michael

Daniel – it is good to hear that you like the patch or sticker. It came from Sarah Mirk. Sarah is a local to me, Portland, Oregon, zinster, comic, activist, and other things. You can find her stuff for sale at

https://www.mirkworks.com/buy-my-stuff

I normally would say something like “all the proceeds go to Sarah…” or something like that but not, in this case, it goes to the cause. To quote her,

100% of profits from this patch are going to
the vaccine access campaign organized by
Partners in Health. A majority – about 75
percent -— of all the vaccines delivered
across the globe have been sent to 10
countries. Partners in Health advocates for
a “peoples vaccine.” calling on governments
and pharmaceutical companies to share
COVID-19 technologies and knoweldge free
from patents.

While you are at the site you will see other things she supports.

Kent, did you say at some time that Duluth, just across the bay has hills? Am I hallucinating…

Mike, a year of Morning Pages, decades of running, perhaps you need to listen to your wife and retire. That will give you enough time to type a page daily. Just a thought. And being retired is really nice too.

All, it seems that the skies will be clear tonight. I am holding off to see what count I get in the little dipper. And the count is: two. Not a good sky to look at stars. At least not until later when a bunch of lights go out. Though that will not be very good then either,

— MichaelRpdx

If you do not have clouded skies tonight you might be able to see lots of stars. Like Daniel who is camping somewhere in Utah. In fact, he should be able to see seven stars in the little dipper. It is available all year to any of us in the northern hemisphere. Catalina, in Oakland, will not have such great seeing. Perhaps two or three stars in the little dipper. It, seeing the number of stars you can count in the little dipper is a quick and easy measure of “seeing”, a quality measurement for the night sky. It helps to go look and count after you have been in the dark for a while. Twenty minutes or so. Years ago I used to give annual talks on “seeing” and how to judge it. Amateur astronomers are very interested in the quality of the skies they are looking through when looking for the “dim and fuzzy” items in the sky. Each region of the sky will have groups of stars with defined boundaries. They are defined by known, bright stars. Count the stars in the group and all the stars you can see inside the triangle or box and you will have an index to the quality of the sky. This does vary by what part of the sky you are looking at or the distance between the horizon and the zenith. The absolute amount of darkness is one measure of the night’s seeing. There is the amount of steadiness, what gives stars their twinkling.

If you like to look at stars, you are, unfortunately, hosed. An image of the USA from the sky, say from the view of a satellite or the International Space Station, you can see so much light leaking from the ground that you can recognize cities, interstate highways, and precious few dark places.

I am waiting for it to get dark to see what I can see of the little dipper. And … I saw zero stars. It is cloudy outside tonight. Hopefully, you can if you have seen see at least a couple or three.

— MichaelRpdx

Feel a deep sigh of relaxation. Go ahead have another. Another deep sigh of relaxation. Two weeks have elapsed since my second and final shot, vaccination shot. I am in the clear. People around me are also sliding into their waiting periods and emerging, ready to go and meet people, actual live people, again. My wife will be at her book club for the next meeting. I will join up with the Southwest Gentleman’s Association for us to raise beers and talk about having made it through the months of well you know what it was like for people. We are all waking up and ready to meet again. It will be our reentry into normal living. We will all breathe deeply.

I asked Kent how his new home was, we have read quite a bit about the place, was it hilly or flat. My home town is not flat. Not monstrously hilly but if I leave the house I am going either up or down. Close to me, where close means two and a half miles away, is a volcano errr volcanic cinder cone. It is one of thirty-two cinder cones in a thirteen mile radius. It is an extinct volcano. But it and they provide some rises to get over when you are out and about in the neighborhoods. I got that tidbit when I was making sure that the volcano was indeed extinct. I do not know where I heard the rumor that it was not extinct but I did from someone somewhere. You know how rumors work. Be nice if it were true. Anyway, Mt Tabor is about 600 feet in elevation we are at 175 feet. Not a huge climb to make but a nice one. I have bicycled and walked over Mt Tabor. It is on my list of things to do this summer. In the meantime I slip down rabbit holes and wish for flat areas here, that is to say, I wish we were on a flat area which we are not.

There were some thoughts rolling around in my brain. It seems they have gone off to someplace for a return to normal life.

— MichaelRpdx

Pancakes. How I miss having them. Perhaps a pizza, a margarita pizza, would be nice. Or a buffet of Indian food all there for your whims for your picking up bits and pieces of the food. Food we could make, put in that variety? Not hardly. We have made pancakes and a pizza. Having someone else do the prep and the cleanup. That is nice. We went out to a food pod cart, something you can easily do in Portland in great variety, like a Peruvian andwhcih made with plantains serving as bread. (andwhcih == sandwich there) Yesterday we went to a pod of carts mostly chicken-based with vegetarian and vegan substitutes because this is Portland. We went to a pod and went to a Thia place. It has been a year since we have had Thai food. My wife ordered Pad Thai Noodles with tofu. I asked for, I ordered Pad Kee Mao (Drunken Noodles, wide and flat noodles, love ‘em) with a faux chicken so she could share the dish and I could enjoy them. We traded out plates mid-way through. We loved both. But now our cravings are growing. By the end of the month, both of our vaccines will be in full effect. It will be time to go to places where people come to us, go off, come back with food. Yeah. Just a couple of weeks away.

— MichaelRpdx

Coffee. That is how it is spelled. Not cooffee. It is never spelled cooffee. The first time I attempted to spell it incorrectly here at got out some correcting ribbon, whited it out, and carefully typed it again. Just want to ensure for all of you that I do know how to spell that word. Coffee. I drink it daily. Almost all the time. Not every day, like doing Duolingo, which is now up to 858 consecutive days of Spanish practice. I will skip coffee every once in some time. I could not tell you when the last coffee-less day was but I am sure there were some days when I did not have any. I also do not remember the last time I bought some coffee to brew. The brown beans or ground bits. It was some 15 years ago when I started roasting coffee. We had been to Bali for, among other things, my wife’s birthday. She brought back some green beans and roasted them on the back porch in a hot air popper. I got curious. I got irritated with roasting quarter pounds of coffee. Well, that came after I was modifying my air poppers. And buying green beans by mail. And learning about roasting and how it was not all about making deep oily roasts and making a lighter roast and well a lot of experimentation. I have been through a bunch of, well just a couple. Except for the fire in one. Had to replace that roaster. I still have the original roaster that was built to roast a pound of coffee at a time, a Behmor. And then one that did a half-pound at a time, but with greater control over the airflow and heat, a HotTop. I have upgraded it a couple of times also. Both of them cost what seemed like an insane amount of money. I think the Behmor was $400 or so. I bought the HotTop used. I do not recall how much it cost but it was probably $750? something like that. Gosh, that seems like a lot of money. One could get a metal bowl and a hot air gun and roast as much as you would like. Or a big heavy pan, like a cast iron pan, and roast coffee there. But I do not do that. A roaster is kinda like a bicycle or a guitar or a ukulele there are bunches of prices and people have their reasons for paying a, well what seems like, a lot of money. But once you start knowing about how to do and why you do something it all seems if not cheap at least reasonable. So I roast my coffee. It is fresh. It is like I like it or something different so I can see what coffee tastes like when roasted ta in that way, I try different things to see how it will taste. But damn it is good really good so I do not much around with the coffee, I just roast it and we drink it and we are both very happy with the way it tastes. There is a lot to learn about roasting, but I have coffee so I do not muck around with it like I said earlier. So I seem to be rambling around and around the subject without saying much about coffee. So I will quit. Except for one thing. If you are curious about coffee order some from my place taste theirs. No, don’t taste it, enjoy it. Because if you like coffee, well theirs is one of the best.

And today will I forget to name them? No: of Oakland it is Sweet Maria’s,

—- MichaelRpdx

People’s name in red? Hrmmm, well OK I will give it a whirl.

Catalina – nice of you to help someone in the store about coffee filters. But, but, BUT you have a great vendor there in Oakland. Oh my, do you have a wonderful vendor. I could save on shipping if I were to relocate to Oakland. They sell pounds of great coffee. You need to accept what they have an inkling to roast. Though there is always an espresso available. We had to take, get, coffee roasteé when I could not for a few weeks. The roasts were fantastic. If you like coffee and have your own grinding set up give them a try. Freshly roasted coffee from them is a treat.

Yesterday I quoted Allen Lane (“Don’t try. It’s bigger than both of us!”) and never got back to who he is and why I was quoting him. He was a star of B-movies for westerns. He was best known for portrayal of Red Ryder and as the voice of Mr. Ed. Yep, the talking horse. That quotation is the only reference to how a horse could talk. Yes, it is good to suspend your disbelief and just believe in what is on the screen for you.

Austin Kleon (wait, do I color it in red if they are not seen here?) has a weekly 10 Things of interest. This week was interesting, to me at least. Item #4 is especially good. “Advice to writers: Nobody wants to read a book.” (The original was in red, so yeah. If you are going to write books and have not done so yet just get it over with, write something bad put it in a drawer and walk away. There is a nice collection of digression in his article on the matter.

—- MichaelRpdx

Allan Lane once said, “Don’t try. It’s bigger than both of us!”
Paying attention is, well if not important, it is something that can really … what am I saying? I was getting around to saying here that I had just now noticed that this Hermes 3000 has an elite typeface, 12 characters per inch, and the other Hermes 3000, the one with all the characters for Spanish, French, and whatever else, that one has a pica, or 10 characters per inch. I had typed on the two of them without noticing the difference. Until I decided to swap back to this machine and use it for a while. What other things do we take for granted? (note the presence of the 1 and O characters on this typewriter. I had missed them. It was one of the, no it was the reason to swap back.)

I am looking for a short story called or something like “A Parable of Laziness.” It is from John Steinbeck. It involves a man on a hot afternoon, a widowed woman, (or does it?), a rug with a rumpled corner, Oh drat. Perhaps I had written about this story from Steinbeck and if I did write about it perhaps I had included it in something I logged, written about in a blog, and…0h Wait. I did. It is in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. But wait, I had looked there, the table of contents has Introduction, log, glossary and then I quit reading there. But a search found it:

The log from the Sea of Corte, John Steinbeck
if only for .”A Parable of Laziness” which is a great telling of Bogle’s “Don’t just do something, stand there” dictum.

So back to my copy of Steinbeck’s book (of which I am too lazy to type out) and yes, there it is because had I read on earlier and noted “index” in the table of contents I could have jumped to the back of the book and found “laziness, 185-6” and gone to the pages and enjoyed reading it again. No widow in the telling, the woman is Helen C. Of which the tale ends with “He is happy; Helen C. may be happy; and the rug is not disturbed at all.” The rug is crooked. Does it care? Why should the man impose his need for “I am, in effect, trying to impose my will, my insular sense of rightness, on a rug…” Now all of this is getting to an observation from Soren Kierkegaard, “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.” Ah yes, why are we busy? Imposing our wills on the world around us. Are we making it better?

— MichaelRpdx (boy, now that is a first draft, to be rewritten!)