michael

“I Care A Lot” — do you care for dark comedies? And I mean REALLY DARK. Well, this one is for you. It is about a series of nursing homes. Well, that is the setting for it. They have a sympathetic judge that grants them guardianship to, well, to do whatever to elderly people. Now, when I say “them” I am referring to Marla Grayson. She is doing very well. Until she picks a woman who apparently has no relatives. Well, it goes from there as they try to convince her to release the woman and she resists. I will also say, they have a crackerjack strong ending. If you can stomach the plot enjoy it.

Power is returning to Portland. There are still about 15,000 people in the dark. But they are getting close to providing for all.

If you don’t care for dark fiction, I will recommend “Blown Away” about people who blow glass. Did you see “Great British Bakeoff”? Imagine something very similar but with people who do glass blowing art instead. Ten people compete. One is kicked out each week. One wins $60,000 and an artist residency at the Corning Museum. And hey, it is Canadian. Expect broken glass, beautiful glass, and watching them work. Well worth it.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Lent has arrived. No big Fat Tuesday celebration last night. Just a quiet slide into Lent. It is my understanding that most people do not practice it any longer. There is no giving up of something for Lent. I am not Catholic. I have never been Catholic. I have not been any whatever it is that does practice self-renunciation for Lent. Yet for years now I have practiced it.

It is something like the InCoWriMo or Inktober or my Blogging Month of August or other set period of time that I do something different. In this case, I give something up. This year it is eating meat, well actually all animal products. Or to put it simply, vegan.

Going vegan is easy on the world. And it is something to make me appreciate animals and what they have provided to us as we consume them. I think about it a lot and I do not consume them I recall all that I have in the past.

Today is the first of 40.

Onward!

— MicahelRpdx :: rkmm

Snow in Dallas? Snow in Little Rock? Snow in Cibolo? Yes to all. But in truth, as long as you are not part of the 133 car pile-up in Texas it is kinda, sorta OK. A couple of days of snow falling, ice covering, you stay inside. Snug as a guy pretending you are on vacation. Provided you have power. Electric power. 200,000 plus people in our area do not have it. For days at a stretch. We have had house guests so they can be inside a house with all the comforts of home. Heat. Warm Water. That kind of stuff. Down in Cibolo about 60% Of their electricity is provided by solar. Only with the cloudy weather, they have implemented rolling blackouts. We are lucky here in a part of southeast Portland where there have been no outages. And maybe I should restrict my comment to our block. A half-mile away there were traffic signals out. Everybody switching to four-way stops.

So I do not know how many of you have not had any snow yet. But I do caution you to be thankful. You could have trees on the ground. Or be one of the electrical crews working all day and all night to restring the cables. There are still hundreds of thousands of people who have not had any power for three days. All due to the ice that fell before the snow.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

It is a time to be thankful. Very, very thankful, We live in Portland, southeast Portland to be specific. This part, and I do not know why, is a stable part of Portland. We rarely have power outages only one time for an extended period. And that was during the summer. And it was an intentional power outage. Someone had ruptured a gas line so they shut down the electricity while makéng sure it was fixed without blowing up anything. Other than that summer outage we have had a few intermittent outages lasting for a few minutes at the most.

News reports that 200,000 people were out of electricity. Some, like my sister and nephew, are still out of electricity. My sister reported that she may not get her power restored until Monday. And it has already been out for hours. How can they do anything?

You saw the photo of our street yesterday. It looked like we had three inches of snow. Yet today the governor declared an emergency for nine counties in Oregon, including Multnomah, where I live. How does three inches turn into an emergency? It is a bit of a misnomer to call it a snowstorm. What we had was a rainstorm that froze and got a coating of snow over it. So it was really an ice storm. We have a blanket of ice. Covered by snow. It is great if you like to skate. Not great if you are a transport kind of person. Example: our public transit place shut down the entire system. No busses, no trains, nothing.

We are so lucky. Power is on. We have food. We picked up our niece from the airport while it was still rain turning into snow. We are eating well and having a great time together. Unlike so many others,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

Neice or niece, one of them, we went to pick her up at the airport last night. We arrived during the rainstorm turning into the snowstorm that lasted until, well it is still going on. It is a great time for someone to arrive from Boston. We are spending lots of time masked up. Though we have added leaves to the table. It is long enough to take the masks off for meals. And ditto for the living room. OK, not ditto. We have two couches. She is on one and us on the other. Still a long ways apart. This is the longest someone has stayed with us for the duration of Covid.

And Hay! Three cheers for the USPS, we had mail delivery today. Which also means they picked up letters to deliver to people. I have kept it up so far. Letters out every day. We also have a mail pickup box down on the corner, next to Hapa which is making Ramen, to go of course. One day the mail delivery guy arrived a couple of hours early. Shit, my letters were not ready to go out. However, the pickup time on the box was 1:15, which gave me plenty of time to polish off the letters and take them down for posting. Hot diggity.

This is rambling. I am going to ramble on another piece of fascination, some language studies. More later,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

I live in Spanish. Ha, yeah right. I like Spanish. A lot.

I am learning Spanish first with Duolingo and now with a gaggle of other applications. One of them, LingQ, believes in immersion. So it does it. You look up words that you don’t know, it marks it yellow (as a link) and works it into your quizzes later on. The repetition is the key. That spaced repetition is the key. And in truth, it is part of any language learning application I have seen. At first, it is very tough. I am also learning Esperanto of which I know nothing. The only words I “knew” were la, estas, and mi. All kinda like Spanish. But wow I have a bunch of words that I have been exposed to and they will be hammering along on them until I know them. But, BUT, this is the key, I will be reading complete paragraphs so I have a word, or a phrase, in context. That is pretty nice. But boy, the first entries into Esperanto, after a couple weeks in Duolingo were exhausting.

Onward, to much more learning. Now to find people to talk with.

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm

With apologies to Austin Kleon.

We are in our month of February. It is our shortest month with 28 days. But gee, it shure is nice. The number of days line up with the weeks. Well, most of the time. We add a day every four years to keep our calendar in line with the sun cycles. (My nephew was born on February 29th, a little bit of “how many do you know?” trivia.) Wouldn’t it be great to have every month like February? It turns out, that we did not have the calendars like we have now. August was inserted into the calendar by … forget that. It was not an honorific for the Roman emperor. It was renamed after the emporer launched the Roman peace that persisted for 200 years. They liked him. Anyway, they kept mucking around with the calendars until … sometime around 300 years ago, 1752 to be precise. That is when the Julian users converted to the Gregorian calendar where we remain today.

But why? We have had this calendar by convection for centuries. We could have a saner calendar of 28 day months. Just add one month, 13, months be unlucky or not, and have a leap day every year and two of them every four years. 13 x 28 days equals 364 days. In the meantime we would have this arrangement of months with the same days falling on the same number, all Sundays would be on the 1st, 8th, etc. This idea was popular in the late 1920s with George Eastman, of Kodak, one of the largest proponents. Kodak used the calendar until 1989. It was a nice idea while it lasted,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 1948

Each night, as I type my One Typed Page right after dinner when I type one, my wife reads whatever I come up with. She will comment on it. “oh, that was nice”, or “you are typing like a stoner there”, or sometimes nothing. Sometimes there is nothing to be said about whatever I write. Her comments are pretty spot on. Last night she commented, “You do know that it is spelled Brazil, with a Z.” I replied that the woman I was writing to, in Sao Jose do Rio, of Brasil, had spelled it with an S. So what is correct? Is it BraSil or BraZil? It depends.

I did a quick check online, your ever-dependable source of information, and ended up at “AboutBrasil, your starting point in Brazil” (Look it up.) The site has a page devoted to the topic. Duh, of course. Oh go have a read, it is entertaining. I will give you one quote “Until then (1897) there was not an official definition on how to spell the country’s name. ‘Brasil’ as well as ‘Brazil’ were both used, even in official documents like banknotes.” Can you imagine having a pair of banknotes with different spelling of the country’s name? And, it was not until 1945 that it was agreed on to use “Brasil”. That is if you are a Brasilian or a Portuguese citizen. The rest of the world could do as they pleased. It is pointed out that ‘Brazil’ “may be used in Portuguese documents in an anti-American or anti-globalist contexts.” Tell them that. There is also a page with, well it is titled “‘Brasil’ in other languages” with 34 countries listed and their spellings. Lots of trying to decipher which countries are aligned with which countries, or languages with which languages.

# # # #

Thus ends the first week of InCoWriMo. My Mom is the first person to be written. Which is good because today, February 7, is her birthday. And her present is not yet here to be forwarded to her. I have gone on to send a letter to a person on each continent inhabited by humans, Antarctica being one, the one without permanent residents.

If you have not yet joined the group, I encourage you to do so. Ignore the handwriting part and type to them, People do like to hear from you. And, I will bet, they really appreciate being able to read, actually read, whatever you have to say. Especially if you surprise them. A letter will get to the person you addressed it to in two or three days. Such a deal.

~~ MichaelRpdx :: rkmm 1948

I sent out a letter today. To a friend of many years. At the top of the page was a new to him, well in the form of a personal letter, heading.

It read:

2021-02-04 Portland, Oregon Royal KMM

Because yesterday I did not write to the OTP place. I started and then paused and never returned to it. Today there was a letter to be written and quickly also – the postman was soon to be here gathering up the things to pass along. A postcard to a niece in Boston, a letter to a woman learning English in Brasil, a man with varied interests in Perth Australia. (She lives in Brasil and is learning English, not that she went there to learn English…) I dived in and told him a few things of no great consequence. The important part was writing.

Writing in the USA allows you to keep in touch with someone for 55¢ And don’t you love it? There is not much you can buy for 55¢ I actually quite like typing it, 55¢ such economy of expression. But that and an envelope or cleverly folded paper and it will be taken away from your house and delivered to your friend. Delivered in two days of working time. Well, that was what it was like before Covid and the last people running the show under the prior “leadership” Yeah, two days to someone down the road in Oregon or across the mountains in Colorado or deep into Arkansas.

If the person you wrote to was diligent or a writer you might receive a reply into your mailbox by the end of the week. Or you can be a procrastinating laggard like me and they would not receive a reply for a couple of months. Because the reply is just that – a response from whoever you had written to and what it took time for them to write you back.

Of course, it is not like nowadays with computers and internet connection that allows you to ask a question and get a reply in a few minutes. Or even the One Typed Page group, where we have some kinds of conversation going on here, you can receive a reply in a day or two. But ahem, we are doing these One Typed Pages to slow down our writing and return to this method. (What am I thinking? Think about that and say something
that fits.)

Until I think again. Well, wait.

How long does it take you to write something to someone? I think it takes me a half-hour for a not too well thought out page of text. I know that it takes me about 12 to 16 minutes to fill a composition book page. Those are “keep writing, keep the pen moving” kind of writing Were people faster back in the days when those were the most advanced ways of filling a page? Then again, did they think while typing or transcribe something they had already written in pencil? Can’t waste those valuable pages of typing now, can we?

More thought required,

— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm