This isn’t my first bout with Covid.

If you’ve followed my blog then you’ll know that my stint in the Peace Corps was cut short when the disease first reared its nasty little head back in 2020. I was a few months into my third year in Namibia when the Corps made the unprecedented decision to recall ALL volunteers worldwide. It was done for our safety, of course. Covid had begun wreaking havoc with airlines and other modes of transportation and it became apparent that the disease was a serious problem. 

Since that time I’ve been vigilant about keeping up with my vaccinations, not just for Covid, but for seasonal flus and pneumonia. Still, I’m not overly cautious when I’m out and about. I don’t avoid crowds, though I’m naturally not attracted to them, I don’t mind a handshake or other forms of physical social interaction. I do what I can to minimize germs I might catch or pass on, but I’m not zealous about it. 

My philosophy is that our bodies have evolved to keep us healthy while we scurry about this soup of viruses, bacteria, and other forms of biological and non-biological toxicities as we go about our day to day lives. Every so often we do need help to address new dangers, that’s what vaccines do, but for the most part, we get along just fine. 

Until we don’t.

As you may have surmised from the title of this post, I have “The Covid”. 

Last Wednesday, after spending time with friends, when I got home I noticed that I was feeling a bit off, not quite myself. I had a mild fever, nothing that would’ve alarmed any health care pro, but it in combination with my general sense that something wasn’t right internally led me to think that I might be coming down with something. Various strains of flu viruses have been going around and I figured that must be what my body was trying to tell me. Still, to be sure, and to make use to the stockpile of Covid test kits I had accumulated since 2021, I decided to test myself.

If you are like me, whenever you learned that our government had Covid test kits to give out for free, you ordered some. And, if you’re like me, you’ve had few opportunities to use said kits on yourself or other members of your family. So, we have a nice little stash. 

Pubic Service Announcement: if you have the iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test kits (these are in orange and white boxes with a dark grey check on the front) and you know they’re older than one and a half years, toss them and order new kits. The fluid use in these kits will likely be dried out or almost so, making them useless. The kits that are now being issued (as of 11/20/2023) are called Binax Now and they come is a black and blue box. These are MUCH easier to use. Get your free test kits here.

Anyway, I tested myself and sure enough, my test showed positive. As I’ve said, at the time I only had a slight fever and an odd feeling, nothing that seemed indicative of the dreaded Covid. So, I tested myself again just to make sure.

Positive!

Damn!

I texted the folks I had hung out with earlier to let them know that I might have infected them then checked my pantry to see if I had enough in store for at least 5 days of isolation. I live in Florida where hurricanes are part of the environment and being prepared is just part of living here. I have several varieties of soups, coffee, several types of teas, canned goods, but most important, a bottle of unopened Maker’s Mark Bourbon, and several bottles of wine.

So, yeah, I was stocked. 

That was Wednesday night. By Thursday afternoon I started feeling like I actually had something that wasn’t a flu bug. My fever, while still fairly minor (101 degrees f), was enough to give me chills. My joints started to ache and what was a minor headache the night before had become a major pain. 

But Covid was just getting started.

By Friday night my entire body hurt. Even my skin hurt!  I was so uncomfortable that I couldn’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time even with medication. I was beginning to think that what I had was a bit more serious than your garden variety virus, and that it might hang on longer than I hoped. 

Observation: Why does time seem to slow down when you’re sick? I would take pain meds and go to sleep at, say 10pm. I’d wake thinking that I had slept 4, maybe 5 hours. But the clock beamed 11:30pm back at me. What the heck?? I’d take pain meds and thinking they should start working in maybe a half hour. Thinking at least an hour has passed I check to find it’s been only 10 minutes since the last time I checked. 

It’s like being sick puts in some kinda weird time-eddy where you just swirl around, not going anywhere fast.

Anyway, I had other reasons to be concerned about my infection. My plan was to drive out west to see my son, daughter, and my grandson. We were all going to have Thanksgiving together. I had been looking forward to that trip for months. My hope was that if I tested negative by Sunday (11/19/2023) then I would go. But it wasn’t looking good.

By Saturday evening, however, things had changed. My body aches had diminished dramatically. My headache, though still present, was a shadow of the monster it was the night before. I was feeling pretty good, relatively speaking. Even though my fever persisted, I started to hope that I’d get through Covid and make my trip out west. 

I tested myself again Sunday morning.

Still positive!

Double Damn!!

All day Sunday my health improved. My headache was all but gone. The fever, though still present, was lower. I didn’t feel quite as tired and I actually slept for more than two hours. I started thinking that maybe I could still make this trip out west. I decided that a test Monday morning would be the deciding factor. If I was still positive, I’d stay quarantined and miss Thanksgiving with my kids. If I tested negative I’d pack up the car, stock up of drugs, masks, and antiseptic wipes and head west.

It’s Monday morning. No body aches. No fever. Minor congestion. I feel good, if not 100%. 

I tested.

Postive!!!

Triple Damn!!!

So, my friends, instead of heading west towards family time and turkey, I am stuck in self-imposed isolation. Such is life.

If you’ve read my blog before and wondered why I haven’t posted anything (until now), I will first apologize (so sorry!) and explain. 

I got sidetracked and I got lazy. That’s really the gist of it. I’ve been consumed with tackling some much needed maintenance on my house and working on a video (which I had hoped I’d be done with by now) that any sort of writing just took a backseat. I’ll try to keep this blog updated as I anticipate some changes are afoot.

Stay tuned.

Vern

Hello all,

Recently I rediscovered a cache of stories I had written long ago. We’re talking 30+ years ago for some stories. Back then I wanted and tried to write science fiction and speculative fiction in a short story format. I had dreams of getting those stories published in magazines and genre periodicals. I did try and I have a small stack of rejection letters to prove it.

What got me fired up to get published was a chance meeting with a famous science fiction writer, Ben Bova. I was at a sci-fi convention and Dr. Bova was one of the keynote speakers. For those of you not familiar with Ben Bova’s work, one of his best known series focused on human colonization of the our solar system. Likely the best known book in that series is Mars. Dr. Bova wrote over 124 novels, short fiction, and non-fiction works and has won many awards. Dr. Bova died in 2020.

At the convention, between talks, I decided to go have a drink. I was absorbing the vibe of being among like minded people who saw science fiction not as a literary stepchild, but a serious genre. As I sipped at my expensive beer, a guy came up next to me and ordered a beer as well. I looked over and nodded a hello. The man smiled and nodded back, then asked me how I was enjoying the convention. From there we started chatting, just two guys drinking beer and talking about sci-fi stuff.

I didn’t recognize Dr. Bova then and I think he knew I hadn’t recognized him. He asked me my name, I told him. He then introduced himself. I think I said something like, “Ben Bova? THE Ben Bova?”

He might have replied, “Yeah, that guy.”

We shook hands and continued our conversation, but in the back of my mind I was frantically trying to recall the last story of his that I had read, in case he asked me which story of his was my favorite. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of one. And, sure enough, he asked me.

I stammered a bit then decided honesty was best and told him I couldn’t recall a story, but I had read several of his short stories. He asked me if I wrote and I told I did, kind of.

“What does that mean, kind of?” he asked.

I replied that I had written many stories, though I had, up to that point, felt they weren’t ready to be published.

“So, you’ve actually have words on paper?”

“Yes,” replied, and wondered why he was being so specific.

He told me that he goes to these conventions a lot and meet people all the time who claim they are writers, but have never written so much as a sentence. That I actually had written and completed several stories was a lot further along than many so-called writers. He then did two things that I’ll never forget.

First, he paid for our drinks. I was actually intending to pay for them, but he insisted.

Second, he gave me his card and told me to send him a few of my stories. He would read over them and render an opinion.

I was floored.

I promised I would send him some stories and, after gathering what I thought were my best efforts, I sent him four. His reply was tactful, but hard hitting. I knew I had a lot to learn about the craft of writing, and he said as much, but he was also very encouraging, stating, “You really write well.”

He then went on to highlight what I did well in the stories I sent him, and where improvements could be made. One story was well executed, but predictable, another wasn’t engaging enough, while another had a strong plot and characters, but needed to be longer. Ultimately he suggested that I put my current stories aside and start something new, focusing on stronger character and plot development.

I took his advice and started pounding the keys and worked at improving the mechanics of my writing. I am still working towards improving my writing.

One of the stories I wrote before my conversation with Dr. Bova was called Juliettes. It was in that cache of stories I mentioned earlier. I’ve just edited it, expanded it a bit, and posted it on my Stories page. It’s a free download. If you’d like to check it out, please feel free. I’d also like your opinion. Tell me what you liked and didn’t like about the story.

In that cache there are maybe 40 or so short stories. I likely won’t post them all, but I will post others.

I hope you enjoy them.

Stay tuned,

Vern

Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel titled ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ which told of an author who wrote about his hometown, and though the novel was a success the people in the town he wrote about took issue with how he portrayed them. The author, then, could never return to the home he knew.

Leaving home, leaving what we’ve grown to know, perhaps love, can be a traumatic experience. When we leave we take with us a snapshot of the place we knew. That snapshot never really changes, but the places we called home does.

I left home on my 18th birthday. Up until that point the furthest I had gone was a field trip to Philadelphia. I knew there was a world and a life beyond the streets of Baltimore, joining the Air Force allowed me to experience it. If I had stayed I likely would have found a way to stay out of jail, maybe get a decent job, but the things I’ve seen and done, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met would not have happened, and all of that has changed me, made me what I am today for better or ill.

And all while I was seeing, experiencing, and being in foreign places, home was changing too.

My life growing up in B-more was not easy. Juxtaposed to the good memories of summer nights playing with kids on the block while our parents gossiped, drank and laughed are memories of going hungry, stepping over drunks lying in the gutter, and a near constant sense of hopelessness that hung as heavy and dense as a thick morning fog. 

Those who never experienced such things often wonder why people stay in situations like that. Seeing it from both sides, I now think I understand why. The fog analogy is a good one. When you’re in a thick fog the only thing you see, the only thing you know for sure is what’s immediately around you. Poverty is like that fog, it restricts your view of the world, limits your options, intimidates you with the unknown and you wind up getting accustomed to those limitations. It becomes your world and it is very hard to leave it.

For me, leaving wasn’t just a choice, it was an imperative. Staying would have drove me to seeking distractions, like so many others do when life isn’t what they believe it should be. So, I am not the man I would have been had I stayed and Baltimore is not the place I left.

The house on Harlem Avenue, where I lived as a young child, is now boarded up. I hear it was a drug den at one point. The neighborhood has also changed. Gone are the stores that used to line Edmondson Avenue; the Five and Dime, clothing shops, even the theater where I spent many Saturday afternoon watching bad sci-fi movies are all gone. So, too, is Public School Number 135, the elementary school I went to. The three story squarish brick building and the adjoining asphalt playground have been replaced by a community center. The other places where I lived, Light Street, Lanvale Street have also changed and not for the better. Gentrification took over the house I lived in on Light Street, while decay claimed the house on Lanvale Street. The people are all gone too.

Had I stayed I may have been able to keep up with a few of my friends. I still have family in Baltimore, a sister, cousins, aunts, nephews, nieces and others, some of  whom I’ve not met. They are the only ties I have left to the city where I was born. When I drive through town I recall a few places, but so much has changed that I may as well be visiting a new city in another country.

I was in Baltimore recently to attend a celebration of life service for a family member. While in town I took the opportunity to stop by some of the places where I lived. As I have said, so much has changed and while I have recollections of each place I visited, the house on Harlem Avenue is special, it’s the place where I have my best and the worst memories. 

I drove up and parked in front of the house. It was early morning and the street was empty, but I didn’t feel safe enough to get out of the car. Still I sat there a good 10 minutes, looking, thinking, reminiscing. I remember the marble steps I used to have to scrub with Ajax until they seemed to glow. Those steps are now dingy with age and disuse. The front bay windows I used to sit by at 2 AM while everyone else in the house slept are boarded up. Below those windows are the windows to the cellar where I and my brothers played during the day, but I avoided at night. I believed there was a monster lurking in the rear of the cellar and it wasn’t until I was nearly 9 years old before I was brave enough to venture back there. I found that the only things that sat in the dark back there was old furniture and dank, dusty boxes.

I really wanted to find a way in and see the places where I slept, played, ate, and lived. In the end I just snapped a shot of the front of the house and moved on.

That place on Harlem Avenue was home to me and as I drove away I realize how true the adage and Thomas Wolfe’s book title is: you can never go home again. At least, it’s true for me.

Stay tuned.

Vern

I may have mentioned in a previous post that I entered a short movie into several film festivals. The movie, ‘Mosquito Love’, was selected for showing in the monthly Life Screening One Minute Film Festival and will be shown on December 3 at 4:15pm EST.

While this is great news, I’ll have to admit that the movie really isn’t much. It is just 1 minute long and the story is pretty basic, but the reason for creating it has a bit of weight.

Back when I was in Namibia I wanted teach people how to create movies using the technologies they had on hand. Nearly everyone there had a mobile phone, many of those phones could take video. Also, many Namibians had access to a computer even if it meant going to a local library. With these bits of basic tech and free software almost anyone can make movie.

But making a movie, especially one that someone else would want to watch, take more than just capturing video. To tell a story, however rudimentary that story might be, requires planning, scripting, and post processing. I believed I could teach that. 

Now that I’m here in the States the thought of teaching a basic movie making class has come back to me. But in order to feel confident enough to teach such a class I needed to go through the steps I would teach, produce a movie and have it accepted in a film festival. I chose the short, 1 minute format to show that a story can be told with as succinctly as possible and still be enjoyable.

Anyway, I did all of that and my little movie got accepted festival that shows 1 minute movies once a month. If you’re interested, here’s the link to the festival. It will occur on December 3, 2022 at 4:1PM EST.

https://www.facebook.com/LifeScreenings

Now that I have some movie making ‘credentials’ the next step is to dust off the syllabus I had put together in Namibia, rework the course for an American audience, and see whee I can offer it as a course.

Could be fun.

Stay tuned,

Vern

When I was a kid I dreamt of piloting something, anything that flew. Jets, biplanes, rocket ships, if it provided a means of minimizing the affects of gravity, however temporary, I wanted to do it.

As home computers grew more powerful flight simulators programs (I called them, “Flight Stimulators”) began to appear. When I first loaded up Microsoft’s first flight simulator I was enthralled to be able to take off from LaGuardia and fly over Manhattan where all of the major landmarks were rendered in wireframe and updated every second. State of the art back then. 

On my Atari 2600 Game Console I could warp from sector to sector rescuing space stations under attack be a nefarious alien race in Star Raiders. With fairly simple graphics (especially by today’s standards) the game put you in the pilot’s seat and let you dogfight in space. Ahhh, those were the days!

Since that time I have flown on commercial and military transports, hang glided (tandem with the pilot/trainer was ready to take over in case I did something stupid), and took the controls of a Cessna 150 for about 10 minutes. The latter two I did with an enormous grin plastered on my face. I actually ‘flew’.

I’m not so much a thrillseeker, but I don’t back away from the prospect of an adrenaline rush either, and I will likely jump at a chance to take flight, in any manner. I guess I’m still a kid at heart.

Drones can allow one to scratch the flying itch, at least a little bit, so, I bought a drone, a DJI Mini 2. It’s a great little system that’s easy to control and allows me to shoot stellar video while not overtaxing my meager budget. Unfortunately, to keep the Mini under the 249 grams weight limit set by the FCC for drone to fly without being registered (I registered mine anyway), DJI left a lot of features off, like object avoidance. 

You can probably guess where I’m going with this, but let me give you the details.

Another feature DJI did not include is the ability to automate a flight using waypoints (waypoints are places along a prescribed flight path where changes can be made to altitude, speed, direction, camera usage and so on). Luckily, DJI did open their drone control software to allow other companies to create such things and a company called VC Technologies did just that and created an app called Litchi. With Litchi, my DJI Mini 2 can follow a subject, fly a prescribed course with waypoints, and do all sorts of things the drone couldn’t before. Of course, I grabbed the software as soon as I learned of it.

Now, what comes to mind now is a quote from Spider-Man that goes something like, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Litchi imbued my drone with capabilities  once only available on drones costing thousands of dollars. I knew there was great power involved and I read and watch everything I could before deciding to try it out myself. 

Alas, there comes a time when reading and watching won’t suffice and one must take the controls. So, I packed up my drone, making sure I had plenty of battery power and storage for the movies I would create as a test, and set off for a local park. I picked a spot where there were few trees, programmed my drone flight with just 2 waypoints at a low altitude, and got everything ready.

Then the moment of truth. I initiated the flight. My drone rose like the obedient automaton it was, turned towards the first waypoint and took off like a banshee, straight into a tree. It was as if the drone knew the tree was there and wanted to commit suicide. It fell into a tangle of tree roots and blinked woefully. I ran to it and picked it up to examine the damage. Propellers were broken, the body was scratched and the drone’s single gimbaled eye dangled as if plucked from its socket by Edgar Allen Poe’s raven.

I gathered up the pieces of my robotic flight avatar and carried it home.

Ahhh, but my ordeal had only begun!

I examined my broken drone and determined that the gimbaled camera was, indeed, the worst of its injuries. DJI wisely provided extra propellers when I bought the device.

 I went online to see if I could fix the gimbal myself. There are lots of videos showing how it can be done, but doing so required opening up the drones and mucking around in its electronic innards, stuff I hadn’t done in years. And to add monetary insult to my technological injuries, a replacement gimbal cost $250! That’s half the cost of the drone! The old gimbal was beyond repair so I had little choice. I bought a replacement gimbal and waited for it to arrive.

While I waited I read and watched almost everything I could find on how to replace the gimbal, hoping there might be an easier way. There was no easier way. I would have to take the drone apart, disconnect tiny connectors, handle delicate circuit boards and more all while hoping my hands were still steady enough not to cause further damage.

The part arrived, so did the moment of truth; could I operate on my injured drone and bring it back to life?

The scene was reminiscent of an operating room. I had lights focused on the upturned drone lying listlessly on my table. Miniature screwdrivers, plastic pry tools, hot glue gun, small dishes to hold the screws and other parts I’d remove were all at the ready. I fired up a video the detailed every step then made the first incision, er…, unscrewed the first screw.

Minutes turned to hours as I gently dove deeper into the inner workings on the drone to get to the affected places. Finally, I had removed, disconnected, and detached everything associated with the broken gimbal. Now I had to reverse the process. More hours ticked by, but at last I screwed in the final screw. I installed a battery, pressed the power button and waited for the drone to take it first electronic breath. Lights flashed, beeps sounded, propellers twitched as if it was fresh out of the box. My drone was back!

It’s still convalescing, I need to run calibration software to get the camera aligned properly, but it will soon be back in the air and once again being my ‘eye in the sky’.

Stay tuned,

Vern

I know my way around computers.

When I was 16 my high school was donated a computer from one of the colleges or universities in the area. It had 128 little black rings with hairlike copper wires running through them, all visible through a plexiglass panel. I would soon learn that those little rings formed the memory of that computer, memory you could program by flipping a set of little switches located on the front of the device. Those little rings were called magnetic core memory and it was my first encounter with an actual computer.

When I was in the Air Force I programmed computer controlled radar jamming equipment using tiny dip-switches. The memory for those jammers were little integrated circuits which functioned similarly to the magnetic core memory, but was scaled a lot smaller.

While in the Air Force I bought my first computer, a TRS-80 Model 1. It had 4K of RAM and a cassette tape player to load and save programs. I learned BASIC on that machine and wrote my first application; a computerized version of Yahtzee, complete with an image of dice that “rolled” when it was your turn. 

After the military I worked tuning satellite amplifiers using an Hewlett Packard 3582 Spectrum Analyzer. I taught a friend Basic and we wrote a game similar to Battleship on that spectrum analyzer,  at its core was a computer that understood a version of BASIC. The game we created was called Sub Hunt. It was set up on a 10×10 grid that was 5 levels deep. The sub moved in a line varying its depth through the five levels incrementally. The object was to locate the sub, drop depth charges and destroy it in as few moves as possible. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it was fun to program.

I took software engineering courses in college. I seemed to have a knack for figuring out logic problems.

Since then I’ve learned several programming languages including C and C++, ADA, system languages for IBM mainframes and Series 1 computers. I’ve wrote parts of the ill-fated DisplayWriter Word Processor for the IBM PC, wrote and played games on a series of Atari computers, then moved to Apple Macs. I’ve worked in the IT field for over 30 years, so I’ve seen my share of system failures, lost data, failed networks, and more. One would think that I would be one of those folks who would never lose data because he has taken every precaution to secure it, right?

One would think that, but one would be wrong.

When I went to Namibia in 2017 I brought along with me a 4tb hard drive. I was big into photography then and I knew I’d have a lot of photos I needed to store. Unfortunately, 3 months into my 3 year stay I drop that hard drive and killed it. I was able to get some of the data off of it, but the drive never worked again. It became an expensive brick and lesson. I needed something more reliable than a delicate silvered plater spinning at 3200rpms in my rough and tumble world. Solid State Drives (SSD) was the only way to go.

I bought a 2tb Sandisk Extreme SSD to replace the dead hard drive and used it the entire time I was in Africa. It had been so reliable, dependable and rugged that I bought 4 more, bringing the total of my portable storage to 6tb: 1tb for my writing, 1 tb for photos, 2tb for my new video interests, and 2 tb to back up my MacBook. I was happy with this arrangement. I did not have to depend of cloud storage and spotty access. My data was always available, and fast. It was a best possible situation for me, until it wasn’t.

About 3 weeks ago the 2tb drive stopped working. It would not show up on my MacBook or iPad regardless of how many times I rebooted, reset, or reconnected it. I dove deep enough into the problem to find that the drive was present on my computer’s USB bus, but it would not do anything more. It was as dead as the 4tb hard drive it replaced. Worse, it contained years of video, much of it taken while I was in Namibia. I tried different applications and called several companies about restoring data, I just couldn’t afford the extremely costly amount these companies wanted to resurrect my data. Sandisk only offered to replace the drive since it was still under warranty, but offered no help in reclaiming my data.

Three years of memories, gone.

My first impulse was to blame Sandisk for making a crappy product and not supporting it adequately. Their online support kept saying “…sorry for the inconvenience…”, which only pissed me off more. This wasn’t an inconvenience, an inconvenience is when my local market runs out of the brand of peanut butter that I like. This was pieces of my life that I had recorded and is now lost due to failed technology! Sandisk technology!

But now, after a few days to think about it I realize that is is just as much my fault as it is Sandisk’s. I was lulled into a false sense of security thinking that SSDs were fail-proof. After all, these drives can be dropped, flung across a gravel parking lot, dunked in water, left in the sun or in the bitter cold and they continue to work. 

Here’s the thing, something a person with my background should know all too well: No technology is fail-proof. It will break. In may not be in the foreseeable future, but all tech breaks. The only thing you can do to protect the data that you care about is to replicate it and back it up. Often.

In my setup that would mean duplicating each drive and storing the duplicate somewhere. Back before I left for Africa I backed up my data of DVDs. Now I am backing everything up by copying everything on the drives I use daily onto drives only used for backup. I do it once ever 2 weeks for my writing, once a month for my photos, video, MacBook and phone.

If you take anything away from this sad tale it should be this: back up anything you want to keep. It will save you a lot of headache when your tech decides not to cooperate anymore.

Stay tuned.

Vern