Entry 820: Mo Problems No Money

There's a Notrious B.I.G. song "Mo Money Mo Problems" that you've probably heard even if you can't place it right now. It's very much an Oh, that song song. It's an okay tune, though not something I'm adding to a playlist anytime soon, and the message has never resonated with me. I suppose at some point you can reach a level of wealth at which it really does cause more problems in your life than you would have otherwise, but I certainly haven't gotten to that point yet. In my experience, life is almost the exact opposite of "Mo Money Mo Problems." Being able to spend money on problems makes you have fewer problems not more.

I mean, to be clear, money alone doesn't make you happier or more fulfilled or more satisfied with your life. And it's also true that I have many more problems now than I did when I had much less money, but that's just correlation. The equation isn't high income equals more problems; it's getting older equals more problems. It's getting married. It's having kids. It's your body slowly withering away to nothing. It's having to take care of yourself and provide for others with increasingly bad eyesight, decreasing levels of energy, and an arthritic shoulder.* That's what causes problems, not money. On the contrary, having a much higher income now than I did as a carefree young man is one of the few good things about getting older. If I had all the problems I have now on my salary from 25 years ago, I would be much worse off than I am now.

*But it's worth it, because the thing that does make you happy, more fulfilled, and more satisfied with your life, in my experience, is developing meaningful loving connections with other people. 

I've been thinking about this lately because a bunch of things have come up that we need to spend money on, and it's starting to get quite expensive. And this is coming on the heels of our unexpected budget-busting detour through Europe. It's really eating into our savings, which I hate because the instability of the job market right now makes me apprehensive, and our savings is what assuages my nerves in this regard.

Of course, the flip-side of this coin is that we have savings to tap into. A lot of families don't. I am aware of that, and I acknowledge it. I'm just not going to write much about it. The purpose of this blog, after all, is not to check my privilege--nobody actually wants to read that, and I don't want to write it. The purpose of this blog is for me to write about what I feel like writing about, and at the moment I want to grouse about all the money we're spending.   

The first expensive thing we need to do is get our trees serviced. That's the biggest and steepest thing. A storm ripped through DC the other night--it's a semi-regular occurrence, unfortunately--and it took down a couple of massive limbs from trees in our backyard. One landed on our lawn, thankfully causing no damage, and the other landed on our neighbors' roof, bending their gutter a little bit.* The size of the branch that fell in our yard makes me very uneasy--had it landed somewhere other than an empty patch of ground, it could've caused serious damage to person or property--so I called the tree people right away to schedule an appointment to have them come out and clear away all the dead branches and debris in all the trees in our backyard. And we got the estimate yesterday: $3,000. 

Ffffuuuck.

But we gotta pay it. If our roof caves in because lightning strikes a tree and splits it in two and half of it falls onto our house, that's on God. If the same thing happens because a stiff wind blows down a dead limb that's been dangling by a thread for years, that's on me.

*I've done extensive research on this--well, as extensive as somebody with no legal training can do using the internet--and from everything I've read our neighbors are responsible for any damage caused by branches that hang over into their yard, even if they come from a tree in our yard. They are also free to remove or trim these branches, if they wish. I've been in contact with them, and I think they know this (I mentioned it to them the other day in a hopefully tactful way), so presumably we are cool with them.

Also, our dryer broke. It's a cheap dryer that I never liked, so I'm not that broken up about it, but I do wish we could have milked another year out of it or so. The same thing happened at our old house, so we bought a nice new washer-dryer set, and then when we moved, we had to downgrade to the clunkers in our new house, because the company who flipped our house cut corners on a bunch of stuff, and we didn't realize it until after we moved in. Actually, I noticed the cheapy washer and dryer before we moved in, and I complained about it to our Realtor,* and he was like, "Just go get the ones from you old house and switch them." And I said, "You can do that?" And he replied, "Why not? We never agreed to anything with the washer and dryer one way or the other." But I didn't do it because I didn't have a vehicle to move them in and renting one, or hiring a mover, would have been moderately expensive, and it seemed more cost efficient to use the bad appliances until they break, and then just buy new ones then.

*I just learned, after typing "realtor" with a lower case 'r' and getting the squiggly red line, that Realtor in a proper noun for a real estate agent who is a member of the National Association of Realtors. Huh, how about that?

It was a sound plan, but now we've gotten to the part where we have to buy new ones. Well, new one, anyway. The washing machine is still working. So, we did buy a new dryer, and it is coming on Tuesday. That's another multi-$1000 hit, and a few days of old-fashioned air-drying, for the G & G household.

Then, on top of all this, we have to buy plane tickets to visit our families (S' for Thanksgiving; mine for Xmas), and I just spent a few hundred dollars to cover the deductible for a dental deep cleaning. That one I was able to pay for with money in my HSA, so it doesn't feel like a big expense, but it's basically the same as if it came from our primary checking account. It's psychologically cheaper to use the HSA, because it's money in a different pot, but it's not logically cheaper to use, because all the pots belong to me (and S) and are essentially just one big pot.

So, we have a lot of expenses at moment, but we do have one thing that has recently broken our way financially, and it's a very big thing: Lil' S1 decided to go back to public school. Unfortunately, he decided this after we had already paid the first installment at his old private school and the refund deadline had lapsed, so it doesn't help us too much this year.* In fact, it's an enormous waste of money this year. We basically gave a massive donation to a school our kid no longer attends and that I never liked that much even while he was there. We spent a large amount of money on nothing. That's absolutely one way to look at it.

*We didn't have to pay quite the full yearly amount, but we had to pay an embarrassing large percentage of it. 

Another way to look at it--and this is the way I'm looking at it--is that we will save nearly four times over what we paid this year, expenditures we already had budgeted, by Lil' S1 not going to private school for the rest of his high school years. Keeping him in private school, just because we already paid for most of a year of it, would be penny wise and pound foolish. It would also be a classic application of the sunk-cost fallacy. The money is gone either way, so we should make the best decision for Lil' S1, regardless, and the best decision is for him to go to public school. It's what I wanted all along (I just got outvoted on the matter), so I'm not even that annoyed that he changed his mind so late in the game, and cost us a bunch of money. It's like when a sports team buys out an underperforming player. Sometimes you just gotta take the L, cut your losses, and get on with this nonsense we call life.

Alright, that's enough money talk for today and probably for quite a while after today.

Until next time... 

Entry 819: Ten Movies I Watched While Traveling

One thing about going from DC to Frankfurt to Paris back to Frankfurt to Bangalore to Shimoga back to Bangalore back to Frankfurt to Philadelphia back to DC is that you have a lot of transit time in which you can watch movies. I saw ten movies total, and that's not including the first half of the The Dink, which I was watching with Lil' S2 and S until our internet connection unexpectedly dropped, and we never got around to finishing it. (Nobody was all that broken up about it.) These were all movies I had not seen before, and below is my review of each of them in reverse order of how good I thought they were.

10. Don't Say Good Luck 

That this movie is last on my list tells you that it's a very strong list, as this wasn't a terrible film. The main reason I didn't particularly enjoy it, isn't its fault; it's Netflix's. It came up on my profile as a comedy, but it's not a comedy. It's also not a "musical teen drama" as Wikipedia says. It's a drama about a teenage girl in a musical. There are very few laughs in it, which was a problem for me, as when I put it on I wanted to laugh. I was in the mood for something not-so-serious, and so when I saw a comedy starring Adam Sandler's daughter, I had something like Booksmart in mind and thought to myself, Ooh, this could be perfect. Then, in the opening scene, you learn the main character's mom is dying of cancer, and it was like, Wait... what?! This isn't what I wanted at all!

9. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

We watched this in India on the big screen. We couldn't have carried on with our vacation in peace if we didn't. No matter what we were doing on a given day, Lil' S2 bothered us about going to see the new Spider-Man. Stuck at the airport in Frankfurt: "If we don't go to India, can we at least see the new Spider-Man?" On the train to Paris: "Oh, when we get there, can we see the new Spider-Man?" On top of the Arc de Triomphe: "When we get down, can we see the new Spider-Man?" We put him off by saying we wanted to take his 13-year-old cousin in India with us, which was true, so then once we got there we had to follow through on that.

As for the movie itself, it was a slight step-up from the usual formulaic, forgettable superhero film. I mean, I saw it several weeks ago, and I still remember the major plot points, which is something. Every other time I saw one of the Spider-Man movies--and I think I've somehow seen them all now--I forgot major portions of the story the second I left the theater. So, Brand New Day at least clears the very low bar of "I can tell you what happens."

8. Obsession

Like Don't Say Good Luck, this one suffers from a genre problem for me. Unlike Don't Say Good Luck, it's on me, as this one is clearly categorized as a horror movie, and I just didn't realize that when I rented it. (I just heard it was a good movie.) Then after I rented it, I had to watch it, lest I pay $4.99 for nothing. This is not a bad movie--it's quite good actually--it's just that I don't really appreciate horror films, unless I'm in the right setting, and that setting is not in an airplane seat watching by myself on a small screen. I need to be with people to get the most out of a horror movie. That's probably why I don't watch them very much anymore. S doesn't like them, and Lil' S1 thinks the live action Grinch is too scary, so he's out. That leaves Lil' S2, and although I'm very lenient on the movies my kids consume, making my 11-year-old child my horror movie watching partner is a bridge too far. I mean, who am I Mark Borchardt?

So, sorry Obsession, you're a fine film, I just didn't consume you correctly.

7. Yesterday

I found this movie delightful because I love the Beatles, and I find pretty much anything associated with the Beatles delightful, but it has a plot flaw that I couldn't get past. The premise of the film is that a struggling singer-songwriter* wakes up one day in world where the Beatles don't exist, but he still remembers them and all their songs. He then starts playing their songs as if they are his own and gets famous, and then the movie is basically about his internal conflict of living this lie (with a cute girl in the mix, of course).

*Played by Himesh Patel in his much less buff, pre-Odyssey body. 

But here's the thing: If these songs only exist in a world in which they are in your head, aren't they rightfully your songs? I mean, whose else are they? And I just kept thinking, Why doesn't he tell the truth? Just say, "Something weird happened, and I have all these amazing songs in my head from a band nobody else seems to remember but me." That's what I would do, and then I could ethically take credit (and money) for the Beatles' music. Nobody would believe me, and they would probably think it was a ridiculously pretentious act, but it would clear my conscience. Plus, I would still be performing, and inevitably changing, the songs (no cover sounds exactly like its original), so they would still very much be my songs. Plus, plus, maybe I would start to think that the Beatles never existed, even in my world, and I was some sort of touched musical genius. I mean, this is less crazy than the alternative, if you think about it.

So, overall, fun movie with a very flawed plot.

6. Bridesmaids

Now this is the silly female-led comedy I was looking for--very solid. One problem is that the funniest part (to me) came within the first five minutes of the movie, so it didn't quite live up to the high bar it set for itself early on, but still, it made me laugh, and it made two-hours of a nine-hour flight go by relatively quickly. So, well done there.

5. The Power of the Dog

A good movie that is not a great movie. The performances are really strong--Benedict Cumberbatch and the kid Kodi Smit-McPhee are both great; Kirsten Dunst is great; and Jesse Plemons is great, as always--but there was something about the character development of Smit-McPhee's Peter that I found lacking. The film is apparently based on a novel, so they probably had to cut out some of the backstory, and maybe they cut out a bit too much.

An interesting fact about this movie is that it is one of three movies for which a woman won the Best Director Oscar. Once, I was in a trivia competition, and my team was leading, and the final question was to name these three women directors. We knew Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), but we did not know Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog). Thankfully, nobody else did either, except for my sometimes trivia teammate/sometimes trivia rival N, but nobody on his team trusted him, so we still won.

4. Scarface

A classic I had never seen. Really good movie. I kept waiting for the line "Say hello to my little friend!" and I waited a long time, as it doesn't happen until the very end. I didn't watch a lot of the famous gangster movies--Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino, etc.--the first time around (I think I was a little too young), so now that I've been catching up on them, I'm struck by how many of the actors were later on either The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. In Scarface, we've got a young Don Eladio and a younger Héctor Salamanca and "Feech". We've also got Michelle Pfeiffer at her apex. Once I was at Sherry's with my high school girlfriend, and an old woman came up to our booth and said to her, "You are a dead-ringer for a young Michelle Pfeiffer." I was like, Yeah, right, if only... 

3. Marty Supreme

This one has been available to stream for free for some time, but I was really resistant to it for some reason (possibly the 150 minute run-time). I shouldn't have been. It's tremendous--an absolute tour de force by Timothée Chalamet. I heard that he campaigned hard for himself to win the Best Actor Oscar, and I can see why. He should have won, and I say that having no idea who actually did win. (Fact check: It was Michael B. Jordan for Sinners, which I haven't seen yet; see my spiel on horror movies above.) The Shark Tank guy was also good, as was Gwyneth Paltrow. She's easy to make fun of, because her Goop company is so ridiculous and she says things like "conscious uncoupling," seemingly in earnest,* but as an actress, I don't think I've ever seen a bad performance from her.

*It's possible she's just an Andy Kaufman-esque comedian, and the joke is actually on all of us. Her line "I'd rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can" is genuinely funny, as is her doubling down on it. The problem is that I've read articles and blog posts from real medical professionals who aver that a lot of her Goop stuff is not just harmless campy fun, but rather junk science that can do people harm. 

2. Wild at Heart

Now, this is precisely the type of film I want to see on a long flight. I'm strapped into a small chair, in a metal tube, with 199 other people, hurtling across the planet at 600 mph, 35,000 feet in the air. Let's get weird. And who does weird better than David Lynch? I've seen a lot of his stuff, and it ranges from quite bizarre but coherent (Twin Peaks) to completely unintelligible (Inland Empire). Wild at Heart is in the former camp, which I appreciate. I like the surreality of Lynch's work, but I need there to actually be some semblance of a storyline, or I start getting bored. It's like staring at a piece of abstract art. It's fine to do for two minutes, but not for two hours (and even within two minutes my mind would start to wander).

And speaking of actors who get made fun of a lot, but who can be legitimately brilliant: Nic Cage. Say what you will about the man, but he's got range. I saw him in a movie called Dream Scenario recently, and he is really good playing a character who couldn't be more opposite than Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart. And he's excellent in this film too. (So is Laura Dern. So is Willem Dafoe.) David Lynch isn't for everybody, so I'm always hesitant to recommend him, but if you like his style and somehow haven't seen this one yet, you should see it... on an airplane. However, I suggest positioning your device in such a way that the other passengers can't see it. That was the one problem with watching this movie in a public setting--it's basically one long continuous sex scene with some breaks for dialogue and action.

1. The Odyssey

One of the days we were in Bangalore, S went shopping with her cousin and mom and took the kids with her. Her cousin's husband was at work, so it was just me on my own. As it just so happens there is an IMAX* theater in the same building as our hotel, so I went to see The Odyssey. I loved it. As a movie, it's pretty good; as a spectacle, it's tremendous. The cyclops scene on the big screen is amazing; the Trojan horse scene on the big screen is amazing; every scene with Charlize Theron on the big screen is amazing. I was enrapted the entire film. It was two hours and 52 minutes, and I could have watched more. One of my steadfast beliefs is that everything is too long, but this was an exception. It could have been four hours, and I would have been into it still. Of course, it helps that in India they take a ten minute intermission during long movies. I love that, and I hope it comes to the States sometimes soon. I don't have to be in the position of choosing between a bursting bladder and missing a possibly an awesome scene. 

*I think it was an actual IMAX theater too, although I'm not 100% sure. I did a deep dive the other day on the difference between IMAX and "LieMax," but it's all dependent on aspect ratio and film gauge and technical stuff like that. My main takeaway: If you see a movie on a giant screen, with huge speakers, and it looks and sounds cool, what difference does it make?  

Alright, that's enough for today. Until next time... 

Entry 818: India By Way Of Frankfurt By Way Of Paris By Way Of Frankfurt

When we set out for Bangalore, India three and a half weeks ago, I did not anticipate the first part of our trip turning into G & G European vacation, but that's what happened. On our flight there, we had a layover in Frankfurt, Germany, and when we tried to board our plane to Bangalore they wouldn't let us on because the travel visas we had for the kids were on their old passports. The visas were valid--they were the same ones we got for our trip in 2023, and they don't expire for five years--but they were on passports that had been replaced with newer passports. The kids' old passports are set to expire near the end of the year, and you can't travel on a passport within six months of its expiration date, so we got them new passports a few months ago. We simply never thought to get new visas also. After all, one benefit of going to India this year is that we wouldn't have to get new visas. But obviously we didn't think it through completely.

Before I go on, let me take a moment to rant about how fucking stupid the six-month passport rule is. I understand you don't want people to get stuck in a foreign country with an expired passport. But six months?! What the hell?! We left in July and came back three weeks later, and that was the plan all along. We had the return tickets to prove it. What could possibly happen for us to not come back before the kids' passports expire in December? I mean, if we missed the return flight, we would have only had all of September, October, and November (plus a bit of August and December) to schedule a new one.

But a dumb rule is still a rule, so we got the kids new passports a few months ago, and because of that we got stuck at the Frankfurt Airport. S immediately submitted applications online for new visas, but they certainly weren't coming through in the next two hours before our plane departs, so we were spending at least one night in Frankfurt. As chance would have it, S's parents, who were supposed to join us on the plane to Bangalore, missed the flight because their departure from the US was delayed several hours, and they got rescheduled on a flight the next day, so we all got to spend a night at the lovely* Holiday Inn at the Frankfurt Airport.

*I'm not being sarcastic. This is a good hotel. It's not at all in the airport as advertised--I started to walk there by myself with three suitcases in tow (I was selected to stay behind and fetch the luggage), before realizing that was pretty much impossible, returning to the airport, and taking a cab--but they have a good complementary breakfast, really good free wifi, and a very nice, helpful staff. 

We saw the in-laws off to their flight the next morning, and then tried to figure out what to do next. And it wasn't a chill, "What would you like to do on this fine Friday afternoon, my dear?" conversation. It had more of a "So, what the hell are we supposed to do now?" vibe to it. Nobody wanted to call it and go home, but nobody wanted to wait around in Frankfurt for the new visas to come through, probably three to four days, so we decided to hop a train and go to Paris. When the idea was first proposed, my initial inclination was, We can't just go to Paris, and then I thought, Wait, why not? S booked us a hotel in a neighborhood where one of her old colleagues now lives, got us some train tickets,* and we were off.

*S is so much better at scheduling these things than I am. Her trick is that she just does it, whereas I incessantly hem and haw in my mind, unsure if I'm doing the right thing. Her way is so much better. Yeah, you might make a mistake from time to time (like not updating your kids' visas), but I make mistakes doing things my way, too, and I carry around all this anxiety of constantly thinking I'm doing something wrong. I'd like to be more like S when planning, but it's not something I can just wish into existence. 

The only major catch is that we had way too much luggage for a weekend train trip to Paris. S brought one large suitcase filled with nothing but gifts from the US for people in India, even though they now have pretty much all the same shit over there that we have here (with the exception of Kirkland brand maple syrup, which one of her cousins requested--and I respect that), and we packed as if we were going somewhere for three weeks, not three days. We couldn't leave our luggage at the hotel because we were checking out, and the lockers at the train station were shit (business idea: safe, reliable bag storage walking distance from the Frankfurt train station, any major train station, really), so we had to haul it all on the train with us. It ended up being fine. We were some of the first people to board, and I just hogged almost all of the common storage area with our suitcases and then quickly sat down, so that people wouldn't know the bags were ours.

Four hours later we arrived in Paris, and it was awesome.

Paris has a reputation as being one of, perhaps the, most wonderful cities in the world. As Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City says to console herself after (foolishly) following her artist boyfriend to the city late in the series: "I'm in Paris. Don't you worry about me." In the end, the relationship and the move didn't work out (that damn self-centered Baryshnikov!), but the quote illustrates the je ne sais quoi of the city. Just being there is (almost) enough in life. And I felt that, big time. I probably would not want to live there (too many annoying tourists like me), but as a place to visit, I don't know that any city I've ever been to can match its aura. Maybe Reykjavik. I love Reykjavik. I'd have to really think on it and compare notes from my previous blog entries to determine which city of Paris and Reykjavik has better energy. 

Because it was such a slapdash trip, a lot of the major attractions were unavailable. The Louvre was sold out, the Musée d'Orsay was sold out, Versailles was sold out, but there was still so much to do there (Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Élysées, etc.), and just being there was amazing--walking around, popping in and out of cafes, eating street food on The Canal. Heck, just sitting in our hotel lobby, sipping complementary espresso was cool. We stayed at this really cute, retro boutique hotel (but they still had wifi and AC, thankfully), and it made me realize that I'm a sucker for decor. I wouldn't have necessarily thought that previously, being kinda robotic and practical by nature, but it's absolutely true.

So, Paris was great. (I'll put up some pics below.) But it was also very stressful because of the whole waiting-on-visas, not-knowing-if-we're-still-going-to-India thing.* S did some research online and learned that you can actually travel on your old visas, as long as you have your old passports with you. (They told us something similar at the airport.) So, when the new visas didn't come through by day three, we came up with another plan. We booked rooms at the Frankfurt Holiday Inn again, and had S's sister go to our house, get the kids' old passports, and FedEx them to the hotel. They would take about three days to get there, so by the time they arrived, and we were able to book a new flight, we would only be about a week behind schedule, which would still give us nearly two weeks in India. When we first booked this trip, I was secretly (okay, not so secretly) dreading the length of it, but, with a side trip to Europe first, it turned out to very much work in our favor.

*It was also incredibly expensive--like, dip-into-our-emergency-savings steep. But it was worth it, and we're about to eliminate a huge expenditure from our household books, which I'll get to in a future post.

So, we took the train back to Germany. And of course, right before we left, the new visas came through, so we had the old passports shipped for nothing. (But we didn't know that at the time. One thing this whole ordeal reinforced is that it would be a lot easier to make good decisions if you could see the future.) We could now book a new flight to Bangalore with the next big battle being who was going to pay for it, us or the airline. I won't keep you in suspense: It was us. After initially telling us, we could book a new flight on our existing reservation for a $150 change fee, they then called us back and told us that it would actually be a $150 change fee, plus a $6,000 fare adjustment... per person. Yes, that's right it would be almost $25,000 to travel on our existing reservation.

There was no way we were paying that. I would have rather stayed in Frankfurt and committed crimes until they deported me. So, we had no other real option but to book an entire new flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore.* It was a fraction of the $25,000 alternative, but it was a large enough fraction to make us wince. S in currently trying to get us some compensation from the airline (Lufthansa), under the premise that they never should have let us on the flight in DC--it's obviously not great business to strand people in a foreign land midway through their travels--but I'm not particularly optimistic about this prospect. It was mostly our fault, after all. 

*We also could have just gone home, which we did briefly considered. But that would have put us in a similar position of having to alter our existing ticket or buy a new ticket, so it didn't really get us anywhere financially. Not to mention, S's parents were already in India, and they and a whole bunch of her other family members, including a few who might not be around "next time", were expecting us there. It would have been a colossal disappointment to not make it to India.

So, after S spent basically an entire night on the phone--a night filled with curses, threats, and tears (of which I received the brunt, for some reason)--we got our tickets and checked-in for our flight to Bangalore. Of course, the next day, the old passports we had shipped to Frankfurt got delayed, and we got an email from the hotel staff saying they had arrived literally (and I mean that literally) ten minutes after we went through airport security, so despite being less than a mile from the hotel, we couldn't collect them.* But whatever... the airplane ascended into the sky, and we were finally on our way to India.

*I actually got a notification before we went through security saying our delivery had arrived, so S cabbed it back to the hotel to pick it up, but it wasn't there. Either it was actually there, and the hotel staff didn't realize it until later, or the delivery person scanned the code saying it got delivered a few minutes before they actually delivered it. Whatever the case, we ultimately had the hotel send the passports back to DC, and they are now in our possession once again, even though we don't, and probably won't ever again, need them for anything, other than to look at them ten years from now and say, "OMG, look at how cute you guys were back then!"

About six hours later we arrived in Bangalore, and it was awesome.

Bangalore is a very different city from Paris. It's dirtier, nosier, and more crowded, but it has it's own infectious joie de vivre. There are people out all the time, everywhere. As we become more siloed in our houses back home, it's especially refreshing to spend time in a city where people still go places. The ice cream shop is bustling on a Wednesday night at 10 pm; the mall is crowded from open to close (and there are no vacant units); food stands lining the streets sell to patrons at all hours of the day. It's a beautiful locus of constant human interaction. On our way into town from the airport, in the wee hours of the morning, I saw a group of guys, four of five of them, just hanging out in front of a closed tire shop. They seemed to be laughing and joking, and I thought to myself That's what it's all about. Just hanging with bros--doing nothing with people whose company you enjoy. We all need to spend more time with our bros, chilling outside the closed tire shops of our lives.

The original plan was to go to both Mysore and Bangalore, but we cut out the Mysore part because of the whole arriving-a-week-later-than-expected thing. We did, however, go to the city of Shimoga for a night. We stayed in the presidential suite of the Royal Orchid hotel. There were two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large central living area, and a conference room--like a full-on long-table, giving-a-financial-report-in-a-commercial type of space.* It was about half as expensive as our rooms in Paris. We only stayed one night, spending time with some of S's family, particularly her bedridden, eightysomething aunt. I'm not sure why we didn't stay longer. I don't ask many questions in India. I just go with the flow. I follow the family from this auntie to that uncle to a second-cousin once removed, eating dosas and drinking coffee all the while.

*This was a stark contrast to the single room we booked in Bangalore. Initially, we had two rooms each with a king-size bed. We can't yet trust the kids to share a room of their own and not kill each other, so S shared with Lil' S1, and I shared with Lil' S2. However, Lil' S1 is the size of a small adult man now, and understandably doesn't like sharing a bed with his parent, so we got him a roll-away bed. But then Lil' S2 wanted to sleep with S instead of me, so it was the three of them in one room and me by myself in the other room. This was both lonely for me and not very cost effective, so we got a second roll-away bed and all crammed into one room like a happy family.

As with our previous trip, we spent the bulk of our time in Bangalore hanging out with S's cousin and her husband and their 13-year-old son. (They also have a 19-year-old daughter who's away at college.) The son is between our boys in age, so they can all hang out together, and they get along pretty well. It's actually very sweet if you can catch them interacting at the right moment. All their birthdays are in August, so we did a bunch of fun stuff in celebration. We went to see the new Spider-Man movie; we went go-karting and bowling; and we ate a lot of cake and ice cream. We also, somewhat randomly, played pickleball and something called paddleball. Well, I didn't actually get to play paddleball. Somebody official kicked me off the court because I was wearing flip-flops ("slippers," as he called them). India can be a weird place. You can drive a motorcycle on the shoulder of the road against traffic, with your wife riding side-saddle holding a small child on the back, nobody wearing a helmet, but you can't hit a ball with a racquet for a few minutes without proper footwear.

It wasn't a very touristy trip (it never is), but we did do something semi-touristy. We went on a tour of the ISKCON Hindu temple where S and I had our wedding way back in 2011. I'm not a religious man--I'm not even that spiritual--but I found the experience to be very moving. It felt like "the real deal" (to quote Timothy Ratliff about the Buddhist monk in Season 3 of White Lotus). We couldn't see the room where we got married because it isn't open to the public, and we had to hustle through the tour because they were closing soon, but that's fine. Had we stayed longer, the kids inevitably would've started fighting and ruined the experience, anyway.

The one thing I'll say in the negative about the temple is that their bathrooms badly need a renovation. They're buzzing with flies, and they have the disgusting, literal hole-in-the-ground toilets you'll find sometimes in India. I think the temple wants to keep things humble and traditional, which is why the bathrooms are like that, but they also have a gift shop and a snack counter that only accepts cashless payment, so I think they could update the toilets to something more modern and less putrid.

Anyway, I'm kinda running out of steam here, and we didn't do anything else too exciting in Bangalore, so I'm going to put up some pictures and call it a post. Actually, wait, I do have to mention the return trip, because it was the perfect bookend to our travels. It's always longer flying east-to-west, because the jet stream winds blow in the opposite direction, so we had a seven-hour flight from Bangalore to Frankfurt, followed by a four-hour layover, and then what should have been a nine-hour flight to DC. However, there was some stormy weather along the usual route, so the pilot had to take a detour, which added about an hour to the air time. That sucked, but much worse, we now didn't have enough fuel to make it all the way to DC, so we had to land in Philadelphia, a mere 140 miles from our destination, to refuel. That took about two and half hours, and then it was another half-hour flight from Philly to DC. When it was all said and done, it was a legit 26 hours straight in airports and airplanes. Well, at least we avoided rush-hour traffic on the Uber ride home.

Until next time... 

[People dancing on the banks of the Seine]

 

[We couldn't actually go in the Louvre, so I just took a picture of the famous pyramid entrance, designed by I.M. Pei (as any good crossword puzzle solver knows)]

 

 

[The Eiffel Tower]

 

[Notre Dame, no hunchbacks spotted]

 

[The interior of the hotel we stayed at in Paris; I spent a decent amount of downtime sitting here, sipping espresso, and playing my word games]

 

[A bridge spanning the Main River in Frankfurt]

 

[ISKCON Temple in Balgalore, where S and I had our big (medium, by Indian standards) wedding ceremony]

 

[Canal Saint-Martin in Paris]

 

[Bangalore, as seen from our hotel room in the VR Mall]

 

Entry 817: The Man Who Fixes Air Hockey Tables With His Mind

There is a lot to talk about today, many travels both past and future, but first I need to relay how I used my mind to fix a wobbly leg on our air hockey table.* It's one of the smarter things I've done in my life.

*The title of this post is an homage to Richard Feynman. In his book of memoirs, "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", he tells a story from his childhood about a neighbor who had a broken radio that nobody could fix. He went home and thought about what could be wrong with it, came up with an idea, and then went back to his neighbor and immediately fixed it. He become known as the boy who fixes radios with his mind. Like many (most?) personal anecdotes, this is probably an embellishment that makes the storyteller come off as cool as possible, but still, it's a good little tale. 

Lil' S2 was home without much to do on Thursday. I was also home, working remotely, so I heard him downstairs rustling about in our basement. I figured the PlayStation controller must have come disconnected again, so I went downstairs to fix it. And before I continue, allow me a quick tangent to say that I absolutely hate our PS5. We bought it about seven years ago, and I couldn't be more unhappy with it. The controllers, which are not cheap (neither was the console), work for a few weeks, and then they start to "drift" (as is the parlance among gamers, I believe) and become completely unusable, and we have to buy new ones. Of the four we've purchased through the years, only one is still good. Two are drifty and one constantly disconnects for no reason. And even the good one isn't actually good, as it disconnects also, but slightly less frequently than the other one. I figured out from YouTube how to reconnect controllers, but it's a whole process that involves powering off and restarting the machine, and it doesn't always work, so I often have to do it three or four times before it finally takes. It's infuriating.

I've done some Googling, and I've learned that I'm certainly not alone in my hatred for PS5 controllers. Although they seem to work fine for some people, there are myriad threads, articles, and videos devoted to the topic of how shitty they are. I think part of the problem is that we bought our PlayStation shortly after its release, so they hadn't yet worked out the kinks. And what makes this even more annoying is that we almost got an Xbox instead. The kids said they wanted a video game console for Christmas, either a PS5 or an Xbox, they didn't care which one. I don't really play video games anymore (I basically stopped at the Sega Genesis), so I asked around and was told by numerous people I trust that they're both good, and it doesn't really matter. So, we basically flipped a coin and got a PS5 (or rather we told S's parents to get a PS5, as they wanted it to be their gift to the kids). Then, of course, right after the purchase, Lil' S1 said he actually wanted an Xbox. It would have been a huge hassle to switch at that point, so we just stuck with the PS5, and I'm reminded almost every day what a regrettable decision that has been. I don't know if the Xbox is actually any good, but it would be difficult to be worse than what we have now.

Anyway, back to the original story, the PlayStation controller was in fact disconnected, but that's not why Lil' S2 was stirring about. He noticed the leg on our air hockey table was wobbly, so he was looking for the duct tape to "fix" it. Now, I'm very much a DIY patzer, but even I knew that tape was not the right solution to this problem, so I looked under the table and saw right away that two screws that were supposed to be securing the wobbly leg were missing. Okay, that's an easy fix, even for an 8th-grade woodshop D-student like myself--just screw the screws back in--except I couldn't see them. Presumably, they had fallen into the hollowed out cavity of the table leg. You can see in the picture below: The right two screws were the ones missing, and the wooden piece below them is one side of a long empty column of a table leg. It seemed clear that the screws had rattled out and dropped into this abyss.

First off, terrible design. They capped off the wrong end. If the top had a piece of particle board covering it then the screws could not have fallen in. If the bottom did not have a piece of particle board covering it then the screws would have dropped all the way to the carpet, and I could have retrieved them by lifting the table a little bit and having Lil' S2 slide them out with something. (That would have taken some effort, but it's doable.) Second off, how were we going to get these things out? The leg is too long to reach the bottom by sticking your arm in, and there's not enough room between the top of the leg and the bottom of the tabletop to fit anything of length into the hole. We tried using BBQ tongs, but they didn't even come close to working.

The first good idea I had was to use my phone to verify with certitude that the screws did in fact fall in. I snapped a picture, and, yep, they were in there alright. 

Now, I just had to come up with a plan to get them out. I thought about using a magnet tied to string, but I didn't know if our kitchen magnets would be strong enough and the only string I could think of that we have is dental floss, and I wasn't sure exactly how I would tie it on. Still, it seemed like a reasonable thing to try, so I went upstairs to get some magnets and floss. My phone battery, in a stroke of good fortune, was a little low, so I decided to charge it while I put my plan into action, and when I set it on its charging pad, it clicked in place like it always does, but this time something clicked in my brain also. It's magnetic! That's how it sticks on! And it has a long cord on it! My iPhone charging pad is literally a magnet on a string! This was right up there with the time I solved the Monty Hall Problem while walking between classes as the greatest "Eureka!" moment of my life. And it totally worked! I fished out the screws using my charging pad, refastened them, and the leg is wobbly no more. Life is beautiful!

But of course I used all my scheduled blogging allotment to talk about this one stupid (but awesome) thing, and so I have no time to tell you about my trip back home nor my upcoming trip to India. But so it goes. I'll hop back on and post something before I leave if I get the chance. If not, then it will be several weeks until I post again. It's a long trip.

Until next time... 

Entry 816: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion

Short entry today, as I'm headed out of town tomorrow and have a bunch of stuff to get done before I go. It's a combination work-and-pleasure trip, in that order. I'm flying into Tennessee for a two-day conference, and then I'm flying into the PNW to visit family and friends and attend my 30th high school reunion. I'm annoyed that I couldn't get a direct flight from Memphis to Sea-Tac--I don't think one exists, I looked for quite a while--but so it goes.

It's just me, no wife or kids. We explored the possibility of them coming, or some proper subset of them coming, with me but it didn't work out financially/logistically. Airfare is not cheap, and the fact I'm flying straight from the work conference would make travel arrangements tricky if I weren't going alone. Plus, nobody has much interest in tagging along with me as I relive my glory days with my old pals, anyway, certainly not S. Whenever we visit my family, I can feel her eyes roll, as I tell her for the one hundredth time how my friends and I used to climb the fence and goof off in the gravel quarry that is now a golf course. So, I won't have a plus-one for my reunion, but I already have my line picked out for why S didn't make it: "I just think it would have been too awkward for her to meet all the girls I didn't hook up with." I can't wait to use that one.

Until next time... 

Entry 815: Independence Day 2026 Top Fives

It's a holiday weekend across the country with some big festivities on tap here in our national capital. I, however, will be avoiding such festivities like the coronavirus in 2020 (hopefully more successfully). I will spend the weekend cooped up in my basement streaming TV shows, movies, and soccer with my family, lifting weights, and working on crossword puzzles. I have little desire to spend the day outside in triple-digit temperatures, where the only relief from the heat will come from scattered thunderstorms, and I have even less desire to partake in the de facto MAGA rally that will completely spoil what could be and should be a nonpartisan celebration of our country's 250th birthday. Sometimes I wish we lived closer to to all the action in DC. Days like today, I am very glad that we do not.

One thing I will almost certainly do this weekend is finish the Hulu series High Fidelity. Even though it dropped over six years ago, I didn't know there was such a show until last week. (Perhaps the biggest problem with TV these days is that there is too much of it, and it's scattered across the various streaming services, so it's hard to find.) I heard somebody mention the show on a podcast and give the "hot take" that it's better than the movie. I like the movie quite a bit, so I started watching the show half out of curiosity and half out of a desire to prove the podcaster wrong. I'm now eight episodes in, and I must admit, I agree with the take: The TV show is better.

Why is it better? I'm not sure exactly--I just like it more. I think it's because the characters are a little bit more likeable. In the movie they are all very amusing, but that's in part because they are all kinda dicks (and not just the one named Dick). In the show, you--or at least I--can sympathize with the characters more, especially the main character Rob, played beautifully by Zoë Kravitz (who is quite beautiful). She's more messy and goofy, but goodhearted, whereas John Cusack's Rob in the film is more self-serious and egotistical. I would rather spend my time with the former than the latter. Although, it's possible that one is better suited to a 10-episode series,* and one is better suited to a two-hour movie. So, I guess, my conclusion is that they are both great, and it probably doesn't make sense to compare them.

*There is only one season, which makes me sad. I hate it when shows go on too long, but it also sucks when they don't go on long enough. At least give me two or three seasons at Championship Vinyl.

One thing I love about both High Fidelity's is the top-five lists. I love making rankings for stupid things. In that vein, here are my top five Independence Days.

Top 5 July 4ths of My Life

5. 2004. It was my first month back in DC for grad school. I went up to West Chester, PA to visit some pals. I don't remember the details, but for some reason it was just me and two of my girl friends. Note the space between "girl" and "friends." Neither of them was my girlfriend (I was single at the time), and in fact they both had boyfriends that I was friends with. I also don't remember what we did, but I do remember it was fun.

4. 1986. I'm guessing on the year here, and it might not have been exactly July 4th, but it was a fireworks game for the Tacoma Tigers at Cheney Stadium. The Tigers pounded their opponent, scoring over 20 runs, which the stadium couldn't display on its old-school scoreboard, because the ten's digit could only be 0 or 1. There were so many people trying to come throughout the game that they let fans sit on the warning track for the last few innings (that sounds crazy, but I swear it happened). I didn't love that, being a little baseball purist, but it couldn't spoil the evening. The Tigers won big, and everybody oohed and aahed at the sky explosions afterwards.

3. 2007. I went to my aunt's and uncle's vacation house on Chautauqua Lake for a makeshift family reunion. I was the only one there from my immediately family, and I saw a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles that I hadn't seen in decades. I also saw my grandma for the last time. The night of the 4th, we all sat around the campfire, and watched the lights. As I recall, in lieu of fireworks, everybody put up lights on their docks, and it was a spectacular visual. It's funny, if this event happened a few years later I would have dozens of pictures from it, but it went down just before the widespread adoption of the camera phone, so I don't have any. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure.

As a somewhat related aside, I was thinking the other day about how it's weird that almost everything that happens today is recorded on camera in someway, when the first 4.5 billion years of Earth elapsed with nothing being recorded on camera. But then I thought, well, what if it was? Who's to say some alien species hasn't been recording our planet clandestinely from afar using super advanced technology? What if they came here and showed us a documentary they made of all of human history? How cool would that be? I mean, it probably wouldn't outsell Aquaman 851 at the box office, but it would still be awesome.

2. 2005. I was dating a grad student in the English department, and we got a little motley crew together of literature and math folks to go to the fireworks show on the National Mall. This was back when we could all enjoy things together, and it didn't matter who was president--like, I didn't even think about what somebody's politics was when I met them, and it was glorious. In retrospect, I took that for granted. Anyway, things didn't last too long between me and the lit chick (I broke up with her*), but we had some fun times together, and this night was one of them. It just felt cool being out in the city with a group of weird, smart, young people. 

*That's an homage to High Fidelity, by the way. I'm not bragging about it. Breakups are the worst, regardless of which side you are on. 

1. 1988. I'm just picking a random year from my childhood, because so many of my preteen 4ths have blended together in my mind. We used to go over to our family friends' house and eat barbecue and run through the sprinkler and light off fireworks. The parents let us kids light them, which is something I don't think would fly today. It was pretty safe--we would set a firework carefully on the ground, light the fuse with a punk, and then hightail it to safety--but I still don't think parents of my generation would let their kids do that. The other thing you have to keep in mind is that this was in the rainy Puget Sound region before climate change totally fried the world, so the fire risk was not as high as it is in other places of the country today. And it was fun! I loved those days, which is why this is number 1 on my list.

I just realized that I left off several July 4ths spent at my buddy DK's lake house. We had some wild times there, and I probably should bump something above to add one of them to the list. But I don't have time to do that, so they get honorable mention here. Plus, they got legit dangerous at times. I'm surprised nobody Jason Pierre-Pauled themselves.

Until next time... 

Entry 814: Sunday, Dreary Sunday

It's a dismal, dreary Sunday afternoon. It was raining when I woke up this morning, and it hasn't stopped since. In fact, it's only gotten worse. It's coming down in buckets right now. It sucks, as S left last night for a business trip, and so I'm here alone with the boys, and it's so much easier when Lil' S2 can run around the neighborhood. He's just cooped up and bored, and unlike his brother who can entertain himself on screens indefinitely, he can only play video games for so long before he needs to do something active. I could take him somewhere, but driving somewhere in this rain is not a particularly appealing option. Heck, just walking from the front door to the car sounds kinda miserable.

A silver lining is that this is a great test for my waterproofing of the roof on our deck, and everything is holding up very nicely. Despite this torrential downpour, I don't see a single drip anywhere. This is actually my second attempt at fixing the leak. My first one--applying waterproof tape in the area I thought the leak was coming from--failed instantly, so I had to come up with a new plan. This time I just put a tarp on the roof and secured it in place with a bunch of heavy rocks I found in the yard--primitive, but it works quite well. It's not a good long-term solution, because the tarpaulin in not translucent, so it covers up the skylight (thus defeating the very purpose of having a skylight), but it's an excellent proof of concept. I'm going to buy some see-through, waterproof plastic and put that up on the roof, and that should solve the problem. Eventually, we will probably have to get a "real" fix, but I'm not eager to spend the hundreds of dollars it will cost to have somebody come out to try to diagnose the issue (which isn't easy with roof leaks, in my experience, even for the experts), especially since there is a nontrivial chance the conclusion will be that we need to spend thousands more dollars to replace the roof entirely. I'd prefer to push off that potential expense as long as possible.

It's also a downer of a day for other reasons. Lil' S2 came back from camp yesterday, and he left his laundry bag there filled with basically his entire summer wardrobe. Before he left, S took him to an outlet mall and bought him like ten pairs of shorts, a bunch of sport jerseys, underwear, etc., and almost all of it is gone now. He came back with a mostly empty suitcase and the clothes he was wearing. S was furious. It was several hundred dollars worth of clothing, but more than that, it was the fact that she put in the time and effort to find the deals and take him shopping, and now it's all for naught. Lil' S2 felt super bad about it. He immediately put on the I'm-about-to-cry face before running out of the room. I think his reaction is only thing that kept S from really unloading.

On him, at least. I still got an earful. One of the main causes of fights between S and me is the kids making us mad. We are already primed for a row, and there is a whipping-boy element to it, where we know that we can't actually lay into our children too harshly because they are, you know, children, so we take it out on each other instead. We both do this, but I think one of us does it to a much larger degree than the other, and you can probably figure out by how diplomatically I'm phrasing things which of us that is. Then there is the common meta-fight of offering solutions versus offering sympathy and understanding. S actually said to me, "Can't you just listen to me and let me be mad for a little while?" To which I responded, "Yes, but a lot of the time that anger gets directed toward me. Why do I feel like I'm the one who left the bag behind?"

So, it wasn't a great scene, and it happened right before she left to the airport, which now that I think about it was probably a good thing, as it probably sped up the reconciliation process. You have to be really mad to leave for a trip without making up first, and I think we both concluded that this minor spat didn't rise to that level. Also, there's a decent chance we can get the clothes back--I wouldn't say there's a great chance, but there's a decent one, at least. I suspect kids forget stuff at camp all the time, so they must have a place where they store lost things, at least for a little while. It's all together in one laundry bag, so if they have it set aside somewhere, then we can either have a friend pick it up this weekend when she goes to get her son, or we can pick it up when we drop of Lil' S1 who's going to the same camp in a few weeks. S already sent an email to the camp director, and there is a number I will call tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed.

As you probably inferred, we did not pick up Lil' S2 at camp this year. We did a car pool, and he came back with a friend's dad. We aren't super close with him and his wife (but we really like both of them), so it was maybe a little awkward when S texted them to see if Lil' S2 had just left his bag in their car instead of at the camp (a long shot but worth a try). Apparently, the dad was very apologetic, insisting he asked all the kids several times to make sure they had all their stuff. But of course neither S nor I put any blame on him. If anything, we should have drilled it into Lil' S2 to put everything into a single bag before he left, so that he only had to remember one thing.* I did, however, pose this questions to S: If it was a mom instead of a dad who picks them up, does Lil' S2 come back with all his stuff? She laughed, and then said, "100% yes." That might be sexist, but it's probably true, and I'm not sure if it's sexist against women or men, anyway.

*One problem with this is that he insisted on bringing a suitcase for some reason. In retrospect, we should have made him bring a giant duffle bag, as it's much easier for a 10-year-old to dump everything into that than a suitcase.  

Another thing about this is that it's all just stuff. We'll be fine without it. I ordered a chub-pack of kids' boxer briefs off Amazon for like $25 last night, and it already arrived. Lil' S1 gave his brother a few pairs of shorts that he doesn't wear much anymore, and we pulled a few more out of the donation pile that he can still squeeze into for a few more weeks. It's all good. This isn't a "real" problem. And this really hit home when we got a text today from one of Lil' S2's friend's mom, who said she was just diagnosed with breast cancer. They caught it early, so there is a high probability of her beating it, but still it's gutting news. We know several other woman who went through breast cancer treatment relatively recently (one of them still is going through it), and it's grueling in the best case scenario. So, yeah... Makes a lot of other shit seem trivial.

Alright, I hate to end on that somewhat grim note, but I am completely out of time.

Until next time...