During the OSR Magic tournaments, the basic unit of monetary tracking is “the wad”.  It contains all the small bills collected from single sales and at the end of the event a portion is kept to use as change for the next week, usually $50 in ones.  When removing my laundry from the dryer today a few ones fell out.  I appear to have laundered 50 ones, taking them from their almost military perfection and send them to chaos as depicted below:

Makin' It Rain

 

As I folded laundry, ones kept falling out of  clothing and I pulled a few more bills from the lint trap and washing machine.  $44 made it back into the change wad meaning I still have $6 floating around in my shirts, pants, and drawers somewhere.  It’s like a scavenger hunt for things you already own!

I’ve known Joe Naylor for probably about 13 years now and I count him among my closest friends.  He and I both enjoy topics of science and critical thinking and I appreciate his willingness to apply reason in cases where I don’t always.  For instance:

Me: Joe, what do you think of the idea that when one door closes another opens.
Joe: I think that means you have poor airflow within the room or structure.

Me: Well, what about every cloud having a silver lining?
Joe: That shows little familiarity with actual cloud mechanics.

So wise.

Joe runs the computer at the Ockanickon Magic tournaments which allows me to run the floor and answer questions.  I really like this arrangement and Joe has at least not actively aired dislike for it as it seems to afford him quality time with current and former staff members as he tackles the amazing task of clicking things in DCIR and later yelling about match pairings.  Camp is a place where Joe and I are both deified and I say that with almost no exaggeration.  We are part of “The Great Old Ones” about whom legends are told.  “Did you hear about when Joe completed camp school without sleeping?” or “Terry once ran a session of Environmental Science that includes 114 kids and one of them was Al Gore”, these nuggets catalyze the rare case where I go from egotism (I’m awesome) to outright arrogance (I’m better than you and I have the evals to prove it).  Also, camp allows one to be a kid again.  Freed largely of the web of connectivity that permeates one’s normal social spaces the sense of ‘now’ comes much more down to who is in the room with you leading to non-standard conversations.

Dave Scherr: My track coach, Mr. Deyfuss said…
Joe: Your track coach is Richard Dreyfuss?  That’s awesome.
Me: That must be motivational having a recognized actor as your coach.
Joe: And I bet each week he chooses a different persona from which to grant wisdom.
Me: Yeah, like what if it were Jaws week and he wanted to inspire you with something.  “Imagine, you’re being chased by a shark.” he’d say.
Joe: “Who is in turn being chased by Roy Scheider with a harpoon gun.”
Me: “Who is in turn being chased by” what did he die from?  Cancer? “who is in turn being chased by cancer.”
Joe: “Who is in turn being chased by the march of scientific progress.”  That would be really inspirational.
Me: Dave, sorry, we cut you off.  You had a story?
Dave: No, yours was better.

I woke at 3 PM after having a long night and longer morning with my only To Do items being “pick up bulk rares from Nick Coss” and “meet with Mike”.  There were a litany of lessor things to do but these were the ones that crossed over to “need”, the former task being necessary for camp and the latter for my probable sanity.

The drive to Nick’s was uneventful once I departed Feasterville as parades had inverted the standards of traffic with a thousand cars on every side street but with the Interstates and major road ways being largely clear.  I got to Nick’s a little after 4, we talked about cards, and birthdays, and Scouting and he agreed that he sometimes felt non-Scouts were morally handicapped.  I suppose this is arrogance but a less damning way of putting it is that Scouts seem to have a head start in terms of personal moral growth.  I talked about the difficulty of finding people willing to do work for something they claim to love and he talked about the quotidian squabbles over pseudo-justice in terms of things like splitting checks, getting people birthday gifts, knowing when to make a loan you’ll never get back, and the logistics of a backyard barbeque.

Mike said he’d be over around 6:30 and I met him at my house then.  I was in the kitchen making a raspberry ganache for truffles and we talked punctuated by bouts of silence as he thought and I stirred.  I felt the stirring added a kinetic quality to the silence but eventually my arm gave way and we moved outside to stare at a copse of pine trees as the sun set.  Again, we exchanged insecurities, semi-thoughts, and shoulder shrugs as islands within the quietude.  Later, I was still a spot peckish after eating a sandwich and we sat on my porch and ate strawberries.  It was now fully dark when the 4th of July fireworks started at the Dolphin Swim Club.  The show seemed nice but only a few crested the trees so there was little to actually look at.  Our chat had wound down, so, Mike and I sat there, listening to fireworks.

I wish all days were as productive.

Each time Max went outside yesterday he’d walk by the door of Matrix and just wait there a second before I tugged him along.  He’d pooped in a foreign land, there were strange dogs, and he wanted to go home.  He doesn’t ask much.  As I gathered up my things to depart Ventnor City and bid farewell to its denizens who I would miss Max raised his exhausted head from in front of the box fan that had made his day liveable and bounded for the door that he had previously bowled through.

He lay down in the back of my car, and didn’t much move for the entire trip, probably thinking that sticking close would reduce wind resistance and get him home faster.  We made record time as the roads were under capacity and Max sprang to activity upon seeing our mailbox.  He exited the car, popped, and went inside to lie down on his dog mat.  Normally, when someone arrives, Max greets them with a sock.  For the entire afternoon, every time the front door opened, Max just shifted his eyes back and forth as a miser guarding his gold while holding tight to his dog mat.

Max and I were invited by a friend to spend a weekend in Ventnor City and Max was initially quite excited to be in my car.  Max very much seems to enjoy going to new places and then pooping at them followed by going home.  He grinned through sliding over the plastic backs of my seats and being stopped on the AC expressway.

On arrival, Max leaped from the car, peed on a neighbor’s flowers and seemed very happy with himself.  He was excited to enter a new house until he found out there were other dogs there and his interest faded quickly.  Moose and Duke were the two dogs already present and between them they clock in at less than a 1/3 of Max’s weight.  Max was unconcerned with this calculus and chose to avoid them or at least tried in one case simply walking through a screen door to make his egress from their company.

As the day wore on, Max encountered some difficulties with the more complicated aspects of where he could and could not pee.  At home, his world is simple.  Thou shalt not pee inside, all other places whether they be the driveway, lawn, forest, flower bed, or vehicle tire are fair game and he was confused by the idea of a porch which was both outside and a place where he shouldn’t pee.  This confusion got to him and he eventually peed outside… on the porch… on my foot… and then other people’s feet… a total of four times.

The final act of the canine comedy of manners involved one of the dogs taking a tiny tinkle inside, followed by Max taking a larger tinkle over that tiny tinkle, followed by another dog remarking that spot, followed by Max proving his herd supremacy and simply flooding the carpet in that area.  I can now recite the directions on how to use Woolite PetSmart Stain release without looking at the bottle.

I’ve been out of the state each weekend for the past four and felt that was catching up to me.  My average sleep time over the past three weeks dipped below 6.5 hours where I normally average 7.8 and prefer 8.5.  I was going to sleep in on Saturday before going to the shore but first I had to put in a long day at work to take care of some things so the next week would be reasonable.  Instead, I slept for 14 hours.  I’ve slept this long and indeed longer in the past but usually tied to illness and now I had the added bonus of my fitbit which tracks my sleep.  Here was the timeline so sayeth the sleepgraph:

6:30 AM – first wake-up.
6:39 AM to 8:07 AM – Every 9 minutes to hit the snooze button
8:10 AM – I either hit the alarm in such a way as to turn off the alarm or my clock gave up.
8:50 AM – I have an active period that I think is me using the bathroom.
1:04 PM – Receive phone call, decide to get up.  Fail to get up.
3:22 PM – I actually wake up.  But this is preceded by what appeared to be very placid sleep.

Thank you, fitbit.