I woke, rolled over, and climbed out of my snuggly blankets around 7. The sun was just up, and the skies were bright blue, promising one more hot, sunny day for the summer of 2026. After today, the heat lows will falter, and then the wet, cold air familiar to us who live in the Pacific Northwest will be back. There is no temperature above 75ºF (24ºC) in the next ten days, and it is unlikely to be seen again until May 2027.
I spent most of Monday indoors, running around at the church or on Zoom meetings. I also found some time to read more about complex numbers as part of my study of quantum computing. The book of the same name from No Starch Press walks readers slowly through linear algebra and vector analysis needed to grasp the complexity of building programs. I have not done this stuff since 1984, and it is hard to get it all back in my head. This stuff had been the reason I stopped working on one AI Kaggle project; I did not remember how to use vectors. I did show my Python kung-fu by building a very inaccurate solution that managed to process all the data and pass, earning me a low score, but I did score! I will admit I nodded off while reading the four pages exploring how to map complex numbers to number lines. But it did create a means to understand complex numbers as an extra-dimensional creation with interesting features arising from the use of imaginary numbers.
I spent most of the morning writing the blog and enjoying liberal amounts of coffee until I needed to be at the church at 10 to meet Jeff A to do some work. With yields exploding, Supreme Court rulings that are shocking to me, and self-proclaimed Christians attacking people for their belief in the USA, I needed some dark liberal coffee and a chocolate croissant to start the day!
It is the last day of August, and I mourn August 2026 as it will not be seen again. It was hot and dry, but it seemed somehow apologetic about the heat and the smoke. August’s nights were cold, and the sky was clear as if an act of contrition for the heat and the smoke. The skies were clear enough to see the stars and the lunar eclipse. It seemed August invited me outside at night as if it said, “Come with me and dance in my cool nights and look up and know there is no end that way.” I am sorry I slept through the nights of August and woke up for the hot days, and I wish I had more nights to spend with August 2026.
I do not finish the blog before I have to get dressed (and all that), meet with Jeff, and then attend another church meeting on insurance. I soon grab my laptop, more Exit signs, and head to Beaverton First United Methodist Church. I arrive as Jeff gets there, and soon his helper (Chris?) appears. They are to replace all the bulbs (working or otherwise) in the sanctuary with new LED lights, and they get the tall ladder out and soon have the process in hand. I also point out that the Exit signs are out of code, and they will also replace them.
The lights are quickly replaced, but the LED lights blink and fail. We need better lights, as there are dimmers and likely other noise on the line. Cheap lights leak a DC pulse that accumulates, causing the cheap circuit powering the LEDs to fail. This is solved by large capacitors built into less cheap lights. I have faced the same issue in my house when I replace fixtures with built-in LED lights on the same string. We need lights that are twice as expensive, but they have to order them. It will not get done today; likely next week, when the lights are in.
But the Exit lights, which require wall repairs, junction box installation, and painting, will get underway and be finished by the end of the week. Yay! Finally, some of the lights that were in my garage for ten years have been installed!
I returned home by way of Walgreens, which has been reminding me twice a day that I have prescriptions there, but only now are there three, along with various complex rituals, including updating expired prescriptions, that need to be performed to create this triple pickup. I had also noticed that they supply flu vaccine. And while not always a perfect solution to the raging winter illness that then appears again in the spring, I prefer the shot and any protection to one more two weeks of misery (and likely a canceled trip) from full-on flu. This has been a policy for me since getting the flu once and pulling muscles from the force of the vomiting back when George Bush got the same flu so publicly back in the 1980s.
The paperwork was intense for them to do the shot, but after thirty minutes, I was poked and done. I was even more tired after that. I headed home.
Cold chicken and reheated, not-that-good scalloped potatoes from Costco made for dinner. I did a long church Zoom meeting. I watched more of For All Mankind and enjoyed the re-scripting of history and of Richard Nixon. I finally booked an overpriced hotel; $340 a night is a lot for a Hampton Inn in downtown Nashville. I found my unfinished copy of Nero Wolfe: Some Bured Ceasar, and returned to the story. I was reading it on my previous trip and lost track of the book. Soon I was laughing and smiling through the story.
I went to sleep too early and woke up every couple of hours all night. But still, I slept enough. Thanks for reading.
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