Winterfell

18:38 Wednesday, 11 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 81.5°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 249

Tomorrow's task for the marmot is to do something about the weather data.

The drive up was very pleasant. Amazingly little traffic, beautiful weather, and magnificent vistas. Low stress, very safe.

Mitzi teared up going through Watkins Glen, "I can't believe we're really doing this."

Yeah, baby... We are.

There were times at Belleza, the condo I used to live at, where I felt as though I was exactly where I belonged. That changed near the end, when the "investors" took over. Later, in Del Webb, I thought I'd enjoy living in a gated community where I was responsible for nothing. I was wrong.

I hated it.

Some very wonderful people there, and I made some great friends. But I didn't belong there.

Mitzi was stressing hard before we left, worried about selling the house, where we're going to put all our "stuff." I tried to tell her that once she got up here, all of that would fade away. I think the drive up, which she did most of, was kind of therapeutic.

By the time we pulled up into the driveway, I think she was home.

I know I belong here. Not sure my community knows it yet, but that's my job, to earn that place. And I will.

Still, "miles to go before I sleep," and all that. Promises to keep too. But life has a purpose and a direction now. It'll be uphill in the snow sometimes, but that's okay.

I know where I'm going.

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Next Stop: Winterfell

05:52 Wednesday, 11 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 75.45°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 575

Made it to Staunton Virginia yesterday evening. The drive was fairly uneventful, except for some severe thunderstorms, which we avoided by Mitzi "cleverly" delaying our departure by an hour.

We did encounter rain, but it wasn't as intense as the leading edge of the front. The rain caused an accident on I-95 with a backup that Maps suggested would delay us by 45 minutes. Since we were not spending the night with Mitzi's daughter in DC, our route would have taken us off I-95 at I-26 in South Carolina. We just got off I-95 ahead of the I-26 exit and took a state road that finally married up with I-26, and coincidentally got us west of the worst of the rain.

We took I-77 up through the Carolinas to 81 in Virginia, which takes you through the Blue Ridge Mountains. The worst part was getting through Charlotte, NC and we should have used the express lanes with our EZ Pass, it would have saved a lot of aggravation and some time. We did use it eventually, but we should have jumped on as soon as we were able.

But once we were past Charlotte, it was a beautiful drive. We'd always stayed on 95 to get to DC and had never gone this way before. It's a much better route, albeit 15 minutes longer, which is nothing. The only tricky part is the trucks, because of the mountains. Most of them stay in the right lane, but when one truck thinks it can pass another going uphill, it'll suddenly jump in the left lane and then overtake the truck ahead of it at a snail's pace. That got annoying, but the views were amazing.

81 was in the best shape I'd ever seen it. Of course, ask me that later, once we get into Pennsylvania. Frost heave and trucks usually do a real number on that road. We did take 81 South back in 2017 when we were on our wedding road trip, though I don't recall taking it all the way down to I-77. Anyway, 81 was an endless thump-thump, thump-thump as you hit these cuts in the asphalt that serve some purpose unknown to me.

We'll grab some breakfast here at the motel, then get some gas and get back on the road. This Fairfield Suites had an EV charger, so the RAV4 is recharged. That'll give us another 40 miles before we start burning gas. Maps says about six and a half hours to the House. Probably eight by the time we stop and change drivers and so on. Should be there between four and five.

They had some severe thunderstorms and heavy rainfall on Monday night. The security camera captured a lot of lightning. There was flooding in the low-lying areas in parts of the Finger Lakes, and boating is suspended on Keuka Lake because of debris and submerged hazards in the lake due to the high water levels and intense rainfall

A reminder that there is no place immune from climate change. But some places are riskier than others. A friend of ours just bought a house in Ohio adjacent to a creek. I didn't say anything, but I wouldn't have bought it. I hope she enjoys many years there, and it never floods. But if it's someplace where water flows regularly, it can flood.

The beat goes on...

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Lickable

18:04 Monday, 9 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 86.07°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 169

I've got iOS 26 installed on the iPad mini (6th) I brought with me from Winterfell. I'm not exactly blown away. Stephen Hackett pointed to the developer video (the link at Stephen's blog opens in the Developer app), which I clicked through.

I stopped watching the keynote today, because I couldn't stand the delivery of the presenters. The cadence, the extraneous body language, the forced earnestness of the speech. Ugh.. Might as well be watching AI video.

Well, same thing at that Developer video. Worse, and this is a "fingernails on a blackboard" thing for me, is the use of the word, "learnings."

To my ear, it simply sounds ignorant. Learn is a verb, dammit!

Why not "lessons," "experience," "feedback," any of a number of other word choices. And he uses "learnings" more than once!

The guy does the same bullshit thing with his hands and his shoulders, the same bullshit cadence, the same faux enthusiasm. Gah!

Go back to live presentations, please. Real people, not these Stepford droids.

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Loaded

15:17 Monday, 9 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 88.66°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 4.25mph
Words: 432

It was an interesting exercise, but the RAV4 is loaded. One large tote filled with "food" (I don't count Costco two-packs of artichoke hearts as "food.") didn't make it. Well, some of the food did (minus the artichoke hearts). She went through both totes, anything unopened went into a tote that will remain here until the house is sold. There were some items past their expiration date that were put in the trash. Any opened items, still usable, are going up, along with whatever else she felt was essential. (Not artichoke hearts.)

Everything I had set aside to go up in the RAV is loaded. I put all but one of my remaining Makita batteries in the spare tire well. It has a styrene foam insert inside the wheel which should contain them well, and keep them from knocking about too badly. I also got a few tools in that compartment as well.

All we have left to do is load the cooler with the refrigerated items, which aren't many, and we should be good to go.

We won't be able to see much through the rear-view mirror, but we can get by with the side-view mirrors.

The post office delivered six boxes to Winterfell this afternoon. I spoke to our neighbor and she kindly went over and put them inside, as they're expecting rain up there. She'll also go by tomorrow and put the remaining four boxes inside as well.

I'm excited. All I'm hoping for now is a safe, uneventful drive north.

I've submitted a temporary change of address so my mail (not that I ever get any) is forwarded. I didn't want to make it permanent yet, in case I need to substantiate that I'm not a permanent resident of New York State at this moment. But after July 1st, I'll probably go ahead and start making those changes.

As of Wednesday, at least emotionally, Winterfell will be "home," while this place will simply be an asset awaiting disposal.

There's still a lot to be done here, once it finally sells, in terms of final packing and removal, which will require another trip. That'll be an interesting coordination exercise. We're undecided whether to drive back down, or fly and rent a vehicle here. Do we fly one-way, and drive the rental back to New York with items we don't want the movers to handle?

But I don't care right now. I'm just looking forward to getting out of here and taking on a new challenge of building a home in beautiful surroundings.

I'm this close...

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Make All Preparations for Getting Underway

07:43 Monday, 9 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 77.34°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 958

Mitzi is having a bit of anxiety right now, worried that we won't be able to fit all the things she thinks are necessary to go to New York in the RAV4. This after shipping seven boxes to New York, which were intended to go in the RAV4.

I'm pretty sure that her anxiety is well founded regarding what is going to fit. I'm also pretty sure that she doesn't need half the stuff she thinks has to bring. But I don't say that, because, well, it wouldn't help.

She's making another run to the post office this morning to ship another box or two. Then I'll take a stab at packing the RAV, after which the real fun begins. She'll have to prioritize which things she'll really want to bring. She's already indicated that after we get the RAV loaded, she may use the empty front passenger seat to bring more boxes to the post office.

I'm quite certain that we have no place to put all the stuff she wants to bring, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I have a handful of items that wouldn't have filled a box that I'll squirrel away into the inevitable gaps and voids that are created when packing irregularly shaped containers into an irregularly shaped space.

When I went to New York in the Mav, I had a similar feeling of anxiety, that not everything I wanted to bring was fitting in the truck. I could have packed more, taking better advantage of the truck bed, if I'd have been willing to simply cover it with a tarp. But I was worried about security and how a tarp would fare at highway speeds sometimes approaching 80mph. Instead, everything had to fit under a roll-up tonneau cover I installed.

But when I got to New York, I stopped worrying about all of that. I didn't care. It just felt so great to be there! I've shipped up three boxes to Mitzi's seven (and counting), of fairly useful items, some books I think would be important to have handy.

Eshbach is coming with me in the RAV, The Way Things Work, Volumes 1 and 2 are in a box in New Jersey. I'm also putting the Oxford World Atlas in the RAV.

To be perfectly frank with readers, I'm anticipating that the internet will be disrupted to one degree or another within the coming year. I don't have any medical books, but I will probably buy a couple of advanced first aid books when we get up there.

I don't think the internet will cease to exist, but I expect that there will be disruptions, outages, of various durations, from hours to weeks. So, shortwave radios and books might fill in some gaps.

Longer term, I don't think we can count on the internet a decade or so from now. Persistent disruptions by hostile state actors, or hostile AI actors, may render it essentially useless. Likewise with cellular networks and voice communications that rely on IP infrastructure.

You may want to look into GMRS radio, pay a little money to the FCC to buy a license. Maybe encourage some of your local neighbors to do likewise. Learn about repeaters and networks and such, while you can watch YouTube videos about them.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm also not giving away any more of my DVDs, because I don't think streaming is going to be a thing a decade from now.

Next big purchase is a generator/battery solution for short-term outages. Then some kind of solar and wind generation solution. Can't charge our GMRS radios and shortwave radio batteries without a source of electricity. And it's great to have a well, but you need electricity to run the pump!

I think life is going to get more chaotic, not less, going forward. You're going to want to build in some resilience to whatever your situation happens to be. Don't forget the most valuable resource available to you will be your neighbors, so invest in that "social capital."

Not saying everyone has to move to the country. That's not practical, or possible, for most people. But there are ways to accommodate disruptions to the kinds of services we take for granted now. Look for lessons learned from people who endured war in urban areas, like in the Balkans, Iraq, Ukraine.

A few solar panels and a "solar generator" (a lithium iron phosphate battery) of maybe 1kWh capacity might keep your refrigerator running and your batteries charged during an extended outage. Won't break the bank, relatively easy to store. Biggest challenge may be access to sunshine depending on the configuration of your residence.

If you live in the 'burbs and buy a generator, be sure to run it now and then. And don't store it with gasoline in it. Not if you expect it to run after it's been sitting in your garage for a year or more. My neighbor spent a few days last week trying to get his to run in preparation for hurricane season.

Anyway, I don't mean to be all "doom and gloom." Life is still a gift, but suffering will always be a part of it. For much of our lives, "things" have generally been getting "better." There's no law that says that always has to be the case; and there are very clear signs now that it won't be, going forward. There may be periods of progress, but they will be episodic and the gains may not be lasting. Joe Biden's legislative achievements, for example.

So, take a little time to think about how you can build some resilience into your situation. You may be glad you did one day.

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Self-Destruction

06:37 Sunday, 8 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 78.48°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 171

As if any more reasons were necessary to make leaving Florida a compelling proposition, the Mad Orange King's cruelly performative immigration policy is another.

If it wasn't clear before, that cruelty and fear and hatred and division are fundamentally stupid (or "foolish," if you're feeling more charitable than I am just now), it will be soon.

Hurricane Season has begun, and while it's quiet right now, it's only a matter of time before we're hit with a major hurricane somewhere in the U.S., almost certainly Florida, but also anywhere in the Gulf (of Mexico) states, or anywhere along the eastern seaboard.

There will be flooding and wind damage. Debris removal and reconstruction will be necessary.

Who do you suppose does much of that work?

So, apart from demoralizing FEMA, and crippling it with incompetent leadership, we're also going to be missing a vital workforce to perform reconstruction.

Who needs enemies when we have elected "leaders" like this?

I suppose it could be worse. I just hate to think about how.

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Group Photo

06:19 Sunday, 8 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 78.48°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 383

Mitzi took two shots of my family (minus Mitzi, obviously) using her iPhone 13 mini and Caitie's iPhone 16 Pro. The 16 Pro did a much better job, though a decent DSLR with a flash (the iPhone used its flash) would have been much better.

Anyway, that was the scene Friday night.

Last night we went to Caitie's event at a place called the Ink Factory. Definitely a young persons' space. When we got there, the band was doing sound checks, which were deafening. All the siblings turned out to support Caitie, so it was nice seeing everyone again. We also met up with a couple we've been friends with for many years, and got a chance to spend a little time with them before we leave Florida. We plan to get together again when we're back here for closing and final pack-out.

Had a showing yesterday. Bit of a pop-up event. Agent called and asked if we could be ready in 30 minutes. Mitzi asked if we could have 45. We were ready in 30. I knew we would be.

I had a Plebe Year.

Alas, not interested.

The AirTags continue to function. Box 2 has reappeared, now in New Jersey, while Boxes 1 and 3 remain in Jacksonville at the distribution center. That's actually fine, because we didn't want everything to arrive before we did, though USPS is projecting they'll all arrive tomorrow or Tuesday.

I was very sad to read of the passing of Bill Atkinson. A very early Apple employee, and before the work on the Mac that would make his reputation, he was responsible for porting the UCSD Pascal operating system and programming language to the Apple II, which required the development and sale of the 16K Language Card, which gave the Apple II 64K of user RAM. (Though it wasn't all mapped contiguously. It's a long story.)

He was also a photographer and ran a service where he'd print your photos as post cards and mail them to addressees for you, all by means of an iOS app. I used it a number of times and it was a clever service that delivered a great result.

A genuinely gifted talent, and by all accounts an exceedingly excellent human being.

His memory will be a blessing.

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Another Step Closer

06:04 Saturday, 7 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 76.86°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 816

The whole clan showed up for dinner last night. Japanese hibachi at the place my daughter and son-in-law worked at for six years, a couple of decades ago. It was a good choice, as we'd had many family dinners there over the years.

My grandson Jackson is turning five in a couple of weeks, and he'd never been to a restaurant like this. The flames (and heat) frightened him at first, but afterward he was highly entertained. The chef was remarkably skilled, flipping a whole, unbroken egg up from the grill and catching it on the edge of his spatula, which cracked it of course, and then writing Jackson's name on the grill with the egg white dripping from the shell.

Even I had never seen that before!

We shared the vision of Winterfell as something that will remain in their lives after we're gone. None of us is quite certain what that looks like right now, and I suppose there are any number of ways it might go sideways, but they understand the vision. This isn't us just leaving Florida. It's leaving Florida to build something we might leave behind.

A very modest something, but more than just an asset to be sold and disbursed.

We sold Mitzi's iMac yesterday. I felt bad because I think the bluetooth keyboard battery is dead. She's been using a third-party keyboard since we bought the iMac back in 2020, and I think the original was stored with the power switch on. Leaving the keyboard plugged into the Mac overnight didn't charge it. It works wired up, but I think the battery is expired. 16GB 21" 2019 iMac for $220, seems like a fair deal.

Mitzi had been using the third-party mouse that came with the keyboard she had, but that died recently, so she started using the Magic Mouse and she's fallen in love with it. She was disappointed to have to let it go with the iMac, so she looked to see if she could buy a new one. $70! ($50 on the auction site.) So, by some measure anyway, the iMac was a pretty good deal.

We had two 13" MacBook Pros, one an intel quad-core i5, and the other was an original M1. I wiped both of those and we gave one each to my son and daughter to give to their kids, or do as they wished. As these things go, each of their oldest children needed new laptops. The intel model has poor battery life compared to the M1, but both are in good shape and are probably adequate for their use in high school.

I gave away some uniform items and plaques from my navy career. Remarkably, these seemed welcome. Caitie didn't want the plaque I offered her, but she has to fly back to LA (I offered to ship it) and lives in an apartment with really no place to hang it. But Melissa and Chris seemed to welcome theirs. I welcome not shlepping them around anymore!

Somehow the one from my days as XO of JOHN HANCOCK went missing. But I've still got the one from my first ship, and I've got a nice Lone Sailer plaque from the chiefs' mess at Fleet Training Center, Mayport from my retirement. They kind of bookend my career. I'll keep those and hang them somewhere in the new place, with perhaps my shadow box in between.

Tonight is Caitie's art event. She's exhibiting some photography, but is also one of the coordinators. It was actually her idea, but she pitched it to a guy who works locally with the venue, and so he got top billing on the program. Oh well... It's a number of local artists who've moved away from the Jacksonville Beaches (Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach), returning home to exhibit their work. Looking forward to seeing what they've accomplished.

Sunday and Monday are just more packing and organizing. We lowered the price on the house by $5K, which has had exactly zero effect. We'll hold here for the time being. It's not that the place is overpriced, it's just that it's got so many features it'll take a buyer looking for those features in one package. That may be a rare bird. I think the solar+battery may be intimidating to many buyers. We're going to need someone who is fairly tech-savvy and who welcomes a measure of energy independence.

The AirTags seem to be working. All three boxes were reported at the Jacksonville USPS Distribution Center, though Box 2 hasn't been reported in over 3 hours. Box 1 and 3 are reporting regularly. This troubles me, because it suggests they're separated. We shall see. Perhaps it's better not to know what's going on minute-to-minute.

Anyway, the beat that can be counted is not the beat, nevertheless, it goes on...

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Between Here and Gone

10:50 Friday, 6 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 85.51°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 541

Great song by Mary Chapin Carpenter, for which I cannot find a decent recording at YouTube. Anyway, the title describes my present state of mind.

Just got back from the post office. I dropped off three boxes to be shipped up to Burdett. Stuff that I'd prefer to have right away, but won't fit in the RAV4 on Tuesday. Most of the space in the RAV4 is going to Mitzi's stuff and some food she wants to bring up. I'm going to be looking for little corners to squirrel away some small items.

The post office offers tracking, but I stuck an AirTag in each of the boxes. I'll be interested to see how well they perform in keeping track of their progress north.

Tonight we're having a little family get-together to say goodbye. I'll be passing along some things that I don't wish to keep carrying with me, and that they're welcome to either keep or dispose of as they wish. In some ways, I think losing everything in a hurricane can be a cleansing event. Traumatic, to be sure; but liberating in a way too.

Mitzi and I went out to dinner the other night, to use up another set of gift cards. We talked about the future of the place up in New York. I was somewhat surprised at what she had in mind. This was a conversation that I hoped to begin once we started making serious plans about the new house we hope to build.

We're in different situations, financially. We're nearly equal in some ways. If I keep breathing for another 20 years, then the future value of my pension and Social Security likely equals her retirement assets, or close enough to it. But there's an open question of whether I'll live that long, or even if my pension and Social Security will endure. So in the near-term, there's an asymmetry in our financial situation, where she's much better situated liquidity-wise.

We decided when we bought this place, assuming we lived here that long, that upon our deaths the house would be sold and the proceeds divided five ways among our surviving children. It's a house in an over-55 community, it's never going to be something that has any special "family value."

She has something different in mind for Winterfell, and something that I welcome. It's not like it's an "estate" with acres of land, but we're hoping to build something that the kids will enjoy visiting and making memories at. And her idea is that it's something that will continue to do so after we're gone.

It'll take some fancy lawyering to draw up the mechanism, a trust of some kind, I imagine; and the structure that will govern it. There are probably some pitfalls we'll have to be alert to plan for, but I'm hopeful we can figure all that out.

The kids won't be equally able to access the place, we both have daughters in California for example. But over time, that could change.

It's an idea that pleases me, and one that I hadn't really envisioned when we decided to leave Florida. I think we're going to share a bit of that vision with the kids tonight.

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Goofing Around

08:22 Thursday, 5 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 74.01°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 236

All of my "good cameras" are in New York, which is fine because otherwise I probably never would have played with this.

This is from an Olympus Stylus XZ-10, a 1/2.3" sensor full-featured premium compact from 2013. Being in New York has really piqued my desire to "play" with cameras. On a whim, I started shooting the TV screen as we were watching Perry Mason last night, using the Art Filters feature the camera.

I started out with the Grainy Film I filter, but that didn't really do much form me. The Line Art filter was much more interesting. I don't recall if this is I or II (If you have an Olympus camera with the Art Filters feature, if you arrow right after selecting a filter, you often get a choice of styles and some frames or effects you can add.)

It was hard to shoot, because the LCD monitor frame rate staggers under the load of the filter. So it was hit or miss on whether or not I got the shot I was hoping for. Mostly miss. But the subtitles added a humorous dimension to whole thing. (I'm easily amused.)

I think this is pretty cool, and it might be fun to take some images without subtitles and write your own captions. Maybe I'll play with that later. I've got to get packing some boxes to mail up to Winterfell.

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Watch the Whole Damn Thing

16:57 Wednesday, 4 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 82.9°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 105

We're all preppers now. This is worth your time, no matter where you live. It's a lot of a talking head, but there are some photos and a couple of clips, but it's compelling nonetheless. Some very important lessons. It's not completely comprehensive, but there are some things that never would have occurred to me. (I have lots of paper and pencils. I have radios with batteries. And I have lots, and lots of batteries. Rechargeables. NiMH. With some solar panels, and, in a pinch, an inverter I can connect to my truck's battery.)

But by all means, watch until the end. Because it's important.

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Caitie Smiles

16:51 Tuesday, 3 June 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 77.74°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 275

She'd probably be mad at me for this, but I enjoy taking her picture. She really hates the closeups, which is my favorite way to frame her.

We spent a good part of the day together yesterday, though we didn't get to the movies. We went out for an early dinner at a local fast casual fish place, Timoti's Seafood Shak. I brought along the little Olympus XZ-1 compact. Since I've been to New York, I've got the itch to shoot again. I got a number of shots I liked, though she objected to them all.

When we finished eating, we went by Publix, I wanted to buy some lottery tickets. I spent $60 on some scratch-offs, and some chances on Powerball and MegaMillions. Caitie picked all the scratch-offs, while I did quick-picks on the lottery drawings.

When we got home, I let Caitie do the scratching. We won over $100! ($110, to be precise.) So I made $50 on my birthday! And Mitzi bought a slice of carrot cake without me knowing, and she stuck a candle in it and they both sang Happy Birthday to me. We all shared the slice.

Caitie cut my hair and then lingered for awhile before saying goodbye. She's genuinely upset that we're moving to New York. She's free Thursday, and she said she'll probably drop by for another visit, which is just fine by me.

After Caitie left, Mitzi and I watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3, which neither of us had seen before. Not my favorite of the series, but it got better toward the end.

It was a pretty nice day.

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The Great Simplification

07:07 Tuesday, 3 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 74.12°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 6.8mph
Words: 420

This video kept surfacing in the menu of videos YouTube thinks I'd like to watch. It also came up in my Resilience feed, so I clicked through. There are chapter markers, so I skipped ahead to 5:20.

I'd say that this is a good summary of my present thinking. Framing is a useful tool in persuasion. When I write about "the collapse of this civilization," it's a catastrophic frame. It's also an accurate description of what is going to take place in the coming decades. The alarmist catastrophe framing is intended to stimulate thought and action toward preparation. (We're all preppers now. Most of us probably don't know it.)

"The great simplification," is a less alarmist framing. It masks the amount of death and suffering that will inevitably accompany the change, and suggests that what is coming may not necessarily be a "bad" thing. That is also accurate, though I don't know to what extent it will inspire thought and action to prepare.

But this pitch is helpful, I think.

I will say that I believe the most important, and powerful, effort we can make to prepare for what is coming, is to make an effort to cultivate a mindset of "loving kindness." The kind of mindset that was manifestly not on display from Senator Joni Ernst when she dismissed the concerns of her constituents that Republican policies will lead to the premature deaths of vulnerable citizens. A concern which is not "hysteria."

Now, I'm not going to offer myself as some kind of role model in that regard. It's more aspirational in my case, though it is sincere. Fear, anger and hate will accompany the collapse too, but they won't help anyone. Maybe in the short term, in a zero-sum sense. But they will only increase the net amount of suffering in the transition. Acting out of fear, which is the antecedent of anger and hate, leads to suffering, denial and regret.

When I write that "We're all in this together, and nobody gets out of here alive," the former is more important than the latter. But the latter is to suggest that mere survival isn't the goal. What good is it to "survive" in a state of denial and regret?

Anyway, something to think about.

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Letters to Ed

08:36 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 75.02°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 97

I got a couple of nice notes yesterday. One was from someone I hadn't heard from before, Loren Stephens, who blogs at ldstephens.net.

Loren uses a static site generator called 11ty (alternatively: eleventy), which was unfamiliar to me and that was somewhat surprising, because I don't recall Jack Baty ever using it. 😏

It's always nice to hear from a reader.

Also, shout-out to Shelley Powers who is recovering from some vision related issues, and to Loren Webster who has been doing a lot of bird photography blogging.

The beat, and the blogs, go on...

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Dept. Q

08:28 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 73.8°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 135

I binge watched much of the Netflix series Dept. Q while I was in New York, finishing the last three episodes here. Enjoyed it very much. I like a series where I can get somewhat invested in the characters.

In many ways, and perhaps there's a connection, it is very similar to the BBC series Unforgotten, in that it focuses on a cold case, and the investigation reveals more than just clues to the central case. It's also very similar in that the characters are all quite complicated, which adds some dimension and interest to the story. Unlike, say, Fountain of Youth, which was filled with indistinguishable and utterly forgettable characters.

It's pretty brutal and gory at times, so if that sort of thing puts you off, you may want to give it a pass.

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M3 MacBook Air

07:40 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 71.69°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 509

Mitzi and I had a discussion about her 2019 21" iMac and what to do with it. We have one "desk" at the new place, which we'll have to share. My thought was to get a 4K external monitor, and swap back and forth when we wished to do some work "on the computer."

I thought she could work from her 13" MacBook Pro and I'd use my 14" M3 MacBook Pro. Hers is an intel model, which is likely to be unsupported in the near future. I still have a 13" M1 MacBook Pro, and I intended to give that to her and sell her intel model.

Both of those machines only have 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSDs, while her iMac has 16GB, which was the reason for buying her the iMac in the first place.

Looking more closely at her iMac, it also only has a 256GB SSD, and of that, only 19GB remains "free." It too is likely to be unsupported soon, so perhaps a better solution is appropriate.

I bought her a 15" M3 MacBook Air refurb, using the veteran and government employee discount. With a 512GB SSD, it was still a bit pricey, coming in at just over $1K with sales tax. That's supposed to arrive today, and I should be able move her account and documents from the iMac pretty easily since we'll be moving from a smaller SSD to a larger one.

I did that once before for a resident here, from a 1TB Fusion Drive to a 256GB SSD. That was a genuine pain in the ass. Her son gave her a much newer 27" iMac as an "upgrade," but didn't bother to set it up for her. I didn't know going in that it was going to be an asymmetrical transfer, but it became clear immediately. Never again.

The MBA has 16GB of RAM and is likely to remain supported for several years. We'll essentially have the same machine, though the 14" MBP has 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Same number of cores and gpus though, so nearly identical performance. Should be a nice upgrade for her, though 16GB of RAM is now the minimum configuration, so I expect software bloat to eventually swamp that.

Hopefully we won't have to screw around with new computers for another five years or so. My 27" 2019 iMac, which I pretty much max'ed out when I bought, didn't last quite as long as I'd hoped, almost six years, though the move hastened its departure more than obsolescence.

In five years, with AI taking over the world, we're likely to be in an entirely new paradigm of some kind, one which I probably can't even imagine right now. It's also possible that we may be in a period of economic disruption, such that mass market consumer computing platforms are no longer a thing, and we'll all be living with whatever we have at the moment.

We're all in for a wild ride in the coming decades, I'm fairly confident of that.

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Act III

09:08 Sunday, 1 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 72.84°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 848

This is an interesting period in my life, in a good way, not in the way of the proverbial ancient Chinese curse. Its nearest antecedent is meeting Mitzi and later marrying here. A choice with a happy outcome.

Much of my life before my divorce was kind of "accidental," perhaps. I didn't feel a particular sense of agency in my life, or in my choices. And some of them were, well, unwise is perhaps the best way to put it. But they all led to me becoming the person that I am, good and bad. Mostly good, I think.

It was, in fact, my divorce that really marked the beginning of my sense of personal responsibility for my happiness, or lack thereof.

Steve Mako linked to a post by Om Malik. I subscribe to Mako's feed because he surfaces interesting links from time to time. I don't read all of them. I'll never read anything by Seth Godin, for example. I gather he's still popular for, if nothing else, his witty aphorisms. I just recall the slide he chose to use at a talk he made at Google to illustrate that his audience wasn't exactly the center of anyone's universe. The text was "Nobody cares about you," and the illustration was an obese man in an overstuffed chair wearing a sleeveless t-shirt with junk food in his hands and on his shirt.

I thought it was an odd choice to illustrate "everyone else" for his audience. That this somehow was the image he called to mind when thinking of everyone. Anyway, I never cared for his "purple cow," or his gospel of marketing and I formed an intense dislike of the man, and I just ignored him from then on. I only mention him now because Mako included him in his list of links, and it's decidedly not one of the ones I would find interesting.

Anyway, I clicked through to Om's piece because of the title, "Designing a Life," because that's kind of what we're embarking on now, in Act III of our lives.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're "designing" our lives. There's some vision, a definite intention, but there are a lot of unknowns. There will be a lot of learning as we go, and the mistakes that inevitably accompany learning. But there is intention. We're doing this on purpose.

We live in a gated community, governed by an HOA (homeowners association), where conformity is valued, and there is no higher value than members' property values. The surroundings are attractive, if sterile, monotonous and crowded. There are organized activities to promote social interaction. It's kind of like living on a cruise ship, I imagine. And I've said before I'll never be one to go on a cruise, so perhaps I shouldn't make that assertion.

But everything is constrained. People report on each other for "violations" of the rules. You can paint your house, but it has to be from the approved pallet, and it must be approved by a committee. You can't grow food, but there is a club, if they have an opening, where you can get a little raised bed to grow a modest amount of food.

It's very comfortable here. I've met some wonderful people. But it's suffocating.

This is it, the final act of our lives, and we're going to do it conforming with the rules, playing card games and pickle-ball, taking our walks on the sidewalks past the manicured lawns?

I can't do it.

Yeah, the hurricanes are the proximate cause for making me want to flee Florida. I'd still want to get out of this state even if we didn't live in an HOA. But living in this bubble is another compelling reason.

It's too hot in the summer. The government is corrupt and there is little chance it'll ever be one that reflects my values in almost any dimension. I'm too old to "recover" from a manmade "natural" disaster.

I have anxiety in both places. I'm wired that way. I see risk everywhere, and I try to plan for it, mitigate it. I kind of expect the worst, maybe as a self-defense mechanism. But in New York, I also feel excited. The landscape inspires me. It's not "wild," but it's definitely not "manicured." It's more organic, more authentic. More diverse.

With a more flexible mindset, I suppose I could "embrace the suck" of suburban HOA living and have a meaningful Act III here. But I'm not equipped with one, and I'm not motivated to try and acquire it. I'd rather just get the fuck out of here and embrace the suck of starting over near the end of my life.

Check back here in about five years and see if I feel the same way. I'm optimistic, but I know how easy it is for things to go sideways. But I'd rather do this than spend the rest of my life in this bubble wondering what might have happened if we had made our escape.

That would be an unforgivable mistake.

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Back In Florida

05:38 Sunday, 1 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 64.65°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 0mph
Words: 638

Yesterday started early. I was up at 0300 to meet the Lyft driver at 0400. I was worried whether or not I'd even have a driver, but one was assigned, and she showed up. One nice thing about the Lyft app, apart from the privacy implications, is the driver goes to the location of your phone, not the address where the mapping app says you are. That would have sent her to the neighbor's house.

About a 35 to 40 minute drive to Elmira-Corning airport, which is actually kind of charming. It doesn't have a "food court" or franchise food operations in the terminal. It has a snack bar. Nevertheless, it still has a jetway to walk down to the regional jets that fly out of there. They may handle larger aircraft, I don't know.

Relatively short flight from Elmira to Detroit, then hustle from Terminal B to Terminal A. The moving walkways run pretty fast, and then there's a tram to the south end of the Terminal A, so I didn't have to work too hard to make my connection. My achilles is still jacked up, so fast walking wasn't in the cards.

Not a full flight from Detroit to Jax, which was something of a surprise to me. Perhaps because Canadians are staying home? I had all three seats to myself, and there were several like that in Comfort Plus, including the row behind me, and nobody seated behind me either. So I reclined that seat as far as it would go, which isn't much.

Landed early in Jax, Mitzi picked me up and we went out for brunch because there was something of a surreptitious open house going on back in the 'hood. The HOA bars open houses because reasons. We'll see if we get reported. Hardly worth it, only two showings.

Of course, we're sailing into some strong headwinds. I guess we can't time everything right. I still think we're ahead of the curve, but I didn't think it was this bad. The lack of activity/interest is solid evidence though. I'm just hoping we close before September and we don't have any powerful hurricanes before then.

I seem to be missing a camera. It's unlikely someone walked off with it, so it's probably in New York in either the truck, or a bag I didn't empty completely. It's the black E-PL7 I was obsessing over back in March of last year. I had the silver one already up there and took it out with me when I went into Burdett for dinner last Thursday. I played with an Art Flyer (Vintage III) walking around a bit. Some results up at Flickr. I'm a little troubled, because I have a vague recollection of running out of room in camera bags, and deciding that I'd leave the black E-PL7 behind so I'd still have one "good camera" when I came back. But I may just be imagining that. Nothing to do for it now though.

Mitzi's worried she's not going to be able to bring everything she wants up to NY in the RAV4. We'll still have the penultimate shipment when we sell the house, but that may be some months off now. There are a few things I'd like to bring along as well, but I may pack some of them up and ship them instead of trying to fit them in the car. We'll see.

I turn 68 tomorrow. Caitie is going to come by and we're all going to the movies, then back here to "hang out" for a while (and cut my hair). On Friday the whole family is getting together for dinner out to say goodbye.

Meanwhile, there's more to put into storage, some stuff to sell and some stuff to give away.

The beat goes on...

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