Author: alohawild

Going with my usual format, I rose early-ish as I again had leg cramps and had to rise to take in some water to stop the pain and clenched muscles. I heard my 6:30 alarm go off after I entered my office, started my usual tasks, and watched the dark gray turn light gray. Overcast days are back, but with sun breaks, for now. We have a few lovely days left until the unrelenting rains start. Though with the change in weather patterns, we often have sunny days in winter. But these are overwhelmed with “rivers of rain,” which are impressive, even for someone like me with 30 years here. I liked the rain all the time in the Fall-Winter-Spring better.

While writing that, I realized that I moved to Oregon in September thirty years ago and stayed at the Lakes Apartments for a few months until I secured 20625 SW Clarion Street; Oct. 31st is the start of the 30th year in the house. I vowed, and still do, that I will stay here. It has always felt like the place I belonged.

Also, my oldest Dungeons & Dragons email is from 2010, but I know we played for ten more years than that, so I have also been playing D&D for over twenty years here and have hosted an online game through the pandemic.

Returning to the narrative, I wrote the blog and finished it a few minutes over. I dilly-dallied for a bit, saw the clock, jumped in the shower, did the usual, and soon was in Air VW the Gray ten to 9 for a 9:30 game. I was ten minutes late. It was the ISS Vanguard cooperative board game with a role-playing and app-driven experience. I play the Engineering section. Our last play, over a month ago, involved a special set of rules, an invasion of our spaceship, and us fighting to take back our ship. I lost one crew member, as did Richard. That left us with a strange restart, and then a month later, we picked it up again.

Richard and James, both board gamers and not RPG players, had forgotten much of the story and rules. I am used to returning to a campaign after a month and doing lots of RPG-style play. Also, Richard wants to min-max, while James is always interested in exploring every corner of the material he has bought. I am interested in the story and figuring out what we are supposed to do while avoiding any video-game-style mining and so forth (can’t stand that; it is a time sink). It takes us from 9:30 to 11:15 to set up for the next away mission. We play until about 3, with my new engineer promoted but off to sickbay, lightly wounded on the mission. We manage to connect, in the story, with friendly, if not unusual, aliens who help us repair the ship. Lastly, a surprise storyline and a secret envelope get opened. We had a choice: military or diplomatic; as usual, Richard wanted military. His characters are set up for this. We picked diplomatic, and this became a permanent change to the game; new items were added and some removed. We had reached a major turning point in the game. All interesting.

I left as Richard and James finished up “saving” the game. I took photos in case we needed to return to the same planet. I headed home in heavy traffic and never enjoy a traffic jam on the bridge. The number of heavy trucks always surprises me. I think it is a waste, since most of this freight should be moved more efficiently with less wear on roads and air pollution, but that would require a group to invest heavily in infrastructure, and billionaires prefer easy money like AI and Social Media.

I arrived home, reheated the pasta I made yesterday for an early dinner or late lunch, and watched season 3 of For All Mankind. I was disappointed that the giant spinning-wheel hotel in orbit has issues (I have always dreamed of one of those), but it’s still fun to imagine as a real thing. It is also interesting to see everyone aged and the styles updated to the 1990s. The story is now in full alternate history.

After that, I decided The 649 was a good choice and headed there; I had a smaller beer, read, and then skimmed the endless math in the book, Quantum Computing. It is interesting to me that my earlier confusion was that there is no reason to apply multiple gates to qubits, since each is a matrix and the whole process falls under the tenets of linear algebra. Instead, you multiply the matrices (fixed values) and apply the result to the qubits once. I also learned that this is true for multiple qubits in the same circuit (I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but it became obvious once the text brought it up) and that you can also entangle the qubits, effectively collapsing them into one value. Hmmm.

I have to admit, my head is overflowing with details, and some of it is getting confused. I need some practical use, but there are another fifty pages on measurement, which I understand is also weird and linear too. I also was not surprised by the no-cloning rule, which says a qubit cannot be copied. Certain processes (i.e., entanglement and CX gates) can create some known changes, but again it is limited; until a measurement is taken and the qubit wave function collapses, it cannot be known and thus cloned. More to come.

I got sleepy and stopped reading for the night. This is more a morning topic for me. I watched a video on the history of the Old Fashioned and talked to my bartender, Matt, and we agreed to try it. Rye with no lemon or cherries, just fresh nutmeg. Maybe with a little water too. Ice stays. Next time we will experiment!

Instead, I had a coffee with a side shot of amaretto, my late-night stay-awake drink. I looked at coding examples in Python and began to understand more about how this must be implemented. Python has matrix and tensor multiplication available in its super-fast libraries (implemented in C and even lower-level ops). Also, the reality of quantum means that these processes would be instantaneous, outside of time. Interesting.

I returned home, and it was still early, but I was tired again. Something I have noticed of late. I got out the Civil War book, did no more math tonight, and read a few chapters of Eric Lawson’s book, The Demon of Unrest. It is a physical book, as it has excellent footnotes. I slept and dreamed I was back at work; I was quite happy, working in RPG, COBOL, and maybe some FORTRAN. I enjoy being paid again, working on old stuff, and being around my co-workers. Yes, sometimes I miss it. I do have a foot cramp, but that works into my dream, as I used to have that problem when coding, as I would push my foot down while I thought and coded. I wake up, it fades, and I return to work/sleep. This time, some Python and AI stuff. I woke up rested on Wednesday.

An interesting dream. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

Need something interesting to do on Thursday?

Beaverton First United Methodist Church is excited to host the Beaverton Lecture Series on Thursday, Oct. 1 at 7 p.m., featuring Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner and New York Times columnist. 

A Yamhill, Oregon farm boy turned Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, and a New York Times columnist since 2001, Kristof has reported from six continents and more than 140 countries, won two Pulitzer Prizes, and co-authored the No. 1 best-seller “Half the Sky.”

THE TALK 
“A Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Thoughts on Fixing the World’s — and Oregon’s — Problems”
From Tiananmen Square to Darfur to the main street of his Oregon hometown, Kristof has spent four decades chronicling human struggle — and the stubborn hope that outlasts it. A candid evening on what a lifetime of reporting has taught him: how we find hope, and how we build it. This event is free and open to the public.  No tickets needed — a suggested donation is welcome at the door.

An Evening With Nicholas Kristof

All through the day, I talked to Deborah and plan to see her in about two weeks for her birthday. I also watched For All Mankind and completed the third season. I lost control of Monday, and it seemed to disappear; I felt I didn’t get enough out of the day.

Last night (I am writing this Tuesday morning), I had more leg cramps, two nights in a row. I will get some packets of Liquid I.V. (no sugar) and see if that helps. Water helped to slow it, but it came back in the morning. I know Dad had terrible issues with leg cramps. Ugh!

I was planning to play Dungeons & Dragons in October and realized that Thursday is Friday! I am revising my 4E D&D version to the current 5E-ish version. I returned to that work for a while. I did not make much progress, but I need to focus on getting the house ready to host D&D again and trying to assemble some players. I am excited to get back to DM-ing, but it takes years of effort to establish a strong gaming group. We will see if I can get a group playing over and over and enjoying a campaign. Most gaming groups do not survive the first three to four plays.

The day ended early. I was very tired, made the bed, and read a new book (The Demon of Unrest on the start of the American Civil War that I purchased last year), but I soon started to nod off, put the book aside, turned off the light, and slept. Before that, as I said above, I finished Season 3 of For All Mankind, washed some pans, and put the other dishes in the washing machine. I also reached into the new garbage disposal, always a worrying task, and removed a ball bearing that somehow got in there, and now it is back to sounding normal–a growl–and not a screaming horror of stops and starts. The ball bearing is larger than the ones I add to paint bottles to make them easier to stir by shaking. I wonder if it was there from the start, or if it came from a paint bottle that popped off its end cover and covered me in paint. I washed off the paint, and maybe there was a ball bearing in the mess that I didn’t notice. Better now.

Before that, Corwin stopped by and grabbed some dinner. I made a lot of pasta, sauce from a jar, and fried ground beef, then baked it. I had some bowls, with another bowl of peach slices, also from a jar. Corwin had his first day at his new job selling used cars, and while he liked it, unless he can sell a car soon, he will have to find something else. He likes his coworkers. He stopped by to get his packages; he still has them delivered to the house.

At 6:30, before Corwin stopped by, I attended a short Outreach/Missions church meeting on Zoom. He covered many topics, and it is always interesting to see how busy we are even with only about 40 people attending on Sunday.

My books arrived today from Crescent Books in New Orleans. Jeff, who remembered me from my previous purchases, threw in a Gram Greene book to try, since we had discussed his writing and I had never read his stuff. I had passed on a set of his works because I was not sure I would like him. Jeff said he would pick a copy and toss it in for free. Very kind. The Heart of the Matter is now on my short read list.

I spent the mid-afternoon drinking a London Fog while reading Quantum Computer and various related math and quantum information online. I am beginning to see how matrix operations and complex numbers correspond to this process, and the author again reminded the reader that the structure of the qubits is based on reality and this math; it has been proven to represent the actual physics. This is not made up or a convenience but is representational. I am having trouble remembering everything and will need some practical work to make this stick. I already have a simulation running in Python, and I need to try it more. I have another 100 pages to reach the algorithms in the book. More to follow.

Before this, I heated up the sourbrot from Costco for lunch. I made spatzel to go with it (I still had some dried from Mount Angel, Oregon). It was an extravagant lunch. I have another meal or two left. I did this as I finished the laundry. Monday is my laundry day. Sheets, towels, and anything that has accumulated get washed. I made another mess in the kitchen.

Before that, I got up around 7 after multiple leg cramps and made coffee. I had chocolate croissants I made the night before. I made coffee and had a banana to go with it. Then I sat down, watched the squirrels and hummingbirds from my office window, wrote the blog, and did my usual updates.

Thanks for reading.

My car keys were cold in my pocket when I got into Air VW the Gray. I had put my keys on the Costco $49 set of excellent sandwiches the night before. I cannot leave without the sandwiches this way. We are having an after-church meeting with Gordon G, the missionary in Brazil, who is running our trip there in November.  I am supplying the usual Costco sandwich selection.

I woke at 7-ish, reheated yesterday’s coffee, and had a banana and later a bowl of cereal, both also purchased in too large an amount from Costco. I wrote the blog, but I am time-boxed by church and the aforementioned meeting. I managed to finish without having to cut it short. A quick shower, all that, and selecting a silk tie I got in the 1980s that I loved but was only appropriate in the Washington, D.C. offices, as the Baltimore offices were conservative in dress, brought back memories of working there in the 1990s.

I arrived at the church and managed to get the sandwiches to the fridge at the church without loss. The top had popped off, and the tray was flexing a bit, but I managed to walk them around to the entrance and into the Fireside Room. The fridge, usually empty, was stuffed with items leftover from another event. I made room and told Bill S and Z about it; they are responsible for the morning coffee and such–the Hospitality Committee and morning crew.

I ushered, and Dondrea ran the service and even gave the sermon. Pastor Ken was out with a family issue. The service flowed, and I thought it was one of our best. Gordon G and Pastor Lowell (his brother and former pastor of our church, First United Methodist Church) were present. Gordon was introduced and gave a short talk about his work in Brazil. Dondrea gave the sermon that recalled our visit to Montgomery, Alabama, and the bombing of MLK’s home when he was 27 and starting out as an activist preacher. She referred to the scripture 1 John 4:18-21, which talks about fear and hate, and that perfect love has neither. Dondrea told us we must seek love, give up hate, and resist fear. The world is crazy with fear, and social media makes this worse; it is nearly inescapable. Dondrea told us we need to recognize what it is—manipulation—and try not to react, but instead focus on love and remain rational. Remember our faith and our faith in community and each other. Justice, my word.

After church, we moved to the Pastor’s Office and met with Gordon G; his brother, Mark, and his wife listened. He met all of us, and we shared expectations and talked about the trip. Gordon brought a calendar and went over how the trip would work. We decided not to visit the favelas on this trip. We would like to meet with the church pastors from the favelas, but for most of us, the risk seemed disproportionate to the gain of entering the favelas.

It was a good meeting, and we focused on a few items, and Gordon G. seemed pleased with the results. We broke up slowly. Gordon was saddened to learn that Joyce Hill had passed; she was his supervisor, and he praised her missionary work. I have Joyce’s book on Brazil, and he suggested that it is still a good prep to read (I ordered a copy from AbeBooks, as my copy seems to be borrowed and not returned).

I returned home, took off my tie, and watched an episode of For All Mankind, cut some roses, and did a few hours of Dungeons and Dragons accounting, where I updated my character to level 14 for the evening game with M@ and friends. Somehow, I have high saving throws for my character, Carter the Great, and I have to recheck those. I also missed switching out some spells, but I fixed them during the game. More fixes to follow.

With some roses and rosemary, I headed to M@ and arrived too soon. Traffic was low this time. The game included Jack again, since Mackers couldn’t make it. We found ourselves in combat-heavy situations; we are more hit-and-run and talk our way out of it, D&D characters. We have one person nearly killed. The dragon wasn’t happy we robbed it and had to use a lot of acid to explain to us that we should be more careful next time! More events happened that we didn’t handle well; again, more combat-centric, but still it was a fun evening.

With that done, I headed home after chatting with Scott for a while. I was soon in bed reading and soon fell asleep. I woke early with leg cramps again, and I am pretty sure I didn’t drink enough water yesterday, so I’ll be more careful about that.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

The post-nasal drip-drip comes and goes all day. This means sudden coughing attacks, cough meds, and then nothing for hours. It was a constant issue and annoyance, but it was mostly ignored, and pills were carried just in case.  The rains stopped, and the pollen was back in the Beaverton and Portland area.

I invested the sunrise and the morning writing the blog with a few asides. I was not overly focused on writing, and talked to Deborah. We were again getting used to me being in a three-hour time zone difference. We enjoyed chatting and will soon see each other 15Oct-20, Deborah’s birthday visit.

I wrote multiple asides and wandered a bit in the writing. I am avoiding boilerplate and repeating myself. But I did enjoy liberal coffee (I know I spend many words on coffee, but it is so nice to have fresh coffee every morning), and the bitter taste reminds me that Justice with Compassion is still a work in progress in the USA. But I have Hope and believe we liberals are slowly making the world better. I remember the scary world of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I also enjoy a banana.

I forgot to write about breakfast yesterday; sorry. I opened a salmon packet for a protein-rich breakfast with some cheese and olives (stuffed with almonds). I was later hungry, as I had failed to have some starch to keep me full. But still, I enjoyed the extra energy. I was worried as I assembled my tasty breakfast that I would taste salmon all day, but that did not happen. I remembered all those European hotel breakfasts (and Iceland too) when I ate my fish for breakfast.

This led, after taking a shower and talking more with Deborah, to defrosting some cod and then baking it with just salt and pepper. I cooked it to an internal temperature of 135°F (57°C). I reheated the leftover polenta in the microwave and opened a jar of canned sliced peaches to go with it. I watched a newly purchased animated film, Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham. A stand-alone story that freely mixes Batman with Lovecraft-like monsters and damnation stories in the 1920-30s; it even included a dreaded text. Not bad.

I found the chocolate mousse servings I got at Costco, took one, and enjoyed it. I also did the dishes (it looked like a chef had exploded a meal in the sink) and folded and put away the laundry. This all while enjoying the animated feature.

Time moved slowly, a pleasant change, and I made sure all the Cthulhu War parts were loaded in the car. I still had plenty of time; I headed to Portland. With I-5 South closed, the traffic pattern changed even on Saturday, and I stalled a few times on a sunny Saturday early afternoon. Mt. Hood and St. Helens were visible on the Fremont Bridge. A magnificent view you can peek at as two lanes merge at the top of the bridge and then split off into two directions, with cars and trucks switching lanes seemingly at random and always slowly, never fast.

Lucky Labrador Brew House on Hawthorn was my target, and I found it with a spare parking spot. I took my laptop and my Quantum Computing book with me. I bought a red ale and a bowl of peanuts to shell, and I did not put the shells on the floor–a sin here. You get a spare bowl for the shells. I read about tensors and then turned to the Internet and found an excellent explanation (here). I then read more in the “Systems” chapter of Quantum Computing. I did not feel I got enough to return to coding in Python and do something interesting. Also, the beer and the deep dive, only about 90 minutes, were putting me to sleep. It amazed me, as I remember getting sleepy when studying math back in the 1980s at Central Michigan University. Pure math can, for me, be a real nap causer. Coffee would be the usual solution, but you don’t get that there.

Instead, I caught up on YouTube and did a few Alton Brown episodes. Drachinifel had a fascinating WWII Battle of the River Plate episode featuring one of my favorite types of ship: Admiral Scheer-class pocket battleships. Really extra-heavy cruisers without enough armor to run fast. I had my EarPods, so this bothered nobody. The strange club of weird keyboards was meeting, as was a language club, practicing on each other over beers. A pleasant Portland afternoon at Lucky Labrador. I had a BLT; they make a wonderful one, and water. I did not want to sleep at Richard’s.

I drove from SE to NE to Richard’s, and Richard helped me with the heavy boxes, and we set up and did a teach on the Cthulhu Wars game. Chris, Laura, and Kathleen made it five with Richard and me. Chris owns an unpainted copy. I brought seven factions, all painted, but I am still short two. Two of mine have never been played, and I was excited when Kathleen took on the Ancients and Chris took on the Tcho-Tcho factions. Their first time in use.

(Laura and Chris looking dangerous as they control their evil factions. The Pretty castles are The Ancients; Kathleen is already taking over. This also give you a scale, dear readers, of the figures)

The play had little combat, unusual for this game, and focused mostly on expansion and building spell books. Soon the board was heavy with massive figures, some more than a foot tall, and while it was a crazy game, everyone seemed to like it and was fascinated by the exceptions to every rule from various superpowers. I focused on rules and play, not on building my Crawling Chaos powers. I scored last, but finished my spellbooks; Kathleen’s faction bribed the other players with power, and she used that to pull forward. Chris spread out and soon followed close behind. Richard’s Cthulhu forces could not catch the Ancients. Despite the ornate setup and asystematic play, it was played fast.

My marker for The Ritual of Annihilation looked great. I had painted it yesterday after discovering it was still unpainted. I may remove the shiny from some of the figures as it glares. I will repaint the yellow on the bases for Yellow Sign and maybe paint white and blue on the Ancients’ bases to separate them from Crawling Chaos. I also need to put the Independent Great One cards in the box, since the Ancients summon them. I had a few in the box that worked, and we just borrowed an unused figure. Still, it was nice to play it again.

With that, I was happy to lose, as it was fun to see everything run. Sometimes I am more an observer of a game than a serious player. We had not played it in four years; we were surprised to learn from Richard’s records. Richard uses BoardGameGeek to record his plays, scores, and game collection.

With Richard carrying the box for me to the car (I don’t carry things up and down stairs now that I have only one working ear), we chatted for a while, and then I drove home without issue, not even noting the loss of I-5 Southbound. I was soon home, put the game back on the shelf in the garage, and looked for the add-ons, but they were packed away on another shelf. I went to bed and fell asleep soon after. While I do not remember my dreams in any detail, they did not follow a Lovecraftian track. I woke once to prove hydration, but not for leg cramps.

Thanks for reading.

I find I am the most tired two days after traveling, as the adrenaline and the happiness of being home start to fade. The cough starts again after I pull a game from the garage. It was a bit musty.  It is a slow-going day.

I rose at 6-ish and watched the sunrise as I wrote the blog, read (mostly deleted) emails, and was amazed by the Supreme Court’s see-sawing on issues (rules for and against Trump on almost the same issues) as I read the news. I read on Facebook posts that it is not about the economy or freedom, but the fact that we folks on the left are secret communists or ultra-conservative Muslims and must be stopped. I am, as always, surprised that anyone would believe this stuff and believe that we, Democrats and liberals, could have such powers to overthrow all our government and religion and steal elections.

Aside: It always seems like something out of “Pinky & The Brain”: “And now we will steal the election by mass mailing ballots that cannot be detected by means that don’t exist,” Brain says in a low accented voice. “But how can that work, Zoink?” squeaks Pinky, excited to hear another incredible, if impossible-to-succeed, plan. “We just have to believe, and it will be true,” Brain says in a happy and calm voice as he puts on a red hat. “Oh,” says Pinky in a voice that shows confusion and disappointment at the same time–With apologies to Warner Brothers.

Returning to my narrative (well I tried to stay on subject), I spent the morning writing and thinking. I don’t get much time to think when I am traveling, as I am, and that fills my mind and senses. I am now detecting changes in my mood; I am swinging more with music, painting miniatures, and reading books that make me laugh: Accidental Alchemist. I had a dark dream that I spent all my money on the trip and was down to my last 100K, but even in the dream, I realized it wasn’t true and wandered off to enjoy a dream mix of Nashville and New Orleans.

Freely mixing Jazz and Blues with Rock-a-Billy and gumbo with BBQ. A great dream destination; maybe I will see you in my dreams, Nashville-NOLA, dear reader. Even red hat dreamers are welcome. We can fill out all those dream ballots together and mail them!

Aside: My health care cost, on a Bronze plan through Regents, is just over $1000 plus $40 for dental a month. I pay that now through my AMEX to get miles, but that adds to my trip costs and makes the trips look more expensive than planned. Thus, the worry in my dream. So far, I have yet to tip into the principal of my IRA. Even with the trips and medical stuff. The Social Security that started this year helps.

I finished the blog, defrosted a pork chop, showered, and all that, then returned to the kitchen, which, after my actions, looked like the Swedish Chef had a bad day. I made polenta with water and salt. My glass-top stove does not cool fast, and I had to take the polenta off the burner and whisk it. I then moved it back to the now-off burner and whisked again. A few bubbles burst, and boiling hot polenta splashed me. No burns, but some discomfort, and I am reminded again to be careful with this stove (some day I will switch to induction). I season pork chops with Tuscany-style herbs from a bag I bought on one of my travels, then finish them quickly in a fry pan. I make pan gravy and pour it over my polenta. I steamed frozen green beans, but Deborah is right: they have less flavor.

I eat that while I catch up on the new season of Slow Horses. I am less happy with this season, as the storyline is opaque. Everything is muddled and confusing, but I find that is often how these stories begin, and by the third episode the story is starting to roll out.

I also make a manual copy of my important files on my Apple laptop to a solid-state 1T USB-C drive. I also reformat it to MS format (which means it cannot handle my large photo library), meaning that a LINUX machine can read it. Last time the Apple laptop broke, I had no access to anything for a week. I will put that back up in Air VW the Gray in case the house burns while I am away and the laptop does not survive the fire (hoping the car will not be in the garage if that happens).

I try for a nap, but instead I collect the pieces of the board game, Cthulhu Wars, that Richard asked to play on Saturday (an unusual choice, since Richard has most new and popular games, and I think he saw one for sale and wanted to try it before buying). I reviewed the rules (coughing from it, as I mentioned above) and the components. I am surprised that the Annihilation marker is unpainted. I decided to fix that, primed it, and, over the late afternoon and evening, added the first colors. I painted the game using the old army painter techniques, and I used them again for this item.

Next, I went to Costco, thinking mid-Friday is better than Costco on the weekend. There I bought $50 worth of excellent sandwiches for the after-church meeting. Gordon G is visiting from Brazil and hosting us in his home country for a church mission trip in November (over Thanksgiving). It is good to meet before we travel.

There, I find some food items that I could use, of course, but I resist appliances and large packs of food. I manage to keep the bill below $200. Yay! And now I have bananas. I drive that back to the house, unpack, and move the games into the car.

Deborah and I talk often during the day. We miss each other and will be together in three weeks. We spent many weeks together at the beginning of the year, and that has made these months seem like forever. Soon!

I meet Dondrea at 7 at Sí Seniors, and we catch up. I give her a T-shirt for Z and a few other items. We talk about travel and about the trip we are leading to Brazil (Dondrea and I took the official Methodist training and are the official leaders for this mission trip). The tacos, something we have tried before, the menu is new, and they are wonderful. I exchanged one; we had different versions, and they are good, as were the margaritas we enjoyed.

We headed our separate ways: Dondrea to pick up Z, and me to return home, paint the marker, and then read. I did not clean up the kitchen. The house elves did not show up for that, and I will do the dishes and cleaning Saturday morning.

Sleep came soon but was broken by leg cramps, then by various proof of hydration as I drank water to end the cramps. Thus, I did sleep but saw the night every couple of hours. But I am retired and do not care too much about that.

Thanks for reading!