Uncategorized – Page 6 – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

Archie

Archie Coopersmith Carlson
March 29, 2006 – September 24, 2020

I loved Archie dearly, but he was always Kathleen’s dog first. Our relationship with him started as an internet romance. Kathleen had spotted an online picture of his face as a 6-month old pup, and it was love at first sight. Archie’s naturally sweet and people-oriented disposition was enhanced by his early education. He was in training to be a therapy dog, which he would have excelled at, when his human partner had to drop out, so he had to drop out too.

Archie grew up alongside our grandsons, and identified with them and with humans in general. When he first came to us, Archie was completely silent no matter how excited he was. It was only after playing with our young grandsons and witnessing them get into a shouting match that he gleefully joined in with a full-throated bark that he continued to apply, when the situation warranted it, the rest of his life.

Archie’s friendliness and sensitivity made him a natural ambassador for his kind. By the second year after he came to live with us here, it seemed like every other house on the street had gotten at least one family labradoodle. None were as good at the original though!

As Archie matured, he developed a more sophisticated bond with us. He could be impatient, sardonic, or skeptical, but he was always joyful. He had an appetite for good company, good food (when he could sneak a bit) and a good cup of coffee, of late sleep-ins and walks in the snow that matched, and helped shape, our own.

From almost the very beginning, Archie was plagued with medical problems, and multiple doctors assured us that he would not live past four years old. But throughout his life, Archie never knew or cared about the sonograms of his heart, or the regular liver function tests, or the barrage of pills we snuck into his food. And as he grew old with us, he didn’t even know that he was the dog-equivalent of 100 years old! He was still walking and sniffing in the park, and running after tossed tennis balls, on the day he died.

* * *

I wrote a silly blog post a couple of months ago, in which I attempted to play “The Glad Game”, and point out all the good things that the global coronavirus epidemic has brought. I couldn’t find any, of course—that was the whole point of the post.

But now I have one good thing the covid brought, and it’s a true gem. The epidemic and the resulting quarantine that we have undergone put Kathleen, Archie and I together every day, nearly 24 hours a day, in a way that even our recent retirements didn’t manage. Being denied the ability to travel far or to be physically close to anyone, even our kids and grandkids, without elaborate preparations, the three of us became almost inseparable.

Our chores, our playtimes, our sleep piles, all of the rituals that kept our lives moving, bound us together into a self-sufficient pack of three that kept us all stronger, happier, and more loving. I read somewhere how dogs everywhere have loved the quarantine, and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved it too, for the seven months (or four whole dog-years!) that it gave us to be close, really close, to Archie.

* * *

In addition to all his other sterling qualities, Archie was also a good looker, and sat as a model for several of Lona’s paintings over the years.

Thank you for coming into our lives, old friend.

Thanks for listening, it felt good to tell you that,
Dorn
9/27/2020

I’ve mentioned Archie from time to time in my posts. If you knew Archie or are feeling especially sentimental, maybe you’d enjoy revisiting those posts.

Fill My Cup Again, This Night Will Pass, Alas

“Britain Turns to Drink” ran the headline recently in the Daily Mail. I have a feeling that they are not alone, so I wanted a painting featuring alcohol in my pandemic oeuvre. I have to say that I, too, have found myself imbibing somewhat more than usual. That said, I will point out that there are also other healthy ways of coping, like good diet, exercise, meditation, strengthening connections, and creative activity. The painting features my niece, who is really good at what I was trying to capture. In the execution, the title that kept going through my mind was ‘Practice Painting Glasses’, but later I found a title in a verse from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
The caravan of life shall always pass
Beware that is fresh as sweet young grass
Let’s not worry about what tomorrow will amass
Fill my cup again, this night will pass, alas.

Summer re-run

– In which Dorn reports old news.

Sorry for the long hiatus between posts, rabid fans. I blame a computer malfunction (and certainly not this endless covid-induced sentence of near-house arrest and near-solitary confinement, which has lasted so long now that I’m totally bored of every activity I used to do, and every new activity I took up to pass the quarantine time, and feel completely brain dead and uninspired). And it’s right that I blame the computer, for two important reasons:

(1) there’s an element of truth in there. When I recently tried to log in to work on a new post, I got an error message saying I could not access the site. Between finding the error and fixing it took less than an hour, true, but my momentum was completely lost!

(2) More importantly, the primary function of computers in today’s paperless world is to take the blame for any errors or inconveniences. This is embossed on page one of every federal employee’s orientation manual, and I’m sure applies to non-feds as well. The only standard excuse that comes even close to the computer one—and it’s a distant second—is to blame all problems on the guy who just retired. Ah, fond memories of when I retired…. (but that’s a story for another day).

Anyway, my writer’s block might be easing a bit because I’ve thought of several possible posts. They aren’t written yet, so to keep you from abandoning the blog entirely while you are patiently waiting, here’s a rerun of a post I did last summer, back when I had just been retired a few months and working was still fresh in my mind, and long before covid-19 was invented, even in China. Enjoy!

Warning: this post is from early in my blogging days, when I was even worse at being brief than I am now.

* * *

From July 24, 2019:

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 1)

– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.

This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.

I call this story “I was a fugitive from the NCIS“. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)

Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.

Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.

That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation.

The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.

In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did.

She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.

I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now.

But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking).

One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!

CONTINUED in part 2 . . .

Pets As Solace

I wanted to paint my brother in law and the reference photo that I found that I liked had his pets in it. I thought that is appropriate for my pandemic oeuvre – since pets have been a solace during this time. I know giving Teddy his daily walks has been instrumental in getting me through this! But the photo was a few years old and the pictured pets have departed – so I added his current pets in a painting on the wall and one on the mantle, creating a curious juxtaposition of past, present and future. A big thank you to all the pets!

Taking charge: cower in place 37

– in which Dorn stops cowering from the covid, and starts to fight back.

To misquote Mark Twain, “Everybody talks about the coronavirus, but nobody does anything about it.” This isn’t true, of course: doctors, nurses, first responders and medical researchers are all working overtime to stop the worst ravages of the disease, and find ways to stop the disease altogether. And this is to say nothing of all those who are working as hard as they can to keep the pandemic from hurting people economically, socially, or educationally. Heroes all, as I’ve said before, but today I wanted to talk about people who are taking a very particular stand against the progress of the disease: those who are offering themselves up to further the research into treatments and vaccines.

I’ve mentioned my friend E— R— (here) who is an actual survivor of the coronavirus. Elizabeth, I mean E—, and other Immunati (as they secretly call themselves), are giving their time and their antibodies to find better ways to fight the disease. I find this amazingly courageous, especially as it involves getting blood drawn in a medical setting. I myself haven’t been brave enough even to set foot in any building since February, but especially in a medical building which covid sufferers might plausibly frequent.

Immunati can bring unique resources into the fight against the disease, having successfully beaten back the virus in their own bodies and now sporting covid antibodies, but non-Immunati also have a trait that is uniquely theirs to offer, and that is vital to developing a covid vaccine: they are uninfected, and vulnerable to the disease.

Hundreds of research groups are working on vaccine possibilities around the world, and every one of these that proves promising enough in early trials must undergo human testing. For that a large population of volunteers is needed. The volunteers are innoculated with a test vaccine, which is probably safe, and might offer some protection from covid, or with a placebo, which almost certainly will not.

These volunteers are risking possible unanticipated side effects from the vaccine for only a slight statistical increase in their own safety against covid. They are mostly altruistic and I’m proud to be of the same species as these volunteers. They increase the average honorability of the whole human race (including my average honorability—I’m actually feeling more noble just writing about it).

Vaccine researchers need a group of volunteer testers who, absent the vaccine, had a fair chance of coming down with covid. Otherwise, they can’t tell if the test vaccine is making any difference. Covid infection rates swing up and down, and researchers’ plans to conduct human trials have frequently been forced to change to new locations, as the rate of infections at their original planned location dropped too low for an effective test.

Brazil is now a popular test area, I’m told. The United States will probably continue to be fertile ground for vaccine tests as long as weak-kneed political leadership and selfish “I know my right to be contagious!” individualism allow the disease to spread nearly unchecked here.

But there’s another way to test new vaccines that doesn’t depend on natural spread of the disease, and which is even more rapid and effective. This type of testing calls for an even more heroic type of individual—one willing to be intentionally exposed to the coronavirus, to see if the vaccine can prevent being infected by it.

The bravery of volunteers willing to do this is simply mind-boggling to me, especially given the fact that we still don’t have fully effective treatments for the disease, which can be fatal, and can leave survivors with permanent lung, heart or circulatory system damage.

I haven’t yet reported on what I hinted at the start of this post: my own way of contributing to the fight against covid. You may have guessed that I haven’t gone down any of the above avenues that have been taken by more intrepid individuals. (It’s not entirely a matter of me being too chicken—I am in regular contact with an immunocompromised, high-risk individual who I don’t have the moral right to put in danger.) I have not volunteered to put myself at risk of virus infection, but I have volunteered to put another there.

That “other” is my personal computer. I have hooked it up to the World Community Grid, an IBM-organized project that coordinates people (over 650,000 of them and counting) who are willing to contribute CPU time on their computers to tackle massive parallel computing tasks that might otherwise be prohibitive.

I am working on a project (or rather, my computer is) to conduct simulated biochemical experiments on a large number of compounds, to see which might have the right shape to interact with the proteins that the coronavirus uses to infect humans. Any such compounds found are prime candidates for laboratory experiments, to determine if they can actually prevent the coronavirus protein from carrying out its insidious work.

Joining the World Community Grid and participating in this project, called “OpenPandemics”, was surprisingly easy. I just had to download some coordinating software and set it to running. It’s been going for a couple of days now and I’ve seen no difference in my computer’s performance, but I can see from the statistics on their website that I am successfully delivering valid results to their project.

The biggest worry I had about doing this was from having to download someone else’s software, and the inherent risks of picking up a virus, Trojan worm, or whatever hackers are trying to infect computers with nowadays. But I did what homework I could to satisfy myself that this was a legitimate, safe download. I reasoned that I face a similar risk with every single program that I put on my computer, and the main difference is that I am not using this program to do anything for my own immediate benefit, convenience, or amusement. The benefit, if there is one, is “only” to humanity at large.

I felt surprised, and a bit guilty, that the decision to run this altruistic program on my computer was harder than the decision to run Facebook or Candy Crush. But I gritted my teeth and did it, so now I am among those risking (a little) to fight back against the tyranny of covid! Yay me!

If you or your computer want to try this, here is a link to volunteer for the World Community Grid on the Covid project or the other medical or public good projects they are coordinating, from cancer and AIDS research to predicting African rainfall patterns. This particular link somehow allows the Grid to know that I am the one who sent you, which I think gives me extra karmic points or something when the final accounting takes place.

Thanks (and I really mean it, thank you!)
Dorn
8/15/2020