Day 562

The scene I am working on now involves Maggie experiencing street harassment. It starts out misogynistic and turns racist (she is middle eastern). Street harassment and catcalls is something I have never personally experienced, but my wife has had to deal with it her entire life. She has also been attacked, chased in a car, and as a woman magician, she gets harassed by men in emails and texts who want her to perform services that have nothing to do with doing a magic show. I thought this would end when she got out of her twenties, but it is still happening. What is wrong with men?

To try and better understand the experience of street harassment, I watched the video where a man walked ahead of a woman while he wore a hidden camera aimed at her. She walked through New York City and they just recorded all of the comments. I also read hundreds of examples online by women describing their experiences.

It was all horrible, but I think that most shocking to me is the sexual comments to obviously underage girls. This should be a felony and if it gets caught on tape you go to jail and when you get out you go on the registry. Whatever money you might have had should go to pay for therapy for the young girl with hopefully enough left over to pay for her college. This type of behavior really needs to be disincentivized. Of course, I am dreaming. This is a country where we can barely get rape kits processed.

Street harassment is meant to cause fear and intimidation, and is more about humiliating women than actually offering any prospect of sex. Women live constantly in fear from men, and with good reason. When I walk down the street, I generally don’t have to be afraid that someone will attack and rape me. It could theoretically happen, but statistically, it is unlikely. Women, however, know that an attack from a man at some point in their life is a statistical probability.

In my scene, this street harasser decides to go after a trained killer while she is suffering from impulse control issues. It does not go well for him.

 

What’s Up With Us

The one good thing we got out of the lockdown was our complete redesign and landscaping of the backyard, adding a waterfall and Tiki bar. It is like one of those reality show remodels. It has been completely transformed.

We used a lot of found items and Craigslist deals, since there was a bit of a money crunch. The future was so very uncertain we tried to keep our expenses at a minimum. We hauled away a lot of rock from people who were tearing out what they had and replacing it. It took a lot longer this way rather than just running out and buying whatever we needed, but the results were well worth it.

The Tiki lounge has a table that seats four, a couch and chairs, plus the bar itself, which was an old non-functioning built-in brick barbecue. We have always enjoyed the whole Tiki bar mystique, despite the fact that I don’t drink.

It is basically a tent with a solid backwall that we built. You go out a sliding glass door directly into it, so it really is like adding another room to the house. The picture above is the bar in progress.

A hot tub is an important therapeutic addition that really helps with my condition. We also just love going out there and enjoying the hot water and talking. It is a nearly nightly ritual.

Since the picture below was taken we softened the background and ceiling of the pergola with colored fishnet. We also added more lanterns. The hanging lanterns have battery powered flickering lights that do a great job at simulating candle light. They all turn on automatically at a set time and turn off several hours later. I am very much into automating as much as I can.

I also have everything Alexified (as is almost every room in the house). While sitting in the hot tub, you can control the five lighting zones and the music coming from the hidden speaker using your voice. Perfect. We have many different types of lighting in different areas, including the amazing Alexa controlled any-color light bulbs. They have come way down in price and are now the only types of bulbs I buy.

All I have to is say “Alexa, Lanai on” and it turns on the outdoor lighting preset, plays my Hawaiian music playlist, and turns off the air conditioner, which is near the hot tub and quite loud. This later is thanks to an Alexa capable thermostat, which is awesome. I can turn on the air conditioner using my phone before I get home. The city has a program for people with smart thermostats that has yet to inconvenience me (it turns down the air conditioner a couple of degrees when there is a flex alert), but pays me enough every year to pay for the thermostat and it put me in the black almost immediately. All of our televisions are Alexa controlled. We are all in with the smart house concept.

The hot tub itself is a marvel of good engineering. It is made by Softub, a company based here in Los Angeles. I have personally met the owner and some of his family. Very nice people. We had one for many years until it finally died right before Covid hit. After well over a year without one, we were finally able to purchase a replacement. They initially told us it would be several months as they were back-ordered, but Belle worked her magic and got one delivered two weeks later.

The Softub design is outstanding. They are light enough to easily move around (without water, of course). Our back is inaccessible except by going through the house, and the Softub was turned on its side and rolled right through the front door. They are soft inside, making them much more comfortable to me than hard acrylic. Best of all, they are always hot while at the same time use far less electricity than traditional hot tubs. This is due to the genius secret behind them- they have no heater. All my friends are constantly having problems with their heaters, so I consider this a huge plus.

Instead of a heater, the water gets warm from the waste heat from the pump that circulates the water through the filter. Even though the tub is always hot and ready to go, it only costs around $20 a month in electricity. Since you are transferring the heat from the pump to the water, this also keeps the pump cooler so that it lasts longer. Some have been in use for as long as 30 years.

This is not as fast to initially heat as a spa with a traditional heater (which typically needs a 220 outlet while this is just 110).  It takes a day or two, but once heated, you just leave it on and don’t have to think about anything other than maintaining the chemistry. 

Managing the chemistry is made a little easier thanks to the built-in Ozone unit which helps keep the water cleaner. We also use a mineral frog in the filter, which uses minerals to also clean the water. Water care is pretty easy. We use it almost every day, and every few days I put in a little chlorine. I have had little difficulty maintaining the ph.

I have written in a previous blog entry about the pellet based smoker we use. Another bit of great engineering and design. It is under its own separate tent, in a dedicated area away from the seating areas.

Finally, the waterfall adds a wonderful sound to the backyard.

 

I also have a video walkthrough on Youtube below:

Day 561

The car chase scene above is from one of the great car chases of all time, from the 1968 movie Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. I had a car chase set in San Francisco. It was meant to be an homage to movie car chases, most notably Bullitt, but with my own different take on it. The car chase takes place when cars are autonomous. There are no bad guys involved in the car chase- everyone is trying to do the right thing. It does have life or death consequences, though.

I wrote it, and it sucked. It was not just because it was set in San Francisco, and I had to work it out on Google Maps because we were in lockdown during Covid and I could not do what I normally do- go to the location and soak it in. I know San Francisco reasonably well. None of that was the problem.

A movie style chase is focused largely on the visuals. If you know the area, you might recognize where you are and realize when they turn left onto a street that is actually on the other side of town. To recreate a high level of visual detail requires a lot of description. In the movies, it is about camera angles, and the rhythm of the editing. Typically, it is almost all visuals with tires screeching and engines revving replacing the dialogue. My problem was that all that description required to recreate that slows down the pace of the chase for the reader. I did not want to be the Ray Bradbury of chase scenes, so I completely reworked the scene.

When I write an action sequence, I get very into it. My heart is racing as I write it. I tend to write at a faster pace. I use shorter words, briefer descriptions. In a movie action sequence, too much tends to happen to take it all in. What I needed to do is what a good director would do- make sure that the focus goes to the most important things happening. Great direction and editing can take a complex action sequence and guide the viewer through it, controlling the focus so it is not just a blur of action. I needed to do the writing equivalent of that.

The rewrite is so much better. I also originally had three characters in the chase car, but that has been reduced to two for structural reasons having to do with changes in the story. It simplifies things to have just two characters in the car to deal with, which quickly turns into just one person. That changed the dynamics of the scene entirely, and upped the emotional intensity.

What’s Up With Us

I feel like things are clicking along again and I am back to the writing pace I had before. The depths of Covid killed my creativity and crushed my confidence. Things are still very bad Covid wise. As I write this, in the United Sates there have been nearly 41 million people who became sick with Covid, with over 650,000 deaths. People are dying in this country at the rate of over 1,500 a day, almost all of them unvaccinated and almost all of them with the deadly delta variant. Because of the anti-science vaccine opponents and mask opponents, a strain like the new mu variation, which is resistant to both the vaccine and monoclonal antibodies, could run wild and wipe out a big chunk of humanity. We are not even remotely out of the woods yet, and millions of Americans are playing out the scenario from the Twilight Zone episode The Old Man in the Cave. They ignore science, listen to the know-nothing fascist idiot, and all wind up very dead.

The second year of our container gardening experiments is coming to an end. I can’t say that our attempts at tomatoes were all that successful. We had four plants in a much larger container than last year, but they got a fungus when the super hot (110 degrees) temperatures hit, which spread to all of them and they died before we got much off of them. Our cucumber experiment was also a fail. The container was just not big enough to hold enough water to keep them moist under the extreme weather we had. We got one cucumber from the six plants. It was delicious, but not a great harvest.

One plant that we added did do very well and is quite fun to grow. It is called Queen of the Night, although a lot of similar plants are also called that. What we have specifically is Epiphyllum oxypetalum. It is sometimes called night-blooming cereus, but that is actually a very different plant. 

It blooms at night, with all of the blooms opening at the same time. They will stay open for a few hours, and that is it. Over the summer, we had three sets of fist-sized blooms. They are very fragrant and quite spectacular, but unless you pay attention and go out on the night they bloom, you’ll miss it. I sort of enjoy the ephemeral nature of the way it blooms.

It is a type of cactus native to Southern Mexico and parts of South America. What appear to be leaves are actually very wide stems filled with a gel-like substance that helps it retain water. The flowers grow from the edges of these wide stems. The flower pods look quite strange, almost like some type of alien plant.

I love that these plants have to be so hearty and look so plain, and yet produce such gorgeous flowers. We have a large cactus garden out front, which also produces short-lived blooms, although they bloom during the day. You would think that producing such brief floral displays would be evolutionarily disadvantageous, and yet, cactus thrives and under the toughest conditions.

You might notice a small roundish fuzzy brown protrusion on the cactus a few inches below the white flower. These get larger and eventually become the flower, although they look nothing like something with flower potential at this point.