V's wife M and daughter G used to watch me and my sister after school before we got old enough to be latch key kids.

Some nights, my sister and I would eat dinner there. Some of those dinners M would make liver for V and something else for everyone else. I remember how tasty the liver looked and at first I was surprised how awful the liver tasted.

Young me thought it was so cool that this man liked something that was so repulsive. So I kept trying liver thinking to myself, "maybe this time will be different". It never was.

Years later when I was mostly living on my own and broke and working in a nursing home, the only meal I would have for the day was whatever they were serving the residents because we could buy the same meal for 1$. And the first time they had liver, I thought "oh, no".

But then I tasted it and wondered why other people thought it was disgusting.

I didn't remember about V liking liver until just now when I heard news of his death.

Looks like I'll be leaving the DMV. I don't know exactly when. I'm currently scoping out apartments in Baltimore. Good gourd is Baltimore cheaper.

The purpose of the move is to be closer to Irene. I have never before felt about a woman the way I feel about her.

I still have to work out the job details. I'm fairly confident that my present employer will allow me to telework close to 100% of the time. If not, I can deal with the train for a few months while I find something else.

On black Friday, I have an appointment with a serious bike fitter. Odds are good that I'm going to have a custom tri bike built. Odds are also good that this bike will be made of bamboo. I'm going to drop far too much money on it.

The fitter is already trying to talk me out of bamboo. For long course triathlon, being aerodynamic is far more important than having low weight. And you can't make shape bamboo to be as aero as you can carbon fiber.

But I'm never going to be competitive. I do tris to have fun. And having the slickest, coolest bike on the course that turns everyone's head will be a lot more fan than the couple of minutes I save on the bike course from being more perfectly aero.

A new bike is motivated by how The Bride of Frankenbike let me down at Savageman. There's one point on that course (The Westernport Wall) where a relatively short hill exceeds a 30% grade. Racers that get all the way up that hill without stopping or falling over get their name on a brick that gets set into the street at the top of the hill. I missed getting a brick by about 10 yards. I just couldn't keep The Bride's front wheel down. It kept popping up and I was wobbling all over.

On a longer hill (Killer Miller) where the grade averages 20% over the course of about a mile, I had a bit of the same issue but not as bad. I didn't have to stop until I reached the top and that was only because I had to pee.

Nevertheless, it's time for a new bike.

Irene and I went down to the Phillips Collection this past weekend. One of the rotating exhibits they had was on Les Nabis, mostly Édouard Vuillard.

I was pretty struck by the artwork. The main subjects of most pieces kind of faded into the background while the background leapt into the foreground, creating the illusion that the subjects of the work were fading into nothingness. There was a lot of ambiguity and a lot of play with lighting and color.

It reminded me of a paper I did on nonsense in Wittgenstein years ago. Many scholars of Wittgenstein have what's called the "austere" position that in Wittgenstein's writing nonsense is just literally making no sense and that's all there is to say about it. Once something makes no sense, you can't even really talk about it because you're not making sense.

But it seems to me that at the very least, nonsense has two poles and comes in degrees. At one pole, things don't make sense because they are overloaded with multiple meanings. I wouldn't say that they make too much sense. But it is probably fair to say that they have too many meanings. The upshot being that at that pole, there is an ambiguity with the world of possible meanings.

At the other pole, things stop making sense when they don't have enough meaning. They fade into a dim background where there is just no meaning to be had at all. Things of this sort have a different type of ambiguity. The beholder can project any meaning they like because the space is so empty. Of lot of the work of Les Nabis reminded me of that sort of nonsense. It was delightful and beautiful.

I pointed out a race condition in a cow-orker's logic last week. His response was "yeah, it's all good, it works".

So I explained in more detail how things could go wrong and records that shouldn't be updated might get updated.

I don't know if he understood. He didn't seem to care. I certainly no longer care.

THen less than half an hour later another cow-orker asked me about how it was possible that certain records were updated. I started off by asking him if he knew what a race condition was. There is a different longstanding race condition in part of our code that I pointed out to the dev team, to management, to the then company owner years ago.

The official response was for me to help tune the database so the process runs more efficiently and narrow the window during which the race condition can obtain.

I no longer care.

I wrote an apology letter to an aunt of mine recently. I said some pretty harsh things on the Book of Faces in a way that vaguely called her out. All the things I said were true. But I feel bad that said them with the specific intent to hurt her feelings.

I don't regret what I said at all.

I do feel bad that I said words with the intent to wound. That's part of myself I don't like very much. It's something I need to work on.

So I wrote her an apology.