Big Day Tomorrow

My picks for the #KentuckDerby tomorrow (if you make any money you owe me 120% of winnings):

PUGNACIOUS FLATULENCE

WHISKEY FOR BREAKFAST

JEFFREY EPSTEIN

CRUSTY FACE MASK

BABY NEEDS CROCS

SPLENDID COVFEFE

RIGHTEOUS KIDNEY STONE

FYRE FESTIVAL II

RICK

— James (@wetcasements) April 30, 2021

"a battleground for bigger powers"

"Wang's analogy of us as human fertilizer revived thoughts I had been thinking for a long time.  True enough, as Chinese, we genuinely felt that our lives were misused here, but as I have observed earlier, no matter how abysmal our situation was there were always others who had it worse.  By now I understood why occasionally some Korean civilians were hostile to us.  To them we had come here only to protect China's interests -- by so doing, we couldn't help but ruin their homes, fields, and livelihoods.  From their standpoint, if the Chinse army hadn't crossed the Yalu, millions of lives, both civilian and military, would have been saved.  Of course, the United States would then have occupied all of Korea, forcing China to build defenses in Manchuria, which would have been much more costly than sending troops to fight in our neighboring country.  As it was, the Koreans had taken the brunt of the destruction of this war, whereas we Chinese were here mainly to keep its flames away from our border.  Or, as most of the POW's believed, perhaps rightly, we had served as cannon fodder for the Russians.  It was true that the Koreans had started the war themselves, but a small country like theirs could only end up being a battleground for bigger powers.  Whoever won this war, Korean would be a loser."

-- Ha Jin, War Trash

"strange, throatless prosperity"

Mitchell Johnson on how his mom adopted the van life, and the larger cultural picture around Nomadland:

"This year, people like my mom are in the national spotlight as the community at the center of Nomadland, the film that won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the Golden Globe for best drama, and heads into the Oscars as a favorite for Best Picture. Nomadland takes place a decade ago, on the heels of the recession in 2011. When my mom started living in her RV, the decline had not ended in any meaningful sense, but the doom of the early years had given way to a strange, throatless prosperity. In this atmosphere, rootlessness could be viewed not as a predicament but an opportunity. It was the era of Eat Pray Love, Wild, and Tiny House Hunters. On social media, the young and online catalogued the adventures of houselessness-by-choice under the hashtag #vanlife. The RV (or teardrop trailer, or sprinter van) became a symbol of inspiration, and a source of ad revenue. Women in wide-brimmed hats and linen shirts sold detox water or bluetooth speakers from the back of their Volkswagen buses, but the real product, of course, was the lifestyle. Living in a van represented a new, glamorous ideal, unburdened from homeownership and a steady job — unmoored, even, from the physical world itself. If owning a home was no longer possible, there was endless space on Instagram. 

In lesser-known corners of the internet, a different set of people were discussing van life, too. Traffic to websites like CheapRVLiving.com boomed as mostly older Americans were planning their exits. A popular Yahoo message board titled 'Live In Your Van 2' doubled its membership in the years after the recession, growing to over eight thousand people. Reddit’s r/vandwellers forum started in 2010 and quickly gained tens of thousands of followers. (Today, it has 1.2 million.) After the recession, sales of vans, RVs, and trailers skyrocketed as more people moved into them full-time. These were the nomads."

I haven't seen the movie, but I've been meaning to read the book.

There's just so much to talk about here -- the fact that so many people of many ages can never afford to buy a house, the American dream of constant mobility and freedom, and our love affairs with cars.

I'll admit that I do watch some #vanlife on YouTube (some of it is decent, seriously).  I also enjoy minimalist survival videos, even though my desire to actually go out camping is less than zero.

Lots to stew on.  Having a house is nice but Americans really tend to overestimate how much house (or lawn, or yard) they actually need.

I'll leave it at that for now.

"the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws"

"So I began to teach them English, just some phrases and short sentences, such as 'Hands up!,' 'Drop your weapon, we spare you!,' 'We don't kill prisoners,' 'Don't move!,' 'Surrender, you are safe!,' 'Don't die for American imperialism!'

There was no paper to write on, so I used a stick to inscribe on the ground the written characters representing the English sounds so that the literate ones among them could have some phonetic guidance.  I couldn't possibly make them pronounce the words accurately, since half of them didn't even speak Mandarin well.  But they were eager to learn, even if they did complain about the pain inflicted by the English pronunciation on their tongues and jaws.  A few claimed they had sore throats.  I was amazed that in just a few days they could rap out to one another what they had learned.  Most of them were smart men who would have gone far in their lives had they had the opportunity and the education.  I wondered why they would concentrate so much on learning a few foreign words that they might never use at all.  Heaven knew what would happen to us tomorrow; we might get captured or killed anytime.  The enemy was just two miles to the north.

I suspected that to them the act of learning must represent some kind of hope.  At least this meant there was still a future, on which they could fix their minds.  Their limited awareness of the larger world and their inert response to the menace of death endowed them with the strength needed for survival.  I was moved by the tenacity of life shown in their desire to learn."

-- Ha Jin, War Trash

"the long course of privation and terror to which we have been subjected"

"Having barely escaped this danger, our attention was now directed to the dreadful imminency of another; that of absolute starvation.  Our whole stock of provision had been swept overboard in spite of all our care in securing it; and seeing no longer the remotest possibility of obtaining more, we gave way both of us to despair, weeping aloud like children, and neither of us attempting to offer consolation to the other.  Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural; but it must be remembered that our intellects were so entirely disordered by the long course of privation and terror to which we have been subjected, that we could not justly be considered, at that period, in the light of rational beings.  In subsequent perils, nearly as great, if not greater, I bore up with fortitude against all the evils of my situation and Peters, it will be seen, evinced a stoical philosophy nearly as incredible as his present childlike supineness and imbecility -- the mental condition made the difference."

-- Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Godron Pym of Nantucket

"but we didn't care"

Isle of Dogs

On the Isle of Dogs we barked.

We had our say

from day till dark.

A chorus we were

of piebald hounds.

Our howling spiraled out

across the downs.

We howled at the redness of light,

bayed at the rising waters

and approaching night --

we lived on an island of sounds.

None listened, none heard,

the sounds were entirely ours

None listened, none heard

but we didn't care

as long as our howls

shaped the still air --

we lived on the Isle of Sounds.

-- Michael Palmer

"do only what is allowable"

"33. Set up right now a certain character and pattern for yourself which you will preserve when you are by yourself and when you are with people.  Be silent for the most part, or say what you have to in a few words.  Speak rarely, when the occasion requires speaking, but not about just any topic that comes up, not about gladiators, horse-races, athletes, eating or drinking -- the things that always come up; and especially if it is about people, talk without blaming or praising or comparing.  Divert by your own talk, if you can, the talk of those with you to something appropriate.  If you happen to be stranded among strangers, do not talk.  Do not laugh a great deal or at a great many things or unrestrainedly.  Refuse to swear oaths, altogether if possible, or otherwise as circumstances allow.  Avoid banquets given by those outside philosophy.  But if the appropriate occasion arises, take great care not to slide into their ways, since certainly if a person's companion is dirty the person who spends time with him, even if he happens to be clean, is bound to become dirty too.  Take what has to do with the body to the point of bare need, such as food, drink, clothing, house, household slaves, and cut out everything that is for reputation or luxury.  As for sex stay pure as far as possible before marriage, and if you have it do only what is allowable.  But do not be angry or censorious toward those who do engage in it, and do not always be making an exhibition of the fact that you do not."

-- Epictetus, The Handbook

"natural puppets with nothing in their heads"

"Simply put: We are not from here.  If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us.  Nothing in nature needs us.  We are like [Philipp] Mainlander's suicidal God.  Nothing needed Him either, and his uselessness was transferred to us after He burst out of existence.  We have no business being in this world.  We move among living things, all those natural puppets with nothing in their heads.  But our heads are in another place, a world apart where all the puppets exist not in the midst of life but outside it.  We are those puppets, those human puppets.  We are crazed mimics of the natural prowling about for a peace that will never be ours.  And the medium in which we circulate is that of the supernatural, a dusky element of horror that obtains for those who believe in what should be and should not be.  This is our secret quarter.  This is where we rave with insanity on the level of metaphysics, fracturing reality and breaking the laws of life."

-- Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

Friday Afternoon

My Dad is sick.  He started coughing last night, and today at lunch he had trouble swallowing (admittedly large) pieces of sausage and broccoli.  We got a big up of chicken broth into him, then he went down to rest for the afternoon.

I'm guessing (hoping?) it's just a cold.  His vaccination was last Saturday.  He's convinced he's having a reaction to it, I really doubt it.

We're keeping an eye of things.

Meanwhile, here's an insanely addictive write up (if you're 46 like me) of 50 all-text games (mostly) from the 1980's.

The write-up of 1985's A Mind Forever Voyaging is fantastic.

Hope Me Greta Thunberg

Me: I live a minimalist lifestyle, trying to consume as little as possible and live an earth-friendly existence.

Also me, when Amazon package comes : GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME.

— James (@wetcasements) April 22, 2021

"Just when I thought that my skies were a June-July blue"

XTC, "1000 Umbrellas"

In one week I'll have lived with my Dad, and been home from South Korea, for a total of three months.

It feels much longer of course.

If you had told me that at this point me and him would be getting along pretty well (only one major fight), I'd be doing some writing that I think is worthwhile, and that the Old Man is now allowing me to drive his car as needed, I'd say that that's better than I expected last winter.

Me taking care of Dad was always going to be an experiment, and a difficult one at that.

But somehow we're making it work, with help from my sister who visits often from the DC area.

I've been listening to nothing but XTC lately, who I've always liked, but I'm taking the opportunity to work through every one of their studio albums as I walk five kilometers every morning, or sometimes eight if I go into the "town" of Nugent's Corner.  (It has a grocery store, a bank, and a Subway.)

Skylarking is over-rated.  Black Sea is their best work.  Or maybe Oranges and Lemons.

I'll probably manage to put together a post about it eventually.

I mowed the lawn now that spring is here.  I haven't done that since high school, I think.

I'm also reading a lot, which is hardly something to complain about either.

Less Of This, Please

I'm reading more than usual these days, given that my schedule is based around preparing meals and meeting the needs of my Dad.  I think it's going about as well as can be expected, and in some areas we've made definite progress -- he's allowing me to do more for him around the house, stuff that otherwise just wouldn't get done and that he'd stress about anyhow.

(I am now allowed to use both the lawn mower and his car.  If that doesn't sound like a big deal, well, welcome to my life.)

In any event, I'm finishing my first John Irving novel, The Hotel New Hampshire.

Is it terrible?  No, in fact it's very funny in some parts.

What it is though is so very, very 1970s (technically published in 1981).

Literal gang rape?  Casual racism?  Multiple deaths?

No big deal!  Get over it you big square!  Just adjust your feelings to appreciate that life has its ups and downs!

Life is hard.  Everybody needs some form of art that let's them know they're not alone, and that sometimes things are terrible.

But without getting too far in the weeds, having a main character brush off her own rape as just some kind of accident, some kind of whimsical adventure that doesn't really matter, is just too much.

The 1970s were a very weird time in America.  Your feelings really did trump all.  (Remember what Woody Allen said when he started dating his adopted daughter -- "The heart wants what it wants.")

My Gen X response: Yuck.  Barf.

That is all.

"the smarts in cities are always going to remain human"

Kim Stanley Robinson on what cities need to do to fight climate catastrophe:

"Talk of 'smart cities' is a little bit overblown, part of the AI craze, because the smarts in cities are always going to remain human. But a highly systematized, quantified, and automated coordination of city functions, not just transport but also inputs and outputs of all kinds of supplies and wastes, will help cities achieve the good efficiencies necessary to make them superior in carbon-burn terms.

Even after we transition to carbon neutrality or turn carbon-negative, the multiple levels of coordination necessary for cities to work will benefit from conscious study and design, extensive recording systems, quantification, and, yes, computers. The city will not become a computer, or even much like a computer, but it will use computers. The climate gains from this effort in system coordination will include a reduction in wasted resources, unnecessary transport, and recycling failures."

I love the fact that while Robinson never hesitates to tell us how bad things are, he's also never short of ideas to mitigate and hopefully solve the problem of our Earth becoming too damn hot. 

And His Name Is...

Just mowed my Old Man's yard.

Haven't cut grass since... high school, I think?

Anyhow, I basically have the same body as John Cena now.#Bellingham #CountryLife

— James (@wetcasements) April 19, 2021

How It's Done

My former home of Daegu, South Korea, was the first city outside of China to be hit by the coronavirus.  It all went down February of last year, 2020.

On the one hand, that sucks.

On the other hand, South Korea is arguably the one country you'd want to be in during a public health emergency:

"South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.

It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.

As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States."

This is what happens when you have an excellent public health system, leadership that is interested in keeping the infection rate low, not personal ego, and a public that is usually willing to go along with mask and distance protocols if it means the greater good of ending the outbreak is served.

South Korea had all of this, plus a very technology-friendly culture.  Within days everyone, including dumb foreigners like me, were getting multiple text messages a day telling us the specific locations of stores, restaurants, or subway stations where an infected person had been present.

The only Americans who think our health system is the best in the world are the ones who have never left the country.

Pet Dinosaur

 

Bellingham, Washington.

My Dad's neighbors have a sense of humor, to say the least.  (A beautiful white goat actually lives here.)

OK Not Great Mount Baker Photoblogging

 

Here's an OK not great shot of Mount Baker (native name Kulshan, among others) with neighbor Terry's house in the foreground.

Yes, those are all of his cars.

Baker comes from the name for Vancouver's third in command.  (A guy named Puget was his second.)

I guess being in the Royal Navy has its privileges.

"the life for me"

 

Terry's yard of misfit vehicles and tools.

Bellingham, Washington.

Bright Sunshiny Day

Bellingham, Washington.

Not the best picture of Mount Baker, but it's spring and the weather is clear at least.  This is my neighbor Terry's yard, for what it's worth.

Simple Thought

It's completely unsurprising that the hardest part about adjusting back to American life is getting used to the daily mass shootings.

My Old Man

You'd think relationship drama wouldn't be a thing with your Dad when he's 92 but it very much is...

It's worse, in many ways...#Bellingham #CountryLife

— James (@wetcasements) April 15, 2021

"higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers"

"Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards).  Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks.  A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays.  A coir and copra industry.  Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English to commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat.  Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia.  No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love.  Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping on on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family.  Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cock-roaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.

Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.'"

-- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

"that's kind of my people"

Jenkem interviews Werner Herzog.  It ain't bad, but certainly not his best interview.

Oh hey just a reminder I spent the first part of coronavirus lockdown watching and reviewing every film by Mr. Herzog here.

"A tanned foot squeezed hopefully into a short boot"

Dry Cleaning, "Unsmart Lady"

Perfectly controlled drums and bass, and manic guitar on top.  That's how I like to roll with my post-punk.

I realize they're the latest Pitchfork "it" band but dammit Pitchfork is right sometimes.  Dry Cleaning is spacy and rad.

Meanwhile, I'm doing very Bellingham things like helping my Dad get his well filled and watching out for the propane tank delivery.

He's getting his second COVID shot this Saturday morning, and I need to look into getting mine.

Wear 'Em If You Got 'Em

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money makes an interesting point about masks -- now that we're turning the corner, at least in America, how long will people continue to wear masks?

There are plenty of anecdotes on Twitter regarding people who've observed mask rules who haven't even had a common cold for over a year.  (I'd be one of those people -- I haven't been sick for at least 16 months now.)

Further, you have countries like South Korea and Japan where mask-wearing when you're sick is culturally encouraged.

Sure, there are plenty of anti-mask dick-heads out there.  Fuck 'em.  If they want to catch colds or flu or even COVID, that's fine with me.  (Maybe not so fine for their children or grandparents, but oh well.)

Grocery stores?  Airplanes?  Hotel lobbies?  The Post Office?

Yeah, I think I'll be wearing a mask for the rest of my life, and happily so.

Bring On The Blossoms

 

Could spring finally be here in lovely Bellingham, Washington?

My dad runs his heat off of propane (popular choice out here, but there are some who still burn wood) and it will be nice once we don't have to get his tank filled every month or so.

If it isn't dropping below freezing at night right now it gets damn close to it.  It's O.K. though because unlike everyone else I look absolutely stunning in sweatpants.

Typical Thursday

Now that I'm middle-aged and staring mortality in the face I should probably give up my weird academic / sexual grudges from college and high school.

(LOL, who am I kidding I'll stay bitter about them until I die.)

— James (@wetcasements) April 7, 2021

"spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear"

"We properly think it a worse fate to starve in poverty than to yawn in the midst of luxury.  If the suffering of the world were, as it could be imagined to be, less extreme, if boredom and simple worldly disappointments were our gravest trials, and if, which is harder to conceive, we grieved little at any bereavement and went to death as to sleep, our whole morality might be immensely, perhaps totally different.  That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.  Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.  (This is a tautology.)  This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons to whose effect even nightmares cannot do justice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear.  This is where we live."

-- Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

"We pray"

Not an easy read by any means, but Kate Clanchy on caring for two elderly parents:

"My father and I get out the advance decisions again. They are so clear. 'In the event of an infection I want to avoid heroic interventions', 'I refuse treatment with a ventilator', 'I do not want my life prolonged if the alternative is permanent nursing care'. But she didn’t have those documents with her, because she was going to the day ward. She had completed full medical attorney documents for me, but I couldn’t be there to advocate for her, because of Covid. And now she has been put on a ventilator, for her operation, and when I call the ICU they say she is stuck on it, she can’t breathe on her own. They don’t know if she will ever come off it, but if she does, they say, she will live a very limited life in a nursing home. 'We must hope she dies,' says my dad when I put down the phone. My parents are devout atheists: they believe there is no God and therefore we must live well. So do I. We pray.

Then I start scanning my mother’s documents and emailing them through to the ICU. It seems an especially hard thing to do just then, in January 2021: when the whole country is absorbed in the effort to save the lives of people like my parents, when the national psychodrama is focused on getting an elderly person on to a ventilator, not off it. I’m worried the doctor will think I am a murderer."

I have a lot to say.  I have nothing to say.  This whole piece is worth your time.

Two things -- this stuff is hard, economically, emotionally, and even sometimes physically.

Second, while I can't speak for the U.K., here in the U.S. it's difficult not to resent the fact that I am somehow harming my future professional opportunities by doing the economically sensible thing and taking care of my dad -- as if any "resume gap" is worth more than the wellbeing of people you love and who need help.

We've inherited a mercenary economic system that frankly doesn't care much for older folks, nor for the people who look after them, professional or otherwise.

And to think, my family is miles ahead of other ones in terms of available resources.

This shit is hard even if you have planned for it.

Ugh

It's rare that you watch a basketball game and think to yourself, within the first few minutes, "this is absolutely brutal."

Congrats to the Baylor team though, even if the larger school is a rape factory.

And not to get all prophetic, but Gonzaga will never have had a better chance at winning it all.

Shrooms

I'm sure nothing will go wrong.  Peak mushroom season is fall anyhow, not spring.

Anyhow, if this blog goes silent you'll now know why.

"performed by a failed Gene Vincent imitator in Prestwich"

"The sound on [The Fall's] Grotesque is a seemingly impossible combination of the shambolic and the disciplined, the cerebral-literary and the idiotic-physical.  The album is structured around the opposition between the quotidian and the weird-grotesque.  It seems as if the whole record has been constructed as a response to a hypothetical conjecture.  What if rock and roll had emerged from the industrial heartlands of England rather than the Mississippi Delta?  The rockabilly on "Container Drivers" or "Fiery Jack" is slowed by meat pies and gravy, its dreams of escape fatally poisoned by pints of bitter and cups of greasy-spoon tea.  It is rock and roll as working men's club cabaret, performed by a failed Gene Vincent imitator in Prestwich.  That what if? speculations fail.  Rock and roll needed the endless open highways; it could never have begun in England's snarled-up ring roads and claustrophobic conurbations."

Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie

"the sea, night, lilacs"

XLV

What thwarts this fear I love

to hear it creak upon this shore

of the trackless room;          the sea, night, lilacs

all getting ambiguous

Who dreams of the black colonnade

Casually tossed off as well

Are dead after all (and who falters?)

Everything turns into writing

I strain to gather my absurdities into a symbol

Every day my bridge

They basted his caption on top of the fat sheriff, "The Pig."

Some "others" were dormants: More water went under the dam.

What excitement to think of her returning over the colonnade,

over the tall steppes, warm hands guiding his eyes to hers.

-- Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets

"like a serial killer had drawn a bunch of shit in fat-point magic marker"

Here's a nice little piece on LA's Oki-Dog takeout stand, which played a surprisingly crucial role in the development of late 70's West Coast punk:

"Oki-Dog stood out from the other food spots, though, partly because diners ate outdoors. 'At the beginning it was just this little lone stand,' [Pleasant] Gehman said. 'If it had been cleaned up a little bit, it almost would have looked like something that came out of American Graffiti. It had that slightly Atomic Age look to it.' Gehman recalled its front windows were covered with signs advertising many of the dishes. The elements had warped the signs so thoroughly that the photos of the food looked like inedible blobs: the fact that Oki-Dog’s workers doctored the images on the signs to look more like the items on the menu didn’t make them any more discernible, nor did the oddly misspelled words they’d written. 'Whoever did it didn’t really know how to draw,' Gehman said. 'Stuff that was supposed to be, like, French fries or a burrito, and it just looked like, like a serial killer had drawn a bunch of shit in fat-point magic marker on top of it.'"

The best book on LA punk is the one edited by X's John Doe -- Under The Big Black Sun (my review here).

And I love that the current link to Oki-Dog's website takes you to a Viagra wholesaler.

April Update

My sister went back to Baltimore and her son and her job this morning, which makes me sad.

But, she's returning in May for another visit.

I think our rhythm is set -- she'll come out every six to eight weeks.  This summer, if our COVID shots are all done, my nephew can visit.

It ain't easy.  But then again, it's been two months and I think we've made a lot of progress.  Just knowing what my Dad's expectations and needs and limits are is a good start.

We could use some warmer weather now.

It is beautiful here, and very quiet.  I sleep very well, better than I thought was possible.

Looking forward to my transition back to American baseball from Korean baseball but then again, the Old Man hates baseball with a passion.

Ichiro still plays for the Mariners, right?