From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I think the worst thing about having a head cold all week isn't the sinus pressure on my skull, or the way the tip of my nose now feels like sandpaper. It's having spent a whole week breathing through my mouth.

I'm now on the "feeling better, will be ejecting mucus for another month or two" stage. The home test says I don't have covid or influenza. But this is the second time in four months that I've been absolutely hammered by this nastiness. Did the common cold get stronger, or did I just get weaker?

An edited version of this article appeared in this moth's BARC Bark, the Boulder Amateur Radio Club newsletter.

At the beginning of February the Parks on the Air website informed me that I’d made contact with one thousand parks. This milestone is celebrated with the Western Prairie Fringed Orchid Hunter Award, complete with a colorful PDF I can download, print, and frame at my own expense. It could take a position on the wall on my shack next to my Wiggins Acalypha Hunter award for 700 parks, my Oasis Activator award for doing 20 activations at Sawhilll Ponds, and my Rover Warthog award for activating five parks in a single day. There’s only one problem: my shack is whatever picnic table I’ve found to set up my radio gear, so there’s no walls to hang a frame. Maybe I could nail my Howell’s Spectacular Thelypody Hunter award (500 parks) to a tree and hang my end-fed from it.

In the 2010s “gamification” was a hot term in the tech world. Using elements from video games like high scores, streaks, profile avatars, badges, and leveling up tickled the human brain in ways to remain focused on using the app. Anyone who’s stuck with language practice because the Duolingo owl doesn’t want you to lose your streak has experienced the subtle nudge of gamification.

Amateur radio is of course no stranger to gamification. The first DX Century Club (DXCC) members were honored almost 90 years ago, and the hope of getting a few new countries in the log has driven many hams to innovate improvements in their antennas and station design. What’s new with the POTA awards system is the onramp: operators receive a digital award on their profile with just 10 parks, DX awards start at 5 countries, and the parks and QSOs counters go up every time they load their profile, and the page has more than a dozen charts showing progress towards different awards. Progress is tracked almost instantly and with minimal bookkeeping requirements: no need to wonder when your QSL card from Rhode Island will arrive so you can finally claim Worked All States.

When people ask about my hobby, I often answer that I go to a state or national park, set up a ham radio, talk to people, and earn Fake Internet Points. The real reward, of course, is having fun outdoors. But I would be lying to myself if I said the fake internet points weren’t an effective motivator. With the Diamond Activator award (activating 50 parks) and over 5000 QSOs under my belt, I’ve been striving for some of the more challenging awards. The N1CC Activator award is my current target: activate 10 parks on 10 different ham bands. It may just be fake internet points, but it convinced me to experiment with portable 80 meter antennas and get my CW skill into good enough shape that I can work 30 meters. I’ve also made sure to get out to a park at least once each month for the last two years, just in case POTA adds a new award for that. Not bad for a pile of PDFs.

At the end of December I read Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. Grandin is one of the most famous people with autism, or perhaps it would be better to say that she's one of the people most well-known for having autism. Grandin thinks in pictures, and Visual Thinking draws on her own mind, her experience working with others, and psychological research to talk about three different types of thinking.

• Object visual thinking involves mental images of specific things or scenes. Thinking about airplanes involves recalling mental images of specific airplanes the person has seen, in person or in a photograph: perhaps a Boeing 737 or a Cessna 182. Temple Grandin is an object visual thinker, and famously designs livestock handling facilities by visualizing what an animal would see from a particular location.
• Visual-spatial thinking involves thinking in relations, abstractions, and patterns. Thinking about airplanes might involve thinking about the general structure of an airplane—the fuselage connects to wings, the cockpit, tail, etc.—without thinking about any specific plane.
• Verbal thinking involves words and sequences rather than images. Thinking about airplanes might involve the process of flight: boarding, taxiing, acceleration on the runway, liftoff, and so on.

The book's focus is on visual thinkers, people whose main mode of thought is either object-visual thinking or visual-spatial thinking, particularly the former. People on the autism spectrum are often visual thinkers, though not all visual thinkers are autistic or vice versa and neither has a bright-line diagnostic. As an autistic child, Temple Grandin didn't learn to speak until later than many children, and she struggled in many classes in school because the material was presented for verbal thinkers and folks who could do abstract reasoning. She talks about finally connecting with coursework that made sense to her when she got to shop class, which is about working with physical objects. Another key educational experience was going to a boarding school which involved chores like caring for animals; lacking language, animals are naturally visual thinkers.

Grandin talks about the kinds of work that the three types of thinkers do well. You'll often find object visual thinkers in roles that require hands-on work: mechanics, machinists, drafters, builders, equipment operators, repair people. They're excellent at troubleshooting machinery, and they're able to tinker and build things with whatever supplies may be at hand. Visual-spatial thinkers are often drawn to engineering, mathematics, and computers; they design complex systems and find patterns in the world. Verbal thinkers are, naturally, drawn to work that's focused on words or sequential thinking. Lawyers, politicians, authors, and journalists are often verbal thinkers, and project managers can apply sequential thinking to make sure things happen on time. Grandin likes to talk about how the two types of visual thinkers are complimentary when designing something. Abstract visual thinkers can do all the modeling and calculations to ensure a factory building will be sturdy and that the machinery runs reliably. But a factory designed only by abstract thinkers likely won't run very effectively because they tend to overlook problems in the specific details of things work on the factory floor: the awkward movements a worker needs to do at the assembly line, or poor lighting of a workbench because something's blocking the lamps. Visual-spatial thinkers can make great electrical engineers, but you might want an object visualizer as an electrician. In the software space you might want an object visual thinker for a UI designer, a visual-spatial thinker writing code, and a verbal thinker as product manager, figuring out the user journeys the system will support.

A lot of the book talks about how modern American society is letting object visual thinkers down. A lot of schooling is designed for verbal or abstract thinking, and object visualizers struggle. Grandin reports that object visual thinkers often have a very difficult time with algebra, which they find too abstract and this challenge prevents many people from graduating from high school. However, many of these same people excel at geometry and trigonometry because their visual cortex can make sense of the relationships. "Let students take trigonometry if they fail algebra" might sound weird to folks used to the traditional progression of high school, but it might result in having a lot more Americans who are good at math, at least some parts of it. Grandin highlights George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act for making this problem worse: schools are graded and funded based on students' standardized test scores, so the incentive is to focus instruction on what will be tested. There's no standardized test that gives subjects a pile of lumber and a box of tools and asks them to assemble a chair, so when budget cuts come, classes like shop and music get taken away. Colleges and universities tend to make things even more abstract and more verbal, and the availability of trade schools, apprenticeships, and other hands-on education has been dwindling. Companies often have a college degree requirement, not realizing they may be cutting object visualizers out of the employment pool. Grandin decries that the result is an America where we're losing the ability to fix things.

This has political implications, too. (Here I'm building on Temple Grandin's foundation, she doesn't frame the book this way.) There are fewer narratives in American politics stronger than the middle class dream of success. After World War II, a man with no education beyond high school could get a good-paying job as a factory worker, a miner, an auto mechanic, doing appliance repair, or many other roles that object visual thinkers do well. These jobs offered the chance to own a home, raise a family, and enjoy leisure time; a combination that was uncommon for their parents' generation. As the 20th Century drew to a close, and accelerating in the 21st Century, the American economy shifted strongly to jobs that reward abstract or verbal thinking. Globalization sent a lot of the manufacturing jobs to lower-cost countries while domestic production became increasingly automated. (Fun fact: the U.S. is still the world's leading manufacturer, even though we employ a fraction of the manufacturing workforce we once did: American manufacturing is mostly done by machines.) Computers and the Internet gave powerful tools to abstract and verbal thinkers who are able to thrive in a service and information economy. High-tech manufacturing also made hands-on work more difficult: in the 1960s and '70s, buying a Heathkit stereo system and assembling it yourself could save significant money and teach you something useful at the same time, and you could easily fix it if a component failed. Today with high-tech automated assembly and microprocessors running everything, the cost to pay someone to fix a damaged Sonos speaker system is probably higher than the price of buying a new one. Starting in 2015, America saw Donald Trump's messaging resonate with older voters who work in these object visualizing jobs, and especially among voters who identify with such work that's been in decline like coal mining and assembly lines. Should it be any surprise in 2024 that Harris outperformed Trump by 13 points among college-educated voters, but Trump was up 24 points among men without a college degree? Millennials living in their parents' basements and playing video games all day was something of a running joke in the late aughts, but that also describes visual thinkers who've been left out of the modern American social structure and have grown to resent folks who were able to follow the abstract and verbal path through college and the modern hands-off economy.

I'd watched Temple Grandin talk about this book at Google, so I was curious how the ideas of a highly visual thinker would come across in a book, a naturally verbal and sequential medium. At times reading the book felt like listening to Temple Grandin give a talk; she often communicates in specific anecdotes, and related stories recur throughout the book. One of the big themes of the book is how people with different thinking styles can collaborate, and in the book she gives praise to her editor who's able to apply strong verbal thinking to organize the scattered notes and fragments that Temple gives her. This is certainly helpful in making this information about visual thinking accessible to verbal thinkers and readers. I found it interesting, though, that a book which is all about thinking in images and spatial relationships contains 400 pages of words and no photographs, illustrations, or diagrams. As a visual-spatial thinker, I was hoping to see some kind of 2D representation of how a visual thinker might operate. I wonder how many visual thinkers would benefit from learning this information, but get turned off by a book that's nothing but words.

I think I first heard about visual-spatial thinking, as distinct from object visualizing, from a previous Temple Grandin talk. I've considered myself on the autism spectrum for over 20 years, since I learned about Asperger's syndrome. When I heard Temple Grandin explain how her brain works I said "that's definitely not how mine works." While I can build intricate and elegant software systems, I'm perennially bad at building physical things. Cognitive tasks like mentally rotating a cube are challenging for me, but I can visualize a map of the whole world or specific areas, and at talent shows I like to recite every country in the world in geographic order. Unlike many kids with autism I didn't have any trouble learning language, and I always read above grade level. But I think my language use shows signs of spatial and abstract thinking: I've always loved puns, which feel to me like I'm demonstrating a multi-dimensional linkage between words that aren't present in the normal linear version. As a kid I often focused on the literal meaning of a set of words, much to the consternation of verbal thinkers who would say "you know what I mean!" (I still do this as an adult sometimes, but I have four decades of building a database of what people actually mean when they say something that a program would interpret differently.) I also tend to be very long-winded: an excellent verbal thinker can convey an idea without using a lot of words, while I tend to say or write down every sentence that comes to my mind related to a topic. Someone might mention a topic at lunch and I'll spend three minutes talking about all the things I learned from Wikipedia that are tangentially related. This is a bit like reading a map out loud: the river we were talking about touches another river, so let's row up stream and see where that one goes.

It's important for people creating tools and products to design with the different modes of thinking in mind. Much as a product that was designed and tested entirely by right-handed people is likely to be awkward for lefties, a product or process that was designed around the way verbal thinkers operate is likely to be frustrating to visual thinkers. Google Maps is an interesting example here. At the core, the data is inherently spatial: where is everything? But there are ways to expose that data that fit different thinking patterns. If someone wants directions from one place to another, Maps could show a path on a map and instructions like "take 6th Avenue to Broadway and turn south, then turn west on Alameda." This is great for spatial thinkers like me; I might ignore the written instructions entirely and just look at the lines on the map; if I take a different turn I can still reach the destination because I've formed a mental model of the space between here and there. Verbal thinkers might focus on the step-by-step instructions, but when they come to each intersection they'll have to figure out "which way is south?" So instead of cardinal directions, let's use left and right turns. Object visualizers still might have trouble, though: the map is an abstract set of lines and rectangles that can be hard to turn into 3D space, and the turn-by-turn instructions are a bunch of street names and numbers that need to be kept in order: "do I turn on Alameda before Broadway, or is it the other way?" So Google Maps recently added navigation by landmarks: "turn right after the McDonalds" and "turn left at the second traffic light." To get even more context, object visualizers can drop into Street View and see what all the buildings look like at an intersection. This multi-modal approach to directions is a big win over paper maps, when everyone but the spatial thinkers was faced with a daunting puzzle. The old stereotype of a woman in the passenger seat complaining that the man in the driver's seat didn't pull over and ask for directions might have been a conflict between verbal and visual thinking…

I was pleased to learn that object visual thinkers do share a trait with visual-spatial thinkers: we organize things by keeping track of their physical location. It might look like a random pile of papers on a desk to a verbal thinker, but ask a visual thinker to retrieve a particular document and they can probably find it quickly. But if a verbal thinker comes in and tries to be helpful by organizing all the papers into an efficient filing system the visual thinker will be unable to find anything, because it's not where they last put it. These two organization approaches are "piling" and "filing." My coworkers are often confused about how I can manage having 20 browser windows open with 50+ tabs in each. I find it quite easy: each window has a loosely-related theme, and I remember where on the desktop each window sits. When my workstation switched to Wayland, Chrome was unable to restore windows to their original locations when it opened and I was completely flustered; I had to spend 20 minutes a week figuring out which window was which and moving them back to their original location. On the other hand, I always wonder how someone who's only got one browser window open can keep track of what they were working on :-)

Hey, I've got a favor to ask you. Please call your Member of Congress and ask them to support including the Energy Permitting Reform Act in the budget continuing resolution. This legislation is moving fast, so please make the call this weekend. I hear that House Democrats particularly need to hear from constituents about this. If you don't have Congress on speed-dial you can use the tool at https://cclusa.org/take-action. It will take approximately one or two minutes total.


Background: Democrats passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act, this congress. But only about 20% of the IRA's potential benefits will be realized if we can't build clean energy projects and connect them to the U.S. electric grid faster. It currently takes federal agencies an average of 4.5 years to complete environmental impact assessments for large energy projects. This timeline can be sped up without negatively impacting quality: we want the same decisions to be reached—yes to good projects and no to bad projects—faster. This July, the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee introduced a bipartisan bill to address some of the problems which unnecessarily delay energy project; this bill passed through committee on a 15 to 4 vote and has broad support in the Senate. With a divided Congress the bill is naturally a compromise, and does have some provisions about fossil fuel permitting. This led many environmental groups to reflexively oppose the bill when it was announced. However, more than 95% of projects waiting to be built are clean energy projects, so if we make the process for permitting (or rejecting) all projects faster, clean energy will outcompete and replace fossil fuel energy. Careful modeling indicates that the Energy Permitting Reform Act will have between a modest climate benefit and a large climate benefit by 2050, the typical target date for net-zero emissions. Additionally, many of the fossil fuel pieces of the bill are things that the Trump administration is likely to do anyway, so please encourage your Democratic House members to support this bill, rather than getting the fossil fuel parts without the clean energy parts next year.

It's October, which means I'm now allowing myself to start scheming about Advent of Code 2024. The last four years I've taken it as an opportunity to learn a new language. This year for some reason I'm inspired to learn a stack-oriented language, so I've been playing with PostScript. The world has generally moved on from PostScript: it gave birth to the wildly-popular PDF format without quite as much "Anything goes in this Turing-complete document presentation language," and even the latest version of macOS Preview.app can't read PostScript files. But if you set aside the fact that a majority of the language builtins are designed for using graphics, text, fonts, and printer hardware, it's a pretty slick language. You've basically got two things available: a stack of data and operands and a stack of dictionaries for dynamic name lookup. Both the programmer and the computer use basically the same model for evaluating code: read a token; if it's data then push it on the stack, if it's executable then run it, reading from the operator stack and writing to the same stack.

Programming language tutorials, particularly for functional languages, have a strong affinity for calculating the n'th Fibonacci number, but let's generate the whole sequence by just calling the same "function" over and over again (== is "print the source representation of the object on top of the stack and GS> is the Ghostscript prompt):

GS> /fib { 2 copy add } bind def
GS> [ 1 1 fib fib fib fib ] ==
[1 1 2 3 5 8]
GS> [ 1 1 15 { fib } repeat ] ==
[1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597]

Stack-based languages can have pretty simple syntax rules. That [ ] array syntax isn't "parse elements between the brackets as an array." Instead, the [ operator pushes a mark onto the stack and the ] operator builds an array with all the items on the stack until the first mark. Everything between the brackets is just normal PostScript code being executed on the stack. The following code builds an array of increasingly nested empty arrays by copying the whole array so far:

GS> [ 5 { counttomark [ exch 1 add copy pop ] } repeat ] ==
[[] [[]] [[] [[]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]]]]]
% Or if you prefer some non-empty values to help read
GS> [ 42 5 { counttomark [ exch 1 add copy pop ] } repeat ] ==
[42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]]]]]

I've heard that some functional programming devotees might think of the non-negative numbers as a sequence of nested empty lists…

In PostScript, procedures are just arrays with the executable bit set, and you can construct and manipulate them as arrays. {} is syntax for an executable array, [] is syntax for a regular array, and cvx converts its operand to executable:

GS> { (hello world\n) print } exec
hello world
GS> % same thing:
[(hello world\n) (print) cvx] cvx exec
hello world

Since a procedure is just a mutable array of things to do, you can replace things in that array. Here's a self-modifying procedure that increments the first value inside itself, similar to a static int in a function in C:

GS> /selfmod { 1 (caller #) print == currentdict /selfmod get dup 0 get 1 add 0 exch put } bind def
GS> selfmod
caller #1
GS> selfmod
caller #2
GS> selfmod
caller #3

Page 115 of Thinking in PostScript defines a procedure by name including some initialization code; it then redefines itself without the initialization code the first time it's run. (The fact that the book is PDF file instead of a PostScript one says something indicative about the status of PostScript in the modern world.)

While PostScript has a couple hundred operators that are part of the language, a lot of those are for doing things like drawing on the page and selecting fonts. The parts of the "standard library" for working with strings and arrays is pretty spartan: even concatstrings is a Ghostscript addition, and I think people copy/pasted their own concatenation function all over the place for years. Since my Advent of Code interests don't include "Let's re-implement parsing a variable-width text file into fixed-size mutable strings each night," I've been getting some practice with the language by writing some core library functions that I'm certain will be used frequently.

I was about to work on the functional programming standbys like map and reduce, but I realized that with arrays constructed by "run all the code between brackets, then move everything from the stack between those brackets into an array" that having a separate function for map would just be extra noise and the basic iteration operator does the trick. Here's the PostScript equivalent of myarray.map { x -> x + 1 } and mydict.mapValues { i -> x * x }.

% Add 1 to each element of an array:
[ myarray { 1 add } forall ]
% Create a dictionary with the same keys as mydict, but square the values:
<< mydict { dup mul } forall >>

reduce (or fold depending on your dialect) is similarly straightforward if you supply with the accumulator rather than using the first array value. Here's myarray.reduce(0) { x, acc -> x + acc } (sum) and an implementation of myarray.all { x -> x % 2 == 0 } (are all items are even?).

0 myarray { add } forall
true myarray { 2 mod 0 eq and } forall

None of these need special handling for empty collections. They also work to iterate through bytes of a string (though there doesn't seem to be a short way to construct a string from an array of bytes). The all implementation can become an any by switching true to false and and to or. all becomes none by adding not before and. Short-circuiting can be added with dup { exit } if after the and/or.

My employer-sponsored health plan has a "specialty pharmacy" insurance which is separate from the ordinary pharmacy benefits. Painkillers for surgery post-op, antibiotics when you're sick, prescription NSAIDs for chronic inflammatory disease, and all those other medicines that come in an orange plastic container are reliably dispensed by my local King Soopers pharmacy with what I would describe as a high level of competency. Other than "we haven't filled it yet, can you come back in an hour" I haven't had any problems acquiring or paying for any of these medications for fifteen years.

The "biologic" disease-modifying drug I take for psoriatic arthritis, on the other hand, is considered a "specialty medication" which means it's paid for by CVS Specialty Insurance, filled and delivered by CVS Specialty Pharmacy, and picked up at my local CVS Pharmacy. Despite all having the word "CVS" in the name, as far as I can tell they're three separate entities who are almost incapable of coordinating with each other.

Drug manufacturers have learned that they can charge a lot of money for biologics. But if they charge too much money, patients with a 10% copay will balk at the price, avoid filling the prescription, and the drug company will miss out on the other 90% that would've been paid by insurance. So they came up with a way to hack the U.S. health payment system: offer patients a "co-pay assistance" card, which is basically a persistent coupon lowering your out-of-pocket costs to almost nothing. Patients will then keep filling the prescription because it's basically free, leading to something of a principal–agent problem where the person making buying decisions has no incentive to consider the cost of the item. My employer ends up footing the bill, but I'm only annoyed with this situation in principle: in practice I get free drugs. (My employer benefits too, because I was not very productive when my symptoms were causing problems and I wasn't taking the drugs.)

In late January or so of this year, I received notification that starting April 1st, our CVS Specialty Insurance plan would no longer cover Humira—the name-brand adalimumab—and would instead be covering Hyrimoz, a cheaper generic adalimumab. This seemed like a bit of an unfair move, since employees can only change decisions about health care plans near the end of the year, but as a fan of generic medicines this seems like a sensible choice. However, although this change was announced in January so people could start worrying about it, we couldn't actually take any action like getting a doctor to change prescriptions for more than a month. Come mid-March I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy to fill my new Hyrimoz prescription, but was told that since CVS Specialty Insurance didn't cover it until April 1st I couldn't actually place an order until April (including "place an order in March for April delivery"). This was rather inconvenient, since I was leaving town for two weeks starting April 1st and didn't want to spent my road trip vacation arguing with pharmacy customer service people when things would eventually go awry. The customer service rep did inform me that I could set up the co-pay assistance card in advance, though. After several attempts to use the drug manufacturer's website that had some technical hot mess I can't recall, I finally got a PDF that had two sets of discount code numbers on it, one "for NDC starting with 61314" and one "for NDC starting with 83457." As a health insurance policy holder I still have no idea what NDC stands for, nor how I would figure out which of those two apply to me. I relayed this to the person at CVS Specialty Pharmacy who suggested she take down both sets of numbers and put them both in their system so they could figure it out once the prescription actually gets filled.

Come April I was able to order a 3-month supply of Hyrimoz, plus a bag of alcohol wipes and a sharps container. I was somewhat surprised that the medication was delivered without much issue, given my prior experience of organizational incompetence ordering Humira. When I tried to pick everything up, though, the retail CVS Pharmacy folks were getting some indication in their system that they shouldn't hand over the sharps container and alcohol swabs, so I walked away with a couple thousand dollars of medicine and not ten dollars worth of common medical supplies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (It only took a day or two for them to realize I could take a sharps container to dispose of the future medical waste they handed me the previous day.)

A few weeks later, someone from CVS Specialty Pharmacy billing department called and informed me that I still hadn't paid my copay for that order. I was surprised, since I'd given them all the information on the card which claimed my copay would be zero dollars. I think we discovered that there wasn't a card on file, so I gave both sets of numbers again and the rep said she would rebill. Problem solved? Hardly. I don't recall the exact timeline, but when I attempted to refill the prescription in the early summer I discovered it was on hold because the prior order hadn't been paid. So I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy; we went through the numbers again, and she determined that based on the diagnostic code from CVS Specialty Insurance the code for the wrong NDC was in their system and she didn't have the other code, so I re-provided all the digits. After some time on hold she confirmed the order had been rebilled.

So imagine my surprise this weekend when I was sorting through an accumulated pile of mail and discovered that the charge from April had been sent to collections. I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy this morning, and pointed out they had a discount card on file. The representative said they would rescind the bill from collections and rebill insurance. Will CVS manage to pay itself this time? Who knows! The two companies seem to share the same name but otherwise lack the ability to communicate effectively.

Payment aside, order fulfillment and delivery is also a comedy of errors. In early September I received a text message from CVS Specialty Pharmacy that said my prescription was ready to be refilled, but when I went to CVS Specialty Pharmacy's website it said I couldn't refill for another week and a half, and once that time passed I could only schedule delivery for another week and a half later. When I arrived at the retail CVS Pharmacy I was handed a large paper bag that was wet and soggy on the bottom. This contained a cold bag with three ice packs and a single box of medicine, 90 alcohol swabs, and three sharps containers. It's unclear to me whether the Specialty side (which distributes this temperature-controlled medication from a warehouse somewhere) or the retail side (which keeps medicine in the refrigerator until I pick it up) were the ones who decided to keep sharps containers and alcohol swabs should be kept refrigerated, but I'm quite glad I didn't pick this one up on a bicycle commute day because that bag was a wet mess. More importantly, I was rather miffed at CVS Specialty for taking my "Please send me three months worth of medicine, alcohol swabs, and a sharps container" into one month of medicine, a year's worth of sharps disposal, and three years worth of swabs. The order sheet says "2 ml" of Hyrimoz, and each box contains two 0.4 ml pens, so it would take two and a half boxes to match two milliliters of medicine; I only got 0.8. I attempted to call CVS Pharmacy retail about this problem, but every attempt to use their phone tree's "Leave a voicemail and we will call you back" feature resulted in the computer voice saying they were sorry. So I stopped by the pharmacy in person to tell them (1) file a ticket to get your phone system fixed and (2) you didn't give me my whole order. The pharmacist explained that they could view and dispense CVS Specialty Pharmacy orders but couldn't do anything else like investigate why it was wrong, so she gave me the phone number for Specialty. You guys are both CVS Pharmacies, why can't your computers talk to each other? Another call to the other CVS turned up the fact that two prescriptions, one for a one-month supply and one for a three-month supply, were both in the computer system, and the system automatically selected the first and billed insurance for it. She said she put a note on my record to do the three-month supply next time, and assured me that I would be able to place that order in October. I've a rather sneaking suspicion that they'll manage to fumble something again and I'll have to take another adventure through their customer support lines to convince their computer that I'm eligible for more drugs before December. (I discovered my previous order sheet this evening which says it was filled for 6 ml, which would be a 10 week supply rather than a 6 week supply. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that CVS Specialty can't even get arithmetic right.)

I wonder if it's occurred to the folks who run my company's benefit plan that I'm not doing anything productive for the company if I spend half a day getting derailed by systematic incompetency every few months.

… the void cat stares back at you.

On the first weekend of last July we got Pearl from the Boulder Humane Society. A slim gray cat with splotches of white and dull orange, she might camouflage well in a boulderfield. They told us she'd probably had a litter of kittens, and had been sent from Texas, which apparently is the source of a lot of shelter cats. Yet another teen mother fleeing Texas for Colorado for better reproductive health care. A teen in cat years, she was long and lanky, with an unusual running gait of paws crossing in front of each other. It took some time to get her comfortable with close human contact.

As an adult Pearl is still long, but looks less like a teenager trying to grow into her own body. She's comfortable with her two humans, but on her terms: she doesn't like to be picked up and hardly ever sits on a lap, though she often sleeps next to us in the bed. A cat with strong boundaries, like Kelly's first cat Joan. She rarely meows. She's a clever problem solver and a determined huntress: she caught four mice in two days this winter. She'll do incredible acrobatic maneuvers to catch a hair tie, and after defeating it in fierce battle she may carry it to her food bowl before eating a bit. This cat is not food motivated, she's hunt motivated.

We've long thought that Pearl would do well with a kitten adopted sibling as a partner in play. Humans can only shoot so many hair ties before they need to go to work or keep fussing with a laptop. Two cats can chase each other up and down the hall any time of day or night. We needed to wait for the right time though, "We'll be out of town for two weeks later this month" isn't good "introduce a new cat" timing. As coincidence would have it, "the first weekend of July" is apparently cat acquisition time around here. Maybe it's because the 4-day weekend provides enough time to clean enough of the house that a cat's not immediately going to get into object-oriented trouble.

The first kitten we played with was very into us, determined to play, fine with being held, and even hung out in my lap despite all the excitement. Black with a white toe, a white patch on her belly, and two white whiskers like a Fu Manchu beard. It seems odd to decide to live with a mammal for more than a decade after just half an hour of play, but she's worked out well so far. She didn't make much noise at the shelter but boy howdy did she holler whenever we left the room as she was adjusting to the house. She's the least hesitant cat when exploring new spaces that I've ever seen: as soon as she can break through the threshold she's never passed before she makes a beeline for who knows where, only stopping to sniff around once she's well beyond familiar territory. Our catsitter dubbed her Little Miss Runs-Like-Water." Time cycles are shorter for juvenile mammals and she can quickly transition from chase-every-toy-around-the-room to curl-up-and-purr-on-your-feet. During the first night her territory expanded from the closet to the bedroom she tried to nurse my beard, longing for the mother cat she didn't have. She realized the beard won't bear milk, but she still goes after my armpits. Curling up and purring on my chest while I lie in bed is absolutely adorable, though.

I've long thought that philosophers would make good cat names. This rambunctious kitten didn't seem like a Lao Zi, but Nietzsche seemed like an excellent choice for a void cat intent on fearlessly seeking discoveries in a world much different than what her parents knew.

Integration of the cats took a couple weeks. Pearl isn't very food-motivated, so attracting her to one side of a baby gate with treats wasn't a reliable strategy. Nietzsche's first several adventures outside the bedroom featured a lot of exploring while Pearl watched with suspicion and disapproval. They would tolerate each other's presence for awhile, then Nietzsche would do something rambunctious like jump towards her, Pearl would start bapping, and hissing would ensue; back to the bedroom. Wrangling cats took up most of the energy of the evening, and would've been completely overwhelming without two people.

Over the last week they've finally warmed to each other. There's still a lot of wrestling and bapping, but it seems to be claws-free and neither cat seems particularly upset about it. Nietzsche still has no fear and will charge Pearl in surprise, Pearl will strike back, Nietzsche adopts a submissive position, they reach an agreement, then Nietzsche withdraws and plans her next move. They'll both chase each other and can happily relax within a few feet of each other. They've got some time before they start snuggling each other, but there was some motherly forehead licking last night.

So now we've got a cat with strong boundaries and a cat that loves to break on through to the other side. A watcher cat and a doer cat. An independent cat and a lap cat. A cat that will chase any toy and a cat that wants the hair ties to fly just so. We've got a yin cat and a yang cat.

(1) How the heck did I misplace a 4-foot 20-pound bag of tent poles?

(2) Who would steal half of a heavy tent, especially when the bag of poles is in the same corner as steel tubes with more obvious scrap metal value?


Yesterday, I packed the truck for a festival next weekend. While trying to fall asleep last night I said "Oh, I forgot to grab the poles, that would be important. This morning I searched the shed, the other shed, the other-other shed, and the garage with confusion. I remember setting it up in the back yard in mid-April to dust off after the eclipse. I remember taking it down in a bit of a hurry because rain was coming. I remember the empty pole bag was hanging on the back of a chair, since it's accumulated a lot of playa dust over the years. But I'm pretty sure I remember putting it in the usual corner of the shed, and there's not a lot of places for a bag of Kodiak tent poles to hide around this house.


Added, Tuesday: (3) Did I disassociate while packing the truck?

Crisis averted. The poles were where they were supposed to be all along, and packing them was such a pedestrian task that I didn't remember I had done it. Clearly I need more sleep. Which I can get, in the mountains, in my nice big tent :-)

For a trip I've been in some stage of planning for more than two years there's a surprising amount left to the last minute.

I didn't really think about taking pictures of the occluded sun until a week and a half ago. Mike's Camera had solar lens filters, but no adapters to fit my lens; fortunately I had a week to get an Amazon delivery. I almost forgot to get an oil change before the road trip. Duffel bags sat empty in my bedroom for a week and a half, not summoning the energy to select clothes until 40 hours before departure.

The truck jenga situation is kind of amusing; the truck seems more full for a 5-day camping trip in Arkansas than it was for two people's Burning Man stuff (including bikes) last year. "This is kind of my favorite part," Kelly says. "We get to recreate a small version of home."

It looks like we might hit near the sweet spot in attendance, which is kind of amazing. A friend and I booked two adjacent group camp sites a year in advance on the assumption that we'd find enough folks who wanted to join an eclipse adventure. But you don't want to advertise such a thing too widely, since there's only space for so many cars. So it was word of mouth with selective invitations and a kind of mental tabulation on people count, with a lot of "I don't know what I'll be doing in eight months." A month and a half ago I was worried we might be squeezed for space. A week and a half ago we were worried that we were going to have a lot of extra space, and miss out on having enough friends to share the experience with. Now it looks like we'll have every driveway in camp occupied, though a lot of folks are coming in the night before the great gig in the sky so we won't get to have as jolly a time in the woods as we might otherwise.

Despite all the last-minute scrambling, I've had all the Parks on the Air sites sorted out for several weeks though. When traveling, it's important to prioritize places to stop and play radio. There's even a Solar Eclipse QSO Party so hams can help scientists understand propagation in the ionosphere.

Google's extended forecast predicts rain all day for the eclipse; another app predicts afternoon thunderstorms and evening rain. National Weather Service's forecast only goes out 7 days, but Sunday currently predicts about a 25% cloud cover for Arkansas on Sunday; let's hope that holds out to Monday. A cloudy day would be anticlimactic for an event I've been anticipating for two years. But at least I'll get a good camping trip out of it, and some road trip adventures in Oklahoma. And if the sun's not worth looking at during totality, I can get 100 extra points in the solar eclipse QSO party for being on the radio during totality.

This afternoon I received two email messages from gmail.com accounts which I suspect are some kind of phishing campaign. But while I'm used to seeing spam with a kind of "horny eastern European from a dating site" vibe, the language in these is remarkably florid and high brow. Perhaps using fancy phrasing like this is a ploy to avoid spam filters: it worked; both arrived atop my own gmail inbox.

From: Valeria Leonard <bransifritik4>
Subject: Zephyrs of Yearning. Embrace their whisper?

Hi, Trevor

I found your bio and noticed your appreciation for the simple delights of life. I have your zeal for gardening, reading, and wildlife well-being. Your compassion and hobbies align so closely with mine, and I‘d adore to connect, exchange stories, or potentially even give tips for designing a booming garden. How do you reckon?

Eager to connecting,
Valeria

A booming garden, you say? Perhaps it's exploding with color.

From: Jessy Morton <jameshbernardlucash>
Subject: Verifying a few items from our conversation.

Greetings, Trevor.
Tales envelop mine domain; I‘ve dug up those in my line of work and construct tales personally. Have you ever sensed connected to a narrative‘s resonance? Which part characterizes your essence?

I didn't connect to this narrative's resonance; it is poorly dressed word salad.

Update: I got another surreal email a few days later:

From: jessie Moon <ianschmittlinocr>
Subject: Looking into trending tech. Seen anything impressive?

Dear,
Trevor

Always, I‘ve forever felt that truly if we are to deeply understand the world, it‘s imperative to should envelop it via each of our sensory perception. Positioned as someone who designs journeys crafted for our inner being, I often indulge in the undeniable enchantment of things like aromas, feels, & also reverberating tones. Have you once been so immersed within an instant wherein moments felt to merely halt completely? What‘s could be the sensation that never fails to catapults you instantly to that time to an treasured time?
Eagerly anticipating for your insights.
Best,
jessie

Well, this sensation definitely failed to catapult me instantly to any other time.

Mid-november, at brunch, Me: What do you want to do with your funemployment?
Kelly: Should we travel somewhere?
Me: well, we've got a wedding right before New Year's, so we probably shouldn't try something too far, or too high of a risk for COVID. How about Hawaii?

Mid-December, at the airport, Me: The amount of stuff we're carrying is kind of ridiculous. And heavy. I spent two months in Central America with one backpack and a hand bag of clothes. Two cameras (one got stolen). No phone, no laptop. I definitely didn't have an entire bag of radio equipment so I could earn fake Internet points…

In the end we ended up using most of the stuff. I brought a laptop because for several years I've been saying that the ideal time zone for Advent of Code is Pacific/Honolulu where problems drop at 7pm. I brought a bag of ham radio gear (radio, amplifier, tuner, batteries, antenna, tripod, coax cable, folding table…) so I could activate Parks on the Air from Hawaii, getting a step closer to "worked from all states." Kelly noticed me listening to KAPA on a portable AM/FM. "I brought three radios to Hawaii." "Yeah, that checks out." I brought three cameras (DSLR, 360, smartphone), though most of my Pixel photos are probably better than the DSLR ones. We brought snorkel masks and fins that we used exactly once, though bringing a snorkel gear bag meant we had space for other stuff, like a folding stool (good for a bedside stool among other things).

I definitely didn't need to bring a second long-sleeve shirt (when it's snowing outside it's hard to remember what "lows of 65" actually feels like). I brought several flashlights that I never had handy when I was outside in the dark. We didn't use the binoculars, though I don't think most of the whales have arrived for their winter vacation; the folks next to me on a sunset-from-the-cliffs evening think they spotted just one. I brought two towels, but don't think I really used one. I never looked at the small camp thermometer. The chocolate granola bar snacks I hoped to eat on the plane out there were nice and melted when I ate them on the way home…

You can really get a feel for the yin-yang of leeward and windward sides on the Big Island. Just looking at a satellite image of Waimea you can guess where the ridge line of Kohala, is on the Mauna Kea side. Driving from Kailua-Kona to Captain Cook and Honaunau quickly transitions from dry lava to wet-enough-to-grow-coffee-and-bananas. We visited friends in Puna for a couple days of intense driving rain, then bailed out back to the Kona side where the rain feels like a light misting. Our horseback ride guide explained that it takes about 300 years for an inch of soil to develop on new lava given ideal rain conditions like on the Hilo side; on the Kona side it can take a thousand years.

Looking at maps of Hawai'i subdivisions is kind of surreal. You know it's on the side of an irregular volcano, but the lines are just as straight and the subdivision just as rectangular and regular as in the great plains. The island is a little smaller than Connecticut with just 200,000 people, on account of the world's largest mountain and a lot of protected areas. There are broadly two types of vehicles: small sedans that can park in a tight spot at a beach and Toyota Tacomas with a lift that can get to a remote beach. I was a little surprised at the lack of electric bikes, though I only saw one road with a bike path on the whole island. A surprising number of tourists rent shiny Jeeps that they never seem to get dirty.

Early and mid December is a bit of a lull for visiting Hawaii; the tourist droves pick up in the week before Christmas as school lets out. Also, flying home on Christmas Eve is pretty cheap, though flight delays accumulate into the evening (my condolences to the flight from Oakland to New Orleans that got delayed until 10pm). The gate staff informed us that Southwest has an open seating policy, but will the 30 passengers please spread yourselves out along the length of the plane to keep the weight balanced. (I'm pretty sure they lost money on this flight.) The Safety Briefing Before Christmas was pretty good, though.

When you die, they should offer an option to donate your body to science, except the science isn't biology: it's physics. They'll shoot your corpse out of a canon in an auditorium full of freshmen.

I've proofread the phlebotomy report. It's typo negative.

A friend emailed me on Saturday and said "Sad news, I got fired this week."
On Sunday I ran into them at the store while I was getting some Burning Man supplies. "Hey, I got your email. Sorry to hear that. Since you're now funemployed, do you want to go to Burning Man?" "I don't think it's my thing." "Well, it might or might not be your thing. Go search the Internet for Burning Man and let me know in a couple days."

Monday I got an email. They're in for the adventure. "Come over to my house this evening. You can ask questions and we can talk logistics." And also some good ramen and Palisade peaches on us.
I emailed three people who'd posted about extra tickets on various lists. All three responded within two hours "Yup, still have tickets."

If your life situation allows you to suddenly decide that this is the year to go to Burning Man, I assure you that tickets are in plentiful supply right now. Tickets usually show up a week or two before the event as people realize they can't go, but this year seems to have an extra large glut.

Today a coworker asked me how packing was going. "I just started packing a second human."