I remember one lazy August when my fridge was on the blink. I hadn’t sufficiently thawed it when the repair man came, with the consequence of waiting more weeks, I forget how many, too many. The thermostat needed replacing, a simple part, no problems since then, from some years before the SARS waves. My sister was visiting. The weather was hot, like it is today, over 100 F.
Well this year, in 2025, the fridge is not a problem, nor the stove (I even replaced a burner coil on a burner I’d not been using for literally years), nor the car (the new AAA-installed battery is working great), but my eyeglasses.
They (plural needed for some reason) snapped near the nose, and the only backup I could find (still the case) is some old now off-prescription sunglasses at the bottom of some drawer, probably the same ones depicted in my profile picture to the right, from an earlier Life of Kirby chapter.
I’m still able to safely drive, at least in daylight. I’m sure I see more sharply than a Waymo or Tesla, even without any glasses at all.
I’ve got new glasses on order, after pricing at both LensCrafters and Stanton’s. I had a blast driving around, like alongside that train with the two tier containers configuration. That sure was a long load, as I discovered when it came time for my route to cross its. Guess who had the right of way.
I’m still able to use computers. But I decided to skip the Python User Group organized by New Relic, which was on my calendar. I didn’t want to be wearing shades, or squinting, or be dealing with eyesight issues in any way. Maybe next time. And no, neither eyeglasses outlet was prepared to process my exotic prescription on a “while you wait” basis. The good news is my old frames (the ones the snapped) were approved as reparable and perhaps that shop, the one doing the repairs, will have them ready even before the new ones appear.
Some of the YouTubes I’ve been attending to work pretty well as audio only anyway. I enjoyed Caleb Maupin’s well-researched storytelling regarding some intellectual undercurrents I’m eager to learn more about. I also picked up a lot from these Active Inference related interviews coming from Verses, an AI company.
In my inbox, I’m being tutored about the geographical meaning of Bohemian, which has everything to do with a part of Europe, which we could circle even today. Prague and Vilnius might both be in it. People in Chicago remember a lot about this old country. Others think about Yugoslavia and what happened there.
This geographical meaning is in contrast to the literary meaning, which has more to do with a free thinking anti-conformist lifestyle originating among disaffected American writers, many of whom had moved to Paris. Bohemian in this sense gave rise to Beat, which gave rise to Hippies, although it also forked into Bohemian Grove type Bohemians, who maybe wanted the free thinking part, but without the inconvenience of material poverty and/or austerity and/or disciplined lifestyle.
Given my somewhat casual (open minded) attitude to geographical naming, I’d be fine with talking about Bohemia like another Cascadia or Jefferson State. Something not on the radar of the legal beagles? Something more science fiction and even Tolkienesque.
We could think in terms of Bohemia, Prussia, Mesopotamia, and the Holy Roman Empire, all on a World Game map, engaged in trade. A board game. Mix and match across historical periods, why not? Cosplay as queen of Phoenicia. One could learn a lot of world history this way, if the structuring weren’t too haphazard.