Ice, gas, and appreciation…

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Early last week there was rumbling of an impending ice storm. Having been seasoned by 21 winters in Western Maryland, most versions of frozen precipitation don’t phase me. I mean if I have the option, I don’t want to drive around in any of it, but with snow or sleet, you’d need to see some pretty biblical amounts before I’d be concerned about not being able to get the Jeep through it if I absolutely needed to leave the house for some reason.

Freezing rain, in my estimation, has always been something of a different animal. Good 4-wheel drive and all the torque in the world might let you get going, but with one little slip it’s hard to tell exactly where you might end up. 

Fortunately, my schedule last week called for me to mostly be home, so driving around in anything wasn’t going to be an issue. The catch for me was the propane tank buried in the back yard being only just a hair north of 25% full. Under most circumstances that wouldn’t be low enough to worry about. 100 gallons is plenty to run the furnace and water heater for a good long while. 

What it isn’t enough to do, however, is keep the generator running for more than a day without manually powering it on and off to conserve fuel. The whole point of putting the genny in was to avoid needing to do that sort of thing during a power failure. I want the heat on. I want George’s sun lamps on. I want the well and sump pumps running. I want light in every room. What I told the guy who calculated the size generator I needed was that I wanted to be able to still host Thanksgiving dinner even Delmarva Power suddenly went out of business. 

All the utility cables in my neighborhood are underground. It means we don’t get too many local outages. The outages we do get, though, tend to be because the larger transmission lines stretching through wood and dale have somehow gotten smacked. When they go down, they tend to stay down for half a day or longer.

All of the long power outages I’ve experienced since moving in here have been the result of freezing rain. Since it looked like there was a good chance we’d be getting iced over, I called my propane delivery company hoping they could pull me ahead on the delivery schedule. Sure enough, the next day Tri-Gas and Oil backed up the driveway and pumped off 300 more gallons for me. The ice ended up bypassing us here at Fortress Jeff, but it’s a decided comfort knowing that our local run time is now measured in days rather than in hours.

As much as my teeth grind when it comes time to pay the fuel bill, it’s hard to be too mad at a company that makes an effort to come when you call rather than making excuses about why it’s too hard to do. I appreciate the hell out of them for that.

Not bloody likely…

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I think I’m suffering from annoyance fatigue. There are plenty of things this week that should have annoyed me to no end, but the most I’ve been able to muster is a shrugging dismissal. To quote a line from one of the great influential critiques of modernity, “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”

In a world increasingly determined to find new and interesting ways to agitate the living shit out of me, I find the number of things I feel compelled to dedicate any mental bandwidth to decreases every day. Where there used to be concern for global and national problems, my current span of concern regularly contracts to the point where it barely extends beyond the house, its residents, and whatever activities need done to meet our short- and longer-term goals.

Sure, that still leave plenty of space for being annoyed, but it’s as if somewhere in my head is a magical shrinking give-a-shit. At this rate, by mid-2035 maybe I’ll have reached some level of Zen consciousness where I truly don’t give a shit about anything and we can dispense with What Annoys Jeff this Week forever.  

That’s not bloody likely, of course, but it’s a happy dream.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Rabbit holes. I’ve lived these last 43 years without ever needing much more than my regular checkups and copays. Despite that, I recently went down an internet rabbit hole reading about my insurance plan’s catastrophic health coverage and how to avoid out-of-network charges. I mean it’s nice to know and surely will come in useful someday, but there’s an hour or two of my week I’ll never get back.

2. Normal. Turn to any news provider and you’re bound to hear stories about “getting back to normal” or “the new normal” or “life after COIVD” or “life with COVID.” Most of those stories turn on the same general theme of wanting something analogous to pre-pandemic life to return as close to immediately as possible. Personally, I’m in no rush… although that could be because most of what I’ve enjoyed during the Great Plague are the same things I enjoyed doing back in the Before Times. The only significant change I’ll notice in getting to whatever “normal” looks like in the future will be inevitably spending more time commuting and sitting in a cubicle. If you’re waiting on me to do handsprings about that kind of normal, it’s like you don’t even know me.

3. Mud. I plant grass seed in the back yard every spring and fall. Jorah, on the other hand, spends all four seasons doing his best to turn everything inside the fence line into a sodden morass. It’s not entirely his fault. The soil is thin and surprisingly bad – mostly clay and rocky – so what grows there doesn’t grow thick. Being a deeply shaded area, at least a third of the green is moss rather than grass. The minute it’s disturbed, it opens a gash and mud ensues. I only bring it up because his favorite thing to do on rainy days is go every outside at full speed kicking up mud like some kind of teenaged bubba with a lifted F-150. That’s fine outside, I suppose, but it’s current on him, the floors, a couple of walls, and a bit of the ceiling from when he had a good shake. 

Joe who?

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Let me say up front that I wouldn’t recognize Joe Rogan if he happened to be sitting right next to me while I’m typing this. I don’t have any idea what his background is or why an apparently large number of people seem to listen to his podcast and believe whatever it is he says. I’m not even intrigued enough about him to bother doing the Google search that would inevitably provide me with that information. 

So, with my understanding that Joe is “some guy with a podcast,” let me dive in with some basic thoughts:

1. Celebrity =/= Knowledgeable. I don’t get my medical advice from Kylie Jenner or my financial advice from random TicTokers. I’m not at all sure why there seems to be a popular correlation between someone being well known and the need to give their opinion any more weight than that given to any other random stranger from the internet.

2. The “Lincoln” Principle. One of the quotes most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln (without, interestingly, any supporting contemporary evidence) is, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” If people, in mass, are fool enough to be taken in by whatever internet huckster happens to be popular in the moment, there’s really not much to be done to protect them from themselves. In this country, we’re generally free to be just as stupid as we want to be.

3. There is no “standard” standard for responding to bad behavior. Whoopi Goldberg got suspended by her parent corporation over making a decidedly ill-advised comment about the Holocaust. Joe Rogan, in contrast, is free to pump out buckets full of misinformation to an apparently gullible audience with little or no oversight or consequence from his corporate host. 

Is one worse than the other? That’s hard to say since what the standard of what constitutes bad behavior is nearly impossible to define in a way that’s universally acceptable.

I use to watch Fox News back when they were just the outlet that reported news from a right of center perspective. As their content shifted increasingly away from news towards commentary and hyper-partisan propaganda, I switched them off in favor of other news sources. I think, perhaps, our individual ability to choose is the real point here. None of us are under any personal obligation to watch or listen to content from any specific source. Expecting “big business” to protect our delicate eyes and ears from words and images we don’t personally agree with doesn’t feel like a solution that goes anywhere we’d really want to be by the time it’s finished.

The wild west of podcast, blogs, and electronic media overall has given us an embarrassing wealth of resources representing every political and social stripe. The catch is, this degree of choice means that every individual has to make a choice about what media they consume – and what sources they believe. We can collectively encourage listening or watching content into which some academic rigor has been put, but we can’t, in the end, fix stupid.

I don’t miss it…

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It’s the first of February. That means I haven’t set foot in a Walmart in a little over two years now. So much for the idea that you can’t get by in rural America without the overawing presence of that particular big box establishment. In the age of online retail, the idea that any one business is indispensable is illusory, at best. 

I made my last trip to Walmart on the last Saturday in January 2020 – just as reports of a strange new virus circulating through the United States were beginning to heat up. It was a “stocking up“ trip. If I remember correctly, I ended up topping off the larder to the tune of about $300 of non-perishables and shelf stable products, laid in just in case things got weird.

I’ll never be a doomsday prepper. Once supplies of certain medications are depleted, my days are most likely numbered, so that relieves me of needing to plan for anything more than about six months of surviving in any post-apocalyptic hellscape.

I know there are plenty of people out here on the internet who are more than happy to tell you that you need a to have a basement filled with years’ worth of dry beans and rice and thousands of gallons of potable water. For 99.99% of any scenario most of us are likely to face, that’s probably multiple levels of planning past the point of overkill. 

Being ready to ride out something less than the complete collapse of civilization, though, just makes good sense. I mean why set yourself up to be caught out by a freak weather event, a temporary supply chain disruption, or the general uncertainty that seems to be the hallmark of life in and around the Great Plague era?

As for Walmart, I don’t miss it even a little.

As it should be…

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Three years ago tonight, I knew I had a very sick dog. I knew we’d run out of room to maneuver. Through surgeries, skin infections, ear infections, bad joints, and most of the other expected bulldog maladies, there was always the likelihood of a bit of improved quality of life on the other side of the visit to the vet’s office.

Three years ago, I knew that wasn’t the case any longer. Standing up under his own power required a herculean effort and the pain of it was written across his face. The one short step down to the porch was entirely beyond his power. I could have filled him with pain meds and hung on grimly for a few more days or maybe even a few more weeks, but nothing seems more cruel than forcing a loyal dog to suffer without hope of it gaining him better times ahead.

Instead, I laid awake a lot of the night and listened to the steady rhythm of his snoring. Most good clocks aren’t as well regulated in their timing. We should all be so fortunate to sleep as soundly as a bulldog.

I won’t relive the rest of the story here. After three years, the inevitable “tomorrow” is still raw. Maybe it always will be.

Maybe that’s as it should be. After all, Winston was a very, very good dog and I miss him.

On crypto…

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Scan the big news sites and it won’t take long to find an article where someone is decrying cryptocurrency as some kind of scam that swindled poor unsuspecting victims out of their life savings and now the bank will inevitably foreclose on the farm while Ma and Pa are tossed out to the ditch.

It makes an attention grabbing headline, but doesn’t garner any sympathy from me. It’s safe to say that most people don’t know the basics of how the Federal Reserve “creates money.” I’d wager that far fewer know with any kind of precision how an asset like Bitcoin really works, but here we are with scads of people wondering how they suddenly lost so much value, even when they didn’t know how it was generated in the first place.

You can almost hear the outcry now, begging for the government to place increasingly restrictive regulations on cryptocurrency and save the ill- and under-informed from themselves. Letting people live or die with their own decisions doesn’t play well in front of the cameras, I suppose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I hold a very small position in crypto. Mostly it’s a hedge against fear of missing out rather than any expectation of it ever shooting the moon. With much of it picked up back in 2017, I guess you can say I’m long on this brave new frontier of finance. I think some interesting things will come of it, even if no one seems quite sure what any of those will be yet.

Waste…

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Despite making reasonable efforts, one thing I’ve found impossible to avoid as an army of one is generating a fair amount of food waste. 

Every Saturday morning, the weeks leftovers, bread that’s started to mold, crackers gone stale, spring mix that’s slimed, and whatever other food is around that I’m just not going to eat, gets hauled out and dumped over the fence. The local critters seem to appreciate it, but it’s absolutely money out the window. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t also some low-level of guilt for what I nonchalantly throw out on a weekly basis, particularly given the increased cost of food and the sometime scarcity of staple products in our plague environment.

I’ve done my best to reduce recipe sizes but when I’m just feeding me there’s always some left. The easy answer would be to dramatically reduce the types of things I buy – just bread instead of bread and buns and English muffins. That’s fine if someone wants to be so self-sacrificing, but I like each of those things in a different preparation – sourdough bread for dipping in my over medium eggs and bacon butties, hamburger buns for, well, hamburgers, roast beef, and chicken sandwiches, and English muffins for breakfast sandies in all their various forms.

That just considers the various bread products that make regular appearances here at Fortress Jeff. Meats, produce, and most other grocery categories are equally represented. Some people are fanatical at cutting anything resembling waste. As much as I wish I was one of them, there are just limits to what I’m willing to eliminate because money is only one measure of value.

Having options is the measure that appeals most to me. The serious granola and sandals types won’t like it, but at least the local wildlife is appreciative. 

Get off my list…

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I’m making a list and checking it twice, because one of my fun little “other duties as assigned” is filling in as the Keeper of COVID Numbers whenever one of my distinguished colleagues is out of the office. Today was one such day.

Without giving away state secrets or anything confidential, let me just say that the number’s we’re putting up aren’t good. They’re not good on a level much higher than previous iterations of my sitting here plugging away on the spreadsheet thinking “Damn, that’s a lot of people.”

I’ve never really been a fan of people, but increasingly it’s hard to think of our species collectively as anything more than unmitigated plague carriers.

Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Wear a mask. Stay the hell away from people. 

Even if none of those things are perfectly effective, combined they go a long way towards keeping people off my list… because quite frankly trying to track this many lines on a spreadsheet is just an enormous, time-consuming pain in the ass. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Schedule. I’m deep in the weeds of designing a schedule for a three-day event where, at best, there’s one day of real content. The inevitable result will be a proposal that nobody likes – but that everyone will eventually go along with because no one else wants to come up with a better alternative. It’s just another week in the belly of the bureaucracy as an event planner, I suppose. Thank God there’s no real-world events taking place globally that would be a better place to allocate limited time and effort.

2. Joe Biden. I get it, he’s not Don Trump. At some point, though, that has to stop being enough reason to give the guy a pass. I never had particularly high expectations for a Biden Administration, but setting aside our policy disagreements on the proper role and function of the federal government, the first year has been less successful than even I expected. From the bungled evacuation of Afghanistan to rampaging inflation to failure to ramp up testing for COVID, most of what’s come out of the White House in the last 365 days has felt botched in many greater or lesser ways. Maybe it’s just me, but I expected more polish and poise from an administration who are largely old hands inside the beltway.

3. Google. About a decade ago, I set up a “Gmail for Your Domain” account to support jeffreytharp.com. It gave me up to 50 “branded” email address overlayed on the gmail.com platform and some other nice integration features. At the basic tier, that was a “free” service provided by Google (presumably for giving them the right to data mine your various inboxes). For a long time, it’s been a totally painless experience. They’ve just announced the end of this as a free service and now I have to decide if $6 a month is enough of an annoyance and pain point to motivate me to find an alternative and migrate to it between now and May 1st. Otherwise it’s a matter of abandoning tens of thousands of emails and other records in place and starting fresh with a new provider. Stupid Sophie’s choice.