cupcake cups and draught conspiracy color- Correct the sunset
Of course, not everybody was impressed. At the gym, I walked into the locker room and overheard a heated conversation.
“There is no drought!” an elderly guy exclaimed. (Hence the exclamation po!nt.)
“Rainfall is far below average,” someone else, representing the consensus, replied.
“That’s because the weather service calculates average rainfall based on an average of the ten highest years in the past century.”
“That’s not true,” the adversary gushed. Remarkably, he gushed at the same time he was sputtering.
“It is a plot.” (Listening in, I felt like a spy.)
“Have you looked at Lake Cachuma?” Someone asked. Dryly.
“They are draining it into the ocean.” [“This fool is unplugged,” I thought.]
“Who is draining it?”
“The government.”
“I thought aliens attached a giant hose and pump,” someone else remarked, sucking up to the nutcase.
“That’s right. Obama wants illegal aliens to steal our water.”
“It’s open borders on stupidity,” I thought.
“I meant extraterrestrial aliens,” the adversary, a science fiction writer, corrected.
“Don’t be stupid,” the paradigm for human stupidity replied. “There are no extraterrestrials. The government just wants to raise the price of water - and control us. That’s why I take long showers, water my lawn and wash my car every day.”
“It’s a shame you can’t wash stupidity away. You need a cold shower and a brain transplant,” I thought. Last week Mitra and Stefan drove up to Santa Barbara for a visit. Mitra brought some cupcake containers.
“Cupcake containers?” Nazy asks.
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m talking about those little, eh, cups, that you use when you make cupcakes.”
“I think those are called cupcake liners or cupcake sleeves or cupcake backing cups.”
“Perhaps, my dear, we have identified a gap in the English language.”
“Young Tiger really likes playing with whatever these cupcake thingees are called.”
“It runs in the family, Dan. You really like the cupcakes that come out of those ‘thingees’.”
This week we also focused on vision. Melika and Nazy got me a pair of color vision correction glasses for Valentines.
(I’m not sure exactly how they work, but it has something to do with filtering or shifting certain wavelengths.)
“You need to wear them for a while to train your brain,” Nazy, who insisted on reading the instructions, explained.
“There is nothing wrong with my brain, Nazy. It’s my eyes that are not meeting performance metrics.”
“It says here,” Nazy continued, “that your brain must learn to interpret the new information that it is receiving from your eyes. You should begin the training regime in strong sunlight.”
“So these wouldn’t work in Zurich?” I replied.
The initial results were …
“interesting, Nazy. Now carrots look red. But pink, that used to look gray, now looks like something I haven’t seen before. I’ll have to learn my colors all over again..
Flashback
Vancouver, Canada
We had moved to Vancouver from Memphis Tennessee and we wanted to select a good private school for Mitra - who was in third grade. We decided on York House. And York House was dismissive:
“She must take an entrance examination,” Mrs. Fuddy-Duddy, the headmistress, explained. “We’ve seen that children from American schools, especially those from the southern part of America are always ill-prepared and unable to compete or even contribute in a meaningful educational environment. You should be prepared for rejection.”
“I’m not worried,” I replied. “These people don’t know Mitra,” I thought.
We waited while Mitra took the exam. She came out smiling.
“How did it go, Mitra?” I asked.
“It was easy, Daddy,” Mitra replied loudly. Then she turned to me and whispered. “They don’t know how to spell color.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t too hard,” I replied. “And that you didn’t have to labour over it.”
End Flashback
Mitra in Vancouver
The color-correcting vision glasses are the first step in a frontal assault on all of my eye issues. This week I am scheduled for cataract surgery. This means that.
“If you’re driving me somewhere at night,” Nazy interrupts, “there will be a good chance that you’ll see any moose that happens to be standing in the road.”
“I’m hoping that we’ll achieve better sensitivity than that.” I replied. “The doctor mentioned something about X-ray vision,” I thought.
In fact, I’m really looking forward to this. Glasses are no longer able to correct my vision to 20-20. And signs at night are rather dim and hard to read.
This week Nazy and I checked the tide tables before going for a walk along the Pacific Ocean. Luckily, low tide (i.e. the biggest beach) occurred almost simultaneously with sunset. We completed the hike without being drenched or knocked off our feet. (See last week’s letter.)
The Sunset