There's money to be made

If you keep your eyes open while walking the neighborhood streets, you can find coins. Maybe not every day, but sometimes. 

Lately the coins I find have been ground against the ground so long they are barely recognizable. 

Are these even still legal tender? I have my doubts. Especially that clipped dime.

But twenty-two cents! On one walk! Such fun!

I don't do "To Do" these days

Back in my working-for-money days (not counting the lost year-plus when I was working the Job From Hell for The Company That Must Not Be Named), I would revise and print two simple to-do text files every afternoon before going home. One for work, that went on my ever-present managerial clipboard, and one for home, that got folded and stuck in a pocket and scribbled on over the next 24 hours as need arose. 

After I quit the JFH, and subsequently conceded workforce defeat and retired, I modernized to using Google Keep notes. For a few years I had a really neat working system of lists for recurring tasks, where I would turn individual tasks on or off for the given day. So clean! So organized! 

After some time in the summer of 2023 I sort of lost my grip, or even the desire to hold on, to the pretense of being organized and efficient at being a grownup. The panic attacks increased, and what with one thing and another, I chose the road of less toxic stress. 

Mysterious: the laundry still gets done. The supplies still get resupplied. I still cook a lot of dinners. Care gets given. And, like, wow! Without a to-do list! 

I even cleaned the toilet this morning! (I'm so proud of me!)

Herpetological Matrix Tanka

Out for my health walk

I see little fence swifts,

A type of lizard.

But there's always only one.

Are they all the same lizard?

Happy Birthday to Dad

Today is my father's birthday. 

He would have been 99 years old, if he had not lost his brief, brave fight against cancer back in 2005.

More than twenty years since his death seems impossible, since there are parts of that scar that have never really skinned over.

-+-+-+-

"Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf.

“I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo... 

-+-+-+-

So. Today is a Sadiversary day.

Ambush

In Chapter 7 of J. D. Vance's book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, he is talking about the birth of his son Ewan. He's talking about parenting advice fads, and so on. Then there is this:

"I felt one emotion above all others: fear. The way that I'd grown up had imparted a sense of fatalism. A despair that the worst parts of my past would define me." 

I can relate to that, in my own small way. An imparted sense of fatalism. Of never living up to expectations or my "great potential" as seen by others. Of always being measured and found wanting. 

Maybe I was born with an overactive flight response, and then grew up with no way to flee?

Childhood memories are crowded with episides of being told -- after the fact -- that yes, there had been expectations, that I had been told to do such and such (which I never remembered) and now it's judgment time and the verdict is YOU FAIL. I'm not blaming anybody, that's just what/who I was/am.

But then in the next paragraph after the Vance quote above, we read, "...perhaps grace was God making the impossible possible, but on His time, not ours." This is a remedy for the fatalism.

So I keep working on it. In the meantime, do excuse my reluctance about entering yet another ravine. It's just that I've been ambushed so many times.

As they used to say in the 1970s, "Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet." 

Autumn Equinox

[This post is revised and updated from 2015]

Wrap this around your mental astronomy phenomena spindle and see if you can make of it more skein than snarl!

The Autumnal Equinox in 2026 occurs at 5:05 PM PDT on Tuesday, 22 September 2026. (Please don't call it the first day of autumn or I will have to hit you with my Summer Solstice Is Midsummer bat.)

"Equinox"  means that, on that day, the time from sunrise to sunset should be equal to the time from sunset to sunrise, right?

Hah! Doesn't work that way.

Wednesday actually has about 5 more minutes of daylight than Friday. On Friday 25 September we actually get a length of day that is 12 hours 1 minute and 22 seconds. And Saturday 26 September has a time between sunrise and sunset that is 11 hours 58 minutes -- so Saturday the 26th is actually this year's winner in the Autumn "Day = Night"  contest.

Why?

First, the astronomical definition of equinox refers to the moment the earth, in its orbit around the sun, crosses a particular point in reference to what astronomers call the fixed stars. Plus, we must remember that "Day Equals Night" day wanders because of the earth's axis-wobble with respect to the earth's elliptical orbit. This wobble is known as the precession of the equinox. The precession happens ve-e-e-r-r-y s-slo-o-o-owly (!) but it it make a difference. At this point, a difference of some days. 

You're welcome.

Where You Were and When

Some years ago I started noticing the ads from the grocery store seemed to know when I went to the grocery store. Figures: grocery store "rewards card" pins it down, plus more recently I tend to connect to the store wi-fi. My choice. Creepy, but whatevs. 

A story on Slashdot opens up a bit of how creepy things are getting. Vandals tore down and stole a Flock camera, hacked the data it contained, and shared it with a cutout organization that in turn shared it with 404 Media and Wired. (Slashdot gives all the links, so go there for the details.)

From Slashdot: "...Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, 'The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections.' "  More: "...software running on the camera explicitly detects people... When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection." (emphasis mine)

Looks like somebody's making a jump from google ads toward Skynet.