Endless Repairs

JWise Thoughts

Blog Repairs

After I embarked on my newest chore, Caroline sent me an article about Hyperfocus ADHD. She knows me well and knew that after I started on this bit of work, I wouldn’t come up for air for a while. So, what exactly am I doing? I’m running 2,568 blog entries through Grammarly to verify that things are okay among the 1.3 million words I’ve written over the past years.

This all started because of a prior Herculian task which involved putting together a page featuring a single photo from every day we traveled since the advent of the digital camera. At the 501st post, I grew weary and took a pause, which lasted months. This is tied in with today’s entry because it was something related to the photos I posted for a particular entry and a seemingly lost image I thought I included on the page titled Travels In The Digital Age. As I got to that post, I saw errors in the grammar and felt I needed to correct them. That took on a life of its own, and now I’ve finished validating the grammar of 940 blog posts and have 1,628 to go.

Obsessively, my hyperfocus drills deep into my sense of “I must finish this as soon as possible” so I can focus on something else. Two something elses are in line to take over my hyperfocus. The first is I have to expand the photos included with early blog posts as those often only include a single photo to represent an entire day of travel; this was due to bandwidth limitations on the internet back before 2015. I needed to be conservative with how many images I shared; now, I’d like to rectify those omissions.

I’m estimating I’ll be done with this aspect of quality control in about ten days, at which time I can turn to determine the exact blog entries I need to flag for adding more images and consider what I might be able to say about them so many years after the fact. In the past, when I’ve written to images where there were no notes to help in the exposition of what transpired, I’ve given a warning at the front of the entry that what I’m sharing is wrung from memories that might be over 15 years old. So it goes.

Now we get to the ultimate reason for this diligence: this blog will someday disappear. When it does, I would like to know that my favorite writings will continue on into the future and the best way I’ve identified for that to happen is in print. To get to the point I can take much of this into book form I really need the grammar and images I want to include to be the most representative of our time.

But John, why do you think there should be any interest in these missives 100 years from now? Two people ventured deep into the breadth of America, recording their adventures for decades. With over 250,000 digital photos taken during those years and hundreds of thousands of words that accompany the images, I tend to believe that few others armed with a camera and notebooks captured so much detail while exploring America and occasionally Europe. I’d posit that we are the first to extensively chronicle our travels and life in America in the history of the country as what are the odds of another couple traveling for the past 22 years armed with digital cameras on over 200 travels and countless experiences?

With that knowledge and knowing that the bits and bytes that comprise this endeavor are temporary in nature, I feel it’s imperative to push this history into the permanent record. So, on I go with running Grammarly over this labor of love before focusing on prepping photos to fill some gaps and then identifying which entries should be preserved. Once all of that is finished, I can go to work on preparing the images for print, which have different requirements than what I’ve done to share them electronically.

Now, back to the endless repairs.

Update April 13th: I’m up to about 300 posts a day, with only 970 awaiting repair.

Porky Excellence

JWise Food, Thoughts

Wagyu Bavette and Mangalitsa Secreto

When I was a kid, I read magazines such as National Lampoon, Mad, Hot Rod, Omni, and Popular Mechanics. On the back of some of them, I’d find ads for mail-order companies from which I could order product catalogs for things I dreamed of one day being fortunate enough to buy. When I became a teenager, I graduated to reading Force Mental, UnSound, Fangoria, and began exploring alternative music and how to make horror films. As a young adult, I brought in Film Threat and an old favorite called the JLF Catalog that dealt with “Poisonous Non-Consumables.” I’m sharing this reminiscing about the old days when there was a delta between the initial discovery of something and the arrival of catalogs or other materials, educating me about the new-to-me subject matter. Another delta occurred after I put in my order while I sometimes waited weeks before I’d take delivery of that special something.

UPS Map Arizona

That age is over, as we are now in the era of instant gratification, where everything is accessible right away, which brings me to the reason for this blog post today. I’m at a coffee shop watching a map that shows me where my UPS driver is with a 32-pound box filled with dry ice and frozen Mangalitsa pork I ordered on Friday. This isn’t the first time I’ve had fresh food shipped in from other places; I’ve had pizza from Buffalo, New York, sent to us, frozen walleye and perch from northern Canada, and Wagyu beef from Idaho. Ordering perishables from companies I only discovered minutes before offering them a credit card number, sometimes receiving shipping confirmation on the same day I placed my order, is such a magnitude of amazing that I have to slow down and recognize it is part of my reality. Of course, if you were born after 1995, this is your normal, which I suppose puts me in a similar situation to those people who would fondly recollect the days before the cars, planes, TV, and smartphones.

Today’s cache is a type of pig that is otherwise not available in the state of Arizona. While there was a local farmer we were able to buy Mangalitsa from, their land has been sold to developers who are building homes, so that is that. But isn’t a pig just a pig? Nope. Mangalitsa is a serious breed apart from other pigs, with red meat instead of pink and a type of fat that claims to be as healthy as olive oil. When I come to think about the time from my early life to now, I suppose the biggest change is how compressed the entire process is. Then again, this level of indulgence where I can buy fresh products in an environment in which shipping is so efficient and relatively inexpensive was never available before, except maybe for the ridiculously super-wealthy who could privately fly goods in.

Vaccinated

JWise Photo of the Day

Vaccinated in Phoenix, Arizona

Wow, just a little more than a year later and Caroline and I are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. While masks around us are quickly disappearing due to an idiot governor more interested in political expediency than science and public health, we are willing to continue masking up until herd immunity is reached or the CDC signals that things are safe enough to do so. Now we need to hope that Europe hits the accelerator on getting its citizens vaccinated so the international travel market can reopen. Even if it does open this year and we’re cleared to not use masks, I’d venture that we’ll do that 11-hour haul across the United States and the Atlantic while covered up. I’ve already looked for an app where I could store copies of our vaccination records that might transition to an official vaccine passport but those are not easy to find, yet.

So how does life change? I’m not as worried about contracting a death sentence. Yes, it is my fault that I am obese which helped cause my diabetes and high blood pressure, but that still doesn’t mean that I should want to give up and sacrifice my life due to prior poor decision making. If that was a thing, many of us should have been thrown to the Soylent Green machine when we were teenagers or young adults. If we are lucky and enough fellow citizens follow suit or we get to vaccine passports quick enough, I’d like to get back to museums and concerts without worrying about the people around me. Hopefully, we’ll continue seeing millions of people vaccinated every day and can start to emerge safely from this ugly virus.

A Decade Of Reading

JWise Book

The Plum in the Golden Vase by Chin Ping Mei

Caroline has been reading books to me in the car for time immemorial in my mind, but this last year was difficult as we didn’t find ourselves in the car all that much. During the past week, that changed as she started heading back into the office more often, and then on Sunday, we made serious progress towards finishing The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray before finishing it last night. Finishing a book opens a small window to return to a book we use as an interlude between other titles.

Back at the end of September 2011, we ordered The Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P’ing Mei: Vol. 1, The Gathering by David Tod Roy (Translator). This epic 16th-century work of Chinese literature was something Caroline read in an abridged single-volume edition prior to meeting me. She felt it was something I might enjoy, and she was curious about the unabridged version that had been being worked on by the translator for 30 years, from 1982 until 2012. David Tod Roy passed away in 2016, but his legacy will live on in this incredible translation of a Chinese classic that stands next to the Four Great Novels of the Ming Dynasty. Those other books are Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber.

As I said, we turn to The Plum in the Golden Vase in between other titles. Caroline will read two to four chapters of it before we open the next book and plow through it, though we have been known to take a commercial break and get a quick chapter in of some saucy Chinese l’amour. Reading this way, it took us nearly two years before we agreed that this was a compelling enough story that we’d go ahead and snag the other four volumes. That first book weighed in at 520 pages, and now, ten years later, we are in Volume 4 effectively on page 2,406 with only 1,266 pages to go.

Maybe you are thinking, “Hey John, when 2025 rolls around, and you and Caroline close the last chapter of that tome and say goodbye to Hsi-men Ch’ing and his band of cohorts and concubines, won’t you miss them?” A part of us will be crushed knowing we’ll never listen to these stories ever again; neither of us has previously invested a decade and a half of spending time with a cast of characters from a period over 500 years ago.

The good news is that when we hand those five books over to a library or Goodwill, we’ll be opening the 14th-century Chinese classic Water Margin, but at four volumes of 2141 pages, we should be able to make good time with it and have it done no later than by 2028.

Early Riser Advantage

JWise Photo of the Day

Sunrise April 5, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona

There’s an advantage to heading out for an early morning walk before the sun appears; it is found in sunrise scenes such as this one. These moments are tiny fragments of the day, barely lasting 5 to 10 minutes before they fade from existence. Maybe our alarm clocks should be tied to color sensors placed outdoors that alert us when certain spectacular hues are being painted overhead. It happens relatively often that we’ll nearly miss a sunset before one of us catches a glimpse of radiant skies to the west that demand we run outside to witness the last glimmering beauty found in the sky from the setting sun.

Another Year – 58!

JWise Moments, Photo of the Day, Travels

Caroline Wise and John Wise driving to Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

Woke just before 5:00 a.m. without the assistance of an alarm and got to preparing a hot breakfast prior to a short walk. After a stop for a latte to go, we are heading south in the direction of Tucson. Our destination is Saguaro National Park. Along the way, we return to one of our favorite pastimes, reading out loud. Caroline is closing in on finishing The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray, which is taking an inordinate amount of time due to us not being in the car all that often.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

The particular reason for this day out on the road is that it’s my birthday. Not only are we traveling, but Caroline baked me a cake; well, bread to be more specific although a dessert bread for sure. What kind is it, you ask? Almond, dried apricot, and orange, a yummy favorite of ours from the Moosewood Cookbook.

We were supposed to be heading into New Mexico back on Friday, but after weeks of dithering about where exactly we’d end up, I lost the enthusiasm to pick a place. So, at the last minute, as just this past Friday, we decided to drive to Saguaro National Park.

Caroline Wise at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

It’s been years since we stopped at the closest national park to the place we call home, though we’ve been meaning to do this for years so Caroline could collect a Junior Ranger badge from here. Today is the day. And it was also the day we forgot our park pass so instead of paying the entry fee, we just went ahead and bought another yearly pass, knowing that the money goes to one of our favorite causes, the preservation of America’s beautiful wildlands.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

After checking in at the visitors center and confirming that someone would be able to accept her workbook we printed at home, we took off for a loop drive down a dirt road so my wife could gather the depth of knowledge about this park that might qualify her as Senior Junior Ranger Woman.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

We intended to take two short walks from the road, but at the first small pullout, seven other cars were parked with absolutely nowhere else to park nearby, so we continued our slow eight mph crawl up the road. We didn’t drive that slow due to the poor conditions of the road, nor did we drive that slow to piss off the people coming up behind us on this narrow path; we drove this slow because under 12mph in our Kia Niro, we are only using electricity and with the windows open the quiet is more befitting the environment.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

I took five shots to get this one reasonable image, but what’s missing is the grand vista stretching for miles with a million cacti between us and the mountains in the distance. This could have been remedied by switching to my 10-22mm wide-angle lens, but I should know better than switching lenses on a dusty road. By the way, how do you like how I coordinated the color of my shirt with the color of my beard?

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

We don’t know which plant this skeleton is from, though it’s obviously not from one of the nearby saguaros but we thought it beautiful enough that it was worthy of snapping an image of. Maybe this will be the photo that propels me virally into social media fame, though that would mean I have to throw it up on Instagram, and well, I’m just about too lazy to even try that.

Caroline Wise at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

Truth in advertising admission, I’m standing behind Caroline, holding her purse while she goes ahead so I can snag a more “natural” image of her ascending the stairs on this short trail to view some petroglyphs. You might think that it’s no big deal that I’m holding a purse, but do some math regarding today’s birthday, and you’ll see I was born in 1963, and I obviously do not have the DNA to be comfortable holding a purse. As soon as I get the photo I want, I will yell at her to rush back to fetch her purse so I can maintain my illusion of what it means to be a man.

Petroglyphs at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

There were more approachable petroglyphs at the top of Signal Hill, but this abundance from below was more appealing to me, so here they are.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

I can’t help but wonder if Phoenix and Tucson once looked like this. Meaning a wide-open desert covered with cacti of a number of types but especially saguaro. These sentinels of the Southwest have been known to stand for up to 300 years with one particular now dead specimen having reached a height of over 40 feet with 52 arms. Evolution works by bringing ecosystems into harmony, and so I tend to believe that there’s likely a very good reason why these cacti have these characteristics, and while they are protected today, that doesn’t diminish that we’ve cleaned millions of them off lands where we built houses.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

Sure, it’s great that we at least have pockets of them on lands forbidden to be developed, but what have we lost in our efforts to replace nature with concrete, cinderblocks, and asphalt?

Caroline Wise becoming a Junior Ranger at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

Poems, puzzles, drawings, and questions across ten pages are now complete and Caroline is being sworn in yet again and awarded a Junior Ranger badge, quite the honor.

Longhorn Grill in Amado, Arizona

For 20 years, we’ve meant to stop in here at the Longhorn Grill so we can claim our bragging rights to having eaten under the world’s largest fossilized steer skull ever found, and now, here on my 58th birthday, which is also the same day Caroline has earned her dozenth Junior Ranger badge, we’ve finally done it. Was it worth it? That depends. Was the food amazing? No way, but we didn’t expect it to be, considering it’s midway between Tucson and Mexico, meaning it’s in a relatively impoverished area of the state, and there isn’t anyone passing through these parts looking for gourmet food. Can I recommend it? Absolutely, because these cherished icons sitting roadside across America won’t be there forever, and often, you meet some amazing fellow travelers who contribute to making our days memorable.

Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona

Earlier, as we drove south out of the national park, I noticed on the GPS a northern section of this western branch of Saguaro that had a road passing through called Picture Rocks Road that we’d never been on. Seeing it had been so many years between visits, there’s the chance we may never pass through this area again, so I figured we should take the detour and check it out, just in case.

We arrived back in Phoenix before 5:30 p.m., which was a lot earlier than I thought we’d be home, but I don’t feel like we diminished our experience of being out for a Sunday drive on Easter during my birthday. As a matter of fact, I’d say this was a gloriously beautiful day that once again presses on my mind to come up with the superlatives that might convey a hint of how perfect this was for Caroline and me, but I guess the old saying, “You had to be there,” rings true and will have to suffice.