Iced In

Make It Go Away

It is unseemly to whine about the snow and ice when one is only recently returned from the islands. It is somewhat more unseemly when one is days away from returning there. But whine I will.

It is Wednesday morning, two days after our return to the Eastern Shore. Denizens of this area have put up with this crap for ten days now, and I do so very much feel for them. I am abed, having decided to remain here rather than head over to the YMCA and exercise with the septuagenarian ladies. I am iced in, not physically, but mentally. The lane is plowed, the roads are clear, and although my Gucci EV is still snowed in, I have access to SUV's left here by absentee daughters.

The problem is not snow per se, but ice. There is no safe route to walk from the house to the automobiles, as each step offers the delightful prospect of a broken (fake) hip. The aforementioned EV simply will not move out of its icy entombment, and the work associated with freeing it is not worth the likely coronary event. I ventured out yesterday to play cards with the fellas at my lunch club (lost $10), and my conclusion once parked was that the walk from the lot to the front door was a danger to life and limb.

The scene from my bed is lovely. I'll share it with you before continuing the whinge.

As you can see, the cove is frozen, which for the deer is a great boon as they can walk across. That delightful blanket of snow is not very deep, but the top is frozen solid and supports quite easily my immense, post-torn calf muscle bulk. Did I mention that it was a sheet of ice?

No, rather than tempt fate, I will cheat death here inside with the fireplace roaring and a hot cup of coffee by my side. The high temperature today is just a few degrees north of freezing, and it is predicted to occur quite early in the day before dropping again. Yay. More ice. This seems the cycle ahead for the remainder of the time I am here.

I have it on good authority that several of the Wednesday night trivia team are gathering in St. Mike's tonight, which is likely to draw me out of the warmth of hearth and home. Should I suffer grievous injury in the pursuit of trivia dominance, I expect to be remembered well.

Contending with trivia tonight is an invitation from older brother and lead-blocker Sean to join him and other members of the early 1980's high school wrestling juggernaut that was good ole Lenape High School for dinner. It is a relatively easy trip (when one must not risk one's life in the driveway) of just over two hours, and were the trivia gig not on the diary, I might have joined.

They are quite kind to me, these giants of South Jersey scholastic wrestling with multiple district and regional titles among them. I was a solid high school wrestler, quite good my senior year until I broke two ribs in a hard-fought match with a much better opponent and then struggled the rest of the season, placing third in the district.

I moved up one weight class each year in high school (105, 112, 119, 126), having to drop some weight each year to get there. Our team was loaded with talent, especially at the low weights and the heavier weights, and it took me until senior year to make varsity. Along the way, I got to practice with a group of similarly gaunt young men, and we had a roaring good time. I really enjoyed wrestling practice due to the presence of these guys. Two things about them merit note.

First, we were budding sadists, in that when we would participate in “Three on Ones"--in which one guy would wrestle for thirty seconds or so with three guys in turn--our aim was rarely to score points. No, we were in it to see who could cause the most pain, in Game of Thrones terms, who could make the other guy “yield". Great fun, that. You have no idea how much it hurts to have a chin driven into your cheekbone.

Secondly, these were young men of intellect. Our little group were great Tolkien fans with ravenous appetites for current events and the German language, often discussing these finer points while inflicting immense pain on one another.

We got together for dinner a couple of years ago, and it was much fun. I had not been with them in quite some time, and it was wonderful to sit with these grown men north of 60 but to SEE them as teenagers, the teenagers we once were. They were frozen in amber to me, and I hope I to them.

Social Media

Restricting myself to social media before 0900 hrs each day (and by that, I mean the ones with which I have an unhealthy relationship, Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook) has proven difficult, especially now that I am home. I spend a good bit of time each day at my desk with my computer, and it turns out that it is just as easy to click on those sites from here as it is on my phone. I mostly scroll for about five seconds and then get a terrible feeling of failure before closing.

But no doubt, there is considerably less to do sitting at this desk when one is trying to restrict social media. I wrote for a bit on the Storyworth site earlier today (What advice would you give to future generations in your family? was the question), and while I’m pushing through it, knowing how unwelcome much of my advice already is to the future generations of my family leads me to take the job on with some dexterity.

I will definitely fill some of the space with reading, and I’ll probably watch more TV. I’ve got a pretty good setup here in the ManCave, though the frigid weather is making my space heater struggle to keep it in the mid to high 50’s in here, which is not all that comfortable for TV watching.

The main thing this is all demonstrating to me is the colossal amount of time I routinely pissed away on social media.

College Hoops Vision Quest

With Captain Todd at the Palestra

Captain Todd and I go way back. We had the same job on sister cruisers deployed to the first Gulf War in 1990 and commanded destroyers together on the Norfolk waterfront in the 00's. Todd was a geographic bachelor then and bunked in one of the spare bedrooms in my house while we ate baked chicken and watched The West Wing. Oh the times of your life. Todd's ship was eight or so months ahead of mine in the deployment cycle, so I was able to learn a lot from him along the way (including that the lube oil in the aviation facility RAST Car needed to be part of the Engineering Department's Lube Oil Quality Management program, for instance.)

Todd retired from HIS second career a year and a half ago, and somewhere along the line, we cooked up the idea that we would one day road trip around the country and watch college basketball in all the generally acknowledged shrines to the sport. We beta-tested the idea this week, catching the Princeton v. Penn (all time series tied now at 128 games each) game at “The Palestra", which modestly refers to itself as the “cathedral" of college basketball. Todd is a Princeton grad, and Catherine is a Penn grad (hence, the lid).

Penn won a thriller, beating Princeton handily though much of the game only to have the Tigers fight their way back to a last possession chance at the victory. That shot failed and Penn won 61-60.

While on the phone discussing this hoops vision quest the other day, I demonstrated to Todd how easy it would be to pull off by first asking AI to tell me the 12 most storied college basketball venues in the country and then asking it to plan for me a logical and efficient trip to each place in order to see a game using the remaining games in this year's schedule. Voila. Seconds later, there it was. We don't plan to do this until next year, and we’ll likely use the November/December non-league schedule to hoover up the more economical offerings, but this idea seems a go.

Travel, cont.

This will post on Monday, 09 February early in the morning. Later that day, we’ll head to the airport for a flight to Miami, overnighting with (very, very patient and kind) friends before continuing on to Antigua Tuesday. I’ll post something in a couple of days and then again likely the following Monday, if our friends’ Starlink is operational.