Excavation in dewey Paducah requires Hi-Tech socks
Regular readers may recall that Nazy recently ‘helped’ me select a new pair of (organic) sneakers. At the same time, she mandated purchase of..
“Hi-Tech socks, Dan.”
“Hi-Tech? What color are they? Remember, I invented the colorful sock craze.”
“Hi-Tech, Dan. The socks use moisture-wicking fabric and nano-technology.”
“What color?”
“And they have a wonderful balance of cushion and comfort.”
“What color?”
“White, Dan. The socks are white.”
“White? What is the point?”
“These are technically advanced socks, Dan. They come in lefts and rights..”
“Let’s get the same number of each.”
“... so that they can conform to the exact shape of your foot,” Nazy continued.
“Should I tattoo a big “R” on one foot?”
“Which foot?”
“A very colorful ‘R’ on my right foot will help me when I’m getting ready to exercise.”
Disclaimer: In spite of my loss on the colorful sock front, I am pleased to say that the shoes themselves are bright red. (They didn’t have the gold ones in my size.)
But subsequent events conspired together to create a disaster:
I was at the gym, changing into my workout clothes. But I had mistakenly brought two “L” socks.
“Oh! The Horror!” I thought as I tried to decide whether it would be better to exercise sockless or with a left sock on my right foot. Uncertain, I decided to go swimming
That particular day was momentous in another way, too. As I left the house and headed to the car, I detected:
“Moisture!” I thought. “It’s wet out here,” I shouted as I dashed back indoors.
“What?” Nazy responded after hearing my cries.
“There is dew!” I exclaimed. “And, I felt ‘wet’ on my cheek. I wonder if there’s a word for that.”
“Would that word be ‘rain’, Dan?”
“No. Rain falls.”
“Drizzle?”
“No, no, no. They use gravity to descend. This, eh, ‘water’, is suspended in the atmosphere.”
“So it’s fog.”
“No, you can see through it - so it’s not fog. I think it’s electrostatically levitated dew.”
“There is no word for that.”
“I know. That’s what I’ve been saying. It never rains here. This may be what they have instead.”
“Wait a minute, Dan.” Nazy interrupts. “The weather report said that the city received 17% of average rainfall so far this year. Therefore, it must have rained.”
“Your logic my dear, is, eh, ‘logical’. Logical, but flawed. If the average rainfall is 0 inches, then 17% of zero is zero. So I’m correct.”
This week we also attended several Santa Barbara Newcomers events. Nazy joined the club a few months before me, so she is no longer classified as a “newbie”.
“What this means,” Nazy explained, ‘is that you, a newbie, have to give a background speech at the next newcomer event.”
“Background?”
“Where you came from, why you left, why you picked Santa Barbara. Something interesting.”
“Which one is interesting?”
“Dan.”
“Haven’t they heard all of this from you?”
“What will you say?”
“Well. I could say that we were in Zurich and that, eh, ‘America called.’”
“America called.”
“Tax authorities in America turned up the volume. And you wanted to be ‘close to the children’. Although I did point out that ‘the children’ were all in their 30s, so..”
“Keep to the narrative, Dan.”
“So, in an unappreciated attempt to meet your requirements, I bought a solid geometry book, converted the locations of the kids’ homes into spherical coordinates and located the place on the globe that was equidistant from all of them. But you rejected the mathematically valid result.”
“Which, as I recall, was somewhere between Paducah, Kentucky and South Peoria, Illinois.”
“Sometimes mathematics is ugly, Nazy. But since you wouldn’t accept the objectively obtained result, I had to construct an elimination system. You eliminated Beirut even though the ‘shopping was great’ because you like to have electricity 24 hours a day.”
“And because it’s too far..”
“That left Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. My midway mathematical solution (Oxnard) was rejected out of hand. We decided that Los Angeles, geographically bigger than Switzerland, was too vast. And, here we are in Santa Barbara.”
“Maybe I can get them to not ask you to talk, Dan.”
This week, Nazy and I decided to “Boldly Go Where no Martin had gone” (in the last few decades): the storage. As we were driving, I thought about something Melika’s fiancee had mentioned.
“Storage,” Tom noted, “is a great business. People rent a space and forget what they’ve stored. But, because ‘it might be valuable’, they just keep paying. (And paying.)”
“I keep paying because I’m afraid to tackle the storage, not because it might be valuable,” I thought. (I had hoped, fruitlessly, for 13 years that a small, but insured, earthquake would destroy our storage facility.) In our first attack, we located the paintings that Melika and Mitra had done in Middle School, an antique Persian water pipe, a few boxes of paperback books and a red wagon without a handle. Excavation will continue weekly. Using mathematics (again), I estimate completion in April, 2043.
“Hi-Tech socks, Dan.”
“Hi-Tech? What color are they? Remember, I invented the colorful sock craze.”
“Hi-Tech, Dan. The socks use moisture-wicking fabric and nano-technology.”
“What color?”
“And they have a wonderful balance of cushion and comfort.”
“What color?”
“White, Dan. The socks are white.”
“White? What is the point?”
“These are technically advanced socks, Dan. They come in lefts and rights..”
“Let’s get the same number of each.”
“... so that they can conform to the exact shape of your foot,” Nazy continued.
“Should I tattoo a big “R” on one foot?”
“Which foot?”
“A very colorful ‘R’ on my right foot will help me when I’m getting ready to exercise.”
Disclaimer: In spite of my loss on the colorful sock front, I am pleased to say that the shoes themselves are bright red. (They didn’t have the gold ones in my size.)
But subsequent events conspired together to create a disaster:
I was at the gym, changing into my workout clothes. But I had mistakenly brought two “L” socks.
“Oh! The Horror!” I thought as I tried to decide whether it would be better to exercise sockless or with a left sock on my right foot. Uncertain, I decided to go swimming
That particular day was momentous in another way, too. As I left the house and headed to the car, I detected:
“Moisture!” I thought. “It’s wet out here,” I shouted as I dashed back indoors.
“What?” Nazy responded after hearing my cries.
“There is dew!” I exclaimed. “And, I felt ‘wet’ on my cheek. I wonder if there’s a word for that.”
“Would that word be ‘rain’, Dan?”
“No. Rain falls.”
“Drizzle?”
“No, no, no. They use gravity to descend. This, eh, ‘water’, is suspended in the atmosphere.”
“So it’s fog.”
“No, you can see through it - so it’s not fog. I think it’s electrostatically levitated dew.”
“There is no word for that.”
“I know. That’s what I’ve been saying. It never rains here. This may be what they have instead.”
“Wait a minute, Dan.” Nazy interrupts. “The weather report said that the city received 17% of average rainfall so far this year. Therefore, it must have rained.”
“Your logic my dear, is, eh, ‘logical’. Logical, but flawed. If the average rainfall is 0 inches, then 17% of zero is zero. So I’m correct.”
This week we also attended several Santa Barbara Newcomers events. Nazy joined the club a few months before me, so she is no longer classified as a “newbie”.
“What this means,” Nazy explained, ‘is that you, a newbie, have to give a background speech at the next newcomer event.”
“Background?”
“Where you came from, why you left, why you picked Santa Barbara. Something interesting.”
“Which one is interesting?”
“Dan.”
“Haven’t they heard all of this from you?”
“What will you say?”
“Well. I could say that we were in Zurich and that, eh, ‘America called.’”
“America called.”
“Tax authorities in America turned up the volume. And you wanted to be ‘close to the children’. Although I did point out that ‘the children’ were all in their 30s, so..”
“Keep to the narrative, Dan.”
“So, in an unappreciated attempt to meet your requirements, I bought a solid geometry book, converted the locations of the kids’ homes into spherical coordinates and located the place on the globe that was equidistant from all of them. But you rejected the mathematically valid result.”
“Which, as I recall, was somewhere between Paducah, Kentucky and South Peoria, Illinois.”
“Sometimes mathematics is ugly, Nazy. But since you wouldn’t accept the objectively obtained result, I had to construct an elimination system. You eliminated Beirut even though the ‘shopping was great’ because you like to have electricity 24 hours a day.”
“And because it’s too far..”
“That left Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. My midway mathematical solution (Oxnard) was rejected out of hand. We decided that Los Angeles, geographically bigger than Switzerland, was too vast. And, here we are in Santa Barbara.”
“Maybe I can get them to not ask you to talk, Dan.”
This week, Nazy and I decided to “Boldly Go Where no Martin had gone” (in the last few decades): the storage. As we were driving, I thought about something Melika’s fiancee had mentioned.
“Storage,” Tom noted, “is a great business. People rent a space and forget what they’ve stored. But, because ‘it might be valuable’, they just keep paying. (And paying.)”
“I keep paying because I’m afraid to tackle the storage, not because it might be valuable,” I thought. (I had hoped, fruitlessly, for 13 years that a small, but insured, earthquake would destroy our storage facility.) In our first attack, we located the paintings that Melika and Mitra had done in Middle School, an antique Persian water pipe, a few boxes of paperback books and a red wagon without a handle. Excavation will continue weekly. Using mathematics (again), I estimate completion in April, 2043.
Melika’s Painting
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