Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

My last two journal entries were both about things I recently
posted at my “site”on The Well.  This one isn't.

This is to let you know about a couple of mishaps I've had lately: I fell down.  Twice.

The first time, I was a on a ladder in my living room, and then a twinge caused me to lose my balance, and then I was lying on the floor, on my side.  I decided not to use that ladder
again.  And I went on about my life, more or less normally, for two weeks.

Yesterday, I fell down again.  The culprit this time was some slippery outdoor stairs.  I ended up in a remarkably similar position—lying on my side—only on wet ground.

I took more drastic action this time: was seen at the doctor's office the same day.  Got X-rayed, confirmed an absence of any fractures, not even the “hairline” kind.  Wheels
were set in motion to get me into physical therapy.

This didn't come out of nowhere: a month and a half ago, I told my doctor about an increase in lower back pain.  What I didn't understand, then, was that such an increase is often gradual … until it isn't.  One day, you try a movement you've done before, but this time, the muscles (joints, whatever) can't handle it.  So: twinge of pain, spasm, fall down go boom.

No physical therapist yet, but I will claim already to have heightened powers of observation, with early indications that this may help the situation going forward.

This is what is known as a growth opportunity.
 

I really, really don't like summer.  Not in any of the places that I've lived since I left graduate school in 1972, at any rate.  All of those places have been in the Eastern time zone of the USA, and you will note that I now have completed fifty-one years of not liking summer.

What don't I like about it?  The weather, obviously.  The heat, and the humidity.  That's what you get in the eastern US.  Okay, bits of New England are partial exceptions, but still.

Would I be happier in a place like New Mexico, where it gets pretty hot but is always much less humid?  A few years back, I thought so.  I spent a non-trivial amount of time there, most recently in August of 2019, for the purpose of testing that hypothesis.  And what was my conclusion?

Strictly speaking, I suppose I would be happier there, weather-wise.  But not enough so.  I could conceivably still decide to move there, but, since that last trip, any real enthusiasm for the idea has pretty much evaporated.  Like summertime rain there: at times, you can see rain in the sky above you, but it doesn't reach the ground.

For that matter, my history of trying to escape from typical Eastern summers goes further back than that.  It was a big part of the motivation for the last move I actually did make: from the Raleigh area (in the region of North Carolina known as the Piedmont) to the Ashville area (in the western mountains of the same state).  It's the same story: I do like the summer weather here better than I did there, but not nearly enough so to make me glad when the summer begins.

In short, I really don't like summer.

It has come to my attention, however, that not everyone feels the same way.  There are even some, bless their strange little hearts, who enjoy what it's like in summer even in a place like Raleigh.

I invite you to tell us how you feel about summer weather.  About summers where you live, or — if so moved — about those in some other place you've been.

Back on March 18, I promised you [yet] another installment of my so-called "holiday newsletter."  I said that it would continue to talk about my interactions with people, moving the focus to social media (and Dreamwidth, in particular).  So here goes.

As it turns out, March 18 is not the date of my most recent journal entry before today's.  On May 13, I posted "Everybody wants a piece of me, I guess".  That's a silly title for a posting whose actual purpose was to let readers know that I had had hernia surgery two days earlier.

And that May 13 posting is a perfect example of what this journal entry is supposed to be about: how (e.g.) Dreamwidth could be an effective tool in strengthening the bonds between (e.g.) me and the people I care about.

You see, even for an extreme introvert like me, there are rather a lot of such people.  People who might like to know when I have something like a hernia operation.  Enough of them so that, in my weakened state two days after the surgery, it was not feasible to email, or call, all of them.

By posting it on Dreamwidth, I made it theoretically possible that they all would learn about it.  But of course that didn't actually happen; to the best of my knowledge, nobody actually found out about the surgery through that medium alone.  Why not?  Because very few people check my journal often enough for it to serve that purpose.

To the limited extent that that is anyone's "fault," it's mine.  The root problem is that I don't post often enough.

On the other hand, I might post more often if I knew that more people were checking.

So here's my plan: after posting this entry, I will begin a two-pronged effort.  An effort to post more often, and, concurrently, a "marketing" effort.  I will contact a collection of people who might be willing to experiment with checking my Dreamwidth more often … and who then might continue to do so, if I keep up my end of the bargain, and post more often—particularly, with "news items" that my friends and relatives might want to know.

My diabolical plan is more complicated than that.  But this journal entry is—as almost always—already quite long enough.  I will finish by inviting you, if you feel like it, to play a guessing game.  Namely, about the series of journal entries of which this one is the third: can you figure out what their content has to do with the phrase with which I titled them, namely, "Holiday Newsletter"?

Okay, here's the long-promised continuation of my so-called "holiday newsletter."  First, a follow-up note to the first section, "computer programming," of the previous post: I finished several improvements to the Clojure code which calculates my income taxes, and got my federal and North Carolina returns filed.

What I promised for the continuation was some information about social interaction.

Background: I lead a pretty solitary life.  Not a surprise: computer programming and writing are both mostly solitary activities, and I spend so much time on them, by choice, that there's relatively little left for real-time interaction with other humans.

Too little, in fact.  And I am making that judgment, not on the basis of any general belief about how people "ought" to live, but on observation of myself.  Sometimes I "go with the flow" for an extended period while programming and/or writing, and end up in a tense state, all tied up in knots.

It took me a long time to realize that I was (often) getting tense because I had been solitary for too long.  But eventually I noticed something: not infrequently, if something led me to take "time out" from my "work," and spend an hour or two chatting informally with someone, I felt better—specifically, less tense—afterwards.  In fact, it finally sunk in, that would often enable me to go back to "work" more cheerfully … and do better at it.

Once I became conscious of this, I did something about it.  Actually, I became more consistent in something I was already doing … without consciously realizing why.  Since I saw that I didn't spontaneously devote enough time to social interaction, I started planning it.

This has evolved to the point where, currently, there are three people with whom I have scheduled weekly conversations.  The nature of the conversations is not so very different from ones that might occur without prearrangement.  But when two people agree in advance to talk at a particular time, then it happens more often.  For me, and these three friends, at least.

I am very grateful to these people.  With their help, I like to say, I have managed to turn myself from a "ridiculously extreme introvert" into a [merely] "extreme introvert."

There's room for improvement.  Not necessarily more of the same modality, though I don't rule that out.  I've been thinking about my use of Internet "social media" (such as Dreamwidth itself).

There are some limitations, pretty much built in, as to how personally meaningful—how deep, if you will—such interactions tend to be.  But perhaps, if folks figure out how, those limitations can be largely overcome.  I hope to say more about this, soon, in another journal entry.

I'm getting ready to move.  That's going to take a while; It's not at all certain that I'll even be ready by spring.  There's a serious need to lighten my load: you know, get rid of stuff.

Move … where?  My most recent truly personal journal entry, posted on September 11, was shortly after my return from a trip to New Mexico, which trip was undertaken because I was thinking of moving there.  In that entry, I expressed some uncertainty as to whether I was going to go through with that plan.

Now?  I'm leaning towards it.  Does that mean that all of my doubts and concerns have been completely overcome?  No.  But I've come around, pretty much, to the view that the only way to be certain that it's the right place for me is to try it and see.

About the "pretty much" part: my view of the decision-making process is that you can't claim to have finished it — to have truly decided — until you've taken some action that commits you to the plan.  And, for better and for worse, there's really no occasion for that now: the process of getting ready is not yet at the stage where anything I need to do depends on the destination.

That earlier journal entry didn't give a clear and complete picture of what the "doubts and concerns" — the uncertainties about New Mexico as my new home — actually were.  And I still can't do that.  But if I say a few words about one of them, that may give you more of the flavor of what the overall decision process is like.

So, let's talk about the weather.

A big part of my motivation for wanting to move, somewhere, is that I really don't like the hot and humid summer weather in North Carolina.  I knew, before the trip, that in New Mexico, you almost never get the "humid" part … and that, as a result, it tends to cool down more, and faster, in the evenings.  But it still can get hot in the daytime.

I deliberately made the trip around the hottest time of year, in order to see whether I could be comfortable with that weather pattern.  And that, indeed, was my first, and biggest, source of doubt, when the trip was over.  No question that I prefer the weather in New Mexico to that in North Carolina.  But I asked myself: if I'm going to go to the trouble of moving, should I perhaps refuse to compromise, and instead pick a destination which fits my weather preferences more exactly?

Maybe I should.  But, as I indicated earlier, I now lean in the other direction: toward acting on the assumption that I can't really know the answer to that question unless I actually do go and live there for a year or so.

Why?

If I answered that question thoroughly, it would take so long that you'd fall asleep before you finished reading this (if you haven't already).  One obvious piece of the answer, and a clue as to why it would take so long to be thorough, is that weather isn't everything.

But even confining ourselves to the subject of weather, I just don't think that I have enough data to make a final decision.  Another factor quite relevant to how I'll feel about it after a whole year: how long is the period when it's too hot for me?  If it's not too long, then maybe I'll be happy with just making behavioral adjustments during that period: slow down some, overall.  Take a siesta: already a somehat attractive idea, and the more so the older I get (right now, I'm seventy-three).  And, during the hottest few weeks, don't spend too much time outdoors in the middle of the day.

That last bit can get tricky.  It will help a lot … provided that you can spend those hours in the right kind of indoor space, in which the heat doesn't affect you too much.  (And, to make it more difficult, I strongly prefer that this be accomplished by means other than air conditioning.)

In other words, a lot depends on the sort of building in which you live.

You want to close the windows in the heat of day, and open them in the evening and overnight.  And for this to be effective, you need "through ventilation": openable windows on (at least) two opposite sides of the building.  Electric fans are important, too, during both parts of the daily cycle.

A further note on through ventilation: this is so important that it (or, rather, the lack of it) almost single-handedly ruins the chances of making an informed decision on the basis of a trip like the one I made last summer: a two-week visit to the state … in which one is staying at hotels.  Because, you see, "through ventilation" is something that American hotel rooms hardly ever have.  (This may have some relation to the fact that they almost always do have air conditioning.)

One additional important architectural feature: thick walls, made of a material with a considerable capacity to store heat.  When combined with the sizeable difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures, these give you the ability to fine-tune the indoor temperature, by learning when to open and close the windows.

There's more than one way to design a building with those properties.  One of the most effective ways, though, "just happens" to be the building method that's also the most long-established in New Mexico.  It's called adobe.

It has to be real adobe, though.  Santa Fe, specifically, has a building code which requires that practically all buildings look like they're made of adobe.  But the great majority of the resulting buildings are what is known as "fauxdobe" … and that isn't worth squat when it comes to keeping the indoors cool without AC.

And that — surprise! — is a good place for me to switch topics, at least partially.  The new focus: assuming that I do move to New Mexico, then where, more specifically?  To what local area within the state?

The previous post listed the three towns that I spent time in, during last summer's trip: Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Taos.  Each of those is roughly in the northeast quarter of the state.  And I am still operating on the assumption that I will choose one of those three.

(A reminder: if you've only heard of one place called Las Vegas, it's probably the one in Nevada.  That's not the one I'm referring to here.)

And now I'm in a position to tell you that Santa Fe, probably the best known (and largest) of the three, has fallen to the bottom of my list.

One major reason for this is that Santa Fe — and, specifically, housing in Santa Fe — is a lot more expensive.  But there's more to it than that.

The new leading candidate is Las Vegas, which is probably the least expensive of the three.  But more importantly, I think: it seems more like a community.

(Taos, definitely still a possibility, is somewhere in the middle, in several respects.)

Why does Las Vegas feel more like a community?  I can't say for sure; I just felt that way, hanging out there.  Here are a couple of things that may have something to do with it.

The distribution of the population by age seems to be wider, and more balanced.  I saw proportionately more teenagers and young adults.  Santa Fe skews older: a lot of people have gone there to retire.  (Yes, I would count as one of those.  But still.)

Santa Fe also skews richer, and that, too, feels like a point in Las Vegas' favor.  I'm pretty sure I could afford to live in Santa Fe; I just no longer feel so much as if I would want to.  It's as if people in Santa Fe are into striving to be special, while people in Las Vegas are … just folks.

And now I can circle back to the matter of weather, and the housing best adapted to it.  Of the places under consideration, Las Vegas (or so I perceive) is the one where it would be easiest to find and rent a dwelling made of real adobe.  (Partly because I wouldn't have to sift through all those fake ones.)

In fact, the distinction between real and fake adobe could stand as a symbol for the broader cultural differences between Las Vegas and Santa Fe.  If I wanted to be snarky, I could say: If you live in Las Vegas, you live in New Mexico.  If you live in Santa Fe, you live in a theme park about New Mexico.

And there's more!  According to one of my Las Vegas informants, most of the city's real adobe houses are in that part of town which has the largest proportion of Spanish-surnamed residents.  (Not surprising: those folks would be more aware of the advantages, since their people have lived in New Mexico much longer than the Anglos have.)

So, as a bonus, I might pick up a little more of the language.  If one wants to become a New Mexican, that has to count for something, verdad?