Rose’s mustache, and calculating devices
I got D&J's permission, so here's the photo of Rose and her mustache.
Moments after I took that photo, Rose reached up and stroked the tip of the mustache with her fingertips. I think she was just trying to make sure it was in place, but the gesture just happened to be an exact replica of the gesture a movie character would make in neatening up the end of his mustache. If the mustache pointed up instead of down, it would've been twirling her mustachio, but I guess this is more a good-guy mustache.
In other news, nothing significant new to report. Still getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night (no sleeping drugs the last couple nights), which is enough to get by for me but I should probably take a nap later. Slowly working up to settling back into my life. Spent a couple hours sitting in a park in the sun yesterday; even played a little frisbee. (In some states, fathers teach their kids to play football; in California, at least in the Bay Area in the '70s, at least with my father, it was frisbee. Throwing a frisbee was pretty much the only physical activity I was any good at until at least high school.) Have been making various phone calls, catching up with people, telling a few people I hadn't told yet. My manager says to take as much time off as I need, so I think I'm going to hold off on going back to work 'til next week; I'm still feeling pretty fragile.
I had been planning to have a combined birthday/housewarming party at the end of March (a week and a half from now), but I don't think that's a good idea at this point. I'll probably aim to have a housewarming party in late April or early May, I guess, 'cause late May through mid-June I'll be traveling.
Most of what's still going on at this point is stuff I can't talk about here—mostly legal and financial issues that Jay is dealing with. Today I'll probably take the personal papers and photos I brought back out into my yard in the sun and sort through them out there, to keep them from filling my house with smoke-smell. And I'll do laundry, though it may be too late to save the shirt and pants I wore in the house.
. . . One of the few things other than papers and photos that I brought home with me is Peter's slide rule. I always wanted that slide rule when I was a kid. I didn't (and still don't) know how to use it properly, but I knew it was a device for doing math, and I thought that was cool.
I didn't bring home any of his multitude of graphing calculators. I was surprised, though, looking at his books, to realize how long calculators had been an interest of his; there were calculator-tricks-and-games books dating back to when I was a kid. I remember the first calculator I saw, possibly the first one he owned, an HP-25 programmable calculator (photo); some of the earliest programming I did was on that calculator. I'm still sometimes a little more comfortable with Reverse Polish Notation than with more straightforward regular calculators. . . . Hey, nifty! There's a Java simulation of an HP-25 available free online!
Peter once promised me a calculator of my own if I learned the squares of all the numbers up to 25. I knew most of 'em, but never did memorize the late teens and early twenties. At some point in high school or college I somehow managed to lose his HP-25, but he went on to more advanced calculators: a 41C (photo), an 11C (photo), maybe also a 16C (photo), though I'm not sure about that last. I think he didn't make the switch to graphing calculators until he started to teach math sometime in the '90s. The funny thing is that he never owned a PDA and rarely used a computer for anything but playing games; that always seemed a little odd to me, but I wonder if he continued to think of calculators as primarily calculating devices, like the slide rule, rather than small computers.
Anyway. I have no real conclusions or point here; just musing.