Most of my Bowen’s sarcoma removal trip was fun.

Tags

A trip to the VA hospital, Bowen's sarcoma, Cascade Mountains, Driving to Portland, Electrodessication & curretage

Debbie’s and my 3½ hour trip from Bend, Oregon, to Portland was through the beautiful Cascade mountains and the Willamette Valley, and the morning drive was very pleasant. I didn’t think much about our destination and the purpose of the trip, because there wasn’t anything constructive to do except arrive at the right place at the right time. We got to the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital forty-five minutes early, checked in, dawdled around reading and looking out the windows. The view is spectacular, as the hospital is on a hill a couple of hundred feet above downtown Portland; also visible were the snow-capped volcanic mountains which were stark in their pointed beauty. The nurse admitted me into the surgery room right on schedule, and I was back out an hour later. In between those two swingings of that door I lost a few layers of skin on my right anterior shin to electrodessication & curettage.

Everyone was polite, and the nurses who were amiable to conversations and jokes were fun for me to vent my anxieties upon. My medical resident doctor and his supervisor were friendly and very professional in their behavior. After I was lying down and the needling to numb the skin was finished, the scraping began, and after a couple of minutes of missing out on all the fun that was going on below, I asked if I could sit up and watch. I’m glad I did because for me it was fascinating.

I had asked if he was going to use sand paper or a potato peeler to scrape off my sarcoma, but what he was using was a little loop of an instrument that could be used by a sculptor when shaving clay. He did this procedure of shaving, and then painted the shaved area with a pin-pointed pen that exuded a short electrical spark. That electrocuted and killed the remaining carcinoma cells in the area he had just shaved.

I never felt a thing, zero pain, and not the slightest discomfort from anything. The room was just a bit chilly and my nurse asked if I would like a warm blanket. That was very nice, and it made me feel warm and comfortable, emotionally as well as physically. I asked for a Teddy bear, … but he was home for the day. Everything apparently went perfectly, and soon I was out the door having a debriefing from my head nurse.

Debbie was waiting for me and reading in the waiting area with the beautiful view. We decided to have lunch in the University cafeteria, which was quite good, nothing fancy, but good. Then we took a short tour of the campus and over to the sky tram. We decided not to take it down and back, but to get back home to Bend before rush hour traffic began. Unfortunately, Portland rush hour begins on Highway 5 South at 3 pm, so it was a crawl for the first half hour, very much to my chagrin, but as we neared Salem it was up to normal highway speed, and we made it back in time for the Bend First Friday downtown party. We hung out there for an hour and then went home … tired, almost exhausted but hopefully fully repaired.

I hope this carcinoma removal was a happy day for me, but I won’t know for a year.

People say I’m nicer now.

Tags

I help people be happier., My arrogant and sarcastic youth., My human development, People say I'm nicer now.

I have been enjoying life more lately, and especially my social relationships. Several people, maybe more than ten, have actually told me that I’m nicer now than when they met me a few years ago. That is strange because during high school, college, USAF, and my fifty years in Berkeley, the most common comment about my personality was that I was sarcastic and arrogant. I often wondered why people felt that way, because in many ways I was always quite helpful, and if anyone asked me for help, say in moving furniture to a new place, I was always there, and willing to help. All the same when my long-time friend Kevin Langdon, of The Four Sigma Intelligence Test renown, created a popularity test in 1966, which he gave to our group named Channing Club, I rated dead last in popularity. I was a bit shocked because in some ways I was well-respected and always had what everyone acknowledged was the most wonderful girlfriend. That is similar to the current favorite Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who has his pick of women from the Miss Universe contestants. It seems that male arrogance attracts beautiful women. That sounds horribly sexist, and probably disgusts everyone who reads that line, including me, but you’ve got to admit Donald has had beautiful wives and children.

Another example of a poor personality rating happened in the Air Force when I scored top of my class at pilot training school in everything except my instructors’ personality rating of me, where of course I rated dead last. That rating totally screwed up my flying career. When I got out of the Air Force I spent the next decade researching the subject of war, among many other activities, and published Tao and War by Lao-tzu and Sun-tzu in 1977. That book was the touchstone quote for Pamela McCorduck’s best-selling book The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence & Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World, about machines who think. She was the lead celebrity in last year’s Edge.org‘s Question of the year given to scientists. It was wonderful to see her with the lead essay ahead of many scientists whose names you probably know.

That is a background of how people generally thought of me – arrogant, sarcastic and interesting, so it seems strange that here at eighty years old people are suddenly declaring me to be humble and loving. Why the difference? It’s not the Unitarian Universalist church, where I do all sorts of chores whenever there is an opportunity, such as welcoming over a hundred people at the door, and my collecting the offerings, and collecting stones from people for the labyrinth. It’s not the Socrates Cafe club, which is a philosophical conversation group where we attempt to analyze interesting questions, but that doesn’t change one’s personality. It isn’t the Atheists of Central Oregon, which has several sub-groups, all of which I attend. They are very enjoyable to me, and the closest to my old Berkeley key group, the Sunday night  Channing Club and its daily Med Cafe coffee sub-group.

What has changed me is a group I would have avoided almost all my life because I would have thought of it as anti-intellectual and unscientific – The Spiritual Awareness Community (SAC). What I like about this group is that they really do experiments every Sunday afternoon. The experiments are various kinds of emotional explorations into a person’s inner being. A lot of it is spooky, but at the core there is always some strange twist on reality that would make perfect sense to the most careful scientific experiment. The experiments look at true reality, but from a different perspective, and I sit through a lot of mental fog feeling into the unknown unknowns for real meanings, and finding stuff. I write about these findings here in this blog.

Another group I attend has some of the same people as SAC, and it is called The Human Development group. It usually has about fifteen attendees at the weekly meetings, and is made up of older psychiatrists, nurses, teachers, ministers and shamans … and me. We all agree, and each of us has said so many times, this is the greatest group we have ever attended. We get really deep into important psychological issues, problems, and reasons for being, and go away floating on uplifting spiritual air. After a weekly exposure to this situation we have all become nicer people, including me.

We have all fallen in love with each other, with our Earth and Universe!

Yikes! I’m 80 years old today.

Tags

80 years old, A quick photo retrospective

I feel like I am still the same person I was when I was in high school; and the same person in college, in the Air Force, in grad school, in teaching, in business, in my decades in various coffee shops talking, and now. When I think back on my earliest years in grade school, it’s not so much me, but by sixth grade there is no mistaking me for anyone else. I can remember a few marginally outrageous things I did in school that no one but me would have done.

I was so very lucky to have the parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles that I lived with for extended times, that let me behave as I chose. I was a good kid so there was never any discipline, and no guidance; my various guardians and I just did things together. There were some events: One time, about age nine, I caught a snake, and not knowing how to keep it I put it in the bathtub, until my parents got home to help me, and I went out to play. My mom came home before I saw her and while sitting on the toilet she discovered the snake next to her in the bathtub. I wasn’t there, of course, but it must have been exciting. After things calmed down, I was told to turn the snake loose where I found it, but that was as close to punishment as I ever got.

My mother’s parents, dad in white gloves, and mom in a white blouse, and his mother about 1911

My mother Mary Estella Eidemiller + Scamahorn/Johnson as a child holding a doll in 1915.

This is a photo of my mother one hundred years ago. As I was her only child, that doll is symbolically me twenty years before I was born. There’s a family story about her wearing the big hand-me-down boots because the snow was getting in her shoes.

My dad showing me off to my mom’s parents on Christmas 1935

Here I am at 8 months, checking out the world.

The note in my baby book, where these photos came from, said my first word was “doggie,” spoken at age seven months. It’s hard to believe this baby was talking, but it’s clearly checking for something at its level, like a dog.

Charles Scamahorn, age 21 months, inspects Spokane, Washington

I survey the world from the Del Rey apartments.

Charles LeRoy Scamahorn age 3 1/2, April, 1938 in Spokane, Washington

Off to my first day of school at Homedale, Idaho in September 1940. It was a one room 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade. That’s my uncle Glen Eidemiller Jr.

Charles LeRoy Scamahorn, age 24, as a USAF pilot sitting for a portrait in a T-33 jet in Laredo, Texas.

Lt. Scamahorn portrait in jet pilot outfit.

Charles Scamahorn in Berkeley, 2008, watching for space aliens.

Charles Scamahorn, age 73, at the Mediterraneum Cafe in Berkeley, California

Charles Scamahorn, 24 June 2013 – self-portrait at Trump’s coffee shop in Bend, Oregon

The symphony auditorium was full in 2012, we had to sit third row center

Debbie and I have lunch on Pilot Butte hilltop plaza on December 24, 2013, on a warm and windless day.

I’ve had a great life in that I had a good time doing what I wanted to do.

When shouldn’t we help other people?

Tags

Helping others, Personal guilt, Personal policy, Socrates Cafe discussion, When shouldn't we help others?

Our Socrates Cafe discussion group generated seven questions tonight: 1. If the law excludes other people should it be a law? 2. Why does God do bad things to good people? 3. When shouldn’t you help other people? 4. When should I commit suicide? 5. Is truth subjective? 6. What book should I be reading now? 7. A paragraph-long and complex question, read from an outside source, that I couldn’t write down quickly enough to maintain the gist? Our method of voting tied #3 and #4 on the first round where we vote for all the ones we like, and chose #3 on the second round which is a this-or-that vote.

As is our custom the person whose question is chosen gets to talk first and that sets the general tone of the following discussion, which proceeds clockwise, one by one. The current speaker controls interruptions which are kept to fifteen seconds by the chosen general moderator. This format is simple and works well with a group of a dozen or so.

We covered many different situations, from helping homeless beggars, to crazy relatives who are unable to help themselves, to general categories of helping our civil society. Everyone stated their willingness to help other people, but there was a huge hesitancy to helping panhandlers who appeared to be using what money they had to buy alcohol or street drugs. There were specific stories to accompany the many situations, and mention of the current news scandal of several prominent and monetarily successful charities spending over 90% of their takings for personal indulgences.

My comment was that I was hesitant to give money when it will be detrimental to the receiving person’s own ability to take care of themselves. Others said that when they felt the person was lying about their need, they wouldn’t give, and the test of lying was that they were verbally justifying their need instead of confronting it. There was a discussion of compassion fatigue, and that a small gift wasn’t going to help a major problem, so why bother. Those who had lived in big cities like San Francisco seemed particularly inclined to the burnout attitude. We considered the philosophical trolley problem of choosing to kill one person to save five others, but this hit a wall instantly, because by pulling the control switch you caused a person to die and that act made you into a murderer, whereas just letting things take their course just left you feeling bad. We got into the idea of hurting no one, and helping as many as possible. Strangely that brought us around to the fact that by giving money or your possessions you were hurting yourself. We turned to Mother Teresa’s ideas of giving for help, but it seemed like an insufficient phony help because the tiny gifts were only symbolic and really didn’t help anyone, and only confirmed and entrenched their poverty and need. It was said that the most help a person could give to the truly indigent was spiritual help, but that seemed to be simply helping the person to continue digging themselves into a deeper pit of poverty. We worried over the problem of whether we should give to people who didn’t ask for help, because we were invading their privacy and violating their self-esteem.

At the end, while still on the staircase and out the door we decided — Don’t help others if it hurts anyone, thus don’t help if it hurts you, don’t help if it hurts them, and don’t help if it hurts the health of society.

How do we identify wisdom?

Tags

Condensed thoughts, Socrates Cafe, What is wisdom?, Wisdom

Our Socrates Cafe question was “How could we identify wisdom?” and we covered many aspects and variations of that problem for two hours. The opening salvo began with the Biblical quotation “Get wisdom and with all thy getting get understanding,” Proverbs – 4-7. This isn’t a religious discussion group, but that was a logical beginning, and Coleridge’s “Wisdom is common sense to an uncommon degree” quickly flew by, Buddha’s Four Cardinal Virtues were mentioned, and a definition was read off an internet dictionary. We sought on for the basis of how we could know wisdom, and most agreed that it could be seen in hindsight as having consistently gotten good results out of seemingly very difficult and confusing situations. Just having a good outcome in a specific situation might be simple luck, and thus “Wisdom oft comes from the mouth of babes” was discounted.

We felt that the individual consciousness was critically involved in who we saw as possessing wisdom, because it was an active and ongoing process kind of thing. There was the hindsight versus foresight problem, and how can we know whom to follow, when we know that we do not know the best way forward. To which, all else being equal, it seemed best to go with a record of successful accomplishment in similar situations. But, there reared the concept of confirmation bias, and the distortions our own minds would insert into a clear decision-making process. Did a situation call for a life-smart kind of person, or one of considerable book learning? Did the problem to be coped with need intelligence, or courage, or experience or leadership?

Wisdom becomes a difficult thing to define, and to choose, and to follow. Typically it’s the person shouting the loudest who claims leadership, but they are clearly functioning from prejudice and performing with bigotry, and following them will often bring us to disaster. Yet, the person who over-thinks the problem will be crippled by doublethink and doubts, and lack of decisive action, and that too will lead to disaster. Perhaps the Classic Greeks had the best answer, and that was to pursue all of the functional options through the planning stage, and if a best one couldn’t be decided upon, to then consult the Delphi Oracle. Then the Gods would speak, and say what must be done. Then the doubter could proceed with utmost confidence, vigor, and enthusiasm because the Gods were with him.

We had a round robin on the question, “Have we, as an individual, had an experience of personal wisdom?” I spoke of my encounter last week with the garden gnome Samumpsickle, and after realizing that my requests for improvement inevitably had a serious downside, I ended with, “Let the world progress as it was going to do without my suggestions or his help.”

We did end with a few generalizations, such as “It’s not enough to be right, if your actions end in disaster,” “Ignorance leads one into bondage, and wisdom gives one freedom of action,” “Wisdom brings calmness and the ability to generate kindness.” It ended with,

Wisdom is the ability to find the exact thing that will make a difference, and the ability to propagate it virally.

September 2011 – Probaway.wordpress.com – web posts

Tags

Probaway Monthly List September 2011

Here are the posts published in September 2011 on probaway.wordpress.com:

1. Computer failure due to dust accumulation. Fixed.

2. Congratulations to Debbie Foster, from The New Yorker

3. Zeroscaping your life will make you more successful.

4. Chandra Smith presents Native American ritual at the Bend UU

5. Pushing the fat man off the bridge to save five other people.

6. Microstyle by Christopher Johnson – a book review

7. Creating The EarthArk is the most moral thing humanity can do.

8. My computer-failure repair was a failure. This is a new computer.

9. Every T. Rex needs a more personalized name.

10. Party time in Berkeley

11. A trick for opening a ziplock bag.

12. Berkeley and People’s Park are a tribute to Michael Delacour.

13. Berkeley, CA and the Mediterraneum Cafe

14. Too many super rich people

15. Berkeley is a wonderful place to live.

16. Finger cuts are avoided with a little tape.

17. Save the Hubble space telescope by selling it or auctioning it.

18. Fancy cars are now in the recent wilderness.

19. Easy living in South Lake Tahoe, California

20. Measuring the speed of cars on the highway.

21. Transferring hard drive data to my new computer

22. The SATA to USB transfer cable didn’t work.

23. Photographs of flowers in Bend, Oregon – Xeriscaping

24. Women should choose their mates for their abilities.

25. My stye in my eye needs my looking into it.

26. Copper is becoming scarcer but is essential to modern civilization.

27. Flowers near my home in Bend, Oregon

28. Ignite Bend is a local tradition of speaking up on something important.

29. Ed Endsley – photographer opening show in Bend, Oregon

30. A prayer for weight control helps.

Making sex unpleasant would halt the population explosion.

Tags

Controling human population, Good humor is not good policy., Human population reduction., Making sex unpleasant, Population explosion

I made what I thought was a funny offhand comment a few weeks ago that has stuck with me like an imprinted goose. My Socrates Cafe group was discussing the world’s problems caused by too much pollution like CO2. I asserted that the population explosion was the main cause of the problem because it brought us from two billion people in 1925 to seven billion in 2013, and the population is presently growing at seventy million per year. My argument was that a ten percent reduction in personal pollution, as was being proposed by the authorities, would be swallowed up in a year or two by population growth, and increased expectations of consumption by those living people. With world population growing at seventy million people per year, every one of those new millions needs new housing, a continuing new food supply, and everything else needed to live for their expected seventy years of life.

Everyone seems shocked when I talk that way, even though it seems obvious the population can’t keep doubling every forty years forever, especially when it is not an arithmetic growth but a geometric one. Malthus was obviously wrong! Everyone seems to believe that, because we are now living with a seven times larger population than the less than one billion he was talking about back in 1800. I say “No, to that simplistic statement.”; human science and exploitation of natural resources have just grown faster than population, and natural resources that allowed our growth are one-time-use things like coal and clean atmosphere, but they are being used up, and the greater the population the sooner they will be gone. When they are gone the existing population will be forced by nature to get along without them, or reduce its numbers. Technology will save us, it always has! But here too, there is some limit, because there is not an infinite number of ways to improve things.

That was the tenor of the conversation, and various suggestions for reducing population were discussed, but all of the solutions seemed to be too little, too late, even if they could be implemented – which they can’t. On average people like the process of having children, because it is bred into our DNA to reproduce, and to enjoying reproducing maximally. The human situation is temporarily different from all other species, because we can see the problems associated with unlimited population growth. It was about that time in the conversation that I suggested a possible solution to the population explosion; it was to make sexual intercourse unpleasant. That met with howls of derisive laughter, as I intended it should, but the downside for me has been the mostly good-humored resurgence of that comment in many other situations. It seems no one likes the idea, but on the other hand if a pill could be created that would bring about that effect, then a controlled population decline would occur, and that seems better than the alternatives of war, famine and pestilence, and the death of vast numbers of innocent people.

I like humor, and “Make sex unpleasant” is a good quip because of its obvious functionality, but utter unpopularity.

March 2008 – Probaway.wordpress.com – web posts

Tags

Probaway Monthly List March 2008

Here are the posts published in March 2008 on probaway.wordpress.com:

1. I posted some Photos around El Cerrito BART station to Flicker.
2. More on Preparations for humanity’s survival.
3. Energy trends and technologies by Steven Koonin
4. El Cerrito BART bike trail.
5. Humanity’s survival with a population of 10,000 people.
6. View of Cal Berkeley Campus from the downtown penthouse.
7. Humanity’s survival with a population of 1 million people.
8. Combining the power of Google, Google Maps and published photos.
9. A quiet day.
10. “Breaking Bad” – Is the best TV – ever!
11. A day at the Cafe Med. – A coffee shop in Berkeley.
12. Fat, Fatter, Fattest! – The regulation of Energy Balance.
13. RFID = Ubiquitous identification of you and your stuff.
14. Another day. – Another trip to the Cafe Med.
15. Storm clouds over Berkeley.
16. FREE – What, if anything, is worth anything?
17. More FREE stuff. – What, if anything, is worth anything?
18. Is anything FREE? Doesn’t everything cost something?
19. FREE – The cult of the amateur worker.
20. More FREE stuff. – MORE FREE STUFF ! ! !
21. Microsoft – HealthVault is for personalizable health control.
22. John Adams – The mini-series part 2.
23. Humanity’s survival with a population of 100 million people.
24. Humanity’s survival with a population of 100 million people. part 2
25. Humanity’s survival after a disaster of a billion deaths.
26. Lifehavens for humanity. 10 survival caves with 1,000 people each.
27. Lifehavens – Survival caves for humanity.
28. Another walk to the Med cafe.
29. Marin County Library book sale.
30. Humanity’s survival after a disaster leaving 1 million people.
31. Type 2 Diabetes – Causes and cures.

Without Free Speech you have no rights at all.

Tags

Civil Rights, Freedom of Speech

I attended a large group discussion of American social advancement of the last several decades; the guest speaker was a young adult, about age 22. She was bemoaning the lack of social progress and was claiming, as fact, that the various rights movements were in poorer condition than they had been before those similar movements of the 1960s. She was implying that the Women’s Rights movement had retreated to an even worse place, as had all of the other people’s rights movements.

An older woman about age 90 spoke up during the response period, and carried on in a similar vein about the unnecessary social disruption, chaos and violence of the 1960s period. Those women consider themselves social activists, they do support the present movements, and they are among the more outspoken of the local supporters of social change. I must leave the specifics of names and organizations out of this, because until they are speaking in a clearly public place it is their right to remain private. These are, and should be considered, private conversations, but their ideas are public.

When my turn came to speak, I admitted that the struggle continues, but to maintain freedom is a continuing struggle. I asserted that the progress toward greater personal freedom during my lifetime had been tremendous. For example, it is inconceivable that I could have hung a rainbow Gay Rights flag on the front of a church in 1955 without a violent response. I had done exactly that less than an hour before. It was impossible for a woman to get a legal abortion, even for a pregnancy created by a rape, at that earlier time. It was almost impossible to purchase contraceptives at that time, condoms were only for disease prevention. And progress is similar with many other social issues now considered natural rights in this country, but not in others. Of course there are still groups of people condemned for their private beliefs, such as non-theists and atheists.

I mentioned the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley, of which I was a modest participant, where we were demanding the right to speak publicly in the open plaza in front of the Student Union building. That movement was violently suppressed by the University of California, and many people were arrested. There were thousands of people involved in supporting the right to speak publicly in those campus open areas. There was virtually no violence against the authorities, even though these thousands of students were repeatedly bullied and tear gassed.

One day, I had been in Sproul Hall on business, and was told the building was being evacuated, so I walked out the main door and a minute later was standing thirty yards to the right of Ludwig’s water fountain, seen in the photo below, behind police lines, talking to the captain in charge of the whole event. He was in a gas mask, and yelling at me to get out of there fast. That was a bit strange because it was quiet and there were very few people in the normally busy plaza.

I left immediately and was three-and-a-half blocks away standing at the Mediterraneum Cafe counter getting coffee when that infamous gassing took place, and the photo below was made. It was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free speech. All that was being requested was the right to speak in public and to hand out flyers on this publicly owned plaza. The media and the Governor made it into a bizarre spectacle.

This is obviously not a riot, and if not, why is a helicopter spraying tear gas on the students? Notice the coed walking with a purse, another standing with her dog, and Ludwig the hound standing in his water fountain. Those running are clearly running from the obviously questionable intent of the helicopter. It was either on fire and crashing or spraying them like noxious insects. It was the latter.

Sometimes it takes some level of commitment to enforce one’s legal rights, and eventually the University did acknowledge the right of Free Speech, and now there are often card tables in that plaza with kids from all over the world behind them handing out literature. That freedom would still be condemned in their homelands, but they can now do it here. Freedom of speech isn’t free! But we have some rights now because of the absurdity of this event, and progress is still being made. There will always be social issues to be contested, but without free speech they cannot be improved or resolved.

Without free speech there is not even the possibility of those other rights.

A typical Bend, Oregon, Sunday for me.

Tags

A quiet day, Bend, Dudleys' bookshop, Indian Day of the Dead, Old Stone Church, Oregon

Today, I went to the UU church service in the Old Stone Church.

The Old Stone Church on Franklin Street, Bend, Oregon. Shot in HDR mode. Click BIG

Typically about a hundred people show up to these meetings, and I like to get there early and help set up the tables and arrange the chairs, and stand at the door and greet people. It’s light work, that’s fun and useful, and gives me a chance to practice my self training of being kind to people. The events today were a bit unusual as it was a performance for El Dia Del Muerte, (Day of the Dead) presented by some American Indians.

The altar arrangement which was used in the ceremonies. Shot in graphic outline mode.

There was plenty of Indian-style dancing and verbal ceremony, but out of respect for their personal rights I didn’t photograph that. After the service I walked over to Dudley’s bookshop – cafe.

Dudley’s bookshop and cafe in downtown Bend, Oregon. Shot HDR mode

There is a picture of Dudley the dog on the door. He still occasionally comes by His place. I met Debbie here, and while she was reading I talked animatedly for an hour with H. about my theory of how humanity was created by talking women selecting the best men for their mates. The men they chose had the qualities we now call human. Later Debbie and I went for an evening stroll.

An arrangement of wordless warning signs and fall vegetation. Shot in graphic outline

The graphic outline mode in my Sony CyberShot DSC – 150 has some interesting features which are fun to play with. Generally, I like straight photography, but some of these features add a visual excitement to an otherwise bland subject.

Purple fall leaves and a grey wooden fence. Shot in graphic outline mode.

This grey fence takes on a strange quality of isolating an apparently impenetrable woods from who knows what? Us? I don’t know, but it looks morbidly pretty.

A mailbox standing on its nose. Shot in graphic outline mode.

Why has this mailbox has been standing like this for a couple of weeks?

A cross reflected in a rain puddle, beside an alternate route.

These last photos were taken on a short after sunset walk around my neighborhood. It was a fine day. We lived and lived and nothing happened.