Catching up...

Arrived in Houston Monday evening. Believing myself to be the owner of only the shoes I wore to Houston, I stopped on the way "home" at a strip mall where I picked up a cheap pair of moccasins at a Payless Shoe Store. The shoe store was right next to a Best Buy, and on a whim, I stopped inside that store to see if there were any DVDs of Hamlet. I must have made the salesperson's day, to see his reaction to my request. After a day filled with requests for films such as The Matrix, The Crow, and The Cell, nothing beats having some guy ask about something you study in school.

There is probably even some gleeful irony associated with the fact that, no, there were no DVD versions of Hamlet available. Nor were any of the several VHS tape versions available, either.

Ah, well.

I was surprised when I got to the house in Pearland. It is now filled to the rafters with the stuff that didn't fit into the truck that went to Colorado. There are no shades on any of the windows, although there are curtains on the bedroom windows.

Sasha, the Amazing Golden Retriever Who Will Chew Anything, was waiting for me, putting a lie to a note, left by Natalie, to the effect that she would be at her boyfriend's apartment with Sasha waiting for me. She had apparently tried had tried to call me on Sunday night, but I had apparently already gone to sleep.

I went to sleep soon after arriving Monday night, since I'd been up since 4 am, Colorado time, and had experienced a couple of moments of severe anxiety at the store prior to leaving for the airport, so I was well and truly tuckered out. I didn't even have the time to think clearly about the day. That was all to the good, since if I had done so, I'd probably worry myself silly for no good reason at all. Or maybe for a very good reason; who knows?

Nearly a month of getting up at 5 am or so became apparent Tuesday morning when I woke spontaneously - without the aid of any alarm clock - at 6:22 am local time. This won't do. According to the preliminary schedule for the flight, my shift will start around 8 pm and end around 4 am, which means I am almost completely turned around right now, and the flight starts tonight, Wednesday, assuming nothing untoward happens to delay the launch for any reason. I stayed up until about midnight last night reading something called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and then went to sleep. The book, despite its arcane-sounding title, is actually pretty interesting. My interest in Bruno lies with his memorization techniques.

At any rate, I woke up at 7:30 am today, and struggled to try to sleep until 8. The neighborhood is awash in noise. There is a railroad nearby whose locomotive engineers insist on blasting their whistles as they pass, even at 4:18 am. (I am so new to the area, I notice things like that...give me a few days, and I'll stop noticing.) A garbage truck was making its rounds, too, and the scraping of its brakes reminded me of the call of whales in the Pacific Ocean, but not nearly as melodic.

Drew must have called a half dozen times yesterday. Two of the conversations were in excess of 20 minutes, as we discussed various fine points of how to account for money at the store. The rest were pretty short, routine calls, where he was relaying to me various petty annoyances. One, for example, concerned the provider of the store's phone cards, who called wanting to know where her payment was (she encloses a deposit slip made out to a local Pagosa Springs bank with her shipments, and her terms are basically payment upon receipt). What she had forgotten was that the payment she was "missing" had been made to a different bank, so that was a fairly easy problem to sort out.

It was a different story with the phone company, which refuses to distinguish between me and the former owner, so Drew took the initiative and paid the entire bill, leaving me to discuss who owes whom what with the former owner. And that conversation will have to occur before I return, I'm afraid, since I can't afford to pay too many more of the former owner's debts.

But I digress...which is an interesting thing to say, considering I've been freewheeling for a while.

The flight from Durango to the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on Monday was fair, considering there were enough people on the plane to pretty much fill all the seats. The fellow next to me was assiduously thumbing his way through the Bible - reading Numbers, if memory serves - while I was reading an unusual naval tale set in the era of the War of 1812 titled The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian. What makes the tale unusual is the detail the author has brought out in the book, and his use of the historical record.

For example, he places the lead characters aboard the British frigate Java in her encounter with the American frigate Constitution, which ended in the defeat of the Java. The defeat is described on an almost broadside-by-broadside basis, from the initial sighting by the lookouts in the rigging to the striking of the British colors.

Thus far, there has also been one interesting linguistic tidbit offered, and that is the origin of the expression "cut no ice with me." The author has one of his characters explain that it is a variant of the Iroquois expression katno aiss' vizmi, which means, approximately, "I'm not impressed." Assuming that this item - as well as others in the book - are true, that puts this series of English words in the same class as the Russian expression San'ka, beree myach [roughly: "Sandy, take the ball"], which - when said rapidly - sounds like "Thank you very much" in English.

As I write this, I have to remind myself of the schedule for the rest of the day. From here (the old house in Webster, where the phone still works!), I shall proceed to the security building at JSC, to get a temporary pass for my rental car. Afterward, I will make my way back to the house and get cleaned up in preparation for a visit to our tenant out in Seabrook, who has a plumbing problem. Finally, I will return to Pearland around 4 or 5 pm for a short nap in preparation for the night's work. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to swing by the office and drop off a copy of the invoice I sent in from Tye, Texas during the Big Move.

That's all for now. Postings will come as opportunities to access a phone line or network arise.

Keep your powder dry, and your knees loose.

Cheers...

Valery and L'Amour

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
  -- Paul Valery, 1895

So starts a guest editorial from The SETI League titled The Folly of Giordano Bruno. The editorial itself propounds opinions I am not qualified to assess, but this quote struck me as one of life's essential truths. Or is this, too, part of a "torrent of verbiage"?

While I have a few moments, let me speak of another treasured book unearthed under the stairwell of the Pagosa house. It is Education of a Wandering Man, by Louis L'Amour.

Many people dismiss L'Amour as a mere writer of Western tales, which are not my cup of tea. My actual introduction to L'Amour's writing was a novel titled Last of the Breed, which told a pre-perestroika tale of a U.S. fighter pilot of Native American ancestry who ends up in the hands of the Soviets, and who proceeds to escape and evade his way across the Siberian land mass Eastward to the Bering Strait, using skills learned as a boy. It was an engaging read.

L'Amour's Education of a Wandering Man, on the other hand, tells a fascinating tale of a self-starting, curious, driven young man who set out at a young age to see the world. Everywhere he goes, though, there are books, and he steeps himself in them wherever he can find them. The narrative holds its own as an adventure and biography, but there's more.

The author's insight is surprisingly keen when he brings to bear what he's learned in his wanderings. For example, he discounts the eurocentric notion that equates "voyages of discovery" (such as those of the Portuguese explorers; among them, Vasco da Gama) with European cultural superiority by noting that the lack of such voyages from Asia to Europe was based on Europe, frankly, having nothing to offer Asia in trade except religion, which was a commodity already in plentiful supply in that region.

L'Amour has an annoying tendency in the book to toot his horn a bit shrilly from time to time, but it's easy enough to ignore the noise. I've finished rereading the book just recently, and plan to go over it again for a closer look.

Cheers...