Author: Ridley

HI there. It’s been a while and that feels weird. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, I had the flu last month and, while I have been feeling better, I hadn’t been feeling quite right. That suddenly changed this weekend, when my energy suddenly returned, the color returned to pretty much everything, and my mood lightened tremendously.

I wouldn’t say it’s properly “ironic,” but my vim sure chose a funny time to come back. I’ve been “on call” this weekend (by the way, when interviewing for a job, don’t just ask about “paid time off; be sure to ask about how much “unpaid time on” you’ll be asked to take on), the weather has been garbage, and my soccer team got clobbered. We did sexy, exciting things like “shopping for cat litter” and “baking bread” and it was absolutely great because I felt like I was really present and not just miming the motions of a healthy me from the bottom of a pit. 

“So, Ridley, what’s been going on?”

I’m glad you asked! Nicole, on a whim, bought one of those new Crosley record players that looks like something from the mid-60s. We bought a bunch of used records, a lot of jazz, some classical, and, um, a couple of Genesis albums and, while I won’t pretend that it sounds any better than digital music, it’s really cute and and “used jazz albums with amazing covers” are a cheap hobby for casual collectors.

I bit the bullet and switched, or rather am about to switch, over to Project Fi, Google’s phone service. I’m not sure I’ll really save any money; the big draw for me is the fact that it works on so many LTE networks at the same time. I’ll report back when I’ve used it enough to have an opinion.

Oh, and the final piece of my Christmas present from Nicole was an Arturia Beatstep Prop, which is an interesting MIDI controller/sequencer, drum thingie that I’m going to be using to make all of my toys play nice with each other. I say “going to” because the old MG-1 isn’t cooperating, but it’s working well with everything else. It’s not substitute for “talent,” of course, but I’m considerably closer to being able to fake it, so yay.

We went ahead and booked a couple of vacations while our cashflow was positive. We’re going to be staying at the Ace in New Orleans in a few weeks, and then we’re heading back to Marfa in June to stay at El Cosmic. It’s taken me half a century or so, but I’m finally starting to feel the full restorative value of getting the hell out of Dodge. The trick, I suppose, was figuring where “out of Dodge” one likes to go. 

What else? My last piece for my moonlighting job was probably my best yet (and under unfortunate circumstances), or at least I thought it was. My editor wasn’t quite so enthusiastic, but what do editors know? Oh, they know a lot. Back to work, then.

I think that’s about it. I wanted to get this down for my own sake as much as anything, but if any of you found it interesting, then so much the better. I should probably get to bed now. Good night, all.

-RK

A while back, we decided to plan our next camping trip. We pulled up the Texas Parks and Wildlife site and poked around for places near home and then we tried to give up in frustration. Most campsites within the “drive there after getting off work on Friday” range were booked through next fall. Having to plan that far in advance takes some of the spontaneity out of the exercise and speaks to a serious lack of park space in our fair state. 

We got a little less picky about the dates and decided to consider camping in late January. Clever readers will notice that right now is, in fact, the very definition of “late January,” so I’m writing to you from a tent at McKinney Falls State Park. It’s an absolutely lovely evening. My phone, the final arbiter of all things weather-related, puts the temperature at a brisk but still unseasonably warm 62 degrees. We’ve had a fair bit of fortune this weekend.

One of my greatest fears is “camping in the rain,” a fear burned in to me by years of character-building expeditions in my youth when no amount of interesting weather would bring about the cancellation of a camping trip. Floods. I have literally gone canoeing during floods. So, you get the idea. I associate camping in the rain with being chilly, damp, and miserable the whole time. I’ve spent my entire adulthood avoiding camping in the rain.

It rained last night and this morning. 

And you know what? It was ok. Nicole has a marvelous sense of not only camp arrangement, but of how to handle a little bad weather without it ruining the trip. She brought cards and checkers and dominoes and books and an extra tarp and we were safe and dry in our tent playing two handed poker without any betting which was more charming than it sounds.

We’re in our second night here, our first two-night trip, and I’m feeling very much like we could go longer than this. In spite of all the hiking, we may put on pounds as a result of the camp food. Burgers last night because we needed to keep it simple for the arrival night, then pancakes and bacon for breakfast, a light, no-cook lunch, and then short ribs braised for several hours over the fire in a Dutch oven tonight. 

We haven’t left the park at all today and even managed to hike the entire Onion Creek trail which my quadriceps are still complaining about. The little bit of rain we got added significantly to the enthusiasm of the falls themselves. We didn’t see nearly as much interesting wildlife as last time, but it was still a lovely, peaceful hike (except for the bit that runs up against a housing development going in right next to the park which strikes me as a little off-message, but progress, right?). 

The park is full, but we really haven’t seen that many people. We’re among the very few people here camping in tents. Most folks are in enormous home-replacement sized RVs, which I’m not knocking, but there haven’t been very many cooking fires these evenings.

The only bit of work I’ve had to attend to has been just making sure all of our locations sent their data to the reporting site. One didn’t, but that was no big deal thanks to the double-edged miracles of modern technology, the same ones allowing me to write to you from here. I didn’t even watch my beloved Leicester City thump Peterborough 5-1 this morning, although I did listen on the radio. Other than that? It’s just been us and a bunch of outdoors, which is an awfully nice way to spend a weekend. 

So we’re sitting here, under the giant umbrella next to the tent, enjoying the slight breeze and the quiet. Well, that and Nicole’s Pandora station which mixes French cafe jazz, progressive rock, and Windham Hill-ish instrumentals  (including Maxence Cyrin’s solo piano cover of “Where Is My Mind,” which is the perfect summary of this mix). It’s peaceful enough that I think I’ll leave you for a while and get back to doing an exquisite version of nothing with my wife.

Good night all.

-RK

And so Sunday turns into Sunday evening and, right this very moment, everything feels right in this corner of the world. Thanks to Nicole, who did most of the heavy lifting, the apartment is spotless. There’s nothing that needs doing, nothing to make one anxious about sentences starting with “I should have.” The laundry is done, the cats and snails are set for the night, the dishes are all, well, if not clean, than at least in the dishwasher. Everything is peaceful and relaxed. 

If Nicole has a super power (and she does; she quite a few), it’s an ability to create environments. I think that’s why we love the Bunkhouse properties (El Cosmico, Hotel Havana, et. al.),all of which are the commercial embodiment of that sort of ability. We have a small space, so arranging it is trickier than it looks and her sense is flawless. If you squint just right, it can feel more like a resort than a home which ain’t a bad way to live.

I made my best loaf of bread tonight which is, well, it’s not a big thing, but as I get more comfortable playing with the recipes and the timing, it feels just a little less like good fortune and more like I’m learning the craft when it comes out well. I realize that writing this almost guarantees a brick of a loaf next time out, but have I mentioned Nicole’s bread pudding?

I’m still in the middle of reading Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker. It’s a big, dense, somewhat untidy book with the occasional side-trip that never quite derails the plot. I’m enjoying it immensely even though I keep getting this weird sense that I’ve read it before. Anyway, I’m late to the party on this, but Mr. Harkaway is the son of author John Le Carre which explains almost nothing about his books, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?

I finally finished mixing my “cover” of “We Are The Champions,” which has been great fun and a reminder that Freddie Mercury was a stellar composer  and arranger on even the slightest of songs. The best that can be said of my version is that you can tell what it’s supposed to be. The fun bit has been getting to play with the ridiculous toys that are available for recording music these days. I’m using a program called Reaper, which is a “digital audio workstation.” The learning curve to master it is pretty steep, but it’s not at all difficult to get started. I think the final version had something like a dozen track and it’s ridiculous that that kind of power is available for less than $60. We live in wondrous times, no?

So, things are good now. They may not be tomorrow; they may not have been yesterday, but right now, right this second, I’m very happy and I can’t imagine wanting anything more.

Goodnight all.

-RK

Snow days aren’t really a thing anymore, are they? Back in days of yore, which for the purposes of this discussion are the 1980s and 1990s, bad weather would shut down the office and you would be completely unable to do anything in the way of work. No cell phones, no internet, no email, and no way for work to find you other than your land line (and you’d best have caller ID to screen your calls). 

Today, my fair city shut down over a thin sheen of ice over the roadways and I wasn’t able to get to the office, but that hardly made a dent in the amount of work I did. No less than four hours of meetings on Hangouts, plus plenty of email-driven tasks. I might genuinely have worked more today than I would have in the office. Kind of takes the romance out of that thin sheen of ice over the roadways, doesn’t it?

So, no real snow, but the icy bits are pretty and the ducks out back seem to to be fine with the chill in the air, so it was kind of fun, even if I wasn’t properly playing hooky. We cooked, we watched some QI, Leicester scraped past Fleetwood Town to get into the 4th round of the FA Cup…all in all, a pretty good day.

On an unrelated note, I picked up volume 6 of Kieron Gillen’s and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked + The Divine. Once I recovered, I picked up volume 1 and re-read it, then realized I’d meant to read volume 2, and then, when it started to click, re-read volume 6 again. All I’ll say is that they played it more honestly with regards to the big reveal than I thought the first time through. It works. It’s mean, it’s ugly, and now I really can’t wait to see how it ends. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

On the off chance that anyone reading this has read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, ping me as I’m interested in hearing your take on it. I’m thinking it would have been a better book to take on vacation than to read from daily on the train to and from work. I just picked up Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker and I’m having the weirdest sense of deja vu reading the first couple of chapters. I would bet my life I’ve never read this book, but almost every word feels familiar. Unsettling. Anyway, he’s a ridiculously gifted writer and I’m loving what I’ve read so far.

I guess I should probably hit the hay. In theory, public transit will be fully functional tomorrow even though there’s been no real change in the conditions. We’re not terribly good at winter weather down here. Anyway, I’ll wager that the office will be semi-empty which is always nice. Sweet dreams.

-RK

It turns out that the flu this year is nothing to (forgive me) sneeze at. While at work last Wednesday, I found myself unreasonably tired from walking up stairs. It came on so quickly from there that I was out of the door in fifteen minutes and home in bed in less than an hour. Bed is where I stayed for the next 48 hours. The next 24 or so were weird in that my body didn’t have the energy to do anything but my brain lost its ability to sleep or do anything other than repeat weird loops over and over. 

Do not underestimate this particular strain of influenza. Today was the first day I felt any hunger and ate anything more than a few bites of bread. I didn’t turn on my computer for three days. If you know me, you know how far down I had to be for this to be the case. My understanding is that if you see your doctor as soon as you’re symptomatic, there’s something they can do to lessen the blow. Otherwise, you’re looking at over-the-counter symptom reducers. 

Side note: This is the second time I’ve had the flu in the last ten years. In both cases, I had a flu shot the previous fall. I’m still going to keep getting them, but they don’t seem to be quite as efficacious as we’ve been told, huh?

It wasn’t all bad, though. There were a few interesting things to come out of my week on my back:

1. The first solid food I ate was a batch of Popeye’s new “Ghost Pepper” wings. They are damned good, albeit a questionable choice for “first solid food.” They’re nowhere near as spicy as the name suggests, but they’re actually pretty hot, well beyond typical fast food empty promises. 

2. I got my primary Christmas present home and, wow, is it a doozy: A Korg Minilogue synthesizer! I’ll write more about it when I’ve had more time to noodle with it, but it’s just insanely powerful and intuitive to program.  I’m getting tingly just thinking about getting to play with it more tomorrow.

3. Watching a soccer match broadcast from a single camera at midfield is dizzying and weird. I can see how one might grow accustomed to it, but the angles were alien to me. It didn’t help that the first time I turned on any entertainment, on Saturday morning, it was such a garbage match.

3a. I’ve been pulling for Fleetwood Town ever since they sold Jamie Vardy to Leicester. They’ve been rising up the ranks, slowly but surely, going from Conference football to nearly reaching the Championship last year. Getting to see the Cod Army out in force only endeared them to me further.

4. QI is the perfect show to binge when you’re camped out on the sofa and have no energy to do anything (including watch whatever is on the screen). 

And, that’s about it. I’m going to try to work in the morning. We’ll see how long that lasts.  Thank goodness for Nicole. She’s done yeoman work taking care of me while she, too, has been afflicted by this crud. 

Goodnight all,

-RK

Hi, and welcome to 2018. I have high hopes for 2018 (not to be confused with “high expectations,” mind you). Last year set the bar pretty low, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think we’ll see at least modest improvement. In case you missed it, here was my tweet summing up the previous year:

It seems appropriate that I can do my 2017 recap as a tweet. Married life was and remains amazing. I lost my father in January. The President is an ignorant bully who makes everything he touches terrible. I think that about covers it.

There were some other good things, of course. We discovered the joys of keeping garden snails as pets (documented here and here). We got to visit Marfa again. I read some quite a few good books. In fact, the last two were among the best all year. 

I’d never read any of Zadie Smith’s fiction, but I enjoy her essays and her debut novel, White Teeth, got some pretty terrific reviews. I didn’t know quite what to expect. Her style had been dubbed “hysterical realism,” which has to be one of the least-helpful descriptions I’ve ever heard. As it turns out, the novel is a very funny tale of three(-ish) families in England and…I wont’ try to describe it further, but I found her tangents and abrupt changes in perspective charming and entirely appropriate to the story-at-hand. I enjoyed it more than all but a handful of books I’ve read since I started reading during my commute.

Next, I picked up Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. I’d never read any Christie and figured this would be a good place to start. It wasn’t for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who’s ever read it, but it was still a delight. Hercule Poirot is a delightful character and I’d probably enjoy reading “Agatha Christie’s Poirot Does A Crossword Puzzle While He Works Out What His Neighbor Is Planning For His Garden This Spring.” 

Today, we did something that I hope will be the start of a tradition: We went to an old school arcade. I was triumphant, setting the high score on the Phoenix game as well as the Cyclone pinball machine. The old football game with the track balls and the x and o figures for the players was a bit of a bust, but it was just as painful as I remembered. To commemorate Texas’ new open carry law for swords, Nicole won enough tickets on the claw machine and skee ball go get me a nifty scimitar and eye patch (I assume we already have open carry on eye patches). 

Turning in a bit early tonight on account of the fact that I’m absolutely knackered. Here’s hoping you and yours have a lovely year and that you’re safe and warm tonight.

-RK

I know Pacific Rim wasn’t a great film, but it was a great idea for a film and it had great parts. It’s been frustrating me for four years now and now I think I know why it was so frustrating.

Last week, I watched my favorite part of Pacific Rim, the battle in and near Hong Kong between the four mechs….er, “jaegers” and the kaiju. That sent me down the rabbit hole of reading up on all of the jaegers in the lore that didn’t make the film. There were, apparently, other jaegers that were going to be in the movie but had to be cut because director Guillermo del Toro felt there was already too much backstory. That’s when it hit me.

The problem with Pacific Rim is that the film we got was the third movie of the trilogy. 

Bear with me on this: Pacific Rim is the story of the conclusion of the decades-long war between humanity and giant monsters from…well, let’s call it “the deep.” The majority of this war is shown to the audience in flashbacks or plain old voice over exposition. Not only is this awkward, it also forces the films to spend an inordinate amount of time on world building instead of fulfilling its promise of wall-to-wall robot versus monster action. The film had some really great parts, but it never got rolling until way too late.

It didn’t have to be this way. The basis for full films is in the backstory. The first is the story of the first appearance of the kaiju. Humanity throws their military might against the huge monsters, fighting heroically but ultimately unsuccessfully against an enemy the likes of which we’ve never seen. As a last throw of the dice, we build a giant freaking robot and, after several setbacks and against all odds, the newly-christened “jaeger” beats back the menace. Humanity has a, ahem, new hope and the jaeger program is born.

The second film shows the rise of the jaegers to the height of their glory. The pilots are rock stars, heroes, and almost gods. Basking in the glory of easy early successes, no one wants to acknowledge that the monsters are getting tougher and appearing more frequently. Soon, the victories aren’t coming so easily and the losses are starting to mount. When an entire city is destroyed due to over-confidence on the part of a jaegar pilot, public opinion turns against the program.  Humanity is on the back foot and the fateful (and ill-advised) decision is made to abandon the jaegers and entrust our fate to enormous sea walls.

Now, we have Pacific Rim as the third film. This solves so many problems. When Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha take the field against a kaiju, the audience knows these jaegers as legendary veterans who’ve won battle after battle. Now there’s no need to spend a third of the film on the backstories of the eventual pilots of Gipsy Danger. Now there’s time to have more robot vs. monster fights, with higher stakes since we’re invested in the participants. It works so much better.

I know this is the mootest of moot points, but it’s been bugging me for a long time. This makes sense, right? Anyway, here’s the first part of the Hong Kong fight. It still makes sad to see the Russians get it this way:

-RK

I’ve opened my laptop every day with the intent of writing something here, and then I’ve closed it again after staring at the screen for a number of minutes. These days are seriously taking a toll on me. 

I’ve always said that the real danger in Washington wasn’t the President, but rather what Congress could do with the spotlight permanently affixed on the shit show that is the current administration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The tax bill! While it’s hard to judge exactly what’s in it on account of the fact that it was still being written moments before the vote and no one had a chance to read it before they cast their vote. Based on what little we know, it looks as bad as anything I’ve seen.

It’s a tax hike on the lower and middle classes and a big cut for the wealthy. That in and of itself is not damning. If the taxes on the wealthy are too high, you’ll get high interest rates and a lack of investment. Of course, that’s not the case now. Companies are not merely flush with cash; credit is cheap and readily available as well. Thus, lowering taxes is NOT going to result in an influx of investment. Many larger companies have indicated they’ll just put the tax cuts in investors’ pockets  which is exactly what one would expect.

Of course, they didn’t stop at tax cuts. They put in an end to the individual mandate of Obamacare, which will cost an estimated 10 million Americans their health insurance. In an attempt to make abortion illegal (via a tax bill, mind you), they defined “life” as beginning prior to pregnancy. They added tax deductions for private education and removed deductions for state and local taxes (which fund public education). Oh, and let’s not forget that deduction for private jet owners. It will increase the deficit by over 1 trillion dollars, which, one presumes, will be the excuse for cutting public services in the future. It’s a piece of shit bill.

That alone is enough to make me feel like we (meaning people with values similar to mine) lost, and lost big. If this thing passes in its current form, the damage will be significant and could take a generation to repair. The Senate Republicans flat-out said that, if they didn’t pass this bill, their big donors would cut them off. That’s indication enough who they’re working for, and if you’re not a big Republican donor, you’re going to be worse off than you are now.

I don’t mean to imply that this is the only bad thing the government is doing. The cascade of awful news is just overwhelming. We’re giving public lands (meaning “yours and mine”) to energy companies. We’re making it harder to report sexual harrassment in schools. We’re trying to kick trans folks out of the military. We’re still talking about that border wall for some reason.  We’re about to elect a man who preys on children to the U.S. Senate, with the endorsement of the President. We’re provoking additional violence in the Middle East. We’re kneecapping the internet as an open channel for communication. We’re allowing the police to murder black people without repurcussion because they feel threatened by the fact that they’re black.

And, for some reason, the President is holding rallies for himself, like this is a normal thing.

I’m wiped out. I’m just buried underneath all of the horrible things we’re doing to try to turn the clock back on every hard-fought gain we’ve seen over the last…well, my lifetime at least. I didn’t even mention the fact that they’re talking about allowing business owners to claim some of their employees’ tips as their own. That’s huge, but there’s just so much and I can’t keep up or prioritize because it’s starting to break me. 

Unfortunately, curling into a ball and turning off all media for the next couple of years isn’t an option and wouldn’t help if it were. Onward and upward. Shit’s broken and it’s not going to fix itself. Honestly, I’m probably not going to fix it, but at least I’m going to have to support those that are while I’m learning to live in the new dystopia. 

Which is all a (very) long way of saying that I’m going to be making an effort to put something in this space on a regular basis. That’s the point of that new “top 5 lists” thing at the top, to give me a place to write something easy and tiny when I’m too knackered to make a proper post.

That’s all the venting for today. Cheers.

-RK