1st of September, 2022. Being something of a rant, and something of a writing update.
"The boomer generation thing isn't exclusively American, but it has its roots there in the post-WWII economic boom. On the other hand, my country had had the fuck bombed out of it and we were living in austerity relative to the US. I grew up in a city that was still full of bombed-out properties well into the 1960s. Call me a boomer again, I dare you."
— me, in a text to a friend
Seriously, never call me a boomer. Never tell me how the US saved our asses in World War II. Never tell me I'd be speaking German if it weren't for the good ol' USA. By the time the 7th Cavalry rode over the hill we had already fought (and won) The Battle of Britain. We had a lot of help from the Poles, Aussies, Kiwis and Canucks in that arena. Sure, you helped liberate France and other bits of Europe, you were happy to ride into Berlin and wave your flags all over, but you had by that time ensured that the economic power of Great Britain was a shadow, and you were ready to bring Old Glory, Coca-Cola and all the rest to post-war Europe. But I've written about this before and don't want to repeat myself.
I'm only a boomer in the sense that I go "Boom!" when people make the assumption that the rest of the world is just an extension of the US. I chuckle to myself when people (well, some people) bang on about the metric system and hold up their "freedom units" as evidence that the US is superior in some way, or who get pissy when someone else writes the date in a sensible fashion², like Day-Month-Year (or even Year-Month-Day). You can prise "1st September, 2022" from my cold dead fingers. And don't even get me started on American spelling; I frequently burn Noah Webster in imaginary effigy.
Yes, I have had some days of meeting the opinions of superior 'Muricans, and I am tired of them. This is another bit of the downside of living in the city; I seem more likely to have to talk to people in those crammed spaces. I'm happy to live and let live. If you want to measure everything in feet or degrees Fahrenheit, that's fine. I understand such units, having been brought up with them; I am even happy to use them daily. I don't try to correct your spelling of words like colour, and I only occasionally vent, just a little, when presented with dates²= like 9-1-22. Live and let live is a good deal of my philosophy, and I'd like you to do the same for me. But please understand that I'm a creature of habit and that like many in advancing age, I find it hard to adjust and accommodate, though I try really bloody hard.
In Davis we're readying for the annual influx of new students, which means an increase in foot traffic and bicycle accidents. The farmers' markets are still busy; the pandemic meant that, at least locally, people eschewed grocery stores and shopped outside. We've had a couple of record years of sales, and even though the Covid fear is waning, interest in the markets does not seem to have followed that trend.
We're coming to the end of summer, and autumn plantings are moving on up. Soon we will have lettuces, mixed salad greens and all the glorious things of that season. The hot weather means that it's impossible to plant or grow some things, and this has been an exceptionally hot year. It does seem that we've had more days over 105°F (that's 40°C) than in past years. I never thought I'd be referring to 95° as "cool", but there you go.
Speaking of farmers' markets, I was on the bloody telly again last weekend. A local CBS TV channel sends a bloke out two or three times a year to report on the local markets and farmers. He's a good lad, name of Michael Marks. He shows up with fabulous shirts themed with fruit or produce, and a ton of knowledge and enthusiasm. Since discovering me (the Englishman in the kilt!) he always makes a beeline for the stand to talk to me about some bit of wonderful stuff. This time around it was summer squash, as he'd spotted the "Squash Kittens" sign on our bijou baby squash, and a monumental Italian zucchini/courgette variety known as Romanesco Costata. This morning, a friend of mine sent me a link to the video. I appear about a minute in to talk to him about it. Go on, I dare you to watch: https://www.cbsnews.com/gooddaysacramento/video/your-produce-man-at-the-davis-farmers-market-7am/#x
I have a lot of fun at markets. I can emerge from hermitude, clown around and have fun with people. The farmer is the third person I met in the whole of the US, after Christine and Tessie. Most of my social energy gets spent there, and I can't think of a better way of spending a weekend.
Meanwhile, I have kept to my earlier promise to write here at least once a week. August was good. One piece of fiction, two daylogs, three four factuals; in addition I launched the Brevity Quest 2022, and am looking forward to that. I've written fifty-two things in the past twelve months and am feeling good about that.
I'm not feeling so good about the possibility of having to go back and edit writeups in which I've used UTF-8/Unicode characters. I'm rather attached to be able to use things like the mdash and accented characters straight from the keyboard using ALT-GR, and those currently seem to be broken. I can even tell how often I've edited a piece by the number of spurious characters that appear after a ° or a —. I'm leaving them in as a kind of protest, even though I have posted it as a Github issue. Thank you, Jay Bonci for keeping the site codebase humming along, and improving it, but you broke my boomer soul in the process. We really, really don't like change¹.
¹But seriously, thanks to jaybonci. I'm just messin' widja.
²Of course there's a relevant xkcd, thanks unperson! https://xkcd.com/1179/
$ xclip -o | wc -w
1032