A Shot in the Dark

Prior to this year, the hardest thing I ever tried doing was going without chocolate for six months in my youth, theoretically to help suppress acne. Then COVID arrived.

Isolating myself and avoiding people has been a piece of cake (chocolate). But trying to get a vaccination is not for the faint of heart.

Upon the advice of various people in the know, I’ve registered with the city, the county, the state, two drug store chains, three hospitals, and the guy peddling drugs to the kids at the nearby playground, but, so far, no luck, except I scored some antidepressants from the peddler.

Now I’m thinking that maybe I should start answering the twenty-three robocalls I get each day in case one of them is a COVID vaccination scam. There’ve been a lot of studies on the possible positive effects of placebos. It’s only a small step further to imagine good results from paying someone for a shot you never receive.

Promises, Promises

According to Lifehack (whatever that is) these are the top ten reasons, with notation added, why New Year’s resolutions fail:

1. “You’re treating a marathon like a sprint.” Speaking from personal experience, doing so in the last two-tenths of a mile of a marathon may result in not being able to walk for a week.

2. “You put the cart before the horse”, and the horse is full of Greek soldiers (1184 B.C.?).

3. “You don’t believe in yourself.” Cogito ergo sum (Descartes, 1637).

4. “Too much thinking, not enough doing.” Back to the ancient Greeks, circa 1988, when Nike, goddess of victory, famously first advised, Just Do It.

5. “You’re in too much of a hurry.” Isn’t that the same as number 1 and the opposite of number 4?

6. “You don’t enjoy the process.” Are we having fun yet? (Zippy the Pinhead, 1979)

7. “You’re trying too hard.” This seems like a red herring. I’ve never met anyone who tried all that hard to keep a resolution.

8. “You don’t track your progress.” How do you expect Fitbit to stay in business?

9. “You have no social support.” Add another Zoom meeting. Have a glass a wine during the call so that you can enjoy the process of tracking your progress, unless the resolution was to give up drinking.

10. “You know your what but not your why.” I don’t know – third base (Abbott and Costello, 1936).

I would add that limiting your number of resolutions helps. Zero is a comfortable goal.

I’m a Rocket Man (Lego Saturn V Rocket – Day 7)

Tada! Having now finished the rocket, I have added Lego skills to my resume, thereby doubling its length.

IMG_0519.JPGIf your day was slow yesterday and you spent time wondering why there was no Day 6 report, it’s because I decided to break with tradition and rest on the sixth day, instead of the seventh, in order to build the suspense as to my progress on the rocket. Thousands of years from now archeologists will posit a multitude of hypotheses regarding the mystery surrounding the lack of documentation of events on the missing day. Books will be written. Songs will be sung. Conspiracy theories will abound.

My mission complete, and my confidence soaring, it’s now on to the next journey. I’m thinking about solving the Riemann Hypothesis, or one of the other six Millennium Prize Problems, and thereby receiving the million dollars (per problem) that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered. Something to do while waiting for my vaccination.

The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall (Lego Saturn V Rocket – Day 5)

I’ve free climbed El Capitan, rafted the Class V Terminator rapids on the Fualleufu River in Chili, and told my mother that I wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving (okay, really only the last one – the most dangerous one), but I’ve never before experienced the magnitude of anxiety one reaches over the possibility that he’s one slip away from causing multiple days worth of work on a toy rocket to crumble in front of him like the Nazi’s head in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade after he drank from the wrong cup.

IMG_0518.JPG

Nine bags of pieces down and only three left to go. Good progress, but the real moment of truth will come when I reach the last instruction, number 337, which will show me how to connect and stack the rocket’s five stages. As Isaac Newton might have said, if he had a better publicist, gravity is the enemy of height.

Gremlins (Lego Saturn V Rocket – Day 4)

I’m done building the first stage of the rocket, sort of. When I picked it up to admire my handiwork, I thought I felt something move, and it wasn’t the earth. So I, very carefully, shook my creation, very lightly. I figured that’s what they would do at Cape Canaveral, though, while my model weighs 5.5 pounds, an empty Saturn V weighs about 188,000 kilograms. In pounds, that translates to really, really heavy, so maybe the real engineers use different methods to check things out.

IMG_0514.JPGAnyway, I heard a tiny clatter, clearly caused by gremlins (see The Twilight Zones’ Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode), which sounded like it might be emanating from a small, loose piece floating about somewhere in the bowels of the cylinder (much like the cartilage in my knees), with no way to extricate it short of disassembling the entire thing (much like my knees).

If I were a surgeon who accidentally left something clattering around inside a patient, it would be called a retained object and I’d get sued for malpractice. According to a 2013 letter on the Public Citizen website, the estimated number of objects left behind after surgery each year ranges anywhere between 1 in every 1,000 and 1 in every 18,000 surgeries. Ouch.

I couldn’t find any statistics related to objects left inside rockets. However, I did discover that one can buy rocket insurance to protect against damage or injury to the person or property of another or failure of a launch. Good to know.

Five Not-So-Easy Pieces (Lego Saturn V Rocket – Day 3)

Based on my current experience, I’m wondering what the NASA engineers did when they were building the Saturn V and looked around and inevitably realized that they had some leftover parts. Probably figured someone was playing a joke on them and had a good laugh. But then perhaps started wondering about the possible effect of an oopsy on the first stage of a projectile hurtling through the atmosphere at 6164 miles per hour.

Personally, I’m choosing to believe that the five, small, untouched pieces of my set that don’t seem to belong anywhere, other than out of my line of vision, aren’t crucial to the integrity of the rocket, and will be just fine in a bag, in a drawer, rather than in the first stage construction.

This attitude probably means that I am not a “steely-eyed missile man” and should not be trusted with assembling anything with moving parts. That said, to the naked eye, the rocket is starting to take shape, though I keep wondering whether I am noticing, but should continue to disregard, what might be an almost imperceptible lean of the structure. How important could a few tiny pieces be?

Working Outside the Box (Lego Saturn V Rocket, Day 2)

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” (Lao Tzu)

I successfully open the Saturn V box and dump the 12, numbered plastic bags (along with some bags within the bags) full of parts onto the table. I take a break.

Without even consulting the 200 pages worth of building instructions, I boldly rupture the bag labeled number 1, pieces scattering on the table, and note that the bags are constructed so that there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. I take a break.

I put together a few pieces to satisfy those skeptics who think that the mere opening of a bag, without injury, doesn’t deserve the credit I know it does. I note that the designers have gone to great lengths to create a myriad of shapes and sizes, not so much, I think, as a necessity for building the 39-inch tall rocket (the real one was 363 feet – wouldn’t fit in my unit), but as a way of very cleverly making it consist of exactly 1969 pieces, reflective of the year Tom Hanks or Neil Armstrong or somebody went to the moon. I take a break.

Tomorrow is another day and I’ll need my energy.

Fly Me to the Moon (Lego Saturn V Rocket – Day 1)

Over the last 10 months I’ve worked on about 750 crossword puzzles, watched almost every three-star and above movie (as rated by TMC) made between 1934 and 1965, and walked 1000-plus miles. Now what? I know. I’ll build the Lego Saturn V Rocket. D’oh!

5CDCBB11-489E-448A-882F-2228C0F0AA85.jpegIt’s either that or knitting (and I’m not good with sharp objects), which provides similar benefits (according to Sheep and Stitch, there are six surprising benefits of knitting).

It reduces stress. Building a rocket that doesn’t have to fly should fit that bill.

It can help kids read. Okay, I’m not a kid, but learning how better to read directions could help me decipher recipes, which I never needed to do until the virus hit the fan.

It can keep Alzheimer’s at bay. They don’t really know that, but, like chicken soup, it couldn’t hurt.

It teaches important life skills. Just like that algebra you never thought you’d need, you never know when you’ll need to think like a rocket scientist.

It helps overcome addiction, by itself being addictive.

It encourages community. That’s right, now I can avoid loneliness by getting online and communicating with other nerdy, freaky Lego addicts. Yeah!

It took about five years for NASA to build the Saturn V Rocket, but the Lego community suggests I can do it in about five hours. That’s not happening.

Given that this is my first time working with Legos, perhaps I should have started with something less vertical, less likely to topple over, sending hundreds of pieces flying across the room, theoretically.

I expect some hiccups along the way, but no loss of life. I’ll keep you informed.

Post Vaccination To Do List

Breathe (in and out), in public, without a mask on
Touch my face, a lot
Hug a random stranger on the street (and then take a 3-hour shower)
Don’t order from Amazon for at least 2 days
Don’t eat my own cooking for at least a year
Burn all my clothes (but remember to take them off first)
Delete my Zoom password
Cancel all fourteen of my streaming subscriptions, unplug my TV, and hide my computer and iPad
Go indoors somewhere other than a grocery store or pharmacy (maybe walk into a bar with a duck and a three-legged dog)
Pay Lacuna, Inc. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to erase my memory of the last 9 months (or better, 4 years, except for the hole-in-one)

It Was a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Running out of new destinations for my daily Covid constitutional, I walked over to the local Armed Forces Recruitment Center today, but was surprised to find that it was closed, given how many people are out of work. So I couldn’t ask anyone there why they had a sign posted on the window that said No Weapons Allowed. I would think they could save a lot of money on training if they saw the wisdom of bringing in people who were already predisposed to violence.

On the other hand, the nearby public library had no such prohibition posted. I guess they assume that no self-respecting weapons addict would be caught dead, idiomatically, in a library.

A little further down the block there was a large advertisement on the side of a building promoting the services of a doctor in regard to medical cannabis consultations. I mention this only because, by the time I got home, it took me (and my worthless laptop spellcheck) three tries to spell cannabis correctly, and I hadn’t even had a consultation, though I can’t speak for the computer program.