To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
– from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
The results from last night is promising, and more in line of what I experienced as far as my sleep: in bed for almost 8 hrs, and asleep for a little less than 7.
The Apple Health app that tracks my sleep every night, has been reporting only 4 to 5 hours of sleep for me, even after I had been in bed ‘sleeping’ for the most part of 8 hrs.
I generally feel OK in the daytime, so I believe I get more than 4 or 5 hours of official ‘sleep’.
For comparison with the Apple Health app, I’m trying an app called Sleep Cycle (screen shot on the right). The results from last night look encouraging (more accurate).
Here’s another gorgeous picture by Tim Durkan, of tonight’s hail storm. It was fine hail, but it went on for much longer than usual.
Photographer Tim Durkan says he sat in his car as he watched it come in from the north: from Edmonds, then over Discovery Park, and then over the city of Seattle.
Picture by Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter), ‘Seattle-based photographer capturing moments that help define our city and times’. More pictures at http://timdurkan.com.
The original packaging for lidocaine, labeled LL30 for its Swedish inventors Löfgren and Lundqvist. Clinical trials started in 1944 and a few years later it was used around the world. The compound was overwhelmingly superior to local anesthetics in use at the time.
The hard cast came off my wrist and forearm today. In addition, two stainless steel pins were extricated. The surgeon pulled them out with sterile pliers, basically.
The pins had held the lunate and scaphoid bones against each other so that the new scapholunate ligament could establish itself.
The second pin had a slight bend in (by design), and was not easy to pull out. I was very thankful for the fat syringe of lidocaine that was deployed on my wrist. Lidocaine blocks the pain signals that nerve cells send to the brain, by interfering with the so-called sodium channel that is the pathway for the signals.
It was 70 °F (21 °C) here in the city today; it will be a lot cooler again tomorrow.
These tulips are from the little Thomas Street Garden by 10th Avenue.
The breakfast Buds I had looked for far and wide, suddenly showed up on the shelf in the QFC on Broadway, and I grabbed four boxes.
Push had come to shove, and I was no longer playing nice by taking only one or two boxes!
And — I returned my ‘black stainless’ coffee maker, and got a slightly different model, after all.
Interesting how the wide-angle lens of the iPhone 13 Pro makes ‘vanishing edges’ of the sides of the boxes of All-Bran Buds.My new Cuisinart coffeemaker has a bigger digital display, and a slightly bigger carafe as well. Yay! Now I can leave the instant coffee behind, and go back to filtered coffee again: the stuff that is a royal treat, fit for a king.
Former President Obama was in the White House today for the first time after leaving office (more than 5 years ago, Jan. 2017).
Obama was there to celebrate 12 years of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) with President Biden. They also announced that they are pursuing expanded coverage for families, and how to make it easier to enroll.
Also mentioned in the reporting today, was Biden’s famous hot-mike comment ‘This is a big f**king deal’, which he made in 2010 as the ACA was signed into law.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Affordable Care Act has saved me a lot of anguish— and tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance costs, just over the last five years.
The East Room in the White House today. As former President Obama took the podium, he started with ‘Vice-President Biden, Vice President (Kamala Harris) .. ‘ then stopped. ‘That is a joke!’ he said, and walked over to shake President Biden’s hand.
It looks like the stormy weather of the past two days is clearing up.
Seattle photographer Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter) posted this gorgeous picture today—of a piece of blue sky and a brilliant rainbow over the city.
I believe his vantage point was off Alki Avenue SW in West Seattle, on the very edge of the waters of Elliott Bay.
Reporter Matt Kaplan writes in the New York Times that a wildlife camera recorded a bobcat repeatedly eating eggs from a Burmese python’s nest.
It is not yet known if this is commonly done by bobcats.
It would be a boon if it were: the Burmese python is an invasive species and is decimating the mammal and bird populations there.
A Burmese python and a bobcat facing off in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida last June, captured by a trap camera set up by the U.S. Geological Survey. In 2019, snake hunters in this preserve caught a 140 lb. female that measured 17 ft in length, and that carried 73 developing eggs. Yikes. [Photo Credit: U.S.G.S.]
My coffeemaker was kaput, and the new one I had ordered, landed on the porch today.
I wasn’t paying attention and ordered a ‘black stainless’ model instead of the ‘brushed chrome’ one that I had before. It’s all Amazon’s fault! .. with their ‘Order in 23 minutes to get it on Thursday’ message as I was about to order it. (Lesson: don’t order items late at night when you are bleary-eyed and tired). I think it will be OK, though. I’ll even get to like it.
There is tennis in Miami this week: the annual Miami Open, a tournament that I attended in person in 1990, during my maiden visit to the United States.
Up-and-coming superstar from Spain, Carlos Alcaraz (18), ousted Stefanos Tsitsipas (23) in spectacular fashion on Tuesday. Alcaraz will face Miomir Kecmanović (22) from Serbia for a place in the semi-final.
This between-the-legs shot (also called a ‘tweener’) from Alcaraz came early in the match against Tsitsipas On Tuesday, at 1-1. Alcaraz had to run back to retrieve a lob from Tsitsipas, and there was no time to turn around. It won Alcaraz the point. [Still image from streaming service Tennis TV]March 1990. My brother Chris and I, before hitting a few balls on the green clay court of the Miami Intercontinental hotel on the third floor. We were there to see our brother Piet play in the Miami Open for real (he was a professional tennis player). At that time it was only the 6th year that the tournament was held. It was billed as the 1990 Lipton International Players Championships.
The blossoms on the magnolia trees are out, along with the cherry tree blossoms and those on the camellias.
I took this picture in Portrait mode (iPhone 13 Pro), to blur out the background. Star magnolias are slow-growing shrubs or small trees native to Japan. They bear large, showy white or pink flowers in early spring. [Source: Wikipedia]
I did not watch the Oscars, and so I missed the storm in the teacup.
Clips of it was all over Twitter, of course.
I don’t think Will Smith is looking good, and I don’t know if his apology of today will help his damaged image.
He was obnoxious as he sat in his seat after the slap, yelling f-words at Chris Rock.
From South African cartoonist Brandan Reynolds, in Tuesday morning’s edition of the Business Day newspaper.
noun
A tangy sauce made of dried fruit (usually apricots) and chillies cooked in vinegar; chutney.
Archaic forms: blaatgham, blatcham
Origin: Afrikaans, Malay
It is probable that in late 19th century Afrikaans this word still had two meanings:
1. A. Pannevis’s Afskrif van Lys van Afrikaanse Woorde en Uitdrukkings (1880) defines ‘Bladjang’ as being made of dried chillies and stewed dried apricots in vinegar;
2. H.C.V. Leibbrandt’s Het Kaapsch Hollandsch (1882) lists ‘Balachan’ and ‘Blatchong’, both with the same meaning as the Malay belachan; and the Woordelijst van het Transvaalsch Taaleigen (1890) includes ‘Blatjang’, defined as ‘een zeker gerecht’ (a certain dish).
When you say ‘blatjang’ or ‘chutney’ in South Africa, you really mean ‘Mrs. Ball’s Original Recipe Chutney. It is nonpareil.
The Woodstock, Cape Town factory that first made Mrs. Balls’s chutney, opened in 1917.
I ordered this jar of Mrs. Ball’s chutney from Amazon. I have loved this stuff for a lifetime.
I am using Adobe Premiere Elements*, to cut up and make .mp4 files of the enormous .VOB files of digitized film & analog video footage that I have, of old family trips. The recordings were shot on film and analog camcorder in the ’70s to early ’90s. My dad had done the digitization many years ago.
I keep the clip lengths to 2-3 minutes.
*Video editing software; the bare-bones basic version of Adobe Premiere Pro.
ON THE PLUS SIDE:
I have three layers of still picture/video and five layers of audio available to work with. That’s a lot. I have a digital scalpel that I can use to look at, and slice in, between two video frames or a split-second of sound (down to 1/30 of a second). I can add in titles, and fix the worst quality defects of the video (such as enlarging the projected image slightly, to erase its black border; or adjusting overall lighting & color hue).
IN THE MINUS COLUMN:
The dreaded Adobe .PREL (for ‘preliminary’, I think) files take a long time to load and render, even with my brand-new PC with 16Gb of memory and unlimited hard disk space (6 Tb).
The automatic save every 10 mins stopped me dead in my tracks for 2 mins at a time. I changed it to 20 mins. (Cancel it, and you risk losing a lot of work). DO NOT mess around with moving files or renaming them. Adobe does not like that, and will give you a ‘Media Pending’ message or black screen, the next time you pull up your .PREL file.
Here are a few stills from a 3 minute clip of scenes at Victoria Falls, 1975 in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
I created a title screen with a Google Earth still image of the Zambezi River and Victoria Falls, and then the text scrolls in from left to right, and scrolls off after 5 seconds.I created just one more slide to set the stage. I combined a still photo with an Adobe Title Page (the white text). It stays in place for 8 seconds (lots of text to read) and then the video moves on to the real footage I had to work with, from 1975. (Oops .. 108 should be 108 m. Will fix it).ALL RIGHT .. that’s the 1975 version of me, in the blue shirt. Brother Chris in front of me with the red and black shirt. We were boarding the sight-seeing boat that cruises the Zambezi river upstream of the falls. There is audio now, circa 1995: a discussion among my family (with me included; my voice sounds weird, the way it always does, of course) of our memories of the trip. This conversation was captured during the projection of the 8mm film on a white screen, in order to capture the footage with a VHS machine on magnetic tape, with the audio.We are on the Zambezi river, and the voice-over conversation is speculating what would have happened if the engine of the boat had stopped at that time, with the falls just 1/2 a mile away downstream. Cool sightseeing airplane comes over. It flies a little too low, maybe?We had stopped at an island in the Zambezi for tea and biscuits. These monkeys would sneak up to an unsuspecting homo sapiens holding a biscuit, grab it, and make off into the trees. I added the text caption as a scroll-in. I picked a large, clear, light font that is should be easily readable to the viewer, without obscuring anything in the picture too much.On to the Falls itself. There is continued voice-over from the family discussion. It is all in Afrikaans, so I am trying to be helpful with an annotation here and there, that scrolls in, sticks around for a few seconds, and scrolls out of the frame. Be careful not to overdo the add-ons, with the arsenal of editing tools at your disposal, I told myself.Victoria Bridge. The gorges are the zig-zag cuts that the river’s flow had made in the bedrock over the ages.Final scene, all of three minutes in. I ended it with the Adobe ‘Dip to Black’ scene transition, to black out the frame, indicating that it’s the end of this video clip. I forgot to mention that I had added an ‘Adjustment Layer’ overlay to the entire clip to lighten up the footage a little bit; it was too dark. I might have overdone the lightening .. will take on more look before I render the clip and export it to .mp4 format from this .PREL format.
I ran out to Walmart in Factoria to go look for All Bran Buds today, but no luck. (All the stores here in the city seem to be out of it. Amazon has none, unless you want to pay $10 or $15 per box, from sellers in Canada!).
I almost bought a LEGO set at Walmart, but they lock them up in a display case, and the store assistant was swamped with four other shoppers.
I love the concept of a world map here, and also the idea of using as few bricks as possible to an animal or something recognizable that represents that country. So which is the cutest: the sleek bald eagle, the orca, the toothy crocodile, the angry lion, the macaw parrot (a psittacine; all parrots belong to the order Psittaciformes), the fat giraffe, the brown bear, the sleepy penguin, or the mama kangaroo (a nice touch, that joey squeezed into its pouch)?Here’s the other way: to use hundreds of bricks to create a lot of detail. Nice teeth for this tiger, to maul you with🐯. ROWR.
I noticed tonight that the dozen or so tents that had been in Seven Hills Park on 16th Ave and Howell, are gone. (Probably have been for a while).
I hope our new mayor (Mayor Bruce Harrell) is making headway with his plans to get homeless people out of the parks and green spaces and into shelters or homes.
It is an intractable problem. (In computer science, these are problems for which there exist no efficient algorithms to solve them).
A count from 2020 showed that our city of 750,000 people have some 11,700 homeless among us (half of which are in shelters or in emergency housing, and the other half unsheltered on the street or in tents and such).
The little green space called Seven Hills Park on 16th Avenue & Howell St is ‘Temporarily Closed’ says the sign. The soil is fertilized, and I’m sure the bare spots will fill in with grass soon. The signboard for the park that used to be by the black trash can, is missing.On a utility pole just a few blocks down on 16th Avenue, there is this sign, weather-proofed and all. It’s a vast oversimplification of the affordable housing issue, and options that are already available to the homeless. I will just leave it at that.
The Dick’s Drive-in burger joint on Broadway is not open yet.
It was a proper spring day here in the city with 63 °F (17 °C), and I had to take off my jacket and drape it over my arm, as I walked back up the hill from Broadway today.
How’s the remodel coming? Dick’s Drive-In burger joint, a fixture on Broadway since 1954, is undergoing a remodel for the first time ever (mostly on the inside). It closed in December, and will reopen some time this spring.Dick’s Drive-in Hamburgers, circa the late ’50s. I guess the 19c (for a hamburger) sign could not stay there until today. [Picture from Dick’s Facebook page]
