Author: alohawild

I rose closer to 8 as the winter weather is here and it is dark. The night is cold and wet; the morning is gray, and I have to turn on the bedroom lights to see even at noon. It makes the blankets comfortable and the pillows inviting. I still manage to rise, reheat yesterday’s coffee in the cheap microwave, find a banana I bought at the 185 Corner Veggie Market, and make toast. I used the bread maker to make a loaf of French-like bread. I then, as there was only me here, sliced it with care with a serrated bread knife. The knife is almost sharp enough, quoting the Panada movie, that just looking at it might cut you. I managed to get the sliced bread into a large bag and freeze the fresh bread without blood loss. I retrieved a slice, toasted it, turned it over, toasted it again, forgot to pop it out, smelled it, popped it, put out the bread that was now smoking, and remembered my sister Linda loved burned toast. I added peanut butter and enjoyed the strong flavors while writing the blog and drinking my liberal coffee.

I felt odd and out of sorts. The darkness, I realized, and turned on more lights and kept moving. Physical activity and light are the key to being in the Pacific Northwest when it turns dark. It is also back-to-school, and that causes sudden chaos in traffic patterns and stuffs the roads with cars, around 3, with parents who are stressed-out and rushed. I have already seen two low-speed accidents.

I spend the morning writing and the usual emails, checking transactions in Quicken, and watching my IRA bounce with rising yields, oil prices, and war news. Since US Bank Wealth Management shifted its focus to yields and indexes, my IRA has slowly risen despite the Trump-caused chaos and war. And while some readers would bristle at my comment, it is hard not to trace this to Trump’s love of stirring things up. But I remember my bankers telling me, “Let’s get out of Tech and specifically away from AI,” and do debt. My bankers suggested there will be a need for a lot of that. I am willing to bet on chaos. I successfully bet on boring when Biden was president, for those who wonder.

With the blog done, I found the mail, and from the UK was a signed comic book, Circuit Breaker #1, on the Fugitive Doctor from the Doctor Who universe. It is a special artist-signed. I also sent one to Rev Steve W and called to remind him that one was waiting for him. The comic itself was a bit dark in content, and the Fugitive Doctor was grumpy. I also have #2, which I found at Cosmic Monkey Comics in Portland. We had a nice chat. Steve is a more classical Doctor Who fan, but I have always thought the Fugitive Doctor fits more the model of the classic Doctors.

I reheat pizza for lunch and watch another episode of For All Mankind. I then head to Beaverton and check out the finished work at Beaverton First United Methodist Church. I see Wendy, the church office manager, and then walk around and see that everything is done (except the light bulbs that are on order). I then head to Powell’s Books at the mall and find a cheap used book on complex numbers and their geometry for under $8. I do not purchase the matrix-handling mathematics textbook for $50, but I had two choices. It is hard not to love Powell’s.

I manage not to buy anything at City Home, but I did have to resist one item that I loved. I kept moving and walked through the store, and Powell’s and the seasonal depression wore off. I have to be careful; I have too many items (grief, cancer, brain tumor, and let’s not even include politics) that can spiral me.

I stop next, sort of retracing my route to Ava Coffee, and have 1/2 of a strudel (getting a bag for the second half that was lovely this morning while I write this) with coffee. I dip deep into quantum computing again. Coffee helps, as I was getting sleepy too. The sugar, coffee, and finally getting more linear algebra wake me up.

I pick up Emma, and we head into the slow back-to-school mess that is traffic inbound and through Portland. The aggression and extra-legal driving moves are increasing to winter levels. The relaxed summer is over. No cement colored painting is left behind as we arrive after taking Emma for a spin by Reed College, her first, which is somehow on the best path to Double Mountain Cedar House and Pizza. Navigation in Portland always seems like a mix of irony and sightseeing, as if Douglas Adams (from the Hitchhiker’s series) was involved in its workings (I do wonder what happened to those AI Large Language Models when they illicitly scanned his books). Mariah is waiting for us as we arrive after finding nearby parking in a neighborhood.

Dinner is a lot of drinks (I had one smoky drink somehow combined with blueberries); every night I have drunk a beer, I wake with leg cramps that night–sticking to hard stuff and just one. We have appetizers and then share a mushroom white sauce (I have to live off lettuce for a week after these past few days!). More high-calorie pizza!

We talk about making a trip to the coast, and I suggest Jot’s Resort (though I did not remember the name until Thursday morning after searching the Internet) on Gold Beach. The dunes are just north of that. It is six hours away, but it would still be fun. More to come.

I do not pick up technical stuff at night and read more Nero Wolfe. I soon fell asleep.

Thanks for reading.

I rose early, at 6:30, and the day was overcast and gray. Winter has come as usual, all at once. We had some sprinkles throughout the day. Back to the Oregon Mist. The wind was still as the marine weather started to flow into the valley. Smoke was back, but our numbers were still under 100, and soon the mist would take the smoke to the ground. September started wtih the return of the rains, and we long-term residents of the Pacific Northwest all but danced in the rains!

I cannot recall whether I finished the blog then or somewhere in between things. I brought the new game Vestige with me to Richards. Today we played a board game as James is out, and we will bring the ISS Vanguard cooperative board game forward when James is back in a few weeks. Robin joined us; I have played with her once before.

Richard stayed with his plan to own the board and added the acquisition of Chopbots to his actions. He scored over 100 while I was below 70, trying to run the various colors. I also misplayed my Special Op cards, losing the points and benefits associated with them. Robin was chasing me, but could not catch me. Richard is trying to decide whether he needs his own copy; if he goes for it, he would not buy the wretched version but the full version. For $49, I have no objection to my lesser copy.

The game is a reworking of Vindication with more choices, I feel, and seems to be less driven by luck and more by planning and interacting with the board and other players. I think it is a much more interesting game. Robin struggled to get the rules in her head, as this is not a usual Euro or American design. We all enjoyed our two-hour+ game. We hope to get play time down to an hour. That is part of the magic of Vindications: you get a whole gaming experience, and it completes in an hour. More to come on that subject. We did not play the Nemesis system yet.

I had to leave early to check in at church about Jeff and the upgrades he is installing. New EXIT signs, some with Emergency lights, are getting installed. I need to make a down payment to cover materials for the church (I have yet to decide whether to make that a donation). I arrived at the church without issue and discovered that one of the new signs was damaged. I then drove to the house and back to get the last set of EXIT signs I had in the garage (there for over a decade) and returned them. I forgot to put them in Air VW the Gray when I left Tuesday morning.

I talked to Jeff and Jack about possible projects involving the bell tower. I will put that on the back burner for now. The cross needs a fresh coat of paint, and the speakers next to it are showing some deterioration. It would be nice to light it at night too.

With that done, I stopped by 185th Veggies to pick up something for dinner. I had put out a steak and a pork chop to defrost. I watched more For All Mankind while putting together my lunch/dinner. I fried the pork chop and microwaved a potato. I also steamed fresh green beans. It was a lot of food. I had some crackers and avocado toast before I cooked, as I was famished. I get the little one-serving avocado packs from Trader Joe’s. I finished two episodes.

Next, I took my quantum computing book to read more linear algebra in The 649. I brought my laptop to play music. This is covered in this book, which has the same name, to enable the reader to start developing programs for quantum computers. Crystal was the bartender, and I ordered a beer and found a quiet seat by the window, put in my AirPods, and read. It is always strange when you are studying how quickly time goes by. I looked up, and it was dark. Crystal shared that she was slammed, as they were dead earlier, and it was just her and the cook now. We both agreed that the patterns have changed in both the bar and traffic. This year, back-to-school is not the same as before. I continued to read and think. I got a bit lost in some of it. I am also having trouble retaining all of it, as I do not have a photographic memory like many, but I think I have the application down. I am better at execution than at reciting text (as evidenced by my grades in Math, though I was in honors math).

I can clearly see how complex vectors will resolve into a model that matches the collapse of a wave function. I also see how operators can rotate, and the interesting pulsing that imaginary numbers create. I am familiar with this from coding fractal graphics (which I did back in the 1980s in BASIC on a Commodore 64, displaying the Mandelbrot set). I also got a hint (while seeking clarification on vector calculations) that complex vectors are related to ellipses. Ellipse calculations are part of present-day encryption that is under threat from quantum computers. Interesting.

I ended my night at the bar reading with a cup of coffee and a shot of Amaretto to sip while I read. I got further into the math. I am twenty pages from starting the coding section, and it is slow going. I will look at some cheap linear algebra textbooks at Powell’s or take classes (MIT has a free lecture that covers this, too).

I returned home, tried to do some figure painting, and read more Nero Wolfe, but soon was nodding off. I had shoved enough into my mind and had enough running around for the church work. The world soon disappeared in snuggly blankets and darkness.

Thanks for reading.

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.

Going back, I reached the house from Matt’s house before ten, and I had a slice of bread with peanut butter as a snack. M@ cooks us burgers with some keto buns, and Scott, who does not eat meat, has dinner before he heads to M@’s place. I just wanted something tasty, and peanut butter and toast worked. I also caught another For All Mankind episode and found it interesting to have watched the recently made prequel and how the two shows fit together. I assembled French Bread in my bread machine, always weighing my flour. The last tries were flops, and I replaced the flour and yeast since then, but I have not made anything lately. I leave it running overnight and later fall asleep to the smell of yeast. I do dream, and I am traveling again in my dream world, then returning to work. I am so much younger. Most of the dreaming details are lost to me now.

Before this, I was at M@ playing Carter the Great, my sorcerer/bard, as we descend to the bottom of Hell to learn the secrets of how to destroy an unholy relic. We are also rescuing lost souls. Tonight, Ulysses, my wizard gnome who invented a way to make fried abyssal chicken that has flavor in hell (where all food usually tastes of ash and dust and does not satisfy), not KFC but UFC, soul will be rescued from damation. Without spoiling or risking copyright violations, I will say we rescued what was left of Ulysses and ran from most combats. Scott’s non-combat monk was beat up and had to be healed. My character and others staged a fake robbery and the resulting fight, and even sang during the pretend robbery while a real robbery was being committed by Scott’s character. Fake blood, multiple rounds of “combat,” and the rest had us finish up the whole recovery before we ran out of gaming time. Off to the third level of Hell!

We had a problem in the restaurant, as Ulysses was suffering from irony, a tool for punishment in hell, and was built into a golem tasked with being a short-order cook. We finally intimidated the owner into giving us the golem, which we then had to violently and dramatically disassemble in the marketplace. Since it was Hell, it counted as entertainment and broke up the monotony.  Scott is enlarged and dragging our boat out of harm’s way. My figure, in blue, is facing a bone devil, and that went poorly, nearly killing Carter in one set of hits! Jack’s character is in a nightmare. Scott, sort of a Flash-like character, ran us out of the battle. The devils had objected to the moral outrage of one of our characters (not Carter, who is a charlatan and sees Hell as just another place full of opportunities for his special skills).

Before this, I rose closer to 8 than I will admit here; I made coffee and started to write the blog in my office. It was partially cloudy, which would burn off to mostly sunny. The wind is back, the harbinger of fall, from the high desert, East to West, and colder than the still air. The cold, heavy air flows into the Columbia Gorge, then blows west over the Portland hills, bringing cold, sometimes freezing, air to the valley. Sometimes called the Coho winds. The rains, pushed out a day, are now predicted to start on Wednesday and last a week.

I write, finish the blog, have some chai pudding (I used too many chai seeds, but I will try to get it right next time), and then dress and board Air VW the Gray. I dress in tan slacks, a biz shirt, a sweater vest, and a brown butterfly tie from Deborah.

I still need a haircut.

I usher and listen. Brian, our organist, is out at his grandchild’s first birthday party. The praise band manages, and Eric K does a nice solo too. Dondrea, tired from running 17 miles in Hood-to-Coast, is doing her usual directing and then steps up to give the sermon too.

Her theme comes from Matthew’s story of his calling with the other tax collectors, 9:9-13. And Dondrea reminds us that Jesus called out mercy, not sacrifice. It is better to eat with and forgive sinners than the best sacrifices of time and treasure. While Z, the liturgist today, read the text listing the sinners, I amused the folks in the back by adding Methodists to the list, especially Carl, who was near me. Being in the back, unseen except by the folks up front, is a special advantage of being an usher.

Dondrea pointed out that we often feel special for all our work and attendance at church. But maybe we should be out there eating with sinners and bringing mercy these days. Mercy should be our focus.

With that, and some easy-to-sing hymns, we broke for coffee. I helped to put the money away and then headed out. I was soon home after committing a caloric disaster at Carl’s Jr. and a Western Burger. I was tired and rested a bit at the house. Corwin stopped by to pick up a package, then made pizza. I headed off to M@’s.

And that takes us full circle. Thanks for reading!

I am enjoying rolling over and not rising early in this late summer. I am still not fully recovered from the jet lag, colonoscopy, and nonstop activities since I returned from NYC. I put the brakes on for Saturday and focused on home things, reading, and coding. I invested the morning in laundry and writing the blog. I think my writing has improved, and I am again enjoying finding the words for the story of the day before. It is not a duty or a discipline.

Also, I am ignoring more and more of Grammarly’s suggestions as I like my voice better than its simplifications. For example, in the previous sentence, Grammarly wants ‘because’ instead of ‘as,’ but to me that sounds less like me. I find ‘because’ to sound like a child, and it screams to me ‘Becaaaauuuussse.’ I almost never use ‘because.’ I don’t like it. It is a thing for me.

Returning to my story, I make coffee now, drinking liberal Equal Exchange again and noticing it has more flavor now. This is not a change in the coffee but a return to taste for me. I have lost much of my sense of taste, not from COVID-19, but from a mouth infection and I am happy to have it slowly return.

I managed to finish the blog by 10:30ish and remember to publish. When I head to Facebook to post it there, I often get distracted by what I find there, both good and bad, and forget to publish my link. Saturday, I remember and even get the email version out. And while, dear reader, you would think I would have this down cold after so many years and thousands of posts, nope, every day is a new day. And that is a good thing.

Sheets, underwear, socks, pants, shirts, and other items are cleaned, and some are even put away. I return to my new Scythe faction I have been painting, the Sultan faction from the add-on and stand-alone board game, Duel of Molech, which was dry. I wipe off the extra black oil paint, and this polishes the silvers. The black has faded some, but the 3D pop is still strong. Done. Later, I will lightly spray them with a dull coat, again using Mr. Clean brand rather than Army Painter’s Anti-Shine, which I find dims the colors and metallics (dull coats from paint stores also do this). A mist spray; just enough to remove the shine and lock in the oil.

(You can see the metallics are not strong even with this light dusting. I often dry-brush them again to brighten them, but these fit the picture. Done.)

I dressed, updated my plans with Rev. Steve, and selected tequila and tacos for lunch at Amelia’s Exquisite Mexican Restaurant in Hillsboro (their official name). I picked the Kolchak T-shirt, which Steve liked, and I got many questions about it, and I think I bored many young people with suggestions to try the show (the opening credits are great, here). It is Saturday Market, and parking is complex, but I manage to find a spot nearby and walk into the Saturday Market, and Steve finds me there, still resisting the sweets, veggies, and breads that look lovely. Instead, we return for a small drink and a plate of excellent food.

We catch up and cover what I am learning about the surveillance state that AI and various corporate entities have created. Unlike something I see on the show Star City, it is not the government that you need to fear, but the greed, complacency, and basic stupidity that a lack of transparency creates when handling deeply personal information (your location and whereabouts). Stalkers have killed people using Flock and similar technology.

I also shared with Rev. Steve (retired) that I am exploring quantum computing and programming in Rust, a programming language and ecosystem I am not very familiar with. All this is from the HOPE 2026 hackers’ convention. Plus, Steve and I chatted about travel and enjoyed each other’s company wtih drinks and food.

With the food and drinks done and dessert passed upon, we settle the bill and head in our separate directions. I head to a London Fog (tea with milk and sugar) and read for two hours more about complex numbers and their use in quantum mechanics and, more importantly for me, their connection to quantum computing. I began to see some of the underlying mathematical structures that align with the metaphor and with my understanding of collapsing wave functions. This reminds me of some of my work on fractals and on solving run-of-the-mill equations, including complex-number solutions. I did not know that the polar version makes the equations easier to work with. I remember back in the 1980s seeing the same thing in Differential Equations.

I also find the work a bit boring, and I remember that from the 1980s, too. The tea helps. The music in my AirPods also helps. A hardback chair and a public space also mean not nodding off. I have not used all these study tricks in a long time. I also recall some of the mathematics, but I have not needed this stuff since classes back in the early 1980s.

Somewhere while driving, I need the wipers, as it rains hard enough to be heard by Deborah on a call. We in the Pacific Northwest are tired of the endless California days and want our rains back. It is the same every August. We are all delighted to finally get a soaking. Next week, we have at least four days of rain. Yay!

Aside: The grape and wine people are rushing to get the crop in before it is rotted or soaked with rain next week. It is The Crush! It is possible to wait it out and let the water wear off in drier weather. Winemaking is about choices.

More Aside: Grapes need to suffer to make good wine. Water is not flavor for wine. It dilutes and spreads yeast too thin, either burning through the sugars too fast or stopping before the work is done; not a helpful return of the rains for wine people.

I pack up and head home. Corwin surprises me by visiting, but then I remember he has some deliveries. Hank the dog is happy to see me, Pee Dog to me. Hank and Corwin stay for a few Slow Horses Season 2 episodes. I heat up Irish Stew from Costco and feed Pee Dog some cheese. We get a few episodes in. Corwin heads out with Hank, who managed not to be Pee Dog today and enjoyed lots of petting.

I wrote some Rust in the evening. I tried to understand some standards and forms in Rust. I learned that Rust contains complex structures and the ability to link programs in pieces. There are also cross-compilers for it. Rust contains object-oriented structures like C++ and Python. I see I have lots more to learn. I also found that Unix 7 has fully incorporated Rust into its programming language model. All interesting. It has been a lot of learning today.

After that, I tried to read a spy story, but fell quickly asleep instead. Thanks for reading!