Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about some things we are definitely not keeping.

My mother was extremely sentimental, which is where I get it from, because my father is decidedly not so. In spite of me and Adah referring to her as that woman with a roll of the eyes, while we dig through her immense stash of belongings, the reality is that she kept many things because they had meaning for her.

Some of those items are meaningful to others, which is why some of the replica clothing and most of the replica furniture are going to museums, while the rest of the reenacting kit is going to people our mother knew in that community. Some are meaningful to me and my sister, like the roughly half cubic yard of Burnston and Aronowsky family photos.

Other items were meaningful to my mother alone, like a box I found containing greeting cards expressing best wishes from her living history museum buddies at places like the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, when our family moved to New Hampshire. Some of the cards are very effusive.

Greetings, friends. Today I canceled my flight home.

The reason why is, simply, that there is still an unknown amount to do in my mother’s house in New Hampshire, and we now have a deadline: April 6, which is when the realtor brings her photographer. Once she has the photos in hand, the house goes on the market.

So I still plan to return to Portland, of course, but not before the house is ready to be photographed, and that means, basically, getting rid of everything in it. Sure, we can have tidy furniture type items in the photos, but basically everything needs to be out.

Now we work backwards through the dependencies. To be photographed, the house must be cleaned, which means hiring cleaners to come to the house after (almost) everything is removed. That has to happen no later than April 3 or 4, just to give us a couple days, in case.

Greetings, friends. Today the heat went out at the house!

This actually happened over the weekend, which went pretty well. On Saturday, I watched Clue with Lu, and then she introduced me to a TV show called Shoresy, which we binged while a blizzard came down outside.

Incidentally Clue holds up surprisingly well for a comedy from 1985. A lot of comedies from back then don’t. Its impeccable casting surely doesn’t hurt.

Shoresy is a new spin off of Letterkenny, starring Jared Keeso in the eponymous role. Now Letterkenny is one of my favorite television shows, but Shoresy is one of its worst characters, whose performance solely involves lobbing increasingly vicious insults at the other characters from off-screen, usually in the form of ribald claims about the target’s mother. Sometimes the sheer creativity of these gibes is impressive, but I find their quality is exhausted by their quantity.

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to thank a number of you for some gifts that you have shared with me recently.

On Friday, Matt and Kim invited me over for dinner. Matt made cocktails and a delicious home cooked meal. Their son Kaleb introduced me to the pastime of letterboxing, which has some similarities to geocaching:

Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and post clues to finding the box online on one of several Web sites…

Individual letterboxes usually contain a log book, an often hand-carved rubber stamp and occasionally contain an ink pad. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox’s stamp on their personal log book, and leave an imprint of their personal stamp on the letterbox’s logbook.

What’s more, Matt had shared with Kaleb the story of the bucket of fermented urine that I posted to this journal last week. Kaleb was inspired by (took pity on?) the photo of me in Mom’s cornuthaum and depicted me on a hand-carved letterbox stamp!

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about what we keep as mementos, and why.

Adah came early this morning to escort the antique and architectural salvage dealers through house and barn. She and I spent the afternoon combing through family photos and other such mementos, which is a great way to relieve the tedium and strain of endless bagging of garbage and giveaways. It feels like a treat we give ourselves when the work becomes a little much.

But it’s also productive work, in the sense that our mother took many photos of many things, quite a few of which no longer have any relevance to us today.

As an aside, our mother kept a lot of her archives in 135mm slides. Remember photographic slides? Dealing with photo slides is going to be the topic of a future journal entry. For now, imagine a lot of me and Adah holding up slides to the light, and squinting deep into a moment buried in the past, like examining a fly in amber. Only, like, several thousand times, because that’s about how many slides we found.

Greetings, friends. This afternoon found us working deep in the stuff mines, and by stuff, I mean my Mom’s stuff, and by mines, I mean the eaves over the second floor of her house. Only the cellar surpasses this part of the house in its wretchedness, but nothing is stored down there, because even the sump pump can’t clear all of the standing water.

The bedroom I had been staying in, which was once Adah’s, contains the two doors that provide access to the crawl spaces under the eaves of the roof. We’d cleared out the downstairs bedroom, so I started by moving my mattress and bedding and clothing and all my other gear down there, because we needed room to work, and I didn’t want dust, fiberglass, and mouse droppings all over my sheets and pillows.

My move downstairs constitutes a definite phase change in our endeavors. I am no longer living out of the upstairs guest room. This is no longer my mother’s house.

Adah and I geared up for the ordeal. Long shirt and pants, shoe covers, $3 shower caps from Target, nitrile gloves, and N95 masks.

Greetings, friends. Boy, it’s been a tough weekend. Adah and I have been hard at work, sorting through antique garments, vintage garments, replica garments, just plain old garments, textiles, yarn, sewing paraphernalia, knitting paraphernalia, jewelry making paraphernalia, academic research notes, opened mail, unopened mail, linens, towels, more garments, and, oh look, here’s another closet containing still more handmade garments.

Are they replica or antique? Are they valuable or commonplace? Are they useful in any sense or too worn to be of any use at all? Should they go to a friend, a re-enacting group, a museum, a thrift store, or the dump? Who can say!

We must. Every single item must be kept, sold, donated, or discarded. Sometimes the decision is easy, but, if it requires even a moment’s further thought, those moments add up. Many items we set aside for our mother's re-enactor friends to examine and hopefully claim. We work for six or seven hours a day with a short break for lunch, sneezing from the dust. My threshold for what is worth keeping or donating spirals upwards and upwards.

Decision fatigue is real, my friends. So is back fatigue. I am feeling both.

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to memorialize my old high school era stomping grounds, the Denny’s restaurant in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania.

The very first review of this restaurant on Yelp wrote in 2008 says it all:

No lie, all the kids I went to High School with would live at this Denny's. Even through college and afterwards they'd still go there…

Well, that would have been me, but about ten years earlier, years before Yelp ever existed. The reviewer goes on to add:

Greetings, friends. It’s the extra large edition of this journal! I’m kidding. Actually this post will be shorter than others, probably. I wonder when I will give up on using Roman numerals to sequence them.

I received a number of deeply sympathetic responses to my post about inheriting a bucket of fermented urine. I am grateful for everyone’s expressions of compassion and understanding.

It was hard to talk about. I told Adah I was going to write about the experience. She asked me if I was going to be explicit about what I thought the contents of the bucket were. I said I was not, because I was concerned that the details would be off-putting to the friends reading this. It’s just gross, ya know?

“But,” Adah said, “That’s what makes it so hilarious!”

Greetings, friends. I… well, I should just start with a content warning:

This post is mostly about dysfunctional family relationships but also about what might have been a bucket of aged urine. Please don’t continue if you are squeamish about either topic.

As I may have mentioned, my purpose in spending half my time in New Hampshire for the foreseeable future is to work together with my sister to sell our late mother’s house and generally wind up her estate.

I also may have mentioned that our mother was, shall we say, a collector of things, so this is no small task. Broadly, the job involves touching every last object in the house to determine if we wish to keep, sell, donate, or discard it.

Greetings, friends. Today I was driving around in Leto II, getting supplies before the big storm that snowed on Portland, and then really dumped on Minneapolis, comes tonight and drops a trifling 6-8” here. At least that is a trifle by New Hampshire standards. It is not a trifle to me when I have to shovel it.

Anyway I was driving around thinking how nice it is to have a motor vehicle that isn’t over 20 years old and has loose steering and makes strange creaking noises and is perpetually in need of some kind of maintenance. It feels… decadent. Almost like I don’t deserve it. Oh well. It’s a privilege I get to have and I hope to make it up to humanity in some other way.

Also, it makes me slightly anxious that I own a vehicle that I probably can’t, or at least, shouldn’t wrench on. I remember when I was a kid I would mess around in the garage, keeping my dad company on a weekend afternoon while he wrenched on one of his cars. I was fascinated by the dials and switches on what was probably an average automobile dashboard.

I promised myself that, when I owned a car, I would add lighted switches to the dashboard, and label them things like “Machine Gun” and “Rocket Launcher” and “Oil Slick”. The switches wouldn’t do anything besides light up. But I thought it would be cool. I’ve never actually done it. I wonder what happened to my childhood dreams. Maybe when I get home I will look into taking Muad’Dib’s dashboard apart. There’s a busted transmission indicator light under there anyway.

Greetings, friends. I’m in New Hampshire at my late mother’s house. I haven’t gone out today. Adah and Keith did bring over takeout for dinner. It is always such a pleasure to see them.

Other than that, I don’t have much on my mind today. I made an omelet with Ellie’s eggs this morning. They were delicious.

I discovered this morning when I went to make breakfast that every carton of Ellie’s eggs contains a printed slip of paper with a dad joke, e.g.:

How did the chicken feel after a long day on the farm?

Eggs-hausted!

Greetings, friends. Today I went for my longest training run yet, for a total of 4 miles. I’m back in New Hampshire, where there has been a brief warm spell, before the weather returns to its normal cold and wet for New England in mid-February.

And, by warm, I mean in the low 50ºF, because my concept of warm is still calibrated to San Francisco. Warm enough, at least, to “run” comfortably outside. I put “run” in quotes because I only managed a 12’30” pace, which is a brisk jog for people in better health than I am. Still it’s not bad by my standards, considering that I ran up Center Hill Road in Epsom, which is marked by the grade of the hill that it runs up.

Epsom, of course, is named for the town in Surrey in England, not the bath salt. Center Hill Road was apparently so named, firstly, because of the eponymous hill, and secondly, because the town of Epsom was originally clustered on the slopes of the hill when the town was founded in 1727. Technically Epsom was a part of Massachusetts originally, as this pre-dated the foundation of New Hampshire by about fifty years.

Epsom had about 700 people recorded in the first United States census in 1790, and today it is home to about 4,800 people. The center of the town is no longer Center Hill Road, though. US 4 and State Route 48 intersect about 2 miles west of here, and, by the time the traffic circle was built in the 1940’s, the town “center” had moved over there. The traffic circle is now where the McDonald’s and the Dunkin’s and the town office and the post office and the state liquor store all are.

Greetings, friends. Fifteen minutes starts… now. I am in New Hampshire now. I am le tired. I did that very silly thing that I often do the night before a long flight and just stayed up late packing and doing random things like putting up beef jerky to dry and also writing for an hour when I could’ve just written for fifteen minutes like I promised myself.

One thing I did not do is bother to check whether I had anything on my laptop with which to amuse myself on a long flight, or, for that matter, check to see if I had actually packed my Kindle. You might think that I would have taken a moment last night to do this, since I was up late anyway, especially given that Alaska Airlines thoughtfully sent me an email and a text at just past 2 a.m. to say sorrie internet no worky on your flight tomorrow hurrr kthx bai!

Very thoughtful of them. No worries, I said to myself, I shall spend the flight Kerballing.

Kerbal Space Program is my favorite video game of all time, and that is absolutely saying something. I have spent probably thousands of hours playing it. Like, so many hours that I actually stopped launching it via Steam after 278 hours because I no longer wished to know just how many hours I have devoted to this game.

Greetings, friends. You ever have a day where it seems like you were go-go-go all day and yet you’re not sure if you got anything done?

Today I was bound and determined to hang some bookshelves. Which meant drilling the mounting holes in the brackets in Besha’s shop, sanding and finishing them, and then driving over to Vancouver, moving the couch and then getting up on a ladder to position the brackets while Besha held the bookshelves in place and read off a level.

Friends, I got almost all the way through step one.

My plan to get up early was foiled by some assholes on the street around the corner from Besha’s house who insisted on playing recorded music at high amplification with a particularly accentuated bass line, starting at 3am.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday I went to a martial arts class for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Way back in 2016, I was in need of an exercise discipline that didn’t involve trudging up and down Twin Peaks, and as I have mentioned before, I am strongly motivated by social expectation. If there is a place I need to be at a particular time, and people who are expecting me to be there, I am much much more likely to do it.

Anyway, training in martial arts had long been a bucket list item for me. Also it was 2016 and good old grassroots American fascism had freshly reared its ugly homunculus head.

At the time, I was working out of an office at 17th & Mission Streets, and I knew that if I had to go all the way to, say, the Presidio for classes, I was going to find ways to weasel out of it. The dojo, whatever it was, had to be within a 10 or 15 minute walk of my office.

Greetings, friends. Today I learned from the Actual Astronomy podcast that Terence Dickinson, the Canadian amateur astronomer, passed away a couple weeks ago. He was best known as the author of Night Watch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe, and co-author of The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide.

When I got into the hobby of visual astronomy a dozen years ago, Dickinson’s books were among the first I purchased on the subject, since they were the most universally recommended, and rightly so. Dickinson’s patient and encyclopedic advice informed a generation of amateur astronomers, including me.

My first telescope, an 8” Dobsonian, was one that I basically purchased at Dickinson’s recommendation. If you want to see deep sky objects, you need to maximize the diameter of your primary optics, since that’s what’s gathering all the light. The Dobsonian telescope is a modern take on the old reflecting telescope designed by Isaac Newton about 350 years ago.

Greetings, friends! I hope this Wednesday finds you well. Today I have some updates on previous topics.

Today is Day 912 in my Duolingo streak. ¡Viva el Español!

I have also been keeping up with the running. I mean, at the pace I’m going it’s really more like jogging. But I’m still going to call it running. On Monday, I was in Oakland, and I was supposed to meet Erin at her place in the Castro at a reasonable dinner hour. Needless to say I had not done my training run on Sunday, because Super Bowl, so I somehow had to squeeze a 3½ mile run in between work and getting to the city. If I don’t do my long run every week, I know I’m going to fall behind.

I came up with the hare-brained idea to make getting to the Castro the subject of my run. So I ran to West Oakland station, got on BART, got off BART at Embarcadero, and ran down Market Street, past the commuters and the underhoused folks and actually not a few other people also running. I spent 12 years living in that city and every street corner on Market has some memory attached. I ran past The Mint where Besha and I kissed the first night we got together. I’m glad I wore a hat. That onshore wind never changes.

Greetings, friends. Super Bowl weekend has come and gone, and it was full enough that I had to burn a couple streak freezes… But, as we say, don’t let a slip become a slide.

The Super Bowl itself was everything we’d all hoped for right up until the final two minutes. For those of you who didn’t watch because you don’t care, I’ll tell you what happened: The Chiefs and Eagles had been engaged in a pretty epic shootout, with the game tied and the Chiefs in scoring position, but with just enough time on the clock for the Eagles possibly to come back and tie it up or win in the final seconds.

Until the Eagles’ defensive back Bradbury grabbed Chiefs wide receiver Smith-Schuster momentarily by the jersey in mid-play, and the refs called a holding foul.

Greetings, friends. Tomorrow brings that long-awaited and/or widely-detested American spectacle, the Super Bowl. I wrote a bit about American football a couple weeks ago, but, as usual, I have more to say.

The sport, like those other two uniquely American sports, baseball and basketball, dates back to the mid-late 19th Century. Its origins are rooted in rugby, and the sport didn’t really take on its modern recognizable form until the adoption of the forward pass in 1906. The sport’s premier professional association, the National Football League, was founded in 1920.

The modern rules of American football are famously Byzantine, and have been constantly in flux. The core of the current NFL rule book is 88 pages long, and with appendices and revision history included, the whole thing weighs in at a staggering 245 pages. All televised games have a special rules analyst to interpret the game’s finer points for the folks watching at home, whenever an uncommon situation or a disputed referee call occurs. Fans like to complain about the sheer inconsistency of refereeing in NFL games, and not without reason, but with a rule book like that, can you hardly blame the refs?

As an aside, American football is not the only type of gridiron football played professionally. The most notable is Canadian football, which like most things Canadian, is recognizably similar to its American counterpart, but stubbornly different in specific particulars. Examples include the field extending to 110 yards, yielding two 50 yard lines; offenses having three downs to gain ten yards instead of four; offenses being able to have two players in motion downfield at the snap; and a one-point scoring play from scrimmage that I still don’t understand. The overall effect, if you are an American watching a Canadian game, is as if you are looking through a funhouse lens at a football game being played in Bizarroland. The game is the same but somehow uncannily, disturbingly different.