tech problem and other miscellania

Monday when I went out to cover a few things in advance of the hard freeze tonight this white iris was blooming confused by the unseasonably warm weather earlier.

This morning my iPhone was functioning perfectly. I turned it off to go clean up the kitchen after breakfast and then thought of a text I wanted to send my neighbor first. Turned the phone back on and now I’m getting a SIM failure message. Instead of showing wi-fi at the top it shows SOS. So I did a search of possible causes and fixes. Restart didn’t work. Other possible causes is damaged SIM card or dirty SIM card tray which seem unlikely since it was working less than a minute previous. Software is updated. Check for carrier setting updates. So I went to setting and to cellular and there are no settings. Instead the screen says ‘set up cellular’. WTF? I can migrate the settings from Marc’s phone but that would also migrate his phone number. I don’t want his phone number. Right now I trying to get my long dead old phone to charge enough to see if I can migrate the settings from it to my new one. If that can’t work I guess I have to call Verizon and see if they dropped my phone number off our service. So right now my phone is a very expensive paperweight (didn't work, OS on old phone too old). Any advice on what happened and what to do will be appreciated.

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I was looking over the text edit page I compose on. I’m in the habit of jotting down thoughts or paragraphs for posts and most don’t ever go any further. So here’s five random musings:

Aging is weird and weird things happen to your body...the wrinkles and creases on your face, the crepey skin, every scar you ever had that faded shows up again, weird scaly patches and dark spots from sun exposure, wrinkles on other parts of your body that look like those sandstone canyons in Utah, whiskers on women, weird pains that just zap you and then go away, and rogue eyebrow hairs that just keep growing.

The weather is beautiful; days sunny and warm with cool, clear, star-filled Milky Way nights. Up at dawn, quiet contemplation before breakfast and breaking camp. Finally we are loaded and I push off with a sigh as I feel the first tug of the current pulling us into the river, carrying us on through the quiet beauty of the canyons. We are in no hurry as we quietly dip our paddles in the river. We come upon a blue heron at the river's edge and it spreads its wings and flies downriver as we approach. Again and again we chase the heron downstream until it reaches the end of its territory and turns back flying over us upriver.

I was listening to a segment on NPR this evening about language and art, neanderthal vs modern human which still painted neanderthals as somehow less than equivalent to us, the modern human. Everything we think we know about the abilities and capabilities and cultural expressions of neanderthals is viewed through the lens of homo sapiens superiority. Here's another interpretation…modern humans, a more violent and warlike species emerges and commits genocide against a successful peaceful thriving culturally rich population even as they interbreed with them. We can't even coexist with the different variations of our own race much less affording another human race equality.

I've always been a science fiction fan and I've read many books about possible futures on earth and the ones that horrified me the most were the ones where we made the surface uninhabitable and humanity went underground in order to survive, never breathing fresh air, never seeing the stars or a planet teeming with life of all kinds, living like tunnel rats. Doesn't seem so impossible anymore. How sad is that?

I don’t consider myself an atheist, neither do I consider myself a theist, not in the traditional understanding of those words. What I think is that we are incapable of understanding or knowing the totality, however smart we think we are, anymore than a cell in our body can know the totality of where it exists. We are a cell in a body and that body is the universe. Treat every part of creation as if it were you because it is. 

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And last, here’s something I read this morning on SM while having breakfast:

OP: Attention dog owners! Serious question! After letting your dog(s) out, do you wipe them every single time when they come in? I’ve got a serious ick about it and there has to be a sane solution.

Commenter: Their BUTT? are you being serious rn? I have never ever in 50 years wiped my dogs ass and I promise on sweet fat baby Jesus I won’t be in any future.

OP: I’m talking about paws..

I laughed so fucking hard I almost fell out of my chair. (And I have to admit that wiping the dog’s butt was what popped into my mind too.)