canyonwalker

A few months ago I visited a dermatologist to look at a few skin issues. One was a lump that was growing on the back of my head, the other was little sores, kind of like acne, that would occasionally appear on my forehead. The acne-like sores the doctor zapped with a cold ray to kill off whatever they were. The lump required surgery to remove. Oh, and I had a few skin tags. She zapped those with the cold ray, too. A few days later they died and fell off.

I don't have a photo of the cold ray, but here's what AI suggests it might have looked like:



I left in the AI tells, like the incoherent text in the caption box. At least in this rendering everybody has a totally appropriate number of hands and fingers.

The occasional sores on my forehead did what occasional problems do. They came back. Actually, I think it was different ones that emerged. Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. It's like a noise in your car that doesn't rattle or squeak when the mechanic takes it for a test drive. When I saw the doctor for a followup a few months later she introduced me to a new term. The occasional bumps/sores on my forehead were scaling.



Scaling. "Great," I thought. "I'm turning into a lizard."

She also used another term that was scarier than turning into a lizard. That term was pre-cancerous. 😰 The scaling on my forehead was actinic keratosis (yeah, that's another new term, too, but it sounds boring). It's a skin condition caused by long term UV exposure. If left untreated it has a 5-10% chance of turning into skin cancer. Thus the term pre-cancerous.

When the doctor understood how my scales appear and reappear she changed her treatment plan. Rather than keep playing whack-a-mole with the Cold Ray— though she did zap me with it in three more places for good measure— she gave me a cream to apply to my forehead for two weeks. The cream would hopefully kill off the pre-cancerous cells.

BUT WOULD IT STOP THE LIZARD METAMORPHOSIS?
WOULD THE PATIENT SURVIVE?
STAY TUNED FOR NEXT TIME...

I've continued my streak of using the pool every day. It occurred to me last night that I started on June 1. That means with today being the 15th... I'm halfway to a month of #PoolLife. I didn't plan it that way, though now that I've spotted the pattern I'm motivated to see it through.

Today the water was warm enough again to enjoy doing laps and floating in the main pool for at least 45 minutes before going for a soak in the hot tub and finishing with sitting on a deck chair in the shade.



(Yes, I've used this pic from the pool a few times now. I don't want to keep uploading new pool pics every day. It'd be repetitive like when my little sister was a kid, shooting 35mm film, and my dad would come back with the photos from the drugstore and complain, "I just paid for a roll of pictures and 22 of them are the damn cat!")

As I started my retirement a few months ago one thing I wondered was, "Will I still get up early?" Over my life I'd seen/heard from so many other retirees who kept getting up at early hours of the day, like 6:30am. All said it was because the routine was so ingrained from years of working or raising a family that it couldn't be changed. Well, my routine the last 12 years had been a M-F 6:45am alarm (occasionally earlier). How long after I retired would I be stuck on that schedule?

To my pleasant surprise the answer was Not at all. Almost immediately after retiring I dropped any getting-up-early habituation and slept in 'til I felt like it.

But that was only part of my concern. The other concern is playing out right now, in the month of June, when the sun rises ridiculously early. The past few years in June I routinely got up well before my 6:45am alarm. The brightening sky had me waking up at 6, 5:45, or occasionally even earlier. And once I was up, I was up. How is that going now?

Again, I have been pleasantly surprised. While I have often woken up at about 6am with the sunlight pouring through the windows in our bedroom (we have a lot of natural light and a south-east exposure) the difference is I'm not woken up-up. I check the time, roll over, and go back to sleep with no problem.

This afternoon we went out for a hike/walk in Byxbee Park. It's part of the City of Palo Alto nearby and is a park we've been to many times. We like it because it's nearby, so easy to get to, and is a mellow location on the edge of the bay.

We had planned to go farther afield today, specifically about Russian Ridge up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We've been putting that off for several days now, as something keeps coming up. Something came up again this morning when Hawk was feeling a bit ill and decided to lie down for a nap. So Russian Ridge goes back on the stack— we're talking about going as soon as tomorrow— and Byxbee became our activity for today after lunch.



One thing we noticed right off was that Byxbee recently got a "haircut". Actually, the first thing we noticed right off the bat was that Byxbee fuckin' stinks today. There's a wastewater treatment plant right next to it. They don't always stir the shit, but apparently today was a let's-stir-all-the-shit day, and the wind was blowing right past it, too.

But, hey, I mentioned the "haircut". The wild grasses have been mowed recently. It makes some of the displays, like the fence with the no-trespassing sign in the pic above, look pretty silly. It's not a scratch 'n' sniff pic, so you can use your imagination for the smell of sewage wafting over it.

Now, as if it weren't bad enough that the smell of sewage and shit wafts over the park, while you're in it you're standing atop garbage.



For decades up until 2011 Byxbee Park was a garbage dump. I mean, it wasn't called Byxbee Park back then. It was probably called "Palo Alto Dump, downwind from the sewage treatment plant". Lots of cities nearby all had dumps right up against the bay. There are similar spots in Sunnyvale and Mountain View. In the late 20th century they all realized that was kind of bad, and they started taking steps to convert the dumps to parks. They stopped accepting new trash then spent years covering it up, letting it simmer down, and monitoring it with pipes and gauges to make sure the methane and other gases from rotting garbage wouldn't explode. Then they called it parkland. Because the best parks are the ones built atop explosive poisonous garbage gas.



Another thing we noticed was different this visit is snails.There are snails on all the signs in the park. I wonder if trimming the grasses has driven them to other places. The sign in the pic above, BTW, is an identifier for one of the making-sure-this-shit-doesn't-literally-explode monitors.



It's not really wildflower season anymore; we've had a few months of dry weather now. But some of the hardier plants up here are still green and flowering. Plus, this garden area is actually watered. You can tell because there are purple colored utility chests (not shown in the pic) that indicate pipes with recycled water. Mmm, probably fresh from that sewage treatment plant!

Recently I realized that my American Airlines Aadvantage balance had reached over 972,000 miles— nearly a million! The most recent boost came from the latest AA-affiliated credit card I opened three months ago. As I've explained many times before, carrying a huge balance with points programs is a bad idea— and nearly 1 million definitely puts the "ug" in "huge". 🤣

An opportunity to take a bit off the top appeared yesterday morning when I was doing my airline book-o-rama. I found a deal on CLT-SFO tickets for just 10,500 miles each (one-way). That's a steal as flights haven't been that cheap in... well, practically forever. Even the days of 12.5k one-way/25k round-trip are over a decade behind us at this point.

To be sure, taking 21k off the top of 972k does not materially change the risk of carrying such a huge balance. It also doesn't set me far back from topping 1.0 million. ...Not that that's actually a goal, or anything. It's just something that would be amusing to log into my account and see.

You might recall the many times I've written about Million Miler status with United and wonder why I'm not more excited about this. These are not the same. With American I have nearly 1 million redeemable miles. On United I earned over 1 million elite qualifying miles. What's the difference? Elite miles come primarily from butt-in-seat travel. Redeemable miles can come from partner activity, like using the airline's affiliated credit card. Indeed most of my nearly 1 million AA miles are from the nearly dozen AA credit cards I've owned over the past 20 years. AA does have a million miler program like UA, and I do have lifetime miles in it... but fewer than 300k, versus my now 1.2 million with United.

That aside, I really do need to spend more of these still-nearly 1 million AA miles. I aim for this pair of cheap one-way tickets home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday morning was like the school book fair for me. Though instead of it being 5th grade me figuring out the best combination of books I could buy with my $7.35 saved up from allowance, it was today me (well, yesterday me 🤣) booking flights for trips over the next few months.

Visiting my inlaws in July

The main impetus was that Hawk and I were planning our next visit to her parents. Her mom is currently doing better, with her cancer treatments still on hold (though that's not really good news). We'll go out to visit her mom and dad in late July, catching them while MIL is still on an upswing in health (fingers crossed) and being there with her for the next string of doctor appointments when she gets assessments of what'll happen over the next few months.

Planning this trip was made more complex by the fact that prices for travel are going up. Prices on everything are going up, of course, so it's no surprise that travel is getting spendier. But oddly it wasn't flights that were so expensive. It's the cost of a rental car that's obscene. I spent easily 3 hours exploring different ways of getting to her parents' place to try to keep the car cost to something merely very expensive, versus holy-fuck-is-that-a-mortgage-payment expensive. 😨

Southwest Status Chase / Wild Goose Chase

Regular readers of my blog know that when it comes to travel I've always got multiple plates spinning at the same time. I'm solving simultaneously for cost, and time/effort, and... points and elite status. 😅 In particular I've been working on renewing Southwest A+ and CP elite status.

Going into yesterday's book-o-rama I needed 3,000 more points on Southwest— in addition to everything I already had booked/forecasted— to cinch both statuses. That's just one good, paid one-way trip on Southwest. But the flight I booked gave me nearly 6,000 points. That's 3k more than I needed. The optimizer in me thought, "Hmm, maybe I can change another booking from cash to points and still hit the numbers,." 😅

So I crawled through all my other Southwest bookings, looking for places I could rebook or make other tradeoffs. I found one. On a flight home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August I could cancel a Southwest flight with a poor schedule and book a nonstop flight on American for the hideously low price of 10,500 points per seat. Ooh, I had to jump on that 10.5k fare. They don't make 'em like that anymore. But canceling that Southwest flight pulled 5,000 points off my forecast. That swung me from 3k over target to 2k short. Oh, no, what do I do now? 😰

Southwest Plan Locked In

Last year I faced the problem of, "Dang, I'm a little short"— in December. It being late in the year my options were limited. Southwest offered a deal to buy status outright, but it was ridiculously expensive. I ended up flying a mileage run. I thought it would be drudgery but ended up mildly amusing. I thought I was flying to LA for dinner. Instead I flew to Los Angeles just long enough to piss and got back in time for dinner with my spouse.



As amusing a story as that December jaunt turned into, I don't care for a repeat this year. That's why I'm working to lock in status earlier in the year. That last 2,000 points I needed to make up after yesterday's bookings and rebookings? With several months left to go in the year I have lots of options. I decided yesterday I can do it with credit card bonuses. I just need to shift some big expenditures I was going to put on another card over to my Southwest card— et voilà! I'll now cinch both A+ and Companion Pass by mid-September.

You may have noticed that I've been writing about the pool a lot lately. There's a very simple reason for that. I've been at the pool a lot lately! Today was 12 days in a row of going to the pool.

Today we had our friends, Barbara and Jesse and their son, J., over. It was a great day to relax in the water. Well, we four adults relaxed; J., age 12, was a fountain of energy as usual. The temperature here in Sunnyvale peaked at 88° today. That's cooler than yesterday's 99° F (37° C)— which made yesterday the hottest day of the year so far, beating even our March heat wave.



With the water still extra warm from yesterday I stayed in longer than I expected. It was "bath tub warm", Barbara and Jesse said. With that I didn't even need a soak in the hot tub. Instead after 90+ minutes in the main pool I took my turn sitting out for a bit and cracked open a cold beer.

It was great reconnecting with old friends we hadn't seen in several months— not since pool season last year! 🤣 One topic of conversation was retirement. Jesse left his last job early this year, a few weeks before I gave notice at mine. At the time he called it a "soft retirement", expressing the possibility he might look for another job after a few months of semi-retirement. While he says the jury's still out on whether going back to work might be an economic need, he sees absolutely no need in terms of sense or purpose or fulfillment in life. On that, he and I are 💯. I quipped, "Within weeks days after retiring I found there is absolutely no job-shaped hole in my life."

I figure we'll all see more of each other now that we're all retired. 🏝️ I mean, except the 12 year old. Someone's going to have to work to pay our Social Security checks 15 years from now. 🤣

Lately I've had an earwig of The Chattanooga Choo Choo, the 1941 song performed Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. Y'know, the Big Band Sound classic that goes

Pardon me, boy
Is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?
Yes, yes (Track 29!)
Boy, you can give me a shine

I'm not sure why this song has been stuck in my head the past few days. I've never been a fan of Big Band music. My partner's dad was, though, and she has some of the classics from that era loaded on her music player. Maybe that's where I heard it.

Anyway, I was singing the lyrics to myself the other day, and I choked after the second stanza.

You leave the Pennsylvania station about a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina

So the first few lines of this stanza are okay. ...Though from Pennsylvania Station— which is in New York— to Baltimore (where the main station is also called Penn Station, BTW), likely with a few stops along the way, via 1940-era train, it's about 3 hours. So that must be a pretty engrossing magazine. 🤣 But the real problem comes with breakfast (presumably, for ham and eggs) in Carolina. That's where I choked on it.

You see, I lived and traveled the first 25 years of my life in the mid-Atlantic region. I was picturing the route on a map as I sang the lyrics to myself, and I was like, "WTF? You would not travel south from Baltimore to, say, Raleigh (or even Durham), then west to Chattanooga!"

There are two big problems with routing that way. One, that's way longer than traveling down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and crossing directly into Tennessee at the state line town of Bristol. I fully understand that rails don't always traverse the shortest route between two points; costs of construction and operation matter a lot. But that's problem number Two: the route described in the song requires rails crossing the steep Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina. Not only is that route 200 miles longer, those miles are way more costly to traverse.

A quick Google search confirmed my objections. The actual train service from NYC to Chattanooga, TN did pass through Baltimore but then jogged west, over to the Shenandoah Valley, then followed that southwest through Virginia and across the border into Tennessee. It followed the same route as modern day interstate I-81. It never entered North Carolina.

As a historical note, the original interstates were often built along the same routes as railroads through mountain passes. That's why the route the rail followed in 1940 looks a lot like the route you'd drive today. That's also why I-40, which does cross through the mountains of western NC, was one of the last of the originally planned interstates to be completed.

BTW, this breakfast-in-Carolina lie isn't the only falsehood Glenn Miller peddled in his famous song. 🤣 That "Track 29!" call-response in the first stanza? In 1940 Pennsylvania Station had only Tracks 1-21. And of the three trains that went to/through Chattanooga, none departed at 3:45. 💩

We had a power outage last night. Around 9pm the lights went out. 30 seconds later they came back on for a moment then died again. Moments later, another quick flicker on then off.

"Oh, that's not good," I remarked mostly to myself. When the power comes on briefly after an outage then snaps back off it usually indicates that the system tried to bridge from one main to another— and failed. And when such failures happen they are more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to fix.

Indeed it did take a while for the power to come back on. Hawk says the lights came back on around 2am. PG&E, our utility company and a convicted murderer 💀, reports on its website that the outage was fixed at 1:30am. Of course, convicted murderer PG&E was also still texting me as late as 6:30am that the estimated fix would be completed at 4pm today. 🤣

This 4½ ~ 5 hour outage wasn't too inconvenient for us. When it hit at 9pm we were already winding down for the night. We stayed up together until 11, surfing the web on our computers on battery power, tethering to our phones for network. We saw on convicted murderer PG&E's site that the outage affected several blocks around us, but apparently not wherever the cell towers are.

Actually it was amusing using convicted murderer PG&E's outage side. It's one of the first things I thought to do; check the site for known outages and report ours. The site said, "Nope, your power is ON!" So I clicked the button to report, "Nuh-uh, it's OFF." And they gave me a spinning ball icon while they said, "We're checking your power meter." Seconds after I clicked the button on my browser, Hawk got a text from convicted murderer PG&E (her name is on the bill to pay for power and murders) "AN OUTAGE HAS BEEN REPORTED IN YOUR AREA". Meanwhile I was still getting the spinning ball icon for another 30 seconds until convicted murderer PG&E said, "Yup, you're right, your power's out." 🤣

Anyway, it wasn't too inconvenient for us. We were basically like, "The power's out, what a shame. Well, anyway...."

Years ago there would've been a scramble to find flashlights. That issue was mooted by the fact we already carry flashlights with us constantly. They're our cellphones! Hawk still wanted me to tell her where all the flashlights in the house are. We do have several in various places. I navigated downstairs by the light of my cellphone to retrieve a less-powerful flashlight for her.

Another "now vs. then" difference is that power outages are so much less common nowadays. When I was a kid, in a different part of the country, we'd have outages at least once a year, usually in the summer during rough weather. Here in Silicon Valley they're rare. A quick search through my blog shows a 14-minute outage 2 years ago and a 30-second outage in 2017. There have been other outages in between those two, but typically not lasting more than a few seconds. At 4½ ~ 5 hours this one was extremely long. Even the notorious rolling blackouts of 2001 only hit us for about an hour at a time.

Last week I quipped that with my next planned trip not until August  I had nowhere to go... except the pool. Now I've extended my streak of using the pool from 5 days in a row to 10 days in a row!



Today the weather was hot again so I spent awhile in the pool, doing walking laps and then just floating to rest, before moving over to the hot tub for a soak. When it's not warm enough for the pool, like the several days beforehand, I just use the hot tub.



Here's a pic from a few days ago I've been waiting to post. Oh, and yes, I bought a pack of Coors Banquet beer to enjoy on these warm summer (technically almost summer) days. And on days when it's cool outside but it's summer in my mind. Coors Banquet is a survivor from the bad ol' days of American macrobrews that's actually reasonably good. Of course, in the really bad ol' days it was so amazingly good that it inspired a blockbuster movie that became a cultural touchstone for years.