Public Service Announcement

My seasonal allergies have started acting up, and as you may imagine, it's making me paranoid as all Hell, especially since I work in Manhattan.  I've been on Metro-North pretty much all week.  Thankfully, no one in my family is at particular risk from COVID-19, but we are all quite anxious about getting the disease, having little-to-no symptoms, and passing it on to people who aren't as fortunate as we are.  That thought is making us all a little nutty.

In particular, I do not want to take the damned thing to work.  Seriously, if there's one thing I've learned these past 17+ years, it's that people in New York really need electricity.

So.  Amazingly, I found this on the Daily Mail website.  It's from the CDC, and it is totally useful. 

We've been taking our temperatures routinely around our house the past few days.

Back to Life, Back to Reality

It's Sunday, but after more than a week off, we're back to the grind today.  I have to swim, iron, and get to the grocery store, and tomorrow I have to go into New York City and do actual work.  My phone tells me that I have more than a hundred sixty-five emails waiting for me, and that's after I've had my out-of-office assistant on all week telling people not to bother trying to contact me.

Sally took this picture yesterday at Pier A in Hoboken.

What can you do?  We've got to pay the bills.

5 Things on a Friday: the Election is Everywhere

I’m still trying to keep it apolitical this week, but that’s turned out to be harder than I expected.  Election coverage is everywhere, and most of it’s so breathlessly scandalous that it simply screams for attention.

Which is pointless, of course.  

Everyone in America has already made up his or her mind.  Moreover, the vast majority of the so-called news these days is little more than clickbait for the already enraged.  I’m personally experiencing some heavy election fatigue, and it’s not even summer.  But I hate it, it’s making me crazy, and it’s absolutely self-reinforcing.  No one is open to new ideas, and at this point, that’s fine.  I no longer care.  

I just want to let it all go.  

Letting go is impossible, unfortunately.  The most interesting story of the week by far came out of the Trump camp, and though I’ve tried to cover it in a just-the-facts sort of way, this blog would have no point without my personal opinions.  Besides, it was fascinating.  Beyond that, I could very easily tie every story in this thing into the election in one way or another, most in ways that are overtly obvious.  Every piece here is directly impacted by our national choice-at-hand.

15 Reasons to be Thankful this Thanksgiving

1.  We’ve all got our health.
This was not a given.  I found myself in the hospital in August after a spider bite.  The back of my leg became infected with an antibiotic-resistant form of the streptococcus bacteria, and it took several rounds of antibiotics and four full days as an in-patient to clear it up.  Not fun.  But I’m better now, and I’ve been slowly but surely working my way back into form in anticipation of the coming triathlon season.

Sally and I are both over 40, and we’re both in good shape.  This puts us markedly ahead of where my parents were at our age, and I don’t take that lightly.

Race Report: Fit For All 5k 2014

Sally and I ran the "Fit For All" 5k in Riverside Park, Manhattan, on Saturday.  The race was organized by Manhattan's West Side YMCA, but we ran as part of my company's corporate team.  Sally works for the YMCA in Milford, CT, so this particular race offered us a chance to both support an organization we believe in and make use of our various corporate connections for a day in New York.  After the race, we grabbed showers at the West Side YMCA and then took the kids to the American Museum of Natural History, where my company is a corporate sponsor.  All told, it was a pretty great day.

Sunday Reading Room:

I wouldn't say it's been a great news day, but a few things caught my eye.

***

Why Don’t More Men Go Into Teaching? (NY Times)
"Ed­u­ca­tors, ad­vo­cates and law­mak­ers fight bit­ter­ly about tenure, aca­d­e­m­ic stan­dards and the preva­lence of test­ing, but one thing most sides tend to agree on is the im­por­tance of rais­ing the sta­tus of teach­ing so the pro­fes­sion will at­tract the best can­di­dates...  The me­di­an pay for an el­e­men­tary school teacher is now about $40,000."

Five Things on a Friday: the President Speaks and Other Stories

It was kind of a slow news week.  If it wasn't for the president's speech, I'm not sure what I'd have written about.

1.  Rebutting Critics, Obama Seeks Higher Bar for Military Action (NYT)

“Af­ter more than five years in of­fice, Mr. Oba­ma has be­come in­creas­ing­ly con­vinced that while the Unit­ed States must play a vi­tal role be­yond its bor­ders, it should avoid get­ting dragged in­to the quick­sand of in­ter­na­tion­al cri­ses that have trapped some of his pre­de­ces­sors. It is time for an end to what he called ‘a long sea­son of war.’

To his crit­ics, main­ly on the right but al­so some on the left, this is a pre­scrip­tion for pas­siv­ity, an ab­ro­ga­tion of decades of bi­par­ti­san lead­er­ship on the world stage. Stung and ir­ri­tated, Mr. Oba­ma used his com­mence­ment ad­dress to West Point cadets on Wednes­day to mount a sus­tained re­but­tal and to de­fine an ap­proach to for­eign pol­i­cy that he be­lieves is suit­ed to a new era and that he hopes will out­last his pres­i­dency.”

Yesterday was such a monumentally frustrating day.

I'm about to break one of the cardinal rules of social media: You should never complain about your life on social media.

But.

Don't fool yourself.  This blog is a carefully cultivated look at my life and the life I live with my family.  You get the version that Sally and I want you to get, and no other.  And that's fine, except that I think it tends to make things look a little too perfect, and yeah, most of the time, that's the point.  But I got a letter from one of my classmates a few weeks back that made me think that sometimes the effort is a little too successful, which is why...

Well, look.  I'm not trying to make you feel better about yourself by telling you that I had a bad day.  Odds are that you don't care, and anyway, whatever I have to say about my life won't actually impact yours one way or another.  That said, I still wanna talk about it because, bottom line, sometimes writing about it is the best way to get it out of my system.

LinkedIn Profile Update

I don't know that I necessarily think LinkedIn is a useful tool, but I've still spent some time updating my profile this morning.  When I set it up, I was thinking of it as a way to try to get more freelance writing work, but I've not spent any time actually looking for freelance work, and if I'm being honest, I'd really rather spend the time working on "War Stories from Wanderhaven."  For better or worse, I'd very much like to get that out next year.

But.  You never know who's looking at this online stuff.  Hence the update, which will hopefully make the thing a little more professional-looking.  At the very least, they're giving me a chance to get my resume out there; I might as well try to make it a resume worth reading.

Last Thoughts on Veteran's Day

I put up a letter Friday afternoon, and folks really responded to it.  I'm glad.  I'm pleased that folks felt like they got something from it, even if it's just an acknowledgement that I haven't forgotten about them.  I haven't--of course, I haven't--but it's a big world, and we all wind up alone in the dark from time to time, and it's easy to feel alone.

With that in mind, one of my classmates put up a link on Facebook to an article that another of my classmates (Mike Stajura) wrote for Time Ideas, which seems to have filled in the gap for Newsweek's old "My Turn" segment now that Newsweek no longer runs in print.  The article is about how difficult it is to leave the military and transition to civilian society, and it is right on.  To quote briefly, when you leave the military, a lot of what you come to take for granted--socially and professionally--just sort of goes away:

"Gone, suddenly, is the cohesive structure that existed to take care of you. Gone is that strong sense of social security. Gone is the sense that, wherever you go, you know where you fit. Gone are the familiar cultural norms. Gone are your friends from your ready-made peer group, who are just as invested in your success as you are in theirs."

That’s true, even for guys like me.

Felt a little better in the water yesterday

It's been a long week. I don't want to grouse too much about this Metro-North thing, but it's made my already long commute much, much longer, and that hasn't been fun. Granted, I finally managed to get back on my foldie yesterday for the part of my commute that's actually in New York City, and that helps, but it's still been a bunch of long days strung together.  On top of that, Sally called me yesterday afternoon to let me know that I had to meet her at the YMCA last night to pick up the kids while she herself attended a meeting.

So, bottom line, I capped the day with some swimming.

This Week's Picks (NFL Week 2)

Fucking Shanahan.

I can accept that the Ravens maybe aren't as good as I thought they were or that maybe the Denver Broncos are better than I thought they'd be.  But RG3 and the Redskins in general looked like absolute shit Monday night, and for that, I blame Mike Shanahan.  Not only was his star quarterback out of sorts after not having played the entire pre-season, his team was also totally unprepared for the spread offense.  And, I mean, c'mon!  It's not like it was a surprise what these guys were gonna do out there.

Life Is So Weird...

You know how people say, "Oh, you'll never use all that weird math in real life.  They're just teaching it to you to teach you how to think."  Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was a European History major.  But so far today, I've used two different kinds of trigonometry.  First, in a discussion of shifting phase angles and polarity in regards to standards conventions versus practice in the replacement of a large and expensive piece of equipment.  Second, when I had to figure actual loading on a large transformer, and our typical power factor assumptions weren't exact enough.  The first instance was by far the more complicated of the two, but it was also a largely theoretical discussion that required only the application of basic concepts to understand what the Hell my boss was trying to tell me.  The second one required real math, although I grant you that it was only a combat application of the Pythagorean Theorem.

But still...

Anyway, it's lunchtime on a Friday, and I've still got one--hopefully routine--study left to do.  With that in mind, here's "Football on Your Phone."  Because I feel like I need a stupidity break today.  And also because, let's face it, Peyton Manning is still the man.

Line of the Day

From my buddy at work:

As an engineer, you can't design a building and intentionally plan for it to fall apart and fail. But as a hedge fund manager you can do exactly that. And as long as you take out insurance ahead of time, you're a hero.

Friday Mad Science: They Call Me the Working Man

Before we start today, let me own up to the fact that I got Sally a subscription to the New York Times Weekend Edition, and it came with an all-access pass to their internet content.  So if it seems like all of these articles come out of the Times, well, that’s kind of what’s happened.  

What can I say?  I’ve been reading the Times a lot lately.

Stray Voltage: April 10th, 2013

I'm in Albany on business this week.  Yesterday, we discussed a bit about the Free Market, with a mechanic's eye to the possibility of bolting on a steering wheel and stick shift, so that we could drive the market in whatever direction we wanted.

No, not really.

What we really talked about was gas/electric coordination and reliability and the reality of the fact that the whole country--but New York and New England in particular--are becoming increasingly dependent on natural gas for power generation.  Which in turn makes the electric business increasingly dependent on natural gas pipelines.  That's not exactly a problem, per se, but pipeline capacity is a limited resource, and while we can address it at some level with fuel diversity, reality again is that gas is much cleaner than the alternatives--and usually cheaper, too.

***

In case you missed it, the Washington Times today has a story on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, who apparently studied in the West as a kid.  The story's kind of what you'd expect, so much so that I think it's proof positive that you simply cannot trust the quiet ones.

***

I started reading some of the GI Joe: Cobra mini-series yesterday, and I gotta say that it is as good as advertised.  The story here is that a Joe washout gets sent undercover with Cobra... and wackiness ensues.

Actually, that's as far as I've gotten.  But so far as it's gone, it's been pretty good.

Also read some of the old 1980s comics yesterday, too, and those were a riot as well.  Very different stylistically from what's being put out today, but I liked that old style.  

More talking, more exposition... more story.  I get that it's less "cinematic" or whatever, but the fact is that I still think of comics as an at least partially literary medium, meaning that words are fine.  You don't have to deconstruct everything to the max and make it widescreen.  Sometimes, you can just tell a story in simple terms, and if it's a good story, we'll all still like it.

The Storm is Over

By now you already know that Hurricane Sandy was a big storm.  I worked a lot of it, helping put about 1,400 Westchester County electric customers, including Governor Cuomo, back in lights.  Now life is returning to normal, and let me tell, I'm tired.

*sigh*

God willing, tomorrow will be a day of rest.

By they way, yes, that's four week's worth of beard right there.  It really, really helped when it started snowing last week.

I Got Snowed in Last Night

We were supposed to get lots of rain and wind. Turns out, we got about 8" of snow. Bottom line, the entire area was destroyed. Again.

Ugh.

Traffic last night was a real nightmare, but luckily my friend George lives in town where I've been working. Even more luckily, I've had a jump-bag packed in my car since the hurricane. So I bunked in George's guest room, and I even had a change of clothes. That saved me--this is no exaggeration--six hours of driving last night.

So we had Mexican food last night, and then George and I watched Bones while his poor wife fought the traffic to get home, and then I went to sleep. A tough day, but not a bad night.

Now we're having breakfast.

Working in the Snow

Storm Update

I don't know how well you can see this, but it's a roughly brigade-sized element of overhead bucket trucks. I have a small company's worth of these guys and a map of one of the local towns, and we're basically rebuilding their system.

Gonna be a busy day today.