Thursday, August 29, 2013

7:52 AM Good morning. The sun wasn't up as high in the sky at 7:00 this morning as it had been recently. Autumn is approaching. I love summer, and it seems that it never lasts very long. Of course, Autumn and Spring are both very mild seasons here in Jacksonville, so it won't be cold for awhile yet.

On the news – A new book is out with more conspiracy theories on Princess Diana's death. It never ends. Anybody can dream up a theory. I feel sure none of the royal family would have engineered her car accident. What had she done, or was about to do, to cause anyone to kill her? She was mainly destructive to herself.

Also on the news, the Long Valley Caldera in California has been more active. I didn't get to hear the whole report and wasn't able to find a news article on it on the Internet. Probably earthquakes. I did look up Long Valley Caldera and found a number of entries about earthquakes there. One site monitors the caldera, listing a dozen or more instances of earthquakes, but it said that it wasn't likely to erupt any time soon. I found an article on active calderas in the United States and got a list of them. There are eight or ten, one of which is Yellowstone. The eruption of a “super volcano,” especially Yellowstone, would probably cause catastrophic damage both nearby and for hundreds of miles around, plus shooting so much ash into the sky that the sunshine would be blocked to a great degree. I do hope none of our calderas erupt, because our population distribution is so condensed over the surface that many people would undoubtedly be killed, and life would be really difficult to almost impossible for many miles around. Where the sun doesn't shine, crops wouldn't grow and the weather would be cold. Of course, there is no really accurate way to predict the eruption of a volcano or major earthquake. It doesn't pay to worry about it. It is in the category of things that we can't do anything about.

On the net – I was thinking about a dish my mother used to make that we all thought was delicious. It's tomato bread pudding. Mother's was all sweet, but many of the recipes I found on the net were sweet and savory. It is a hearty and satisfying side dish or dessert. When I think back to my young days, my mother's cooking is one of the things I enjoy remembering. She made especially good cakes. I didn't like her meats as much, because she tended to overcook them in order to be sure all the bacteria were killed. When she was young there was no refrigerator, so food poisoning was a real danger. Leftovers wouldn't last longer than the next day, and the more thoroughly cooked the food was the longer it would keep.

Actually, I can remember an “icebox” that our family had. That was probably because we were poor, but many people in the town still had them, I think, because there was a business in Thomasville that did nothing but supply big blocks of ice. I can remember the ice man coming and carrying the ice into our house, putting it into the icebox. I think I'll look up iceboxes and refrigerators to see when the electrical refrigerators came into use. According to Wikipedia, the mechanical refrigerators were introduced in the 1930's, so we were behind the times in the 1940's with an icebox. Refrigerators were in use as early as 1915, but they sometimes leaked refrigerant, which could be poisonous. Modern refrigerators became more affordable and more reliable in the 1930's, and came into more common use in homes then.

Joy, Perimeter Security's landlady, reactivated my key card because she finally got John's check. She said it doesn't quite cover the whole rent. John can't win for losing. He needs to close the business and sell it if he can. He just doesn't have enough money to pay for his new baby and home expenses and a struggling business as well. I have detached from the whole problem. Joy said she wouldn't trash his belongings, just lock them up, and that was my main worry. I am no longer employed there. I have to let go. I am very sorry for John's predicament, but I can't help him.

News last night – my library branch at Brentwood is one of the two branches that the city is closing. I'll have to go to the library web site and find another nearby branch on this side of the river, or go down to San Marco if it is still open. I'm very disappointed. Brentwood was so convenient. I wonder when they will close it? 12:11 the website has not been updated to tell which branches are closed. I'll have to call them on the phone. I called the Brentwood Branch, and they answered, so they haven't closed yet. I asked when the closing would be, and she said that the whole City Council (or whoever it is that is voting about the issue) has not met and voted yet, so the decision to close it isn't final. At least for the near future they are still open. Meanwhile I did go to the library website and got a complete list of the library branches and hours, plus a map to help me spot which other branches are closest to me. There are two others here on the North side that are still going to be open, so I can drive either to Edgewood off Lem Turner, or Dunn Ave, both of which are closer than San Marco. So my situation is not too bad.

I got the application for housing from Florida Christian. With it, they sent me a business card from SPM, a building management company that I had a problem with at Perimeter Security. They used our guard service for a month free when the building changed hands and the old company overlapped in service dates with the new company, SPM. It turned out our contract was made out in the name of the apartment building, so the old company refused to pay the bill, so we contacted SPM next. When I finally found them in California, they didn't refuse to pay, they just failed to pay. So John never got his money. But the real problem is that when I looked up SPM on the Internet I found a site full of complaints against them from tenants. They have some very poorly run apartments, with the comments running from failure to fix things that needed to be done and renting out dirty apartments to trying to avoid giving people back their deposits and frequently raising the rent. There is only one of the four apartments that will work for me, and their HUD list is closed right now. The lady at the management office said it should open up in October. I'll just wait patiently.

My current novel – The Risk Agent by Ridley Pearson. This is a complex story set in modern day China. The agent John Knox is American, working for an American company in China to find his friend who has been kidnapped, along with a Chinese man whose job was to distribute bribes, which the Chinese call “incentives,” to cement business deals – apparently a basic part of the way business is done in China. Knox's friend was breaking the Chinese law by carrying on an investigation of the Chinese man, so Knox doesn't want to go to the police to have them find him. Likewise the Chinese man who was also abducted was doing something against the law by giving bribes, which though commonplace, are illegal. Knox is being aided in the search for the two captives by a wily Chinese woman who has not been totally straightforward and Knox doesn't fully trust her. Nonetheless, he needs her for her knowledge of Chinese society and interactions, so there is some friction between them as they work together. The story is slowly progressing toward locating the two men, and hopefully saving them. It is interesting, though not fast reading, because it is set in a very different culture from ours. Good book so far.

It's time to eat supper and relax for sleep. The end.