Category: Just Because

…was the first time in nine months Ben and I were able to enjoy a [appropriately socially distanced from the rest of humanity] afternoon at Starbucks. It was wonderful.

We have to be out of the hotel room every Saturday for housekeeping to perform what they cal a "deep clean." This requires finding someplace to sequester the dogs while we're out of the room. Thankfully Ben's grandfather is more than willing to watch the little pee buckets at his place while we run errands, do laundry, and yesterday—grab a little respite from all the insanity of the last month.

After grabbing coffee and breakfast, we did our week's laundry and then we hit Best Buy to look at televisions. We didn't buy anything, because we have nowhere to store it, but we have a much better idea of what we want when we settled into our new place in a week's time.

Finished there, we hit Starbucks, grabbed some lunch, and enjoyed the balmy December weather sitting outside for a few hours before picking up the dogs an heading back to the room.

Today we left the dogs in the room (they were amazingly well-behaved) and hit IKEA, where we picked up a few necessities that were going to be needed at our new home before we get the remainder of our belongings returned.

All in all, it was a good weekend.

Next weekend, however, is going to be crazy.

Well, it's done. There are a few items remaining on the property that we need a truck for, but yesterday was my last trip to this house. (Ben and his friends will be removing those items next weekend.) The restoration companies (one for hard goods, one for clothing and linens) came out earlier this week and inventoried, packed, and removed everything that was salvageable from the house. The contents will be cleaned and restored and returned to us wherever we eventually resettle.

We hit the place after they had finished Wednesday evening and retrieved anything else we wanted to keep that they had deemed unsalvageable. For instance, they took the vast majority of my books but curiously left others that were completely undamaged.

We are somewhat fortunate in that with my anal-retentiveness, I'd scanned and saved receipts from many of our big-ticket items which will make getting money out of the insurance company that much easier.

Lately the most common phrase to leave my lips is "Fuck James." (James being our landlord whose negligence while sweating the water lines to the new water heater caused this disaster.) Every time I have to buy something that didn't need to be bought, every time I have to throw myself out into public after nine months of COVID isolation, I mutter "Fuck James."

All this could've been prevented if he'd only used a heat shield up against the wood when he was welding.

To be honest, there were a lot of things we grew to dislike about this house; little annoyances cropped up over the years that became sort of a running joke. (Like for example who puts the refrigerator directly opposite the stove, preventing two people from working in the kitchen at the same time?) Counter space was abysmal; the bathroom horrifically small. And the back yard…don't even get me started.

But it was still home.

Unfortunately, when you have dogs, you never have this luxury.

Byte – one grain of rice

Kilobyte – one cup of rice

Megabyte – 8 bags of rice

Gigabyte – 3 container trucks

Terabyte – 2 container ships

Petabyte – covers Manhattan

Exabyte – covers the UK (3 times)

Zettabyte – fills the Pacific Ocean

(h/t to David Wellman at Myriad Genetics)

Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by ancient Egypt. It started one summer while at my grandparents' house when looking through an issue of National Geographic. In that issue, the disassembly and relocation of the Temple of Abu Simbel was documented, prompted by the rising waters of the Nile after the creation of the Aswan Dam. It was probably the greatest archeological preservation in history and I was captivated. I took the magazine to my mom and showed her, asking, "When did we go here?"

She tried to tell me that we had never been to Egypt, yet I remained convinced that I had visited the temple at some point. (One of the many things that have happened over the course of my life that—despite my professed atheism—makes me remain a closet believer in reincarnation).

My interest never really waned, and in fact in the mid 80s I fantasized about visiting in this life. I said I wanted to be able to see the Great Pyramid while I was still young enough and nimble enough to able to crawl around inside.  I never got around to it for a multitude of reasons (most notably the unrest in the middle east and more importantly a simple lack of funds) and now, sadly, that time has long passed.

Since the height of my interest in the 80s, many new discoveries have been made, and I am now among those who believe that because of water erosion present on the Giza plateau, both the Sphinx and the great pyramids located there are much older than traditional dating would have you believe. Combined with the knowledge being gleaned of the Younger Dryas event (a meteorite swarm that hit Earth approximately 12,000 years ago) I'd go so far as to say they date from that period, if not earlier.

Furthermore, it is postulated that there was a worldwide civilization in existence prior to the impacts; a civilization as advanced as our own, yet one built on a technology that it shared many aspects of modern civilization, also possessed some wholly different and as yet un-discovered.

I mean, are we to believe the precision rock cutting and finishing found in Egypt—seen in several of the photos above (and in fact across the world, all dating from essentially the same period) was done with copper chisels?

If you're interested in going down this particular rabbit hole, all you need to do is Google Younger-Dryas and pack a lunch.

All I know for sure is that these images elicit something on a very gut level. The meanings (and I'm not just referring to the individual hieroglyphs) of all these things is so close—and yet just out of reach. We'll probably never fully understand what motivated the Egyptians, so instead we're simply left appreciating their incredible art.

Maybe I'm a goddamned bleeding heart liberal hippie, but I would gladly pay $0.50 more—oh hell, I'd pay $1.50 more—for fries if it meant enough of a pay increase for the person making those fries that they didn't have to work 3 jobs to survive.

I keep forgetting that Chris Pratt's character has an actual name in Jurassic World.

To me it's just Chris Pratt.

Doing his job.

Saving the world.

Guarding the galaxy.

Only minimal Photoshop required today. Guess I slept okay after all.