A few days ago while I was marveling at my silly dress-up vest with the finished pockets sewn closed, I was standing under an old-time fixture that I had installed all on my own. Frankly it was going to turn out to be a nod to the past any way it unfolded. It was either going to be the fixture we eventually chose or a “in the spirit of” Tiffany-style lamp. So either way we were going to install a fixture that prized the past. We noticed the “Edison Style” bulbs immediately and almost in the vein of “love at first sight” these fixtures trumped the Tiffany-style stained glass ones almost instantly. It helped of course that the “Edison Style” was $45 while the “Tiffany Style” was $90. We could afford a small bit of throwback style for half the price.

So while I was looking at myself, all trimmed and shaved (for what it’s worth) in a dress vest, under an “Edison Style” bulb it had to be synchronicity for what transpired tonight. For the past few days I’ve been dwelling, at least mentally, in a space that appreciates how excellent really old designs are and sometimes these designs are actually pinnacle moments. They are wonders, marvels, true magnificence that once expressed can’t really be improved upon. It takes a real romantic to even entertain that an old thing retains value. In some ways I sense that old things not only retain their value but augment their value because they last, or touch something deep inside that means something very important to you.

So I stood there, in the civil twilight of pre-dawn right before work. Standing under an Edison-style bulb and appreciating my reflection in the hall mirror and being filled with a feeling that something quite like this could have been how my predecessors felt in the 1800’s when all this technology was brand new. Nobody then marveled at the warm yellow glow from an Edison bulb as a matter of romance, they saw it as an improvement to paraffin, naphtha, or beeswax candles. So for some strange reason I thought of someone I never met, ever in my life but only know through Ancestry.com. That would be my second great grandfather Fernando Race. The father of my maternal grandfather, Allan (I think). So oddly enough I had technically summoned the shade of my second great grandfather and it was something very deep and meaningful.

I never EVER knew any of these people. The only memory I have of my maternal grandfather is little blazes of bright memory. Me sitting on his lap while his model trains ran around his little train village in the basement of my grandparents home in Ithaca. It’s true that scent can bring you back, and it does for me. Funny enough if I catch WD-40, an industrial cleaner and lubricant, and it’s scent, accessing these memories of my grandfather all becomes very plain and very simple and they kind of burst forth right into my mind. Scents carry memory, alas, nostalgia. So getting just a scent of WD-40 puts me right back there. So thinking about the past also helps put me “back there” and frankly I find it highly entertaining that I find myself preferentially dwelling in the past where things I take for granted would mostly likely be interpreted as high sorcery.

It wasn’t until a few days after my “in the past” reverie that I called my mother out of the blue. No reason for it other than I love her and miss her terribly and the missing feeling goes away a little bit when I talk to her on the phone. So I called her on my way home from the gym. People at work who find me … unique… (a great word, I love it) always ask to visit with my mother to see if that can explain why I am the way I am. Why I’m emotional and ebullient and always say whats on my mind. I laugh at my coworkers who puzzle over my behavior at work. If they knew my parents, they’d understand I wasn’t crazy but that I was as they see me, which is beloved (and special, huge heaps of special)

Then my mother laid two big whammies on me. The first took my breath away. I don’t really want to delve deeply into it for it’s subject matter, at least not now, but while dashing down I-94 going somewhere between sixty and seventy miles per hour she laid a HUMONGOUS whammy on me. It was a challenge to retain my composure and not drive off the highway into a ditch. The news she shared created a new emotion. It was a complicated knotwork of surprise, shock, and a heavy dose of what would be if you mixed “Eureka”, “Synchronicity”, and patent incredulity. Baked at 350 for one hour and seasoned with a kind of half-joking expectation, almost a kind of odd deja-vu sensation.

So I dwell here, thinking about things and people in my life. It’s important not to say too much lest I give it all away that I know, but I’ve been waiting many years for this to happen and this has awakened the voice of my power animal, my totem if you will. He talks to me in my own voice, and comes from deep within, my intuition and I’ve learned to respect that part of me, or him, or both. I will dwell where I am, quiet and waiting. That’s what I think I should do and that’s what my totem is telling me outright to do.

Anyways, beyond the unavoidable teasing which I apologize for of the previous section, it wasn’t the end of the whammies my mother laid out on me tonight. She shared with me some things which I’d rather not share here, but bear directly on my random mental roulette ball landing on the Races and Tuttles. I could have chosen anyone from my past, and thanks to Ancestry.com and my Uncle John and my Mother I don’t really have to wonder much anymore, that who I thought of first would come, in a way, forward through time and tap me on the shoulder and in a very roundabout way give me a wholly unexpected hug from the 19th century all through the agency of nobody else but my very own mother. I hate to be cryptic about this, but I feel I have to be circumspect. Suffice it to say, in a very strange and surreal way I feel like this part of my life was meant to play out this way, and that Fernando Race, his son, or his grandson – my grandfather dwelled closeby me that day when I was caught in my reverie of the past.

It wasn’t until I talked with my mother tonight that so many tumblers all clicked into place. I don’t know exactly how much she appreciates what has happened, but for me, at the focus of this storm of synchronicity, with so much all colliding all at once as if it fit together so perfectly that it lacked seams, that these two things will likely come to pass if I do not meddle in my fate. Time and time again I have been ringside as I have attempted to meddle in my fate and been handed my hat for my troubles. This time I won’t. It’s very Zen, but in a way, to move forward I have to remain perfectly still.

I can say that the synchronicity thrills me. So if anyone out there puts two and two and the square root of minus two together and expects that answer, then we should indeed talk. Life is happy there, or at least, it could be.

Months ago, before I got serious about losing weight Western had “Operation Historic Moment” when we announced that we had received a record gift for our new medical school. As part of this we had a public unveiling of the gift and as such I had to dress up more than I have in a very long time.

For me to be in a suit and tie would require someone to die, barring death, perhaps a wedding of blood kin would be enough as well. So I had to dress up and it struck me that I could go half-way and pull off a black dress vest and a very nice button-down shirt with black slacks. It’s a look that even XXL men like me can pull off and not look like we’re wearing a tent. So off I went, with my heft and found at the venerable JC Penney’s this particular vest pictured above. It’s a black dress vest from Stafford. Paired with a nice shirt it wowed all my coworkers who never thought they’d see me in a nice shirt, a tie, or >GASP< all clean and dressed up nicely.

After the event, I put the vest in my closet and pretty much forgot about it. Then I decided to lose all this weight and over the intervening months I was pawing through my closet and ran across it again. I put it on and laughed. What was tight was now very roomy; I had lost enough weight where I could start wearing fine clothes like this and not feel like a blue whale being strained through linen. So I’ve been dragging it out into rotation every once in a while and I quite enjoy the entire style of it.

This morning it came to a head while I was standing in my hallway under my old-time Edison-light hall fixture:

That I was occupying the same space and time as my 2nd-great-grandfather Fernando Race. Or at least I imagine that bulbs like these, the ones that are very old and cast a wonderfully warm yellow light on everything were the ones that might have lit him from above as well. So I stood there for a few moments taking in the old light style, the vest, which is definitely a retro fashion and chuckled to myself that I am standing at a collision between super-cool futuretech and equally cool bygone style.

So today while eating my lunch I noticed little seams where two small pockets appear to be, but they are sewn closed. I laughed at the stupidity of putting dressing that leads one to think there are pockets there on a flat sheet of fabric. I ran my index finger along the seam and discovered that a part of the stitching that ran along the fake pocket was coming unravelled. It was enough space for me to explore using my index finger and I discovered that it isn’t a faux pocket at all, but a true pocket – finished and everything! So I snipped away the remaining seams on both sides and now I have a better vest than when I initially bought it. Now it has two functional, and whats more, finished pockets!

Which then begs the question that plagues me: WHY THE HELL WERE THEY SEWN SHUT!?! Why go to all the trouble to install and finish perfectly functional vest pockets and then sew them shut! I cannot understand the logic behind this move by Stafford. It was a cheap vest, so perhaps it was a factory second, a mistake. But even then, who the hell accidentally sews pockets closed? It takes a modicum of will to finish a pocket and then more to perfectly try to sew them shut! ODD!

Of course now that I have a nice dress vest with functioning pockets, and a certain romance about the past bouncing around in my head, obviously I went all the way to this:

I’m thinking it would round out the look and it isn’t terribly expensive. It’s the kind of thing that nobody needs, but would really serve well to confuse people when they meet me. He has a pocket watch and an iPhone. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HIM.

I thrive on that entire idea. It entertains me enough where buying and enjoying the watch may be absolutely perfect. Evil Cackle And no, I’m not going to ask people what they think because they’d likely declare I’m silly. And all right, I’ll be silly. But I’m fine with going that way. For nothing more, it’s agonizingly romantic!

At work I have an older red hand-truck that has been used hard and left abandoned when it lost too many parts to be useful. My heart went out to the poor thing, unused and hated because it had only one quarter of the bolts needed to keep the deck together and the other side was supported by one of those little metal clasps that you often times see holding a stack of punched paper together.

This past week I resolved to repair this poor hated thing that was left ignored in the supply room here at work. I brought it into my office and removed the only real bolt that was holding the deck together and it was loose. The bolt itself turned out to be a square carriage bolt 5/16-14. Getting the bolt off was a bear because while it was very loose people still tried in-vain to use the hand-truck to lift objects and so the threads of the bolt were all mashed flat and dug up beyond recognition. I was able to grab the nut and bolt with pliers and wrench the two apart freeing the deck from the main body of the frame. Replacing the bolts was easy after I found the right kind and size. I even went so far as to get lock washers and place them on while tightening the nuts onto the bolts with the deck in place.

Everything worked well and I was able to fix the deck, as well as the axle since on the left-side the cotter-pin that held the hub onto the axle fell off and was replaced with yet another one of those circular paper clasps. The only other thing I had to fix for this were replacement casters so people could use the hand-truck as a standard hand-truck or flip the handle around and turn it into a kind of cart. I ordered replacement casters from Amazon.com and they arrived a few days ago. I went back to Lowes and tried to size out the casters because they weren’t 5/16-14.

As I stood there, in front of the mass of fasteners that Lowes carries it struck me how stupid all of it was. I stood back and marveled at the inclusion of both “english” and “metric” system bolts each with their own thread counts which only made things more murky. I was gratified that Lowes carried a 7/16-14 supply of nuts and lock washers. The logical part of me railed silently against all of this. Why the hell are there still “english” measures when not even the English use the “english” system?!? It’s just us, daft stupid Americans who cling to the concept of an inch, which means NOTHING to ANYONE except dullard Americans who refuse to adapt to the better metric system! I also railed against the various thread counts. Why the hell make the same size bolt but cut in different thread counts? IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Why not just standardize on metric bolts and say 5 threads per centimeter and leave it at that! I’m sure there is a mechanical engineer who might come out of the woodwork to tell me why higher thread counts are important. I call bullshit. Why not standardize on one singular measurement system and within that, one standard thread count density?

While standing there in front of all the fasteners I silently exclaimed “This is why we can’t colonize space, we’d die for a lack of 7/16-14 bolts!”

I paid for my parts and assembled the rest of the pieces of the hand-truck together and that’s it. I will likely never need to buy nuts and bolts again for years since very few things in my life actively use nuts and bolts. Computer parts are different. But it doesn’t mean that I find the stupidity any less outrageous!

I look confused and then I confirm that I do work out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, as opposed to the older one in Portage. He mentioned that he’s seen me in there several times and that he wanted to welcome me to his establishment.

It was all very above board and very pleasant, however I couldn’t shake the idea that I was being cruised. Thankfully my self-monitor was fully engaged so I didn’t allow the interaction to grow or become anything more than just a pleasant bit of restaurant flattery amongst the flatware.

After the fellow left, I commented on how unusual it was to Scott and he didn’t see the cruisy bit but thought it was a great customer relationship trick, to go out of your way to mention that the proprietor has seen you beyond the confines of their establishment and how it creates a sense of community and recognition. If nothing else, such flattery is very likely to lead to repeat patronage and I have to say that I do enjoy going to that restaurant. Scott then teased me about joining the World Beer Tour game they host there and that I’d flirt with the fellow that flattered me.

There just isn’t any winning.

This is what comes of blind obedience to religious dogma. Your children are GAY and your children are DYING!

We will never know who they might be. They might have cured cancer. Now nobody will know.

Your faith in the Bible is killing your children. They just want love and instead all they get is hate. Hate that kills.

Stop talking about Jesus Christ. He would have never accepted one child to die by THEIR OWN HANDS! If you love Jesus so very much then love your gay children and leave Leviticus to the JEWS!

It is time for an end. An end of hate, an end of suicide. You do not understand. GOD CREATED US GAY FOR HIS DESIGN! You are destroying children. There is no penance earnest enough to relieve the shame of a needless death.

So, if you hate gays then FIND ONE and hug him or her. See that we are not evil. We are your children, your friends, your loved ones. What do you think your GOD would say to you, upon meeting him or her? Would he or she congratulate you on your defending a book written by 2000 year old men with sexual maturity problems, or would your GOD weep at your bigotry, your hate, your baseless ignorance of the truth of your children’s lives. Well?

It is self-evident. Dead children are WRONG. WIll you all just wake up and get over your fears and grab your gay child and tell them that you love them permanently. Would you etch it in stone and carry that stone on your soul for the rest of your life? Your children are DYING and THEY DON’T HAVE TO!

Grow up and stop making God cry.

Once I got the game installed I had to fix DirectX, and then after that it ran. I had seen it during Sony’s beta test of the game and wasn’t terribly impressed or thrilled with the gameplay mostly because the human interface was so different from what I was used to with City of Heroes from NCSoft. I knew Scott was very keen on having me play so I relented and agreed to play the game. While going through the lead-in trial course that every new player has to go through I revisited the same issues I had before when playing the game. The mouse and keyboard controls are maddening. I was cussing and swearing while trying to button-mash. It felt like the inanity of a Playstation game, where you dispense with the pleasantries of the cut-scenes and the lame lead in until you move a figure to a part of the screen and then click like you’ve got Parkinson’s.

Near the end of playing yesterday, around lunchtime I went exploring the settings of the game and discovered to my chagrin a setting called “Invert Camera” and that singular adjustment made the game MAKE SENSE TO ME. All of a sudden the game played much more like City of Heroes and once I was beyond that obnoxious hurdle I actually really got into playing the game.

What do I think of DCUO? It’s certainly a competent game and is engaging. The mission system is acceptable and the play itself is entertaining and worth my time. The only real issue that remains with DCUO is how much lag the mouse pointer has when it’s not controlling the camera in-game. You have to have patience with the pointer as it doesn’t fly as your mouse moves, it instead feels like the game is asking the computer to manually redraw the mouse each time the mouse updates. This is irritating but not so much to make me stop playing the game.

As I play more of DCUO I’ll have more experience and will most likely refine my critique of the game and if I have the presence of mind enough I may blog about it again in the future. Or I won’t. We’ll see.

This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed such behavior in Michigan. I’ve never in my life witnessed it in New York and I don’t know if it did happen there and I was just not cognizant enough to notice or if this is indeed a Michigan quirk. People have absolutely no qualms about grabbing a product off the shelf at the supermarket, opening it, and before they have checked out and paid for it, they begin to consume the product! I find this a very rude behavior and it drives me to distraction. You didn’t pay for it, at least not yet, so what gives you the right to just chaw into something? Can’t you wait until you leave the market before you feel the urge to shovel matter into your gaping maw? It doesn’t help that some of these people make that disgusting crunch-munch-gasp-goopy wet sound that comes with people who masticate in public. That alone drives me crazy! Please, for the love of god, either learn how to eat with decorum or eat somewhere else! Anyways, I witnessed this and I instantly thought that that mother was perpetuating two very bad things. First, that you can open a container in a supermarket and just go to town on it without paying for it and second, that her children will grow up spoiled rotten on instant gratification. They put their little prissy hands on their hips and screech and carry on and someone hands them a pack of wafer cookies to shut them up. It ruins the children and sets a bad precedent for normal behavior at the supermarket.

I don’t know if anyone else has witnessed this atrocious behavior where they are. I find it abhorrent and repellent. I can’t stand loud masticators and I really can’t stand such rudeness. Perhaps it has more to do with the idea that I don’t prefer to think of my fellow man as a rude lout with absolutely no manners at all – despite the notion that not everyone can have the same sense of decorum that I was raised with. I think what bothers me is that my sense of decorum shouldn’t be remarkably strict, it should be common!

I didn’t approach the mother and chide her for her bad parenting. I can attribute that to MY sense of decorum. At least one of us has it. Filthy rude loutish proles. Gah!

The socket was just old. I turned off the house power at the mains because I don’t trust that this house I live in was built with any kind of zone-idea when it came to the electrical distribution network here. So instead of risking my life to fix this outlet I just turned the entire house off at the service entrance. I undid the outlet and of course this is the one outlet where they snipped the wires good and short. Any pull out? None whatsoever. On the positive side the house is wired with solid copper wiring, on the negative side, the house is wired with solid copper wiring! That stuff is very stiff and once I got the old outlet out of there (some cussing and swearing) I tried to apply the new outlet and of course the posts for the wires would not stay in an up position, so I had to use a pair of scissors and a screwdriver and a needle-nose plier working with absolutely no give to the wires whatsoever. I did this at sundown of course because I’m a glutton for suffering. Scott held the flashlight and offered moral support while I went on a blue streak against the bright bulbs who built this house. Who the hell trims the wiring to fit exactly in the service box and not give any slack?!? This place does! Gah! I wished very very unpleasant things on the wire-monkey who put the upstairs wiring together. I was finally successful in getting the new outlet installed and I tested it several times and there aren’t any shorts, both plugs in the outlet work fine and that was a solid win on Saturday.

The next deal was our regular going-to-Lowes and fighting over lights. There is something about the lighting department at Lowes. It doesn’t matter which Lowes, they are all the same. When we walk in it’s like we’re both possessed by jilted lovers bent on mutual annihilation. The minute we leave the lighting department everything is fine. It’s a lot like the scene in Transylvania 6-5000 when Doctor Frankenstein goes in and out of his lab, the personality shift is that profound for us both. We needed to replace the light in the hallway on the ground level. Those that have visited us, this light is between the kitchen, bathroom, and two ground floor bedrooms. The bulb was fine, but the fixture was shot. It was my top bet that it was in the fixture because there is no reason for the switch to go bad suddenly and there isn’t any way that wires in walls can have a failure unless they’ve been nibbled on by rodents. We don’t have rodents. So, while we were at Lowes, in the lighting department, wishing we could drown each other with giant sacks of sledgehammers we came across this very neat fixture. It’s a wall-mount fixture with a oiled-copper base (that’s the color name at least) a clear glass bowl and an old style Edison lightbulb featured in the center. These bulbs really are quite awesome. They have multiple filaments and their bodies are clear so you can see the light the glowing filaments make. The bulb is designed to run at 60 watts and only give off 350 lumens of light. It’s dimmer than a standard incandescent bulb and the light is warm and very yellow. To me it’s exceptionally romantic and is a far more appealing choice than standard CFL bulbs which either put out a bluish light or a really white light. The yellow light throws off the color of the hallway, but I really like the look of it and if someone really doesn’t like it, swapping it out for a CFL while they are visiting us is not a problem. Taking down the old fixture was not a problem, the distribution box in the wall was circa 1945 and finding the right screws to fit that was a challenge. The new fixture came with a bracket, and I saw how to assemble it together. I got the old fixture out, cleaned the distribution box as best as I could and installed the bracket, routing the hot and neutral leads through the center hole in the bracket and found the right screws to attach the bracket to the distribution box. An electrician would of course have suffered a full Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark facemelt if they were to witness me doing the installation but I can say the damn thing works. Once I got the primary fixture up, the rest of it went very easily. In went the test CFL bulb and that worked fine so I opened up the Edison bulb and it was big and fat and beautiful. I screwed the bulb into the base (it uses a standard bulb base too) and turned it on. The six parallel filaments are glowing and I can see them from here. They throw off a very 19th Century glow.

The upstairs fixture is another matter altogether. Nobody makes fixtures like that anymore. Everyone makes vertical wall fixtures that attach to distribution boxes and in-the-wall wiring. The fixture upstairs eschews all of that for a simple fixture hung with a nail in the wall and an electrical wire running down the wall and plugging into the outlet directly below. This fixture hasn’t worked for years and I’ve been searching in vain for a new one. Several days ago it struck me that something so simple couldn’t be permanently attached and likely could be serviced. So on a previous trip to Lowes I went to the lighting department on my own and found a replacement lamp base with a brass pullchain. I bought the new base and took it home with some replacement incandescent bulbs as this fixtures shade actually attaches right to the bulb itself making CFL’s useless in that application. I grabbed the fixture, and immediately saw how the old base was attached, I pulled it apart, unscrewed the leads and put the new base on, put it all together and tested it and it worked like new! So now when you walk upstairs and turn to the computer alcove you aren’t stumbling around in the dark searching in vain for my desk lamp, the light on the wall is right there and usually will be left on when people are in the house.

Altogether I have to say I’m very pleased with my relatively low-brow DIY accomplishments. New fixtures bring a bit of freshness to this place and repairing the other fixture really pleased me as I no longer have to search in vain for a replacement fixture any longer.

Hooray for tiny accomplishments!

I met myself as my “splint” walked through the door to the rooms that were from my past. He was an exact copy of me. I had my iPhone and was taking pictures. I asked him about being a splint and if he knew why he, or the place he inhabited existed. He didn’t know but wasn’t upset and seemed to enjoy my presence and felt that my questions were entertaining or at least worth attending to. I was exploring my childhood bathroom, taking pictures and I turned to him and asked him if he had anyone in his life. He blushed and I had to ask if he was serious with someone and for some odd reason I was really interested in TMI derails. As he was about to tell me I was fumbling with my phone, trying to get it to take a video and as he was about to share with me intimate details the dream dissolved and I woke up.

It’s uniquely an awful book. It is the first and last time I’m going to read anything written by Isaacson. I need a quiet place where I can suffer through this awfulness. The only thing I really wish was that it was a paper book and not an ebook that way I could throw it in the backyard, douse it with gasoline and let the hateful thing burn.

I really have to renew my library card and get to borrowing this dreck. At least that way when these awful books manifest I can get rid of them without having to waste precious money on this printed crap.