Meanwhile over in Real Life

I seldom write about my daily life, leaving future readers (should there ever be any) mostly in the dark about practical matters I deal with. Here's a glimpse into a noteworthy week.

The central USA was hit by a wicked winter storm early last Sunday. It was caused, according to a TV weather report I saw, by an alteration in the jet stream which allowed an incursion of Arctic air from the polar vortex that normally hovers around the North Pole. A map I saw in the New York Times showed temperatures in most of the center of the USA being below 0 degrees Fahrenheit! 

Here in Baton Rouge, it dropped quickly into the 20s and didn't get above freezing until Wednesday. The electricity in our neighborhood went out at 630am on Sunday and wasn't restored until yesterday (Friday) around 1pm when everyone's power came on... except ours. 

We have a generator that allowed us to have electricity and run one of our two heating units at a time but not both (heating either the upstairs or the downstairs). I tried turning off as many appliances as possible in hopes of running both but no luck. The governor function cut the unit off no matter what I tried. So we coped with partial heating. Mary Lou spent a lot of time and two nights at Maureen's house, helping her with Mary Clayton as Cody was out of town on business. As the days wore on, the incessant noise of the generator struggling mightily around the click to keep electricity flowing wore on our nerves, a necessary stressor preferable to freezing wirhout a wireless connection.

Our generator system is designed to switch on when the electricity from Entergy (our local electric utility) stops and to shift back to Entergy when they restore service. That happened with all our neighbors but our generator kept running. I spent a good deal of time Friday and today trying to get Entergy to send someone to check our service. They finally did this morning and it turned out Entergy were sending electricity to our house. Something was preventing it from taking over from the generator. After several efforts to reach someone, I got a technician named Blaine from the generator supplier to come out around 3pm and he found the problem- burned out coils in the switching unit. Blaine was a pleasant, nerdy guy who was fun to talk to while he worked on the generator and he fixed it very efficiently. It was a frustrating process but it finally worked out. 

Life and death on Planet Earth (Facebook comment on the death of Rush Limbaugh)

I think of myself and each of us as an amazing (to me), time-limited physical system, a member of a species of animals that has somehow managed to generate language, self-awareness, knowledge and technology. Sending spaceships to Mars, for example, is quite an accomplishment. I have concluded my identify "Owen Scott" only exists as a sort of fictional character in a shared story that serves to organize our species for survival and procreation. What happens when my body's time runs out? I suspect "Owen Scott" is gone and the story goes on, so it's best not to be too attached to ones identity. I read that the Sufis have a motto "Die before you die." Easier said than done but a path to freeing oneself to focus on bringing out our best and making the most of our time here.

What punishment does Trump deserve?

Now that Trump has been acquited in the Senate trial, we'd all love to see him in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash beside the highway but what is the appropriate punishment for his crimes? He has done immense harm in many ways, 400,000 excess deaths from COVID being only one example. He should certainly be concerned about the possibility of there being a literal Hell. All that said, simply being convicted and losing his ability to run for office, hold insurrection rallies and strike fear into the hearts of cowardly Republicans would be a major humiliation, an inescapable "narcissistic injury." Losing his money and business empire after being convicted of tax fraud seems to be a realistic probability that would certainly put the hurt on him. If those things along with being a pariah and object of scorn in the media and by stand-up comedians worldwide resulted from his being convicted, I'd probably be OK with him getting to serve on probation with appropriate restrictions on his activities like no internet usage. I doubt Melania would stick around for the sex. Showing mercy would be a gesture to his diehard red hat base supporters.