Food for thought

On Friday the OGADE drum and gourd ensemble in which J and I participate assembled at a local church gymnasium just before supper. This was a free meal evening, a recurring feature of the social outreach of this particular congregation to any who find themselves in need of nourishment.

Perhaps 70-80 persons were in attendance, along with another 15 or so volunteers who circulated among the tables, bearing paper plates of a macaroni+spinach+mystery meat dish and a half slice of bread to whoever wanted them. There was coffee, tea, juice and water.

So, to the accompaniment of several djembes and assorted shakers, bells and balafon, the evening began. The leader, P, and members of the group who have mastered the various traditional rhythms and even know the various names took the lead as they always do, and soon people were beguiled by the unstoppable energy that cascaded from the stage and neutralized most conversation.

After several numbers were offered it was time for our supper, so we dispersed into the crowd and were served. The table where J and I sat had four interesting companions. One was a fellow who reminded me of Willie Nelson: dark clothes and black shoulder-length hair that came together via an elastic band at the back. He responded that he'd been called worse. Across from him sat a short, thin woman who claimed that she couldn't eat spinach: it would make her puke.

One tall gentleman moved from one end to the other end of the table when a buddy of his showed up. While the buddy chowed down at least four plates worth of the entree, this fellow talked about his job in a plastics extrusion-forming factory. It consisted of waiting 60 seconds and then opening a door to an oven-moulding machine, and retrieving a part that would be further finished into some component of an automobile. He was proud of his consistently-high performance. No, he didn't find it mind-numbingly boring: he was fascinated by the various products that he produced, because they were all done by custom moulds that were changed whenever a given job lot was completed.

-- As an aside, J and I watch a cable program from Canada called "How it's Made". We use it to go to sleep by: I doubt that we've ever seen more than two or three of these programs in its entirety. So much automation, and in many cases, it looks like workers are employed to do the jobs that robots refuse. --

After supper, P handed around a number of small gourds to the children in the hall, and led them around to one of our drum sequences. Such natural performers. Personally, I think he was on a recruitment drive for OGADE.

For the final couple of numbers we were joined by an older fellow who wanted to play his harmonica with us. Of course, lacking amplification, it was completely drowned out by the percussion, but he seemed immensely satisfied by his performance and asked to come back the next time.

Out in the parking lot, L suggested that we go for a coffee, but it's very difficult to find exotic coffee outlets within a reasonable driving distance. Various reasons and excuses were offered as the group melted away, each to their own Friday night activities. Mine, as it turned out, was to go get supper. I was not a huge aficionado of spinach, macaroni and mystery meat.

Later that evening, when we went to the local McDonald's, we were astounded to learn that one couple there had been waiting 20 minutes for their food order. There were only about three people on duty, and several drive-thru cars were waiting as well. J and I circled the local fast-food emporiums but nothing appealed to our jaded tastes, so we pulled into the local Subway outlet and brought home a couple of six-inch delights.

Even the moon was nearly full as we speculated on the nature of life and the injustice of it all. J pointed out that the money squandered by Bush and his pals so far in the Middle East (not to mention the lives lost) could have given every U.S. citizen a million dollars. That would pretty well put church basement charity suppers out of business.

In too deep? Cut it out.

Well, I suppose the big news around here right now is that we topped out at 80 F today, March 25, missing the all-time record by a mere 8 degrees. It was a great day all around.

And in other news, I took a circular saw to the outmoded whirlpool bathtub on the main floor, and converted it to a walk-in type. These are very popular and very expensive amongst the assisted-living crowd, but I’m sure the net effect was to lower our property values by a few thousand Washingtons.

The whirlpool sides were too high for J to vault comfortably, and the tub never belonged there in the first place. A standard tub was removed, and some space in an adjoining closet had been annexed to provide for the bigger receptacle. Before we bought the place, the contractor who had been fixing it for the owner had to change a lot of plumbing and stop a serious leak in the drain system. Even that wasn’t enough to make the tub all that attractive to bathers. The whirlpool initially coughed up green water and plaster dust, and despite repeated cleanings, it seemed unlikely ever to resemble something that would be found in Better Homes and Gardens. We used it only twice in two years.

A shower stall, on the other hand, would prove prohibitively expensive. So I cut to the chase, so to speak, and over two days fashioned the new look. The problem of supporting the shower curtain over the 20 inch open space was solved with a plexiglass panel that hooks over the side of the tub. The electrical connections have been rendered inoperative, which will solve the problem of guests thinking they’re turning on the vent fan and getting an obscene burp from the jacuzzi. The old nozzles have been covered by glued-on rubber drain stoppers.

There’s still work to do. The water in the Great Miami Aquifer is notoriously hard, and it takes only a few weeks for rust stains to attach to walls and curtains. The easy part is finished. Now I gotta clean the grout.

SMART for life.

Rebuilding a computer that's gone bad is not easy. It takes a lot of time and better-than-average familiarity with the inner workings of a computer.

I've been trying to do that now for two days for a colleague. But this computer presents its own set of issues. The hard drive (as most do) has a "health monitor" called SMART, which warns you when you boot it that the disk drive is pretty well on its last legs, and you best get your act together and save anything worth saving to another medium before the drive goes to the big recycle center in the sky.

Rather than get into the boring details, let me just say that we're on the way to recovery. It won't be perfect, but neither will it be a total loss.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a SMART system built into our lives that would start flashing warnings like "Death is Nature's way of telling you to slow down" when you're veering towards self-destruction? I'm not talking, necessarily, about the physical part. There's tons of physicians willing to take your case if you are interested.

No, what I mean is, I guess, a kind of seventh sense that says "you know, given your future potential, you need to start wearing a helmet when you're on your Harley." And then, just in case you missed the message, it would accompany the text crawler with an in-skull video of a morgue drawer being pulled out, with you in a torn leather jacket sleeping the eternal sleep of the un-helmeted. And you'd see that vision periodically, like every time you turned the ignition key.

I don't think it's that we're by design inclined to ignore wisdom when it confronts us. It may be more that we obey the Law of Inertia more than we know: things like to keep on doing what they're already doing. Same holds true of those asteroids that are supposed to collide with earth over the next few decades. Ditto for beliefs, biases and bodies.

Trouble is, if you obey the Law of Inertia, the Law of Averages will gitcha.