The Month That Was - October 2023

A relatively eventful month as you will read below.  October did what it was supposed to: opened with the last vestiges of Summer and ended with a glance at the winter to come.  I got to enjoy some of the colors this year, which I don't recall doing in the last couple of years, probably due to travel.

Otherwise I soldier on.  Pushing through each day.  Trying not to panic about everything I should be doing that I am not.  Subtly fearful of what changes aging has in store for me and will I be able to adapt.  It's just the underlying hum of my life.

[Health and Fitness] Time Waits for No One

[Savannah] Re-evaluating Savannah

[Music, Rant] Sound in Your Skull

[Health and Fitness] Time Waits for No One

This may be TMI, but this month marked my third colonoscopy, a thing that I will be doing regularly for the remainder of my life.  It is a hideous annoyance.  I am supposed to get one every 5 years, but I generally push it to 7.  The indignity of it all -- from the preparation to the procedure itself -- is humbling at best.  I'm going to put my next one off until I'm 70.

At the risk of turning into one of those old folks who does nothing but complain about maladies, I have also managed to get another old guy condition -- a detached bit of solidified vitreous in my eye -- basically a permanent eye floater.  I'm used to it now, it's my new, always reliable, best friend. 

I also have a very mild case of arthritis in my right foot.  Very mild, but it's still arthritis.

All of these things are about being old, and I hate them.  In the scope of life they are very minor.  Symbolically they are awful.  And I have no doubt there will be more to come.

An interesting aspect to modern life is that if anything goes wrong with your health, you expect it to be fixed.  This wasn't the case, say, 150 years ago.  Back then, if you got sick, there were weird potions and things that were little better than witch doctor spells.  For the most part any malady just ran its course, if you died you died and if you lived you lived with whatever the consequences were.  Modern medicine is such that for the majority of illnesses you experience, the expectation is there is a drug or surgery or something that will fix it.  

So when things happen that can't be fixed or are never going to get better, it's doubly frustrating. I was horribly nearsighted and Lasik fixed that.  Thirty years ago my gall bladder went south and it was a small matter to remove it (a century ago I would have died at 33).   I am inoculated and immunized against any number of diseases.  The list goes on. As such, my thought pattern is, "Just laser the floater out of my eye, give me in injection to relieve the arthritis, and how about a pill to prevent colon cancer, etc.,..." then things would be back to normal.  As I think more deeply, this is really a plea for immortality.  If they could fix everything that degrades or goes bad, I'd never die, right?

Sadly, they can't and so I get old and things fail.  One day that failure is not going to be just an annoyance. That's the troubling part, every one of these little things that goes bad and will never get better is a reminder that there is a big thing like that coming.

I wish they would hurry up with my replacement Android body.

[Savannah] Re-evaluating Savannah

I spent a couple of weeks down in Southern Headquarters and I now have fairly extensive experience with Savannah and I can say it's very nice for a visit but I can't really recommend it as a place to live.  There is a core historic district that is quite lovely with a very active waterfront along the river and lots of shops and restaurants mixed in with remarkably beautiful restored historic homes.  It has its own flavor with its system of squares and a lovely central park (Forsyth). It is a combination of history tourism mixed with college students from SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) that give it a college town edge also. 

The way Savannah has developed is that the newer wealth is situated out in the suburbs out of Pooler and Richmond Hill.  So you get the vibrant core historic district surrounded by old, dilapidated, near-ghettos that aren't really old enough to be historic and are just ugly, then the outer suburbs which are lovely in a more modern sense.  Perhaps related, Savannah also has rather significant problems with crime and the homeless.

The big problem with Savannah is that the infrastructure is woefully inadequate. The road system is confusing and, in places, downright dangerous.  There are many heavily trafficked arteries for which there is, quite literally, no alternative route, so an accident or construction can result in multi-hour delays.  Related, the drivers here are awful -- not aggressive, just incompetent.  Furthermore, official bureaucratic services are an enormous hassle. To turn on water to your house, you have to attach a copy of your house closing settlement, your ID, and $30, then they will start your water sometime within a week or so.  There is a "fire fee" that supports fire service that you can pay online, but they will charge you an extra convenience fee for not paying in person.  To get your driver's license you need your birth certificate and a certified copy of any name change (largely affects married women) and certain states do not provide certified copies anymore so you can imagine what sort of Kafka-esque power-play opportunities that provides for high-handed staff at the DMV.  Just annoyance after annoyance.

Lastly, from what I can tell, Savannah is not particularly amenable to outdoor activities.  I may be spoiled since my Northern Headquarters has endless options for hiking and biking and just generally being outdoors.  I would be very afraid to bike around Savannah given the state of traffic. I have found minimal options for hiking, the odd city park here or there.  There is the ocean within a half hour so beach days are possible.  But in general, the level of activity in Savannah is much lower than the Ann Arbor area, but like I said, Ann Arbor might be an outlier.

So I guess the bottom line is I don't see Savannah as a long term home. The step-daughter dejure will be graduating next year and I strongly suspect the current southern headquarters will go on the market shortly after.

Addendum: It's interesting to compare Savannah to two other cities that are deeply dedicated to their past.  St. Augustine and Charleston.  I have spent much less time in those two places, but from what I have seen they are both a good deal more livable.

St. A has a smaller historic district, from what I can tell, and although crime and homelessness are evident mostly just across the water on the mainland, it's still a Florida coastal community which means there is a wealthy beach side of things and therefore can be relatively safe.  And of course, Florida beaches are a cut above the rest of the coast.  

I would guess that Charleston is the wealthiest of all although I have only been there on day trips.  A trip there just this month revealed no evidence of homelessness or safety concerns and, as a corollary, very much wealth.

I know all this drawing contrast between the wealth of an area and its evident safety concerns are ghoulishly unfashionable, but they are reality -- especially so for senior citizens of which I am effectively one.  I can get senior prices at McDonald's now.  It's one thing to embrace or tolerate societal dissonance when you're a kid and attracted to life's various excitements.  It's another when you're trying to live out the remainder of your life as peacefully and drama-free as possible.

[Rant, Music] Sound in Your Skull

Earbuds, how hard should they be? Earbuds are one of those things that I have spent too much time dealing with and trying to get right.  I use earbuds for two things mainly; at the gym up north and walking the dog down south. At the gym I just need standard earbuds, as long as they fit well.  I don't need noise cancellation although it's nice.  Down south I need almost the opposite, essentially I want something open air so I can hear traffic coming and be aware of my surroundings.

Up north I had until recently been using Jabra Elites.  They were fine.  Good sounding workhorses.  I usually charged the case before each session, but even if I didn't I could usually get as much as four hours out of them.  Of late, though they had gotten flaky -- occasionally telling me the battery was low when I had just changed them or, more recently, only one of the two earbuds functioning.  My experience with relatively inexpensive hardware is that once it starts to flake, the end is near, no point in trying to save them.

So I began looking at reviews.  First off, Amazon reviews are notoriously inaccurate and often outright fraudulent.  I have purchased at least one product that included a coupon that promised a $50 amazon gift card to me if I posted a five star review and sent them documentation of doing so.  That 4.7 rating, even if there are thousands of reviews, is suspect.  Secondly, you have to be careful about professional looking review sites, as often as not they are bought and sold, giving good reviews to anyone who will send them free stuff to review, even if the thing sucks.

After a good bit of exploration I came to the conclusion that Anker Soundcore A are the consensus best value.  I took a shot, and they do sound very, very good. Time will tell if they hold up as well as the Jabras.  They have a nifty application that administers a hearing test and adjusts the sound level as needed. That's nice.  My first impression, beyond the beautiful sound is that they are unbalanced -- the left ear is ever so lightly lower volume than the right or perhaps my left ear is weaker, although the hearing test didn't find that. I was hoping for an old fashioned balance control in the app but I couldn't find one.  Maybe it's the seal and I just need to try a different set of silicone pads.  Either way, I have to give the 'buds good marks.  Anker Soundcore A40 lives up to its good rep.

Down South it's a different problem.  The best solution I found was bone conduction headphones.  These transmit music through vibrations to the bones in your ear rather than forcing sound through the ear canal.  Or something like that.  In any event you get to privately hear your music without anything blocking your ears at all.  It's kind of strange at first but then you don't notice it.  The only difference between them and regular earbuds is that you can hear every sound going on around you, which is what I need when walking the ridiculous dog.

My first set was from a company called Kaibo that I bought through their kickstarter. At first they sounded spectacular, I was stunned by how high quality the sound was for bone conduction.  The problem was the damn things would not work.  Half the time only one side would function.  And the touch controls were so sensitive that even just adjusting them on my head would trigger a power down or a song skip or something.  Even when I wanted to take an action, the clicks and swipes to adjust them were so complex and the instructions so inscrutable I couldn't figure it out.  Finally I went onto their support site about the one side cutting out and found it was quite a common complaint.  They offered a workaround that involved moving files on your laptop and performing some sort of ritual that many people reported did no good, and was not available to anyone who didn't have a Windows laptop.  When Mac users asked what they should do, the response was "Find a Windows laptop".

Eventually I got so frustrated with them that I threw them in the trash.  That was my second participation in a kickstarter and both the products I was involved with ended up being trash.

Still, I was sold on bone conduction and the big name in bone conduction is Shokz. I bought their cheapest model because although I was sold on bone conduction, I had a bit of shell shock from Kaibo.  Also because the cheapest model had actual buttons, not touch controls, which I hate.  Well the Shokz work well.  And I appreciate the buttons, but the sound is pathetic.  It almost sounds like mono.  There is very little definition.  It's listenable, but just barely.  Functionally I like the Shokz and I may upgrade eventually in the hopes of better sound quality, but for now I'll live with it as I have spent WAY too much money on earbuds just to get to this point.

I'll stop now having written almost 1000 words about earbuds and wasting a fair amount of your time if you've gotten this far.

Addendum: Speaking of sound, one thing I have noticed is that most of the young people I know seem perfectly happy to listen to music through the horrible tinny speakers on their phones.  I can't stand it.  It sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.  How can you appreciate music that way?