Over the past weekend, we took the usual summer pilgrimage to Johnstown. This time, Berta's sister Therese was in the process of moving, so while they packed up some of their things, I watched the kids. This turned out not too unpleasant. During the time going out and while the kids were entertaining themselves amicably, I was able to do some more reading.
When last Pat as in town, he loaded up my Kindle with a few sample books. I started reading one by Vernor Vinge called "A Fire Upon the Deep". It was both interesting and strange. We also started listening to an audiobook prequel to the Tales of the Otori trilogy, "Heaven's Net is Wide", by Lian Hearn.
A Fire Upon the Deep is, as I said, strange. It's been a while since I've read true space sci-fi, and this certainly qualifies. It will be difficult to explain some of the many layered characteristics of this book, which set to establish axioms by which Vinge's world operates....
I am not old, in relative terms. But I'm becoming more concerned these days about issues regarding age in my profession.
Many of the folks in the web development industry are in their twenties. You almost have to be to be good at it. By that I mean that if you're older, you likely weren't exposed to all the new technology and never had the free time to amass (by osmosis) the knowledge needed to do it well, and if you're younger, you likely aren't a professional yet and don't have the experience to do it well. Obviously, there are exceptions, but generally this seems about the right age within the group of peers I am familiar.
I should note that I am on the top edge of this age group, perhaps just outside. The difference being that all of the rockstars of the internet that I know are single 20-somethings that party frequently and generally live the "internet rockstar lifestyle". Conversely, I am a happily married, proud father of two. I also have a bunch of gray hair, which leads me into my point here....
When I was little, my brother and I would play in the basement in the dark. The basement was our spaceship. We drew ship controls on paper in markers and crayons and used masking tape to tape them onto work tables in the basement. We'd pretend we were going to far away places, pushing the buttons of our controls to operate our space ship.
I have a memory of receiving my first telescope. We were at my uncle's house and there was snow on the ground. We set it up in the frigid air and looked at the craters in the surface of the full moon. It was awesome.
My grandfather used to teach me constellations that he learned while manning ships in the US Navy. I never learned them as well as I should have, but I looked for them whenever there was enough night to see stars. I knew that if I kept at it, I would get closer to them one day, even if it was on a derelict battleship converted into a spacecraft with a giant energy weapon carving a hole through its center, or perhaps even inside of a spaceship shaped like a lion....
I used to live near a paper mill. Several of them. Some of my family worked there, including my grandfather and my uncle Joe (my grandmother's sister's husband). Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe were in the Navy, and they plied their skills at tying knots to their new trade in the private sector.
Perhaps it is not widely imagined how paper is processed by a mill. Actually, all of the paper mills in Downingtown are recycled paper plants. They don't use cut trees to make paper, just old paper and cardboard. The paper is put into a big vat of chemicals to help break it down and re-form it into pulp, then it's pressed out through some machinery to be flattened and dried. The resulting paper can be any thickness, and can be used to construct many things, like boxes for board games, french fry containers, or inch-thick concrete pillar molds.
When flat, cut stock comes off the line, it's often stacked in piles and wrapped in cellophane. Prior and in addition to this method of keeping the paper from flying all over the place, the paper was tied together with string. If you've ever tried to tie a knot around something box-shaped, you know the standard difficulties. Now try imagining that the string has to be tight enough to withstand shipment and that the box isn't a solid object, but many thousands of shifting pieces of paper or cardboard. Then, perhaps, the benefit of such a specific knot becomes apparent....
A couple of weeks ago, I headed out of the house for a lunch meeting. It was 12:30 on a Friday, and both kids were at school. Being that it was a just a lunch, I didn't think much of how it would affect the rest of my day.
The lunch ran a bit long. I didn't leave until somewhere around 3:45, and I figured I would pick up a couple of things on the way home, including the weekend fish feeders that we needed for during our upcoming trip. Being that it was just lunch, it never even occurred to me that it was so late in the afternoon that Abby would be done school and waiting for me at home.
While driving home, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. Our neighbor across the street and a few doors down had heard Abby sobbing on our front porch. She took her up the street to stay with another of our neighbors, and that is who called me. How thoroughly mortifying.
It took me until 4:20 to get home, cursing traffic the whole way. I drove straight to my neighbor's house, where I found Abby playing cheerfully. I was very glad that we have great neighbors that would help out like this, but thoroughly shamed that this escaped me. more
