Roanoke and Salem, Virginia
Today felt like: a combination of pressures and releases, almost as if I were being played like a musical instrument.
The day moved like this:
Terrible morning for breakfasts. Herding cats, bad planning, poor accessibility issues (Larry Foot, my back, buffet at Green Goat), Hang 10 closed, Donnie D’s last straw with beef tallow/MAGA/pedo/Mormon/service issues.
Still trying hard not to be a grouch.
BHK got very ill, and her garlic bagel with butter, large orange juice, and ungodly amounts of liquids did an upstairs return to sender.
I noticed:
• something small: a tiny rubber band used to hold cables together under the couch.
• something living: a night heron!
• something that felt out of place: two food trucks in front of a restaurant. It seemed redundant.
animals / visitors:
deer munching on tree, yellow cat and spiffy bug
The valley:
There is a quiet, heavy calm that settles over the Roanoke Valley on a late July afternoon.
The mountains around us are wrapped in that familiar mid-summer haze, holding in the mild heat while a light breeze moves down off the ridge. It’s the kind of Sunday where the best option is to move slowly, sit on the porch with a cold drink, and watch the clouds drift over the horizon.
something strange:
Today, the whole world seems a bit weird to me. Politics is maddening. The massive amount of ignorance that seems like the norm is so off-putting, but so many people are absolutely wonderful. Sometimes I honestly wonder how humanity manages to be so amazing, funny, terrible and stupid all at the same time.
I’m so glad for the good stuff, and so angry at that bad right now. Lots of feelings.
I kept thinking about:
Taking more time to step away from the glowing rectangles, appreciating the here and now, and letting my brain run idle for a few minutes.
Today’s weight:
Health, mine and my family’s. We have many challenges, and we can meet them with work.
small good things:
• happy blog birthday, Darktrain! https://darktrain.livejournal.com/ 27 years!
• Pearl is currently sleeping in a bed that seems roughly 40% too small for her. She refuses to admit this is uncomfortable.
•hearing Larry tell stories of being a teenager, horsing around with Ernie and teasing on the farm. Failures at bowhunting, harvesting corn, capturing rabbits.
Tonight:
Recharging our batteries after a lot of stress, heat, and pressure. I am glad we have the facilities to do so.
Tomorrow:
might bring more challenges, but more victories seem likely.
free write:
It started at about 6:30 AM with a glass of tap water and a sweet tabby peering through my soul.
Pearl has a specific look she gives me when she feels I am failing as a steward of her domain. It is not anger, but more like the disappointed head shake of someone who knows better watching me make a rookie mistake. She sat next to the sink, tapped the faucet twice with a silent paw, and waited.
I turned the tap to a trickle. She took three laps of water, looked up at me as if to say, “Thanks, Pop,” and strolled off to sleep on top of the couch.
***
I have been reading a lot lately about data center resource consumption. Millions of gallons of cooling water get pulled from local water tables just so a network can process a slightly better picture of a capybara in a chef’s hat.
There is a disconnect between the invisible weight of modern technology and the tangible reality of our immediate surroundings. Software engineers spend ages trying to abstract away the messiness of hardware. We build virtual machines inside virtual machines, cloud instances on top of distributed clusters, and sometimes we forget that somewhere down the line, physical copper is getting hot and real water is evaporating into the air to cool it down.
Every time I clean a clogged fan on an old PC or watch the municipal water meters around Roanoke, I am reminded that you cannot abstract physical reality forever. Nature always collects its toll in entropy.