Category Archives: Friends

In Pursuit of Beard

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When I was much younger, in my teens, I attempted to grow a beard. It was mostly born out of curiosity, how it would come in, what it would look like, and how other people would react to it. I never had the most common issues, which is patchy growth or thin wispy scruff growing in where real hair should be. My hair was rough, strong, and exceedingly curly. Of course, when I was a callow youth I didn’t know enough to actually care for a beard, to style it and maintain it, to direct it. So when it came in, I appeared all a mess. Because it came in super curly and practically kinky, forming ringlets all by itself, I endured light mockery about being a hodgepodge of lanky button-nosed Irish dope mixed in with a Hassidic Jew. So I got scissors, trimmed it as far as I could, and then shaved it all off.

The response to that still rings in my ears, “Oh God! What have you done! Grow it back!”

So for years and years I pursued a standard goatee, shaving inconsistently because I never really felt like my appearance was anything worth fretting over, so I’d get scruffy, then neat, then scruffy, then neat, with little forays into yeti territory with event-driven neatening up. I also had a cheap and trashy pair of Conair buzzers that I would use on my own head to give myself haircuts. Ever since I was 13 and went on a trip to Florida with family, I blundered into the buzz cut and never looked back. That made self-maintenance a ten minute trip in the bathroom with a subsequent small hair explosion as I tossed my hair cuttings outside after I was done buzzing everything down. I did this for years and years.

As I aged, the same firm flow of testosterone that gave me my voice, and really fast growing facial hair also began to kill off the hair on my head. Male pattern baldness, which I’ve romantically referred to as “Sexy Bald Captain” after Patrick Stewart in his role as Captain Picard on Star Trek. I have made easy peace with balding. I could attempt any sort of coping mechanism or I could accept it. I elected to accept it.

So, fast forward years and years forward. My partner, Scott, started to grow out his beard first, and it was a certain curiosity to see how it would play out. Right along this time, during a thoughtless session of self-maintenance with the aforementioned trashy Conair buzzers, I went about giving myself a haircut. Absentmindedness led to me forgetting the usual 7mm guard on the buzzer and I took the first swipe, from the temple back, and the buzzer did its duty and sheared off the hair, practically right down to the skin. I took my goof to a professional place, a Great Clips, and they helped salvage my look from my absentmindedness by leveraging what I had done into a new style, a faded cut with a buzz on top. The reception of this new look was shockingly positive, which was a rather big surprise to me, leading me to think “Why did none of you mention this before!”

After the style recovery, Scott had made contact with a local barber in our city, who runs Junior’s Old School Barber Shop. As Scott was going to seriously pursue a beard and wanted expert care and guidance. We went together the first time, and as I sat there, pretty much an audience to the proceedings, I learned more about beard care in that ten minutes than I knew for all the years leading up to that moment. I felt like I could perhaps give it another shot myself, with the ringing chuckles in my ear about it coming back in ringlets and looking like a transporter accident between a Irish sheepherder and a Hassidic Jew. It was Scott inspiring me, and Junior with his teaching and instruction that led me to where I am now.

I had no idea about all the things that I could explore, and try out, with what nature was always trying to give me. For all the facial hair growth, not a single follicle will ever come back on my head. So perhaps it was time to see where I could take a beard myself. Properly inspired, and myself a new customer for Junior and his Barber Shop I let the wild take me.

I never thought I would be this pleased with myself. The feel of it is hard to describe. It feels nice to fiddle and futz with the growth, the longer it gets the more interesting the sensations become. As I learned more and more, starting with Junior’s advice and observing Scott pursuing his beard options, I started my own exploration. A trip down the beardy rabbit hole.

The things I didn’t know were washes, balms, and conditioners. I also had no concept of a boars hair brush. I just thought of brushes as things that my mother and sister had, paddles on handles that would help them discover snarls and knots in their hair and lead to crying and cursing. A whole new collection of things were now open and ready for me to explore, things devoted to help what I was quickly growing to grow in straighter, smoother, easier to manage, and more pleasant to have and to touch. Thankfully my IRS refund arrived just as I was looking at the pile of new possibilities. There are many brands, many makers, and as many formulations all promising a variety of positive outcomes. Junior recommended the Reuzel brand, and specifically the Reuzel Beard Balm. That’s when it struck me that there was an entirely new class of personal care products that not only could do good things for me, but also give me a very enticing and attractive scent that I absolutely loved. I think what really tipped the scales, more than the inspiration and the learning was feeling what a good Boars Hair Brush can do. From the first moment I tried it, with the Reuzel Balm, the condition of my beard improved and the sensation of using the brush became a kind of indulgent pleasure. Now I carry my brush around with me everywhere I go and if I have some time to myself, using it has become a delight.

I then visited Junior myself, with what nature was handing me and he helped me bring style into my life. He gave me guidance and suggestions, and now I can’t imagine going anywhere else to get my hair cut, my beard trimmed, and all the other careful and delightful things that a excellent barber does for his clients.

I have since then explored more products in this arena. It started with the Reuzel Beard Balm, but now it has branched out to Honest Amish Beard Conditioner, which is much looser than the Reuzel Balm, and has the unique scent somewhere between Pumpkin Pie and Honey. I also have Beardoholic Conditioning Beard Oil, which is unscented but still works delightfully well. I have also purchased and enjoy Beardsley Beard Conditioner, which hilariously gives me the distinct aroma of a fruit salad. I am also quite fond of Lush Cosmetics Kalamazoo Beard Wash and Conditioner. The last thing I bought for myself was a beard comb, not that my brush wasn’t doing wonders for me, and it was, but I thought that a nice comb designed for the very hair I was trying to grow would be a smart move, and it definitely was. It is made of sandalwood, and the scent of that is pleasant in its own distinct way. I selected the Hundred Beard Company Comb.

All of these people, and wonderful products, have all worked together to give me a wonder. I couldn’t imagine ever living without a beard now, and if you are local in Michigan, I would make the trip to visit Junior. If not, finding a barber like him would be the best way to start. There is so much they can teach us all.

Lastly, a picture of yours truly, with the hard work and careful conditioning that all of this has resulted in, at least up to this point:

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TWSBI Fountain Pen

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A few months ago while talking with a friend about technology the conversation turned to throwback items that we enjoy using. I brought up my fondness for fountain pens, which always seems to surprise people. The idea of a pen as a writing instrument goes back a really long time. Around the turn of the last century, there was an explosion in patents related to fountain pens and how they hold and dispense ink as you write. After my conversation with my friend, I was inspired to go shopping a little bit. I had some money that I set aside for small little gifts to myself that I had set aside over the past number of years. I never really touch it, so the money sits in my accounts. I came across a company that sells a highly regarded fountain pen, called TWSBI. As I got to browsing the options on Amazon, I looked at my Lamy branded Fountain Pen and realized that it was good as entry level pens go, but I wanted to move up a notch. TWSBI seemed a good option. The pen I selected was the TWSBI Diamond 580AL Silver Fountain Pen with the medium nib. I also got the “Broad Nib” as many reviewers expressed pleasure at writing with both.

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TWSBI 580AL Fountain Pen

I have to say that writing with it is quite an experience. I started writing with fountain pens back in college and found that the way the ink flows beat any other sort of pen hands down. Plus the way the nib moves on good paper makes writing longhand a pleasure. It can still work on rough stock, but it struggles with the rough material, and there is more skritch-skritch-skritch while writing on some of the lowest class papers out there.

The Lamy I have uses a piston-convertible insertable tank, while the TWSBI has its piston tank built into the frame of the pen itself. I find that the TWSBI holds more ink, way more ink than my Lamy ever did.

Another little bit to note, fountain pens aren’t meant for left-hand writers as far as I know. The ink doesn’t dry fast enough for the way a lot of left-handed writers have to use a pen. Although I don’t have many folks I know that are left-handed writers, so there is no way to see if they could use it or not without making a mess of their hands with the ink.

If you have a little bit of spending money, this pen can go a long way in both its look and its function to add a little something to your workaday life. It won’t solve problems or anything like that, but it is something nice to have that a lot of people appreciate. I always chuckle to myself when people remark on how I use a fountain pen, and what I do for a living, which makes people think I should be keyboard bound. Sometimes old things peak, and iterations afterward are all downhill from that peak. In a lot of ways, just like Windows 2000. LOL.

Kalamazoo #NeverAgain March

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Today we drove up to Western Michigan University and joined the community in the anti-NRA #NeverAgain March from the flagpoles on campus to Bronson Park.

It was surreal to park on that campus again. We walked up to the flagpoles and the crowd was quite well organized and burgeoning. Several schoolkids were there with the event organizers to speak to the crowd and offer their viewpoints and context to what we were about to accomplish. Here’s a sample of what we saw:

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The group was peaceful and orderly, there was no violence and no exclamations. As we walked away from the flagpoles, and down past the entry to Sangren Hall on Western’s campus, that was the only point that I noticed any counter-protestors. There was supposedly going to be counter-protestors from the local Open Carry group, but Western’s Public Service does not allow open carry on University grounds, so the only counter-protestors we saw were some people with signs. There were very many of us and maybe a handful of the counter protestors.

The event organizers helped a lot by telling all of us that counter-protestors were expected and that the best way to interact with them is to not interact at all. This was an exercise of First Amendment Rights on both sides, the teeming horde of us in the #NeverAgain march, and the handful of counter-protestors. Nobody that I saw made contact, there were some glances, but nothing overt that I witnessed. The march downtown was met with lots of honking horns from the rerouted traffic. The police were kind, principally silent, and really to keep watch around the edges and to handle traffic. We came into contact with one police officer who was attempting a charm offensive, he thanked us for our orderly civic display and we thanked him for traffic control and keeping watch over us all.

The march itself was very pleasant. There wasn’t anything remotely provocative about any of the progression down to the central park downtown. There were no accidents that I saw, no foolishness from anyone, and we all demonstrated our political viewpoints in a very calm, exceptionally orderly manner.

Afterwards, when the words were said and the kids had their moment to shine, the march broke up and everyone drifted away. We ended up going to Kelvin & Company for a snack because we really wanted a break from the chilly wind and all that walking. After our little stop, we dropped by another new store on the Kalamazoo Walking Mall, RocketFizz. We enjoyed some Special Dark Hersheys Chocolate Bars and I bought a bottle of butterscotch root beer from a bottler in Washington State, Oh-So brand, I think. The walk back was long, and upon reflection if we had stashed the Juke somewhere downtown we probably would have had a faster way to get back to campus. Political marches aren’t very common, so that we missed out on a logistical tip wasn’t so awful. We got in a lot of walking steps on our Fitbits, at least.

Peer to Peer File Transfer, Reep.io

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I recently needed to move about ten gigabytes of data from me to a friend and we used a new website service called reep.io. It’s quite a neat solution. It relies on a technology that has exists in many modern browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera called WebRTC.

The usual way to move such a large set of data from one place to another would probably best be mailing a USB memory stick or waiting to get together and then just sneaker-net the files from one place to another. The issue with a lot of online services that enable people to transfer files like this is that many of them are limited. Most of the online offerings cap out at around two gigabytes and then ask you to register either for a paid or free account to transfer more data. Services like Dropbox exist, but you need the storage space to create that public link to hand to your friend so they can download the data, plus it occupies the limited space in your Dropbox. With reep.io, there is no middleman. There are no limits. It’s browser to browser and secured by TLS. Is that a good thing? It’s better than nothing. The reason I don’t like any of the other services, even the free-to-use-please-register sites is because there is always this middleman irritation in the way, it’s inconvenient. Always having to be careful not to blow the limit on the transfer, or if it’s a large transfer like ten gigabytes, chopping up the data into whatever bite-sized chunk the service arbitrarily demands is very annoying.

To use this site, it’s dead simple. Visit reep.io, and then either click and drag the file you want to share or click on the File Add icon area to bring up a file open dialog box and find the file you want to share. Once set, the site generates a link that you can then send to anyone you wish to engage with a peer-to-peer file exchange. As long as you leave your browser running, the exchange will always work with that particular link. You don’t need any extra applications, and it works across platforms, so a Windows peer can send a file to a Mac client, for example. That there is no size limit is a huge value right there.

If you have a folder you want to share, you can ZIP it up and share that file. It’s easy to use, and because there are no middlemen, there aren’t any accounts to create, and thanks to TLS, nobody peeping over your shoulder.

Shifting Platforms

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I go through cycles of having an interest, and then not having an interest in social media. Twitter and Facebook are the core services that I’m thinking about here. Amongst these services, I’ve given up on Twitter. I no longer engage with anyone in Twitter and the leading edge of loud, noisy chatter has carried on without me. If I do run the Twitter application, it’s mostly to witness some event as it unfolds, like a news source, or to jump on some shame bandwagon when a public figure makes a terrible mess of their lives by saying or doing something stupid.

I am about to give up on Facebook as well. There are many reasons for this renewed effort to leave the system. I am tired of the see-saw polarity between stories. The negative political stories mixed in with the positive reaffirming stories build up a kind of internal mental noise that clouds my day and keeps me from being focused. Another reason to leave is the interface has become somewhat moribund on its own. You can sometimes comment, sometimes not. The only option to express your reactions when it comes to feelings is “Like” and the entire service has become self-balkanized. I have friends and family on Facebook, but out of all of them, I only follow a few and I’ve muted the rest. I don’t really miss the engagement, but always having to think about tailoring my thoughts based on the audience has started to give me fatigue.

I think then that it may be time for me to go back to writing blog posts on my WordPress blog. The blog encourages longer format writing, and I expect that engagement will drop as I won’t be using Facebook. In a lot of ways, it is a kind of social addiction and the only way to break it is to wean off of it. Perhaps cold turkey is not right, but rather cool turkey.

I don’t expect anyone to follow me off of Facebook. I will share my blog posts to Facebook so people can still see what I write, but the engagement will drop off. Feel free to comment on my blog if you wish. Otherwise, that will be that.

On a more technical note, I changed how the stories are shared across systems. The original way was to publish a WordPress entry, which would share to Tumblr, and that would then share to Twitter and Facebook. I have torn that down and set it so that WordPress itself shares to Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Twitter. It’s a more direct path that doesn’t require people to slog through my Tumblr. I think it’s more direct this way.

Thanksgiving 2015

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Tis the season for us to unpack all the holiday crazy that comes with the post-Halloween holiday adventure. Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cooking, planning, setting up, and a lot of decking of the halls!

So we start with Thanksgiving. Weeks ago we took advantage of the 50% discount deal at our local supermarket and made room for the frozen Turkey in our basement fridge. Then we slowly accumulated all the other ingredients to our “feeding an army for two people” style of Thanksgiving. On that Monday, November 23rd. I caught a little video from a television and network cooking personality, Mr. Alton Brown. He recommended that people could defrost and brine a turkey at the same time. So I had a frozen Turkey in my freezer and I had never brined a Turkey before and didn’t know how it would turn out. Following Mr. Browns advice, I hauled out the twenty-pound bird and found that my biggest stock pot fit it like a glove. The directions couldn’t have been more direct and simple. Strip the Turkey of it’s webbing and plastic wrap, then put a cup of Kosher Salt in the vessel along with 2L of hot tap water in the vessel and stir until the salt is dissolved. Then add 4L more cold water to the vessel and then put the turkey in. I put it so that the main cavity was pointed up at me, so as I added more water (water to fill all the way around the turkey) it wasn’t going into the cavity, so I poured into the cavity until the entire bird was submerged. Then I wrapped the top in plastic wrap and put it in the basement, behind locked doors. No refrigeration required! As the turkey defrosted itself, it also brined itself. When I temped out the bird two days later it was at about 45 degrees and then I stowed it in the fridge until we were ready to cook it. When I was set, I poured the water off and then rinsed it with fresh cold tap water, all the cavities and everything. Then I put it in the roasting pan.

The oven was set at 350 degrees, however, it was running hot for about twenty minutes, so the first shot was at about 400 degrees. I knew something wasn’t right because the turkey was making a lot of snap, crackle, and pop noises. When I checked the temperature I noticed the temperature disparity and corrected the dial, which brought the oven back into calibration.

There were two competing schools of thought during the cooking process. The first one was that I had accidentally turned our turkey into Lot’s Turkey, a solid pillar of salt. The other school was “it defrosted and it didn’t amount to crap.” and that the salt was pretty much just a silly affectation. I held out hope, mostly because of the sage words of Mr. Brown, whom I trust when it comes to food preparation and cooking.

We were a little taken aback when the temperature probe indicated that every part of the turkey had reached about 170 degrees, it was well and truly done. I asked, “How much juice is in the pan?” and the answer was “Not very much, if any. Only what it was basted with.” We had made enough of our own with the basting juices made with turkey broth concentrate and sauteeing the neck. I let the turkey settle for about ten minutes and then carved into it.

The meat was so moist and juicy that it fell apart as I carved into it. The entire dinner was spent marvelling at just how amazing it all was and how we’ll never do a turkey any other way than this. So simple, a saltwater bath for three days changes so much about a turkey! And just like Mr. Brown promised, the brine really shines for leftovers. The turkey is usually tough and dry as cardboard by the time its leftovers, but with the brined turkey it is nearly as amazing each time we take little out of the fridge for dinner it’s still amazing!

I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t brine their turkey. We’ll brine ours from now on, fresh and leftovers are just the tip of how amazing this is. The turkey probably was fully thawed in a little over a day! The three days just added to the brine’s power to make the bird juicy and amazingly flavorful.

Just for the record, the turkey wasn’t related to Lot at all, it wasn’t salty. It was amazing.

Geek Excursions: BitMessage

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Along with my curiosity surrounding Bitcoin, there is a similar technology that has been released for public use called BitMessage. This system is a really neat way to securely communicate in a secure method that involves absolutely no trust whatsoever. It’s a completely decentralized email infrastructure and has captured a lot of my spare attention. BitMessage works a lot like how Bitcoin does, you can create email addresses on the fly, they are a long sequence of random characters that your system can display because you have both a public key and a private key. In a lot of ways BitMessage deals with the biggest problem surrounding PGP/GPG, which is key management. Nobody really wants to manage keys or use the system because it’s extra work. Plus even with PGP/GPG, your identity is written on your keys for everyone to see.

Getting started with BitMessage is a snap. First you need to download the BitMessage client, and you can get that at bitmessage.org. There’s a Windows and Mac client available, you can start it and be instantly attached to the BitMessage network, ready to create new “BitMessage Addresses” and throw them away just as easily. So, for example, you could reach me by sending me a BitMessage to this address: BM-2cWAk99gBxdAQAKYQGC5Gbskon21GdT29X. When you send a message using BitMessage, its to this address and from an address that your client makes, so the conversation occurs securely and since every node has a copy of the data it’s impossible to tell who is getting what information. I think an even more secure method would be to cross BitMessage with a PGP/GPG key. The only problem with a key like that is that classically PGP/GPG keys require that you include your email address as a subkey so that you can be identified by a human-readable email address when looking for your public key or when someone else is looking for it, to verify a signature for example. The PGP/GPG system doesn’t require an email address, you can of course create a public and private keypair using PGP/GPG and make the email address up from whole cloth, and instead just let people know the key ID that you want them to use. So technically if Alice wanted to secretly communicate with me, we could give each other our public keys to start and then use BitMessage as the messaging mule. I don’t see how any eavesdropper could make sense out of any of that data flow. It’s unclear what the contents are, the PGP/GPG encryption keeps the contents of the message secure, and BitMessage itself seriously obfuscates if not outright eliminates being able to tell where the messages are ultimately going to or coming from.

I have to admit that BitMessage is very user friendly and very handy to have. My only issue with it is that I don’t know anyone who uses it, but perhaps this blog post will change that. If you are interested in this bleeding-edge crypto/privacy software, I encourage you to chat me up on BitMessage for serious matters or for fun.

Daily Prompt: Singing in the Rain

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Safe inside, toasty warm, while water pitter-patters on the roof… describe your perfect, rainy afternoon.

It’s a split between the slow romance of a rainy afternoon or the quiet snuggliness of a blizzard. Either event always carries within it the possibility of power outage and since the last great outage I’ve found myself both challenged and strangely engaged. Without technology, without all of the noise I found it much easier to live and carry on. The nighttime is pitch, refrigeration is a commodity and cooking becomes more challenging with the loss of an oven, but being cut off from the trappings of technology let you get back to what really matters.

I’ve for the longest time felt that technology has shrunk the world and made everything knowable. Even the things that should always remain hidden and unknown. Some people share too much, and we’ve devolved into fetishizing worry and concern over things that we have no ability to affect. Ever since I killed my television, effectively walking away from broadcast TV and all the awfulness that comes with it I’ve found my life in flux, rebalancing and having more access to happiness as a result. The mood of a rainstorm or a blizzard is a perfect setting for considering where I am in life, it’s the perfect moment for introspection and reflection. It doesn’t escape me that both of these conditions glorify the home, things that surround the home are always going to make me happier.

When the power fails, when technology recedes you find yourself sitting alone with your thoughts, if you are with other people you start to struggle for activities to occupy your time. Telling stories, talking, reading books, playing games – the things we all did before all this technology came and made everything “better” are sometimes the very things that we need to get back to. I have always carried a special reverence for old things, older technology that has been supplanted by newer technology. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s better. My analog wristwatch and my fountain pen are personal testaments to that very thing. The rain and the snow lend encouragement to the things in our lives that none of us should stray very far away from. I’ve found myself actually fantasizing about turning off the house power to have new oases of freedom from electricity and the trappings of technology. It’s not actually practical as turning off the house mains would shut down my refrigerator and that would make living significantly more difficult and increase misery if I lost all that safety in the box-that-stays-cold.

I think more people should at least play pretend that the power has gone out. Try to reconnect to each other without technology, without social networking and all these little gadgets that have filled up our lives. Break out the lanterns and play card games, play board games, talk, tell stories, relate to one another again without all the structure that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The irony isn’t lost on me, that I am advocating breaks from technology while typing on the very pinnacle of such technology and eventually posting it into the very thing I rail against. I think it comes to a sense of balance. Not being completely embedded, obsessed, and reliant on technology on one hand and not being a Luddite in the other. There’s a time and place for both and keeping both alive in your life feels important somehow. Electricity isn’t like sunshine, it isn’t guaranteed. It’s important to figure out life without electricity and to be prepared. This balance and respect for older things makes a lot of sense to me.

It’s far afield from where this daily post started – a description of a rainy day and how it makes you feel turning into a pleading that you can see better represented in Koyaanisqatsi. Funny what a little rain will bring.

When The Lights Went Out

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Lightning_03Yesterday was one hell of a powerful storm. The wind was magnificent and the storm itself was chugging along at a heady clip, around 55 miles per hour by the reports from the weather service. The tree in front of my residence is a red oak, and I’ve always known that red oaks have a reputation for shedding lots of branches and it did not disappoint! We lost about 10% of the canopy in front of my house including one big branch that dug a foot long gouge out of the turf in the grass between my house and my next door neighbors. I pushed the torn sod back into place and stomped it flat with my shoes, so that’s fine, but the front of my house looks a little like a war zone where the trees and the wind went to battle.

My next door neighbor, across the street lost a giant part of her tree and it took out her power and cut mine as well. Thankfully her house didn’t suffer any structural damage, just a big bit of tree where it doesn’t belong. I had a time warning neighbor kids away from the area since it was a downed power line. Nobody approaches downed power lines, even if the power is out. Much like a toaster, a downed power line remembers and seeks bloody revenge, you don’t handle the line as much as you don’t rescue the piece of toast in the toaster with a fork. When my across-the-street neighbor returned I let her know that I contacted Consumers Energy and let them know about the downed line and the damage.

Losing electricity has returned our lives to simpler more fundamental conditions. When the sun is up, daylight makes living easy. The water pressure and water quality are unchanged, so the sinks, toilets, and showers all work properly – except that the hot water tank has an electric heat control, so whatever hot water comes out of the tank will be all there is for a few days. Much of the technology in our lives no longer works. The network connection is of course dead, along with the entertainment center. We don’t have TV per se, but the general entertainment for that part of our lives is no longer possible while electricity no longer flows. Life goes on, and without technology it can continue to go on quite well. It’s important to establish a solid thread running into the past, I’ve always been fond of old technology, especially things that do not require electricity. So we have a lot of battery-powered devices and wind-up clocks and automatic watches to keep the time. Our refrigerator is very slowly reaching the same temperature as the surrounding environment that it’s in and that’s unavoidable. We’ve transferred much of the expensive food out and into the freezers where Scott works. The rest of the contents of the refrigerator are not exactly perishable, things like OJ and mustard I doubt will suffer very much even if they are warm. We’ll lose other bits in there but that’s life. Cooking has become slightly different, as I have a gas range the cooktop is perfectly serviceable with a handy source of ignition but the oven, which requires electronic temperature control doesn’t work. I can cook around that limitation, however the inability to refrigerate means that making anything that we can’t eat in a single sitting is probably a bad idea.

Living this way, without electricity, even temporarily is healthy I think. It reminds us just how reliant we are on the fundamental utility of electrical delivery and distribution. Candles provide light at night, however they are open sources of ignition and are potentially disastrously hazardous, especially with a cat who has no fear of fire because he’s never actually come into contact with it in his life. From what I can see, he lacks even an instinctual aversion to it, which we have to manage. On my list of things to acquire is an LED lantern, something that can last a good long time, puts out a disturbing amount of light, and won’t set a curious feline on fire. Entertainment has changed, it’s different but still equivalent to what our usual fare is during evening hours. Instead of TV programs, network entertainment streams, or movies, we’ve swapped all that out for card games, board games, talking and reading books. Again, retaining that thread that runs into the past is essential. The smart money is on technology that does not require electricity. I’m amused quite deeply that here, steampunk pops up as a relevancy. If everything in your life that used to be automatic is now clockwork powered, you still have a semblance of convenience however the source of power is yours truly. For my watch it’s just movement that winds it, for my emergency flashlight it’s ten minutes of vigorous shaking, but I will need to find some way to provide a pool of safe illumination at night and early in the morning and perhaps some way to charge all my connected devices by human power.

Earlier this morning, when I was taking a “Marine Corps Shower” which is to say, the fastest most efficient and bracing method to clean oneself, I thought of a possible way with a carefully geared pedal generator that one or two people could operate that would be able to collect enough energy from pedaling to keep a refrigerator running, at least give it a boost so it could chill down for a cycle. I’m sure if I’ve thought of it, a product exists somewhere out there that can do just what I’m thinking. It’s definitely a first-world problem that only occurs to you when you don’t have the convenience of electricity at your beck and call. That we rarely think of life without electricity, we really ought to. Take a weekend and turn off the house mains (except for the fridge,  you want to simulate a disaster, not initiate one) and then look at life without. What needs to be available to make life possible? A box of candles, perhaps. A LED floodlight with a deep-cycle battery? Much better! Events like these, where you are thrown backwards test your ability to cope and your cleverness.

They say that our electrical power delivery will be returned this Monday around 11:30pm. That being said, they are saying that to everyone, so we are hoping that this is an engineers estimate and that our power will be back on sooner than this. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Now I need a way to charge my phone by hand. Funny, your priorities…

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