Writing Wrongs

Once again I worked from home till afternoon, once again the apartment inspector never showed up.

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My big sister's husband turned 76 on November 10. Four days later he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which had already spread to other organs. Ben was the kind of guy who didn't let a little debilitating pain get in his way, so I'm not surprised he didn't see a doctor as soon as he had symptoms. When Ben was growing up, everyone who had cancer died, and as soon as he was diagnosed he gave up.

Yesterday my sister emailed that cannabis and hospital rest had helped, but this morning she wrote that they had overdone the morphine last night and he was not doing well. Email forwarded from a niece (there are three of them) said her dad said he "was done".

This afternoon sister emailed saying he passed away, the funeral would be Friday. In Israel, it's almost 8 am Friday as I write this.

It is a shock, but not a surprise.

Ben was an American, had been a master sgt in the Air Force for 15 years before moving to Seattle. He met my sister at a Jewish religion class at Hillel while she was in college, courted her that summer when she was cook at a camp for Jewish kids, and they were married a year after she graduated. Unlike my sister, he was not very religious, but he loved her, and agreed to her dream to move to Israel and make babies until most of the population was made up of their peace-loving children. Unfortunately, they took after their mother, and are your basic religious fanatics, most of them living in the Occupied Territories.

He was an electronics genius, he built the world's first operational Doppler radar by hand, from scratch. During his career with the Israeli water service (they are Israel's NOAA) he consulted with the University of Colorado, and meteorology departments in Italy, Russia and Israel on radar tracking for cloud seeding. He taught electronics and programming at universities in Ber Sheva and Haifa. All male Israeli residents are required to serve in the army until age 55, and he was drafted to be an ambulance driver (typical army stupidity) during the war in Lebanon. Eventually they made him the Israeli navy's main radar repairman.

He leaves behind two sons, three daughters and 27 grandchildren.

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After the no-show inspection, I went for lunch at Togo's, it's on the way. At work we wrapped up the laser testing, apparently they nailed down the bug, but I'm not sure if the fix was implemented. The system works better than before, which is good. But data through the air can never be as reliable as data over a wire, so I'm not sold on this scheme.

At home I used the limitations of VPN to take two required health & safety classes which Corp HR insists are required by OSHA. The second class starts by saying OSHA only requires it for people who handle chemicals as part of their job, which is hardly anyone at this company. No one at my site. I passed both classes easily, but it was a total waste of time.

Had my 1-on-1 with the boss, he moved it from yesterday because stuff is piling up for the coming release and new products. I told him about the needlessly complex path to home ownership, and he shared his. Same deal, surprises being sprung which should have been handled up front, and way too many documents. He also built a house in Thailand, there was none of this crap over there.

Home by way of Lucky's because they have a Jewish food section. I had falafel in the freezer, but needed humus and tehina and pita. It took forever to find pita, and the only types they had were whole wheat and 8-grain. Compared to several hundred types of taco and tortilla wrappers.

Watched the Saints and Falcons flail around for the final half while enjoying my Ben Memorial dinner. He was fond of a shot of schnapps now and then, maybe I'll have a sip in his memory.

Two packages picked up from UPS, one was a rotary nose & ear hair trimmer. The kind which looks like a miniature hedge trimmer is useless. And 4 6-packs of Nike crew socks. Had to throw away a 2-week supply of Dickies brand, holes in the toes after the first wear on too many of them.

Two weeks from moving. Two more packing projects before the crunch:
- Pack up the camping equipment which is on shelves in the storage room
- Box everything in the office closet which is not in drawers
- Box up the blank CDs/DVDs and ink cartridges in the office credenza
(those last to really are just one project)
This weekend I'll also do a full backup of my RAID array. It has all the big stuff, photos, videos, docs.

Plans for tomorrow:
Call the apartment office and yell at them for the no-show.
With luck, escrow will close. If it does, celebrate.
Uke class #2

Mostly for yourbob but possibly useful trivia for Thai food fans. I've mentioned often that Thai restaurants in America usually have good food, but it is not necessarily authentic. One thing they all tend to do authentically is curry. So here is a little tutorial on Thai curries. YMMV.

Massaman curry is for wimps. It is not spicy at all, and goes with vegetables, especially potatoes. I have heard it called Pattaya curry.
Green curry is mild, and goes with beef and pork
Yellow curry is a little stronger, and goes with chicken and shrimp
Red curry is strongest, and goes with anything (because the curry will drown out the taste of anything)
Penang curry is actually from northern Malaysia, and is a lot like Indian curry. It is almost as spicy as red, and is mostly used as a dip for roti. It Goes well with beef and lamb.

The curries named for colors should be those colors. Massaman is grey, Penang is red-orange.

Now for the confusing part. You can order any of these to be mild (1-star) or spicy (5-star) or any of the stars in between. They just use more curry paste per serving. And thereby hangs a tale:

I was In Love™ with a woman who lived in Boston, and I went to spend a week with her there. One of the conditions was I teach her to make Thai food. For starters I decided on Green Curry Beef. We went to the market and were able to find all the ingredients, including my favorite Thai green curry paste. We went back to her place, and I started showing her how to mix the paste into the warmed coconut milk. She was insulted that I was only using about a teaspoon of the stuff, telling me she loved spicy food, and she could handle anything. She insisted on two tablespoons of the paste. We were making three servings. After cooking it all up and serving with a plate of white rice, she took one bite, said "that isn't so ba....." and put her head under the kitchen faucet. I tried to cut a serving with more coconut milk, but the curry had embedded itself in the beef, and the meal was a total loss.

So even though the curry may be relatively mild, it depends on how much is in the dish.
 

Once I was finally up and dressed yesterday I went to get my nail;s done. My usual therapist manicurist was booked for the next several hours, the place was packed - never seen it this crowded before, but then I am usually there in the morning. I was told 10 minutes, so I went outside to find a wifi signal, downloaded the B&N reader app, and came back (about 7 minutes). Sat down and read an old National Geographic for 10 minutes and still no one assigned to me. So I went a few doors down, had lunch and came back again. Finally got someone to do the deed. Older woman, I think she is new. She did okay, but she is not the Nail Whisperer (my usual person, Niko, is an absolute artist).

From there to the pet store to get treats and litterbox refills, then to Best Buy for a long firewire cable which they did not have, but I did get a lovely protective case for the iPhone.

Home, such a nice day I went out onto the balcony to enjoy it, notice the hummingbird feeder was 1/4 low, which means something has been drinking from it, though I have not seen any hummers yet. Maybe if I came home before dark after work...

Anyhow, the balcony was littered with stuff which I had parked there until the weather got nice enough to haul them to the dumpster. It's a block and a half from my door, which is a long slog in the rain and wind. So I got off my butt, and brought it all downstairs in several trips, put them into the HUGE box in which the printer had been shipped, put that on my hand cart and in three trips got it all thrown away.

Took some time in the recliner to recover, and was soon covered in cats. Next chore was a trip to the grocery store, replenished the depleted ice cream and was outraged to see they have screwed us yet again. Sometime last year I remember ranting that while all the ice cream at Safeway was on special, all the major brands, including the house brand, had shrunk their largest packages from 2 quarts to 1.75 quarts, while keeping the prices the same. Yesterday they were shrunken again, to 1.5 quarts! With higher sale prices. I was so upset I bought a house brand frozen "self-rising crust" pizza, which I made for dinner. It didn't have enough cheese, and I was out of mozzarella, so I added some Swiss. The crust, surprisingly, was excellent; the toppings not so much. Coffee with fudge bits ice cream for dessert.

While eating I watched Channel 4's interview with Jerry Brown, who is running for Governor again. He governor when I first moved to CA, and was perhaps the most ineffective and non-charismatic governor I had ever seen. He kept being compared unfavorably to his much stronger father, who had been governor from 1959-1967. Technically his dad was Edmund Gerald Brown, Sr. and he is Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr. but his dad called himself Pat and he calls himself Jerry. Jerry was governor until 1983. Since then he has been ineffective mayor of Oakland and is currently the ineffective CA Atty General. He will probably win the Democratic primary on name recognition alone, since no one famous is running against him. Anyhow, he is still the mild-mannered, milktoast, characterless personality he was when he was governor, only now he's almost 3 decades older, and looks it.

Meanwhile Meg Whitman, who turned eBay from an honest peer-to-peer marketplace into a mega collection of megastores, has switched from reasonable, positive campaign ads to a vicious smear campaign against her Republican opponent, Silicon Valley CEO turned Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner. Interesting that both are Bay Area peeps, considering how most of the conservatives are in SoCal.

After dinner I finally got around to the projects for which I'd had the new printer drop-shipped, and the CPU cooler installed at great pains: Did some editing on a video from a friend, made a couple of DVDs from that, and printed them (I use inkjet-printable DVD blanks, and the Epson Artisan 50, like the old Stylus Photo R280, has a DVD tray). Next was organizing all the required material and writing the cover letter to get my $1300 back from the travel insurance company. And then printing out rebate forms, cutting out UPCs for the rebates on the new computer memory and one of the CPU coolers I'd bought. It's not the one I ended up using, but I'd assembled it and applied thermal paste so it wasn't returnable, and it was too cheaply made to sell or donate. May as well get $10 back.

Plans for today:
Take out the garbage
Do laundry
maybe go swimming (renewed my club membership last week)
Meet a friend for coffee & to give her the camcorder & DVDs.
Maybe get the car washed