Where Are My Teeth?

The last one for a while

So we sat out in a couple of lawn chairs with the camera and binoculars until the moon had gone entirely pumpkin-colored and the autofocus gave up in disgust. The picture doesn't do justice to what the binocs showed -- bright, vibrant, almost three-dimensional. Looking at the rest of the sky was pretty amazing too, with stars upon stars.

Next time I might try for a slightly longer lens, and maybe the telescope for viewing by eye. But the moon will barely be above the horizon, so who knows...

So that's how it works

I've been giving blood on and off for 25 years now, but until yesterday I never really thought much about the mechanism whereby blood gets pumped out of your vein and into the little plastic bag. "Oh, it has something to do with blood pressure," I thought, but really didn't consider it past that. Everyone who already knows all about this, just stop reading now and consider me an idiot.

The woman in the next couch over was having trouble finishing her pint, and the phlebotomist explained to me that it was taking so long because her blood-pressure cuff hadn't been tight enough. Huh? I'd always thought that the cuff was there to regulate the bleeding, not to enhance it.

But no. Why do you think they crank the cuff up to tourniquet level and ask you to make a fist -- it's so that the blood pressure in your vein will increase and it will stand out nicely. And then once the needle is in, that same squeeze of the fist pumps blood out of the vein into the bag. If the cuff weren't clamping your vein down, making the fist would just pump the blood right past the needle and back into the rest of your body.

It's so obvious I should have recognized it decades ago, but better late than never. And I didn't even fall over or spring a post-donation leak this time (even if I did end up sitting across the canteen table from an ex-master-carpenter telling me way too much about the badly restored russian painting he gave to a british widow -- with comments on how he thought she had become widowed -- and about the tool collection he had tried to give to a scout camp for the boys to use, but that ended up being pounced on piecemeal by adults instead. Oh, and the lousy meal he had at the Capitol Plaza when he took some relation he didn't even like for a birthday dinner, and...)

The silent bigotry of low inflation

When I was a kid in the time of dollars that shrank and prices that rose for no good reason other than that they were already rising, it was pretty much a given that the value of something in currency was just a temporary marker, not to be taken seriously for the long term. When my sister with a new PhD started collecting a higher salary than my father had in his last year as a full professor, she was making less than half as much in real money.

But in the past 20 years or so, recessions and punitive economic policies and technology and some very very good luck have beaten inflation down to the point where only people who want to send their kids to college soon, pay for medical care or buy a new house have to worry about how prices are rising from year to year. For everything else, "same as last year, or the year before" is close enough.

But 20 years of relatively low inflation is a long time. Back when such things were crucial everyday knowledge, my father taught me the Rule of 72: divide 72 by the current inflation rate, and that's the number of years it will take prices to double. Well, we're about there. The respectable-but-not-princely $20,000 a year I earned in my first reporting job out of college is equivalent to $40,000 a year in today's dollars. The 99 cents I was willing to pay for a 15-ounce can of jack mackerel back then (add some bread and have lunch and dinner for a whole weekend) would be an outrageous $2 now.

So? Every generation has had to recalibrate their expectations about fair prices and wages at some point. But decades of low inflation have made it that much harder for the one currently in middle age. When I hear a friend in new york is renting an apartment for $2500 a month, I think of something spacious or done to the nines, not the walkup railroad flat I shared with another off-semester graduate when I found my feet in the city. When I hear about a reporter or an assembler with 10 years experience making $33,000 a year, I think, "Oh, that's a pretty decent job", not "Oh, that's less than I made my first year out." Heck, when an editor offers the same dollar a word that I was getting in 1997 I don't automatically think "84 cents".

For all of us whose income has been going up much faster than inflation for the past 10 or 20 years, those minor adjustments of 15 or 20 or 35 percent don't really make much of a difference. Yet.

Driving IFR

A few days back I had occasion to drive to New Hampshire and back, and the luck of the draw gave me a new Prius. I really liked driving it (although the seat was not as comfortable as I might have hoped and I really missed our blind-spot mirror). It's zippy and nimble and the control-panel display is endlessly fascinating whether you're monitoring your instantaneous miles per gallon and regenerative-braking score or just marveling at how many options there are for the air conditioner.

It's also a little bit strange for anyone used to driving a normal car and half-consciously sensing the dozens of little clues that engine and transmission give you about how fast you're going, whether you're speeding up or slowing down, just how steep a hill you're climbing and so forth. There's only a distant correlation between engine revs and speed in the Prius -- heck, the motor doesn't even start up till you're doing 15 or 20 miles an hour -- and I kept wondering why there was so much wind noise until I realized it was because there wasn't any damn engine noise at all much of the time at highway speeds.

The whole drivetrain also has very little effective mass, so the car bleeds off speed very easily when you pull back on the gas pedal (unless of course it's going downhilll, in which case it will pick up just as readily. I regularly found myself 5 miles and hour faster or slower than I'd thought I was going the last time I looked at the speedometer (the digital display doesn't help much there either).

Of course the same thing happens in a well-tuned non-hybrid car when you're zipping along the highway, but somehow here it made me think more. The speedometer really was the only thing that connected me to to car's performance on the road, especially in new-hampshire-driver traffic where the guy you start to pass because he's going 60 might be doing 75 by the time you catch up with him. I found myself wishing for a different set of instruments and also wishing I'd read the manual so I could turn on the cruise control. Or maybe a little electronic system that pumped synthesize engine and transmission noise through the stereo speakers.

As cars get fancier, the sense of driving by instruments is probably only going to get more pronounced.

Wine

The nice lady at my table (nice because she stayed even after I mentioned I knew no one else in the room) didn't like the california chardonnay or the syrah. I think she was right about the first (who cares how buttery-oaky-full-bodied you are after some point), but I disliked the french chardonnay it was matched with only marginally less.

As for the syrah, it had a bunch of musty notes that made me feel right at home, as if I were drinking any superannuated red from my father's cellar. Sort of "eh" at first, but but definitely interesting to think on. (Surprising that it should be only 3 years old.) The corresponding australian shiraz was perfectly fine, lacking the rip-your-tongue-out tannins, but kind of one-note after a while.

The occasion: a benefit wine tasting for our local library with the executive chef of the Blodgett Company (think almost every pizza oven made in the US) and lovely bread, cheeses and chocolates from all the usual local suspects. Catered, of course, and with pastries by the nice folks at NECI. I should like to say that the best bits were from blackflower chocolate, who put things like lavender and chili peppers and I'm not sure what all (I think the one I had might have been lightly curried) in their truffles and dust them with exquisite desgns.

Did I mention that even with a discard bucket five different wines have a definite effect?

Solar-powered car

This is pretty cool. I can think of a bunch of ways that the thing could be made more efficient (concentrators, better soalr cells, cells that split wate directly using sunlight rather than electricity...) but the fact that a bunch of high school students could do this with no real previous expertise shows that it's not the technology holding things back.

A walk in the woods

I hadn't gone for a walk in a while -- gluing and spraying the cabinets has been taking up much of my fair-weather time -- but today was so beautiful I had to go out. T-shirt weather, with red and brown leaves carpeting the ground and plenty more aloft.

So on the way back from a more or less usual round I took a side trail I'd never done before, heading up over the ridge that separates the little neighborhood downhill down the hill from us from the park. Of course I got lost, or at least bewildered, and rather than ask directions at the nice new house with a big covered porch a hundred yards down the wash, I carefully began retracing my steps, orienting mostly by mountain-bike gashes in the mud at the low spots.

There was a little rise that I just know would lead me to the back of a neighbor's house if only I could find a way through, but it was getting toward dark, so I began heading backtoward the trail when suddenly there was a crashing in the brush. I froze behind the nearest big pine tree and started taking pictures as the deer nosed its way through the open woods toward me. Finally a biker came tearing along the trail and it decamped.