The beat goes on -- just more slowly. . .

Well, here I am in my first week of retirement. I've spent this week running around doing errands and tying up loose ends for our upcoming trip to the UK. Yesterday I thought I'd lost the passports somehow, but after fifteen very tense minutes of racking my brain on their whereabouts, I finally remembered where I'd put them.

At this point I'm all packed, at least tentatively. My plan is to take roughly ten days of clothes and I have arranged in advance to do laundry at a couple of the B&Bs. The goal is to keep the checked bags at 50 pounds or less. I know world-traveler, Rick Steves goes to Europe for a month with two changes of clothes and a camera. He just re-washes everything every two days in the hotel sink. Somehow, I can't get enthusiastic about that scenario. For the first laundry day I found a B&B in southern Wales that has a contact who picks up laundry and delivers when finished. Can't beat that. I think the B&B in Lincolnshire, about 2/3 of the way into the trip, has laundry facilities in house, which will be even better.

The bags we are using are the rolling duffel style, which I really like. They have lots of zippered compartments on the outside and a big zippered lower compartment underneath the main duffel for things you want to keep flat. With the telescoping handle and wheels they're really easy to transport and their pliable sides make them easy to "stuff" places, like the diminutive hatch back on the Mini Cooper we're renting.

Anyway, along with the note for today I thought I'd include a nice pix of my buddy and co-worker, Jim Hansen and me, photographed on my last day in the office. Some folks might say Jim doesn't smile enough, but here's proof he's actually darn good at it.

Cheers, Jim!

First Day of Retirement

Well, here we are at last -- the first day of the rest of my life after retirement. Funny thing, I don't feel any different. This morning I still had to take out the trash, wash the patio, and pick up my socks as usual. I suspect that it will take a great many days before my blissful freedom materializes. But for all those co-workers who together made my working days so interesting and so rewarding, I say many, many thanks. I certainly won't forget you nor allow you to completely disappear from my life. This may seem like the end, but it's only the beginning.

Tomorrow. . .

To commemorate tomorrow's special day, here's the lyrics from the musical, Annie. And just for fun, at right is my 1973 passport:

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!

Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!

When I'm stuck a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And Grin,
And Say,
Oh!

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
A way!
!

The day before the day before the day

Well, here we are on the day before the day before the final day. Tomorrow is the good-bye lunch. We already had the good-bye breakfast/lunch here in the technology building with all my long-time techie co-workers. The plane in the picture was signed by all the helpdesk and desktop folks to send me off. It certainly feels like momentus things are about to happen.

Towards better photograhy

Want to improve your photographs? At right is a photo by LatentE," a photograher I found on tabblo.com using a software package from Photomatix.com that really does a nice job of combining a series of photos into one truly great shot.

I have to say that I've never been a fan of manipulated photographs, however photograhers have always known that your eye sees much more detail than the camera can ever capture. With LatentE's technique your photo captures a greater range of light and dark that more closely portrays what your eye saw originally.

To do this you have to have a stable shooting platform, preferrably a weighted tripod, so your shots don't vary from each other. Then you find a perfect spot and expose a series of photos using the camera's automatic over/under exposure feature. Finally, you import the shots into photomatix and manipulate the melded image. For instructions on how it works and to see other great shots from LatentE, go here.

British Mortality

Ever wonder why our ancestors died at such an early age? Here's a discussion I found on an Canadian web site about 18th century England:

"Every visitor to 18th-century London was impressed by the noise and the throngs of people. But the city itself was neither quaint nor clean. Most residents lived in appalling conditions. After the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed more than 85 percent of the city, London was rebuilt in a hasty and haphazard manner. Then rapid surge in population - from 675,000 in 1750 to 900,000 just 50 years later - caused enormous pressure on city planners to get buildings up quickly. Houses and tenements were thrown together in a slapdash manner, with little attention to plans or codes. Buildings were patched up, subdivided, and subdivided again to cram as many people into as little square footage as possible, which left a jumble of narrow, unlit passageways between residences and shops. Walking through one of these stinking, airless alleyways - especially after dark - was terribly risky, since the convoluted pattern of streets provided excellent cover for lurking criminals.

According to Richard B. Schwartz's Daily Life in Johnson's London, 'The city had become honeycombed with what were intended to be temporary dwellings but which grew to be permanent ones. The scarce available land was continually subdivided. Courts were built upon. Business establishments were cut up into tenements. Hovels and shacks were commonplace. Many of the poor crowded into deserted houses. A sizeable number of the city's inhabitants both lived and worked below ground level.'

Commercial streets were no less hazardous. Many London buildings were made with such shoddy materials - crumbling bricks and knotty timber - that it was not unusual for them to collapse. Heavy, pendulous shop signs projected out from storefronts on large iron bars. The signs, regularly whipped by the wind, could create such force that the entire façade of a building would come crashing down. Often this happened on top of passers-by. The din and danger from these creaking signs led the city to pass many ordinances restricting their use.

London was filled with the smell of wet horses and the waste materials associated with them. Sanitation was unheard of. Water was unpurified, and raw sewage ran down city streets in open drains. It was common practice for people to empty their chamber pots out of their windows, and to leave garbage out in the street to rot. C.P. Moritz wrote in 1782, "Nothing in London makes a more detestable sight than the butchers' stalls, especially in the neighborhood of the Tower. The guts and other refuse are all thrown on the street and set up an unbearable stink." (4)

An amazing variety of filth slopped down London's cobblestone streets. Along with dirt, dust and animal manure, there was the ever-falling London rain to add to the mess. Cesspools of human waste collected in puddles everywhere. Dead animals (dogs, cats, rodents, even horses) were left to decay in the streets. In darker corners of the city, an occasional human corpse might even be found. To add to all this, horse-drawn carriages with heavy metal wheels often splashed through puddles, slopping the street's putrid muck all over strolling pedestrians

With its overpopulation, bad sanitation, and out-of-control housing, English cities like London was a breeding ground for bacteria and disease, and death was common. Epidemics, infections and occasional food shortages led to an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Medicine was still quite primitive. In fact, in 1775, more than 800 deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to "Teeth." Lice and dirt were everywhere. Soot and grime covered overcrowded tenements. In these circumstances, unbridled disease ran rampant, and even the smallest wound could lead to death by infection.

The connection between personal hygiene and good health was not fully understood. Francis Place wrote that in the 1780s well-off women "wore petticoats of comblet, lined with dyed linen, stuffed with wool and horsehair and quilted...day by day till they were rotten."(7) Baths were extremely rare - in fact, many people considered them harmful. In all six editions of Sir John Flyer's Inquiry into the Right Use of Hot, Cold, and Temperate Baths in England, he never once mentions bathing simply for the sake of cleanliness.

There was also a grave fear of fresh air, in part because of airborne diseases like "consumption," so windows were kept tightly shut. And because entire buildings were taxed according to the number of windows they contained, many landlords sealed them off, with disastrous results for their tenants.

There was a seasonal pattern of death. In winter months, when thick, heavy, encrusted clothes were worn day and night, respiratory tuberculosis, influenza and typhus raged. Dysentery and diarrhea came around in the summer, when flies transmitted bacteria from filth to food and water was at its most foul.

Of every 1,000 children born in early 18th-century London, almost half died before the age of 2. Malnutrition, maternal ignorance, bad water, dirty food, poor hygiene and overcrowding all contributed to this extremely high mortality rate. And if an infant did survive, it then faced the perils of childhood - namely malnourishment and ongoing abuse. Many poor children were dispatched to crowded, backbreaking "workhouses" or were apprenticed to tradesmen who used them as unpaid laborers. A Parliamentary committee reported in 1767 that only seven in 100 workhouse infants survived for three years. Stephen Inwood notes in his book The History of London that "workhouse 'apprentices' swept London's chimneys, hawked milk and fruit round its streets, and labored unpaid in the worst branches of tailoring, shoemaking, stocking making, baking, river work and domestic service. Later in the century industrialization offered new outlets and London pauper children were packed off to work in the cotton-spinning mills of Lancashire and Cheshire."

Fascinating, right? Click here to read the whole account.

Widows and Orphans

Here's an interesting factoid from the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) website that I thought I'd include on the blog because so many of my male ancestors (and a few female ancestors) died at an young age:

In England, between 1650 and 1700, the average age of women at widowhood was 47, rising to 53 by the early 19th century. Early 18th century valuations of widows' property in three different parts of England suggest that the property was worth between 38 and 79 per cent of their husbands', meaning that they didn't inheirit the entire estate after their husband's death. Where there were adult children, husbands left only part of the property to their wives. And, property was often granted to widows only for the length of their life rather than outright.

Friday before the Friday

Today is the Friday before the Friday when I turn off my computer here at the Technology Division for the last time. I'm going to miss a lot of folks here, many that I've known for nearly two decades. And I'm surely going to miss this great Dell computer with the dual-monitor setup. If you haven't tried dual monitors, by the way, you should try it. It makes everything you do so much easier.

Last night I watched a documentary on the Plague years of 1347-1351, the infamous Black Death that consumed Europe and the Mediterranean region back then. Now that I'm a budding genealogist, the program got me to thinking just how lucky we descendents of the survivors are to be here. After all, whatever individual ancestors were present in the mid fourteenth century, by the time the effects of the Black Death had waned, anywhere from a third to a half of everyone was dead. In some cities the death toll was even higher. Venice, Italy suffered a 60% death rate, while in the Italian city of Florence as many as 75% of the population died.

So how come we're here? What stroke of incredible luck decreed that our ancestors from 650 some odd years ago survived while so many did not? Naturally I turned to the internet to answer the question. I found the following possible explanation which was taken from a 2008 International Tribune article by Nicholas Bakalar:


"Many historians have assumed that Europe's deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an illness, it is not always the case. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed thousands of healthy people in their prime while sparing many children and the elderly, whose weaker immune systems did not overreact to the infection. Sexually transmitted infections like HIV disproportionately affect the strongest and healthiest, for the obvious reason that they are the most sexually active.

Plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it is usually transmitted to humans by fleas; flea-infested rats caused the 14th-century epidemic. The bacteria invade the bloodstream, causing internal bleeding that leads to shock and death. In the new study, the researchers examined 490 skeletons exhumed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London. The site, like many other cemeteries, was set up to bury victims of the Black Death and was almost certainly used for no other purpose. The scientists determined the victims' state of health when they died by counting bone lesions, defects that suggest previous infections and other existing health problems. The researchers also estimated age at death by noting dental development and using other established methods. As a comparison, they analyzed the bones of 291 genetically and culturally similar people buried in a Danish cemetery shortly before the plague began.

The aim was to find out whether the Londoners, who all died of the plague, were frail when the epidemic struck. In the nonplague Danish cemeteries, bone lesions were strongly associated with earlier death. If the Black Death killed without discrimination, such skeletal defects would not be associated with an increased risk of death in East Smithfield. Many of the victims would have had healthy-looking bones when the plague killed them. But this was not the case. Among the East Smithfield plague victims, bone lesions were also associated with excess mortality. In other words, many of those people were already in poor health when the Black Death struck. Most of the bone defects that the researchers found can be caused by malnutrition, and the scientists suggest that the findings may show effects of starvation on immune function. It is known from contemporary chronicles that many survived the plague, and they, the authors write, were probably well fed and healthy enough to mount an effective immune response.

'Even something as clearly deadly as the Black Death is still selective,' said Sharon DeWitte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University at Albany. The Black Death, she continued, is comparable in some ways to various emerging diseases of today like Ebola or SARS, and studying it "gives us some insight into who might be at highest risk for these new diseases."

The authors acknowledge that their findings are not conclusive. The samples used were from two geographic areas, and similar lesions could have been caused by diseases of varying severity in the two areas. Still, the authors write, the fact that a pattern of excess mortality was associated with different kinds of lesions suggests that the plague more often killed the weak than the strong."

The above piece was very interesting. But since I suspected that there must be other reasons, I kept looking. Here's another piece I gleaned from the internet which is equally intriguing in its implications:

"While we commonly think of the rat acting as a host for fleas and the plague bacillus, it was certainly not the only animal that carried the disease. Besides humans and rats, most animals were susceptible to the bacillus and were infested with fleas. There was, however, one exception -- the horse. According to Robert S. Gottfried in his book, 'The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe,' however important black rats were in the dissemination of plague, it is essential to emphasize that they were not the only secondary carriers. Along with the rodents already mentioned, additional secondary vector hosts included virtually all household and barnyard animals save the horse, whose odor apparently repels even starving blocked fleas."

Wow! So now it seems our surviving ancestors may have been healthy horse owners. Seriously though, I suspect, as you probably do, there's a lot more to it than that. For instance, might there be a genetic reason? Following that tack, I found a piece by Dr. Barry Starr of Standford University in California, USA, who wrote:

"There may be. There are many stories where someone who was in constant contact with plague victims didn’t die. Maybe genetics is the explanation. For example, in 1665, the plague hit a small village in England called Eyam. The town quarantined itself to keep the Black Death from spreading into the rest of the country. A year later, the plague had burnt itself out but half of the townspeople were dead. Was there something special about the half that lived?

In 1996, researchers tracked down descendants of the people of Eyam and looked for any mutations they might have in common to explain this high survival rate. What they found was a mutation called CCR5-delta 32. The CCR5-delta 32 mutation was already known for a different reason—people with one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. People with 2 copies are virtually immune to HIV.

The CCR5-delta 32 mutation probably arose a few thousand years ago in Northeastern Europe. It stayed rare until around 700 years ago when it suddenly became more common. The plague started in Europe around 700 years ago.

So, does CCR5-delta 32 protect people from the plague bacteria? Probably not. Mice infected with the plague bacteria died at around the same rates whether or not they had the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.

Why then is this mutation so common in Europeans and even more common in people whose ancestors came from Eyam? Maybe smallpox is the reason. Smallpox killed 3 in 10infected people for thousands of years in Europe. Recent studies suggest that smallpox, like HIV, can’t infect someone with the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.

Of course this doesn’t explain Eyam (unless there was a lot of smallpox in the area). A more controversial theory is that an unknown virus, not the plague bacteria, caused the Black Death. Besides the evidence of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation itself, some people contend that the disease shouldn’t have been stopped by quarantine and that it spread too quickly for a flea borne illness.

Anyway, as you can see, while genetics were probably involved, there isn’t yet a solid answer as to what genes were involved."

Now, that makes sense. We all know how immunity works. As kids, we get shots all the time to build up our immunity to nasty diseases. If our ancient ancestors, those that came before the plague survivors, had contracted some disease that provided them some protection against the Black Death, it would make sense that they might survive, especially if their non-surviving neighbors did not possess that genetic protection.

Of course, there's no way to know at present. But with the speed at which scientific advances are being made in genetics, I'm sure we're going to know more on this subject in the very near future. Until then, click here to see more information on the study being done on CCR5 delta-32.

84 Charing Cross Road, London

Concetta and I have long been fans of the movie, 84 Charing Cross Road with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. It's a story of a relationship fostered by the love of books. Anne's character, Helene Hanff, is a writer and bibliophile in New York City and is having trouble finding the fine literature she craves. She begins to correspond with Frank Doel, played by Hopkins, who is a clerk in a bookshop in London. The time frame is post WWII. As the movie jacket details, "Their intimate, richly detailed letters draw us into their lives as Helen and Frank share their dreams, hopes, sorrows, and joys and in doing so, develop a lasting and extraordinary friendship."

We've watched the movie several times and each time we grow to love it more. Though we know there's probably no book shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, we certainly plan to navigate our way there when we visit London this fall just to satisfy our curiosity.


The book was actually written by the real Helene Hanff. Wikipedia says of her, "Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916–April 9, 1997) was an American writer. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she is best known as the author of the book 84 Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a play, teleplay, and film of the same name.

Helene's career, which saw her move from writing unproduced plays to helping create some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a kind of professional New Yorker, goes far beyond the charm of that one book. She called her 1961 memoir Underfoot in Show Business, and it chronicled the struggle of an ambitious young playwright to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat" circuit along the East Coast of the United States, writing plays that were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers but which somehow never saw the light of day.

She wrote and edited scripts for a variety of early television dramas produced out of New York, all the while continuing to try and move from being what she called "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who don't become Noel Coward." When the bulk of television production moved to California, her work slowly dried up, and she turned to writing for magazines and, eventually, to the books that made her reputation.

First published in 1970, the epistolary work 84 Charing Cross Road chronicles her 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop, on which she depended for the obscure classics and British literature titles around which her passion for self-education revolved. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during England's post-war shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.

Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.

In the 1987 film adaptation, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City.

Hanff was never shy about her fondness for cigarettes and martinis, but nevertheless lived to be 80, dying of diabetes in 1997 in New York City. The apartment building where she lived at 305 E. 72nd Street has been named "Charing Cross House" in her honor. A bronze plaque next to the front door commemorates her residence and authorship of the book."

Highway in the Wind

Like many of my generation, I love to get out on the highway and just head somewhere. And, over the years, I've encountered a number of artists who seem to "get it" when it comes to travel songs. Mary Chapin Carpenter has no equal. The theme music to the movie Top Gun goes well with traveling. But one of my favorite singer/song writers from the days of tie-dyed shirts and shoulder-length hair, Arlo Guthrie, really captures the mood in his song Highway in the Wind from the Alice's Restaurant LP. Back in 1972, I seldom hit the road without putting Arlo's tape on the 8-track and cranking up the volume. Oh yes, I can hear it now...

In the "teens" at last

Well, come Monday morning I'm going to be a "teen" again. That's right, tomorrow morning when I arrive at work I'll have only 19 days left on the clock before I turn off my office computer for the last time, hand over my keys, and say adios to the Nevada Department of Public Safety. It's been a strange twelve years to say the least.

I wasn't hired by Public Safety; it was more like I was Shanghaied. Twelve years ago I was happily working for the Department of Parole and Probation as their Management Analyst. I had just been promoted to that Department's one-and-only Network Specialist because most of my MA duties had, in fact, revolved around keeping the agency network running. Even though I had no formal training as a Network Specialist, had never even seen a network when I was put in charge of one, I managed to keep all my users happily computing for seven years starting in 1989. My duties ranged from running co-ax cable, building computers out of spare parts, and writing database software, to supervising the data-entry unit, functioning as resident statistician, and planning for yearly technology expenditures.

But in 1996 everything changed. That's when the Department of Parole and Probation became a division within the Department of Public Safety. Unfortunately, one of the first things that the new expanded Department of Public Safety did was pull all technology staff into one location to work under one supervisor. Instantly I went from being a big fish in a very small pond who reported directly to the Chief of P&P, to a very tiny fish in a huge pond where no one really thought I had enough experience to be working in the job to which I had just been promoted. To say they really didn't want me on the team is probably understating it.

Still, it seems that I have outlasted all my detractors. I've faithfully performed my duties to the best of my ability for twelve years and been absent from my workstation the merest handful of days in all that time. In fact, even after giving away literally hundreds of hours of my sick leave to less fortunate fellow employees, I'll still be retiring with over 1,750 hours of sick leave on the books and 300 hours of annual leave.

Along the way I've made a lot of friendships that I will always treasure. Because the agency relegated me to desktop support for most of my career here, I was able to move throughout the division helping an wonderful variety of folks with a daunting variety of problems, which kept the job exciting, interesting, and rewarding. So, though I didn't get to rise in management as I surely would have done if I had remained at Parole and Probation, I gained a much wider appreciation of technology from the ground up. In the trenches is where the action is. Pushing paper will never be as rich.

Enough said.

Tom the Viking

Here, with a nod toward the Burtons who trace their lineage to Normandy and the Vikings, is me in my Teutonic raiment.

This morning I've reached the 21-day mark on my count-down to retirement. Twenty-one days! It's almost impossible to grasp the enormity of it. After twenty-five years of state government, and over forty some odd years of showing up somewhere every morning at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., I'll have nowhere I must be every day. I'll actually be able to read the morning paper in the morning! What a concept.

Plans for the trip to the UK continue unabated though Delta playfully continues to tinker with our flight numbers and, at times, intermediate stops. I think the only area of the country they don't have us stopping is Alaska, which I'm sure they've at least considered.

Yesterday I emailed the rental agent for the mini we're going to be driving asking that he send me a .jpg of the car so I can post it here. I hoping for a red one so everyone can avoid me when I make traffic mistakes. They drive on the "wrong" side of the road, you know. In 1973 when I lived on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean for several months I found that everyone drove on the left side. I actually made the switch rather easily. We were riding motorbikes most of the time, but I even successfully drove a big Ford station wagon on malta's tiny roads without incident.

This week I made another incursion into heretofore avoided areas of technology and loaded up a gift IPod with several hundred jazz, classical, and folk tunes to listen to on the airplane should their in-house music prove wanting. On our recent trip to Florida, the airliner's canned music was awful. The IPod doesn't take up much room and I was taking the "noise-cancelling" headphones anyway.

Right now I'm listening to Celtic music, which reminds me of a book I recently finished. It's called Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.It's available through Amazon for as little as $8.50. The book is a great read if you're interested in learning about your British ancestors. The author, Bryan Sykes, uses DNA testing to determine just what impact various immigrants and invaders have had on British genetic makeup. When I had the National Geographic genetic test done, I learned that my ancestors spent the last big ice age holed up in Spain. Sykes says that later, a coastal contingent of these Spaniards sailed north to the British Isles and became what we consider to be the Celts. The most surprising thing I learned from Saxons, Vikings, and Celts was the relatively small impact the various late-comers -- the Vikings, the Angles, the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Normans -- have had on the genetic makeup of the islands. I won't spoil it for you. You'll have to read the book, something I heartily recommend.