Halfway there?

This is my sunrise view, just a few days after the Vernal Equinox. The sun will gradually move over to the left, more northerly, until it’s rising above the Parliament Buildings. And will shine right in my face when I roll over in the morning. No curtains up here, no need, I like the view. It’s nice having such an open view of the world every day, seeing storms roll through, seeing the seasons pass. Maybe that’s what got me thinking more about mortality and time.

Journey vs Destination

I suppose that's my approach to life, but it’s also the type of video games I like. I prefer simulation-style games, with an emphasis on just taking on a role, rather than chasing a goal. In Farming Simulator, you have a map of an area, your farm, and some equipment. And you just farm it. There is a progression through the various seasons, with planting and harvesting, but it just repeats for another year. More money means more fields, bigger dairy herd, etc, but your growth is limited to how much time in a day to do all the chores. Truck Sim is touring around the US or Europe, exploring new areas as they are added. RailRoader is managing some trains and industries, some train driving, but mostly the sorting and scheduling needed each game day. You don’t really “beat” any of these games.

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Nothing particularly fancy or profound here.

Vampire Numbers

Vampire numbers are composite, even-digit natural numbers (n) that can be factored into two “fangs” (x and y), each with n/2 digits, which together contain all original digits of the number.

A classic example is 1260 = 21 x 60, where the fangs (21, 60) contain all digits of 1260. They cannot both have trailing zeros.

I just finished watching S02E01 of Patience. Fascinating series, basically copied from Astrid: Murder in Paris (AKA Astrid et Raphaëlle). From IMDB - Autistic archivist Astrid Nielsen and impulsive inspector Raphaëlle Coste work together to solve crimes in and around Paris.

I just ‘found’ Season 6 of the French series, so that’s on my list of distractions too. In both versions, Patience/Astrid loves the intricacies of Bach Preludes and Fugues.

Politicians Exploiting the US Market

This is now less of a conspiracy theory and more of a sad truth. Sad because it’s happening and will continue. Oil prices dropped 7% today after Trump “randomly” took back his threat on Saturday of bombing civilian energy sites in Iraq within 2 days. Unless they surrendered or grovelled or gave him another peace price - doesn’t really matter. He announced that after Iran reopened talks and had some concessions, he was extending it to 5 days. Talks that Iran has denied are going on—if that really matters. Does he plan these ups and downs in policy to manipulate the markets, or is he as dumb as he looks, and it’s just the smart hangers-on who know what’s coming next, so they keep benefiting?

Mortality

I used to not worry about my age, or about getting things done, about ‘wasting’ time. Last year or so, this has changed, for some reason. I am retired and can do whatever I want, so I could spend three hours driving a train or a truck in a simulation game. Or I could focus on (re)learning piano—I do have a keyboard and a good book. Or explore the world of synthesized music and create my own compositions with the Ableton Live DAW. Or re-ignite my interest in lino-block printing. Or read some fiction, or non-fiction. Or write my own fiction. Or work more on blogging. Or join a local hiking club for slow-moving seniors. Or even travel—if I want to go wild. Maybe each morning needs to start with ‘spin the wheel for today’s focus’.

Spring Walk

It’s getting nicer out now, easier to wander the local streets in relative comfort.

View looking east, local playground, new steel-clad bix with a wooden walk.

Local community centre with an outdoor rink, an interested local condo/co-op (?), and a tiny library.

Local graffiti on two buildings.

Expressive

The music. Not the face.

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Confused Weather

Yesterday, the weather forecasters had some dire threats for today - freezing rain all night and day, over 10 mm accumulation on trees, wires and roads. Orange alert.

In reality, rain didn’t start until mid-morning today. It is freezing, but not really that bad. I needn’t have postponed my dental appointment, as once again the forecast was off. But why?

I asked Google,” Why is Ottawa, Ontario, hard to forecast weather?” It’s our location, and the surrounding geography. We’re at a nexus. We have the Ottawa Valley, the St. Lawrence River system, and the Gatineau Hills. We get cold air from the north, warm air from the south, and extra moisture from the Great Lakes. Plus the occasional visitor from the East Coast. Depending on where and how these meet, somebody's rain becomes snow, or vice versa. Or a balmy day morphs into a deep freeze.

Apple Crisp

I was feeling peckish, so I made a batch. This is a fav of mine, increase all the dry ingredients a bit for a thicker top crust.

The Stuff

• 5 apples, peeled and chopped

• 2 Tbsp granulated sugar

• 1 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon, divided

• 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice

• 1 cup light brown sugar

• 3/4 cup old-fashioned oats

• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 cup butter, diced into small cubes. Or marg.

• pinch of salt

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350 F degrees. Butter an 8x8 baking dish, or spray with non-stick cooking spray.

• Add the chopped apples, granulated sugar, 3/4 tsp of the cinnamon and lemon juice. Stir to combine.

• In a mixing bowl, add topping ingredients (brown sugar, oats, flour, 1 tsp cinnamon, salt, and butter). Use a pastry cutter, or two forks, or your hands, to cut the butter in until the mixture resembles pea-sized crumbs.

• Spread the topping over apples in the baking dish, and gently pat to even it out. Bake 40-50 minutes, until golden brown and bubbly.

• Serve warm and enjoy!

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Orange Weather

Weather warnings in Canada are now colour-coded, as additiional way of indicating severity:

• Yellow - Hazardous weather may cause damage, disruption, or health impacts. Impacts are moderate, localized and/or short-term.

• Orange - Severe weather is likely to cause significant damage, disruption, or health impacts. Impacts are major, widespread and/or may last a few days.

• Red - Very dangerous and possibly life-threatening weather will cause extreme damage and disruption. Impacts are extensive, widespread, and prolonged

We have an Orange Warning for freezing rain—starting tonight and then all day tomorrow. 10-20 mm accretion is possible. I had a dentist appointment tomorrow but cancelled - I’ll be hunkering down.

I remember the last really big one here in Canada, in January of 1998. 80 hours of freezing rain, up to 100 mm ice. 1000+ power transmission towers down, 4 million in the dark, and 30 deaths. I was working at Bell at the time, but took off every afternoon to drive to Casselman, a nearby small town, to work in a local food bank. Aside from organizing and handing out donations, a major task was just reassuring people that things would be ok, and not to feel bad about accepting help.

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Stacking My Distractions

Doing ‘stuff’ can also be a way of not doing ‘other stuff’. Watching the news can be interesting, and addictive - always just one more story. Even repeat coverage - maybe I missed something forst time through. And some games can be addictive. Never mind, most are addictive. But both those can be a distraction from the to-do list, especially the things-I-really want-to-do list. Stacking the two seems better, as if adding two nulls can be a something.

Just a thought. It was lovely here today, +13 and sunny. Snow and cold in a few days - it is March after all.

That’s it for today.

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Springing Ahead

Once again, we’ve moved the clocks ahead an hour into Daylight Saving Time. And, in the fall, we will ‘fall back’ and crank those dials.

This supposedly started during World War 1 to save coal—less needed for evening lighting. And it’s still good for tourism and recreation. In the fall, that shift helps a bit with those dark and cold mornings. But fewer places are doing this dance. BC has done their last shift, and will stay on DST. Saskatchewan dropped the change years ago, as did the Yukon.

Not that we actually have to crank all the clocks in our house to or fro an hour. It’s all automatic, synced via the Interwebs. Back in the 50s (yes, I’m old) it was all manual, and that first morning meant trying to remember which clocks you’d changed before bed. People would still be late/early for church, and ditto for school or work Monda morning. We were that “un-connected.”

NAS and stuff

My hard drive was overflowing with years' worth of movies, shows, and tunes. My son had been using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and had an older one I could borrow. Empty, so I had to buy a hard drive for it. And learn more stuff. Two drives, actually, because it’s set up as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). 4 TB Seagate Ironwolf drives. The borrowed box had some issues, so I got a Synology DS224+. Set up a Plex server, and now have 100’s of shows and movies—I could cancel all my streaming services, I suppose, and just re-watch everything.

I like the following list, via The Atlantic. Don’t have any, but most are Free To Watch via the Plex network.

Six Bizarre Movies That Are Actually Fun to Watch

• Iron Sky (streaming on Prime Video and the Roku Channel)

  Iron Sky is the sort of movie that demands a long-form investigation into how many hallucinogens were consumed during its production. The premise: Facing defeat in 1945, a group of Nazis flees to the moon and establishes the Fourth Reich, waiting for the right time to retake Earth—that is, until they are inadvertently discovered by an American astronaut.

• Jupiter Ascending (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)

  Jupiter Ascending is like no other movie ever made. What if Mila Kunis were a house cleaner named Jupiter who secretly owned all of planet Earth? What if Channing Tatum were a dog-human hybrid who skated around the sky on levitating boots? What if Sean Bean were also there?

• The Wicker Man (streaming on the Roku Channel)

  Edward Malus (played by Nicolas Cage) is a cop whose ex-fiancée asks him to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on an isolated island off the coast of Washington State. As he digs into the mystery, he gets caught up in the local matriarchal commune’s ancient rituals. LaBute’s The Wicker Man is intent on being a detective procedural; to modernize the story, it eschews the moralistic dissonance (and the musical elements) of the original, producing instead a madcap, paranoid thriller that is as absurd as it is fun.

• Frozen (streaming on Prime Video and Tubi)

  This is not your granddaughter’s Frozen. There are no trolls, reindeer, or enchanted snowmen—just a young man, his best friend, and his girlfriend trapped on a ski lift on a Sunday night. The resort won’t open again until Friday, and a storm is rolling in. I recommend this film not necessarily as a gratifying viewing experience—though I love it in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way—but as a conversation starter. Frozen is a horror movie in which so many implausible things happen, and the characters make so many unfathomable errors, that you can spend hours debating its events with your friends and family.

• But I’m a Cheerleader (streaming on Tubi and the Roku Channel)

  A comedy about a high-school cheerleader sent to conversion-therapy camp could already be a bit of a bizarre premise, but even that description doesn’t cover how wonderfully weird this movie is. Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is thrust into the blue-and-pink-washed world of True Directions, where the girls learn how to vacuum and the boys are taught how to fix cars, among other activities, in the name of counteracting their homosexual tendencies. (These undertakings all, somehow, get pretty horny.)

• Strawberry Mansion (streaming on Tubi, Prime Video, and the Roku Channel)

  Christopher Nolan’s Inception may be the most famous film about dreams, but it fails in one regard: It doesn’t capture their ephemeral beauty, and how strange they can be. The 2021 movie Strawberry Mansion offers a more familiar vision of them, if that vision involves sailing through various purgatories in a pirate ship manned by bipedal rats or reincarnating as a caterpillar destined to inch across the planet for centuries.

BTW - here’s a tiny film -

Multi-tasking Day

I sent the passenger train in my RailRoader game off on a run, did some chopping and stirring for spaghetti sauce, and listened to Heather Cox Richardson. All good, except none of those things were on my to-do list.

Country Joe - RIP

Woodstock performer Country Joe McDonald died from complications resulting from Parkinson’s disease yesterday in Berkeley, California, on March 7, 2026, at the age of 84.

When he performed at Woodstock at age 27, Country Joe McDonald was already an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Navy. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17 and served for three years (1959–1962), including time stationed in Japan, although he later became a prominent anti-war activist and singer of the protest anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock.

Thx to Woodstock Council of Elders Local Tribe #1969 on the FaceBook

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New podcast

I’ve started cohosting on a friend’s podcast. WeJustLoveGames. He’s been doing it for a few years, so it has a good following and is nicely polished. Not that he isn’t open to improvements. It includes a witty intro each week, game stock numbers, photos and letters from our followers (via our Discord), what we’ve been playing, and several recent gaming stories in the news. Possibly quirky ones. I choose and narrate the news, and we share the other bits, along with some banter. It’s fun, and gives me another needed bit of structure in the free-wheeling life of the retired. We record Friday nights at 8:30 pm Easter Time, live to Twitch, and are also distributed to many podcast platforms.

Gaming the Rails

I started gaming with Zork in the 70s, but in the past 10-12 years have been playing various simulation games, such as Euro Truck Simulator, Farm Simulator, and Train Simulator (Classic). The latter was a love-hate relationship, as the developers released hundreds of dollars worth of DLCs, rather than addressing persistent mystery crashes in the game. Software crashes, not trains. An extensive modding community kept users interested, but I finally grew tired of the crashes and quit.

Which brings me to RailRoader - suggested by my podcasting friend.

You and your fellow railroaders are the lifeblood of your railroad, just like it is the lifeblood of the communities it serves. Switch cars at industries. Keep people moving while running local passenger trains. Run trains with a purpose in transition era Appalachia – in Railroader!

It’s an Early Access game released three years ago, has good play value as is, gets regular updates every six months or so, and has a strong user community on Discord. I bought it three weeks ago and have 189 hours. Yes, I have played a lot, but there is a Waypoint-based navigation, so I can tell a locomotive to take its freight to a certain spot, and then I do something else. Like watch the news, do the dishes, have a shower—whatever.

Walkabout

Finally, we are into some warmth. Like +11. Rain and fog this morning, thunderstorms coming, but I did tour my ‘hood a bit. The older wooden houses from the early 1900s are being replaced by multi-unit condos and rentals. Big boring blocks of real estate. We are near an O-train station, so this is part of the city’s intensification plan. Hopefully, we also get a local grocery store and some bars. I did drop by a rebranded place, Bodega—looks promising for coffee and drinks. And pricey restaurant food.

Ramblin’ Man

No, not the Allman Brothers version. The shambling free association Trump. riffing at any chance he can get. I caught a bit of him bloviating at something for the Shield of the Americas. He went on for quite a while about translators, how they can’t always be trusted, how one time his long beautiful flowing sentence was cut down to 1/4 of the time. And then there was the destroyers. He’s gone on about this before.

We're building a thing called the battleship like in the old days. I always said why don't we have battleships anymore shooting big bullets instead of, you know, $3 million rockets.

And they said, "Uh, well, sir, we just don't have them."

Nobody could give me the answer, but we're actually building 10 of them.

And I said, you know, you remember the old ones from you'd see Victory at Sea. Remember Victory at Sea? And you'd see these ships going through those waves like the waves were nothing. Although the waves are pretty powerful. They knock out a lot of lot of territory. But you’d see these incredible. They’re pieces of art. Beautiful. Most beautiful. the big battleships of the 1940s, right? Power.

I said, “Well, would we ever want to bring them back?” Cuz we have some of them. They’re museums and other things.

And they said, “Sir, the new ship is 100 times more powerful than what we were looking at with those guns and amazing,right? 100 times.”

I said, “You sure it’s not maybe 90 times? 100 times more powerful. And we’re building 10 of them not to use them. We don't want to use him, but by having them, nobody's going to play games. So, yeah, just good to have him. We don't want to use [them].

My take is they are building new modern destroyers, but Trump may think it’s still the old ones. With big bullets. His advisors/keepers may let him stick with that.

Linksies

OK - last entry. Some links I’d added elsewhere today:

• From many moons ago. With extra women. Love that open G at the start - so simple a riff.

• I like this music genre- -

• Further to the above - One piano. Two artists. A collection of electromagnetic pluckers and pokers arrayed against the strings and piano body. A rack of electronic filters and shapers.
  Keyboards are one of my many hats - I’ll post more on thatanother day.

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