Fathers' Day: No-contact families

According to Psychology Today

...No-Contact Families Are Becoming a New Norm

While many people experience a nurturing and loving childhood, others aren't so lucky.

When people grow up, they may choose to limit or cut off contact with their family for many reasons.

Neglect or abuse, unresolved conflicts, betrayals, and different values are some leading sources of tension. 

 Toxic and abusive parenting is a common cause of estranged children

A sample paragraph

“…I had a generally happy childhood. Then, in 2016, they (my parents) started going further and further to the right (coincidentally(?) the year Trump was elected the first time) and getting drawn into conspiracies until they finally moved to a different state completely for ‘freedom,’” shares a Reddit user, “We simply no longer have the same values or beliefs. I will not let my own children be around them unsupervised once I heard them call COVID a Chinese conspiracy.”  Source

My take on the no-contact phenomena is much more upbeat

A period of no-contact is a natural and healthy developmental stage that many, perhaps most adult children go through. There does not need to be a victim. There does not need to be an oppressor. It Just Happens.

All four of my kids went through (or are going through) this phase. This is not a problem. Even Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness at the start of his ministry.

The strength of parental bonds (even if you were only a so-so parent, more-so if you were an involved parent) warps the time-and-space that the young adult child moves through. The shock of leaving college and re-entering the hurly-burly of the real world can be a real challenge.

They need space to navigate in their new life. Frankly, they need less "noise" as they sort through their "friends" and new-values and the challenges of their new, Darwinian environment. They have to reconcile what they were taught was "reality" in college with the reality they encounter after college.

Parental input jangles their thinking and they ask "Are these echoes of my parents yakking at me or are my evolving values and emotions authentically mine?" Then there is the issue of them automatically defending their choices even when they have hidden doubts about them. They need to decide if Billie or Krystell is a bad friend on their own. Your objections will only muddy the water.

Some kids have a low-drama, surgically clean break while they "find themselves". Others get trapped in a push-pull situation where they want some things (money, affirmation, watch their pet when they go on vacation) but want total separation in other things. 

Others waffle which proves confusing because of the mixed-messages the parents and other family members receive. Part of the kid wants to stay close and receive affirmation. Another part of the kid subconsciously* knows that they need to push away. The subconscious part makes them irritable, prickly and cranky and disagreeable. They want to push away but they don't want to feel like the villain.

How long does it take?

I doubt that there is any one, single answer. The estrangement described in the sample paragraph might well be for the rest of his/her parent's lives. In other cases, the estrangements might occur serially as clueless parents (and kids) rush back into legacy expectations from the child's teens.

One factor that comes into play is the ratio of parents-to-kids. When parents had six and eight kids there was not enough "mom" to go around and kids were far less likely to be smothered.

The high ratio of parents-to-kids also fosters helicopter parenting. That results in parents having too many repetitions of rescuing their kid, too many repetitions subtly telling their kid "You can't cut it".

Single parents (almost always the mom) with a single kid are especially pernicious. The mom doesn't have a husband to distract her. There is a lot of temptation for the mom to project her needs for closeness that she would normally get from her husband onto her child. "It is just you-and-me against the world, kiddo". That is a hell of a burden to place on a child and the guilt-bonds can be exceptionally sticky...and create exceptional resentment.

Summary

Periods when kids are not talking to their parents are not pathological; they are normal and healthy.

Think of your being available without pushing-for-closeness as a gift you are giving your child.

If your child is in push-pull or waffle-mode, then remind yourself that based on the evidence, contact with you is causing them pain and making them angry. Remind yourself that you don't want to cause your child pain or to make them angry. If that is too painful, then remind yourself that it is an inarticulate part of their subconscious talking in the only way it know how. 

Give them time. They will probably sort things out and things will normalize. Likely, they will emerge with a three-dimensional view of you rather than a 2-D, cardboard cutout and you will engage where your values are in alignment and you will (mostly) avoid the landmines where they do not.

Bonus meme

*"Psychology Today", subconscious...see what I did there? 

Turkeys, raccoons, Seattle's economy as a bellwether

I am hearing more turkey gobbling when I am outside than I have ever heard in my life.

I am also catching far fewer raccoons and 'possum in my traps.

Raccoon populations are known to go up-and-down. The down is often caused by distemper. Distemper is very closely related to the virus that causes measles in humans and it can spread like wildfire when the raccoon population density is high or when an event like drought limits the number of food sources and the local population is concentrated at those sources. That is, the trash-dumpster at the local restaurant  or the porch of "that nice lady who feeds wildlife" can become Grand Central Station for raccoons.

The virus attacks a succession of tissue types. The first tissue on the menu are the lymph nodes. Those are the organs that product the majority of the antibodies that suppress bacteria and viruses.

That entire "the population can go up and down" makes me think of the stock market. Yes Virginia, it can go down.

Seattle's economy

A report came out from the Downtown Seattle Association that claims the "Jumpstart" tax has had a chilling effect on the Seattle economy.

When passed in 2020, city leaders said Seattle’s record new “JumpStart” business taxes would generate progressive revenue from Seattle’s largest, highest-paying businesses to fund COVID-19 relief (an important need at the time), affordable housing, essential city services, long-term economic recovery and resiliency, while jumpstarting economic prosperity throughout the city.   

But since 2020, what we have seen in downtown Seattle is not a “jump start”, but instead, a slowdown. Since being implemented, downtown Seattle has lost around 30,000 jobs. The office vacancy rate increased to 32% in the downtown core. And more than $10 billion in office value has been lost.  

Meanwhile, in Bellevue, dating back to 2020, the city has seen more jobs come to its core, lower office vacancy, and the stability of office building values. This provides a stark tale of two cities and two tax environments just miles apart.   Link

Direct Foreign Investment for the Greater Seattle Metro Area by year. Raw numbers look impressive (Source)

 

The numbers are very scary after adjusting for inflation to 2015 dollars. According to Financial Times, Seattle went from #2 metro region for "Attractiveness for Foreign Investment" to #13.

I used 3% inflation for 2015-2019 and 10% inflation for 2020-2025. You can quibble about exact inflation numbers all day long. I gave you the numbers so you can use your own, favorite inflation numbers and create your own chart.

One of the traps that growth-enterprises can fall into is that investment that is flooding in can mask the fact that the enterprise is not viable, that it is not making a "true" profit. The same thing can happen to a regional economy. Investment flooding in stimulates high-paying construction jobs and speculative real-estate feeding frenzies.

After the hysteria has run its course, the region is "over-built" and under-tenanted. The organic, home-grown business activity cannot sustain the cost of maintaining the grandiose monuments that were erected.

Seattle is also bucking a secular trend. AI is replacing a lot of coders who used to write generic code for apps. On the favorable side for Seattle, Boeing will be getting a lot of contracts to backfill losses in Iran and inventory gifted to Ukraine.

Not just Seattle

A breakdown of Phoenix, AZ economy

We are living in a bubble-economy. Politicians of all stripes and colors have been goading the Fed to pump the economy full of liquidity since 1999.

That money has been frantically looking for parking spaces in safe-havens while the perpetual malcontents have been agitating to "get whats mine".

Thinking of one of my friends whose net-worth is in the neighborhood of $10M...what good is it to have that much money if all of the inventory of the drug-store has been stolen...either from the shelves, while in transit or at the point of manufacture?

I am not slagging him. He has properties in several different locations, including a building the small town where his wife grew up. He has many physical skills that could come in handy. What will be devastating to him will be liquidity traps if/when things go into the septic tank. Bankruptcy proceedings could take years, especially if the courts get flooded with multiple, complicated bankruptcies. Outcomes in court are politically skewed and precedent is now considered just a vague suggestion. 

Many small chores. Little feeling of having accomplished anything

I have at least one small rabbit in the enclosed garden. It has been eating my pole beans.

Baited with a bit of apple with a few small chunks scattered nearby

Two rat-traps were deployed and I hung the netting for the pole beans.

Not a rabbit

I checked them yesterday evening when I put the ducks in jail. Not a rabbit. I rebaited and reset the trap.

I probably need to replant the beans...again.

Opportunistic meso-predators

That is what the smart kids in graduate school call raccoons, 'possum, skunks, coatimundi and monkeys. Most of their calories don't come from meat but they will consume it when they find it.

One characteristic of opportunistic feeders is that unlike obligate carnivores their population does not follow the boom-bust cycle of their prey.

The top of the duck jail had prints on top of it. I had not noticed them before, so I assume they are less than 24 hours old.

It could be either small raccoon or possum. If I had to guess, it was a raccoon that got his paws wet when he checked out the duck's swimming pool and then walked on top of the dewy truck-cap. That means it was an early morning foray.

Raccoon

Possum

It looks like I will be carrying the 20 gauge with me when I go out to open the duck-jail in the morning. I will also be freshening up the bait in the dog-proof raccoon traps; scrambled egg in the trap inside the enclosure and marshmallows in the outside trap. I will fry up the egg fresh this evening.

Burning brush

I was planning to mow but the brush-pile had gotten out of control. We have been cutting bamboo.

So I spent a couple of hours supervising the fire. I did not get around to mowing.

There is a small Carpathian walnut growing in the ashes just outside of the burn area. 

Vines and Thatch

I spent about a half-hour pulling vines out of fruit trees. 

I also spent about fifteen minutes raking the thatch off of the area I set up to capture mulberry seeds. I want to expose as much mineral-dirt as possible. Seeds that land on top of thatch are unlikely to germinate.

Those two tasks will make an interesting set of muscles hurt.

I have a doctor's appointment scheduled for the middle of next week. One of the standard questions is "Do you have any new aches and pains?". I now interpret that question as "Do you have any unexpected pains of unusual intensity?"

Potatoes

I did not add any fertilizer to my potato patch this year. The site had been fallow for at least two years and had heavy vegetation on it.

I hired Kubota to drive the garden tractor over it to smash it down.

Then I shredded it with the push-mower followed by tilling.

So, how is that experiment going?

Glad you asked. In previous years I would fertilize with between 100 and 200 pounds of Nitrogen. The potatoes grew so fast that I had to be Johnny-On-It to get them hilled before they canopied over the space between the rows. I had, perhaps, two weeks between the vines at 6" tall and then sprawled out across the 40" rows.

Photo taken at 6:25 a.m., June 20, 2026. In previous years you would not see any dirt in a photo taken this time of year.

This year...no sprawling. Like nearly all things, there are some good sides to that and some bad sides.

On the good sides, the plot is drying down more quickly than it would be if it was congested with vegetation. Sunlight falling on soil dries it out quickly and, in turn, the humidity of air in the potatoes' canopy drops quickly after a rain or dew. That is good for snail control and for slower leaf disease development. Given how wet this June has been, that is a very good thing.

The downside is that there will be a smaller harvest. Less sunlight is capture by the leaves. Less CO2 is turned into sugar, moved down to the roots (stolons for the nit-picky) and turned into potatoes. Since about 2/3 of the sunlight is falling on dirt, it is reasonable to estimate that my harvest will be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of what I get when I fertilize.

I am sure I could throw fertilizer around and get a bump in top-growth but I don't anticipate need more potatoes than I am likely to harvest. If I needed to feed people, aka SHTF times, I would fertilize in a heart-beat. 

Shamelessly stolen from Midwest Chick

I think I will pre-print the "My Name is..." stickers for the next family reunion with various "Topics I don't discuss in polite company"

Texting in cursive

So there I was, dropping Quicksilver off at her play-date.

The mother of a different child was also doing a drop-off.

She was sitting and texting and it wasn't like any other kind of texting I had ever seen before.

She was holding the phone in "landscape mode" and her thumbs skated across the virtual keyboard and she rarely lifted them.

I week or so later I worked up the courage to ask her about what she had been doing. There is something creepy about people who are watching other people text and I didn't want to come across as "that guy".

She gladly told me that if you tweak-in the dwell-time required for your phone to register a letter, you can glide your thumbs across the screen without lifting them. The time it takes a thumb to reverse or change direction is enough to make the device "read" that character. 

She also pointed out that, like touch-typing, it pays to not look at the keys but to watch the "auto correct" or suggestions at the top. When the work you are keying out appears, glide up there and tag it.

She seemed to think that the cursive method of texting (a made-up term) worked better on some phones than other. It may be because of differences in operating systems and the amount of control they offer the user in setting dwell times, or maybe it relates to the quality of the screens.

And now you know. 

Gloating

 

The leaks are fixed. The hot water is back on. The plumber left three valves in the event that we spring a leak in any of the other three feed-lines.

I took a shower. While I did not dally beneath the wonderful stream of hot water, I did enjoy it immensely.

Three minutes from turning on the shower until grabbing my towel at the end of it.

Mowing Southern Belle's orchard

Before/After

Before/After

Lots of goldenrod still trying to over-top the grass. Many blackberry bushes popping up. The key seems to be to mow them while the stems are juicy and before they get woody.

Random pictures of Southern Belle's garden

'Taters

Second planting of sweet corn

Third planting of sweet corn

Broccoli ready to harvest

Socializing

I spent a couple of hours socializing with some guys I used to work with in the 1982-1992 time-frame.

It was a great time to be alive. We were worker-bees and (mostly) oblivious to the company politics that swirled around us. We were young, courting and starting families.

The guy sitting next to me was conversing with the guy across the table. They were both back-packers and they both took their kids back-packing. One of the stories was when one family hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim. One half started on the South Rim while the other half drove around to the North Rim (4-1/2 hour drive) and started hiking from there. When the two halves met, the keys to the vehicle were handed over to the north-bound party...and they just kept walking. 

The elevation change for the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim hike is approximately 6,000 feet, as you descend from the North Rim to the Colorado River and then ascend back up to the South Rim. The hike typically involves a descent of about 14.3 miles and a climb of 9.6 miles back out    -AI content

They did it in one day! Oh, to be young again. 

P.S. Both of those guys still mow their lawns with (powered) push mowers. 

Things flipping right-side up and SURPRISE!

Three of the four issues that complicated my life are flipping right-side-up.

The patient who had surgery is doing well. In fact, the resolution of their chronic pain, or at least the promise of its resolution, seems to have made them happy and optimistic.

The issue that tangled us up on Monday is on the mend.

I got my truck back at 7:30 p.m. yesterday. It still had more than 3/4 of a tank of gas.

Those are the good parts.

The not so great part is that I called the plumber when he missed the 3:00 p.m. appointment. "Things came up. I will try to make it between 5:00 and 6:00."

I replied "OK. No problem."

Then he missed that window. I called him up. "Hey, what is going on? I am going to be away from the house for an hour and a half."

"I am in the hospital" was his reply. Then he gave me some details which I am not going to share.

The bucket is still under the sink. I am going to take a shower at the gym today. A HOT shower.

Air Layering

I still had a few scion of a hazelnut that I want more copies of. 

I also had a shortage of plants to graft them onto.

So I found a shoot that split into three stems that were of appropriate size and I grafted all three stems. Then I slid an empty milk jug over the stem and filled it with potting soil. I also ran baling twine through the handle and tied it to a branch in the mother tree.

  

Newspaper is stuffed in the hole that I cut in the bottom of the jug so I could slide it down the stems. (Pro-tip: position the jug over the mother stem BEFORE grafting)

So, I want you to picture in your head a craftsman hyper-focusing on his task. He is handling very sharp blades and is attempting a procedure more complicated that his normal job. 

The gallon jug holds quite a bit of potting soil and it has to be carefully tucked into every corner and care must be take that it doesn't leave the jug through the hole in the bottom.

Now I want you to visualize this refined gentleman reaching into his bag of potting soil to fill the milk jug and pulling out a 15" long snake.

Yep. A snake. A very dead, very stinky snake. I am not sure how he got there or even what species he was. 

Schizophrenia

There was a time when a person who believed that they were a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body would have been diagnosed as Schizophrenic. The cynic in me says that the medical industry decided it was more profitable to call it "gender dysphoria" and to chop off their junk at $100k a pop.

The internet claims that people who are diagnosed as schizophrenic and who are meds-compliant with an effective anti-psychotic drug commit violence at rates that are no higher than the general population. Peer-reviewed research that uses meta-data (combining a multitude of studies that are similar to produce a very large sample-size) states that the mean rate of meds noncompliance among people with schizophrenia is 52%.

The other fly-in-the-ointment is that drugs will suddenly stop working. There will be no warning. The brain will go off-the-reservation. So it is disingenuous to qualify the phrase "meds-compliant" with the term "an effective anti-psychotic drug" when the effectiveness of any drug might be years...it might be months...it might be weeks. It is a circular logic: They aren't any more violent than the general population (IF) they are taking the drugs that (by random chance) are making them no more violent than the general population.

Schizophrenia symptoms

• Delusions (often paranoia)
• Hallucinations (often hearing voices)
• Disorganized speech and thinking
• Unusual motor behaviors, agitation
• Flat affect, unable to show emotion (dead-eyes), poor hygiene
• Withdrawal from friends and family
• Doing poorly at school or work
• Sleep irregularities
• Irritable, depressed
• Listless
• Much higher risk of suicide...as many as 5% of people with schizophrenia commit suicide. 

Note: early use of cannabis is liked to higher risk of Schizophrenia

Side effects of Clozapine

Clozapine is the last-resort drug that is the go-to when everything else fails.

More common side effects

blurred vision

confusion

constipation

dizziness, faintness, or lightheadedness when getting up suddenly from a lying or sitting position

fainting

fast, pounding, or irregular heartbeat or pulse

fever

nausea

shakiness in the legs, arms, hands, or feet

sleepiness or unusual drowsiness

sweating

trembling or shaking of the hands or feet

unusual tiredness or weakness

vomiting

Less common side effects

absence of or decrease in movement

change in appetite

dark urine

decreased sexual ability

difficult or fast breathing or sudden shortness of breath

increased sweating

increased thirst

increased urination

lip smacking or puckering

muscle stiffness (severe)

puffing of the cheeks

rapid or worm-like movements of the tongue

swelling or pain in the leg

uncontrolled chewing movements

uncontrolled movements of the arms and legs

unusual bleeding or bruising

unusually pale skin

weakness

yellow eyes or skin

Gee, I wonder why people go meds-noncompliant.