justing.net

The Daily Bits 49

By Justin G. on 25MAR31MON

I found my words this week.

Almanac / outlook, Mar 24 to Mar 30

The week starts off hot, low 80s for a high, but quickly crashes back down to seasonably average weather. From Wednesday on it’s in the 60s during the day and mornings in the 40s again. Possibility of rain sometime in the latter half of the week.

The days are rapidly getting longer, sunrise will be a little after 7 and sunset almost 7:30 at night. That’s twelve and a quarter hours, and increasing noticeably each day.¹ The moon is a waning crescent, and is new on the weekend. It means the darkest nights of the month are at hand.²

Day Bits

Below is my foreground at various moments during the week. Keep in mind the weather and waxing daylight for background. Now it’s a three dimensional scene.

1. MAR24MON
   • There was this very irritating horn drone in the YouTube DJ mix. Or the car is making a very irritating continuous sound since merging onto the 101. But it really does sound like a horn, not a sound that a car makes on the 101. It’s very convincing. I’m trying out this new YT channel. The first video I found was great, but after that it’s been something off, some detail that just grates. This horn, it would fit the pattern. See, the tricky thing is that the horn did and didn’t change when I changed the volume of the stereo. Cutting the music though, the horn definitely persisted. Definitely. So, not the music. New theory then, maybe it’s in my head. Or ears. One more test: the exit. In a quite surreal way, the volume of the horn decreased right along with the background ambient car sound as we slowed to a stop at the end of the offramp. The third theory is it! It’s in my head, or ears. Should I be this excited?
2. MAR25TUE
   • Have you yet had the pleasure of not hearing the gardeners because they are using battery powered tools? Our tree guy today had an electric chainsaw and leaf blower and I don’t know what else. I didn’t hear any of it. And the tree looks great.
   • We had a very early preview of summer evenings to be today, in late March. The evening temperature: perfect, maybe a little warm. The breeze: delightful, especially in the shade. Walking along the sunny side of the street in those slanting rays: warmer than preferred. Tomorrow will be twenty degrees cooler. Twenty.
3. MAR26WED
   • The drivers this morning all wanted to have words. There was the one that felt they waited too long for a biker to blow the stop sign. The driver had words with the biker, after not sharing the road and boxing in the biker behind some parked cars. Physically pressuring a cyclist with their SUV is clearly taking it too far, but it wasn’t the only cranky driver this morning. At the intersection closest to our house, another driver flew through the stop sign while making a right. The scary thing is that it was close enough that the driver heard A let out a long “waaoow!”, and then they slowed to roll down the window and shout back “really!?”. You cannot make this stuff up. What the big hurry was for either of these drivers remains unknowable to us, and probably, unfortunately, for the drivers themselves too.
4. MAR27THU
   • I was walking to a meeting when I glanced to my left and saw through the open blinds of a window that the rain was falling again. I could see clearly, all the way across the parking lot to the building across the street. There was a clear gray light, and it seemed every raindrop along the line of sight was sharply visible, every droplet, every bit of water falling gracefully. There is a different look to it when your view is slightly downward through all this falling water, the vertical dropping is more apparent.
5. MAR28FRI
   • The hills around San Jose are that brief but brilliant spring green, almost painfully verdant and bucolic. If you don’t look too closely at the foreground suburban sprawl you could mistake it for somewhere else, somewhere more humid and always wet from rain. All the light fluffy clouds hanging isolatedly over the valley really tie together the idea of elsewhere. Combine those pure white cumuli with the intense green meadows and the only thing missing is a flock or two of sheep among the scattered oaks to complete a postcard picture of, say, Ireland.
6. MAR29SAT
   • There were so many buyers at the Friends of the Library sale this morning. I estimated that half of the people there were professionals, or gig workers if that is a thing in the used book economy. They are more pushy and less considerate, but not outright rude. Just determinedly checking every single book down the line with their scanners and apps. Maybe indifferent to the regular folks, maybe even more indifferent if you’re a woman. People gotta work, I know that, and their money is green same as anyone’s. But is this event for the community to support the library, or for the entrepreneurial to skim off the best books for only a dollar or two? I hadn’t realized there was such a demand, there were even more buyers than I remember from a few years ago. I’m just surprised this part of the market could grow so much that it’s starting to spoil it for us regular readers.
7. MAR30SUN
   • The internet was out for about half a day and I gotta say it was a relief. It abruptly cut out in the middle an X-Files episode last night and wasn’t restored in the morning. Turns out that reading books to wake up isn’t so bad, I’ll have to find the right material to do more of that. Maybe it helped that I was reading The Work of Art which is written by a magazine editor, so chapters were short, focused, and easy to read, but on engaging material. The internet came back late in the morning and the sense of normalcy returned.
   • While I waited in the car it must have rained tiny unexpected drops on the windshield from the high scattered clouds. It had to be only for a minute, if I hadn’t looked up just then I wouldn’t have known at all.

This is an abundant crop of words after last week’s weak showing. I tried something a little different, variations on the typical structure I’ve established. Leave out the punchline, change the emphasis, that sort of thing. Next week I’ll vary again.

Outside Events

There were many more significant events this week. This is just a small sampling, the ones that really stuck out to me personally. Not a survey or a summary, more of just keyhole snapshot.

• It will be white dudes on the moon again. God this is stupid.
• The SecDef uses Signal and so can you.
• People are being disappeared off the street now.

To Reply: Email me about your words.