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.

Big Plans At The End Of 57

JWise Moments, Travels

Monterey Bay Aquarium Map

Today is the last day of my 57th year; tomorrow, I’ll be 58. But this wasn’t just any old day closing out another year of life. I was working to clean up the grammar of older blog posts when I came across one about the Monterey Bay Aquarium we last visited in 2017. That triggered me to wonder when the aquarium might reopen; well, today was my lucky day as they are making that splash on May 1st to members only and then on the 15th to the general public. If you think that just because we are 700 miles (1,137km) from Monterey, we aren’t members, you are wrong.

Here, just before my birthday, I worked out a nearly 10-day trip and already booked our lodging reservations in the sincere belief that when the aquarium opens reservations on April 26th at 9:00 a.m. PST, I’ll be right there to book our entry for a 10:00 a.m. entry for one of the days we’ll be up there.

Note left at Treebones Resort in Big Sur, California

If that wasn’t exciting enough, I also have us booked at the Lover’s Point Inn in Pacific Grove, just down the street from the aquarium, along with two more unbelievable nights in the Human Nest at Treebones Resort in Big Sur. From there, we’ll head down to Cambria to stay at a place across the street from the ocean. While I still have some details to figure out, the frenzy of having worked all that out requires me to take a break and allow my brain to stop sizzling. This kind of excitement is taxing on old men’s brains, NOT! The photo above is the note I wrote and the drawings Caroline made back at the end of 2010 when, for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, we stayed in the nest but were nearly blown out of our perch; click here to see that post!

Octopus at Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California

While it feels like we’ve been to the aquarium dozens, if not hundreds of times, the truth is more modest. This is our 11th visit in 29 years or hardly enough when I see it this way. Our first time ever in Monterey back in January 1992 included the aquarium and then in 1997, after we’d moved to America, we took my mother-in-law Jutta with us to visit this magic place. In 2001 and 2002, we visited once each year, but in 2004 and 2005, we visited twice each of those years. This was followed by a six-year pause, and we didn’t return until 2011. Another six-year break ensued that culminated with our last visit in 2017. Now, in 2021, seeing this on our horizon, it almost feels like there should have been five or six other visits thrown in there over the years, but obviously, there were other places on the map we wanted to visit, too.

Maybe we’ll make it an even dozen times we’ll have visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium come 2022 when a new “Into The Deep” exhibit is scheduled to open.

The Rationality Catapult

JWise Thoughts

Roman Coin Featuring Claudius "ROMAN EMPIRE, CLAUDIUS 41-54 A.D. b" by woody1778a

I recently wrote about the Origins Project that was operating through Arizona State University for a number of years and which, in many ways, came to an end by 2017. This got Caroline and me talking about how many great lectures we had attended, and then it all stopped, just as the music stopped once the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down. The difference, though, is there wasn’t a pandemic per se but a catapult of rationality that happened to coincide with the program going quiet. But why?

It was time to legitimize that segment of the population that had been feeling excluded and fearful of becoming irrelevant. As society progresses during this age, there is an increasing requirement for a wide swath of our population to wrestle with complexity. Due to limited resources of deep intellect to explore difficult problems, humanity must pull from all corners of culture to find the talent that can rise to the daunting challenges we are facing. In these ever-shifting sands, it’s inevitable that people will be left behind; this has always been part of the price of progress.

When we attended our first Origins event, it was in 2011, which was also the year that the Google Brain Team was established. Look at any image of that group, and you’ll see a microcosm of what our workforce is inching ever closer to looking like. This was also the same year the Occupy Wall Street movement began, though this might have had its roots in the Tea Party movement that got underway in 2009. Another part of this puzzle is that the smartphone gained serious popularity with the release of the iPhone back in 2007. So, how are these disparate elements playing a role in the catapulting of rationality?

Since the advent of the commercial internet in 1995, and even before that, with the rollout of the personal computer, great stressors were being placed on the way business was evolving and how people were employed and remunerated. Between 2007 and 2011, we left the first stage of the internet behind as it became ubiquitous in everyday life. Out of the ruins of the housing collapse, we saw the demise of the Big Block stores accelerate and a move away from Mom & Pop restaurants. People were simultaneously heading online for shopping while at the same time looking for uniform experiences from those things and places where they were spending money.

The speed of innovation and the changing face of the labor force combined with social media platforms that were spreading information faster than ever were all contributing to more and more people being able to see the place they were living in clearer than ever before. While some of us who grew up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York City in the 70s and 80s saw this cultural shift first hand, the majority of Americans only had only caught glimpses through television. As time went by, these same isolated citizens were starting to wake up to the fact that gay marriage, Indian programmers, and pharmacists, along with predominately Hispanic kitchen labor, were all around them, and they panicked.

By 2017, the momentum behind the Make America Dumb Again and Pride of the Deplorables was in full swing. Behind the movement of silly archaic ideas was an exploitative media blowing dog whistles, convincing this segment of our population that revolt was the best way forward. This culminated with a near-full-on attack on the U.S. Capitol in a half-hearted attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government.

The progress made after the 1968 countercultural revolution has been curtailed by the events and messaging of the past four years, and I can’t yet see that this momentum will be recaptured as America must deal with the recognition that abandoning any segment of the population is detrimental to its overall health. Failing to lift up those who are less fortunate is equivalent to having an immigrant problem but ignoring it while it serves particular economic benefits. Our problems are deep and complex; calling a group dumb, deplorable, liberal, racist, or any other moniker that riles the “base” only contributes to issues becoming intractable. Fixing things from the end of a gun barrel might work in some war situations but has never been conducive to propelling societies forward in any prosperous manner.

But the catapult of rationality has been launched, and where its payload landed is beyond my purview; I can only hope that 2020 will not have been our 476, and we are so far gone that all is lost.

The coin image is licensed by Creative Commons and is titled Claudius “ROMAN EMPIRE, CLAUDIUS 41-54 A.D. b” by woody1778a