Greetings, friends. (LI)

Greetings, friends. Today I started unpacking the mystery boxes in the barn. I didn’t get as far as I planned, and I want to take some photos of things. So I will write about that tomorrow. Instead, here are a couple personal updates.

Being in New Hampshire is not that great for me, to be perfectly honest. I have a full time job, which is fine, and then on top of that, there is the estate, which feels like a full time job. Subtract time dedicated to cooking, eating, sleeping, and bathing, and there is not much left over.

Which is probably good, because there’s not much here that I like to do in the winter time. I almost bought a pair of snowshoes at Job Lot when I got here, and in retrospect I almost wish I had.

The only really good thing about being here is getting to spend so much quality time with Adah and Keith, but virtually every moment of that is bent on winding up the estate. I have a couple friends I’ve gotten to see here, which is great, but everyone, you know, have lives and stuff.

I do not. I haven’t been home in nearly a month, and I probably won’t go home for another couple weeks at this rate. Heck, I barely have a life in Portland, since I moved there in October, and Mom died in November, and I’ve spent at least half my time here ever since. I still haven’t even finished making bookshelf brackets, much less mounted the shelves, and never mind actually unpacking the books. My apartment in Vancouver still looks like someone hasn’t finished moving in. Because he hasn’t.

I’m not complaining. I’m a well-paid white dude, I have friends and loved ones and a million things I haven’t done, just you wait. It’s just that none of those things, and almost none of those people, are here right now. Since hiking is out, the only other things I have to recreate with are target practice, running, writing, and video games.

Target practice is expensive, because ammunition isn’t cheap. Also, the indoor range is a good 35 minutes away, so it’s a bit of a time commitment to go up there, spend maybe an hour shooting, and drive back.

Although, I heard gunfire in the distance today, and that made me curious. So I did call the police station in Epsom to find out if there were any regulations about discharging firearms on private land in the town. It turns out that the town has no ordinances about it, and the state doesn’t prohibit legal use of firearms on private land in low-density rural areas. The officer who took my call solemnly reminded me to practice basic firearm safety, and suggested I mount the target against a berm or slope, both of which I would have done anyway. He did observe that “nine times out of ten, or even more than that, when people call us just to report gunfire, we have no cause to believe that the law is being broken. Unless you see someone actually shooting across a road, or being unsafe in some other way, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ah, America. There is still a good six or eight inches of snow on the ground, and another foot on the way. Maybe this weekend, after the storm blows through, I’ll buy snowshoes and some paper targets. I wonder what my mother would say.

Running is going so well that I decided to run today, even though it’s not on Hal’s training plan. Technically Mondays are cross-training days, but I’ve been doing so much hauling of boxes and books and donations and garbage that I don’t feel the least bit guilty about marking down the cross-training the past few Mondays as “completed as planned.” But today I actually wanted to run, so I did two miles on the treadmill. Feels pretty good.

The difficulty for me is just quieting my mind down, so that I’m not spending every other thought anxiously wondering if I can stop running yet. I can physically do the running, it’s just that I don’t like it and I have to stop myself from slowing down or quitting entirely about once a minute. The real challenge is almost entirely mental.

Listening to music I’m very familiar with helps, which is why I’ve branched out from my running playlist and started taking in some other things, like Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album.

“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” might seem, at first blush, like music better suited to getting stoned, than as preparation to run a half marathon. In fact Mason & Waters maintain a steady heartbeat tempo over the entire suite that falls somewhere between a fast allegro and a slow vivace, which is exactly my running cadence. And since I know every note by heart — from back in the day, when I did used to get stoned regularly — it works on my brain like an infant’s pacifier, quieting down that weird busy part of my monkey mind that keeps wanting to know if we’re done yet.

Queen’s Greatest Hits, Vol. I are also making a regular appearance. Deacon & Taylor lay down some great beats on “Another One Bites the Dust” and (of course) “We Will Rock You”, but the one that really gets me going is “Don’t Stop Me Now”:

I'm burnin' through the sky, yeah, two hundred degrees
That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I'm traveling at the speed of light

Man, that guy was so queer. I love it so much.

Of course, I’m still working on the playlist. Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” speaks right to my heart:

Bright lights, the music gets faster
Look, boy, don't check on your watch, not another glance

Thank you, Kim. It’s become a mindfulness challenge for me, a test of my discipline, to see how long I can go without looking at my watch. I measure the time in rock ‘n roll songs. I know I have x distance to go, that’s y minutes, meaning roughly z pop songs. Can I wait that long before looking? Usually I cannot, but I think it is good for me to try.

Running still feels like work, though. Writing does too. They both take effort and are not always immediately rewarding.

No, after doing everything else, the only unmitigated fun I get in a day, the only surefire dopamine hit, is playing Kerbal Space Program. And sometimes I really need that dopamine hit, enough so that I will stay up late chasing it, and wreck a good night’s sleep.

The eagle eyed among you will have noted that Kerbal Space Program 2 came out three weeks ago, and yet I have not said a peep about it. The reason for this is simple. The sequel’s graphics are so au courant that the recommended system requirements exceed that of most desktop gaming PCs, and the used gaming rig that I just bought barely makes the minimum requirements. All I have with me is my work laptop, which is not exactly optimized for high-performance gaming.

So I have been learning, as I said, to build spaceplanes in the original KSP. Being able to almost 100% reuse spacecraft completely changes the dynamics of contract play, because you’re not constantly throwing away rocket parts. The downside is that, in addition to having a working knowledge of rocket science and orbital dynamics, you now must also have some grasp of basic aerodynamics.

For me, the breakthrough moment in learning to land a (space)plane was when I realized that, basically to land a plane on a runway, you have to have the momentum vector of the plane aligned with the runway itself, while descending very slowly, but not so slowly that you miss the runway completely, while keeping your horizontal speed low enough that you don't taxi off the end of the runway but still above your aircraft's stall speed so that you still have aerodynamic control and don't go nose down and lose control of your aforementioned rate of descent.

If any of those things are outside a narrow range of tolerances, you are either not landing, or you are experiencing rapid unplanned disassembly.

My landings are usually such that I land near the runway and then taxi back to the space center. It’s no worse than flying into Dallas-Fort Worth. The game still gives you full credit for the return.

But I managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit, bring it back, and land it on the same runway without incident, all for the very first time in the eight years I have been playing this dang game. In fact, I’ve finally been able to do this so regularly enough, with minor variations to each spaceplane for the various missions the game has handed me, that I’ve now advanced to the point where I am literally back to the drawing board to figure out how to design all-new spacecraft that will fly single-stage-to-orbit and complete more complex and difficult assignments.

The fact that I can play this game off and on for over eight years, and still find new things to learn, and new strategies for gameplay just underscores why Kerbal Space Program is my absolute favorite video game ever, hands down.

(Sorry, Sid Meier! You’re still my favorite video game designer.)

I have the day off on Friday. Besha has assured me that “nobody would judge you for a full day of KSP.” I appreciate that, but, once I finish everything I have to do here, I get to go home.

And play Kerbal Space Program there.

Or, come to think of it, maybe Kerbal Space Program 2.

If you’re reading this, I’m astonished, but I send you my love nevertheless. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Toodles!