A la “The Tales of Ba Sing Se,” this post will recount some of the random goings-on over the last week.

 

The Tale of the Stolen Space

I arrived back at my apartment Tuesday evening to find some interloping car in my spot. Never in all my 50-odd weeks of living here had that happened before. For a hot second I just stayed in my car, puzzling it out, like I did when, near the end of the semester, someone took my “unassigned” seat in high school psychology and I had to go get a drink of water to compose myself before heading in and taking a different seat.

I parked in a guest spot and decided to have a bit of fun with whoever-it-was. I have some left-over name tags I used as my Halloween costume last year, the kind that say “Hello, my name is” with room to write in whatever. Last year I went as “Bob”.

Anywho, I left a note reading, “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You took my spot. Prepare to feel bad about it.” I had to iterate a couple times on that last clause, cause I didn’t want it to come across like a threat. But it all worked out, the car was gone the next day.

 

The Tale of the Upstairs Infant

I’ve always felt a tinge of guilt about my upstairs and downstairs neighbors. I’ve had some loud parties at my place, and I never got around to delivering goody bags to say sorry. But I got it dished back to me occasionally; the upstairs neighbors periodically performed what I can only describe as something akin to a Muslim call to prayer, and it always went on for some time.

They moved out though, and in their place came a family that didn’t seem to cause too much noise. That all changed a few weeks ago, when I started hearing faint, intermittent infant wailing. It was never very loud, took me a while to pinpoint the source. I take it as penance for my past parties.

There is an upside, though. As I type this, I can hear the mom having fun and playing silly games with her child, and that’s always heartwarming.

 

The Tale of the Irish and the Italian

On Friday I went to a friend’s house to watch the 2015 movie “Brooklyn”, set in ’50s America, featuring the love story between Irish and Italian immigrants. Thumbs up, would recommend.

 

The Tale of the Starship Discovery

On the more modern end of the scale, I’ve seen the first three episodes of the new Star Trek: Discovery TV show. Hot dang is it good. Go watch it. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller: “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking it up.” $6/month, or roughly $1.50 per episode. Gotta admit that First Officer Saru is one of my favorite characters, with Captain Lorca not far behind.

 

The Tale of the Ghost in the Machine

I had a friend over and was using Chromecast on my phone to project media to my TV. Individual apps can be “casted”, which results in the TV displaying a unique UI, controllable from the original app. When the TV requests content, it typically streams it itself; i.e., when casting from the YouTube app, the video data is not flowing through the phone and back to the TV; the TV is actually fetching the data straight from YouTube.

In addition to media playback, Chromecast on Android also supports screen mirroring. In this case, video data does travel from the phone to the TV.

So there we were, having a grand old time, when all of a sudden my Chromecast sessions started dying soon after activating Chromecast screen mirroring. Ah technology, the bane and lifeblood of my existence. I then noticed that the reason my Chromecast sessions were dying was because my wifi was being disconnected. Out of curiosity I decided to trigger it again and pay attention to the lights on my router, see what they did when things went sideways.

Lo and behold, the problem wasn’t with my phone at all. It turns out that my phone was disconnecting from wifi because there was no wifi; the router was busy rebooting. It did this consistently, within four or five seconds of beginning to screen-mirror over Chromecast.

At that point I just gave up. I explained to my friend that this was as if, whenever you turn on the second faucet in the master bedroom, the water meter explodes. My only hope now is that it decides to fix itself as mysteriously as it decided to break itself.

 

The Tale of the Haunted Mansion

Speaking of haunted stuff…

Saturday’s afternoon session was spent at a friend’s house.

Between that session and Priesthood session, I and three friends played a rousing round of Betrayal at House on the Hill. I convey a dramatization of the round in a Facebook post. Needless to say, the game will definitely be going to the Cabin.

 

The Tale of the Balding Tires

The game had to pause, as the house got haunted right when I had to head off to a friend’s house for Priesthood Session. It was raining hard, and I took a two-lane freeway on-ramp too fast. I began to drift from the right lane into the left – fortunately there weren’t any other vehicles in my immediate vicinity. My vehicle was becoming stable, when I noticed that my steering wheel was turned far too much to the right; if I suddenly regained traction, I’d head right into the opposite guard rail. I began to correct, and immediately my tires started gripping the road again. A minor fishtail as the control loop stabilized and I was back on my way.

I just barely hit the mileage number on that little sticker they leave in the upper corner of the windshield, so I’ll have a professional confirm that I do indeed desperately need to replace my tires before I go and do that. In the meantime, no more pretending I’m in Fast & Furious.

 

The Tale of the Highway Husky

On my way to work today I passed up the opportunity to hop into a faster lane on the freeway, just so I could get overtaken by a car with a husky peeking its head out the back window. Hi Puppy!!

 

The Tale of the Missing Headset

As I mentioned last week, my phone now works with a VR headset. It was supposed to arrive Thursday last week, but ended up getting delivered to my office Friday at 5:30pm, so I wasn’t able to retrieve it until 3:30pm today once receiving processed it. It is definitely a fun little doodad; I’ve loved swiping through old “photospheres” I took on vacation. Can’t wait to play “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” when I’m up there next.

 

The Tale of the Jelly Donut

“Jelly donut” is the not-so-technical term for the shock-absorbing ring separating individual vertebrae, so this tale is simply a progress report. Physical therapy’s going well enough. I can feel improvements strength-wise, but flexibility hasn’t really improved, and my backside still feels like it’s bruised up after sitting down for too long or driving for more than six or seven minutes.

I had a follow-up visit with the spine specialist who originally referred me to physical therapy. One of my objectives was to obtain an MRI. The specialist demurred, noting that given my improvement, even if it does show a disc herniation—the leading theory of what went wrong—the recommended treatment plan would not change. Not until I demonstrate a plateau in improvement anyways. He had me schedule another followup four weeks out, and if I haven’t had dramatic improvement in that time, then he’d go for an MRI and consider more invasive options, like a cortisone injection. Fooey.

 

The Tale of the Walk in the Park

The last session of General Conference was shown at my bishop’s place. I arrived late, and had to park around the corner due to high turnout. Afterwards, I walked back to my car, and decided to just keep walking. It was a gorgeous day out and I wanted to see how far I could go.

Wandered through a nice residential area. Passed a park with a tennis court in it, where I spied a lone man practicing some form of martial arts – could be shaolin, but honestly it looked like it could be wushu, a form of martial arts practiced only for exhibitionary purposes, with no focus on practical applications like self defense.

I also passed a house with an ambulance out front. No one was around and the ambulance wasn’t making any noise. There was a laptop screen facing the passenger-side door, and I could see an event log, with timestamps placing them not five minutes prior. The messages told the tale of a son calling in that his father had passed, the paramedics arriving, and calling a police unit to the scene.

I wasn’t sure that the log messages on the screen corresponded with the ambulance’s current stop. I figured I’d wander back the way I came, and if I passed the house and it had a cop out front, I’d be confident what happened.

Eventually found my way to a park where a couple of kids were playing in those inflatable battle bubbles. A path led off into some woods. It wound around the edge of a vast gully. I followed it for a time, until I came across a smaller path that forked off and led me down into the heart of the gully.

I felt like I was an anthropologist, exploring the ruins of a past civilization, brushing off the cobwebs of old – figurative and literal as it turned out, as spiderwebs abounded. Ended up grabbing a branch and brandishing it around like a torch. And yes, eventually the branch stopped being a torch and started being a lightsaber.

It had been some time since I’d been well and truly lost. I had absolutely no idea what direction I’d come in from. I was considering backtracking, when I stumbled across the find of the century. (Not really, but, y’know.)

Brought me right back to the forts we’d build in the creek. But this, this was the real deal.

I pressed on, looking for more evidence of civilization. And I found it:

Didn’t evoke quite the same sense of childhood sentimentality, but it was still cool.

At this time it was about an hour until I was due back at my apartment to greet friends. Still felt no closer to finding an exit. At some point I’d have to text the group and admit that I was lost in the woods. But I pressed on and scaled a hill, leading back to the trail I’d abandoned earlier.

I managed to find my way back without resorting to GPS, a goal I’d set for myself before setting off on my adventure in the first place. And sure enough, I passed by the house again, and saw that a police cruiser had taken the place of the ambulance. Some family members were standing around the front yard, looking somber. I was glad I knew enough not to cheerily call out “howdy,” but I kind of wish I had less inhibitions against potentially awkward social encounters, or I could’ve really made things surreal for them. “Hi, Sam? Yes, I just wanted to say I’m sorry your father passed, I’m sure he was a good man, I’m glad he got to pass in his own home, surrounded by family. No you don’t know me. Oh I just had a feeling that your name was Sam and that your dad passed away today. Cheerio!” Maybe if I were in Tim’s family I would’ve given it a shot or three.