Ending Out the Year

   The look of "Magic eye" tubes  have always fascinated me, so I thought it would be fun to end 2024 and my forty-fourth post of the year with a GIF I created for myself in 2017. Ta-ta!

There Was a Time...

 ...I was so into...

Look Magazine Special Edition (1967)

 

 

See what I mean...

 That's my twin sister in the foreground and me behind her with the magazine she is calling to the camera's attention. Holy cow, it only cost $1.00 back then for the special edition. Anyhow, I liked that 'Look' so much, I had a back copy of the "Flying Saucers" issue up until 2021.

 

Humanitarian

James Earl Carter Jr. (October 1, 1924 – December 29, 2024)

 

 

 

 

 

 

'An Acrylic Digital Picture Frame is Worth...' (A follow-up)

     For my Christmas gift this year, my twin sister Georgene got me an acrylic digital picture frame (just like the above title and description on the box both say). Neat! I next created a video to be displayed, and set it to  the short piano piece entitled 'Miss Clare Remembers' from Enya's 1988 'Watermark' album. For the visual, I chose the 1985 poem I just recently posted twelve days ago.

      Here is the simple video I assembled:

 

 

 

 

According to A.I....

Presenting: me!

For reference, below is a photo of me from 2017. The above image more closely resembles my younger self than it does my present day portrait on which it was actually based. Flattery will get you anywhere.

‘Apparition: I Trouble the Moonlight’

 

 

 

 

I trouble the moonlight,

“Come, shadow me a spell.

 

In thy gray light,

It may be that I shall see her.”

 

A shimmer of luminescence, I know,

As long ago's go.

Patrolling the Earth...

 

Still, I wonder:

 

Clothed in the pallor 

Thy albedo accords,

 

Who is the haunt,

With this spectre,

A ghost?

-antaresrichard-

The Greater Half of My Life.

   This is it.

    I seem to passing one milestone after another lately. In a little over a month from now, I will be observing yet another golden anniversary. However, I just recently passed a milestone I almost overlooked. Had a thought not occurred to me forty years ago, none of these other landmarks would I have reached. 

    "If I die now, the improbable will become impossible."

    On the fourth of December 1984, defeated in love, and distressed at my employment prospects (I had gotten myself fired a year and a day earlier) I took a lethal overdose of sleeping pills and was waiting for the effect to set in. 

    It wasn't immediate as I had imagined.

    That's when the aforementioned thought I hadn't considered, with respect to unrequited love, crossed my mind.

    Needless to say the suicide attempt was aborted as I walked myself over to San Francisco General Hospital (which was just across the street) for emergency treatment.

    I have now lived more decades since that moment of crisis than I had leading up to it. This then is the greater half..

    As for my troth and my chances...

    At present, my hope is still improbable and one day, it will be rendered impossible, but I will let life do the final turning of the page and closing of the book. It will not be my own hand, for all hope requires is but the barest improbability to persist.

    Dying only cements ill fate - forever.

'This Then the Notion'

 This then the notion I confess,

A pure devotion have no less:

What lips to lips in  soft caress,

Address in kind, I too profess,

And offer mine up to thy "bess",

To that which grants sweet Heaven, yes!

 

I penned this way back in 1985, but somehow forgot to include it in  my little blog.

BAMPFA...

...with Birdie or, as she is better known on social media, Birdie Roy (Trish Keefer). To celebrate her birthday, I was asked to treat her to the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which I did, and happily so.

 Roy (Trish 

Photo by Trish Keefer, who herself was actually in a James Bond flick, Vic!

Thirty-three+ Years in the Failing Part 2

 Continued from Part 1...

    Running off the temporary splice, all appears to be okay. The flow of electricity has been constant since the patch was installed. Till the field crews show up this will have to suffice.

    Then around 2pm I lose power at the laptop. Strange, three quarters of the house is down but the kitchen and livingroom remain supplied'. Yvette and I summon PG&E again.

    Joe returns at 2:30. The underground line to 1379 Northwood Drive (our nextdoor neighbor) is out, but the temporary splice is still drawing limited energy for 1385 (our residence). Alfred Pulonco, our neighbor, now totally without electricity, has also contacted PG&E. 

    Joe decides to leave the splice in place so that 1385 will not be completely in the dark. He does show me the master power switch used to shut the meter down should any major disruption occur. A second step-up in the case will bring the crews tonight. 

    4:30pm sees Joe depart and 4:55pm has Ken of JB's High Voltage arrive. He's here to mark the street and to assure Yvette and I of the ETA of the crews (both contactors to PG&E). They are about an hour to an hour and a half away and enroute from their prior job.

    Ken takes off at six. 

    Minutes later, a lone, non-company truck drives up and is joined by a public works vehicle from the City of Fairfield. The two occupants meet at the junction box across the street and after a little discussion the public worker leaves. The time is 6:15pm

     7:15pm: At long last, the field crew arrives to join that lone occupant of the truck. Holy moly, they are many! There must be no less than five possibly six big work trucks, representing JB's High Voltage, Inc. and Henkels & McCoy West LLC. The vehicles disgorge around ten crewmembers. (One even brings his five children with him!)

    That mystery man? It turns out, he's the onsite representative from PG&E, He spoke little and smelled a great deal of cigarettes (though I never saw him light up once the entire night). Hmm.

     The crew gets to work, locating the trouble almost immediately. It's under a tiny rose bush in our front yard and near to the side fence and mailboxes shared by our neighbor and we. Placing the dug up plant in a wheel barrel, the workers use high pressure water nozzles to spray open a four foot hole in the dirt which they suction using a high power vacuum aboard their big bruiser of a truck.

    I mingle among the workers with their permission taking photos and videos of the absorbing field repair.

    Dominic of Henkels & McCoy West (he's the one who brought his kids with him) uses my camera to take a close-up for me of the particular damage the crews hove found.

     He explains the "burnout" they uncovered. It was all due to a bad splice the construction people made when they hooked up both 1379 and 1385 Northwood Drive to the main, PG&E underground, electrical line some thirty-three or more years ago! The resultant short, decades later, took out twelve to eighteen inches of electrical line. Gone completely was the section!

    Whoever the developer hired back in the nineties to do the hook-up, has, according to Dominic, so far resulted in forty or so such burnouts in the Cordelia Hills home development of which we are a part. it's almost endemic to our community. Luckily for us, the neither the front tree or the the fence was the cause for the burnout. Though early on they were both under suspicion, neither will be impacted.

    by 9:15 pm the personnel expertly replace and hook the cables, fully restoring electric power to both homes. "Lovingly" they replant the tiny bush and with that, all is done.

    The only snag to occur at all was a tree limb that snapped across the street having accidentally latched onto one of the departing trucks. The branch had to be sawed off and discarded.

Photos and videos:

The crews acted like the job was one big get-together!

Dig, dig, dig!

About twelve to eighteen inches of braided wire are completely gone! Photo courtesy of Dominic

A souvenir clip of one of the burnt-out electrical lines.

It only two the crew two brief hours to do the entire job and restore Christmas cheer.

     The following day, Joe came out once more to close out the work order the crews, the PG&E guy, or PG&E itself, forgot.

Thirty-three+ Years in the Failing Part 1

    I will try to keep this concise.

    Around three in the morning, Yvette awakens to the sound of the office cam security trying to boot. When she turns on the room lights, she discovers they are flickering. Thinking it a momentary issue, she returns back to bed and sleep.

    At 5:55am I awake and think to use my iPad tablet. It cannot get internet. I go to the living room and find Alexa constantly cycling. When I turn on the lights, they are at reduced power and flickering. The kitchen refrigerator is turning on and off. I check the household electrical panel but the circuit breakers seem perfectly fine.

    At 6;25am I put in a call to PG&E. They remotely test the meter and though there is power to to the vicinity, my meter is dead.

    Joe arrives at 7:25am. I note to him that though our outside meter appears off, the next door neighbor's meter shows no such sign. Indeed, Joe finds our address receiving barely any juice and ratchets up the case calling in for a repair crew as he suspects a damaged underground line leading anywhere from the PG&E junction box across the street to our house. Other properties seem unaffected.

    Finishing his paperwork, Joe leaves at 9:30am. 

     Yvette is well up by now.

     10:20am sees the arrival of Jerry. As the field crews are currently tackling other emergencies, Jerry decides to place a temporary splice from the nextdoor meter to ours so that we will have a steady current. I text our neighbor to apprise him.

     Temporary power is restored by 10:58am and Jerry leaves with our thanks in tow.

     End of Part 1

The PG&E splice up close.

A mobile phone video of the same splice,