The seasons are changing, and it’s a beautiful part of the country for that.
It’s a bit colder in Cincinnati than I like but there’s a couple weeks after summer is over where it’s just perfect.
I’m in the suburbs outside of Cincinnati in a town called Amelia.
Reminds me of when I was a kid during a brief period I lived in a village on the other side of Columbus called Glouster, where I went to preschool and first grade. We used to take the whole family out on hikes and pick wild garlic. This was back in the 80s, so, kids just pretty much roamed the neighborhood. I remember just walking into peoples’ houses through the village and people would give me treats. 🙂 It is just not like that anymore. We don’t have the sense of safety in our communities that we did back then. There was an old lady, someone’s grandmother, down a few blocks from us that would make these awesome peanut butter cookies — the kind where you press a fork into them to make a little pattern before they bake — and on the other side of the way, you had Mr. Cliff, who was a nice old man who grew rows of lettuce in his front yard, and when I’d come in he’d make applesauce from a raw apple in the microwave.
Up the hill was my friend Ashley who’d run around with us kids. Up the hill further was Joseph, an older kid who usually got us in trouble with our parents.
This was the city we lived in when my little brother had a catatonic seizure. I went to go wrestle with him when I saw him on the couch and when I jumped on him he just had a blank stare on his face and exhaled and didn’t take any air back in. I poked and prodded a little and no response. So I ran around and found someone. Next thing I know we’re in my Dad’s red convertible ’68-’69 Chevy Oldsmobile Cutlass cruising down the road following Mom and my brother in an ambulance up ahead. Next we’re in the ER. They got him breathing. I’m not sure what happened after that.
That specific little brother was a wild child back then. I remember one time he slipped out the back door, about 2 years old, buck ass naked, and made a little dirt cloud behind him running down the road. A semi-truck saw him running down the road and stopped him long enough for Mom to catch up, about half a mile down that road.
I also ended up in the ER at one point there. I remember I was in the bathtub playing around and hit my head into the faucet by accident, and it cut me really bad on the top of my scalp. Next thing I know I’m in the ER myself, being held down while a doctor sews stitches into me.
The first time I held hands with a girl was at that school there. We pretended we were boyfriend and girlfriend lol. On a whim a few years back, I typed in the name I could remember and we reconnected on facebook and had a fun time running through old memories about it. Cute times. We have wildly incompatible worldviews, lifestyles, and tastes, now, but it’s a neat shared memory and I’m glad I made that connection purely for the sentiment.
My best friend back then, Justin, though, remains a mystery. The people I’ve re-connected with all remember Justin, but nobody kept in touch, and nobody remembers the last name. Justin was the cool kid. He had wealthy parents who spoiled him with the coolest toys, like bikes, and skateboards, and gaming systems. He always had the cool buzz-cut haircut with the zig-zag pattern etched in and nice clothes. We played the hell out of some Batman on what I think was a nintendo. He had a projector TV and all the cool satellite channels. I vaguely remember using pump-action water guns to piss off beehives with him. I think. It was decades ago.
I remember my first bully there. A big ape of a kid named Nathan. Nathan would wait at recess and just pummel the shit out of us relentlessly until the playground looked like a battlefield. Then, one day, I was climbing up the jungle gym, this big monstrous skyscraper of a recess climber with stories and stories of height — you don’t see these in school playgrounds anymore, and he was in close pursuit just below me in the level below and I ran out of levels to climb up to. Figuring he was going to break my arm or throw me off the jungle gym this time, I figured I’d go down fighting. So, I used the advantage of higher ground and put all my weight into a fist planted right in his nose lol. He fell and caught himself on the monkey bars and had a properly bloodied lip from it, dismounted, and ran away crying to the teacher. I got in trouble for it. Of course, Nathan didn’t. 🙂
I remember my first Halloween event at that school. My mom forgot to send me off with a Halloween costume, so, I turned my sweater inside out and pretended that was my costume. Kids just went with it lol.
I remember moving away to Iowa from Glouster. Dad had just finished loading the U-Haul and we were preparing for another one of our famous “Dad and Toph cross-country trips”. We had lots of them before and plenty after. No place felt like home until it was time to leave. The neighborhood kids wanted to say goodbye, so, Ashley came down the hill and when she realized we were leaving she started sobbing and reached out her little hand towards me and calling out my name. I was not very happy either. Her Dad picked her up and carried her back up the hill as we closed the U-Haul door.
Anyway, enough about Glouster — I was talking about the weather in Amelia. It’s just like Glouster. ‘Nuff said.
Tonight it’s coding on Tetsuo for the Vulcan variant. I remember posting about how I was gearing up for a rewrite in about September and that things were cooling off at work. Well, they’re finally almost to a point where I can work on my own stuff again on my own time. Even if they weren’t, I’ll take the hit. I have to keep growing. The re-write is going humorously: I waited two months to do the second half of the rewrite, so, I’m coming back to my old code and being like “I have no idea what I was doing here” and having to relearn the approach I was taking and calibrate that to what I needed it to do. I shouldn’t have gone so long with my head out of it before coming back to it, but, I guess that’s better than burning out on it.
Unfortunately, it takes 20 hours to do a full data pull to have the training data I need to work on the piece I’m working on:
Oh – a few weeks back I had a fun police encounter. So, first, I noticed my new challenger wasn’t responding as well as I’d expected considering the engine in there. After some looking around online, it turns out there’s an electronic component in the car that will calibrate to the driving patterns you use, particularly around how the throttle responds– and if you drive like somebody’s grandma too long, it’ll respond like grandma’s car. So, to fix that, I needed to clear that component’s memory out and do a calibration run so it could learn my driving habits rather than the dealerships’ or the previous owners’.
Pull the fuse, let the juice die, plug it back in and it’s good to go for a run.
So it’s 2330 pm, and I’m hauling through the dead Bethel business district flexing in sports mode and getting it used to being revved up a bit and shifting a little harder. It went pretty well. On my way home, I’m going the speed limit, but, I’ve got a mid-muffler delete on this car, and the patrol cop in Bethel thought it was too loud, so he pulls me over.
He says “pulled you over because your exhaust is too loud”. I say “Is that a crime?”. He says “yes”. I ask “how many decibels did you clock me at?”. He says he didn’t. So, I say “Then I don’t think it was a crime, officer”.
He runs my places, and hands my ID back to me. I pull out and head home. So, this guy follows me for another mile, mile and a half, about 50 yards behind me. I’m going the speed limit so he’s not able to pull me over again. Then eventually he turns around as I hit the Amelia area. About another half mile down the road, a Sherriff’s car is behind me, lights and sirens blaring, and he’s on his megaphone saying “PULL OVER, NOW, AND SHUT OFF YOUR ENGINE”. So I comply.
After a little bit of “why are you being so aggressive” with the deputy, it turns out my tires slipped when I pulled out at the first stop, and that patrolman who’d been tailing me reported to dispatch in a manner that falsely gave them the impression that I had “fled the stop while being detained”. So, I tell him to give me my ticket and send me on my way, which he does, and I took it to court — and won. So, now I’m doing followups to get the police behaviour element addressed, because it could have created a serious safety issue unnecessarily by not making competent reports. So that’s my fun police encounter. I’m not touching that fucking exhaust.