Category: My life

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Orderly in its own peculiar way

I don’t like things too orderly, at least not in the usual sense. I have to emphasize, not in the sense usually understood.  I have been reading and studying for the last couple of years about randomness, chaos and spontaneous order. Most systems have an element of self-organization and all are subject to randomness. I am beginning to think that there is a higher order, a more subtle one but one more appropriate to the complex and changing situations we generally face. There is much we cannot control and it is probably better not to try. Instead of making plans that won’t work, it is better to have robust processes in place that take advantage of many situations. If you want to plan, maybe optimize it for the most likely scenario, but be ready to adapt.  

I have come to accept and even celebrate my ignorance, uncertainty and lack of detailed plans. It can be difficult to explain to others. I sometimes find it useful to have a profound plan that I can explain. Who knows?  It might work. But I rarely believe that. I know with moral certitude that I will have to vary the plan, so it really is not a good idea to get too detailed into the planning. I suppose it is related to the “don’t spend a dollar to make a dime decision” rule of thumb.  Don’t spend a lot of time and resources on something that is likely to be overtaken by events.

Things have been working out very well for me with my belief in the contingency nature of planning.  I trust it will continue to work like that.  People with plans seem to have things better in hand, but when those plans work it is merely a species of my random contingencies.  

It doesn’t mean I don’t have any plans of my own, but I keep my goals firm and my methods flexible.  IMO, some planners get this exactly wrong. They are less clear where they want to go than about the steps they will need to take to get there.

I was thinking about this today as I was weeding my “garden”. You can see the pictures of my flowers.  It is disorderly in some senses, self-organizing and others and goal oriented for me.  I pull weeds all the time and I move plants around. For example, I am establishing that ground cover you see with the blue flowers. Once in place, there will be no grass to cut in that place. The grass never grew very well there anyway.  I have been gathering plants from other parts of the yard. The flowers come from seeds I gather when I ride my bike and then spread. They are all volunteers. I weed out what I don’t like, so it is not unplanned, but I do depend on what grows. My system is maintained w/o any power tools and I compost everything, so there is no garbage going out.   

When I briefly had a gardener, we “exported” several bags of organic waste every week. I got rid of the gardener because he dissed by disorder and composting. I have not cut the whole lawn since May of 2012, although I knock down parts with my hand mover and scythe. There are lots of bees and butterflies and I suppose perhaps some of the nastier denizens of nature too, but they need a place to live too.  The disorder gives us more diversity and more of everything in its disorder. 

I think that is a good metaphor for life.  It might be easier just to mow everything down, as it was when I got here.  It would seem much more orderly, but it would be less interesting. Next week it will be different in ways I can anticipate but don’t control. I am always interested to see what will grow and how. I get to play in the garden every day and exert my influence, but there is the aspect of randomness. I like that. I established order in my peculiar way.  

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A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy

Language difference is the obvious but vaguely surprising thing I noticed in Columbia. Portuguese to Spanish is a one-way street.  Portuguese speakers can understand most Spanish, but Spanish speakers do not understand much spoken Portuguese.  My Brazilian colleagues told me about this and I found it was true in Bogotá. People spoke to me in a language I more or less understood, but my responses were met with puzzlement. Portuguese, especially the Brazilian variety, uses vowels in a more exuberant way. 

The boundaries of language are interesting.  Some dialects should qualify as languages and some languages are really just dialects. There is an old saying that a language is just a dialect that has an army and a navy.   When I spoke Norwegian, I found I could also understand Swedish w/o too much difficulty. Written Danish is almost identical to written Norwegian, but the spoken language is different.   

Of course, some things called dialects probably should have their own language.  I read that Chinese “dialects” are mutually unintelligible.  Like Danish and Norwegian, the written languages are the same or similar, but the spoken languages are not.  I have had some problems with English.  There were people I could not understand when travelling in the UK.

My first language shock came when I was nineteen.  I hitchhiked from Wisconsin to South Alabama.  It was a dumb idea.  I was not prepared and I had only about $15.  I was trying to go to Florida, but I didn’t have a map or much of a plan.  I ended up on State Highway 10 and got a ride from a guy in a truck.  I understood nothing the man said.  He didn’t take me very far and when I got off a farmer was standing near the road.  He started to talk to me (People of rural Alabama very friendly).  He had one of those Civil War accents, but I understood him well.  He was a little put off when I told him that I was glad I understood.  He laughed when I explained that I had understood nothing from the man who had just dropped me off.  “Oh, that’s old Butch.  He’s the town drunk.   Ain’t nobody understands old Butch.”

Accents and languages can be fun.  I am not very good at accents, but I did find an interesting performance by a woman who does 21 accents in a few minutes.  She is at this link.

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I bought a scale

I am not skinny and don’t want to be, but was getting too fat, year-by-year the weight just ratcheted up. So I bought a scale back in may to measure the problem. I wanted to get below 200lbs. At my height and build I think that is okay. The last time I was down to that level was back in 1995, before I “filled out.” I doubt I put on more muscle in the last 18 years, so it was not a good thing.  I gained in winter and lost almost as much during the summer running season. It ratcheted up. You can make “adjustments” to the mirror; the scale is more precise.  My new scale told me I weighed 217lb. There is some daily variation, but I was tipping in at an average of 215.

You cannot reverse years in days or even weeks; real success comes from thinking systemically. In a complex system, like our own behaviors, little changes, over time, make big changes.  You have to address the pressure points and it can take time to show results. I identified habits and triggers. I was thoughtlessly eating candy, cookies & chips. The trigger was minor anxiety, usually around ten in the morning and two in the afternoon.  I couldn’t really fight the habit, so I altered the trigger.  When I felt the anxiety, I still got up, but instead of buying cookies etc. I just walked around or bought a bottle of Coke Zero. That is almost all it took. 

They say that it doesn’t make much sense to weigh yourself every day, but it does. It is true that there are variations in water retention etc. that make the false the precision of the statistic.  But knowing that you will weight yourself the next morning affects late night snacking the day before.  When I reach for the cheese and crackers at 10pm … well I don’t do that anymore either.  

So, today I reached my goal. This morning I weighed in at 199.8.  Fifteen pounds in almost five months won’t be written up in the diet magazines, but I think the lifestyle changes are sustainable.  I still eat junk food, just not as much.  I go to McDonald’s still about once a week (I get the Big Mac menu with large fries) and have not given up Dunkin Donuts, although I cannot get them here so it is a mute question. I still like the beer and pizza too. I see no reason to push those things out.  Nothing too much. I am not sure how much more weight I will lose. There is no reason the weight will simply stop at 200 because I set that as an arbitrary goal.  My guess is that it will level out at around 195, although I admit I have no hard reason to pick that number either.

There is some irony here. When I was nineteen years old, I thought it would be good to weigh 200lbs. I tried to reach that level w/o success. I pushed up to around 190 and never could achieve more. Today getting to that weight from the other direction is a challenge.  Of course, as you see in the picture nearby, at 19 & 190 I was fat free as I will never be again.  Some things pass never to return. I had hair back then too.  (actually, I think I am 20 or 21 in the picture) I suppose you could say that I had my gains and losses.

My challenge is to avoid the accretion of bad habits.  I picked them up a little at a time and could do it again.  But I am okay for now. Losing weight proves that old idea that what is simple is often not easy.  Time and persistence seems to have worked.

My picture has nothing to do with the text. These are trees I saw growing in Brasilia.  I think they are what we call ficus plants when we have them indoors.  They get much bigger here. 

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Feed the birds

Above you see part of my corn crop.  I looked at it this morning and figured that it needs a few more days.  Evidently the birds didn’t agree.  I have some bananas at the end of the yard.  They are still green and hard, but maybe I should harvest them before some bird, mammal or bug decides they are ready.  

We used to grow tomatoes when I was a kid, but always had to wait for a longer time to get our first taste. My father liked tomatoes while they were still green and hard.  He harvested them before anybody else wanted to eat them. We didn’t get our share until the productivity of the tomato vines overtook his daily consumption. 

I really don’t have much success with my food crops. I got one watermelon. It was good, but not very big and the vines took up lots of space.  I got a fair amount of tomatoes, but only after I changed to smaller, faster maturing varieties that beat the bugs.  I doubt I will get any corn.  I don’t like mangoes, but even if I did the fantastic production of the tree in my yard wouldn’t be worth much. The birds go after them high in the tree.  We get dozens of those florescent green bungees. They are kind of pretty, but their songs suck. They show up at dawn and squabble.  I suppose I can take pride in that I am feeding the birds, bugs and possums. It is a lot easier to buy produce at the supermarket. Given the actual yield from my gardens, it is probably cheaper too.

Below is my giant compost heap produced by the spring cleaning.  Supposedly things decompose really fast in the tropics, but I have not noticed that it happens faster than in Virginia. To be fair, I suppose I am thinking only of the warm months in Virginia. Nothing much decomposes in the cold. The tree in the front with the interesting leaves is a breadfruit.  This is what Captain Bligh was supposed to bring back on the Bounty when that famous mutiny took place.  It was a Polynesian plant and is one of the most productive food sources.  Breadfruit is starchy and hard to prepare.  My tree doesn’t have much fruit and if it did I would not work too hard to cook. 

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Lost, found & maybe lost again

Things should be lost and only sometimes found.  We try too hard to preserve things for a posterity that should be left alone to discover for themselves what we knew, what we were and what they have become.  It is sad when something of old beauty disappears and tragic when hard-won lessons are lost, but it might be sadder and more tragic still if they persist and crowd new beauty and lessons to be learned by another age.  

We have a passion to preserve, or at least try to.  We embrace change in theory but in practice try to hold onto everything, memorialize each moment.  But things pass and when they are gone they cannot be persevered, perhaps only fossilized, a lifeless impression reminiscent of the vital living thing, but w/o any of its essence. The essence of vital life is change and the fossil preserved cannot do that.  

Sometimes just let go, let that moment pass into obscurity, with maybe some lingering meaning to be discovered by an explorer or an antiquarian of a future generation, when it will be rediscovered and misinterpreted to fit their needs.  

Things preserved are things dead.  The world should belong to the living. My historian’s heart loves the past and knows that we can learn from the experience of others.   Our ancestors left us a wonderful legacy and I count as MY ancestor every human who came before me whose legacy I touch: good, bad and indifferent. Events change but human nature abides.   But with all due respect to what went before, the future is what matters. Knowing what came before should enable us, not hold us down. They are our ancestors but we have no responsibility for what they did. 

I often feel most awe in lonely places. I recall coming on a big pile of rocks while hiking in Norway.  It turns out that it was a Neolithic monument.  Thousands of years ago, the local hunters and farmer just piled rocks.  There was a marker, which is how I knew what it was, but it didn’t really have a good explanation. Maybe it was just that somebody started to do it and other just did it too.  The tradition perhaps persists along hiking trails, where you find piles of rocks that people create as a type of fetish.

When I come on a sign of some great past event, I feel pensive but also connected. I feel connected, however fleetingly, to humans who like me strives, achieved, failed and overcame.  I know that all I do will soon be like all they did.  I take a moment to respect them and also myself.  I try to take a lesson and then I move on.  

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Government shutdown

I don’t really understand.  I went to a census webpage today and got a message that it was suspended because of the shutdown.  Why?  If there is still electricity to run the site, and there is because I got the message, there is no additional cost to leaving the information accessible. In fact, it probably cost more to put up that message than it would to just leave it alone. 

I am still working, since overseas diplomacy is considered crucial at least for now. My Brazilian colleagues cannot be furloughed because of Brazilian law, which applies to them. Since we are on the job, I think we should do our jobs to extent we can given that our resources have been cut. 

We are shut down due to lack of appropriations. It isn’t like being on strike; it means that we still want to work but don’t have money and I cannot spend money on new things. But we still have a lot of not new things that we can use or do and we have our skills, talents and time.  I don’t want to stand down until I have nothing left to stand with.  The work we do is valuable.  It was worth doing last week and is worth doing now. There are rules about these things, however, and perhaps protean interpretations.  I just want to do the job that they are still paying me to do and I think most of my colleagues do too. We should do our best to minimize the pain and mitigate the damage. That is what I intend to do as far as I am allowed: maybe even a little bit farther.

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End of the trail

I thought about keeping this in my private journal, but I think it is a problem common enough that maybe I should write something more public. It might be of interest to the FS community.  IMO, this is a subject extremely interesting to many people, but one we talk about obliquely or not at all.  Lots of my colleagues are in similar positions and more generally this applies to CS and all old guys. I also feel confident in writing since I feel generally successful and not aggrieved and I am looking at the development it with surprising indifference.

I didn’t get promoted this year. I figured my chances were 40-60 against and I lost the toss. At my rank, promotions don’t mean much more money and there are very few practical advantages other than the honor of it all. There are good things, as I will explain, but first a little background.

Our FS system gives us time limits within our grades.  A “normal” career will last about 27 years and the person will honorably retire at the FS-01 level, a rank equivalent to an army colonel. To survive longer, you have to jump to the senior FS, which I did in 2007.  After that, you get six years to make it to the next grade.  I got a little extra time, since they gave me credit for the year I spent in Iraq and Congress didn’t get around to ratifying my promotion until 2008.  Anyway, I can keep my job until January, 2016, when it is “hit the road Jack” and I have to retire.

This is not a bad thing. I will be sixty.  I have been eligible to retire since 2005 and I have been “kinda meaning” to retire and do something else, but I hung on because the FS was fun and I felt like I was contributing.  My finest hours were my service in Iraq and now doing extraordinary things in Brazil.  These came after I could have retired and leaving those songs unsung would have been a shame. Of course, I would not have known what I didn’t achieve.  Now, however, I don’t think there is much left for me.  I think that the job I am doing in Brazil is the best I can do. Future assignments would be coming down from the peaks. 

So how is the lack of promotion good news?

This was probably my last chance for promotion.  As I said above, I did the best I could in Brazil and the reports that my Ambassador and DCM wrote reflected that. Ambassador Shannon wrote something so good for for me that I would certainly be too embarrassed to write for myself.  It won’t get better. If that is not enough, I am out of luck. I don’t want to be a DCM or a DAS, so PAO Brazil is as good as it gets for me, but evidently not good enough. It is still a little ways off, but I now can see clearly the end of my FS road.  

If I was not forced out, I would think of excellent reasons to hang around like a fart in a phone box.  I would not leave, but my usefulness would have peaked.  We have people like that at State.  They are ghosts of their former glory.  It is sad and not for me.  You should always leave when they still want you to stay.

When I talk of retiring, I don’t mean to do nothing. I still feel energetic and will find a good job where I can still do something good. I will have the luxury of taking a job that means something to me w/o having to worry too much about the salary & benefits. My forestry enterprise could use some attention and I have lots of personal things to do before I take that final road to glory.

So life is good.  I still feel little pangs of pain for not being on the promotion list.  At this point in my career a promotion is a “positional good,” i.e. you want it because not everyone can have it and you have the “why not me?” question when you see people you think are less worthy.  Having served on promotion panels myself, I can answer that question truthfully in ways that need not make me angry or sad.  Some is just the luck of the draw.  Promotions are statistically valid in that the better people tend to do better, but there are lots of anomalies in both directions, as well as more people who could be promoted than can be.  I also admit that I have certain personality traits not immediately appreciated by the bureaucracy.  I consider them mostly good and if I have not changed them up until now, I sure won’t be doing any major renovations at this late point.

I will go gentle into that good night with no raging.  It will be going on 32 years by the time it is done, hard to believe.  I had a good run and I think things are better at least in a small way because of things I did.   The FS treated me fairly and I was able to build a good life both in and outside work. There is no job I would rather have had.   

P.S. – One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day.”  I may take more lessons from simple comedy movie than it has to teach, but I see it as the story of the iterative pursuit of excellence.  The main character, played by Bill Murray, repeats the same day, February 2, over and over again.  He finally moves ahead only after he lives the day right in all its aspects.  I think the FS is like that in many ways.  We go from place to place doing similar jobs, trying to get better at doing them.  Up until this tour in Brasília, I always tried hard but didn’t really get it right.   I am not saying that my performance in Brasília is perfect, but I think it is right this time.  I am entitled to move along now.

P.S.S. I have learned to love poetry in my later life. I only wish I had been able to appreciate it sooner. Maybe you have to be ready for it.  Anyway, I am reminded of the Tennyson Poem, Ulysses, that I didn’t appreciate in HS.  I don’t hold with the revisionists views of the work and take it for what it is, w/o irony. The relevant part is below.

…Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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Jabuticaba & the rainy season

Rainy season has started.  It usually doesn’t rain all day, but when it rains, it rains hard and the grass turns green overnight.  I planted some corn a while back and had to water it every day.  Now nature will take care of it. I hope to get some corn this time.  Last year I had corn, tomatoes and beans and then they were set upon by ants.  I never saw anything like it. They just killed everything.  This year I am vigilant. I don’t know how well it will work, but I got some grill starter.  It is sort of like napalm, i.e. a sticky jell that burns.  If I see lots of those ant armies again, I plan to nape them. Don’t you love the smell of napalm in the morning? So far no large numbers of ants have shown up.  Perhaps they fear my deterrent.

The bigger plants have ears, but I am not sure they will be good. I didn’t get enough corn sprouts from the first batch and had to plant again. They have to pollinate from each other.  Each of those little hairs is a flower leading to a grain of corn. If they don’t get pollinated, they don’t turn into corn.The picture below is from two weeks ago when we still were in the dry season. The round topped tree is the jabuticaba.  You can see that I don’t water the lawn during the dry season. I raked off the dead grass. The grass looks dead in that picture, but it is already growing back.  It comes right back, it seems within hours of the first rains.

I got a fair number of tomatoes a few months ago by planting smaller tomatoes that matured faster than the bugs could find them.  If I has to rely on my farming skills, I would soon starve to death. For all my watermelon growing last year, I got only one eatable melon. It was actually pretty good, although small. But it is kind of fun to try to grow things, since I know I don’t depend on them.

I have not been cutting the grass since I got rid of the sheep.  I tend some parts of the yard, for example, I trim the hedges, but mostly it is “natural.” I have been bringing seeds back from the various plantations around Brasilia.  Some grow. I bought some seeds and a couple bags of dirt, including some terra preta – a kind of black charcoal looking dirt – at local garden store, Leroy Merlin and made some little garden patches that you can kind of see in the picture. Little plants are coming up now.  I think I will make the front into a more tended garden for the neighbors.  The back, where only I go, can stay more natural with my flowers mixed with the grass.  I like that much better.  It is fun to see what comes up.

One of the interesting things in the yard is the jabuticaba tree.  The fruit grows right on the tree trunk. You can see a picture at this link.  Go to the bottom of the page.  It flowered after the recent rain, as you can see in my pictures. The fruit is supposed to have all kinds of special health benefits. I don’t know about that. They are kind of like grapes and taste okay.  You cannot get them outside Brazil or even very far away from where they grow, since they begin to ferment in only a few days so you cannot keep them long.  I am surprised that they don’t have a greater following among health nuts.  They have a funny name and are exotic. Maybe they will be discovered like açaí  That stuff tastes like dirt and the only way you can make it reasonably palatable is to dump in loads of sugar, but the alternative food & medicine folks love it.  They say it is the health secret of native Amazonian health.  I have seen native Amazonians. I am not sure theirs is a lifestyle we would want to emulate.

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Drinking a greater variety of beer

I like beer and like the fact that there are lots of kinds.  Today we have more breweries than ever in the U.S.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I evidently started drinking beer at the low point of breweries in the U.S.  Wisconsin still had a few.  We had Point Brewery where I went to school, Leinenkugel in Chippewa Falls, Heileman’s Old Style in Lacrosse & Huber in Monroe, plus the bigger brewers like Pabst & Schlitz. I think they are all gone now or owned by others. 

I remember we used to make a big deal about getting Coors.  It was not sold far from Colorado because it was not pasteurized and needed to be kept cold.  Coors was also one of the first to use recyclable aluminum cans. We thought it was cool that you could crush the soft can in one hand. Steel cans were not so easy. They even made a movie, “Smokey and the Bandit,” about bringing Coors east.  Now you can get Coors everywhere.  I still like it but only during the day.  I usually take a couple cans when I do work on the tree farm.  It is very refreshing on a hot day but a little to light to sit and drink in the evening.

Anyway, it is good to see that there is more variety, but it does make life complicated. In the old days, there were lots of types of beer, but they were local.  You had to travel to get them.  Today they are all or mostly all available in your local liquor store.  In some ways that ruins the fun. It was nice to have some things you had to travel to get or could bring back from a trip.

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St. Louis Blues Week

We were lucky enough to have our hotel a short walk from the St. Louis Blues week. It was sponsored by Jack Daniels, so they were selling Jack with various combinations.  They had Jack Daniels and Diet Coke. It is very good. I just had the straight stuff followed by beer and lots of pulled pork. Lucky we could walk back the hotel. It wore off some of the food and avoided a drunk driving experience.

Making good barbeque is a real art.  People work on it. They have special recipes and techniques. I am not a connoisseur of pulled pork but I do like to try the different types.  I ate too much and went back the next day. I can admire the artists of pork.

I love the variety of America.  Above are perhaps not “typical” but they are picturesque.

I was vaguely aware of St. Louis, but didn’t really think much or know much about it. It is a really nice city.  It is much like Milwaukee, probably because of the German influence on civic pride, but (excuse my hometown) a little nicer in many ways.  If it had Lake Michigan it would beat Milwaukee.  Speaking of German heritage in St Louis, above is a statue of the great German poet & philosopher Frederich Schiller.  Below is the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.  Germans made great contributions to America and our country. Our universities are based on German models; much of our civic culture was cultured by German immigrants; of course we eat hamburgers and frankfurters (hot dogs) and drive on highways inspired by the autobahns.  The experience of two terrible wars has made us forget how much our country was affected positively by Germans. It is useful to recall, even in this, that our American armies and navies in those wars had lots of German Americans, including leaders such as Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz and John J Pershing. On the 2000 census 58 million Americans claimed to be primarily of German ancestry.  It is still our largest ethnic heritage.