Indoor-ish Critters

I’ve mentioned Rosie, also known as Doofus, Roomba, and GET OUTTA THE KITCHEN!, on Twitter but I don’t think I’ve done it here.

Making noise, as dogs do

She’s obviously a Boston Terrier, huh? Panda delivered her to FAR Manor around Christmas as “a gift for Mason.” Of course, I was not consulted, and of course the bulk of her care and maintenance falls to me (although Daughter Dearest gives her baths). She displays the occasional cat-like qualities, especially if she’s on the bed and someone slips a hand under the covers, but mostly she’s a dog: loud, smelly, grabs “treats” out of the garbage when she gets a chance, occasionally incontinent, and chews stuff (especially Mason’s toys) when nobody’s looking. Oh, and she’ll drop a fart-bomb and walk away—like she did just now.

Daughter Dearest’s fiancé has Roscoe, one of her brothers. When he brings Roscoe over, things get… well, this is FAR Manor. She tries to hump him.


More recently, Cousin Splat lost the lease on the house he was renting (“It was in the bottom drawer, I swear!”) and brought a cat and her kittens down to the in-laws. Dogs being dogs, they started hunting the kittens, grrr. Wife brought the mom-cat and the last kitten standing to the manor, to live in the garage, and the fiancé adopted the little grey furball right away. That left us with the hollow-flanked mom, who is quickly regaining some weight now that she only has to feed herself. She was a bit shy at first, but now she’s all about getting picked up and cuddled:

Pick me up!

For lack of a better name, I’m calling her Miss Target because that’s what she does (where “target” is the litter box). Wife is fed up with that already, even though it’s just in the garage, and is threatening to send her packing. Maybe we should try a covered litter box, where she has to be in the thing. I’ll try to get a better pic of her… it’ll have to be when she doesn’t know I’m there, though.

Ring-a-Ding Ding

Welp… Daughter Dearest has gone and made it official:

So, this happened…

I won’t be posting the wedding pics for a year or so, because that’s when they’ve scheduled it. A year and about a week from now. I made a crack about leading the reception crowd in a chant of “EMPTY NEST! EMPTY NEST! EMPTY NEST!” but the wife said they’ll probably be moving in with us. Oh… well, it’s been a little quiet at FAR Manor lately. There should be plenty of blog-fodder to come.

So here’s a shot of the happy couple…

Here they are!

Oh, and Daughter Dearest is teaching full-time next year! Full-time job, with benefits… maybe he’ll be the househusband. :-P

Now I need a blog name for him. “Baldy” is too obvious, so that’s out.

Spring #3 Cleaning Up

Spring #3 has been pretty wet so far. All the rain melted the snow in a hurry, and it’s supposed to be sunny and 70°F Sunday and Monday. If we’re going to get a Winter #4, it had better hurry up because the calendar’s running out.

As you may recall, Winter #3 left us with a rather large mess on our hands. I was glad to put the generator away, though I do need to dump some Sta-Bil in the tank and run it long enough to get into the carb. But the first order of business last weekend was to deal with the downed trees above the mailbox:

Snap, crackle, pop

I had planned to get outside with a chainsaw as soon as I could on Saturday. I was stuck inside with Mason, but The Boy pretty much took over.

Let the cleanup begin…

The process was fairly simple, but rather physical: trim branches off the fallen ends, toss them on the truck, then cut lengths for the fire pit and load them separately. Finally, cut down the trunks and cut them up. He finished the job up Sunday morning while I was at church.

Lookin’ good!

The only downside is, now you can see the manor from the road. I guess I’ll have to plant some holly or boxwoods along that edge. The big upside is, the persimmon tree (to the left behind the holly bush) is no longer shaded by the pines. Maybe Mason will have some more fruit to munch on this fall.

Winter #3

Winter #3 took up pretty much the entire second half of February. And two weeks of winter on Planet Georgia is about as much as anyone can stand.

It began with a shot of Arctic air, once again pulling temperatures below 10°F overnight. It warmed up long enough to start raining on that Monday evening, then it got cold again. And kept raining. You know what that means:

So pretty. If you don’t have to live in it.

The power started blinking on and off around 7pm Monday night. The computers, DSL, and TV are all on UPSes, so we were okay for a while. The outages started getting more frequent and longer, and we grabbed flashlights. Just after 8pm, it went down… and stayed down. For 71 hours. We lit some candles, cursed the ice, and I shut down my desktop before the UPS ran out of steam. All my mobile gadgets had a full charge, and the TV held up for another half hour before the UPS ran down. We kept ourselves occupied and went to bed when we felt like it. All night long, we heard the cracking of branches (or entire trees) coming down. (Daughter Dearest, who was sleeping upstairs, said she hoped she didn’t end up with a tree wanting to cuddle up in bed with her. None did.)

In the morning, it was pretty chilly in the bedrooms despite the fireplace insert doing a fine job. We grabbed some cold breakfast and went out to survey the situation. The roads weren’t icy, but they had a few obstructions:

Kind of hard to drive over

It was then that we realized the one thing we didn’t do the day before: get gas for the generator. A neighbor with a Jeep said he could get over or around what was on the road, and offered to take our gas cans to town. With nothing better to do in the meantime, we got the chainsaw (and we had gas for that) and got to work clearing the road. Down the road, we saw other people sawing away at the downed trees on either side of FAR Manor. With the southbound lanes cleared, the wife called the guy she had working on the farm and had him bring the tractor up. There were some larger trees in the northbound lanes, and once I got chunks cut he would push them to the side with the tractor. It took maybe an hour or so to get the road open.

The gas got delivered, and I got the generator started (with the help of a little starter fluid). Voila, we had lights, refrigerators, furnace—and the Internet! The phone company buried fiber all along the road a couple years ago, so the phone and DSL were working. What wasn’t working was pretty much anything that ran on 240V service: water pump, hot water heater, stove, and dryer. We had water jugs and a toaster oven, though, and we were careful to run only one high-wattage appliance at a time. I had the work laptop, so I was able to get work stuff done.

On breaks, I got outside and took pictures:

Underexposed and overdramatic

We ended up getting Big V and bringing her to the manor. She hasn’t been taking good care of herself lately, and by the second day she was heading toward Diabetic Coma Land. Wife called 911 and they sent an ambulance to get her to the hospital. Otherwise, life went on, a bit of a hassle but we were warm and connected. We had to dump five gallons of gas into the generator twice a day, until the power came back on at 7pm Thursday evening.

But we weren’t out of the soup just yet. Another shot of moisture was coming. At first, the weather dudes were talking the dreaded “wintry mix,” then changed over to snow as we got closer to the actual event. It came in Tuesday night, of course. The power blipped once but stayed up—I rather thought it would, as all the stuff that was going to come down already had. But it snowed all day and night Wednesday. So here’s what it looked like outside the window come Thursday:

We usually get this much snow in March.

The Boy was here, so he took Mason and Skylar out to the pasture to slide down the hill while I worked. The temperatures were already above freezing, so Mason came in pretty much wet everywhere. Only his t-shirt was dry, so I got him into dry clothes. Meanwhile, he was complaining because he wanted to be out in it some more. (Un)fortunately for him, Mason-sicles are not allowed in the manor. It has stayed above freezing for a couple of days, so all that’s left are a few patches of slushy snow in shaded spots.

It’s March now. C’mon, spring!

Break a Leg

Tuesday night, we were sleeping snug in our bed… and the phone rang. I said “Tuesday night,” but it was technically Wednesday by then. Whatever.

It was BrandX on the line. He’s been staying with the father in law for a while, as they both tend to be up during late hours. But the old guy was making a bathroom run, and his “non-skid” slippers lived up to their name rather than their adjective, if you get my drift. THUD. By the time we got there, BrandX had pulled a chair around and got him off the floor. He had landed on his side, banging his shoulder, elbow, and hip all down the right side. There wasn’t much problem above the waist; the wife popped a bandage on his elbow where it was scraped a little. But his leg hurt, and he couldn’t move it much.

Wife called 911, and sent me home. They were going to take him to the hospital to X-ray his leg; but he refused, saying he would go in the afternoon if his leg wasn’t feeling any better by then. Of course, he backtracked on that one when the time came, but by mid-afternoon yesterday it was clear he needed to have it looked at.

And I got the call: he’d broken his hip. Oh joy. When you’re in your late 80s, surgery is always a dicey proposition, and this was going to need some help getting put back together. So they scheduled the surgery for this afternoon. Wife sent an amusing shot of some of the prep, including an awesome tinfoil hat:

“He’s ready for liftoff,” said the wife.

Good thing I was working at home today; the wife usually watches Mason, but I lined up Jam to deal with him… and then she remembered an interview she had at 2pm. He was mostly okay (except for the last half hour) until Daughter Dearest arrived to take over.

The father in law was all put back together after a few hours, and now the wife is on her way home. Him… he’s staying. The non-nutty sister is staying with him tonight, so I don’t have to worry about dealing with Mason tomorrow morning. He doesn’t fly, which is good because he’ll set off metal detectors from now on.

Friday can’t get here fast enough. Not that I’ll get much rest this weekend either.

Lost in Nightwalk COVER REVEAL!

The story is with the editor now, and I don’t have an exact publication date set just yet, but I’m still hoping to launch by month’s end. Here’s the blurb:

Lord Darin is pursuing Sura. The Web is pursuing Bailar and Mik. Still, they continue teaching combat magic to sorcerers in Koyr and the Northern Reach.

Training for conflict in the Goblin fastness, soldiers and mages start using Nightwalk, the vast maze under Ak’Koyr, for war games. Fleeing an assassination attempt, they find themselves lost. Now the problem isn’t Lord Darin or The Web—it’s getting out.

Okay, how about a look at the gorgeous cover?

Meanwhile, Beyond the Sea of Storms (Book 6) has been drafted, so at least one of them survives Nightwalk. Or maybe it’s a reluctant Charn or Isa who pick up the mantle…

Piling On

The last few days have been the good part of November—sunny, cool, perfect for getting outside and doing stuff.

Sunday afternoon, I hunted for the rake… and I could have sworn it was in the garage just last week. Oh well, I was able to lay hands on the leaf blower and a really long extension cord, and got to work on one section of the back yard. It wasn’t long before I had a big pile of leaves, and let Mason have at it:

Very soon, he insisted that I jump in and join him.

Deep in the heart of autumn

Oh… why not. It’s been quite a few years since I’d buried myself in a leaf pile. Laying in the leaves, I took a shot of the deep blue sky:

We won’t see skies this nice for a while

So we played in the leaves until it started getting dark. He complained mightily about having to go in, of course, but maybe we’ll have another shot later. That arctic blast is on the way, and things will get cold in a hurry after tomorrow.

Little Swingers

Meet Amelia, in the swing next to Mason. She refers to him as “my boyfriend.”

Just a-swangin'

This is a church thing. They sit together in church sometimes, and usually at the Childrens’ Sermon (where the kids all come up front). I first found out when she had her arm around him as they sat listening. Her grandmother and I were cutting up about it later. “She’s a little old for him, ain’t she?” I asked in my best fake Southern accent. She’s six, and her birthday was during the summer, so she’s definitely older than him.

They don’t do much more than sit together, sometimes hold hands as they go downstairs. Mason doesn’t seem to be fazed much by it; it’s just part of church for him. For their grandparents, it’s just one of those amusing things kids do.

But apparently, she’s a bit of a troublemaker at school. Seems like Mason’s inherited his father’s (thankfully former) attraction for troublesome girlies. One more thing to grow out of. I hope.

The Boy and His House

The Boy closed on a house on September 15th. Over the weekend, we took a truckload (plus half a vanload) of stuff down to him. He and his bride had filled the back of her car on Thursday with a bunch of small things—plus Mason. They have a room set up for him, and I really wish I thought to get more pictures than I did.

But I got a picture of the front of their place:

Ready for Hallowe’en, I see…

Here at FAR Manor, I don’t have to put up spider webs. The spiders do it for me:

At least this one isn’t in the walkway

The Boy’s house is sitting on a little over 2 acres; he was showing us all the things he has planned (including a garden along one side). Amazing… he’s embraced this home-ownership thing big-time. The only downside is that it’s pretty close to his in-laws. Experience has taught me that such a location is hazardous to your mental health. But her dad paid cash for the place. The wife and I looked at each other at that news… I said, “I guess he married well.” If I got FAR Manor for free, I wouldn’t complain about it very much at all.

So October is here, and I’ve been taking the work laptop outside in the mornings when it hasn’t been raining. The mosquitos are a little plentiful, perhaps the result of a few buckets left out in the rain. I’ve dumped them out, though, so now maybe the spiders will do for the mosquitos.

Vacation Slides Along

On Monday, we signed out a paddleboat and took a little tour around the lake:

Faster, Granddad!

There's a beach area on down a ways, that has a slide going right into the water, and Mason was all hot to do that. So next morning, away we went!

Splashdown!

There's also a raft, not something I see a lot of here in the South, although lots of lakes had them up north. On Monday, I steered the paddleboat up to the ladder so he could climb up for a few seconds, but yesterday he wanted to swim out there. Fortunately, the lake water was reasonably warm. His floaties did the job, and he got a pretty good idea of how things were when I was a kid in summer. (I hadn't swam out to a raft in decades, so it was fun for me too.) He did get to shivering after a while, so I got him up on the raft and sitting in the sun for a little bit until he warmed up.

OK, I'll skim across the water and make the turn...

As you can see, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. That was kind of a pity, but I guess with it being the week after Labor Day, all of the kids are back in school. I hope we can get over here on daytrips next summer; Mason already wants Daughter Dearest and me to chuck him off the raft. I told him he has to learn to swim without floaties first, so he has an incentive. He really wore himself out yesterday, and slept a long time, almost until 9.

Last night, we found a playground, and there was already a little girl his age there. Both of them were glad to have someone else to play with, so they let the parental units talk among themselves for a while. The downside of that is, Mason's now bummed when we go somewhere and there aren't any other kids around.

I'm not hurling, just spinning!

Too bad it's just him and me. DD is sick, and the wife is (as usual) tied up. I've got a little cold myself. But he's trying to get me to take him to the pool up at the clubhouse, so I need to leave this here. More vacation fun, you know!

A Dark and Stormy Night

I thought I didn’t sleep well last night, but I apparently slept right through a pretty heavy thunderstorm. It was rumbling through the evening, so I must not have given it much thought. I do remember waking up at one point and hearing all the UPSes click. That may well have been when the power came back on, because when I went to poke the iMac this morning it was powered down. But that means I slept right through the constant nagging beeping of the UPSes, something I thought would not be possible.

So when I got to work this morning, there was debris all around the grounds. And this just past the driveway:

Then there was the email saying we lost power about 6:45 last night… must have been a really hairy storm down this way.

Here’s hoping your day is debris-free. Tomorrow’s Friday, and I’ve got it and the whole next week off! Stay tuned for a #FridayFlash queued up for tomorrow…

Achievement Unlocked: Daughter in Law!

Saturday was the big day, and nobody ran off at the last second (although one of the bridesmaids went missing for a while). I ’d have been happier with more of our side of the family there, but The Boy also had a couple friends show up and that made him pretty happy. The wife did a video, a sort of chronological thing of the two of them growing up, then some of them together at the end. It was really nice.

So anyway, here they are…

Dearly Beloved…

As you can see, this was an outdoor affair. In August. On Planet Georgia. Needless to say, we sweated like race horses. This is why I insisted on a winter wedding for us.

A lovely bunch

Daughter Dearest was one of the bridesmaids. She told us she was sure she was going to pass out, because her dress was a bit tight. But she underestimates herself. Not only is she a strong girl, she’s been trained to stand under hot lights (chorale concerts), so she held up without any trouble. She was really pleased with how well her hairdo held up; I guess they used epoxy on it or something.

It was the bride I was worried about. She was swaying for a little while, and I was trying to whisper “bend your knees, bend your knees.” She didn’t hear me, but stayed on her feet anyway. Turned out she put on a little weight (as skinny as she is, a little weight can be a lot of difference) since they got the wedding dress, and it was a little tight on her as well.

Me and the boys

The Boy asked me to be in the wedding, and to be the best man —that was a pleasant shock. I was there with Cousin Splat, Brand X, and the bride’s brother… and Mason. Mason was in a bit of a mood, as he’d spent a long time just before the wedding doing photography poses. He heard “just one more” a few times too many, and by the time of the actual ceremony, he was ready to quit. I ended up carrying and holding him, and he fussed (quietly) until I started indicating people in the crowd and asking him if they were zombies (Traffic Cone zombie, Buckethead zombie, etc.). That got a smile out of him, but after a while he went to sit with the wife. But he came back up and did the thing where the three of them poured different colored sand into a jar. The sand can’t be separated, and so neither can they, is the idea there. Touching, really.

Newlyweds! (sweaty newlyweds)

So, woohoo! We all survived, even if we smelled like a herd of dead water buffaloes by the end of the evening. We slugged down lots of water, and then we got to do some dancing and celebrating. The happy couple is off to Orlando for a few days, and now things can settle back to the normal abnormal that is life at FAR Manor.

Harvest Time

On Planet Georgia, the harvest begins in earnest in August. The mother in law, who was the major garden person around here, departed a couple years ago. Still, the wife attempts to at least put some garden stuff in.

It didn’t help that we ended up with a huge amount of tomato plants this spring. One of the local banks does a customer appreciation day, in which they have a cookout with free hotdogs, and give out those six-pack trays of tomato plants. This year, they arrived close to the end of the day… next thing she knew, the bank people carried three entire flats (12 six-packs each, which meant there were 216 plants) over and dropped them in the back of the van. I took one of the flats to church, where several of the church ladies snapped them up, but the other ones were still there. I didn’t help matters; I wanted some Roma tomatoes to put on the dehydrator, so I bought a six-pack (this was before the “load 'em up” incident at the bank).

In addition, there were melons, a couple rows of corn, a handful of okra plants, and a few other things. It wasn’t as much garden as the mother in law planted, but it was more than enough.

This week, the piper paid us.

I came home from work to find the drainboard completely full of Romas. I got to work Thursday night, and roughly half of them were enough to fill the dehydrator. I tackled the rest today. Now, I have two quart freezer bags full of dehydrated tomatoes. The basil we bought is doing well, the oregano is sprawling all over the place, and I have enough tomatoes to make plenty of sauce.

Prepping for the dehydrator is easy enough. Drop them in boiling water for about 15 seconds, and the peel comes right off. This year, I got smart and added a pot of cold water for a quicker cool-down. Cut them in half, drop them on a dehydrator rack, repeat until the rack is full or until you’re out of tomatoes.

That was just the Romas. The wife dropped off a pretty good load of larger tomatoes, both ripe and green. I had made some noise about wanting to make green tomato salsa again, since the last batch I made didn’t last very long. So last night, I was off to the races… or rather, in the kitchen. Blanch, peel, chop up, add some other stuff like garlic, jalapeño, cilantro, onion, vinegar, a dab of sherry, and some “taco” seasoning. Then I dumped the whole mess in the crock pot to simmer overnight.

This morning, I grabbed four pint jars with lids, scooped salsa into them, and screwed the lids down. Despite the lids being used, they sealed. I’m still putting them in the fridge.

But gee, there’s still all these red tomatoes to deal with! I’ve always been curious about gazpacho, so I looked up a recipe. When I took +E.J Hobbs to work, I picked up the stuff we didn’t have around the manor, and came home and got to work on that.

This took a little longer than the 45 minutes the recipe page said, especially with regard to the “take the seeds out” part. I won’t be surprised if a handful of seeds managed to sneak past my diligence. Still, I’m looking forward to trying some of this, come tomorrow’s hot afternoon. If it’s any good, and EJ and I leave any, I’ll take some to work Monday.

The only downside is, I used less than a fourth of the ripe tomatoes to make the gazpacho. And the wife opined that there’s probably as many more tomatoes coming our way next week. She’s already made salsa (much milder than what I like to make), and she thinks she’s getting a rash from eating too many of them, so I need to figure out what to do with this bounty. I suppose I could give them away at work easily enough…

Oh, and lest I forget. You know I like big melons; I’m a guy. Get a load of this (it was a load, all right):

45 pounds. Can’t wait to get my hands on that!

Taking a Dive

Daughter Dearest has been living in one of the rental trailers below the father-in-law’s place for the last couple months. I haven’t said much about it, because… well yeah, she left the nest, but it’s the same tree. She has a roommate, whom we’ll call Roomie. I can’t think of a more suitable blog-name that doesn’t insult what little intelligence she has (oops, I did it anyway). But I digress.

So, between her trailer and the family of Mr. Sunshine, BrandX, J, and Evil Lad NOT, is a third trailer. This one is rented out by Some Guy. Some Guy will usually help out around the farm if his part-time construction job doesn’t have him otherwise occupied. He grills a lot on his back deck, and invites BrandX and the girlies over to chow down and hang out.

Two weekends ago, he invited DD and Roomie to do a bar run. (I should point out, DD has a boyfriend, but Some Guy isn't him. He’s in Rome GA.) So Roomie was like “Sure!” and DD was “I’ll be the designated driver.” They took his truck and went to Dahlonega. (There’s a song about Dahlonega. My favorite line is It always smells like chicken $#¡+ on Highway 9 / But at least we can score cheap moonshine.)

Now I should mention, Some Guy is divorced and has a daughter, and of course his wife likes to play the custody games that some divorced people seem to revel in. So he was off to drown his sorrows, and Roomie just likes to drink and par-tay. They went to one place, and it was a little crowded with local college students, so they moved on to a different bar. There, Some Guy was talking with a young woman… and then her boyfriend showed up and got belligerent. DD got everyone out of there without a fight, and they left that place.

This is where it gets interesting. Some Guy was bummed out to begin with, and this didn’t help. DD was driving his truck, with Roomie in the middle and him in the shotgun position. Except that he said, “I’m tired of this,” and abandoned his position. By which I mean he jumped out of the truck that was moving at around 30mph.

DD stood on the brakes, and they jumped out. By this time, Some Guy was already on his feet, which says something about drunken luck. Still, he was banged up pretty seriously; he looked like an extra for a Walking Dead episode. DD took charge, started to call 911, but realized they were close enough to the hospital that she could drive him to the ER faster than an ambulance could get there. “Get in the truck,” she told Some Guy. (Meanwhile, Roomie was standing in the road in dark clothes, just gaping.)

“I don’t want to get blood in my truck,” he replied.

The tailgate was down, fortunately. Long-time blog readers know that DD can do a pretty good imitation of She-Hulk when things get dicey. She picked him up and threw him into the bed, told Roomie to watch to make sure he didn’t jump out again, then drove to the hospital. This was around 12:30am. DD called home to let us know what happened, because she wasn’t sure if he was even going to survive it. However, they let him out at 4am with a few instructions about changing the dressings.

The interesting thing was, back when the wife had the knee replacement just before Thanksgiving, they sent us four boxes of supplies —massive dressings, wide gauze rolls, tape—and she didn’t even need one box worth. We stacked them in the bathroom, and there they sat until we sent them down to him. After DD got through with him, he looked like an extra from The Mummy, one of the corpses that was only partly wrapped:

Don't jump out of a moving truck.
You might need more bandages than this.

So yeah, Some Guy is lucky to be alive and able to gimp around (he wrenched his ankle). He’s also lucky DD didn’t do him in herself, after that little stunt. :-P

Somebody’s very glad he’s still around:

Who would feed and brush me
if you're gone?

Remember, boys and girls, keep your bods inside the vehicle until it has come to a complete stop.

Taking a Dive

I was working at home Thursday morning, minding my own business, when:

KA-RASSHHHHH

My first thought was, “OMG, +E.J Hobbs just had something fall on him!” and was out of my seat and halfway up the stairs in a heartbeat.

“I’m OK,” he said. “I was just in here shaving…”

Mirror, mirror, on the floor,
Why’d you have to fall down for?

“It just came off the wall,” he said. If you look at the picture, you’ll see five black spots where the mirror was. They’re some kind of caulk, dried up and hard and not sticky at all. A line of silicone caulk at the bottom of the mirror, where it contacted the vanity, was the only thing holding it in place. No clips or anything else. Just another example of why FAR Manor was a bad idea.

“Oh well,” the wife said. “We” (that is, she and Daughter Dearest) “were talking about repainting the bathroom anyway. We also need to do something about the lighting.”

She had bought Daughter Dearest a mirror with a white frame a while back, that she isn’t using, and it’s just big enough to cover the black spots (the wallpaper underneath is dissolved, so chipping it off won’t solve anything). I found a cardboard box in the garage, and EJ used that to collect the shards. Since it’s a 3-day weekend in the US, maybe I’ll be able to hang the mirror today or tomorrow.

Blackberry Winter

We only had three mini-winters on Planet Georgia this year, although they were pretty harsh. In mid-spring, we get a cold snap they like to call “Blackberry Winter,” because it usually happens around the time the blackberry vines are blooming. The fun thing is, blackberries blossom for two or three weeks, so there’s plenty of time for one (or more) to happen.

So last week, it got cool. “Maybe this is all the blackberry winter we get,” said the wife. “But they need some cold to bloom out, I thought.”

“They’ve been blooming out for a week in some places,” I pointed out.

But this weekend had to be it. The lows got to 40F, and it was cloudy and rainy. The rain is gone, but the cool weather remains. After a taste of nice May weather the week before, this was a bit of a letdown. But with any luck, that’s the last of the cool/cold weather until late October.

The vines are already setting fruit. Looks like Mason will have a great time picking come July 4th weekend. The wild lowbush blueberries should be ripe in the next couple weeks as well.

Resurrection #2

The Boy finally got his car working. It wasn’t long before he “found” a job and a place to live near his girlfriend’s place in Newnan. But the fun part was all the stuff that happened along the way.

I believe I mentioned, shortly after he left Wisconsin and was re-admitted to the free-range insane asylum, that his car croaked. Compression was gone, and he immediately decided he needed a new engine. I suggested he do a compression test, because he might only need a top-end rebuild (and like his in-laws, he ignores any data that doesn’t support his snap decision.) Then he decided he wanted a JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) engine, because they supposedly make more horsepower than the US version.

The Boy didn't see this. ;-)

I was skeptical, and so was his friend (the one who bought our green Civic and got it going). But, as I said above, facts don't stand a chance against the snap decision. They hauled the Acura into the #4 chicken house, and The Boy got a Haynes manual—which was horrible for this situation; the manual kept jumping around and skipping steps. But eventually, they got to where they were able to get the tractor bucket chained to the motor and pulled it out.

So, the new one came in. The usual hilarity ensued with getting everything to line up, moving this and that around, and hooking all the wires back up. So he had me down there one chilly Saturday morning. “How do you check the spark?”

I was rather shocked, that someone who thought he could replace an entire engine wouldn’t know how to hold a spark plug against the engine block, but I explained it. He had me crank the engine while he held the plug. No spark. “OK,” I said, “check your distributor, plug wires, and ignition coil.” I checked the fuse block. Easy stuff first, that’s the first rule of troubleshooting and a rule that doesn’t seem to stick with a certain person who prides herself on common sense… but I digress. Anyway, The Boy did some Googling and found that a JDM engine requires a matching ECU (the domestic one doesn’t work for whatever reason). So off to eBay once again, ECU arrives, he installs it, still no spark.

So the friend finally gets back over there, and he begins the methodical kind of approach I can relate to. He swapped in the ignition coil from his Civic, and hey presto, spark! Yes, I razzed The Boy about that on several occasions. Spark, but no vroom. There should have been an earth-shattering vroom. I thought the engine was making that whine that suggests it jumped time, and he decided (as I’d advised him far earlier) to check the timing belt. Turned out it had more teeth missing than a hockey player. With a new timing belt, it finally ran! So they got the car put back together and The Boy got it insured and plated.

Then the fun began. Why he didn’t think about doing this stuff while the new engine was sitting outside the car, I’ll never know. But he figured the first thing to do was change the oil. That’s when he found that a sumo wrestler must have put that oil filter on. It took several days of various things to finally get that sucker loose—he rammed a screwdriver through the filter to get leverage, the old-skool way of removing an oil filter, to no avail. He finally smooshed the end down enough to get a pair of big channel-lock pliers on it, and that did the trick.

Then as he put the oil in, he found that there was a hole in the oil pan. That was a fairly easy fix, as he had the oil pan from his old engine handy. But it was still pretty hilarious, even if by this time he’d taken my garage space and had my Miata out in the rain. I suspect that his shiny new motor was pulled from a wreck. Fun times.

Finally, he found that he’d bodged an axle seal, so his manual transmission fluid was leaking. But that was also a relatively easy fix. Once he was able to get the car back up on jackstands.

Onward and upward… until the next thing happens. I think The Boy’s friend is going to locate us a replacement engine for my old Civic. That should be less of a hassle than the Acura, since we’re not doing the JDM thing. But the Miata has working air conditioning, so I'd probably just sell the Civic once we got it running again.

Resurrection

While Daughter Dearest was still in college, the wife got a mini-van and gave her the blue Civic to drive back and forth to Waleska. It was newer, and in much better shape. The old green Civic was a backup, until we loaned it to BrandX to use… for driving to college and back (but, in his case, Gainesville). He drove it—and, just as one might expect from the offspring of Mr. Sunshine, assumed that basic maintenance was something for someone else to deal with. The car overheated a lot, and we’d ask him if he checked the water. “No.” Well, duh.

So eventually, the green Civic couldn’t hold its water, and we parked it. And there it sat… until one of The Boy’s friends expressed an interest in it. We agreed on $400 for the sales price, and he brought us the money (cash) in several installments.

So he topped up the radiator fluid, took it for a brief (1/2 mile) drive, and returned with water gushing out of the cap. “Just needs a head gasket,” he said, and on Thursday he returned around 3pm with the gasket and a large collection of tools. I was working at home that day.

“Don’t we need to tow it down to the chicken house?” I asked. (The Boy has his Acura down there, undergoing its own engine transplant.)

“Nah,” he said. “It’ll only take a couple hours.”

“To pull the head?”

“Yeah. It’s no big deal.”

I checked in on him a couple times through the day, just to see how he was doing and to take a picture. “The head’s really clean, for having 300 thousand miles on it,” he said. “I expected an eighth inch of sludge all over everything.” He scraped off a very fine layer of oil-colored coating with a fingernail.

Well, of course, that “couple of hours” turned out to be closer to five hours; which meant he had to finish the job in the dark, with his friend shining the headlights of his own car at the Civic. I would have loaned him a trouble light, but The Boy already had it down at the chicken house. With all the tools he brought with him, I still loaned him a pair of pliers and a 1/4" 10mm socket. But as we were coming home from the usual supper at the inlaws, he was wrapping it up.

“Can I get a couple gallons of water?” he asked. No problem. When I did the major garage clean-out, I gathered up some gallon jugs and hung them on a pole. I also found about five gallons of radiator fluid, and offered him some to go with the water. One of the half-full containers was exactly right, he said, and was grateful to have it. (Plenty more where that came from, no problem.) So he filled up the radiator, and took it on that half-mile test run. Sure enough, the head gasket replacement fixed the problem, and he drove it home. He offered to help rebuild the red Civic, after The Boy gets his Acura going, and I’ll be happy to have it running (even if I just sell it).

So everybody’s happy. We have $400 in our pocket and one less piece of rolling stock cluttering up the manor grounds. He has a working vehicle. Now if I can just get him to stop teasing me about this rotary engine he’d be glad to drop in my Miata. (NO. :-)

Jury Duty Day 2, and more Winter #2

So everyone has heard about the debacle that was Atlanta traffic on Tuesday afternoon by now, right? Seriously, people who don’t live on Planet Georgia: it’s not the two inches of snow that throws everyone in the ditch here, it’s the quarter inch of ice underneath. I was explaining elsewhere, that we get snow in a fairly narrow temperature range—below 25°F, it’s usually “too cold to snow” here. So when we do get snow, the ground is often warm enough to melt it… then it freezes while we get more snow on top.

Then, once the snow came in, it stayed below freezing for several days. Usually, it’s here today and gone tomorrow. And we had icicles on the house. Icicles, people! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen that?

Oh yeah… jury duty. I wasn’t called in on Tuesday, which is fortunate, because the mess really started in the afternoon. I just plopped the work laptop on the desk and got to it. I called the jury duty hotline in the evening and got: “report on Thursday, January 30.” I ran the message again to make sure I got that right… then realized yeah, they’ll be closed Wednesday.

So Wednesday was another work at home day, except that I took a brief break to let Mason play in the snow. The only problem (as you might expect) was convincing him that he was getting cold and we needed to go back in. But in the time we were outside, he got to make snow angels, drive his trucks around, crawl around in it, fall down and complain about losing his footing.

He pointed out the icicles on the house… and I have NO idea where “I want to eat one!” came from. And he was very insistent about it. What the heck, I used to do it all the time. I found a sufficiently long stick, got him to stand back, and knocked one down.

I was rather surprised that he started slurping that thing, and wouldn’t turn it loose. That is, until he fell… then the icicle went flying, and he started begging me for another one. But he was cold, and I was getting cold, so I took his angrily protesting self back inside.


OK, back to jury duty. When we last saw the inside of the courthouse, it was 2:15 p.m. Monday. None of us waiting in the assembly room had been given a lunch break. That didn’t jibe well with the comforting speech from one of the judges earlier in the morning, who claimed to understand the inconvenience that reporting to jury duty was (before heaping the inconvenience of no lunch on us all). With a couple days to… um, cool off, perhaps things would be better today, right?

So I trundled in, flipped open my Kindle, and waited. I popped earbuds on and cranked up some music at one point, because a pair of teabaggers were reinforcing their constructed reality. And waited some more. Read some more. Played Midnight Mahjongg on my iPhone. Waited some more. Noon came, with no sign of an impending lunch break. Here we go again…

Fortunately, some judge suddenly thought about the starvelings in the assembly room, and we got a super-generous 45-minute lunch break starting at 12:45. It was enough time to grab a lunch special at the local pizza joint, anyway.

So we returned. I was hoping the all-day no-call meant that all the cases were being pled out, and we’d all soon be sent home. But… around 3p.m., the clerk called a clump of jurors, and they filed out. Shortly after, he assembled another clump, which included yours truly. Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to court we go.

As for the rest of the story, it will have to wait for (I hope) tomorrow, when we finish the trial, because I got selected. That was very surprising, and I’ll go into details when it’s over.

Jury duty. It’s like getting a “chocolate” icicle:

Home for the Holiday

Home, home again

I like to be here, when I can

— Pink Floyd

I took the three days off work that the office was open this week, but it wasn’t even a staycation.

Last week, the wife went into the doc’s about her knee. Over the years, it never really recovered from the car wreck that brought Daughter Dearest into the world a month early, and a chicken house accident certainly doesn’t improve anything. It finally gave up about a month ago. The doc suggested trying this and that, which weren’t likely to be a permanent fix if they worked at all. The wife said, “Let’s cut to the chase, not mess with stuff that isn’t going to work, and just replace it. Because that’s what’s going to happen after these other things don’t work anyway.”

That hardware is going
to be around for a while

The “system,” usually glacial when it comes to elective surgery, got its act together more quickly than expected, and she went in for a new knee on Tuesday. Yup, that was how I spent my birthday: dragging myself out of bed at way-too-early-thirty, taking her to the hospital, playing solitaire on my phone in the waiting room, then joining her in her new room. The operation itself was a breeze, but the recovery will take a while.

Lots of people have said to tell her to make sure she does her therapy. No problem there—she’s been trying to get ahead of the curve, trying to flex her leg a little a few hours out of the operating room. Her actual first therapy session went well, with her gimping around the bed on a walker.

With Thanksgiving looming, Daughter Dearest and I wondered about the timing. Still, there was plenty of dinner on the table, including the rolls I made from Grandma’s secret recipe. We didn’t have any shortening, but I found online that coconut oil is an acceptable substitute and we do have some of that. They turned out just fine. She called me in the morning, and told me to pick her up after I ate.

So it was off to the hospital, wheelchair to walker to van, then down to the in-laws to join the rest of the crowd for the second round of face-stuffing. There were jokes about her and Big V having a walker race, but Big V has more experience. I thought that “Two Gimpy Sisters” would be a fine name for a punk rock band.

So there’s a few things to be thankful for this year: thousands of copies of Accidental Sorcerers sold, Mason started pre-K, wife is going to be able to walk well for the first time in years… and Daughter Dearest is more like her old self than she has been in a while.