Bedtime Habits

It's said that a nighttime routine helps you get to sleep faster since your body will begin to recognize the patterns around bedtime and act accordingly. I'm fortunate to generally fall asleep fairly quickly, but a few pre-sleep habits I've gotten into coincide with some of the quickest falling-asleep times I've ever measured.

I start thinking about bed approximately half an hour before I get into it. Once I get up to brush my teeth, the nighttime routine is past the point of no return. After brushing, I change into pajamas and check that the doors are locked and the stove is off. Finally--and this is important--I take a drink of water or two. Sometimes it almost feels like a mild compulsion, and if I wait more than thirty seconds or so between drinking water and getting into bed, I feel like taking another drink to keep the pattern fresh. With all this complete, I can turn off the lights, turn on my alarms and an audiobook (listening to something keeps me from thinking overmuch), and go to sleep.

I very much look forward to lying in bed and drifting off, so to get this feeling more often, a new element has been added to my nighttime routine: I wake up after about two hours and get to enjoy being groggy for a few minutes and falling asleep all over again.

Mosquito Swatting

It's said that some early European explorers of northern Canada were driven insane by the inescapable swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes. During my summer in the Yukon, we were better equipped than these explorers could have been, but learning to live with the clouds of flying insects was still an ordeal. Mosquitoes were the main issue in the valley we inhabited. They have many ways of identifying potential targets; for example, they are attracted to carbon dioxide, so unless you can hold your breath indefinitely, there's no good way to hide from them.

If you're moving fast, mosquitoes will have a hard time landing on you, and wind also provides a welcome relief from flying insects. Surprisingly, climbing trees will get you away from all but the most determined mosquitoes, so I suppose they must prefer to hang out near the ground. In general, we used wearable bug nets to keep biting to a minimum; even then, the buzzing cloud that surrounds your head can test the limits of one's patience.

For the first couple weeks, I would swat at mosquitoes, but past a certain point manual control seems pointless. With hundreds of mosquitoes in the air around you, it doesn't make sense to spend your energy going after individuals. That being said, we did have an unofficial competition at camp to see who could get the most mosquitoes with one swat. While I was sitting in the woods watching squirrel territories, I would keep an eye out for groups of four mosquitoes or more that had landed on me close together, usually on my knees where the dark material had attracted them. Over the weeks, I was excited to announce my milestones as I got five mosquitoes at once (a sort of rolling swipe) and then six mosquitoes at once (a fingers-spread swat on the knee). There were a few moments where I might have gotten more, but only numbers that could be verified by mosquito bodies or marks on the hand were counted.

Ultimately, seven mosquitoes at once was my record, which I am pretty happy with. A few weeks later, a grad student managed to take out ten mosquitoes with one swat, and nobody came close to that afterward. The days grew colder near the end of summer and the swarms of mosquitoes thinned out. Perhaps one day I'll again be in an environment where ten or more mosquitoes might land on a hand-sized portion of myself; until then, I must be content to bide my time and train.

Posthumous Careers

I was browsing through IMDb the other day when I saw a hyperlinked reference to Virgil, great Latin poet and author of the Aeneid. I followed the link and was surprised to find an IMDb page with several writing credits, including one for a movie currently in production.

It does make sense, I suppose, to give credit to writers of bygone eras when you're basing a movie or TV show on their work. Homer and Chaucer have healthy IMDb pages, each having inspired their fair share of films, but all the old writers I could think of are dwarfed by Shakespeare, who has 1342 writing credits, 49 soundtrack credits (all for lyrics, I believe), and 5 'miscellaneous crew' credits-- I'm not sure what happened there.

Sir Thomas Malory, I was impressed to see, was even nominated for a Hugo award for his work as a writer on the 1982 movie Excalibur. I don't think Shakespeare ever got nominated for a Hugo award, but the brilliant thing with the posthumous careers these writers carry on is that there's always the chance for more recognition in the future.

Car Dealer Ads

A lot of the ads I hear on the radio are for a handful of major car dealerships around Charleston. As far as I can tell, they perpetually have major discounts and deals going on-- first there was a special Christmas sale, then a New Year's event, then Presidents' day sales that stretch to fill the whole month of February. In general, you can get a new car for $4000-6000 less than the sticker price by trading in your old car, spending your tax return on a new car, or just showing up with a decent credit rating.

A few factors make me distrust these ads. For a start, loud voices and aurally abrasive sound effects put me in a bad mood within the first few seconds of most dealership ads. Secondly, car salespeople as a group don't have a great reputation for honesty, and from the style and content of their ads, it seems that none of the local dealerships are trying to set themselves apart from this stereotype. Also, the focus on affordability rings hollow in a system where most corporations prioritize profit; a discount is much more likely to be a sales tactic than a good deal.

In any case, I'm happy to add these dealership ads to my list of advertisements that make me less likely to do business with a company. Overall, I'm surprised that with the amount of money people spend on advertising, so many ads come across as empty and annoying.

Comic Quality

I read the comics in the daily newspaper whenever I get the chance, and while I'm certainly entertained, I rarely find myself actually laughing at a comic. Out of the thirty or so comics on the two-page spread, there are maybe three or four that I look forward to as probably being funny. I'm sure that other comics appeal to other people's senses of humor, but it also seems very possible that, given the requirement to produce one comic a day, it's impossible for the average cartoonist to think of a great idea for every strip.

I can't really think of a good solution for this-- rerunning a few pages of Calvin and Hobbes each day would be fun, but even that would get old after a while. In a lot of ways, it seems to me that the comics with the most longevity are the ones that focus on characters over jokes. Anyone can run out of punchlines, but comics with well-developed characters are more self-sustaining, and a lot of humor eventually comes from the unique actions and perspectives of these characters. The best of example of this that I can think of is Peanuts: most individual strips are not particularly funny, but overall it is one of my favorite comics. Humorous personalities developed over years of daily strips carry the comic past a collection of jokes to something much more meaningful.

Dryer Lint

Dryer lint is a sort of magic; clothes are put in the dryer and clothes and lint come out. Classic philosophers might suggest that lint is produced ex nihilo, but the modern conclusion must be that the lint is subtracted from the clothes being dried, which in turn suggests two things. First, my clothes must be getting thinner every time I dry them, and I suppose that if I kept drying them indefinitely, they would disappear entirely.

This is very similar to the way rock works; igneous rock (the clothes) is ground down to dust (the lint), which is then compacted into sedimentary and metamorphic rock and so on. The second conclusion, then, if lint follows the pattern of rock, is that it should be possible to recycle dryer lint into new fabric (felt maybe?) and continue the cycle. None of this is empirical, of course, but that just means the logic is purer, right?

Fresh Starts

In general, I like fresh starts. If I leave a book I've read partway through or a video game I've started but not finished and then come back later, I'll often start the whole thing over to get a unity of experience not possible with on-and-off consumption. In the past few years, I've enjoyed traveling to and living in new places, getting set up and getting into a new routine.

Of course, the problem with always starting things is that you less frequently get around to finishing things, which is possibly even more fulfilling. I don't believe that I'll ever stop starting things, but there are at least a few short-term habits in my life that I'm trying to turn into long-term habits so that I can get the payoff of a thing well finished.

Also, I'm not going back to the start of the Witcher games because it took me forever to play the first two.

Fun With Foraging

I've been interested in plants for a while now, but that doesn't automatically transfer into actual knowledge about plants. The goal for someone who is interested in plants, I suppose, is to be one of those people who can walk through a forest and recognize all the species by sight and smell, and know their uses as well.

Spending time in the Yukon was an unexpected boon in this matter because there are relatively few plant species (and less biodiversity in general) in such northern environments. In the valley where we worked, for example, there were only two types of trees to keep track of-- if it had needles, it was a spruce tree, and if it had leaves, it was a poplar. With the help of a good field guide, then, my dream of knowing most of a forest could be realized thanks to subarctic simplicity.

I was happy to find that many of the local plants were edible, in part or in whole. Fireweed, the official flower of the Yukon, is the perfect starter for anyone interested in foraging-- it is visually distinct, very common (at least where we were), and every part of it can be eaten, though the young shoots and flowers are probably the tastiest. Several other plants were eventually added to the pool of things I could snack on while in the woods: a few berries, a few flowers (rose petals are generally pretty good), and several sorts of leaves were on the menu.

There were also several local plants that were very poisonous, which made things more interesting. It certainly provided an incentive for accurate identification. There was a type of purple flower you couldn't eat that would make you hesitate to seek out the type of purple flower you could eat, and so on. Again, a good field guide was a real lifesaver.

At many points, I wondered if I had learned enough to survive for a few days on foraging alone. There was, after all, a lot of fireweed around. I never got to test this, but perhaps that is for the best.

Simple Ramen

I grew up with ramen noodles in Nigeria, specifically Indomie, a brand that I just learned comes from Indonesia. Apparently Indomie introduced instant noodles to Nigeria in the 1990s and now has the largest instant noodle factory in Africa there. In college in Atlanta, I was introduced to more gourmet types of ramen, with all sorts of vegetables and fancy meats, and maybe an egg or something. The recipe below is the start of my attempts to have fancy ramen with minimal effort.

Ingredients
5 C water
2 packs instant noodles
2 C frozen vegetables
1 can Vienna sausages (the canned kind)

Put water on to heat in pot and add vegetables. Chop up Vienna sausages and add to pot. When water boils, add instant noodles. Cook for 3 minutes, remove from heat, and add seasoning packets.

So far I haven't found a shortcut for putting an egg in.

Post Poem

Every day at one o'clock one might be booned to see
One's postal box be filled via a postal employee
One's often joyed with envelopes but frequent dulls the keen
When every mail is spam that has been molded by machine

Simple Hot Drinks

Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that I like drinking hot drinks but not making hot drinks. Just having to boil water as a first step makes the average hot drink more complicated to prepare than the average cold drink.

Buying hot drinks is, of course, an option, but as many people have calculated, costs add up quickly if you make a habit of it. What I need to find, then, is a tasty hot drink that I can prepare at home with minimal time and effort.

Hot chocolate is a good place to start-- using a mix, preparing hot chocolate is as simple as adding powder to boiling water and stirring. However, the real giants of the hot drink world are tea and coffee.

If simplicity is the goal, any drink that needs to have milk or sugar added won't cut it. With these rules, herbal tea seems like a good place to start. Without the influence of a sweetener, it can be fun to explore the tastes of different leaves and plant parts. Ultimately, my journey has led me to Twinings English Breakfast tea (a black tea) as a pleasantly generic hot drink that can be made with very little effort. I have a few herbal teas for niche situations.

When you take a step back, though, plain water is still the champion of simplicity. It tastes pretty good too.

Dog Encounters

Welcome to Micah's Dog Blog, your one stop shop for canine accounts. I wrote recently about the large number of dogs I have been exposed to recently; here are a few encounters from this week.

Most dogs will bark when you ring the doorbell. Some will stand up with their paws up against the door or a window to get a better view. The dogs at one house I visited took things to the next level: there were at least four of them, in various sizes, and when I rang the doorbell they took turns flinging themselves against the door, adding loud thumps to the usual chorus of barking. A glass window in the door allowed me to see this spectacle, and also served as a testament to the considerable strength glass can have.

One particularly nice house that I went to had two statues of greyhounds flanking the front door. Later, when I went around to the backyard, I saw the two greyhounds that presumably inspired the statues, jumping around in excitement. The odd thing was that they were completely silent; they didn't bark once the whole time I was there (maybe it's a greyhound thing). They were both large and friendly, but it felt very strange to have a dog jumping around me while not making any noise. I could certainly get used to it.

Finally, I met a guest dog at a beach house. The dog's owner had just been staying there a couple days and was on their way out as I was on my way in. A fence enclosed the front yard and the dog seemed reluctant to leave it. I was waiting outside the fence, but the owner said, "Go ahead, she won't hurt you." I thought that was reasonable enough; after all, it was a relatively small dog. I stepped through the fence gate and the dog immediately ran at me and bit me in the leg. I was impressed to find that, even with my trouser leg in the way, the dog had managed to break the skin. Afterwards, the dog consented to leave with her owner, whose only comment was that I must have had something on me that smelled interesting.