Noblesse

It's 7:30 PM and I'm sitting up in my hotel room bed, in for the night. My sons and I will go swimming at 9:30 or so, but my feet are finished walking, and there's no chance that I'll leave this hotel tonight.

We walked to St. Joseph's Oratory today, 4 or so uphill miles from our hotel; and then returned to McGill University, and decided to walk to the top of Mont Royal, too. I recorded 26,000 steps today. That's not the real story, though (but 26,000! Impressive!). The real story is how amazingly beautiful the Oratory and Mont Royal Park are, and how much work and prayer went into the creation of both of these miraculous places.

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Most people know Frederick Law Olmsted as the designer of New York's Central Park, but apparently, he was also involved in the design of Mont Royal Park. According to Wikipedia, an economic crash in the mid 19th century prompted Montreal's city planners to abandon many of Olmsted's very ambitious plans for the park. This is astonishing to me, because it's still amazingly beautiful and welcoming, the type of public space that the great 19th century robber barons built with their vast fortunes. Using winding paths and wooden stairs built into the side of the mountain, visitors can either climb or hike to the top, where Chateau Mont Royal will welcome them with ice cream and cold drinks and overpriced souvenirs. (Buy an expensive t-shirt! It's not cheap to maintain a thing like Mont Royal!) Then, they can stand on the overlook, with all of magnificent Montreal spreading below, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with having climbed a mountain--even a relatively small one.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to take a panoramic picture.
Trust me, it's much more impressive in person. 

St. Joseph's is even more magnificent. You walk and walk and walk down Chemin de la Cote des Neiges, growing more and more certain that you have the wrong directions and that your GPS doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. And then, just as you approach Chemin Queen Mary, you see the very top of the dome emerging from the tree canopy.

OMG! There it is!

St. Joseph's was also built during the midst of an economic crisis. According to the $2 Visitor's Guide, construction was halted in 1931. Brother Andre was supposed to have ordered the construction company to place a statue of St. Joseph in the open structure. "If he wants a roof over his head, he'll make sure that the money is there." A few years later, construction was complete.

This is what it looks like today, as you approach on foot.

Mont Royal Park was built with the help of municipal funds and private donations from Canada's robber baron counterparts (descendants of Hudson Bay traders, I guess). And St. Joseph's was completed with the help of private funding from donors large and small (but probably mostly large). 

I don't like to indulge in class-warfare rhetoric. If you compare my life to the lives of most people who have ever lived for all of human history, then I'm the one percent, and I could do a lot better at noblesse oblige. On the other hand, it's hard to compare today's super rich (no Donald Trump, not including you, because no one expects anything from you) to the super rich of the 19th and early 20th centuries and not feel a little bit shortchanged. The Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts endowed parks and hospitals and museums that were built to last forever. I guess it's still too early to say what the Buffets and the Gates and the Zuckerbergs will leave behind. If it's anything half as magnificent as Mont Royal Park and St. Joseph's Oratory, then I guess I can forgive them for Facebook and Windows Vista. 

9:00 now. I'm too tired to move, but swimming doesn't count as moving. More Montreal tomorrow, maybe. A bientot. 

En Francais, s'il vous plait

I had planned, before we came to Montreal, to study and try to improve my French a little bit. I use Duolingo for Spanish, and I thought that I'd just add an additional language and practice for a few minutes a day. And then all of a sudden it was the day before our trip, and I hadn't practiced at all. Zut, alors.

I took two years of French in high school, switching to Spanish during my junior year. I also took an additional semester of French in college. After that, I hardly ever spoke or read anything in French, so I was well out of practice. I also took only two years of Spanish, but everyone who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland can speak a little bit of Spanish; and between hearing Spanish spoken every day and practicing with Duolingo, I can get by in Spanish; or at least, I can follow a conversation.

But when in Montreal, I like to do as the Montrealers do, and I've been trying to speak French as much as possible, with limited success. I get a little better each day, though.

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I don't have much of a talent for languages, other than my own. It's humbling to realize that even as I gain a little bit of competency in basic French conversation (lentement, s'il vous plait!) I will never, and I mean NEVER, achieve real fluency.

I'm an editor, so when I read signs or posters, especially long signs (pool rules, for example), I edit and rewrite them in my mind. The English-language rules posted at the hotel pool, for example, are badly written. This might be because a French speaker wrote them; but I've been to enough pools in the United States to know that it's just as likely that they were written by a native English speaker--pool rules signs are always badly written for some reason. After I finished my edit, the sign was stripped of unnecessary capital letters (another Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome trigger) and altogether much better and more clearly written, in my mind. But the French sign? Who knows? Even as I congratulated myself for being able to understand 70 percent of the sign without referring to the English version, I realized that I had NO IDEA if it was grammatically correct. That sign could be a morass of bad grammar and poor word choices; and riddled with spelling and typographical errors, and I'd be clueless. Humbling.

*****
So this morning, we visited the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. My favorite exhibit was "Les Prophetes," a collection of tiny creations made of string and bits of wood and plastic and colored paper, all marked with handwritten labels. Each of the pieces is a three-dimensional representation of an economic statistic of some sort. I picked up an exhibit guide, but haven't read enough yet to know whether or not the statistics are real or made up for the sake of the project.

It looks so cheerful, n'est-ce pas? Actual
caption: "Work Fatalities in Europe by Country." 

I loved this for two reasons. The world (meaning the part of the world in which I live and work) is preoccupied with "metrics," to an unhealthy extent, and I like the idea that each of these metrics can be reduced to nothing more than colors and shapes, no more meaningful than the string and colored paper they're made of. I also loved the finicky care with which each of the pieces is assembled and labeled. I pictured myself at age 11 or so spending weeks constructing and labeling something similar.

"The Unit Simplex." Reminiscent of a Spirograph drawing.

*****
In the afternoon, we went to the Montreal Botanic Garden, taking our first ride on the Montreal Metro, which is very much like the Washington, DC Metro. Pie IX station deposits you right at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, which is certainly the ugliest place in Montreal, and maybe one of the ugliest in North America. On a hot day, there's nothing less inviting than a nearly all-concrete stadium, as they were built in the early 1970s. To call the Olympic stadium reminiscent of East Germany strikes me as unfair to East Germany, which after all, I have never visited. Maybe it was pretty and cheerful in 1976. In 2018, it's a parched, sun-baked concrete bowl, marked by graffiti, its cracked walkways overgrown with weeds and unshaded by even a single tree. We didn't inquire about the tour.

The Botanic Garden, however, is beautiful and exactly the remedy for the soul-crushing malaise of the Olympic stadium. I took lots of pictures there. Here is one.

It's a flower. I have no idea what kind. 

It's 9 PM now, and time to swim. Mont Royal and St. Joseph's Oratory tomorrow. Au revoir a demain.

Je me souviens

Bonjour! It's Sunday morning, and I'm writing from beautiful Montreal, my home for the next week. We drove here from the Washington D.C. suburbs. It's a long, but pleasant drive, via my beloved New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and then through the Catskills and Adirondacks. Yes, I know that "beloved" is not an adjective that is usually used to describe the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike, but I love New Jersey, including its highways, and especially its mandated-by-law full-service gas stations.

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We crossed the border at about 6:30 PM last night, and because we weren't paying close attention to the (few and all but invisible) signs, we ended up, completely by mistake, in the NEXUS line. My husband (who was driving--I had taken the first driving shift) realized his mistake a split-second after it was too late to correct it.

"Uh-oh," he said, as an angry-looking Canadian border guard approached the car. My husband started to explain/apologize, when the border guard asked "Sir, can I ask you a question? What would make you think that you can jump the line in front of all of these cars, when this lane is clearly (not at all clearly BTW) marked 'NEXUS only'?"

The question having been asked, my husband attempted to answer it, only to be interrupted by the border guard, who held up his hand, saying "Wait, let me finish. You see a traffic jam at the border, and you decide that you should just blow past all of these people, hoping that breaking the rules will save you 15 minutes?"

"I apologize," my husband said sheepishly. "It was an honest mistake. I really didn't notice the sign."

"REALLY?" the border guard demanded. "What did you think that all these people were waiting for?"

I chimed in, as I do sometimes. "Again, we apologize. We have been driving for 13 hours and weren't paying as close attention as we should have."

The hand went up again. "Ma'am, there are people who crossed this border today who drove from Florida, 20 hours or more, and they got in the right line." I didn't argue. I hadn't seen a single U.S. license plate in the line of cars waiting to enter Canada, but maybe I had missed the earlier caravan of alert Floridians.

My husband tried again to apologize, and the border guard held up his hand once more. "Do you have any guns in the car?" he demanded. He asked for our passports, and after giving them the most cursory of glances, explained that in the future, we should remember that the NEXUS line is reserved for immigration cases. "It's not rocket science," he pointed out helpfully, therefore disabusing me permanently of the notion that Canadians are naturally witty. Having visited Toronto a few years ago, and having attended many NHL games, I already knew that they're not any nicer than Americans. After accepting another finger-wagging and scolding from a second border guard, we were waved through and just like that, we were in another country.

"Well," my husband said.

"I know, right?" I said.

"I mean, if 'it's not rocket science, sir' is the worst abuse I have to endure, then I can live with it. We probably saved 45 minutes, don't you think?"

Easily. EASILY.

*****
It could only have gone up from there, and it did. Montreal is lovely, and its people are delightful, proving that it's not hard to be kind to strangers, even if their French pronunciation leaves a great deal to be desired. Ce n'est pas sorcier.

*****
Last week, I finished reading Lynn Freed's Leaving Home: Blah Blah Blah. It's a memoir, and so it is of course filled with the author's memories, including her recollections of vague childhood envy of families who vacationed in what she called "caravans," or "trailers" as we say in the U.S. I thought for a moment that this was another reminiscence of a thing that used to be done, that is no longer done; and then I drove through upstate New York on a Saturday in August, and realized that at least half of Quebec vacations this way. We saw dozens (no exaggeration!) of cars bearing the "Je Me Souviens" Quebec license plate, towing vacation caravans on their way back to Montreal and Quebec City and Sherbrooke and Drummond. Years from now, a French-Canadian memoirist will lament her family's unconventional city vacations, wishing that just once, she'd had the chance to tow a caravan from Quebec to the Jersey Shore like all of her friends.

*****
Who knows what my 17-year-old son will do when he can't have poutine with every meal. During his first college visits, we explained the Freshman 15, cautioning him not to overindulge in dining hall all-you-can-eat pizza and soft-serve ice cream when he goes away to school. The Freshman 15 could easily give way to the Montreal 20 if we stayed here for too long. I don't get the appeal, but my son loves it.

*****

Last night, our crazy Arlo security system (another story, for another day) alerted my husband of a visitor at hour house. A person was knocking on our door at 1 AM. He knocked, peered in through the kitchen window, knocked again, and then disappeared. Apparently, our house was not burglarized, but it's a little disconcerting to know that something or someone might be threatening your home when you're too far away to do anything about it. Being me, I naturally had a panic attack that grew into a full-blown existential crisis. Bonne vacances! Eventually, I did go back to sleep, and woke up this morning feeling much better.

Henri Matisse, Portrait au Visage Rose et Bleu, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Last night, I was the blue part; this morning, I was rose. 

It's Monday evening. Time to swim. More on Montreal later this week.

Nerd rage

Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome: Characterized by flaming hot fury and acts of violence that include pen-throwing, foot-stomping, and keyboard abuse; sometimes accompanied by NSFW verbal outbursts, this disorder may be triggered by any of the following:

• Inability to distinguish between "e.g." and "i.e." OR (and especially) the misguided belief that these Latin abbreviations are synonymous and may therefore be used interchangeably. 
• Liberal use of both "e.g." and  "i.e." without the (necessary) comma to follow. 
• Note that "liberal use" means at least three times per page, throughout the entire length of a 174-page proposal. God help me. God help us all. 
• Use of the semi-colon to separate single-word list items (OH GOD THE HUMANITY).
• Use of the phrase "flush out" in reference to anything other than a toilet or a sewer system. 

So that was Monday. And now it's Tuesday. I slowed way down on my way home from the pool, to accommodate two (not one, but two) squirrels who were either blind or just not smart enough to get out of the way of an oncoming Subaru. I wondered for a moment if squirrels as a species might not have benefited if I'd hit one or both of them (NOT ON PURPOSE) because these two were obviously not the best contributors to the squirrel gene pool. But then I realized that as humans, we're probably better off if the squirrels don't become too intelligent. My family in particular doesn't need any more rodents that can outsmart us.

*****

Do you see what happens to me when I don't get out enough? I mean, really.

*****

I don't look at blog analytics very often, but I did look yesterday, and found an unusual one-day spike in visitor numbers. Interestingly, many of them are from Russia. So добро пожаловать. That means "welcome," if I take Google's word for it. I suppose I should actually learn some Russian, given that it will eventually be the primary language of the United States. Meanwhile, I hope that my poor grammar doesn't upset any Russian trolls. I know how that feels.

Ma'am like Ham

For over a week, I tried to finish reading a book that I didn't like very much. I always feel compelled to finish a book that I start, even when I don't like it; and it takes me forever to read a book that I don't like. I thought about giving up on it, but then I decided to just alternate between it and a different book--there are so many in my Kindle backlog that I want to read.

The book in question is Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends. It takes place in upstate New York in (I think) the late 1970s or early 1980s, as a pair of social science professors attempt to infiltrate a very small religious sect that believes (sincerely, I think, though I'm only about halfway through) that a higher order of beings from a planet named Varna have achieved true enlightenment, and that a small group of chosen people on Earth can achieve similar enlightenment if they adhere to a series of ever-weirder made-up teachings. A review that I read characterized the novel as a satire of academia, particularly social science, and I guess that's true enough. It's better as a commentary on people who are willing to believe a lie, no matter how obvious. Particularly relevant now, of course, but I can't seem to stay engaged in the story.

It's Sunday now; a rainy Sunday after a very rainy Saturday. So instead of swimming, I'm at home, watching "The Queen," which was free on demand. I love this movie. This is the third or so time that I've seen it. I love the part at the beginning, when the Queen is sitting for her portrait, and chatting with the artist about how fortunate he is to be allowed to vote. She envies him "the joy of being partial." That's the attraction of politics, I suppose. It's the tribal instinct, the joy of being partial, of picking a side.

I love Queen Elizabeth, too. On her twenty-first birthday in 1947, she gave the speech that included the famous passage "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service." She meant it, and she has kept her promise throughout her whole, long life. I'm a small-r republican by conviction, but a royalist at heart. 

*****
Later, the sun came out for just about an hour. I ran to the pool, and swam laps for 45 minutes, stopping only when a thunderclap prompted a long whistle from the lifeguard's chair. The water, after two days of rain, was no longer warm, but not quite cold--a perfect contrast with the still-warm, humid air. I fell asleep later, feeling as if I was still moving through cool water.  

*****
And now it's Tuesday, 10:15 PM, and I just finished work. I worked until 10 PM last night, too; and also worked for a few hours on Saturday. So I'm tired. Tired and out of sorts. It's been raining for two days, and I haven't been swimming, and my eyes are tired, and my head is aching; and so obviously, what would I do except sit in front of the computer and write even more? 

*****
I finally gave up (temporarily) on Imaginary Friends, but ironically, I'm sort of itching to know how it turns out. So I'll revisit it again, a chapter at a time, until I finally finish. I'm reading a memoir now, Lynn Freed's Leaving Home: Reading, Writing, and Life on the Page. It's quite good, two-part, colon-separated title aside. Tiresome. The title, that is. 

And I'm leaving home next week; on vacation, I mean. We're going to Montreal, a place I've never visited, but for some reason, seemed the only reasonable place to go. I reserved our hotel rooms early in the month, and then called last night to confirm. I can stumble along in something that resembles French, but I can't conduct business in any language except English, so when the desk agent answered the phone in English, I immediately said "Bonsoir--parlez-vous Anglais?" And she said, as I expected she would, "Mais oui! Bien sur!" Maybe a week in Montreal will improve my French. I'm sure that it will improve my attitude. Au revoir, until next week. 

Equinox

Monday: Last week, a coworker and friend was suffering some eye discomfort, and I suggested that she look at her eye makeup and eye cream ingredients. She did, and found that a simple product change made all the difference. Maybe I should do the same thing, because it's almost 9 PM and my eyes are burned out like an old string of Christmas lights. So maybe it's just eye cream. It probably has nothing to do with age-related macular degeneration or cataracts or glaucoma or any other of the many blindness-causing ailments that I imagine that I have every time my eyes are tired.

I mean, I don't see any reason why it would.

*****
Tuesday: The Washington Capitals' Stanley Cup win is fast becoming the greatest financial catastrophe ever to befall my family. Do you know how many Capitals Stanley Cup shirts we own? No, I don't either. I lost count. And here's what arrived in the mail today:

Yes, that's a bottle of wine that I can't drink. 

That's exactly what it looks like: A custom-engraved, limited edition, Washington Capitals 2018 Stanley Cup Champions wine bottle; filled with wine of some sort, I presume. It showed up in a box the size of a dumpster, and I'm sure that shipping alone cost $50. We kept the box. We might end up living in it.

*****
Friday: Every summer, there's a turning point. Darkness falls a tiny bit earlier, and the air, even though it's warm, starts to develop a barely perceptible but real edge of coolness. The haze lifts and the sky becomes azure-clear blue in mid-afternoon, warmed with a red-pink glow at sunset, which comes just a tiny bit earlier each day. Of course, the hazy warmth will return and linger throughout August, but by the third week of July, it's impossible to ignore the signs of the coming end of summer and the beginning of fall. The pool was noticeably cooler tonight, and even though I know that summer isn't over, I can feel it slipping away. It's always later than you think. I should make that a tag.

Fiction and non-fiction

Monday: It's 6:50 AM, and I'm the only person in the house who's awake, but that will change in 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile, it's time to get started on a post for the week.

In "Stranger Than Fiction," Will Ferrell plays an accountant who is also the lead character in a work-in progress novel written by a neurotic novelist played by Emma Thompson. He discovers (I forget how) that he is not only a fictional character, but a doomed one; and he spends the rest of the movie trying to change his fate and convince the author not to kill him off. It's a good movie.

I'm not a novelist, but I write. Some days, I do little else. Sometimes I write about how or why to do things that must be done--a procedure, or a policy, or a weekly email that lets swim team families know what meets and events are happening this week, and what everyone has to do to make sure that those things happen.  Sometimes, I write about things that have already happened--a past performance narrative for a proposal, or a blog post about a new product release, or another email newsletter with highlights of the last month's events and accomplishments.

I realized yesterday, as I wrote a weekly newsletter, that writing about events and plans is almost the same for me as actually making them happen. In fact, it's the only way that I can make something real and concrete.

*****
And now it's Wednesday, and who even knows what I was thinking when I wrote that. It was a bad day.

But Tuesday was a much better day. At 12:30 or so, I was in a meeting at the government site where I work, when a senior Fed interrupted the meeting to announce that the Thai soccer players and their coach had all gotten safely out of the flooded cave where they'd been trapped

That night, my sons were watching "The Martian," a pretty good movie, on TV. I wondered aloud if the movie had already been scheduled to air, or if the network's programmers had made a last-minute decision to show it after the miraculous rescue. My older son asked me what one thing had to do with the other. What does a high-budget movie about an improbable space mission have to do with 12 little boys and one man trapped in a dank, cold, pitch-black underground pit, that could so easily have been their tomb?

A world waiting with bated breath, watching a race against life and death. A no-expenses spared all-hands-on-deck rescue mission. Volunteers willing to endure great physical hardship, even extreme danger, just for the possibility of saving one life, or 13. The heartbreaking sacrifice of a hero who gives up his own life to save others'. And a cinematic happy ending. No matter how awful humanity can be (and we suck sometimes), we will still bear any burden and pay any price (JFK, I think) to save another person's life, whether he's lost in space or trapped in an underground pit. You couldn't write a happier ending. 

Saman Kunan, rest in peace.

Red, white, blue

As a veteran government contractor, I am highly fluent in Beltway acronym. But every time I think I've heard them all, a new one comes along. Three different times last week, I heard people describe a plan or a project as "OBE" (technically an initialism and not an acronym, because it's pronounced "O B E" and not "obe" as in rhyming with "lobe"). It didn't really register the first two times, but when I heard it a third time, I had to investigate.

"OBE" does not mean "Order of the British Empire," at least not in this context. It means "overcome by events," which is now my favorite-ever government insider slang term. I'm going to find at least 10 reasons a week to describe something (or someone, even) as "OBE."

And now, you might be thinking to yourself, as you contemplate the minute of your life that you spent reading this, a minute that you will never regain, that this blog is or should be OBE. You would not be the first person to think this. The author beat you to it.

*****

It's the 4th of July. Normally, I'd write "fourth" rather than "4th," but the ordinal number is acceptable in references to Independence Day. My sons are looking forward to their favorite 4th of July dessert: Yellow sponge cake dessert shells filled with strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip. Not whipped cream, but Cool Whip. My Korean mother-in-law introduced them to this mid-century Americana treat, and now, they consider the holiday incomplete without it. Apparently, my mother-in-law's friend, also Korean-born, told her that this red, white, and blue dessert is an American tradition, and she or my sister-in-law have made it for every 4th of July gathering since.

Having married into an immigrant family, I've learned that most immigrants are eager to understand what is uniquely American, and to adopt it as their own. For some immigrants, this means observing and imitating American ways of dress and speech. For others, like my neighbor from Vietnam, it means growing and cultivating the greenest and most American of front lawns, complete with garden gnomes and American flags and barn-shaped mailboxes. For my mother-in-law, it's food. She cooks, and eats, mostly Korean food, but she always insists on traditional American fare for American holidays. Turkey for Thanksgiving and ham for Christmas; and of course, strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip in a little cake shell for 4th of July. Sons and grandsons of immigrants, my children have the most American of families. 

*****
So between one thing and another, my week has gone off the rails. Last week at this time, I was ahead of or at least on top of every task and chore on my list. This week, a combination of a midweek holiday and other unexpected occurrences has thrown the whole operation into chaos. Overcome by events, I will end here. Until next week...

Artificial intelligence

In terms of my particular work, there's nothing worse than those days when you're chained to the laptop all day long, as the minutes tick by and the deadline fast approaches. But there's nothing better than when you finally get to the last page, and you do your final spell check, and update your table of contents, and ship the thing off, knowing that it's as good as it can possibly be. Even when that happens at 10:10 on Sunday night, it's still a happy moment of euphoria that will carry you through to the next mad deadline crunch, which you can only hope will happen on a weekday.

*****

So that was Sunday; and now it's Monday, and I'm now the proud owner of this:

Yes, I'm listening to everything you say,
but you have nothing to hide, right? 

I had to replace my phone recently, and I got a Google Pixel 2. Unbeknownst to me at the time (any excuse to say or write "unbeknownst"), Verizon was offering a free Google Home Mini with any Pixel purchase, and it arrived in today's mail.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's a fun new thing in a pretty box! It was free! And we'll have so much fun talking to it and telling it to play music and look up random facts and tell us when the puck drops. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it will become (if it isn't already) a surveillance device that will report on my every thought and conversation. I've read 1984, and this is how it starts.

I actually thought about just leaving it in the box. I could donate it somewhere, I thought; or we could just sell it on eBay. But curiosity got the better of me, so I opened it, just to see what it looked like when I plugged it in.

It's a very cute little device, and when you plug it in, four tiny lights flash the now-familiar Google colors (red, blue, yellow, green). It's cheerful and fun to look at; it's like Christmas in June. But after I set it up, I didn't know what to do with it. My son started testing it on state capitals, and then I threw it some multiplication questions. When I was 9 or 10, I dreamed of something very similar to this--a machine or a robot that knew everything and that could offer the sum total of human knowledge, just for the asking. State capitals, multiplication tables, and the weather, all in a a little round package.

*****
Last year, I had to write a white paper about data lakes. I don't know very much about databases, relational or non-relational, but that didn't stop me from writing all about them. One of the things that I learned while researching this topic is that when you build a data lake, you don't need a use case for the data you're collecting. You can just gather any and all data, throw it in your data lake, and then figure out later how to use it, and why. That's kind of terrifying, isn't it? With the right kind of data repository as the backend, your Google Home device, or your Alexa, or your Apple Home, could just collect data on every question you ask it, now and forever, store that data indefinitely, and then eventually figure out how to use it, presumably against you.

*****
I don't know very much about algorithms, but I do know that algorithms control how search results are compiled and returned. The day after I received the Google Home device was primary day in Maryland, and I wasn't sure where my polling place was (it changed recently), so  I asked Google, and it suggested that I should visit the Board of Elections, in Virginia. Based on the weather forecasts, it knows that I live in Maryland, so there was reassuring proof that it doesn't know everything. It does, however, know that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup, because everyone in my house has asked it "Who won the Stanley Cup?" at least ten times.

*****
It's Friday now, day 5 of sharing my household with an AI-enabled speaker that actually speaks. I like asking it to tell me jokes; and of course, the daily reminder that "the Stanley Cup was won by the Washington Capitals" (passive voice; another algorithm quirk, I'm sure) will never get old. But I'm keeping it at an arm's length for now. As helpful as it might be to get a quick Spanish-to-English translation (or the reverse) or to get the weather forecast without looking for my phone, I'm still not convinced that it's not spying on us and reporting my every idea to our Google overlords. By the time I finally unplug it, it might be too late.

Washed and clean

Tuesday: I intended to start writing yesterday morning, and then the morning got away from me. Yesterday was the first no-school day, so our morning routine has changed a bit, and I thought that I had more time than I actually did. It's always later than you think. Well, it's always later than I think, anyway.

So now it's 7:15 (AM). Cloudy, with silvery pale sunlight and dense humidity, and it feels like a morning at the beach. I’m keeping track of the time this morning. I’m on top of things.

And now it’s 9:15 PM. Today was a back-to-back meeting day. I'd planned to go outside and take a short walk between meetings, but a sudden heavy rainstorm derailed my plans. And then within ten minutes, the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, giving way to intense, mad-dog-and-Englishmen noonday sun and the smell of ozone as the pavement dried. The air was dense; so humid that it was just short of condensation back into rain. The grass and trees and shrubs were jungle-green and dewy. You know how sometimes a garden or a lawn goes from lush and verdant to sloppy and overgrown, all in the space of minutes? The whole world looked like those few minutes. I walked in the sun as the rain dried. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the office, and then the rain started again.

The rain stopped, again, and I finished work, came home, made dinner, and went swimming. The pool water has been warming gradually, from icy to chilly to tolerable to just right. All of this is to say that it feels like summer, finally.

***** 

I use spell-check, but only as a fail-safe for typos. My eyes aren’t what they used to be—when I was younger, no typo had a chance against me. I’ve noticed something with Word’s spell-check feature. When you spell-check a document, and spell-check doesn’t find any errors (this still happens fairly often—I’m pretty good), the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete—You’re good to go!” Not only confirmation that the spell-check has done its job, but a congratulatory exclamation point. But when you run spell-check and ignore any of Word’s grammar or spelling recommendations, the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete.” Full stop. It comes across as a little bitter,  a little truculent. No “good to go,” no exclamation point…it’s as if Word is washing its hands of you.

***** 

It's Wednesday now. I'm at a Wednesday night swim meet, with no job. Not as in unemployment, just no swim meet job. This is very rare for me; very rare indeed. Rumbling thunder cut the meet short, and there was a mad scramble to clean up the pool as quickly as possible before the rain started. A friend and I, both of us long-veteran swim parents, were walking toward the parking lot to stow our handbags so that we could come back to help clean up, and we saw the meet manager walking toward us.

“Let’s say ‘Good night, Lois—see you Saturday’ and keep walking, just to see what she says,” I said to my friend.

“Awesome,” she said. We executed perfectly, and then cackled like idiots when she fell for it. Then we all cleaned up together, and I thought about how lucky I was that I got to go home over an hour earlier than I expected; and even luckier to clean up a swim meet with these people, who I love and whose children I love; all during my beloved summer.

***** 

So as I mentioned once before, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And as I also mentioned that last time, I won't really compare the President to a stopped clock, because he's not right anywhere near twice a day. But he did the right thing today, so he deserves credit. It doesn’t matter that he did the right thing for the wrong reasons; it only matters that it was the right thing. Hopefully, most of the children will soon be reunited with their parents.

RAICES

No, but if you hum a few bars, I can try to play along

Wednesday, June 6: I was just going to write a sentence, which I'm not going to write, because you shouldn't put certain things in writing until they actually happen.

*****
Remember how I was singing along with "Evacuate the Dance Floor?" And then remember how that song was stuck in my head for a damn week afterward? No?

Well let me tell you all about it. I sang along to that song one too many times, and then it was stuck in my head for a damn week. And if that was the end of that story, then there'd be nothing else to say. But that is not, as it happens, the end of that story.

I'm extremely susceptible to the curse of the earworm; and sadly for me, the songs that get permanently lodged in my brain are not always songs that I like. "Evacuate the Dance Floor" and "Just Dance" and "Badlands"? Fine. "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Where do Broken Hearts Go?" and "We are Never (Ever Ever) Getting Back Together"? Not so much.

In fact, just hearing one or two bars of a bad song at the wrong time are an almost-certain predictor of an earworm that will last at least 24 hours, and often as long as a week. It's like the aura that some migraine sufferers experience. It's like that vaguely feverish malaise that within hours morphs into full-blown flu. By the time you recognize the symptoms, it's probably too late.

*****

Sunday, June 10: So now It’s a rainy and unseasonably cool Sunday afternoon, and I’m just a few miles north of Baltimore, driving southward on I-95 after an overnight trip to Philadelphia. As always, I feel duty-bound to point out that I’m not actually driving the car that’s conveying me home. And I’m not online, either. I could write on my phone, but I’ve never learned how to type fast on a smartphone. On a real keyboard, though, I can type like lightning. I can barely see my fingers--that's how fast they're moving.

I’m beginning to resign myself to the likelihood of a cool and rainy summer. My swimming friends and I have been steeling ourselves to the icy water, because we’re determined to swim and if we wait until the water warms up, we won’t get to swim until July. I’m learning to like the cold water, though I’d take warm over cold any day. But once you get used to it...

*****

Friday, June 15. You might have read or heard somewhere that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup (this, of course, is the thing that I couldn't put in writing). My friends and family in Philadelphia, even the die-hard Flyers fans, all congratulated me last weekend, as if I’d scored the game-winning goal. The last time I lived in a championship city was 1980 (Phillies, World Series), and I'd forgotten how much fun it was to be part of a joyous collective celebration. And I'm really happy for Alexander Ovechkin, the world's greatest hockey player. I know that he's a Putin supporter, but how can you not love this face?

*****
Speaking of my favorite Russians, I finally finished with the Count. I haven't read any reviews of A Gentleman in Moscow, and I wonder if any critics commented on the relative lack of suffering in the book. After all, it's set in Russia, beginning in the 1920s all the way through the mid 1950s--Suffering Central. Without giving too much away, the main character, Count Alexander Rostov, was in 1922 placed under permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel and remained there for over 30 years, eventually becoming the headwaiter of the Boyarsky, the hotel's renowned restaurant. Early in the novel, he is removed from his luxurious, expansive suite, and sent to a tiny room on an upper floor. He has an unpleasant encounter with a Bolsehvik aristocrat-hater.  Soviet-style bureaucracy encroaches on his beloved Boyarsky, even its famous wine cellar.

But no one starves, and no one ends up in a filthy cell in Sukhanova. A few major characters disappear, though, lost to the gulag; and the reader always feels the Stalinist menace hovering over the Metropol and threatening all of its occupants, including the Count and his adopted daughter. I might write more about him next week. Once again, Stalinism and all of its totalitarian relatives seem particularly relevant right now.

*****
Stalinist menace or not, the weather has finally turned and it feels like actual summer again. The Count wasn't beaten or starved or sent to Kolyma, but he was held indoors for 30 years, never stepping outside, even during the summer. And right now, on the southern border of the most fortunate country in the history of the world, there are hundreds of children, separated from their parents, and held indoors in prison-like conditions for most of the day.

I have no idea why some people, or some countries, or some times in history are marked for suffering. I'll probably never know why, at least not in this life. All I can do is to not forget the people who suffer, and try to think about them and pray for them when the sun is shining on the pool water in just the right way and all is well in my particular part of the world at this particular moment. 

GIrl-on-girl crime

Sunday: I have a busy week this week, and will be away next weekend, so I could just not write anything, but I have a more or less continuous once-a-week-at-least streak underway and I feel compelled to maintain it. It's Sunday, and I have to do some actual work for my actual job today, but I thought this morning that if I could choke at least a single paragraph out of myself, then I'll have a start for the week. And then I realized, as I wrote this, that this IS actually a paragraph, which I DID choke out of myself, so I DO have a post started. Mission accomplished!

*****
But really. There's so much to write about, in life and in the world. I could write about a certain hockey team, but apparently, I'm now a sports superstition person. This is why I've been carrying my least-favorite red handbag since the end of April.

Or I could write about media bias and the double standard that so-called conservatives always complain about. This week, they're actually right. I think that Ivanka Trump is a silly, shallow, stupid, and yes, feckless person. I think that her thoughtless little Instagram post featuring her beautiful self holding her beautiful baby was insensitive to the point of cruelty. And I also think that Samantha Bee should be fired.

I'm probably not the most impartial observer here, because I find Samantha Bee even less likable than Ivanka Trump, if that's possible. But that word used to describe a woman is beyond the proverbial pale, and it's even worse when a it's a woman who says it. Like Ms. Norbury said: "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores." And worse.

*****
To the two girls who flung side-eye at me as I walked and sang along to Cascada's "Evacuate the Dance Floor:"  Keep walking, ladies. Nothing to see here. Worry about yourselves. Maybe go and do something useful, like learning CPR. Because what if that beat actually was killing me? Did you think about that?

*****
Tuesday: I read two stories today, one that made me sad, and one that made me even sadder. And I can't help but think that the two are connected. I'm not sure why.

I don't care much about shoes or jewelry, but I have always loved handbags, and Kate Spade's were exactly suited to my taste when I first started to earn enough money to buy a real, grown-woman handbag. In the mid to late 1990s, before I was married and had children, I owned at least 10 Kate Spade bags and wallets. I still have one tiny evening bag; all of the other original nylon Kate Spades from the late '90s are gone (they were beautiful, but not very durable). Kate Spade once wrote or said something about how in the Midwest, where she was from, a woman chose a handbag because it was pretty and she liked it, not because it was a status symbol or the must-have accessory of the moment. Ironically, her simple nylon black-labeled bags became the must-have accessory of the moment; and I won't pretend that I have never been interested in having the must-have thing, just because it's the must-have thing. But the real reason why I bought Kate Spade handbags was because they were pretty and I liked them.

Sometime in 1998 or 1999, I came home from work one night, so exhausted that I took off my shoes and my coat, and fell asleep on my couch, still in my work clothes. A few days later, I was paging through a magazine (I used to love magazines) and saw a Kate Spade advertisement, in which a young woman, just home from work, was sound asleep on her couch, still in her work clothes, her Kate Spade bag sitting on the floor in front of her couch. The young woman in the advertisement was pretty, of course, but not intimidatingly beautiful. Her apartment was colorful and book-filled and cheerful and just a little shabby. It was as if someone had taken a photo of my life, and then made it a little bit nicer and prettier and more glamorous than it really was. And that made me really happy, just for a minute.

Now I wish just for a moment that I'd been the scrapbooking type of girl who cut ads out of magazines and saves them. I also wish that there was some way for Kate Spade to have known how much her work, and her ideas, and her inspired, down-to-earth but completely original vision meant to me and so many other women. Maybe she didn't know. Or maybe she did, but whatever she was suffering was so awful that she couldn't find solace even in her great success and tremendous accomplishments. I'm so sorry for her family, and I hope that they and she will find peace.

*****
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/. 1-800-273-8255.

Guided tour

Summer swim season is officially underway. This means (among lots of other things) that between my normal weekly work newsletter, the weekly news update for the government project, weekly emails to the swim team, and this hot mess, I'm writing four once-a-week bulletins. It's hard to keep it all straight. By July, swim team parents will be reading about IV&V and SharePoint development; while government IT people will get to read all about 15-18 boys' freestyle results. Everyone will learn something new. Everybody wins. 

*****

I had to correct a recent Instagram post because of a typo in a hashtag. This was not the result of carelessness or poor spelling skills (as if) so much as failing eyesight.  And it's only going to get worse.

*****
So that's a lot of writing about why I'm not actually writing this week. Instead, enjoy this photo tour of the scenic Twinbrook neighborhood in Rockville, Maryland. All photos taken with my old Samsung Galaxy S7, which I just replaced with a Google Pixel 2. Maybe I'll tell you all about it. Next week, that is. 

*****

A mailbox shaped like a barn, because why not?

Click here to find out why
I have no idea what kind of bird that is.  

No parking sign: One of the few indicators that the neighbors
of Twinbrook might not welcome the daily office worker invasion. 

Flower walk

A trailer with a cat face. Again: Why not?

Neighborhood watch. Someone probably
called the cops on me. 

A Little Free Library!

I read somewhere that bamboo, once it takes root,
cannot be eradicated, so I hope these people actually
 like their bamboo. 

Hand-painted storm drain next to Twinbrook Elementary School.