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.

Boldly seeking attention

I recently suffered through a professional blog post in which it seemed like every fourth word was in bold. Similarly, I asked to be removed from the distribution list for a guy I know from college whose emails went on for pages and consisted exclusively of one-sentence paragraphs.

One of the basic rules of writing, of any mode of communication, is that things a writer does to accentuate specific bits of content must be used sparingly. Otherwise you have the boy who cried wolf. If someone continually beats you over the head demanding your attention, it's an admission that she hasn't really earned it and that she knows it. Rules are made to be broken, but if they are being broken all the time, they aren't rules. It's just chaos. 

Lazy Sunday?

As I believe I have shared in the past, I have settled on Saturday as my personal sabbath because it is easier to shut in the demands of the world on Saturdays, compared to Sundays when all the things I feel like I'm supposed to do -- which is all too coterminous with the the things I could do -- come rushing in on me. For example, today I tried sitting in the armchair in our bedroom to differentiate my groove from that of a weekday -- when I end up in the armchair in my study at around 8:15 or 8:30 and check my phone and computer for messages and the day's futures. 

But sitting on this side of the house means I look down at the lake, so I start thinking about lake stuff. Like, for example, how the engineer who certifies our dam told me that I should "observe the dam under different conditions." This winter, unlike last winter, has featured more cold weather and therefore -- potentially at least -- freeze/thaw cycles. As any long-term reader of the blog will be aware, our dam -- built in 1938 with help from the WPA -- comprises stone held together by concrete mortar which, over the course of decades -- has developed cracks which allow water to seep through. While this is absolutely normal for a dam of this sort, one thing it is not is comforting, especially as the population density downstream from our 50 acre lake has probably increased by a factor of not less that 50 in the intervening 8 decades and change. And freeze/thaw cycles, of course, do not strengthen masonry dams with cracks in them, though I have no idea of the time frame or trajectory over which the dam gets weaker. At any rate, I should go down and check it out.

I also need to get some more firewood from our neighbor Scott (for which I need to wait till Graham comes back from robotics to help build the boy's dadgummed upper body), recaulk our shower stall -- especially because Mary spend a lot of time cleaning it on Friday evening, do taxes and create 1099s for a small LLC Mary has with her friends for a book project, make some phone calls for LFA stuff, send some emails to sell Mary's book... I'm exhausted already. In any case, it's almost lunchtime.

 

Fact and fiction

One of the most amazing things about this blog is that it offers me windows on the past when I happen to be perusing things for this reason or that one. For instance, this post from 2012 about a nine-year old Graham who was just learning the distinction between fact and fiction. 

A few minutes back I found myself looking out the window at the snow reflecting on the fact that I needed to wait till Monday to find out what followed from the most recent cliffhanger episode of Sex Education. I believe I have extolled the show in the past, if not, let me do so here. It's quite good.

In any case, it occurred to me my caring about what happened in the show was in fact a function of my own poor boundaries between fact and fiction. Since I know the show is fiction, why should I care about what happens to the characters? The answer, of course, is that it is good fiction, fiction which has made me care about the characters, because it rings true in important ways, despite the fact that so much about the show is utterly ridiculous, far-fetched and idealized (a school in which teenagers talk openly to one another about their sexual hang-ups and deepest insecurities? yeah right).

The show, in short, displays many of the hallmarks of good realism in that it captures an important human reality (characters we want to both like and hate) while idealizing some things and taking ridiculous liberties with plot pacing and probability (Maeve and Otis keep ending up alone by accident) to speed things along.

An important part of growing up, then, is learning that fiction isn't literally real. But just as quickly as we learn that, for strong realistic literature to work, we have to turn right around and accept that there can be something literally real about fiction.

Sadly, I think that nobody outside of Slavics studies the structuralists who came out of Tartu, Estonia and Moscow starting in the 60s and 70s. There were a lot of smart people that came through there, first and foremost amongst them Iurii Lotman. I remember being astounded by his statement in his 1976 Analysis of the Poetic Text that prose is inherently more complex than poetry, because it was always proceeded by negating the things that poetry did to make it art. Something like that. In the end, I think what he meant that artistic prose had to demonstrate that it was different from a simple journalistic or narrative description to demand enough attention to stand the test of time. It had to do something special to elide the distinction between fact and fiction, to walk the tightrope between ideal and real, to hold our attention. 

News, good and bad

First off, the good news. Graham got into UNC. I suppose that with his good grades and SAT scores we should have considered it a foregone conclusion -- he and his friends had looked at the data and concluded that mathematically it would be almost impossible for them not to -- stories nonetheless abound about Chapel Hill kids who should get in but don't, so it was still comforting news. I slept soundly, till about 5 am, then I took a pill.

I woke up exhausted. Between the stress of college search, the years of COVID, weeks of markets going down (which I know is natural but is still no fun, especially when you have any nervous clients, and I have at least one), running the LFA for a couple of years now, trying to push Mary's book out the door, I'm burnt out. Plus client situations. Yesterday I learned that one of my first clients, and old friend from graduate school, got bad news on her cancer. It keeps getting worse. She is a trooper, I love her dearly.

In the near future loom taxes.

Nearer even, thankfully, is this weekend.

My current books

Right now I am in a felicitous place where I'm reading two books, each of which is flowing pretty well, on top of my morning Bible reading (and Mark out in Seattle reminded me that he had given me Robert Alter's translation of Genesis, so I switched over to that for the time being). 

On the literary side, I am reading Claire Messud's Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, which starts off autobiographical. It's entirely possible that if I didn't know Claire, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I am, but I do know her, so it's giving me a lot of background on why she is as she is and was as she was and it's just well written. Her level of recall of little details from growing up is fairly astounding. More than anything, this book makes me wonder about what we talked about when we were in college. I spent a fair amount of time talking to her back then, especially my junior year, her senior year. It's entirely possible that this whole level of detail about her family and backstory is new to me now because I forgot it all, but it's also possible that it never came up in conversation because we didn't ask about that stuff when we were younger, it didn't seem important, that the future loomed larger than the past, or that I was just trying to impress her and was at some level blinded and intimidated by her level of worldliness and sophistication. Or that we were just amusing one another.

On the business side I am making my way through Telephone by John Brooks. Brooks -- for decades one of the New Yorker's main business writers -- wrote this book in 1978 on the 100th anniversary of the telephone, apparently on a somewhat commissioned basis from AT&T, at that time a if not the colossus of American business. And honestly, if I just stopped there, it would be enough. The book is a profound reminder of how much things change over decades and centuries, how one industry can be dominant and then fall. But it's also full of lots of fine tidbits, as books written by good writers always are.

Interruption by life

I was just about to write about something else when my phone rang. It was a client. Her mother had just died, rather unexpectedly, after having fallen and broken her hip a week or two back.  (The woman who lives across the street from us also recently lost her mother in a fall). The only silver lining of course is that my client's mom did not die a protracted death from cancer with a lot of pain. That seems to be the really big exit ramp for lots of folks. (I had thought that actuarially cancer as a cause of death actually declines for octa- and nonagenarians -- but a quick perusal of the interweb indicates that's wrong. It appears to get worse).

Falling, while not an altogether preventable risk, is one that is quasi-manageable if people focus on core strength and balance. I'm glad that my mom has focused on this stuff to the best of her ability. Her dancing is, I think, pretty key. In my mind's eye I see elderly Chinese people doing Tai Chi in parks first thing in the morning and that seems like a best practice.

I realize that this post started off sounding empathetic and human and quickly degenerated into clinical analytics. It's late in the morning by now and I kind of need to get better organized for the professional day. Not that I wasn't already doing that when my phone rang. 

Out or in? The odd tension

Last night Mary and I went over to a neighbor's house for dinner. We got there at 6:30 and left around 10. It was tremendously good fun to be at someone else's house, eating different food, talking to different people, petting a dog! But still I was feeling a little crappy because I had promised Graham I'd be home in time to watch Bosch but we were running late.

The problem of course is that it's so good for Mary to get out. As I've written recently, she doesn't get out enough, and when she does, she's understandably not eager to get home.

Even in the pandemic, I feel like I'm able to be out and about myself and the most precious thing in the world for me is time with the kids. Time on the couch watching TV is extra-special because there's no work involved, we just lie there with one or the other of the kids' feet on my lap and commune over some mediocre-to-good narrative, share a laugh or two, perhaps a gruesome murder. 

We are apparently not alone. There's an article in the Journal today about moms feeling lonely at home. Haven't read it yet

In the end, last night Graham agreed to start watching TV at 10, which is rather late for him, since there was no school tomorrow. So I got to have my cake and eat it too!

Are we listening?

We are seeing shortages in stores lately, over the last few days they have related to people -- southerners who never learned to drive in snow and others whose knowledge of or desire to do so may have long since lapsed since their relocation to NC -- bustled to stores for the proverbial dairy, bread, eggs and (here's a new one) poultry. More substantively, the number of people out of work because of COVID has had ripple effects up and down supply chains -- more recently seen in absenteeism at grocery stores and the truck-based logistics chains that gets food to them.

News outlets like to run these stories because it creates fear in people and drives their eyeballs to the media itself: "if it bleeds, it leads." Which is fine, they are businesses, after all, and heightening awareness of an issue helps focus our attention on its seriousness.

At a base level, I can't help but to think this isn't some kind of cosmic justice. Christians might say the Lord is smiting us.

But for what? I would argue that we have failed to internalize the lesson of the pandemic, which is that we have to dial it all the fuck back and just focus on the basics of caring for each other. I also don't want to delve deep into the theology of vaccines and mask-wearing. I obviously am pro, but I try not to wish death on those who resist, as I have heard others do. The Right has had a point all along about the need to recognize and acknowledge tradeoffs,* and the long drift of time will probably show that the costs of keeping schools closed as long as we did outweigh their benefits. Admittedly, that is easy for us to say, when the costs in human life would have been borne by teachers and other school staff who aren't being paid to risk their lives. It is all rather complex, but we're just not set up to manage complexity and acknowledge trade offs today.

But right now when I hear of shelves bare of chicken, I am reminded of 20 months ago when toilet paper and hand sanitizer was scarcely found on store shelves and there was a video somewhere of someone who left out either one or the other for delivery people, and a viral clip showed a UPS driver picking some up and being grateful. Admittedly, whoever was leaving out the TP must have hoarded a bunch of it and that was probably the wrong thing to do. But then they admitted they were wrong and left some out. We need more of that.

Also, this is another little reminder to all of us to be thankful for what we have. Between all of the nuts, legumes, canned fish and frozen stuff in our house we could probably get by for 10 days or longer without even going to the store. That ain't bad. Plus stores aren't really running out of food, they are running out of specific foodstuffs. We need to be constantly reminded of our plenty.

* Not that I really understand what we are trading off when we wear a mask in public. The ability to see someone smile? Yes, I miss it, but it 

Where did she go?

An hour and change back I was headed down for a nap on the still excitingly new couch in my study while Mary went outside to do a little shoveling. Graham and I had already done the driveway and also part of the neighbors' across the street (the mom over there's mother apparently died unexpectedly in a fall a week or so ago, so I figured it was only neighborly to shovel a little). For a little while I heard the new metal shovel scraping the pebbled surface of the front walkway, then it stopped. When I got up a little while later to make coffee, she was nowhere to be found. The shovel was by the door, the back deck had not been cleaned up, somewhat to my chagrin.

Mary's running shoes were in the mudroom, which makes my best guess that someone came past while walking, maybe Jonathan's wife Sharon, perhaps together with Andrea, and Mary went walking with them.

I sure hope so. The woman needs to get out of the house more often. Frankly, when I have clients who are between jobs or whatever and also need to get out, I get on the phone with them and harass them to get out and look harder. This has worked very well with a couple of clients. I kinda need to do that with Mary, honestly. Left to her own devices she ands up spending too much time... with her devices! All too often she is found with her laptop on her lap writing email or her phone in hand, scrolling through Instagram. She needs more fresh air and fresh faces.

The People of China

During the Cold War, there was a widely held recognition that the fact that the Soviet government was evil did not mean that all the people of the Soviet Union were evil. People were readily able to hold in mind the distinction between the ruler and the ruled.

At present there's a tendency in the West to show sympathy for the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan but in general a less thoughtful attitude towards China's Han majority. In the early days of 2020 reports of the stringency of the lockdown in Wuhan elicited sympathy, but that has long since disappeared from people's minds as we've dealt with our own restrictions. More recently the lockdown in Xi'an and the story of the woman who lost her child at the doors of a hospital because she didn't have a COVID test -- a story the Chinese censors let run internally for a while in a rare instance of the Chinese system allowing a release of pressure -- bubbled towards the surface of Western consciousness.

But as most people know from interacting with Chinese people in schools, neighborhoods and businesses all around the world -- the Chinese are people too. The reason many are willing to emigrate is that living in China has a ton of challenges. We read about some of the worst of them. 

I may or may not have recounted what Leslie's husband Walter had to deal with when his father passed away. Beijing -- a city of 20 million and change -- has something like 20 centers for cremating one's loved ones. Forget about interring them, that's obviously a challenge in a place as densely populated as China. With a life expectancy around 80 and 20 million people, ballpark a quarter of a million will die each year. So 20ish cremation facilities must handle that flow, call it 12,500 each per year over 250 odd business days, 50 funerals a day.  It turns out each family gets like 30-45 minutes to commemorate their loved one's life, and can have a very restricted number of guests in. Not ideal for a culture that venerates elders and ancestors.

That's just a small instance. In sum, we need to do a better job thinking of Chinese as people too. Yes their culture is different and we need to grok that too. And the only way we can do this is by talking to more Chinese people, consuming their books, movies, etc. Old school humanism. 

Back to the basics, more deeply

Recently I finished reading AA's "Big Book" for the first time after 30 years of sobriety. The fact that it took me so long is evidence of just what a stubbornly individualistic jackass I can be, but also of the fact that I've had a lot to read and do during those 30 years and also the fact that it's really not meant to be read in one fell swoop. Reading the personal stories of the alcoholics whose lives were changed by AA one after another -- even when spread out over weeks or months -- gets rather repetitive. Reading them individually, sprinkled into life as it is being lived -- as I have over time in various meetings when they are read aloud -- that offers the possibility of magic.

The first part of the book, the core written by Bill Wilson back in 1939, that is truly special. He wasn't a great great writer and it's not always brilliant, but then it wasn't supposed to be. It is deadly earnest and from the heart and it changed a bunch of people's lives, which is all that matters.

It's also an interesting document insofar as it gives insight into what it was like to live in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. At some level I'm pretty amazed at how much one could fuck up and keep a job and/or marriage before getting the boot. Though most of the alcoholics eventually do run into trouble, just enough trouble to realize they need help, and they know full well how fortunate they are to get it.

Now I am on to reading something else I've had on my shelf for a long time but never read: the King James edition of the Bible. In fact, it's the same physical book I was given in childhood at St Phillips in Durham which has followed me around all those years. So far, so good. I'll report back.

I am also following up on a meme I've seen on the internet that sounds interesting. I've been regularly doing sit ups and push ups all through the pandemic after my morning meditation while the coffee brews. Somebody on YouTube suggested that doing 100 push ups a day for a month would have a meaningful effect on one's physique. I am one day into this program and am putting it out here on the blog to encourage myself to stay at it.

Leftover pancakes

This weekend we mixed things up a little bit. Usually Sunday is pancake day, but since I had gotten fresh bagels on Saturday, Graham and I agreed to put off pancakes till the Monday holiday and eat bagels on Sunday while they were still fresh.

As usual, there were some leftover pancakes, which Graham usually eats the next day. This morning however, I saw Graham snarfing some cereal for breakfast and I said "what about the pancakes?" He quickly explained to me that it made more sense to eat cereal on a snow day like today since it took longer to eat it than it did to eat the pancakes, so he was saving them for tomorrow, which he is assuming will be a regular school day with its compressed schedule, so that he can stay in his warm bed as long as possible (we've all been there). I had to bow down before his considerable wisdom on this one.

The Steve Meshnick Book Group

In half an hour and change I'm having a Zoom for this book group of guys 50 and up who read history books, named for Steve Meshnick, a tropical disease guy at UNC who died just prior to the onset of COVID of cancer. Steve was a great guy. In many ways it's a shame I didn't get to know him better from a younger age. That was an unfortunate collateral effect of a break that happened between Natalie and some other girls in her class (one of whom ended up being Steve's daughter, though I don't think she was present in the initial event that led to the break) not too long after we got to Chapel Hill, maybe around 2011 or so. Natalie turned out just fine, as did the other girls (who were at fault), but it was a social rupture nonetheless.

Anyhoo, Steve was awesome. Funny, witty guy and legendary in the tropical disease world. My friend Dorothy out in Seattle who works on malaria in Uganda knew who he was and I ended up connecting them. He also wrote really witty songs, some of which are available on YouTube. Here's a fine one about John Snow. 

This week the book club is discussing Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans, which I talked about briefly a week or so back. I ended up grinding through to the end, and learned a fair amount about the early days of the CIA, most of it reflecting poorly on the agency, Dwight Eisenhower, and particularly his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who turns out to have been a rigidly reductionist Anti-Communist who basically had his head up his ass. Between the two of them, they made a lot of what in retrospect seem very bad decisions, particularly around an opportunity to recast the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West following Stalin's death and another to support the Hungarian revolution that could have been in 1956. The book also offered clearer insight into US roles in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (we basically did that) and the early days of Vietnam. The basic thrust of the book was that there were people on the ground in the CIA who learned from failures of stupid missions and had reasonable views of what the US could and could not do, but they were overruled by the President, JF Dulles and his brother Allen, who ran the CIA at the time, and we are still paying the price for it today.

The Dream of the Second dissertation/doctorate

Last night, or in the period just before waking, I once more had the dream about my second dissertation/doctoral program. Somehow it seems there was something wrong with my first one, something vaguely shameful, and I was doing a second one, except I kind of avoided going by the department. Interestingly, this time Sandy Baker, who was certainly in my class at Phillips and the high school and maybe at Seawell too (?) was in my department. I was sheepishly kind of telling her about my situation late in the day when she was packing up to go home.

In the end, I woke up fairly early and ordered fresh bagels from Bruegger's so there'd be something exciting for everyone to start the morning with.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, today is the day that the last of Graham's college applications are due. Maybe the two dissertations are really about two children. As to the essays, there are four to submit, but really there's not that much work. We polished the essays for two of them yesterday evening after tennis (3-6, 6-1) and still had time to watch two episodes of Bosch before bed, which was awesome. So now we just have a couple of essays left to polish and have agreed that we'll get one if not both out the door before lunch.

I must say that I am learning a fair amount -- at least I hope I am -- about management just through working with Graham on this project. His energy ebbs and flows as he works through this alongside a really demanding semester (6 AP courses, all of them) under tough conditions. I'm learning when to nudge and when to back the fuck off. Not always perfectly. The lessons are really similar to what I was learning when riding shotgun with him as he got his 60 hours of driving practice with one of us (almost always me) in the car.

For today, once it's all done, Graham gets to pick from the entire universe of takeout options for dinner tonight. I have money on a pad thai from somewhere, but maybe he'll surprise me.

In my bones

By now I have been joking for so long about my psychosomatic COVID that Mary basically won't listen to me, and how could I blame her? Of course I don't really have any symptoms except some sniffles, which are pretty common and are probably just allergies that we are too lazy to abate around the house -- my dust mite allergy, for example -- and the fact that I am bone tired.

Today I slept till 7:40. Turns out nothing was wrong with my alarm clock save for what the immortal George Costanza termed "the AM/PM." Dooohh!

This bone tiredness of course is highly adducible to how long it's been since I had a proper vacation, and also to the fact that so many of my activities outside of work are quasi-work like. Like the fact that I am grinding through a book -- Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans -- that I didn't choose for myself but instead got from a book group. It's 470 pages of smallish type about the early history of the CIA. For sure I am learning a lot, but it's kind of like work.

Thank God for TV. I am totally enjoying Sex Education. It gets a little ridiculous here and there but it is always warm-hearted if a little snarky and it seems like every episode another character gets deeper. Of course the skinny geek in me continues to just root for Otis and Maeve to get together, but I can also accept that it's not really that important in the end.

I should also, honestly, accept the fact that it's unlikely that I blog more in 2022 than I did in 2021, instead of trying to live up to it. 

Cars and inflation

Typically solid thinking on inflation from Greg Ip in today's Journal on inflation. In the article he quotes Biden as saying re inflation in autos, "If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions: You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer." This is a rather simplistic way of viewing the problem, and admittedly Presidents do have to boil things down and speak at a high level.

But he could go on to say there's a third way. We could increase the supply of cars by extending the life of the cars we already own by being more mindful in how we use and service them. Auto repair is primarily a local industry (I don't have stats), though there are roll ups and chains like Pep Boys, etc. I'm willing to bet those are largely franchised, so they are effectively local. Moreover, the auto repair business is highly trust-based, so the successful ones are very community-oriented.

We could also reduce auto demand by thinking more about the driving we do and being less willing to hop in the car at the drop of a hat to go to the store to get one thing, go to a drivethrough for dinner, drive 400 miles roundtrip in a day for a soccer tournament, etc. Would that make us poorer? It really depends on your definition of wealth. I think that most people, if they slowed down to ponder it, wouldn't think so.

Time and again I think back to the anecdote John Bogle uses at the beginning of his book Enough. Kurt Vonnegut is at a party at the home of some hedge fund guy in the Hamptons talking to someone who remarks on how nice the house or yard or something is. Vonnegut says to the guy: "I have something these guys will never have. I have enough."

China COVID zero tolerance

After tennis yesterday I went to Trader Joe's to pick up a number of things, amongst them not meat. Which was a good thing, because there really wasn't a ton of meat in the meat display, including chicken. At that time of day (6:30) it could have been a function of trucks not getting there, or it could have been an internal staffing issue of just not having someone available to stock the shelves. At any rate, I didn't really care, both because we have been cutting meat consumption in our house for a long time and because I've gotten accustomed to shortages so they don't freak me out much. At a high level it does remind me to keep reasonably high levels of things like beans, peanut butter, tuna, etc. at the crib, but that I've been doing anyway just because it gives me a warm feeling.

Ahh yes, China. Stories continue to emerge about China's zero tolerance policies and their knock on effects. Certainly they could create more supply chain problems for us, which could lead to inflation. I think that's all good, honestly. People in the West need to learn to sort out what's really important to them, and pricing mechanisms are really the best way of helping people figure out what they really want.

The policies are also exposing cracks in the facade of absolute control by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). The huge outcry over the woman who lost her child outside a hospital in the city of X'ian because she didn't have an up to date COVID test is one case in point. People there are tired and exhausted by the government's excesses, which also throw policies in the West into considerable relief. Those who whine about vaccine mandates and the social pressure to wear masks should really be paying attention to what real totalitarianism looks like.

More than anything, China's lockdown policy seems like a doubling down because the government can't admit it made a mistake. How it will navigate the Winter Olympics is anyone's guess. There will be a lot of bad press if they quarantine athletes and journalists in really shitty hotels.

Certainly the policy degrades any real threat to Taiwan in the short run. There is no way that Beijing can attack Taiwan if it can't allow a little COVID to run through the population.  Too many people would have to be in motion to make an attack work, and they couldn't be quarantined once they got going. Which should give the Biden administration some leverage in dealing with Putin re Ukraine, since the negotiations there appear geared more than anything to be a test bed for how far we are willing to go for Taiwan.

Lastly, given China's rapidly aging population, it's surprising that the CCP isn't willing to let COVID run through the population and cull some of its superannuation problem. We know that the CCP at a very basic level really doesn't care that much about its people. If it did, pensions and health insurance would be better and its population wouldn't have to save 50% of its income. How could the CCP jail that many Uighurs if it did, or kill so many Falun Gong, or tolerate such shoddy building standards that 13,000 could die in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (admittedly that was better than the half a million or so that died in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake).

No, the CCP can't revise its policy re COVID because it doesn't have a mechanism for changing its mind.

Back to Reality

Deposited Natalie at RDU at a little after 5 this morning. It was a little surprising how much of a hubbub there was there, though I know lots of people take early flights and how the most seasoned business travelers use them to do out and back trips in one day and limit the number of nights they stay in hotel rooms. Which makes all the sense in the world to me by now, though my days of hard-core road warriordom are thankfully far enough in the past for me that a night in a hotel isn't the worst thing in the world.

But I digress. Natalie is gone after about three weeks in the nest with us. Not the highest octane or funnest of her life, for sure. We recrouched into the familiar postures and routines of the early pandemic (books, puzzles, baking, walks, etc) and while it worked fine, it surely has gotten old and I know she is psyched to be flying out to see Stuart.

The extra-maudlin in me pondered the prospect that this might be the last time she ever spends this much time under our roof, or at least until she has kids of her own (knock wood). Theoretically, it could be. She will graduate and then will do what is next. She and Stuart are thinking about living together, which sounds to me like an excellent plan. Not sure where, but it likely won't be at our house. Anyway, time will tell, it's all good. We got her on a plane without her getting Omicron, we're pretty sure, which was the short-term goal. Now we just have to get Graham through his college essay deadlines coming up this Friday. Then we can go hang out in redneck bars and luxuriate in Omicron to pump up our immunity.

Bonus day

I had thought that Natalie was getting on a plane at 6 this morning, but it turns out it's at 6 tomorrow morning, so we got a bonus day. Mary, Natalie and I went for walk this afternoon, not all that long after I returned from splitting two sets with Adam over 2:15 (a long two sets). Now my calves are twitching a little bit from the exertion of it, and I am excitedly awaiting the Korean takeout we are getting.

Meanwhile, Graham has had a very full weekend with a big robotics event and not one but two Quiz Bowl tournaments. Yesterday was a less competitive tournament, so Graham was the dominant player on his team and finished 6th out of 104 players in terms of points. Today is more like an all-star tournament against top-notch competition from all up and down the Eastern seaboard, so all of East's key players have showed up. We look forward to hearing it recounted over dinner.

Saturday Omelet

Woke up early this morning and decided to roll with it, particularly because I have to put Natalie on an airplane tomorrow morning at 6 so will have to be up extra early. Also, I was excited to make toast with this excellent bread from La Farm to accompany my omelet.

I have mentioned my omelet in passing before, but have never delved into the subject. Every Saturday morning for who knows how long I've had a cheese omelet, sometimes with onion or some kind of pepper (pickled jalapenos or Hatch chiles, for instance). After we went to Glacier National Park a few years back I settled on the coffee mug I bought there as the mug I drink from on Saturdays and only on Saturdays, to add to the ritual of it. Also I put some green hot sauce on it, the Picamas stuff I get at the Tienda Guadalupena off of Elliot.

Mary mocks me and says she doesn't understand how I can eat the same thing every week, but what she doesn't get is that I eat in only on Saturdays, so it's a total treat, a highlight of my week. Then I go to an AA or Al Anon meeting. It's time for that now, so I bid you adieu and happy Shabbos.

Learning when to quit

For some weeks now I've been struggling with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. It's over 400 pages long, I'm 300 in, and it's just going nowhere. It's just a romp, using historical names, it's own quirky, earthy English dialect and a vision of an ornately dressed London of the 1850s in a world where technological and political history flowed differently, but it's not doing anything for me. I have to put it down.

This is hard for me. I was taught to finish things, but I need to learn when to walk away from unimportant things that are failing me and sucking energy out of me so I can focus on things that are productive and energy-giving for me, my family and my clients. I am reminded of a little book by Seth Godin called The Dip: A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit. I read a good chunk of it while standing in the Bookstore on Franklin St before putting it back on the shelf because in general Godin's books are too expensive per unit of insight. Or at least they seem to be. This one was maybe $10 used for 80 pages. But at the time I thought I was taking Godin's message to heart pretty effectively.

Anyway, I think I've made my point and probably would be better off getting on with my day. Another thing I should probably draw from this is that I know now that I am a fan of William Gibson, though like most authors he's not perfect and this just isn't his best. But probably not Bruce Sterling.

A Dream of Black Shoes

Sometime last night I dreamt that I talked to Mary about my desire to purchase a nice and expensive pair of black men's shoes, similar to the Alfred Sargent boots that I bought in 1994 when we started going out. The ones I got married in and still wear fairly frequently after resoling them, though the leather cracked some during a decade or so when I wore them not at all.

In my dream I thought about how much they would cost ($400-$500 came to mind) and where I might shop for them (should I see what Nordstrom's at Southpoint might have or just wait to go to Saks when in NYC?). But I definitely knew that I should discuss a purchase this big with Mary, because that's kind of how we roll.

I have actually had some of these same thoughts in real life. But this, my friends, is pathetic. I should be able to dream a little bigger. 

Probably this is influenced by my reading of the Gibson/Sterling book described back in December, which is a little too taken up with matters of haberdashery.

Crazy daze

Last night was one of those insane nights we've had too many of under global warming -- a winter thunderstorm. Of course, it didn't feel like winter during the day, it was another winter day with temps in the high 60s/70s. The power went off around 11, then it was back on around 3 and I was thinking, great, there'll be no problem making coffee. But of course there had to be a big transformer flash and boom somewhere across the lake -- and all was black once more.

We got five college applications out the door yesterday (three of which had no supplemental essays and just needed to be put out of their misery) and right now Graham and I are ensconced on the couch upstairs working on his essay for Swarthmore. The old one wasn't really singing, he was trying to dredge life into it, so we're going with the good old blank canvas. It's gonna be awesome, but mostly it will be done.

Here we go

Off into the New Year, which kicked off somewhat inauspiciously in me allowing myself to get frustrated by other people being slow to get things done. For the millionth time, I had to remind myself that I can't control other people and that they live their own lives. I can only take care of my own stuff, of which there is more than enough.

Many years ago, I first had the realization that a key thing for my happiness was to try to limit what I was trying to do, what was in scope for me. Then I read in about a million places that others had figured that out long ago. Only more recently did I come to understand that finding and maintaining good teams and fleets of other people who knew how to do specific things better than I did was essential.

When he died in 2017 a lot of articles were published about the rolodex of David Rockefeller, which contained entries for about 200,000 people and detailed each interaction. Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Rockefeller's, had 35 cards, which listed out meetings the two had had since they first met in 1955. Similarly, Fischer Black -- the genius/geek who was one of the two progenitors of the Black-Scholes options pricing formula and who was present at the table through much of the quant revolution in finance until his untimely demise in 1995 -- had a full room adjoining his office at Goldman Sachs for his own personalized card catalog of ideas or thoughts he considered worth noting, each catalogued according to a system of his own concoction. Which reminds me (and I'll stop shortly), of how Phil Knight of Nike noted in Shoe Dog that his first employee, Jeff Johnson, a somewhat quirky hyper-energetic runner who was first a super-salesman and then did a bit of everything before retiring from Nike, lives in what he calls his "Fortress of Solitude" in New Hampshire, a house filled with reading rooms, reading chairs and books -- all organized by a card catalog system of his own making.

In reality, these are all just extreme examples of how we all live our lives, encountering other people, ideas, and texts (and other cultural artefacts) and trying to keep track of it all. Finding a balance between experiencing, interacting and retaining information and then directing and influencing others is key. Then we have let go and understand we won't retain it all, nor will we get it all done.

(While I was writing this, Graham got up, made his pancakes, and let me know he'd like to finish up his college essays for a few schools today. So now I transition to that). 

Round up

So it draws to a close, this 2021. By the way, oddly enough, I just looked at 2021 and thought: is that a prime number? It surely looks an awful lot like one. The answer, per Google, is no. It is 43 x 47. Which is pretty dadgummed close to being a prime number in my book. But I digress, which may shock you.

2021 turned out to be a disappointment of a year in many ways. Not financially, mind you. My clients made money. I made money. Not only did I make money, I satisfied some long-held desires and now own such things as a new couch, window blinds, and an electric guitar. Also we pressure-washed our roof, which was very satisfying. Natalie has a new boyfriend and he is just lovely. Mary's book came out. (Readers who have not yet purchased one may do so here). Soon we will even have all of Graham's college applications in and that die will be cast. It was just the whole COVID thing that continued to suck, and the fact that politics remains fairly crazy and the government therefore largely subfunctional.

But in the most important category -- namely number of blog posts -- 2021 has been a triumph indeed. With so much of the year lived in a relatively monotonous, interior way, you might have thought there would be little to write about. And maybe that's true. Nonetheless, I wrote about it. I appreciate your continued and diligent readership. But now, it's time for tennis.

Back to Square 1?

It has landed on our shores quite firmly, this Omicron, as we knew it would. Last night CovidActNow showed cases per 100k in Orange County as having sextupled overnight. This morning I talked to Jamie, a neighbor and cardiologist as I was picking up my paper. He said that positive test rates for Orange County were at 25% (or maybe it was NC), their highest ever.

Once more, things are moving so fast that it's hard to sort out the data. Everything seems to indicate that, for the most part, Omicron is a pretty mild variant. But what does that mean for at risk populations? The elderly, those with real comorbidities? We don't know. My instinct is to slow down and let the data emerge so we can make informed decisions about taking risks. I think I'm not alone.

So therefore we are back to carefully titrating our exposures. That means going to the store less frequently and more mindfully, planning more. It also means being easy on ourselves and being sure to incorporate self-care, first and foremost exercise and considerate house cleaning and good communication. But also remembering how fortunate we are and doing some year end giving.

The Swarm

Up this morning on the early side for the first time in what seems like weeks, am working my way through my morning routine at a normal pace: feed cats, meditate while coffee brews, stretch, sit-ups, push-ups, read and drink coffee, read and drink coffee and eat breakfast... Was about to check email etc, but I know if I do that before I blog all is lost, because my brain is quickly overcome with the swarm of thoughts about other things that need to be done: tasks, scheduling, follow up, nudging this person and that person to do this and that, checking to see if x and y had been done...

Yesterday I reached down deep and pushed through the Economist's survey of Japan. I try to read as many of the long surveys as I can, because they really abide by the ethos of the slowing perspective of the world that is ultimately so fruitful. The most important theme of the piece is that Japan with its aging population, extraordinary debt load and long struggle with deflation, is more a harbinger of things to come for the globe than an outlier. And that Japan is doing better in many regards than people give it credit for, especially in its resiliency planning for the wide range of natural disasters to which it is subject (first and foremost earthquakes and tsunamis but also the odd hurricane) but also in keeping its aging population healthy and engaged.

In any case, the world keeps on turning. Graham continues to crank out essays. Natalie has almost confirmed her booking on a 6am flight out to California to see Stuart in 10 days or so. At first I was surprised that she was going so soon but then I realized that by the time she left she would have spent almost three weeks with us, which is plenty of a nuclear family for most people, and certainly for a healthy 21-year old figuring out her own path in life. Graham's passport arrived back from the passport agency so we've got all the documentation we need if we decide to travel abroad next summer, if the world is willing to have us.  

Bear Mountain

After almost a week of very diligently and patiently inspecting all aspects of George and Rob's house, today we set off for a mini-adventure up at Bear Mountain State Park, about half an hour up the Hudson. This is a park I had been past and near to many times over the years -- I remember in particular a lovely walk Mary in took in the nearby Harriman State Park on our mini-honeymoon almost a quarter century back -- I guess I had never been in this one.

It's kind of an odd place, close enough to the City that it basically feels like an extension of it, but with lodges and suchlike built in the WPA rustic style that you see in so many national parks. There's also a skating rink, which we parked near, and the trail we chose took us up over the rink, so that our hike was serenaded by the blasting of pop music, not all of it award-winning.

It got pretty steep pretty quickly and the trails degenerated at a similar pace. Turns out we would have been better off going up the trail with all those staircases, though we would have been cursing them soon enough. We ended up walking around this little lake to get in enough miles to call it exercise. Still, it was a good deal better than walking here in the nabe or around the graveyard and it effectively killed off an afternoon.

On the drive back, Rob discussed a range of wacky business ideas that we all agreed were nonsense. But that's pretty much par for the course.

Christmas bustle

Things are busy in the heart of the house with meal prep etc while I oscillate between hiding out in my room trying to get little things done and read. I am currently trying to generate momentum in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Gibson -- and I guess a lot of sci-fi -- often takes a lot of concentration and focus to sort of get immersed into his world. This novel, with its steampunk alternate past with a lot of pretty much useless descriptions of fashion elements based on historical fashions themselves splinched together from various times and places. Hopefully the book eventually rewards the effort. 

Anyhoo, I've decided to come downstairs to be available to help with cooking and cleaning as necessary. Part of it is me getting sucked into the guilt cycle of "we were working so hard on dinner and you weren't doing anything." I have now offered to help but haven't been taken up on it, except for a little cleaning here and there between cycles of meal prep.

Pretty much all is in order, however. The presents are under the tree. Things are progressing. The food smells good.

I have now been drafted to work on the fake sausage for the vegan stuffing. 

Underfoot for the holidays

Up here at George's house in North White Plains/Valhalla/Greenburgh, NY (the municipality sitch is, in typical NE fashion, confusing). Omicron is everywhere around us, but we are trying to hide out and go into as few buildings as possible, which is made complicated only by our need for a little bit of food cheer and diversification and imperfect meal planning on the part of the extended household -- so we don't have all the ingredients we need for Xmas feasting. We hope that the diligent and disciplined use of KN94 masks and general minimization of exposure should protect us and, more importantly, the more medically-fragile members of our assembly.

We have historically been at the bigger house in Larchmont which is, sadly, no longer in the family. Sadly in general, but felicitously for Rob, who did all the work of taking care of the old house back in the day -- and it evolved into a ton of work just to make it mold-free and habitable and then ready for sale.

Our current house is quasi-open plan with cheap hollow-core doors, which makes for poor sound-baffling, which is certainly sub-optimal for things like Rob doing big Zoom calls for work (which makes it hard for the rest of us to think) or, it turns out, for us to watch 30 Rock reruns around bedtime. Apparently I in particular guffaw rather loudly, which disturbs Rob's wind down process. I've been trying to keep it down.

In general I have to feel for Rob. He has many particularities, but his life is clearly run by very well-established routines (juggling the soccer ball in the morning, watching CNBC with lunch, calling Mary Lee with George around 5:30) and then we just show up and sit around in the middle of it. Larchmont was much better designed for this than this house is. More well-defined, discrete spaces to retreat to.

Normally it would be easier to sneak out and, say, go to a movie. This year not so much. With collective discipline and more than a little luck, we hope to get through this.

Endemicity and the university

As we enter the third year of the pandemic and everyone seems inclined to believe that it's becoming endemic -- though the optimisitic read is that Omicron burns through the population, raises herd immunity and transitions the virus to a much less lethal state -- it seems likely to have major impacts on the shape of the US professoriate going forward. In short, it could well hasten the retirement of a lot of older tenured professors, clearing a path for at least two things:

• A rejuvenation of the faculty -- probably pulling it even further left and in the direction of interdisciplinarity -- with real risk to the integrity of the disciplines themselves. Though as relatively recent historical phenomena, maybe the disciplines were themselves kind of bullshit all the while.
• A continued rebalancing of the higher-ed employment model away from the tenure model and towards "clinical faculty," which will enable greater institutional nimbleness but also make it easier for conservative Boards and alumni associations to influence curricula. But listen to Grandpa Grouse up there. Maybe I'm hankering for it.

In any case, things will change. Some feet will walk, some heads will roll. Hopefully few will die.

Then again, whether the retreat amongst faculty proves statistically significant vs. the shaving of ~2% off of the US overall workforce participation rate that we've seen since the onset of the pandemic is another question. Could be that it's roughly the same. I think that the fact that the tenured population skews old relative to the workforce in general will be meaningful.

POSTSCRIPT:  A small unscientific survey on Facebook says that, based on anecdotal evidence, my prediction above is wrong. I'll still leave it up there because that's how I roll! It's a blog, dammit.

 

Holistic Financial Planning

For some reason I was going through my stubs of old drafts of posts that I hadn't published and found this one from 2006.

"Bundle CFP, Shrink, Trainer, Career planner. I guess that's what a life coach is supposed to be."

It's fairly remarkable how close this comes to what I actually do for many of the clients who ask the most of me. I don't do all of these things at the same time. Sometimes I am doing more, sometimes fewer of them. And while I am rarely technically a trainer for people we are often talking about workouts and what works and doesn't over time and how it all ties together. It was a fairly prescient post, except I never actually present myself as a life coach. 

Names on gravestones

I had in the past mentioned the very old-school Italian names on the gravestones here near Rob and George's house. Today near dusk we went for a walk in the graveyard. We hadn't gone 10 steps before Mary took out her danged phone and started taking pictures of this and that. I ended up walking alone. 

I myself took some pictures of gravestones so I could remember the most distinctive of them:

Ermelinda
Concetta
Severio
Angelarossa
Avrora
Righetta
Giacomo
Gennaro
Filomena
Nastesia

For the most part it's the women's names that stand out, most likely because we get exposed to a lot of the distinctive men's names via mob movies (though few of us know, say, a "Pasquale" in real life. But not the women's. They are terra incognita.

Earlier in the day I had been at a killer Italian deli where I snagged us sandwiches of pork loin with broccolini; soppressata, arugula and shaved pecorino; that kind of thing. The fruits of the Northeast.

Natalie wants to watch TV. Gotta hop.

In the North

Once more we have conquered the highways and made it to the north. A generally uneventful day on the road, save for the fact that we listened to the podcast S-town on the way up there. It was pretty amazing. 

Other than that, pretty much nothing happened. Oh yeah, except we were delighted to see that rotisserie chicken has rejoined the menu at Subway. That was huge.

There's still a big Confederate flag on 29 somewhere near Chatham, Virginia. The Trump signs seem to be dying back for the time being, probably because people are getting tired of mowing around them. I have no illusions about them being gone forever. We kept our yard signs out the whole Trump administration, what the hell can we expect?

Emerging from a gauntlet

Yesterday was one of those days: Rascal kept puking, Graham was sick, at work we had some internal squabbling over logistics and personality clashes, I was working through the details of an unfamiliar account set up and made a small booboo (thankfully it was for a personal account so my clients can benefit from me learning from my own mistakes), and I had to counsel a client about some marital challenges.

At the end of the day things got a little better. I thumped Adam in our first set (6-2) but he held on in the second (7-5), but generally I played well with the exception of an implosion in the second set where I double faulted three times in a row or something like that. That was the Christmas spirit shining through my racket. Then while Mary was at the vet I improvised a very nice dinner with the help of the internet. It certainly helped that I was beginning with a big hunk of meat (a pork tenderloin) and potatoes. Add garlic, dijon, and honey and it's hard to fuck it up.

This morning most everything is in order. Graham is better -- clearly he was having side effects from his booster shot the day before; Rascal is not puking. I've still got a couple of things to sort out, but I think we can drive north tomorrow.

A golden moment

So it's already 9:30 and I'm still sitting here in the arm chair in my study, the arms of which had the hell scratched out of them by the cats, necessitating its forcible retreat from the public portion of the house. The light comes in golden from the East about now, especially in winter, but it hasn't yet come around and settled on my screen. It's a nice time of day.

It's not that I haven't been working yet, mind you. I've already straightened something out on Paypal and sent a couple of emails to clients. And signed a contract for the LFA and did a little promotion of Mary's book and arranged logistics for Graham's booster shot this evening (which sadly conflicts with a robotics competition).

Yesterday evening Graham's friends Sam and Tyler were over "working on homework" at the dining room table because they couldn't find a good public place to set up. Actually they were also gossiping quite a bit about who got in where in the first round and kvetching about why Duke and Harvard wouldn't let them in based on their perfect SAT scores. It was a little annoying because I was tired and Graham had to do some college admissions stuff BUT it was the quintessence of high school and totes adorbs. We need to be sure to encourage Graham to do it again. With both an armchair and a couch and a desk up here in my study and another armchair in our bedroom, Mary and I can totally retreat to up here and let Graham and the fellas hang out and be the high school goofballs that COVID has sometimes made it hard to be.  

Resilience(y)

First off, I had to clarify the spelling of the title: "resilience" vs "resiliency". The latter has definitely gained the upper hand in the battle for primacy these days, but the former is really the default usage.

On to the actual content. After last night's deflating news from Tufts, I certainly had to struggle back to get into the flow. We were certainly hoping for Santa to come early, though in the back of our minds we know that Boston is an awful long ways away from home for a kid who has never flown alone yet.

So now we have to model resilience. Graham has to hunker down and produce some more essays this month. Oh well. It's not like getting in to college is the be all and end all of it. I had my struggles at Yale for sure, Natalie has had her own. Mary would have been absolutely lost at Michigan had she not been in the Residential College.

To his credit, Graham chose to receive the college news at a Starbucks with his friends Sam and Tyler. Though he got bad news, his strategic positioning one him the consolation prize of a free muffin, which the baristas said they would have to throw away if no one took it. It was a pumpkin muffin, with a rich vein of cream cheese running through it. Dairy allergy or no dairy allergy, Graham ate the hell out of that thing and showed no signs of an allergic reaction, at least while I was downstairs. Go Graham!

Up this morning crafting my day, I saw that I had a LinkedIn invite from the child of a friend who's a sophomore in the business program at App State who wants to pursue a career in sales. I love it. Nobody says they want to go into sales, but one way or another, everybody ends up in sales. Some people just get to the age of 50 or 60 before they realize it. I want to have coffee with this kid.

But first, I need to sell some of Mary's books (go here to get yours!) and then get on with my day. I'm kind of excited because for the first time in what seems like weeks I don't have to be focused on lake stuff or reviews for current clients and I can focus on building and maintaining my practice, including some continuing ed stuff for a professional certification. I need a bunch of hours by April 30. 

tick tock, tick tock

Today at 6 pm Graham has been told to expect an email from Tufts, so we are hopeful that this whole college-shopping thing will come to a close. Frankly, they had better let him in. The alum who interviewed him said "Let me know when you get in," which is something I would never ever ever ever say when interviewing for Yale. Just the fact that Tufts has guided us to expect an email exactly at 6 is something I would never do if I weren't setting up expectations. Not good practice.

It's not, frankly, that Graham is deeply in love with Tufts. It was fine, as were a number of other places we looked at. The fact that it's as chilly as it is up there is a negative for a softy like Graham, a kid whose instinct is to put on gloves to take out the trash when it's 50 out. The fact that direct flights from RDU to Logan are available at all times of day and that JetBlue is one of the primary carriers is undoubtedly a positive.

In any case, we shall see what 6 pm brings. I have a very full day between now and then, which is a blessing, so I won't be obsessing over it too much. I won't think about it at all, I promise.

The punchline: he didn't get in. On to the rest of this joyous process.

Mental health breakdown

Ok, hat was a bit of a deceptive headline, but then again as I am selling Mary's book these days (available exclusively here!) I need to up my marketing game. It's not that I'm having a breakdown, but rather that I will break down the mental health activity I've seen in the recent days.

Yesterday I twice offhand made reference to my own mental health adventure from three decades ago, first when leading an AA meeting (on the occasion of 30 years of sobriety), then again on a Zoom call with a handful of friends spread across the USA and Europe. After the first instance, a client reached out to me after the call and told me that her adoptive son had had an acute but scary anxiety attack at dinner before and asked if I could talk to him about my experience. We had talked quite a bit about this son over the last couple of years and I had spent time with him in June in a different context, so it wasn't entirely out of the blue. So now I am having lunch with him in an hour (she is buying).

Then after my noon call, a friend reached out and talked to me for 30 minutes or so about challenges he was facing. I was starving so I had to go eat. This was after Friday, when I found myself cast as a marriage counselor for a client couple where there are real money-related problems in the marriage. That one got a little testy.

All of this is outside of my training but in areas where I can provide limited professional guidance but pretty decent wisdom. And also connections to other clients who are mental health professionals.

But it all takes away from my ability to rest and recharge and fulfill my professional obligations to clients. But I guess it gives me material to fulfill my ethical duties before you, my hungry readers.

Crash course in small business

In recent days I may have mentioned that Mary's book had arrived from Germany and that our bedroom and the rest of our upstairs suite is now positively infested by them. It is true. Though at least they are not crowding out my new couch, which continues to hold pride of place of all the upstairs objects.

But it is an awful lot of books, so now we have to get rid of them. That's where you come in, my dear readers, in your natural capacity as customers. Just click right here and you can go get one of these beauties. If you live locally, select "Pick Up" rather than putting in your address and Mary or I will swing it by your house sometime. Or meet you in a dark and secluded location for a discreet handoff.

To be honest, it's not your money we need, it's the revenue. See, the thing is, we have a lot of expenses for this book. If you are not an art superstar, art book publishing now is a pay to play deal. We paid $30k or so to a company in Germany (Kehrer Verlag) and they designed and printed the book. They didn't do hardly any editing. That was all on me. But they did a fine job printing the thing. The pix look great. Mary agrees, which is kind of key.

So we are expensing that $30k and reducing our income. But if we're gonna do that, the IRS wants to see a good faith effort to make money on our part, lest we run afoul of the "hobby rules." For some reason the IRS doesn't want to let people just throw money away and reduce their taxable income. I get it, makes sense. 

Another thing the IRS wants to see is a concerted attempt to improve business methods, to be business-like. Mary has been packing books in boxes and running them down to the post office. That will get old quick. Soon we will have the postal service come and pick them up, like my neighbor John does with whatever weird crap he is shipping out that week.

Frankly, we're also gonna need to get a business bank account for this. Mary is gonna have to suck it up and come down to the bank with me. Otherwise all this will flow through our personal accounts and it will get messy.

But for today, I'm done.

Athens and Chapel Hill

Until last weekend I had never been to Athens, Georgia before, though I'd heard a bunch of course. Here are a few thoughts.

The University of Georgia likes to act as if it has some claim on being the first public university  because it was chartered before UNC (1785 vs 1789). This is complete and utter bullshit, and could only be put out there by a state that was founded as a penal colony. Georgians might point out that it was not really settled by many felons, but if you follow their logic on the university question, the idea that it was supposed to have been takes precedence. UNC built the first building and opened its doors first, so they need to just shut the hell up.

Athens has a downtown that is a good deal more usable than Chapel Hill's. It's a bigger city and it's not built on the spine of a hill, so it has a gridded downtown with more cool-looking bars and restaurants. It wins the rock and roll argument hands down, many more significant bands have spent a lot of time there than here. All in all, it's probably a better place to enjoy ones self while in college.

Though it has a lot in common with Chapel Hill, at a certain point in time their characters diverge. Right now, for example, Chapel Hill is one of the most vaxxed places on the planet, whereas Athens and its surrounding county are at ~50% vaxxed. The public schools there aren't very good, partially because there is a white flight county just across the way where people decamped. Of course, Chapel Hill's dirty little secret is that it itself is a white flight place in a sense, or, rather, it is a place from which blacks have been made to flee by relentless real estate pricing pressure and hypercompetitive schools. 

In many ways, Athens is more like Ithaca or Charlottesville -- it is the center of a region, whereas Chapel Hill is an affluent corner of a large conurbation. Also, like Ithaca, it is a good distance away from a major interstate, so it feels surprisingly way back in there.

Top of the Morning

A bit bleary today after leading an HOA general meeting last night. Graham stayed home from school not feeling well, Joan is also not well, even Mary (usually the most stalwart of us all) is displaying a little cough downstairs (not a good sign). I of course feel tired but then I always do, especially after a working road trip followed by the shit show that is our HOA general meeting, so it's hard to untangle exhaustion from disease. Particularly when I am listening to the tales of Kastorp et al. up at Davos, pontificating and perseverating over every symptom and the filigreed significance thereof.

Plus it was hard to go to sleep with my mind course racing from the adrenalin of performing for 70-80 neighbors on Zoom. Happily, afterwards I was able to curl up on my own private sofa and enjoy some TV, this time Netflix's Sex Education, which is starting to develop some depth and resonance as it moves past its somewhat silly premise into actually letting us get to know its protagonists. It is moving in the direction of a combination of Stranger Things (good-natured geeks and outcasts stick together) and The Breakfast Club (all teenagers are insecure oddballs when you look at them at the correct perspective), larded with plenty of instances of general good humor. I can work with this. 

Passing time with Kastorp

Back from Greenville and Athens, a pretty good few days of driving. I will spare you extensive commentary from my passage through generic Trump country, except to note of course the cancerous predominance of enormous pick-up trucks, the near omni-absence of masks in stores and a high point -- a billboard somewhere in northern South Carolina -- to the extent that that's not an oxymoron -- that proclaimed that Trump got 120 million votes. Out of 157 million, of course.

Mostly I was unable to pay attention to such trifles because my attention was riveted, riveted -- I tell you -- by my book. Something deep within me had told me it was time to take on one of Thomas Mann's longer novels. My office mate David convinced me that if I had to choose, and I did, it should be the 1924 The Magic Mountain rather than Buddenbrooks. I chose the older rather than the newer translation of the book because I liked the voice of the narrator on Audible better -- it is read by a dulcet-toned Scot. The book is 800ish pages long, which translates into 37 hours of narration, so in principle the 11 hour round trip drive should have gotten me a quarter of the way through. It did not. I had to listen to some music.

Which is not to say it is not a good book, engrossing in its own way. In the 7-odd hours I listened to, our hero -- Hans Kastorp -- comes to a sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim, who is stricken by tuberculosis. Kastorp is not, or... is he? It's not entirely clear from the first 7 hours. No spoilers, please.

Much thinking and reflection is done in the book, much of it very relevant to both a long road trip and to passing through a pandemic. Considerations of such questions as the passage of time and the perception of the passage of time, and how such concepts as "eventfulness" impact the latter. Does eventfulness make time pass more quickly or more slowly?

Faithful readers of the blog will recall, of course, that we have discussed such questions here on occasion, how our perception of time seems to accelerate as we age and pass milestones, but how the having of children and (dare I say it) grandchildren offers us an opportunity to re-immerse ourselves in the anticipation of milestones that offset this acceleration.

Such as December 15, the date of college Early Decision announcement. And then, after that, Christmas. 

Hitting the road

Headed south to Greenville and Athens over the next couple of days to see clients, which will be my first time venturing out further than... Raleigh/Hillsborough/Saxapahaw/Southern Village since Labor Day weekend. At some level I'm still recovering from all the summer road trips, but I'm also kind of raring to see a little more of the world.

Finished Bojack Horseman last night. It was really quite something, highly recommended. I was very pleased to see that there was a little redemption in the end for our guy and all his core crew. The penultimate episode had been very sad and might have contributed to my getting up in the middle of the night before last, which I remedied with a Sonata, reading an excruciatingly boring book about the finer points about Social Security claiming strategies, and setting up on the new couch to sleep so I wouldn't disturb Mary. It slept just fine.

We had taken Mary's car in to Auto Logic yesterday for an oil change and for them to track down a suspicious smell somewhere in there. When my phone rang late yesterday as I was out walking, I was hoping for good news, instead I hear Bo's voice telling me "You've got something dead in your car." Sigh. It was deeper in the AC system then we had hoped. We'll find out where, but it will cost a little more than I was hoping for. Mostly I'm thankful for a good garage that OK'd the additional expense before diving in to trouble-shoot the issue.    

Graham goes out to lunch

Graham's high school has allowed students to start going out to lunch again, an opening in policy as we muddle forward in the age of COVID, surely a component of its new pro mental health program. Graham is embracing it vigorously. He went to the Pig two days in a row (on Tuesday because Deli Edison was closed) and is going to Deli Edison today. He is eating a lot of pork.

A little background is in order. For starters, Graham is rich. He has been earning allowance and also birthday and Xmas money here and there his whole life, plus he worked some at the lake over the summer. So he has money, but in some ways little appreciation for it because it has never been scarce for him.

What's more, he is skinny. At 5'9", he weighs a mighty 109 lbs. He was a little surprised that he didn't gain more weight over Thanksgiving, given how much stuffing he ate. Part of the problem is that he has internalized his mother's disciplined reading of nutrition labels and serving sizes over the years. For example, if we are low on dessert and he decides to hit the bag of chocolate chips for dessert, he will read the serving size (15 chips, for instance) and count out that many for himself. Which is a little silly from the perspective of his present size, though it may prove a good habit in the future.

It's also great that he is getting out and transacting with the world more. These forays to eateries are on top of the time he's spending at Triangle Chess on weekends, playing games with strangers for hours wearing a mask.

So it's all good. He can eat a lot of lunches before he gets low on cash and/or heavy. I do need to get him back to building muscle (raking leaves, for instance).