November 2025 Grab Bag

 I hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful.  Na Clann were all here for the week, so we got a healthy combination of local adventures, food, Thanksgiving Day episodes, and shopping.  As Nighean Gheal was in South Korea last year, this is first time in two years that we have been together.

For reference, last time we were all together, I had not been laid off as part of Hammerfall 3.0, we still lived in New Home, and we had not had a presidential election.

The world was a different place.

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In Administrative notes, I realized that I had not linked all of the 2024 Turkey entries into the single page dedicated to this purpose.  That issue has been rectified.  Additionally, The Collapse page should be up to date to current entries.  And a new page for 2025 Cambodia And Vietnam has been started (although given how long it has take me to get through was was the first 3 days of our trip, we will be reading about this all through next year).

I still need to bring A Year of Humility to a page near you.  At this point, that sounds like an end of year task.

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This week I had a medical appointment.

This was a rather long delayed one dating from February of this year when I should have gone, when due to my training in Japan I seem to have done something to my right knee.  I was hopeful that I could just "exercise my way out of it", but it got worse, not better - worse to the point that I am pretty much unable to do any kneeling waza at this point.  The good news?  Apparently it is tendonitis as no tear or rip could be found and it has full range of motion.  Exercises for now, with the possibility of physical therapy if that does not work.

Other things discovered during the visit:

- My blood pressure is normal.  I was afraid I was pushing up into pre-hypertension mode, but apparently not.  That is a relief.

- Based on descriptions, I may have Obstructive Sleep Apnea.  A sleep study has been ordered.

- A round of general labs has been ordered

God willing and nothing new, I will be back for an exam in a year.

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As a note to the ongoing sale of The Ranch, we have received no offers after our initial lowball.  At the recommendation of our realtor, we are taking it off the market and will re-list it in Spring.

During my last trip earlier this month, I spent no more than 30 minutes at the maximum checking things out and making sure no new issues had arisen.  This has very much become a rear-guard action.

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For the first time in something like 20 years, I will be doing a public harp performance.

The whole thing came about as a result of the small group I led earlier this Autumn.  One of the icebreakers was "What is an unusual thing that you do?" Mine, as it turns out, was playing the harp.  Word gets around as these things do and now I am performing in the lobby before, between, and after services on 21 December.

Certainly an incentive to practice intensely.

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With the passing of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, we enter the Christmas season - which, based on the way Christmas falls this year, is only 3 Fridays away.  I need to make a sincere effort to be mindful of the season this year as it feels like it will be more compressed than usual.

At least Christmas carols are now fair game.

Thanksgiving Day Turkey Drop, WKRP

 This remains, in my mind, the finest comedy sketch ever.

Thanksgiving 2025

 As is customary for this time of year, I present below the original Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.  

Every year as I do this, I realize how much I have had to be thankful for. I am extraordinarily thankful for of you, my readers.  And I am thankful again that my family - The Ravishing Mrs. TB, Nighean Gheal, Nighean Bhan, and Nighean Dhonn - will be here to celebrate in New Home 2.0

A Blessed Thanksgiving to you all.

George Washington's 1789

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

- http://www.wilstar.com/holidays/wash_thanks.htm

2025 Cambodia And Vietnam: Tuol Sleng IV

 A picture of seven of the eight known survivors.  Most of them survived by having skills that that Khmer Rouge needed:

A picture taken after the Vietnamese Army invasion in 1979 showing the four surviving children:

At intake, the Khmer Rouge took pictures of every single individual coming in and recorded their name.  The names and pictures became separated in some cases and so there are thousands of individuals whom are only known by their pictures.  This board represents one of many displays in the prison.

Looking at the boards and the pictures, one is undoubtedly find someone that one will identify with.  

There was no name attached to this young man.  Judging the time period, he was maybe 10 years older or less than that in comparison with me at that time.  His shirt...that is a shirt that any young pre-teen or teenager might have worn in those years.  For all I know, given another reality, that could have been me.

I have been to many places in my years, including places where terrible things had happened.  Never in my life have a been to a place where the very walls of the building seeped evil.

2025 Cambodia And Vietnam: Tuol Sleng III

 Torture at Tuol Slen represented a wide range:  electrocution, water boarding, beatings, searing with hot metal, hanging, suffocation, removal of nails and then the pouring of alcohol in the wounds.  Confessions, once given, could run into the thousands of words, all recorded via tape or writing and used against other individuals named in the confessions.  Likely most of the confessions were the product of torture.  Additionally, prisoners were used for medical experiments and training, undergoing surgery without anesthesia or having their blood drained from their bodies.

After the end of torture after 1976, prisoners taken to the nearby Boueng Choeung Ek ("Crow's Feet Pond) where, in order to conserve valuable bullets, prisoners were battered to death with iron bars or pick axes or cut down with machetes.

The average age of an guard was in their teens, those of the interrogators in their 20's.

One of the larger prison cells, where prisoners were chained to an iron bar.

The prison preserved many of the instruments of torture.  Individuals were either dunked into the basin until they almost drowned or hung by their torso on the frame.

Memorials:

Listing of known deaths:

 

On Sickness And Reflection

 As noted this past Friday, I was under the weather most of this week.  And when I say "Under", I mean to suggest far more under than I have been for at least the last 7 years.

I cannot definitively tell you where it came from, although I can tell you that the two weeks previous were filled with work, not a lot of sleep, travel over the weekends (One for a family wedding, one to visit The Ranch), and almost zero recovery time between the traveling and my work week.  

I can tell you the inflection moment:  it was a week ago on Monday where I felt sufficiently "off" to not attend the first meeting of my men's small group meeting after our seven week hiatus.  

By Tuesday morning, I was cooked.

The issue presented as a sinus infection complete with drainage, a delightful cough I could feel in my chest along with the wheezing in breathing, and some level of elevated temperature, at least on two of the days.

I naturally (and stupidly) attempted to split the middle by working from home Tuesday and going in Wednesday - which solved nothing, as I felt bad enough to take a complete sick day on Thursday for the first time in years.  Friday I rallied to make it back in with a pretty solid day; Saturday (yesterday as I write this) I essentially sat on the couch encased blankets and read.

7 days for an illness.  Again, it has been years since this has happened.

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The initial response when all of this manifested itself was, or course, a vast sigh of exasperation:  after all, I have (or rather, had) far too much going on to afford to be sick, let alone miss a day of work. Yes, work itself of course, but all of the other carefully crafted allocations of time I had worked in for the completion of all the other things that are (well, were) going on in my life during that time.  There was that initial period (Monday and Tuesday) of working through the "inconvenience" of being ill was my plan.

In retrospect, it was a pretty ill conceived plan.

By the end of Wednesday I had thrown in the towel (holding it together only long enough through drugs to make it through my small group commitment).  Work was not a thought on Thursday and only the barest of things got done on Friday.  And all those "other things" that constitute my life?  Not one of them happened after Tuesday.  Turns out doing the sotto voce version of "Hacking up a lung while upright" is not conducive to training, calisthenics, iaijutsu, language, aerobics, blogging (who knew),  or anything else beyond the basics of eating, sleeping, and showering (a necessity).  Reading was the "But Wait, There Is More" add-on to the deal I did not ask for.

Interestingly, the only person that denoted my lack of progress in any of these areas was myself.

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The fact that I may have been "overloading the carry capacity of the wheelbarrow" was not necessarily a surprise to me.  The subject had shown up a half dozen times in some form or fashion over the last two weeks in my journal.  The surprise - if I can call it that - is that it actually manifested.

(Yes, I know - not that surprising; pushing any system to its operational limits will eventually result in a failure at the weakest point of the system.  Sadly, I also tend to believe that I am often exempt from the laws of the real world. It is a known failing).

Five years ago an event like this would not have set me back on my heels the way this one seems to have.  I am trying to understand that, just as I am trying to accept the fact that if I do not change, this sort of thing is likely to happen again.

To the first point - Why has this set back on my heels so? - I can only think that I have been on the receiving end of health and relative energy for so long that it is something that I have come to take for granted.  The idea of essentially having no impediment due to health and energy  as I attack my rather wild list of things to do has not really confronted me before.  I am, very aware that such good health and energy  are in a real sense quite temporary in the full term of things.  I perhaps did not expect "temporary" to start now.

To the second point - something needing to change - I point back again to my journaling, where for some weeks now I have been making the observation that fitting an ideal amount of sleep for me (which, tragically for my higher aspirations of accomplishment, really does seem to be between 7 and hours a night) is reasonably impossible when allocates less than that amount for actual sleep.  Repeatedly.  For weeks on end.

"Ah" I keep telling myself as sit down looking at my hour calculations.  "Given the amount of time I have to set aside for work and (begrudgingly) sleep, I only have Y amount of hours to do all things I really want/need to do!"  A flurry of calculations inevitably ensues by me trying to find ways to shave off 30 minutes here or there to set aside (the number of times I have designated my lunch for "useful" thing is embarrassing at this point).

And then, something like this happens and reality suggests in a far from cordial way that I might want to rethink things on a more holistic basis.

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Do I have a plan?  Nope, not at all.  I am giving myself the grace of the holidays:  Na Clann will be here this coming week for Thanksgiving (and I will be off starting Tuesday for the week) and then come the holidays when things are generally winding down anyway, including a week off at the end of December.  I can definitely coast on a lot of things until then (except lifting and Iai and blogging of course).

But next year?   Something has to change next year.  The risk of being guttered like this again is not worth it.

A Year Of Humility (XVIL): Serving When Called: A Retrospective

 As you might recall from early October, I was offered an opportunity to lead a small group for seven weeks.  This was part of a church-wide focus on Spiritual Friendship; the hope that that it would enable folks who struggled with making connections find a channel to help them make a connection in a small group environment.

The initial period is over; we chose to extend a bit through the first week of December as there was interest and childcare available.  As a result we only have one week left which will be as much of a goodbye as a study.

What, then are my observations on serving when called?

I think my biggest worry was simply that things would go awry.  That there would be incredible amounts of dead time which would be awkward.  That people would come for a week or two and then leave (in my mind, for no other reason than they did not like me). 

None of the fears were realized.

Were there periods of silence?  There were.  But never too uncomfortable, and almost inevitable someone brought something up that moved the conversation forward.  

Did some people not keep up?  Also yes, but that is to be expected with anything.  Certainly after the initial 7 weeks, but that was past the original commitment that everyone made.  So by and large we came out as we went in.

Perhaps the most important thing:  Did it make a difference?

I think it did (not me of course, but the group).  There were connections made.  People opened up to some pretty significant things that they were facing, things that I think in my former years of leading a group would have never happened (again, that was God, not me).  Outside of the group interactions occurred, even if it was just finding someone else to say hello to at church on Sunday.

Would I do something like this again?  I think the answer is a pretty solid "No", at least in a sole leadership position.  This was something outside of my normal comfort zone and while I am glad I had the opportunity, I am just not a leader in the traditional sense of the word and holding at least one role like already (my current job), it can be exhausting.  

But I am glad that I did it.  For all that I did not do, I saw God moving powerfully in the lives of others.  And seldom if ever does one get a front row opportunity to see that happen.