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Celebrating Christmas 2020

As everywhere, Christmas 2020 ends a year like no other for us on Waschke Road. Rebecca was scheduled for spinal surgery in March that was postponed by the pandemic lockdown. That resulted in a harrowing few weeks during which we decided that a two-story house was not for us.

Sunrise before Christmas 2020 on Waschke Road
The morning panorama on Vine Maple Farm

Though we loved our spacious Ferndale house, a smaller house on Waschke Road we built for Rebecca’s parents was a much better fit for a pair of seniors with bad backs and arthritis. All on the same floor and a ramp to the front door, just in case the surgery failed.

We gave the renters notice, which, fortunately, they were glad to receive because they had already decided to buy their own house. In Phase 1 lockdown, we started moving on the 1st of July with much needed help from the family. (Even six-year-old Dario helped.) We made it in time for Rebecca to recover from surgery on Waschke Road. The Ferndale house sold a shade below our asking price in August.

Every morning, the sun rises in a panorama over the old homestead. It’s so good to be home.

2020 on Waschke Road

The Whatcom County Library System, where I serve on the board, has been open for digital lending, curbside pickup, and a raft of online events and videos. I’ve been amazed at the skill and alacrity of the library staff’s work to move the system online. Our grandson Christopher and I are working on a pilot for an online bookstore for the Friends of the Whatcom County Library System to replace in-library used book sales, which are blocked by the pandemic. I’ve been leading weekly bookstore project standup Zoom meetings, secretly promoting agile development methodology.

Software Architects Anonymous, a miscreant gang of cynical enterprise consultants, meets on Zoom Friday evenings for a little beer and a lot of gossip.

The best news of the year came from the old homestead farmhouse. On Tuesday evening, 24 November, our son Paul, wife Lanni, and a midwife brought Charles Theodore Arnold Waschke into the world in the very room his great-uncle Arnold was born a 100 years ago. My dad— Theodore, Charles’ great-grandfather— was born in what is now a chicken coop.

2020 the dismal

2020 is the year of the most devastating health disaster in a hundred years. The death toll is climbing rapidly, 318,000 as I write this. On September 11, 2001 3,000 Americans died in a single day from a terrorist attack. In December 2020, we have already endured 4 days that exceeded 3,000 deaths from covid-19. Looking at the climbing death rates, I am afraid we’ll exceed the number of U.S. military and civilian casualties in WWII (420,000) by the New Year. If you accept the Economist’s excess death method of calculating the death toll, we may already have passed that milestone.

Christmas 2020 the wonderful

As bad as all this looks, in 20 years, I am convinced we will look back on 2020 as a year of successes. I’m not crazy. At least I don’t think I am.

2020 medical breakthroughs

  • We have 2, possibly 3, effective vaccines for covid-19 11 months after the virus flashed on the scene. The first flu vaccines did not appear until nearly 30 years after the 1918 flu pandemic. In June of 2020, the World Economic Forum reported that it takes 10 years to develop an effective vaccine. We got three in 11 months.
  • Artificial intelligence has solved the problem of protein folding, potentially the most significant discovery for medicine development in a century.

Hope for arresting human caused climate change

  • In sunny places, solar electricity became cheaper than fossil fuel generation in 2020. People will start using renewable energy because it is cheap, not from altruism, which is in far shorter supply than sunlight.
  • BP, in its yearly market forecast, predicted that world oil consumption, currently suppressed by covid-19, will never return to 2019 levels. Not all oil companies agree, but the P in BP is still petroleum. Think of that. Ferndale depends on its refineries, but with the right planning and strategy, the jobs will remain and grow while the climate is preserved. A company that views the future clearly has a hand on success.
  • Car sales plummeted in 2020 but electric automobile sales went up. People buy electric now because electric is cool and practical, not because the trees need a hug.

Technology marches on

  • SpaceX now sends humans into space for $62 million. The space shuttle cost $1.5 billion per flight. The science fiction dream of visiting space is becoming practical.
  • We are learning more efficient ways to teach and learn. With all the grumbling about Zoom fatigue, it is easier and cheaper to be trained in practically anything than ever before.
  • Quantum computing is becoming real, hinting that a new level of computational power is on the horizon— a fresh set of batteries for Moore’s law.
  • Although the economy has taken a massive hit, the digital economy is surging ahead. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that Internet data volume, use of online conferencing tools has been surging. And network providers have been keeping up.

Forces are lining up for the biggest economic burst in centuries.

There is hope that Christmas 2020 will bring future peace, joy, health, and prosperity to us all.

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Liberty

The United States is hamstrung over liberty. It’s hard to sort out. New covid-19 regulations every week: masking, quarantines, contact tracing, banned gatherings, bars and restaurants closed. The legitimacy of the presidential election is in question.

Tethered border collie in flood
Albert, the border collie, contemplating troubled times for liberty

Joseph Biden is set to win the popular vote by a 4% margin and the electoral vote by 306 to 232. Historically, this is not an especially close election. Not a landslide, but not exceptionally close either.

In the 2016 election the electoral vote went one way, the popular vote the other. The famed supreme court decision in 2000 was pronounced over a 547-vote margin. The closest margin this year is over 10,000. Associated Press has set the standard for calling election since the 1960s. Their summary is here.

Yet people are upset, arguing, misunderstanding, and talking past each other. I sense, for the first time in my life, that some people seriously question the legitimacy of majority rule. And I sense that feelings would be the same no matter which way the election went. This has sent me on a mission to examine my own feelings.

Two Years Before the Mast

With that mental backdrop, last week I read Two Years Before the Mast by a Richard Henry Dana Jr., a book I’ve known of since I was a teenager captured by the idea of going to sea, but never got around to reading. You can get it from the library.

In 1834, Dana was a student at Harvard College. He contracted measles, which damaged his eyes. He couldn’t study. He was told that a long ocean voyage might restore his sight.

His family could have sent him on a grand tour, but instead, in 1836, he signed articles as a common seaman on a merchant voyage to California on the sailing brig Pilgrim.

Two Years Before the Mast is a non-fiction account of the voyage and Dana’s experiences loading cowhides on the Pacific coast for shipment back to Boston. On his return to Harvard, he finished college and went on to a law degree and a successful career as a lawyer and politician.

A day of liberty

I highly recommend the book. Dana is an exceptionally clear and moving writer.

I shall never forget the delightful sensation of being in the open air, with the birds singing around me, and escaped from the confinement, labor, and strict rule of a vessel, —of being once more in my life, though only for a day, my own master. A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is entire. He is under no one’s eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases. This day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard, —the sweets of liberty.

Dana’s day of liberty was spent with his friend and shipmate, Stimson. How many of us today seek escape from the strict rule of covid-19? To be our own masters, maskless, gathering with our families and friends, singing, laughing, and sharing a holiday? Ah, for a day of liberty.

The dark side of liberty

Dana and Stimson’s day of liberty was granted by Frank Thompson, captain of the Pilgrim. A 19th century sea captain ruled the ship, its officers and crew. At sea, the captain had complete liberty; he answered to no one, could do whatever pleased him, direct the ship wherever he wished.

Well into the voyage, John, a Swede and the best seaman on the crew, stood up for an injured shipmate who was about to be flogged for complaining about his injury. As Dana watched, Captain Thompson had John tied to the rigging and began to swing a rope on the man’s bare back:

As he [Captain Thompson] went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out, as he swung the rope: “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! —because I like to do it!— It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”

The man writhed under the pain until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us: “O Jesus Christ! O Jesus Christ!”

“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson! He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”

At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, I turned away, and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water. A few rapid thoughts, I don’t know what,—our situation, a resolution to see the captain punished when we got home,—crossed my mind; but the falling of the blows and the cries of the man called me back once more.

Dana did not have a chance to see the captain punished, although he did stand up for seaman’s rights and started important reforms. On Thompson’s next voyage, before Dana could accuse him of wrongdoing, Thompson contracted a fever in Sumatra, died in misery, and was buried at sea.

Liberty in 2020

In 2020, how are we to treat liberty? Is the desire for liberty, a force that has unleashed the death and destruction of covid-19, like the uncontrolled brutality of Captain Thompson? Or is liberty only Dana and Stimson’s delight that we are temporarily denied by the pandemic?

John Stuart Mill

To answer these questions for myself, I turned to Dana’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, whom I recollected from first-year college humanities class as the formulator of a balanced and measured definition of liberty. Get his writings from the library.

From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Mill is clear. Enforced wearing of masks is legitimate curtailment of liberty because it protects mankind from the virus. Enforcing masks for the protection of the wearer is illegitimate. I guess this means it is okay to remove your mask as you inhale, but you must put it on while you exhale.

This is an argument that might convince some anti-maskers.

John Stuart Mill was onto something.

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Cissy Chandler Worked Naked From Home

Folks wonder about dressing for remote work. Cissy Chandler was the wife of Raymond Chandler, the classic hard-boiled detective story writer. She preferred to do housework in the nude. In a letter, Chandler said she felt more comfortable doing it that way.

You don’t have to dress for work at all when you work at home. There is nothing to stop you from following Cissy’s example. Throw on a suitable top for video meetings, or turn the video off, and there you are. Try it. You might like it.

I know myself well enough never to have tried working naked. I’m decidedly not Mrs. Chandler. I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all. If I had my preference, I’d put on clothes to take a shower. But I’ve attended formal meetings minutes after jumping off a farm tractor, sweaty and dirty from hurried work that took longer than I expected. I don’t recommend that either, but I know it can be done successfully and, on occasion, I was glad that I could do it.

Dress in the way that makes you most productive. I tend to dress like a Pacific Northwest junior programmer most of the time: tee-shirt and jeans; perhaps because I hit my productivity stride when coding most of my workday. My east coast colleagues tend to be more formal: collared golf shirt and khakis. In the day, you could spot IBM techs by their white shirt, black suit, and inch-and-a-quarter black tie. I’m not sure how or when Cissy Chandler hit her stride, but she was an artist’s model in New York City before she met Chandler in Los Angeles.

If you have customers, managers, or colleagues that demand a certain style of appearance, by all means, take steps to keep them comfortable. I used to keep a pressed dress shirt, tie, and jacket handy if I needed to make a formal impression in a meeting, putting them on and removing them as needed through the day.

Distractions are the scourge of the class working from home. Offices and other formal workplaces insulate workers from some distractions and promote others. For example, when working in an office, I can’t recall ever being distracted by a passing thought that I forgot to turn on the dishwasher, but I have been frustrated for hours listening to a talkative guy from sales recount his weekend fishing for salmon off Westport while I had reports to write.

Working at home, Westport fishermen never show up at my door to chew off my ear, and Cissy Chandler died before I enter elementary school, but the dishwasher does cross my mind occasionally.

A productive response to the thought of an unrun dishwasher is to continue working to a good stopping place, dash to the kitchen, punch the button, and return to work.

An unproductive response is to call a halt to whatever you are doing, grab this morning’s office coffee mug, do a quick scan of the kitchen for other dirty dishes, put them all into the washer, brew another cup of coffee while filling the dog’s water dish, give the kitchen floor a quick sweep waiting for the coffee to get done, and, a half an hour later, fill a fresh mug, return to the office and try to figure out what you were doing when you thought of the dishwasher.

How to avoid the second response?

Some, including me, use their attire to trigger an attitude that shields them from distractions. I can assume my work attitude any time, but when I have dressed in a certain way (I must have a left-hand breast pocket for my phone and fountain pen), and I have trimmed my beard and put on computing glasses, the work attitude snaps into place almost automatically. I still might think of the unstarted dishwasher, but I won’t allow the thought to take over.

Don’t go out and buy a collection of pocket tees, grow a beard to trim, and get computing glasses to emulate me; you may be able to focus better dressed like Mrs. Chandler. Study yourself as I’m sure she studied herself. Humans love rituals. Make them work for you.

Discover what puts you into a relaxed and productive frame of mind, then do it. Turn the video off if necessary.