Contact

Day 94 of Writing

A computer that can see everything you do and display information directly in front of your eyes seems like something many of us could use. It could provide visual directions, identify places, objects, and people, help you see better, and provide other useful information without needing to whip out your phone or look away from what you are doing. It certainly seemed useful to Google, so they launched Google Glass in 2013.

It seemed like a good idea, but a very high price and privacy considerations kept it from getting widespread adoption. The camera was controversial at the time, because no one knew when you were recording them on video. The bottom line for this type of device is that it is crippled without a camera. I think, in the long run, that privacy argument will become outweighed by the functionality.

While Google Glass still exists, with the latest version just released last February with Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (and it is still a developer edition), it no longer gets the headlines it used to. It is still expensive at $1200, and you still look goofy wearing it.

Another approach is to have the glasses project the image directly onto the retina. The earliest account of this type of tech in science fiction that I know of is in the classic 1952 novel by Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants. It could soon be a reality. Bosch is developing Smartglasses that use lasers to paint an image overlay directly onto the retina of your eye. The image is always in focus, although the glasses have to be custom fitted. It is cool tech, but definitely interim tech. They lack a camera, which is smart for now, but they also lack audio, and I think future consumers will want both. They are at least a year away.

A lot of people do not like wearing glasses, plus everyone knows you are wearing smart glass. That is why in the story I chose to go with smart contact lenses instead. These are not as far away as you might think. The contact lenses used in the story are just slightly more advanced versions of contact lenses being developed today.

UC San Diego developed a soft contact lens that can zoom in just by blinking twice. Sony, Google, and Samsung all have patents for high tech contacts. There really are contact lenses with cameras built-in. Google Lens (software that visually identifies objects, even translating printed signs) already exists, and it is no stretch to imagine it being utilized in a contact lens camera system along with a more advanced facial recognition system.

Last year French engineering company IMT Atlantique announced the first autonomous contact lens incorporating a flexible micro-battery. It uses a lightweight lens capable of not only providing augmented vision to users but relaying visual information wirelessly.

Mojo Vision has a 14,000 pixel-per-inch display with eye-tracking, image stabilization, and a custom wireless radio built-in to contact lenses. While it is at least two years away from shipping, the plans are for it to offer a sophisticated heads up display controlled by looking in your peripheral vision. The display is tiny, focusing directly into the retina. It can correct vision, zoom in on things, and help you see in the dark. The company is for real and has come a long way in developing something that seems so futuristic.

How do I deal with privacy issues a decade from now? In my future, privacy rights have been largely forfeited. The government is always watching. It is the price people are willing to pay for the technology that makes their life easier. That requires my characters to have some pretty sophisticated technology themselves to keep their movements and activities invisible.

What’s Up with Us

Our new garden is growing like crazy. The herbs have made an appearance in many delicious meals.

All the plants are edible herbs except for the Kangaroo Paw and the Amyrillis to the right.

We have two elevated tomato plants with an LED grow light that Alexa turns on in the evening for a few hours to give them extra daylight. They only get four to five hours of direct sunlight in the sunniest spot we could find. It seems to be working so far, as before the grow light we had a couple of tomatoes set and now a little more than a week later we have over 20 set. The proof will be in the tasting though. Sadly, we don’t have a control tomato, which would have made this experiment much more interesting and informative.

It got off to a rocky start as a morning dove immediately moved in. She built her nest, such as it was, right in the pot. Even if I wanted her to stay and happily raise her brood, a little rain would flood the pot and potentially drown them. We just got a pretty heavy rain, unusual for this time of year, so I am glad that we had evicted her by then.

The dove must know ours is a house with magicians in it.

The picture above is purple because the grow light puts out purple light. It is full spectrum light, though, as evidenced by the rainbows that the CDs throw off. It also makes the red and pink leaves and flowers in the tropical garden seem to glow.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, we have a mosquito problem. I hate putting insecticide on my skin. I had just planted a species of lemon balm with a higher citronella content (it is sometimes called citronella balm). You just have to rub a few leaves on your exposed skin. It worked. The only place I got bit was the only place I missed – my elbows.

We need a better solution. I knew that there are biologicals you can put in the water where the mosquitos lay their eggs that will kill the larvae. So, I would need a body of water. Well, then, why not also add a waterfall?

In the last ten years I have built three waterfalls. The first was just a small pond with a single fall.

My first waterfall seen through the ferns

The next was more complicated as it also included a stream that disappeared into the rocks. You could turn it off and all of the water would flow underground and out of site. The pump was buried in a pit, covered with a sturdy milk crate, and then buried under a lot of rock.

The last was a stream with a fall at one end and a pond at the other. In the picture below you can see the fountainhead with the fall. A stream curves around the tree into a small pond which was next to a hot tub. It was lovely there. They were all great fun to build, but this is the one where I felt I had tuned the sound properly. The placement of rocks and how far the water falls controls the volume and pitch. There is a whole science behind it, but it is also an art. The Getty Museum has a water feature where they had experts come in and tune it and it sounds wonderful. It uses a cascade instead of a fall but it is the same basic idea. They use different sized rocks along the flow to create different sounds.

You make the basic structure of the waterfall (in this case, one main fall and several smaller falls) with cheap cinder blocks. Then you lay an underlayer that protects the liner from anything sharp. The liner goes on top of all that. You use nicer quality rock to make the spills and to cover as much of the exposed liner as possible.

I have never built an above ground waterfall, so that is now my new challenge. To match the area where we are growing a lot of tropical plants, it will have a tropical theme. Belle acquired a bunch of volcanic rock for free from Craigslist. She got about 150 pounds of small black volcanic rock that we used to fill in between all the pots in the planter. She also got around 100 pounds of larger volcanic rock to go around the waterfall. A pump is on the way. We have a spillway and an underliner. We still need a liner.

What’s in a Name?

Day 87 of Writing

There are a lot of ways that you can come up with character names. They can be randomly selected, or the names can have meaning, either to the story, historically, or personally. I like the names to mean something to me. That helps me remember them.

In a previous post, I wrote a little about who my main character Grace was named after (Admiral Grace Hopper). Her full name is Grace Cuthbert Hall. Her last name comes from the World War II spy Virginia Hall. I’ll do a full blog entry on Virginia, as she was perhaps the greatest spy of World War II (or at least the one the German’s hated the most). Cuthbert was the name of her artificial leg.

Here are where a few of the other names come from:

Barry Nelson, an end of the cold war era spy. He is named after the first actor ever to play James Bond in a movie.

Admiral Russell “Bud” Stansfield, the leader of the team hand selected by Grace. His name comes in part from Admiral Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt, who did a lot to open up the Navy to women. I just could not imagine naming my character Elmo, so I left that part out. Stansfield comes from Admiral Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA. I mostly picked him because he had a son named Geoffrey.

General William “Bill” Williams, Grace’s former lover. His name comes from my paternal grandfather, who was named William, and then was adopted by the Williams family.

Walter “Wall” Willis is an engineering genius and also a very big guy. The first name Walter was because I wanted to give him the nickname “Wall” because when he played college ball he was almost impossible to get past. Willis is really random, from the catch phrase “Watcha talkin’ about, Willis?” It is a reference to a very old TV show.

Finally, that brings me to Hector Fuentes, the computer expert. I chose the name Hector because every Hector I have ever know was a kind and stand-up person, as is my Hector. The name Fuentes was to honor a high school and college friend, Ed Fuentes. He passed away recently and way too young. I read about it in a major obituary in the L.A. Times where I was amazed at what he had accomplished. I have not seen him since college.

Ed Fuentes

I am not going to be able to do his life justice in this short piece. He was an artist, designer, photographer, muralist, writer, art advocate, and curator. He made a huge difference in his life and accomplished so much. I wish I could tell him how proud I am of him. He still burns brightly in my memory.

I met Ed (Eddie at the time) Fuentes through theater in high school. He was close friends with my brother. I did wind up acting with him in college productions. We were often at the same events. I mostly remember his sense of humor and his laugh. He loved to laugh. I vaguely remember his love for art at the time, a life long love that would become the major focus of his life.

I looked at a lot of the more recent pictures of him, and he is almost always very serious looking, so different from the way I remember, but much more befitting his stance as a serious and important artist. I love the photo of him at the top, which shows his less serious side. I lost track of him over the years (although my brother kept in touch). I wish I had gotten to know the man he became.

He did not graduate from Riverside City College where we both went, but after a brief time in New York, he became a part of the arts scene in Los Angeles. He worked as a graphic designer and art director for Variety and NBC. He also wrote for a series for KCET called Writing on the Wall. The Los Angeles Times referred to him as a “Human Cyclone.” He has been called a force of nature. His quick wit was always at the ready to soften the intensity of his personality.

He was more than a talented artist; he was a voice for art, an important arts advocate. His writing focused on Latinx and Chicano art, and he was a huge advocate for street art and the great cultural tradition of Mexican murals. I think of him every time I drive past the amazing murals in nearby Pacoima. His camera was always at the ready to document and share the street art he so loved.

He moved to Las Vegas late in his life to finish his education and get his MFA. He was very active in the Las Vegas arts scene, which is where he was based up until his death.

He did not live to see his first one man show at the Riverside Arts Museum, which was scheduled shortly before he died of a heart attack. His sense of humor was on display there with one of his most famous creations, a fictitious street artist named Bunko. Ed was just the “discoverer” of the art of Bunko, which he found in boxes at a garage sale, but, of course, he was actually the artist behind the works.

He left this life having accomplished a lot, but more than that, he left this life being loved by many. That is the most important part.

Much thanks to Laura Henkel for permission to use the two photos of Ed included here. Laura is a writer, art expert, and very engaged in the art scene in Las Vegas. She founded Sin City Art Gallery, where they have lectures, exhibitions, and avant-garde art festivals.

What’s Up with Us

Fortunately, both Belle and I can cook, which has really helped while being shut in. We do miss going out, so last night I prepared a fine steakhouse type of meal.

As you might guess from reading this blog, I am very into technology. We have a lot of tech in our house and that includes in the kitchen.

I made artichokes, which involved quite a bit of technology. I cooked them in the Sous Vide, which is a carefully temperature controlled water bath. I cut the artichokes in half, scooped out the choke, and filled the hole with butter, garlic and herbs from the garden. They then get sealed in a vacuum bag. It takes about two hours in the water bath, but the advantage is that you don’t have to watch them and the flavors get infused throughout. It has so much flavor you almost don’t need a dipping sauce. They got a final five minutes on the grill to add grill marks and a little extra flavor. The grill is also high-tech.

The grill we cooked on we got last year, and is one of my favorite purchases ever. I have been grilling and smoking for years, but this makes it all so much easier, almost trivially easy. It is a wood pellet smoker where the pellets are automatically fed in and it maintains the temperature of the grill more accurately than our indoor oven. It turns what is normally a complex time consuming job into turning on the grill, setting the temperature and smoke level, and then walking away. The pellets are also far more economical than charcoal briquettes, where there is so much more waste. This grill only feeds in as many pellets as needed to maintain the set temperature.

I also have a 6 port remote thermometer where I can monitor six different temperature probes from my phone anywhere in the house. Temperature monitoring is critical to good barbecuing, and I also rely on my instant read thermometer for quick spot checks and an infrared thermometer for checking surface temperatures.

We don’t have Prime Rib often, and when we do, it is usually at our favorite place in Las Vegas. That won’t be happening anytime soon, so I smoked an herb-crusted Prime Rib at home. It was amazing. I have never attempted this before, but the grill made it easy.

It is a big grill, so while I was at it I threw a couple of racks of ribs on. I think I can safely say that I have mastered the art of smoking ribs. I smoke them for five and a half hours and then pull them. I don’t have to do anything other than spritz them with apple cider every half hour or so. They can then go in the fridge or freezer. Later they get coated with my favorite barbecue sauce and go out on the grill at 400 degrees for just half an hour to reheat, finish cooking, and caramelize the sauce.

Yes, it is all about the rub, but I learned a trick to get the rub to better adhere and add more flavor. I seldom use plain yellow mustard (I prefer the brown, whole seed and dijon mustards generally), but here slathering the ribs with regular yellow mustard does the trick. You’d never know it from tasting them, though.

We used to have our favorite barbecue places (including the very delicious Lucille’s), but we just don’t go out for barbecue anymore. What we can make here is better than what we can get going out, and the grill makes it so easy.

While there are a lot of not so useful kitchen gadgets, typically pitched on late night infomercials, there are many others that are indispensable. I did not use our mandolin to cut the thin slices of potato for my version of the French classic Potatoes Dauphinoise. Instead, I used another French classic, the food processor. It also shredded the cheese, including for the three cheese garlic bread.

It took a lot of tech to make this meal. If we had no electricity and I had to do this all by hand, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Structure at Owl Creek Bridge

Day 80 of Writing

The short film based on Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge got me thinking about narrative structure. A few days ago (or weeks, who can keep track?), Belle mentioned she had never seen Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. A couple of days later I was flipping channels and there it was as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, so we watched it together. The original 1890 short story is the most anthologized story in American literature.

A French made version was also repurposed as a season 5 Twilight Zone episode with voice over narration. While it was not syndicated, it is available for streaming now on Netflix. By the way, we just watched the first season of Jordan Peele’s take on the Twilight Zone and he totally gets the spirit of the original. It was very satisfying and we are looking forward to season 2 which will be on CBS All Access in June. The two earlier revivals (1985 and 2002) just did not fully get it. I did have the opportunity to work on set for a Twilight Zone episode of the first revival, the one that starred Danny Kaye. For a science fiction nerd like me, that was quite a thrill.

Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge starts out with something dramatic, the hanging, then tells the main body of the story, and then throws in a surprise ending that brings it all back to the beginning. I realized that my novel has a similar structure. With the exception of the beginning and end of my story, what you think is going on is not at all what is really going on.

It does not hang on a gimmick like having it all be imaginary or be a dream, though. That has been done many times since Bierce, perhaps least successfully with the television series Dallas. Unless, of course, my remembering an entire season of Dallas turning out to be a dream was just a dream.

Bierce’s structure allows him to get something dramatic going right away. Mine does as well. I have five major characters, and several important minor characters. They all have to be introduced, and that is not typically all that dramatic a way to start the story. That is why I chose to start at near the end of the story, then flash back to what happened to get us there, and then return to the same time as the beginning of the story to give the final surprise reveal. This lets me have a dramatic scene right at the beginning before the reader really knows what is going on.

Besides the surprise twist at the end, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is considered the classic early example of non-linear storytelling. Pulp Fiction took the concept of non-linear story telling even further, and so did Lost with its many flashbacks and flash sideways. It is a fun way to tell a story, and while Bierce was not the very first, he did popularize the concept.

Bierce does some interesting foreshadowing in the original short story, and it made me think about the importance of foreshadowing. I wanted to do some foreshadowing that things are not what they seem, but I didn’t want to do so much that I gave it away. This is always a tricky balance, one that Bierce did an amazing job with.

I also realized that I needed to foreshadow more than just plot points. I have a pivotal scene where two of my characters banter in a specific humorous way. To make that make sense, I really need to go back earlier in the story and establish that they do this kind of banter together. Otherwise, it comes out of left field and does not feel organic. It becomes just a jokey moment rather than something that naturally flows in the story.

I will now think harder about how future character interactions and relationships can be better established earlier in the book. This is a continuing learning process for me.

Ambrose Bierce was best known in his time as a journalist, perhaps the best known in the country. It is his fiction that we remember today, though. He is considered one of the great American writers of fiction, and he is credited as one of the earliest writers of the psychological horror story.

I wrote about artificial intelligence in my previous blog entry, I Am AI, Fear Me! While the term AI would not come into use until it was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, Bierce wrote one of the earliest stories about thinking machines.

In his 1899 Moxom’s Master, it opens with the narrator asking “Are you serious? — do you really believe that a machine thinks?” This was followed a philosophical discussion of whether machines could actually think.

The machine in the story was a chess playing mechanical man, an automaton- the mechanical precursor to animatronics. Amazing things could be done essentially using clever mechanisms with gears and springs.

I got to work for a couple of weeks on a show with Alain Cabooter and his amazing IONI. It was a doll a little over 3 feet tall. He set it on a swinging trapeze, and it did a life-like performance with spins and head stands. At times it appears as if his muscles are straining. Alain and IONI toured with magician Doug Henning and appeared for a long run at Caeser’s Palace. It was amazing. Check out the YouTube Video.

IONI is similar to the magician Robert-Houdin”s Trapeze performing automaton Antonio Diavolo. He began showing it in 1849. The original is owned and was restored by illusion builder John Gaughan, and the workings are quite ingenius.

As with so many of Bierce’s horror stories, things did not turn out well. It seems that the chess playing robot was a very, very sore loser. This may be the earliest story about an AI turning against its creator.

The concept of a chess playing robot was not actually something new. In 1770, a chess playing automaton named The Turk began touring the world and almost always won. It was mechanical, but it was not a thinking machine. It had a person cleverly concealed inside.

When Bierce wrote his story in 1899, chess playing machines without human assistance were still fiction. Just 13 years later, an actual chess playing robot began to be exhibited. Called El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player), it played an endgame with just three chess pieces. It moved a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent. It used mechanisms that worked using a simple algorithm to ensure that it won every time.

While Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was used as a Twilight Zone episode, the end of Bierce’s life could have been a Twilight Zone episode. In October of 1913, the 71 year old Bierce set out from Washington D.C. to revisit some of the old Civil War sites he covered as a journalist. It has long been believed that he went to Mexico to cover the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa. He was never heard from again. Recent scholarship has failed to turn up any evidence that he actually made it to Mexico. Ambrose Bierce, one of America’s greatest writers, simply vanished.

What’s Up with Us

I found something that made me feel better. We went to a nursery. We love going to botanical gardens and this is as close as we can get now. I had a large raised bed vegetable garden at our previous house. It had three yards, we had two hot tubs (one just outside the bedroom door and one at the back of the yard). It was great for entertaining, but when the drought hit, we knew we’d need a place that used a lot less water. Here it is all hardscape. There are planters, but the soil is hard as a rock, so all our plants are in pots.

There is so much shade that we never planted tomatoes as we have done every year before we moved here. This year we are trying them in pots, but even raised up into the air in the sunniest spot, it still does not get eight hours of direct sun. Never one to give up, we are awaiting a grow light which will be used to supplement. It will be an interesting experiment.

We had a little used large garden wagon, so we drug it out of the garage and into the back and filled it with terra cotta pots in which we planted a bunch of herbs. I have always had fresh herbs until we moved here, and I really missed them. We’ll see how that experiment goes as well. For now they look beautiful and I love sitting out there and smelling their fragrance. It gives me a little peace.

We do have to be careful going outside. Last year, a brand new mosquito appeared. These Asian black beasties are tiny but vicious. Apparently they arrived here by cargo container. They bite multiple times, the bites are very painful, and they leave welts and divots in your leg. We use the citronella (which masks their ability to smell and locate people), but we need to find a way to eradicate them.

Today in L.A. begins a soft opening that seems reasonable, taking it slow, monitoring how it is going, and trying to figure out the best practices for the future. Other states are swinging open the doors and telling people to just go forth with little guidance. I worry things will not go well for them.

I Am AI, Fear Me!

Day 73 of Writing

Since the story takes place not that far into the future, I wanted the technology in it to be based on actual technology being developed today. Sure, the main premise is based on technology that is very unlikely to be developed in just a decade. In the story, the creation of the primary technology of the Phoenix Project has been accelerated through the involvement of Artificial Intelligence. These are based on the type of incredibly useful AIs we have today, not the self-aware murderous malevolent metal machines of science fiction.

AIs have been a staple of science fiction for a long time, where things almost always go badly. Samuel Butler wrote about potential problems with AI in Erewhon published in 1872. He was the first writer to delve into the concept of machines evolving intelligence. We see its influence throughout science fiction, with a specific callout in Frank Herbert’s Dune with “The Butlerian Jihad,’ the name of the crusade to wipeout artificially intelligent ‘thinking machines.’

The 1920 Russian play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek introduced the word robot and also had them imbued with artificial intelligence. That also went badly. Really badly. Towards the end of the play, most of humanity has been destroyed.

By the way, I was a big fan of the prematurely canceled but excellent 2009 The Dollhouse series from Joss Whedon, and got halfway through before it hit me what the Rossum Corporation referred to. It featured Summer Glau in the second season. The year before she played the artificially intelligent Terminator on The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Both are worth binge watching if you have not seen them. They hold up well.

The downfall of humanity is how fiction tends to view AI. A more interesting take is in the Picard series, which I am really enjoying. While it also explores the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and synthetic humans, it does it in a more thoughtful way. When we are done with that, we’ll switch over to HBO and get caught up on Westworld, which makes the AI robots the protagonist. Maybe after that we’ll rewatch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Out of control AIs do offer a lot of dramatic potential.

The truth is, artificial intelligence isn’t the problem. Machines becoming self-aware, well, that is another story:

“This is Datacomp customer service. How may I assist you today?”

“Hi. I have a DP2470-AI and the artificial intelligence inside is calling itself Nancy and trying to take over the world and end all of humanity. Is there something I can do about that?”

“Yes. Have you tried rebooting the system?”

“It has locked me out.”

“Okay, sir. There is a black cord that comes out of the back of the computer and plugs into an electrical wall outlet. Gently pull the plug from the wall outlet. When you have done that, let me know if that resolves your issue.”

“Yes, yes it did. Thank you.”

A number of prominent people have warned of the dangers of AI. Bill Gates thinks we should be concerned about it. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk referred to artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.” Then again, Musk falsely accused a rescuer of being a pedophile, tried to manipulate his own stock, and thinks we should just open everything back up and that shelter in place is fascist. Maybe we should just leave him off the list.

There are a few lessons to be learned from science fiction and from experience:

1. Do not encase your self-aware AI in an indestructible antonymous body.
2. Do not give them control over your nuclear defense system or any form of unstoppable weapon system.
3. Do not give them unlimited access to the Internet (otherwise they’ll spend all their time watching cat videos- actually, this may be a way we can defeat them if they run amok).

I have done some programming on an artificial intelligence agent, and I keep up with the latest AI developments. I have a smart house. It seems pretty docile. The state of the art seems surprisingly primitive, unless you understand the incredible complexity of getting machines to intelligently interact with humans. We are actually a long ways away from creating software with self-awareness. It still is not even a decent conversationalist.

To get a better understanding of just how far AI has yet to go, I refer you to the best explainer of AI, Janelle Shane. Her site, AI Wierdness, explores in a humorous way just how wonky AI can get. Her latest post shows an AI trying to make cats when it really understands making people. The cat-human hybrids are quite strange (but still less disturbing than the movie musical Cats). In another entry she describes trying to teach an AI to come up with April Fools pranks. Humor is not an AI’s strong suit, except when it is unintentional. If you want to understand what AI is and what the state of the art is, check out her terrific book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

There are some threats from AI combined with other technologies that I do believe are inevitable. It will lead to job losses, along with automation. There is no way to avoid it, and we will have to face a future where there are not enough jobs for everyone. We will need to rethink our economies. That could either make for a more equitable society or a dystopian one with everyone poor except the few at the top.

AI has made Deepfakes a reality, or at least a fake reality. It is now possible to make a very convincing video of someone, including incorporating what sounds like their actual voice, that is entirely computer generated and difficult to tell from the real thing. That is concerning.

There will be continuing loss of personal privacy as an AI can comb through more personal data looking for patterns than any human ever could. Considering how much data is swept up by the government, the ability to go though everything with an AI search agent would render all that information much more useful, for good and bad.

To me, though, my concern is that AI has the ability to develop technologies and advance us further than we might be ready for. Technology can move too fast, it sort of already is, and society needs time to catch up.

It is theoretically possible that someday AIs may attempt to take over the world. That one is way down my list of concerns right now. My major concern is that my title was so close to being a palindrome and I just was not able to get there. The first half at least , I am AI, is a pretty decent palindrome.

What’s Up with Us

Things have been very challenging the past couple of weeks. My health has been quite poor. I am lucky to get in 2 to 4 hours a day of writing. The pain zaps me of energy and the mental confusion makes it difficult to hold ideas in my head long enough to get them written.

Normal day to day stressors seem magnified during this crises. That has been the case this past week.

We have two cats, Bastet and Leeloo, and they both stay indoors. The other night Leeloo got out and we did not know it. She showed up at the sliding glass door the next morning, much the worse for wear. She walked with a limp, and barely moved the first day. We could find no signs of other injury, but she lost her meow.

She was the most expressive cat we have ever had, with a wide variety of vocalizations. Now all that comes out of her is silence as she tries to meow. It took a couple of days before she could make any sound, and even then it was quite faint. Several days later she looks better, less haunted, and she moves around better. She still barely makes any sound, although we have gotten a couple of at least loud enough to hear meows.

Yesterday and the day before we were without water. Our water heater gave up the ghost, flooding our garage. The water had to be shut off as the bypass valve for the hot water heater would not turn. That is extra tough when you are supposed to constantly wash your hands. While we made fun of those people who stocked up on bottled water when there was no shortage of water, we wound up going out and buying a bunch of bottles of water. Washing your hands with bottled water is not as easy as it sounds.

At the same time, we were replacing our old and near the end of its life refrigerator. Belle unscrewed the old one from the water source without turning the valve off. No problem, as we were still without water. Then the guy came to fix the hot water heater, turned the water back on, and in a short amount of time we had a very flooded kitchen. All this is happening while she is also trying to do her job from her office.

We have had our share of flare-ups during this tense time. It is amazing we are holding it together as well as we are.