failed to pull forward far enough. And then, to compound the wonder of it all, a third Prius, a darker one just visible over the top of the V, made the same error and pulled up short. So we had a small fleet of Prii with their butts sticking out into the parking lot.  Go Team Prius!

Of course, American parking spaces are amply proportioned so as to fit all the F-150s, Silverados, Hummers and other boat-like vehicles that fill us with so much pride and patriotism. So nobody is harmed. But I'll bet there are some drivers of SUVs and whatnot who secretly seethe and fume when they see us Prius drivers do this. But fuck em.

100,000

Our 2014 Prius V, by far our newest car, just crossed the 100,000 mile mark yesterday. She had about 24k when we took delivery of her back in 2017, rolling off a truck on an access road by 15-501 after being shipped up to us from Florida by our good friends at Car Pal. So we've been doing in the neighborhood of 10k a year on our primary road trip car for over a decade, which is not too shabby given that we are working to shrink down our carbon footprint as best we can.

Moreover, the last 10,000 have taken us since January of '23, because I remember rolling through 90,000 out near Lake Mattamuskeet when Mary was out there taking pictures that comprise her Gamelands series, highlighted below. Not too shabby.

4000

This is the 4,000th published post of the Grouse, which now spans the period from parenting toddlers to the onset of what some might think of as late in life problems, but which I am preferring to view as bumps in the road. The fact that this has happened in slightly less than 20 years makes us reflective of our generation, which has been in aggregate having kids at progressively older ages. I'll return some other day to the threat of this demographic bust to the global economy. At least we had two.

We will roll forward. When I started the blog, I had little idea that it would become what threatens to become at lifelong project. In its early stages it was beset by a bunch of clowns who thought it would be funny to pretend to be auto-generated comments touting penile enhancements, which was a common theme of the aughts. Actually they did some good work, but proved to have little stamina. I have decidedly outlasted them.*

To all of you who have ridden shotgun with me through this ever-thrilling adventure in sitting and typing, I offer thanks and praise. I look forward to seeing all of you here or there, for lunch or coffee or whatever, and to hear what's up with you and what's on your mind.

* Unlike last night, when Z had more stamina than me and saw me off 7-5, 7-6 (7-5) over 2.5 hours in the thrilling final of the regular season of the Farm 3.5 men's singles championship. I am coming for him in the playoffs.

What's going on

The most stalwart readers amongst you may well have wondered what has been going on with my lack of posts in recent weeks and days. Here's the deal.

Mary has breast cancer. She had some surgery about 10 days ago and we've been dealing with that. I've not been writing about it, as I alluded, out of a concern for privacy but it's really not tenable to have a blog about your life and not write about the biggest things going on in it.

Admittedly, I have for the entire period of the blog studiously abided by a policy of not writing things critical of my wife or, to as great an extent possible, other family members and even friends. Who wants to read somebody bitching about other people, after all? More importantly, there's always tension in relationships, particularly close ones, and learning to manage through them and accept that you're not always right (indeed quite often if not most of the time you're not), is a big part of life.

Cancer falls into another category of personal matters, however. To the extent that accepting, dealing with, and managing through it will be a big theme in my life going forward, I'm not going to keep it off the table anymore.

On the other hand, I'll try not to let the blog devolve entirely into a granular recounting of her and our cancer journey. There are plenty of those available in book form, on the interweb, what have you. But the topic overweens in our personal experience so much that I can hardly write about my life without writing about it.

The Permanent Record

Last night I dreamed that I returned to the Columbia Slavics Department (located on the 7th floor of Hamilton Hall, which was recently seized by protesters prior to being liberated by NYPD).* Of course the physical appearance of the dream department looked almost nothing like the place in real life.

When I got there I saw there was a short line of people standing there waiting to be serviced by someone behind a desk like one might have in a library or old-fashioned bank. Naturally I got in line and waited my turn. Of course I knew some of the people in line, including Sasha Mihailovich, who had actually TA'd a section I was in at Yale, not at Columbia, and had been on the ACTR trip I took to the Soviet Union back in '87. It was very nice to see him.

When I got to the front of the line I asked if I could have a look at my Permanent Record. "Your Permanent Record?" asked the young woman behind the desk, apparently unaccustomed to fielding these kind of requests. "Yeah," I said. But she didn't hesitate much, she pretty much turned around and pulled my Permanent Record -- an accordion file stuffed with a wide range of papers -- off of a shelf and handed it to me. I took the file to one of the tables in a decent-sized reading room and started going through it. I was surprised to see that it contained stuff going back as far as elementary school and started to take pictures of the stuff with my phone. Then I woke up.

* Note that the only bound copy of my master's thesis -- which looked at installations by Ilya Kabakov as well as Life: A User's Manual, by George Perec -- is located in the Slavics Reading Room up there on the 7th floor. I do hope it's OK.

Police on campus

There has been a lot of hue and cry about bringing police onto the campuses of our fancier universities. One Columbia faculty member was up in arms about how a car backfiring on Amsterdam Avenue could set off a bloodbath on campus. There have, indeed, been instances where excessive force seems to have been used by cops. The author of TriangleBlogBlog wrote of cops coming onto UNC campus and pepper spraying indiscriminately. Lucy just validated that story and said it was worse than that. Graham told me about seeing video of a faculty member at Columbia getting her head bashed against the concrete by NYPD. Not good. What with other stuff I've had going on I haven't had time to track all of this. I'm sure there's more. The Chapel Hill Police reportedly didn't take part in coming onto UNC's campus because of the bad optics, which is an interesting and probably good call. 

Much of the issue is that the top tier college campuses largely exist above the law. I remember being acutely conscious of this when we would hang out on the roof of my residential college at Yale drunk and/or stoned. The function of the gates and moats and all that was to keep the law out so that we kids of the middle class and up and could their own wild rumpus, free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. People like Brett Kavanaugh certainly loved this immunity back in their day. One of his freshman roommates is a friend of mine, a gay punk rocker type, who told of having a dead pigeon nailed to his door. Kavanaugh and his buds were the only logical people to have done it, but my friend had no concrete evidence so he couldn't aggressively take it to the press back during Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

Campus security largely exist to keep kids safe and keep outside threats away, but they do not get all down in students' business for the most part. So there certainly aren't enough of them to reimpose order when kids start seizing buildings and ripping shit up aggressively.

Another reason people want to keep cops off college campuses is that, on average, cops are Trump voter types who at some level fucking hate the kids and the faculty. The reason they are quick to break out a little pepper spray is that they can and the blue wall makes it hard to make charges stick to them. They're still not stupid enough to go shooting kids with guns for no reason, but the fog of war provides them with some opportunities for mischief.