Full bloom

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz —
I wonder where the birdies is?

So goes a favorite doggerel of an old college buddy, whom we called Johanna Banana back when. The current answer to her question might be “Florida,” judging from the birds we saw in abundance there last week. Anyway....

We came home to find everything is in bloom around the manor. Dogwoods usually flower around April 1 on this planet.


This tree stands guard at the corner of the garage. This time of year, it buzzes to warn intruders away... or maybe it’s just the bees who swarm the top of the tree and leave us the bottom eight feet.


A closer look at that tree.


On the opposite corner of the manor house, there’s a flowering cherry tree. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be a favorite subject of haiku poets.


The dogwood tree by my outbuilding. During the summer, it provides a little shade. It won’t be long before I have to hoist the air conditioner unit into the window, though.


The dogwood bloom resembles a blood-tipped cross. That, and its flowering close to Easter, has obvious connotations among us Christian types. As a kid, I pointed that out to a Catholic friend and he promptly ate one — much to my astonishment. He didn’t get sick, but I wouldn’t make a habit of that. Some plants are toxic, after all (cherry trees are toxic to cattle, for example).


Planet Georgia’s flower is the Cherokee Rose, but if I’d had to guess I would have said it was the azalea. Or kudzu.


My sage plants are about to bloom and the parsley has gone absolutely bonkers in the last two weeks — it’s starting to produce seed and is threatening to engulf the adjacent rosemary plant. I picked up pennyroyal and lemon balm, and another rosemary (it looked so cute) while out and about yesterday as well.

Busy afternoon

Errands, errands, errands.

First, it was off to Home Despot to get some outdoor stuff & some other stuff to shore up the bug defenses. I think I wound up getting a bag of grass seed for free. Not sure how that happened.

After that, I had to zip by the auto parts place for some oil (I already have a filter or two) and a new battery charger for the bike. I also got gear oil for the final drive, but I don’t think I’ll have to change it yet. Mrs. Fetched is going to start driving my Civic around, since it gets twice the gas mileage as Barge Vader, on days when I take the bike to work (which will be as often as possible). Did I mention that gas is up to $2.75 here?

Speaking of gas, the last stop was to get some for the lawn mower; I topped off the Civic while I was at it. It took a while, since the gas station was crowded with motorcyclists and other tourist-types stopping by. I just parked & listened to the iPod until a pump opened up; it only took a couple of minutes.

I got the oil changed in the bike, in between doing a few other things (like fixing a dog pen a bit too late to keep one of the stupidogs from getting through to visit another stupidog in heat). I noticed a leaky fork seal, so I need to get that fixed before too long, and I figure the tires might last until June. So beyond a need for a good cleaning (the bike, that is), I should be ready to rumble tomorrow morning.

My back is a bit stiff from the bending over. And I need to get in bed anyway.

Third time the charm?

In the Roundup post below, I mentioned that Lobster was supposed to cough up the rent but I figured he wouldn’t. This one was a little on the spectacular side.

So yesterday evening, Mrs. Fetched caught him and asked him if he had the rent money.

“No,” he said. “That’s not important. I don’t have to pay it anyway.”

“Then pack up and get out,” said Mrs. Fetched, starting to switch to Battle Mode.

“You can’t make me leave,” he said, “it’s against the law.” (Have I mentioned that Lobster has pretty much turned off his brain lately?)

I chimed in at this point, “Show me a lease, foo’.” He had a chance to sign an agreement, which could perhaps have been construed as a lease, but never did it.

Mrs. Fetched didn’t say too much, but I’ve seen her Axe Murderer look before. Charles Manson would have thought twice before messing with someone giving him that look. After disagreeing with our choice to drop off his stuff, Lobster suddenly realized he needed to be at work and left precipitously.

Next thing I knew, garbage bags were dropping down the stairs and landing in the hallway. I went up to help, and so did The Boy. We loaded up all his stuff, dropped it on his parents’ porch (after calling them), then went to get groceries. Since Lobster works across the highway from the supermarket, I popped into the KFC to let him know where his stuff was, not to come back to FAR Manor, and to let us know if anything was missing. Having heard nothing since then, I presume he has it all.

Never say never, but I don’t think he’s coming back. I guess he just finished wearing out his welcome. This (unfortunately) being a real-life soap opera, nobody is ever completely written out of the script — but everyone is glad to see him go. After talking to Mrs. Fetched the way he did, I guess he’s lucky he didn’t have to pick his teeth off the floor with broken fingers or something.

Roundup

I spent two of the last three weeks in Florida... unfortunately, it was the week in the middle I was at FAR Manor (two trips). As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to collect a bunch of short items into a single post. I might come back and update this tonight or tomorrow if I think of anything else.

The first week, you pretty much know about already.

Lobster is (as usual) late with the rent. He seems to think he can just blow us off and spend it on clothes or whatever. WRONG! I’m hoping he’ll just move out, personally — he’s pretty much worn out his welcome as far as I’m concerned. If he takes the money and runs, fine.

From the Wishful Thinking Department: At work, I got a purchase requisition signed off for a translation project. I’m hoping to come back to work Monday to find it’s well under way.

Driving to Florida on a Spring Break Friday is not something I would advise under any circumstances. Between the time it took just to get through Atlanta, the road construction on I-4, and the usual delays (including dropping off M.A.E.), we got to where we were staying at 3 a.m. (about four hours late).

Speaking of M.A.E., I joked with BJ a few weeks back that we might just drop M.A.E. off at her aunt’s and “forget” to pick her up on the way back. Bad move: it got back to her and she thought I was serious. While we were in Florida last week, she called us just about every day to make sure nothing had changed.

As usual, there was nothing available in Orlando this time of year so we stayed at a timeshare in Titusville. Getting there at 3 a.m., we didn’t realize that the unit we were staying in was actually on the street instead of the little lane where the office and five of the units are. It took us 15 minutes to figure that out, at a time when we really didn’t need that aggravation.

Mrs. Fetched and I agree: we like Titusville. That’s probably because it’s not primarily a tourist area; Kennedy Space Center is the primary economic engine and there isn’t a beach area nearby. Even though it’s on the water, there’s only one high-rise condo development and it’s under construction. The only hurricane damage that we saw was the demolished fishing pier. Another part of its charm is that it’s separated from the Orlando (aka Tollando) area by 17 miles of marshland — fat chance that will get developed any time soon! It has that scruffy but comfortable feeling of a favorite pair of shoes. I could see myself living there more than just about any other part of the state. Not that I ever expect to escape Planet Georgia, but you never know.

Toll booth operators hate it when you pay in pennies. Tough $#!+ — if you’re going to screw over the people that pretty much keep your economy afloat by charging them to get from Point A to Point B, you need to expect some pushback. Especially when people are down to their last few bucks.

We ended up spending a night over at Mom’s — we had invited them to visit us, but they started hitting problem after problem (sound familiar?) and gave up. We decided to check out a day early and go over there instead. Very nice!

From the Rant-o-rama Department: One of the more egregious pieces of happy horse$#!+ I heard (last week or ever): men consider the “ideal woman” to be totally subservient and totally uncritical. Talk about gritting one’s teeth to keep from making a scene. Personally, that would be boring after a short while. I’d settle for someone who thinks she is (and actually is) equal, rather than superior in every way, and isn’t compelled to point out every freeking mistake (in her mind) that I make, especially when she doesn’t want to do it herself — or worse, set me up to knock me down. For example, we got in about midnight last night. Mrs. Fetched decided that the four eggs in the refrigerator were probably bad — even though I’m totally strung out from driving the last 13 hours, I’m supposed to hear (and remember) not to use the eggs on one side of the tray. (I guess making an effort to throw them out was totally out of the question.) So she wants me to fix eggs for breakfast and gets them out. Naturally, I got the “wrong” eggs. Of course she had to tell me that she knew I would get the wrong ones; but again, actually making an effort to prevent me from doing that must have been beneath her — either that, or she wanted me to get the “bad” eggs so she’d have something to gripe about. It’s getting harder and harder to scream “F**K YOU” and leave when that crap happens. I’m starting to wonder if she’s trying to kill me with stress for the insurance money.

Going north on a Spring Break Friday isn’t much better than going south. The first 100 miles were stop-and-go, finally opening up around Gainesville FL. But the freeway was pretty much carrying its capacity all the way up to Atlanta. Breaking for a picnic lunch at a rest area is probably the best way to cope with it, although things won’t necessarily be better when you get back on the road.

Finally: road atlases definitely have a shelf life. They should probably be replaced every three years or so, especially if there’s a lot of construction in areas where you’re travelling.

Two in a row!

Daughter Dearest’s chorus brought home the Musicfest 1^st place trophy for class AA! They missed the Grand Champion trophy by one point — a show choir won it.

I’d do the happy dance, but the four guys who went to pick up the trophy did it for me. We got video, but people stood up and Mrs. Fetched couldn’t get the tripod up off the benches. I’ll extract it and post it in this entry a little later.

Adios, Sonny

Early yesterday evening, cancer finished the job it started on my uncle Sonny a couple of years ago. He was unresponsive by the time we got to his place (in Florida) yesterday morning — he pretty much started shutting down Sunday evening — but perhaps he could hear us. He was surrounded by his friends and relatives at the end, and went peacefully and probably painlessly.

So Mrs. Fetched and I are staying another couple of days; the service is on Saturday and we'll head home Sunday morning.

This is a choka rather than a haiku, so I'll post it here:

The cook was puzzled:
Why were his loved ones weeping?

What they cried over
Was naught but an empty shell —

While Sonny himself,
had not felt better in years.

Recent memories:
Nephews thanked him for his help;

His two sons, stricken,
Struggled to express their love.

His partner, Colleen,
Not as ready as she thought.

His sister told them,
"Finally, he is at peace."

Friends and relatives
Praying for a miracle.

He told them good-bye,
Knowing they could not hear him —

Looking at the light,
He let it pull him upward.

The light flooded him,
Both around him and through him.

He heard bells and song,
It was new but familiar.

Finally he stopped,
A gatekeeper greeted him.

"Have a beer, Sonny,"
A frosty can of nectar —

"I'm ready to work,"
Was the master cook's reply.

"Oh, you'll work, alright;
The kitchen is waiting now.

"But those gone before —
They want some time with you first.

"Time to cook later;
Now there's a celebration.

"You gave much on Earth;
It's time for you to receive.

"Riches uncounted
For the open-handed ones,

"Who give all away,
Without thinking of themselves.

"Now enjoy yourself!
You can start cooking later.

"When the party's done,
Start preparing a big feast

"For those left behind,
Who will join you when it's time."

So heaven rejoiced,
As Sonny walked through the gates,
Into the Eternal Joy.

Impromptu road trip

Actually, I knew this was coming, but was hoping to put it off for another week or two.

My uncle in Florida, mom’s brother and dad’s best buddy (even after the divorce), is rapidly losing his battle with lung/brain/etc cancer. We’re heading down in the morning to see him for a couple of days, probably for the last time.

The Boy wanted to come, but couldn’t get the time off work. As it turns out, my other bro is coming in & so there wouldn’t have been room anyway. Daughter Dearest is stuck with school; chorus is getting ready for the national competition next week. Just Mrs. Fetched & me, it looks like. I hate leaving DD in charge of the asylum, especially since she’s not been getting up for the school bus lately, but Mrs. Fetched’s mom and brother will be up checking on things at random intervals.

Meanwhile, I’ve loaded up the iPod with a handful of audio podcasts and a couple of video podcasts — Mrs. Fetched can watch a Photoshop show if she likes; I grabbed a couple of cooking shows (and all my audio subscriptions) for me.

Bonus babies, aka new toys

They passed out bonuses at work on Wednesday — a little earlier than I was prepared for, because I’d like a new MacBook but want to wait on the next hardware revision. So to assuage the technolust, I settled for getting an iPod and all the stuff I’ll need to go with it. Seeing my iBook is fairly old, it took nearly four hours to copy all my music and photos over a USB 1.1 port... just an incentive to get that newer laptop, I guess. We also picked up a 250GB hard drive for Mrs. Fetched’s video editing system — that G4 dualie has churned along for nearly four years now with no hardware upgrades, and it seems like 80GB drives aren’t as big as they used to be — and a set of noise-cancelling headphones.

I’d like to say one thing about the headphones: They. Are. FANTASTIC.

It seems to be an axiom that whatever the absolute worst cube in the office is, it will be assigned to me. The dwelling place I’ve been stuck with for the last couple of years is certainly a candidate if not the runaway winner — as far away from the windows as possible, along a main traffic route, and directly across from a training room with at least one of everything we make. Many of those products have fans, and they run all day. The only thing that drowns it out is the blare of the trainer, whose voice carries through most of that part of the building — he “can’t” shut the door because it would get too hot. The new headphones don’t do much for the chatter, but they easily knock out 80% of the fan noise emanating from the training room. Switching off the noise canceller produced a roar that I thought at first was blood rushing through my ears (like you might hear with a seriously good headset with no sound coming in), but was actually the training room.

I was impressed enough to risk official opprobrium by wearing them on the drive home, playing my iPod into the ’phones instead of through the FM transmitter thingie. Like wearing earplugs on the motorcycle, I think I hear better with the headphones: all the wind noise and road noise and climate control fan noise simply fades away; leaving only the hum of the engine, a little residual background stuff, and the music... which I can play at a much lower volume.

The only drawback is that they're the kind that hook over your ears, with the connecting band going around the back of your head. For whatever reason, they irritate my ears after a few hours.

I would pay some serious money for a “cone of silence” headset — something that would cut out both white noise and external chatter.

Status quo

Things are rapidly getting back to what the problem children call “normal” — staying out waaayy past 10:30p.m. curfew and the like. Mrs. Fetched is again making noises about clearing them out. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Emotional constipation

Have you ever felt like something wasn’t right, but you can’t articulate it? That’s how I’m feeling tonight.

Or maybe it’s just an excuse to hit the rum a lot harder than I really should be. BWI, Blogging While Intoxicated, that’s me tonight. I guess I should go back to my card game.

Signs of spring

The last two weekends have involved yard work. It’s amazing how a simple thing like mowing down some border plants (they grow better when they’ve been zapped) leads to all sorts of other stuff. First you see all the fronds in the yard, so you rake ’em up. There’s a big bunch of grass raked up with the fronds. Next thing you know, you’ve got the generator out of mothballs, a blower plugged in, and then there’s an enormous pile of leaves and clippings burning. And what passes for a front lawn at FAR Manor is a little longer than the house and no more than 15 feet deep. Mrs. Fetched saw what I was doing and started in on the other side of the driveway (which parallels the front of the house). Thus does a 15 minute job run all afternoon.

The back yard is a bit bigger, and has been neglected for quite a while. I finally got tired of looking out the bathroom window at a bunch of sticks and twigs on the ground, got out the rakes & blower again, pulled up a zillion little pine trees (Dad helped with that quite a bit) and made a border with some logs that I will probably never get around to splitting. This side will be the yard, that side is the woods. The leaves I threw in the dog run area, also known as the moonscape.

There’s not a lot of lawn out back, which has a lot to do with the trees that nearly took over. Since some of them were leaning toward the house, we had some people come out to cut them down. Others we had a lumber company pay us to take away (they wanted the pines, which had pine beetles in them anyway). But I digress.

Warm days have brought the potted herbs outside until tomorrow afternoon (it’s supposed to get chilly again tomorrow night). I’m hearing the frogs (a spring kigo for haiku writers) peeping in nearby ponds or creeks. I can’t seem to get grass to grow right (hey, less mowing that way), but lots of other stuff just comes up on its own.

Wild onions in the yard. I added some (domestic) chives to my potted herbs, so I haven’t need to harvest them. Besides, with the dogs running around loose... yuck.


Daffodils on the roadside. They’re hardy little boogers; they grow alongside most of the roads around here and you can see them down in the woods. A cheerful reminder that winter is almost over.


The pansies are also hardy; Mrs. Fetched keeps some out through the winter and they’re still hanging around. I’ll remember to get pictures. Maybe.

Talk about lucky...

Almost like hitting the lottery....

Monday Night Cinema — special edition

This one just won’t wait for Friday night — it’s a jaw-dropper!

Turn up your sound and check out Chris Bliss: Must-See Finale

Oh hey...

I sold a photo this week! Or I should say, Mrs. Fetched sold it. It was a shot of Amicalola Falls that also appears in Fall at the Falls from November.

A local indie coffee shop bought it to screen onto their “Amicalola Blend” coffee. Not much money, but lots of free coffee coming out of this one....

Dad’s here!

Stopping by on the way back to Michigan. Updates will probably be slow (again) for the next couple of days.

Well, I’ve started...

The boss told us in the staff meeting that the word for the year is “automation.” I told him I could automate quite a bit of my work by going to a markup-based system, and he said go for it.

So I’ve stopped talking about dumping FrameMaker for groff and started doing it. Not a moment too soon — the new Intel-based Macs won’t run Classic applications, of which FrameMaker is one. I’m probably going to be getting a MacBook at work soon, and getting one for myself as well.

It helps that the latest version of groff adds support for links and bookmarks in PDFs, and the HTML output continues to improve, so I shouldn’t lose any functionality.

A Boy and his wheels

The Boy has had a Chevy Lumina sitting in the driveway for a couple of months now, waiting for the title to come in so he could get plates and insurance on it. The title arrived late last week, and Mrs. Fetched took him to get the paperwork done yesterday. He’s happy.

It’s kind of nice, not having to worry about taking him to work (or picking him up) now. At least until he runs out of gas....

Impressions from a bus ride

Busy week so far. Tuesday night, Daughter Dearest and her high school chorus got to go to downtown Atlanta to sing the national anthem at a Hawks game. I went along to videotape it, but they wouldn’t let me bring the camcorder in. Grr. But I got to see what turned out to be a pretty good game, and the home team won it for a change.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. We spent a pretty good while on a yellow school bus getting into town, and there were a few thoughts that impressed themselves on me during the ride (there and back).

I’ve always known there’s some kind of barrier between the freeway and the not-freeway, but perhaps since I was reading The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (good book if you haven’t read it — things haven’t changed much in 65 years) I saw that barrier in a different way. Instead of a safety measure, I saw a boundary between two worlds, mobile and fixed. In some places the boundary was little more than a token: a guard rail or “portable” concrete barrier, something easy to step over. In other places, the guard rail was backed by a high chain-link fence, sometimes topped with barbed wire; sometimes the fence stood alone without the guard rail. The most extreme cases were the metal or concrete sound barriers that loomed 10 feet or more above the roadside.

I still have the ability to read a book and shut out the hubbub around me. The tap on the shoulder I can’t ignore, and never was able to. Daughter Dearest was impressed that I could ignore the noise and read. The kids double-up on an iPod: one earbud in each head.

Bus seats aren’t nearly as comfortable as they were when I was 17 and weighed 140 pounds.

The height of school bus hijinks these days seems to be boys parading shirtless up the aisle. The “freeze-out” I remember from my high school days, and it was much more effective in a real winter.

The security people were very pleasant, in stark contrast to the job they’re doing. I had to ask the guy about his twisted locks; he said he’d been working on it for seven years. Amazing.

Trying to read email on a cell phone is a pain under any circumstance, and twice as much on a jouncy bus.

No-Good, Very Bad...

Warnings: Very long post, graphic

I have to say, I’ve lived a relatively sheltered — one could even say “whitebread” — existence. What I’ve called a “bad day” up to now usually involves interactions with in-laws these days: a shouting match, forgetting whatever plans I had for the weekend to take care of a die-off in the chicken houses, getting pushed into buying a house I didn’t want and can’t afford... the usual everyday stuff in a rural middle-class existence.

Yesterday redefined “bad day” for me and Mrs. Fetched. For The Boy, it was easily orders of magnitude worse. This gets a bit gross down below, You Have Been Warned.

The day started shortly after midnight. Lobster (who seemed to have got the attitude adjustment we’d hoped for, and got his repaired truck about the same time) had volunteered to pick up The Boy when the latter was done at work around 10 to 10:30p.m. But The Boy had called and told me he wanted to go to the apartment tonight because his roommate (we’ll call him “Jimi” here) was sick. “He was having trouble breathing this morning, and BJ (a mutual friend) called an ambulance but he wouldn’t go to the doctor. He has asthma and I was going to take him an inhaler.” The Boy had an inhaler from a bout of bronchitis (misdiagnosed as first-stage emphysema at the time) to give him. Having heard lies upon lies from The Boy, I was naturally skeptical about this — sounded like a massive load of fertilizer, in short.

“The agreement was, you could spend Mondays and Tuesdays (his days off from work) there. You’re supposed to be home tonight,” I reminded him. In one ear and out the other, and no explanation of what they had been doing for the previous two hours. Another friend was in Lobster’s truck (an extended cab Ranger), leaving one more open slot. M.A.E. came bouncing out to go along, and was disinvited by The Boy.

“We’re picking up another friend, so there won’t be room for you,” he told her.

Lobster, always one to take a dig at M.A.E., said “I’ll come back for you if you can give me gas money,” knowing that she didn’t.

M.A.E. came huffing back into the house and got on the phone, which is something she does a lot when she’s mad at The Boy. Since it was so late, we told her to get off the phone and she wound up talking to us until past 2 a.m. At this point, we were ready to tell The Boy to just stay at his apartment, get his GED whenever he felt like it, and find his own rides until he gets his car licensed (the title came in earlier this week).


All that went in the dumpster when the phone rang at 5:15a.m. Mrs. Fetched got it, because it’s on her side of the bed. The Boy was hysterical, barely coherent, but we got the gist of it: Jimi had died in the bathroom, with one of The Boy’s syringes sticking out of his arm, and he wanted to move out of the apartment and come home for good. Three hours of sleep or not; when you get a phone call like that from one of your kids, you get moving.

As it turned out, The Boy had actually been telling the truth about the health of his roommate for a change, even if some of the details were wrong. He was coughing up blood (never a sign of good health), and BJ called an ambulance for him and offered to pay for Jimi’s medical care if necessary. Jimi insisted that he was OK, although he certainly didn’t look OK, and refused to go to the hospital. The chronology, as best as I can piece it together so far, goes like this: about two weeks ago, he hooked up with somebody, which precipitated a relapse of his cocaine habit. When you’re diabetic, you’re the best buddy of every druggie out there, because you can buy syringes without raising suspicion... and The Boy never had to worry about securing his needles beyond the usual disposal issues. So all Jimi had to do to get a syringe was to grab one out of the bag on top of the refrigerator. I don’t know if shooting coke rips up your stomach, or he had some other issue, but it certainly wasn’t helping matters. Earlier in the week, The Boy gave Jimi his half of the rent money ($200) and told him to give it to the superintendent (two doors down). He then told the super that Jimi had the money and would bring it over when he got his half from his brother. Jimi, as far as I can tell, went and spent $100 of that on some coke.

Now we get to the events of early Saturday morning. They picked up the fourth friend, and went to The Boy’s apartment. Jimi looked horrible, but was in good spirits, walking around and talking with them. They decided to make a trek to McDonald’s (nearly an hour round trip) and grab some chow; Jimi begged off and said to go without him. So they went, and spent another hour hanging out at a gas station where another friend was working. At some point during this two hours, Jimi locked himself in the bathroom, shot up some coke, passed out immediately, vomited blood, and choked.

Having absolutely no clue as to what was going on, they dropped The Boy off at the apartment around 4:30 and drove off. He tried the bathroom door, knocked, got no answer, then started to worry after a few minutes. He knocked again, got no answer, then remembered there was a screwdriver on the dresser. He took the doorknob off, opened it up, and there was Jimi. He tried to wake him up, then called Lobster. Lobster came back, took The Boy to BJ’s (who lives nearby), then drove off. What a friend we have in Lobster, eh?

So BJ and The Boy went back up, tried to revive Jimi (here opinions diverge: I’m pretty sure he was dead before The Boy got back to the apartment; Mrs. Fetched is equally convinced The Boy saw him die), called 911 somewhere in the process. BJ left again, and The Boy called us some time after the cops arrived. We got there about 6 a.m., to find three cop cars (and a fourth soon blocked us in). We’re standing around in 28F, freezing away, The Boy barely maintaining. BJ returned, wearing a shirt from some security outfit, and talked to us and the cops. Eventually, they brought out Jimi. The Boy and Mrs. Fetched preferred not to watch this, but he was in a body bag with a sheet draped over that so there wasn’t much to see anyway. I offered a silent, clumsy benediction.

Shortly after, one of the cops asked The Boy to talk with him in the warm car. You can imagine my relief when they opened the front door for him. Presumably they got a statement, then let him out and drove off. The cops said they were done with the apartment, and the super said if the place was clean The Boy could get his security deposit back. OK, fine, we went home to regroup.

The Boy couldn’t get out of working, so after a catnap I took him up (11am to 7pm shift). Mrs. Fetched, her mom, and I gathered up cleaning supplies and went on back. The bathroom should have been declared a biohazard area; there was blood all over the floor and some on the carpet outside (The Boy and BJ dragged Jimi out partway, trying to revive him). Never one to dodge the nastiest part of any job, Mrs. Fetched donned rubber gloves and went in with the mop. I used a spot cleaner on the carpet outside, achieving partial success. Mother-in-law attacked the kitchen. After the spots, I started bagging up Jimi’s clothes, getting some help from Mrs. Fetched when some of The Boy’s got mixed in.

One surprise: even when cleaning up the effects and blood of a dead man you’ve never met, you get hungry. I ended up popping up to a nearby supermarket to get some apples, soft drinks, and the Girl Scouts were out front so I grabbed a couple boxes of cookies... and they had those roasted green peas I fell in love with a while back (wasabi flavor!). We broke for a quick snack, then finished up the job. BJ and his family came by while we were at it; Jimi’s relatives were looking for his diary and a picture of his parents (Jimi was raised by his aunt & uncle after his parents died when he was very young). BJ went through Jimi’s things, finding the diary and lots of The Boy’s syringes in the process, but never turned up the picture. There were lots of very good drawings, mostly in the heavy metal theme — he was quite talented.

Some time after BJ left, mother-in-law opened a kitchen drawer and found the picture. I called BJ, but got no answer, so I loaded Jimi’s things in the back seat of Barge Vader, The Boy’s stuff in the back, and the furniture went into the in-laws’ pickup truck. We left that place one heck of a lot cleaner than it was before The Boy moved in, I can tell you that. If there’s any money knocked off the security deposit, I’ll want to know why — in detail. We drove away, forever I hope, about 4 p.m.

After a day like that, we imposed a permanent 10:30 curfew (only exception is working late), and were in no mood to hear any arguments about it. People tend to get arrested or dead in the wee hours.

The creator-consumer dilemma: preservation

O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter blog recently ran a short article about the concerns over long-term preservation of today’s digital media.

It’s an interesting problem. In the olden days, before 1980 or so, the vast majority of “home” media came from a film camera. People typed (on a typewriter) or hand-wrote letters and stories and kept their paper copies in a desk drawer. A few years later, VHS camcorders started making inroads, but almost nobody edited their tapes — partly because it would require three decks, and partly because it would degrade the already mediocre video quality. Here in the 21^st Century, we have digital media coming out of our ears (actually going in our ears... think iPod) but I’m still waiting for the tours to Saturn.

But we face a very real issue of impermanence. A while back, I mentioned finding several short stories I wrote in college; some were typed (on an old “portable” Smith-Corona manual typewriter) and some were hand-written. I also have one and a half novels I wrote back then (longhand). All of them were on paper, and had survived over 20 years of storage. Whatever I wrote on a Commodore 64 in the mid-80s didn’t fare so well. Printed digital photos tend to fade over time, and exposure to sunlight hastens their demise — compare that to black&white film photos that have survived 100 years. Videotape can last several decades if stored properly, but dropouts accumulate over time and make the video that much harder to recover. That haircut video I burned to DVD, or those copies of stories and photos burned to CD, are good for a couple of decades if stored properly. On the other hand, check out what can happen to a CD that gets kicked around in a car for a little while:

Those spots are in the CD, not on it. You can’t polish that out. If you want your disks to last, keep them in a cool, dry, dark place.

There are a couple of bright spots: first, there’s just so dang much digital media being cranked out, by you and me and everyone else, that some of it is bound to make it to our grandchildren. Next, if you can solve the “bit-rot” problem (that’s a technical term), future generations could have access to perfect copies of our narratives — no faded photos, no text obscured by stains or yellowing, video as good (or bad) as the day it was taken.

Digital media is much easier to back up; for example, there are plenty of services dedicated to sharing digital photos — and those photos you share are also stored on a disk that isn’t in your house. There are analogous services for video and even text (you’re looking at one of the latter right now), and I even have a little program that lets me use my Gmail account to stash files in one of its folders (yes, my stories are backed up!). Someone truly fanatical about saving their text or photos could print them (even in black&white) on acid-free paper and have (physically) distant relatives keep a copy — if you lose your originals, you could at least OCR the text and scan the photos.

Backing up is easy, but most people don’t do it (or in my case, don’t do it as thoroughly as I should). If you need motivation, try this: you’re one hard drive crash away from losing all of your pictures, video, music, and writings.

Friday Night Cinema

When the wallet and the attention span just aren’t up for a night at the theater, Tales from FAR Manor scours the inboxes and search engines to bring you free short flicks.

Tonight’s feature is both funny and scary, and shows us what we’re in for if we don’t get serious about protecting our right to privacy.

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Lobster called from work, wondering if we were going to pick him up. Um... no. He really must think that nothing I say has any actual content. Mrs. Fetched got a bit squeamish the last couple of days about letting him fend for himself — I was half-expecting her to let him come back and to #3|| with what I wanted, at which point I would have packed up and left myself — and even The Boy, who is not exactly fond of Lobster these days, tried to talk me into letting him come back. I figured he could fend for himself at least one night, then see if he suddenly got enlightened about how one should treat people who let you stay in your house for months on end, etc. etc.

Well... shades of the Summer of Discontent. Guess who took him in? Yup, Big V. She picked him up from work, hitting a deer along the way (serves her right for poking her nose into things again, she can’t see at night anyway). Then she brought him here to get his clothes, and came in herself. Words were exchanged with Mrs. Fetched, as usual, with me (futilely) trying to get a word in edgewise, until Big V did one of her typical eight-cylinder-huff exits.

The way Lobster has been acting, he hasn’t learned a thing: he did zip/nada to find another place to stay, then tried to tell me a couple of nights ago that I had to give him 30 days’ notice (WRONG). Tonight, he whined about not being able to go back to school (the school policy is that you have to live at home; they bent it to let him stay with us)... although from what the principal told us, he hasn’t doing anything but warming a chair lately anyway. Hey, he said it himself: he’s 18, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone, he can do what he want and go where he wants and come back when he wants. Fine, he just can’t do it at FAR Manor.

Obviously, Big V hasn’t learned a thing from the previous episode either. Her and Lobster both think the universe was created solely for their benefit... so I expect things will blow sky-high before too long. I doubt it will even last the 2-½ weeks The Boy and M.A.E. stayed there. I give it 10 days.

This is one of those times when I would really like to have a second place far away from here. I’d be there, with everything valuable that I could carry with me, right now.

VoIP... coming to an office near me

One of the IT folks came by my cube this afternoon, with a brand-new toy: a Cisco VoIP phone. Ain’t it cute?



Unfortunately, they don’t quite have them enabled yet. It came up, told me it was downloading a software update, then showed me this plaintive whine. The IT guy told me their plan was to roll the phones out to everyone, make sure they were doing their job, then cut everyone over. Presumably they’ll come to pick up the old Nortel PBX phones.


After looking at these pictures, all I can say is: my cellphone camera really sucks.

Google-licious

Google is starting to take notice of Mac users, finally. They’ve released three DashBoard Widgets, of which I installed two: the Blogger widget (I’m using it for this post) and the Gmail widget. I had to rearrange my Dashboard a little — the Gmail widget in particular is pretty big, especially for the iBook’s 1024x768 display — but change is good.

What FAR Manor and a Dozebox have in common

Answer: neither one are very secure.

I’m working at home today. Before I was even able to grab some breakfast, Mrs. Fetched was telling me we had to go down to the old place because the renters couldn’t get the furnace started. Turns out they were trying to light the control box instead of the pilot (for which you have to open the hatch), and they had the gas turned off (instead of the pilot setting). I didn’t say much, but I sure thought a lot.

Of course, my own personal brain-fart had gone off and I hadn’t noticed yet. Mrs. Fetched was going to take Mrs. Renter to eat breakfast out, drop her off at her job, then pick up my BP prescription refill. I noticed when she locked the door going out to the garage when we left, but hadn’t thought about my house keys, sitting on top of the dresser. Of course, I thought about it as soon as they were gone... and sure enough, all the doors were locked. $#¡+!!!

Once in a while, the door from the porch (where the cats live) into the living room doesn’t latch, but no such luck this time. My first thought was to get the extension ladder and go in through one of the upstairs bedroom windows: The Boy often pulled that stunt when he was out tomcatting around or whatever last summer. Unfortunately, I put an end to that nonsense by locking the ladder under the house last week. What to do, what to do... stepping off the porch, I was right at eye level with the window to Mrs. Fetched’s video editing room.

Sure enough, the window slid open. I got the small stepladder out of the garage and raised the window. All the windows at FAR Manor are these once nice metal framed things. Every single one is broken in some way or another; there’s a spring-latch mechanism that’s supposed to hold them up, but they don’t stay up anymore. Fortunately, there was a piece of shelving within convenient reach inside the room, and I used that to prop up the window while I crawled in.

Mrs. Fetched is suddenly more amenable to my suggestion that we replace the windows one at a time, as we can afford it. I guess I need to buy some dowels in the meantime, to help keep closed windows closed. And always carry my keys.

The Boy’s Hot Time

Night before last, about 9:30, I caught The Boy checking his glucose — something I don’t often see him doing without prompting.

“What’s your level?” I asked him.

He looked. “212... I figured it would be high, I think I’m sick.”

Yipe. I did the usual parental feel the forehead thing; this time it was warm. “Yeah, you feel hot,” I said. “You might want to go to bed.” And that’s just what he did, confirming to me that he truly was sick... he would have just shook his head at me otherwise.

One thing about The Boy: when he gets a fever, it spikes up pretty quickly. By the time we got him some tylenol and found a thermometer, he was around 103. The tylenol didn’t seem to be helping, so we gave him some ibuprofen and it came down overnight. Mrs. Fetched and I swapped beds with Daughter Dearest, in the other upstairs bedroom, so she could check on him through the night.

Morning came, she took him to the doctor, who said he has strep throat. Seems like we get hit with that more often than the flu.

We had choir practice last night, so after work I spent a fruitless hour at a hobby store looking for bookbinding supplies then went straight to the church. Afterwards, I came home with DD to an empty FAR Manor — The Boy and M.A.E. were nowhere to be found. Whatever... I hadn’t eaten supper, and it was like 9:30, so I was in no frame of mind to give it much thought. Mrs. Fetched was chatterboxing with some of the other choir ladies, and got in about 10:30. She immediately called his smellphone, get the voicemail, and left him a message telling him to not come home (which pretty much completes Project Honey I’m Home without my help). When you stay up most of the night taking care of someone, it’s understandable if you get cheesed when that someone takes off instead of resting up.

I hope he doesn’t infect M.A.E. and all his friends. Running around loose when you’re sick doesn’t strike me as a very intelligent thing to do.

Project “Honey I’m Home!” continues

The Boy is next in line on the launching pad. After this morning’s rant, I went to get The Boy up to help me pick up the trimmings from the butterfly bushes. He rolled over, looked at the clock, and asked for 20 minutes (11 a.m.). OK, it wasn’t anything that needed to be done right away. I gave him 45 minutes (almost 11:30).

And of course, he didn’t want to get up at 11:30, either. He wanted to not have to do anything (even a half hour worth) until it was time to go to work (i.e. until it was time for me to take him to work). I finally told him that if all he wanted to do here was eat and sleep, giving us nothing but disrespect in return, he could follow Lobster right out the door. While I was picking up the trimmings, the girlies returned from the chicken houses and Mrs. Fetched helped me get the rest up while I let her know what was going on. Afterwards, she jumped in the shower and I did a couple of other things then woke M.A.E. up about 1 p.m. to vacuum the floors.

After Mrs. Fetched & Daughter Dearest got out of the shower, we decided to go out for lunch (we’d planned to do something since we had a day off, although I would have preferred more than just a lunch). The Boy had to find a ride to work: he can’t get up to help me, why should I be arsed to drive him around? We weren’t where we could drop everything and come back for him anyway. After lunch, we picked up Lobster then went in the store to grab some garbage bags. M.A.E. called Lobster and (according to Daughter Dearest) was complaining that I woke her up at 1 in the afternoon, the horror! When we got home, the two went outside (one at a time, but right after the other)... y’know, for two people who profess not to like each other, they sure do stick together. Wife sent me out to “putter around in the garage” while they were out there; they kept their voices too low to hear but I did manage to find a coax cable with F-connectors (I swear I looked in that box last week and didn’t see one!) and a soft-sided cooler. The former went to the outbuilding for future photography needs, the latter in the trunk of my car.

So Lobster gets to stay through the end of the month. I’d just as soon give him the $30 rent, pro-rated for the rest of the month, and tell him to hit the road... but whatever. As long as they’re out of here. Eight days, then they really can be independent. Eight more days.

All I can say to this is...

YUCK!

Throwing Back the Lobster

A while back, we made it pretty clear to Lobster — as well as The Boy and M.A.E. — what was expected from each of them individually and all of them as a group... and if they didn’t want to live up to those expectations, they knew where the door was.

Lobster is kind of a special case at the moment: he’s the only one actively in school. The Boy started flinging the “this school is stupid, I’ll be able to do better at the private school” (that he couldn’t wait to get away from last year) crap. Fine, whatever, as long as he finishes, right? So we started making the arrangements to get him back in the private school. We figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem — especially since the preacher at the church told Daughter Dearest that they would try to make some arrangements if they wanted to come back — and The Boy just jumps and expects the soft landing to be there anyway. The upshot is, he quit the public school and the principal at the private school said “I prayed about it and it’s not the best thing.” I’ll spare y’all the obligatory potshots at pentecostals.

So ever since, Lobster has been whining and complaining each morning that he has to get up while The Boy just lays there. We’re trying to arrange a home school program for The Boy so he can finish up (as if he’ll put any effort into it, but he won’t be able to say we didn’t give him the chance), but these things don’t happen overnight. None of them have any sense of responsibility, it seems... as if we didn’t know that already.

President’s Day weekend rolls around, under the unskilled aegis of the worst president ever. Daughter Dearest & even your humble correspondent get Monday off. But not Lobster (nor Mrs. Fetched, because chicken houses never rest, but anyway). That private school has some good points, but they’re seriously weird in others. The Boy and M.A.E. decide they want to go to a movie, along with Lobster. Since it was 8:30, I figured they could go, be home by 11, and I’d be able to get Lobster off to school. I fiddled around, did a little exercise (been slacking on that lately, bad FARfetched, bad!), and called Lobster’s smellphone around 11. No answer. I told him he needed to be home ASAP to get to school the next day.

Around midnight, still haven’t heard anything. I called his phone, he picked up & hung up. I tried it again, same result. The third attempt went straight to his voice mail, and I left him a rather pointed message. About five minutes later, I tried again, got the voice mail, and started leaving a real happy note when he called. “Oh, we decided to just come home around 6 and you can take me to school.” I told him at that point to not bother coming home, he could get a ride to school with whoever was carrying them around.

“But what about my bookbag and uniform?”

“Not my problem,” I told him. He whined about my trying to “control” him, and I told him it had nothing to do with control and everything to do with responsibility. After some more whining on his part, I just hung up, turned off the phone, and went to bed.

So of course they don’t show up at 6... it’s almost 8 a.m. sharp when The Boy calls and says, “we’re outside, can you unlock the door?” The three of them came in and all of them, including Lobster, got in their beds. Uh-uh, Lobster, you’ve got school. I said I’d take him there but not bring him back; he could find somewhere else to live and whoever takes him in can come get his stuff.

On the way to school, I told him I really do hope he succeeds at whatever he decides to do, but we obviously can’t help him take the next step. He wants to be his own person, it’s time for him to step out on his own, and The Boy and M.A.E. will be gone just as soon as he gets his car legal. He just grunted, as if I expected anything different. Now Mrs. Fetched starts criticizing me about how I shouldn’t have said anything about the others leaving, and Lobster has paid rent through the end of the month, and M.A.E. still owes us $270... and that, in a nutshell, is why I haven’t made much effort to play much role in what goes on around here: when everything you do and say gets criticized or negated, why bother? I told her as much, and she clammed up after a couple feeble attempts at self-justification. As far as M.A.E. is concerned, there’s such a thing as cutting your losses.

So that’s my day off. Now I need to get The Boy up to help pick up some brush trimmings....

Dude... you got a discount

We got a company-wide email a couple of days ago, announcing that we were now part of the Dell Employee Purchase Program (EPP). We can get up to 12% discounts on Smelly Dell consumer models, plus a free download of XP Home.

ooooooooooooooooohhhhh... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The funny thing is, we’re in a de-Dell-ification process at work; people needing new computers are getting IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. I’ve suggested to those who are waiting for their Smelly Dells to finish flaking out to “accidentally” drop them on the way to a meeting or something so they can get to the front of the line. Just trying to be helpful....

From experience, when people ask me what kind of computer to get, I tell them two things: 1) Don’t get a Dozebox. 2) If you ignore #1, don’t get a Dell. Then they get a Dell, have all sorts of problems with it, and I get to say I told you so. :-P I’d take one if they gave it to me, but I’d install Linux on it and use it for a music/video jukebox.

Weekend Cinema

Having missed Friday Night Cinema due to playing catch-up and other distractions, we bring you a Saturday Night Special. Hat tip goes to VoodooMike, who serves up tonight’s double feature.

Feature #1 is a whimsical selection called Musical Roundabout.

Feature #2 is rated NSFW. It’s a rather interesting Deleted Scene from Star Wars.

I would have been in bed earlier...

...but I found my old website from my Nyx days in The Wayback Machine. The home page proudly states that its last update was November 7, 1998... in Internet time, that’s like gaslight and 2400 bps “high-speed” modems. It even has the lost episodes of Chicken House Hell, which I may scarf up and repost here if I’m feeling sufficiently disgusting. Anyway, I spent way too much time looking at stuff I wrote over seven years ago. I thought I’d had a detailed analysis of the Concept virus there, which is why I tried to find it in the first place, but it either didn’t get archived or I put it on some other page (it might have been an internal corporate site).

If you’ve been around a while, long enough to abandon a web site or two, your old sites may well be gone but not forgotten. If you can remember a URL, punch it in and see what happens.

Now I’m going to bed. Maybe I can get over this and sleep....

The End of Innocence

We knew it had to happen sooner or later: now Mac users have the Leap.A trojan to worry about. Something like 50 people, total, have been hit by this... but judging from the press coverage, you’d think it was Apocalypse Now. Just don’t accept any files called “latestpics.tgz” from iChat and you should be fine.

Way back when transferring files meant schlepping them around on a floppy, Mac viruses were fairly common. I kept a fairly extensive collection of disinfectant software and had a fairly detailed plan for cleaning up the department Macs when we got hit (which only happened twice in five years). Later on, the primary viral focus shifted from floppies to Microsoft Word files; you could write viruses using Word’s macro language, and they ran on both PCs and Macs. I remember the first Word macro virus; it was called “Concept,” and it was simple enough that I took it apart and analyzed it. It was rather chilling to see a routine called “PayLoad,” which contained only the comment “this should prove my point” — and indeed, it wasn’t long before more destructive macro viruses (that mostly only damaged PCs, fortunately for me) appeared.

After that, malware activity on Macs faded away gradually and those disinfectant utilities withered for lack of need. Lordy, it’s been 7 or 8 years since there’s been anything beyond breathless pronouncements, quickly debunked. Part of it, of course, is the sheer number of Dozeboxes in the world... and the larger part is how easily it has been for malware to infest those Dozeboxes. Macs represented too much effort for too little return, so we have enjoyed a long period of innocence which may well have come to an end this week.

If you use a Mac, grab the Free ClamXav malware scanner if you haven’t already. I think it’s already been updated to detect Leap.A, and it’s a good idea to use it if you transfer files to Dozeboxes... you can’t get infected by their viruses, but you can be Typhoid Annie and transfer them. Be a good citizen and avoid doing that.

While Leap.A is probably not a serious threat — you have to accept an incoming file transfer, unpack the archive, double-click the executable (that tries to disguise itself as a JPEG file), and enter your password to allow the installer to do its thing (and if a JPEG file wants your password, it’s probably not a JPEG) — it represents the straggly first weed in your putting-green lawn. Time to get the shovels, rakes, and implements of dee-struction... and keep them safe in the garage. For now.

Nice winter days

The only thing you can say for certain about January and February on this planet is that the days steadily get longer. I noticed yesterday that there’s now more light at 6:30 p.m. than there was at 5:30 p.m. at Christmas. Spring training is about to get under way, another sure sign that winter really is not permanent. I don’t follow baseball nearly as much as I used to, but to me baseball is still a metaphor for summer nights, the voice of which is Ernie Harwell calling the play-by-play for the Tigers on a static-y AM radio:

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

I mean, really. The announcers for the Braves are OK, but nobody can do “swinnnnnnnng an-a miss!” like Ernie. God, I miss him. Maybe that’s why I don’t follow baseball these days; my personal Voice of Summer is now only in my head.

So yesterday, I didn’t feel like fixing lunch, and I needed a little exercise. I stepped outside and ohhhh yeahhhhhh, sixty-some degrees, the sun was shining, and you can’t enjoy a day like that in a car! Off to the Kroger Grill to get some grilled chicken, to be consumed at an outdoor table with some baked beans and a Diet Cherry Coke (an indulgence I allow myself once or twice a week). I walked quickly, both to save some time and so I could count it as my day’s exercise. Just to have a little fun and make it a bit more aerobic, I took the shortcuts through the weeds in the back of the office park and the parking lot of the building where I used to work.

And... the grill wasn’t open? WTF!?? A day like this, when people are going to want to have lunch outside, perhaps for the first time in months? Sheesh! There are plenty of other restaurants close by, but nothing I particularly want (or need, given I’m trying to limit sodium). But wait! They have a sushi bar inside! I asked the chef on duty about sodium, and he showed me their booklet that has all their nutrition info plus other neat sushi facts (not to mention all the groovy things they’ll sell you, including a complete DIY sushi kit for $37.50... yum). The Shoreline Combo looked like a pretty good match of moderate sodium and low cholesterol, so I grabbed one. Since I was there, I picked up a six-pack of ramen since I was out. The cashier actually asked me if I was from California. Um, no... but Lord knows this planet could stand to be a little more like it.

Turns out that little soy sauce packet they give you has more sodium than all 12 pieces of sushi combined, so that went in the trash and I just spread the wasabi over each piece. It was a very pleasant meal, and I had the entire outdoor dining area to myself. I saw another (full) soy sauce packet on another table, so it looks like someone else may have had the same idea before I did. Walking home after a very satisfying meal, I had to take my coat off and carry it. Mid-February can be like that, or it can be cold steel rain, or slush storms. You just make the most of the good days.

Just think... in a few months, we’ll be wishing it was cold again. But for now, it might snow again tomorrow night. sigh

When Computers Go Bad

Saturday night, Daughter Dearest came in with her laptop and said “it’s doing something really weird: it gets all these pretty colored lines on the screen, then it goes black and freezes.” I held down the power button to force a shutdown, then restarted it. It got to the "Welcome to MacOS X" screen, then did exactly what DD said it did. I shut it off again, jotted down her serial number, and looked it up. Whew, all of three weeks left on the warranty! Thank God it wasn’t three weeks after.

It’s not unheard of in the G3-series iBooks (maybe the G4s too) for this to happen. It’s either the cable the runs from the screen to the motherboard (new cable) or the graphics chips (new motherboard). DD is jonesin’ for her laptop, and using mine some nights (which partially explains why I haven’t updated much this week). The bright spot is that she might get a G4 motherboard out of the deal, a nice little upgrade.

Since she had my laptop, I picked up Bedbug, an old (as in 100MHz Pentium) NEC Versa laptop running Debian Linux. Some time back, it had gone sour after an upgrade, and I’d never gotten around to fixing it. Without getting all geeky on you (that’s coming though!), the upgrade had lost the network (and other) drivers, which turned its network into a not-work. The old kernel (the central piece of the OS) was still on the hard drive, along with its drivers, so I told Bedbug to drop back to the old kernel. Presto! Well, not quite. It now realized it had an Ethernet port, but the hardware was acting like it didn't work right. It might be the cable I was using; we’ve strung it through more than a few doors in its day and it might have finally broke. I’ll try it tomorrow with a good cable and see if it does any better.

...and we got an offer to extend the warranty on DD’s computer for another year, for $148. Mrs. Fetched and I had the same thought: if it flakes out again, we’ll be way ahead on that deal. Now where’s that checkbook....

M.A.E.: You’re Fired

How romantic. Valentine’s Day rolled around, and M.A.E. was scheduled to work at Arby’s. A lot of her co-workers were taking the day off, which gave her the opportunity to get some needed hours on the job. She decided that she wanted to spend the day with The Boy instead of working too... and depending on whose story you believe, she either called in or she didn’t. Either way, the result was the same — terminated for no-call/no-show. So much for being responsible.

There’s a bright side: the business at Arby’s has been a bit slack as of late, and M.A.E. had recently been lucky to get in more than 16 hours in a week. Given that she still has to get her driver’s license back, and has no car anyway, Mrs. Fetched has been providing transportation. Yes, M.A.E. has been paying for the gas, and it was a noticeable chunk of her take-home pay. She applied for a job at a resort about two miles from FAR Manor, and with any luck she’ll get that job. But it’s always best to hang on to what you have until you can grab something better... something I’ve had to start reminding The Boy about lately.

Snowy morning

The Boy, in a rare role reversal, rousted us out of bed this morning so we could take him to his job. It snowed again last night, and everything was covered up. I got a few pictures while it’s there, because it will probably be gone again by late this afternoon. Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest ran over to the church this morning to sweep the floor downstairs, and they said there was hardly any snow at all over there.

The dogs don’t seem to mind the weather too much (a nice way of saying they don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain). They have the option of crawling under my out-building to snooze and stay warm, but they’ll lay out in the snow or ice just as often.

Since I got an ourmedia account to stash my podcast(s), I decided to put the camera in video mode and take a slow pan across the front yard as well.

Podcast from FAR Manor (#1)

I don’t know if I’ll do this often, or again, but I thought I’d give it a try.

I kept it fairly short, about 6 minutes. Give it a listen.

Um... okay...

Caught at a stoplight on the way home from work yesterday, this is what I saw.



I can’t think of anything to say.

Friday Night Cinema

No money? No time? Let’s try this again.

Tonight’s feature is rated RL for Rude Language, the kind of stuff you would hear in junior high hallways. But once you get past the profanity, you’ll find out why this poor schlub is swearing and has the Worst Job Ever.

Worth a listen

I subscribed to O’Reilly’s Distributing the Future podcast a few weeks ago, but have just now gotten around to listening to the first one. The one I listened to on the way home from work today, Attention Span, is really worth 25 minutes of your time. If you don’t have 25 minutes, at least listen to the first part — the part about Continuous Partial Attention. It is soooo true. The second part, “What Business Can Learn from Open Source,” is pretty good as well and is not tech-heavy stuff.

Just in case you don’t know, you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts. Just click the link and listen at your desk if you prefer. Like I said, this one is worth a listen.

Trivia fodder

I’m more than a little cheesed about Friday night’s posts getting eaten. Nothing puts a writer off his feed faster than losing work. Anyway....

Here’s something to regale trivia buffs with at the next opportunity: Benito Mussolini had five children. His youngest son died last week at the age of 79. What did he do for a living?

I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Crossing fingers

Maybe Blogger has stopped eating posts now....

The Lobster Crash

So yesterday morning, Lobster dragged himself out of bed and headed on to school. I’ve always been a little leery of the turn into that school (the private one where the kids went last year); it’s just below the crest of a hill on a fairly busy highway. So Lobster is waiting to turn left into the school/church lot, with the sun in his face. He went for it... and some goober in a big pickup pulling a boat, came wailing over the hill and clipped Lobster in the rear, totally destroying Lobster’s truck bed.

Nobody hurt, fortunately... just a couple grand worth of repairs that nobody can pay for. Of course, Lobster got the ticket because he was doing the left turn, but he’s going to ask for an investigation because the guy was traveling at a pretty good clip in what should be a school zone.

One more expense for the kid. I’m not much inclined to cut him a break; his attitude of late is that he is entitled to do what he pleases, regardless of how we feel about it, and to live here basically for free. I kind of think his living here is compounding the problems he’s having with his own parental units — both sides may feel like they don’t really have to work out their differences because he can just come here instead.

I’m not sure whether it will take a crowbar, or those new mini-nukes they want to drop on Iran, to get the extra peeps out of FAR Manor. Maybe I should grab an axe like in The Shining, yell “Honey, I'm home!” and chase ’em outta here.

State of the County

We had a town-hall meeting for our county district tonight, hosted by the church I go to. I’m sure it was far more interesting than any collection of talking points the pretendersent might deliver. I’ve found in general, when you miss TV, you don’t miss much.

The hot topic (and I do mean hot) was the county commissioners having a study... well, commissioned... to see if we would benefit from a “general aviation” airport. You could build a gays-only wedding chapel in this arterial-blood-red part of the planet and not get people stirred up as quickly as just talking about an airport. The problem is, Atlanta’s aviation authority owns a large tract of land in the county, and (after bulldozing it level and cleaning up a highly radioactive spot, which I may talk about in another post) could put a commercial airport on it. The FAA tells us that building a smallish airport (i.e. a place where individuals and businesses could hanger their planes) would overrule any larger airport in the area, so it seems like a case of the Lesser of the Two Evils. But you can’t tell these people that....

Other interesting topics included road building. This part of the county is still mostly (51%) dirt roads. I asked about bicycle routes, which have been talked about in conjunction with other highway building projects before. Cyclists have marked out a couple of routes already and (even at this time of year) are out & about on weekends; I get nervous for those guys on our narrow roads with drivers who don’t always pay attention. The road guy is going to get back to me about the status of the bike routes. He did say they (with the DoT) are working with some cycling clubs, so maybe something will happen. I hope so; the way things are going, the bike paths will get used pretty heavily before too long just for transportation.

The really interesting part is that they have a zoning plan for 2025 (20 years from now) — our area is expected to be “exurban residential,” and it’s primarily agricultural right now. I don’t envy the first developer who starts building out here.

My father-in-law told someone he wants me to run for the county commission. I said I’d do it on the Green Party ticket. Actually, I think Greens could actually do well in this area if they describe their platform in the right words. People like to fish & hunt; you need clean water & healthy forests for that. They prefer the government keep its nose out of their business. And above all, they don’t want a lot of (or more than a little) development out this way. All Green positions. I’d do it, but it would be such a hassle if I actually won....

Changing your mind...

...is said to be a mark of intelligence. It works for The Boy, anyway.

Last night, he came home to an irritated mom, who demanded the van keys immediately. This set him off, and he announced that he was quitting school. We talked for a while about it; he said he would go back to the private school next year and finish up. “I doubt you will,” I said.

“The public school sucks. I don’t get any help from the teachers or anything. I’ll be able to work at the other one.”

“That’s exactly what you said about the private school last year,” I reminded him. “You said you couldn’t concentrate, the teachers didn’t help you, etc.”

“The old principal is back; I did great when he was there before.”

“Whatever,” I said; I get tired of his pretzel logic in a big hurry these days. “I hope I’m wrong, but you won’t go back next year. By then, you’ll be too busy.”

We left it at that, and went to bed. He refused to get up this morning, but apparently changed his mind sometime today. He did end up going to the doctor with his cold... and she said it appears to be early signs of emphysema. He must have Mrs. Fetched’s constitution, if smoking one or three cigs a day for a couple of years brings it on that quick. I’ll have to remind him that he only gets so many do-overs, and he’s had more than most people get in a lifetime.

But he asked me to get him up for school in the morning. He has a doctor’s excuse for the two days he was out, and maybe he at least subconsciously understands the do-over part....

Daughter Dearest, Zombie Queen

If you need a zombie queen for your next horror movie, I have just the girl for you...



Need I say more?

Recurring dreams

When I was little (like 4 or 6 or so), we had a flat tire in our rustbucket ’59 Impala; Dad pulled off to the side and changed the tire. For whatever reason, that event stuck with me and I would dream about it. In the dream, I usually stood across M-40 (on one side of town or the other), looking at the car as the wheels and tires sagged like one of Salvador Dali’s clocks. I had that dream several times, even after the Impala got traded in, and never figured out why.

These days, I dream about going back to college. The dream itself is a lot more variable than the Impala dream — in one dream, I’m standing outside the dorm I lived in, chatting with some people; I might be walking to a classroom in another — but it’s always the beginning of the school year. In last night’s dream, my old roommate and I were moving into a largish two-bedroom apartment that had a third bed right in front of the door. The centerpiece of this dream was a large clothes hamper on casters, lined like a baby’s bassinet, that could tip its contents into a basket on the floor. Toward the end of our dream, the landlady was getting ready to move it out thinking we didn’t want it in there; we protested and then she showed us how it worked.

Other details I remember (more or less in order) include:

• Thinking the bed by the door was mine, until I realized I had my own room


• Seeing the hamper


• Plugging in the clock-radio that currently adorns the dresser on the wife’s side of the bedroom, and throwing some luggage on the bed


• Wondering if my ex-girlfriend would want to sleep over, and wondering why I even thought I wanted her to (the breakup was not amicable) — dreams truly do have their own #%@*&!!! logic


• Making a list of things I had to drive home to get — a 10-hour drive in the dream and when I was in college; it would be a much longer trip now, and I wasn’t college-age in my dream


• Being interrupted in my list-making by the landlady coming in to get the hamper

That was the first time in some months that I’ve had one of those dreams. I haven’t figured out what the deal is with those.

Why I’m a Cat Person #72,379

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction. I laughed my butt off reading this story, and I have a LOT of butt....

They're inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring.

It just gets worse from there.

All’s quiet

The Boy, as usual, is taking his sweet time getting home. He has to get up & go to work in the morning, and he hasn’t had much sleep as it is lately, and he has a cold... but when you’re 18, you can burn the candle at both ends for a while. Things have settled down into a series of head-butting contests with Mrs. Fetched; she’s ready to take him back to his apartment and leave him there. Now if only he would stop the head-butting crapola, she might let him have the old minivan (we got it back this week) and he could have all the fun of living on his own for real.

The chances of his (and Lobster’s) graduating this year are pretty slim at this point. Lobster has often elected to sleep until whenever instead of going to school; The Boy is a little better but is often tardy. Report cards are pretty rank, with the usual I’m-doing-better-now protests that don’t pan out. If Lobster wants to spend the rest of his life working in a KFC, he’s certainly going about it the right way... at least until he sleeps late once too many times and gets fired.

The wife’s new dog (Crissy, although I often call her Princess Bladder or Pissy for reasons that should be easy to guess) is learning the ropes amazingly quickly. I think today was the third day she’s been to the chicken house and she’s already picking up dead chickens and bringing them to Mrs. Fetched. There was the incident last week where one of the in-laws’ dogs attacked her on her first day at “work,” chewing on a foot and freaking everyone out, but she has pretty much healed because this afternoon she (again) climbed over the top of her pen and jumped out. Nothing wrong with that foot if she can take a six-foot drop and not yelp! Her breed, whatever it is (I was told blue healer but she doesn’t look anything like the photos I found on Google) is energetic and thinks a chain-link fence is a ladder. We’ve had several dogs from this line, and they’ve all been like that.

Me, I’m doing OK. I left a post on Eat4Today that lists some of the benefits I’m already seeing from trying to get my own situation under control. Those first 15 or so pounds were easy come, easy go; I suspect the next 15 pounds won’t be quite as easy or quick to shed (they’ve been there a long time). There are other things I talked about that I think are more important than simple numbers... maybe I’ll start feeling more energetic before too long too. Or maybe I should try getting more sleep....

As gimmicks go... I like it

The former oldies station in Atlanta, Fox-97, is now calling itself “97.1 The River,” playing what they call “classic hits.” The format is similar to Jack FM, no DJs and a medium-size playlist, but River seems to stick to lighter stuff. For example, “School’s Out” is the only Alice Cooper song they play.

Yeah, just another not-too-oldies station... except for their kickoff promotion. They’re claiming to play “10,000 songs in a row, commercial-free.” Assuming they started on New Year’s Day, I expect they’ll wrap it up some time over the weekend or maybe Monday.

Gutsy move. I’ll retreat back to Album 88 when the ads start running, but for now it’s a nice change of pace.

Fiction: A Picnic at Mt. St. Cardiac

This is one of the five or so short stories I found when cleaning up the outbuilding, getting it ready for its new carpet, and the second to appear on the blog.

I wrote it in the early 1990s, I believe. Cyberpunk had by then established itself as the up-and-coming sub-genre of science fiction, although by then some people thought it was well in decline. Me, I thought people were missing out, treating “cyberspace” strictly as the habitat of criminals and mega-corporations. Certainly, people would work, play, and perhaps even work out emotional issues in cyberspace as well.

So click the “Read and Comment” link, and see what happens when a family takes...

A Picnic at Mt. St. Cardiac

The VR headset magnified the circuit board until it looked like... well, a miniature city. Clichés, even at the microscopic level, Mike grinned. But an exotic ghost town of copper streets and black epoxy buildings was just what it looked like.

Mike lifted his viewpoint above the board’s surface — and there was the problem. A hairline crack in a solder joint, although at this magnification it seemed big enough to slip his hand into, on pin 3 of chip U407. He reached up with gloved hands and brought down a huge — or so it seemed at this scale — soldering iron and a line of solder as big around as his arm. In a few seconds, the crack was patched.

As Mike was about to start diagnostics on the board, his phone chimed. The status area in his headset said simply, Dad. Mike smiled and opened the video onto one corner of the display. His father’s puzzled face appeared in a window on the side of one of the chip-buildings.

“What’s this? You playing that new VR City game, Mayor Mike? Patching up potholes? But where’s the media with their photo-ops?”

“Nope,” Mike grinned even wider. “Hey, why don’t you join me?” His image froze, one finger held up toward Dad in the universal gesture that meant Wait a minute, then reanimated; a pair of silvery benches appeared behind him. “Link up and come sit for a few. Remember that RW-4 factory rework unit you helped me pick up last week?”

Dad raised one eyebrow skeptically as he stepped into the rework unit’s VR, the window dissolving behind him, and sat on the bench opposite Mike. “Naw. You couldn’t have got that thing working, could you? I thought you bought it for scrap.”

“I did,” Mike chuckled. “In fact, I opened up the power supply first to see if there was anything worth salvaging in there. What I found was a mouse nest and a bunch of chewed wires. I thought ‘what the heck,’ spliced everything together, and it came right up. I think it has repair maps of most everything built through last year.”

“Quite a find. And a steal, for fifty bucks. I’m impressed. Y’know, you could go into business with this, fix up stuff —”

“Or buy up rejects and sell ’em as refurbs,” Mike finished. “I already have a flyer out, looking for a batch of boards.” He looked around to see if the slow fade he’d set up was noticeable yet. Sure enough, the circuitry was starting to look grainy and rippled, the benches grew darker and rougher, and his clothes were fading away completely.

“Good. If you need a little help from time to time, let me know. I’ve gotten down to twenty hours a week at work now.” Dad looked around him, went Wait a minute, then returned with a grin and a different look. This image of Dad was younger and thinner, with black hair (only one or two grey strands) down to his shoulder. The appendectomy scar was still there, though. Mike’s next thought started him: He used to look like that when he was younger. And it’s how he still sees himself.

Dad brought Mike out of his reverie. “I’ll go along with the nude beach. Better be careful with the wood benches though; wouldn’t want virtual splinters in your old man’s backside.”

“No probble,” Mike said, then subvocalized. The benches became canvas beach chairs. “Better?”

“Yeah, but you forgot the babes.” A volleyball game popped into existence nearby. “And this is kind of a generic beach — may I? Thanks.” Wait a minute, then the sand became coarser and darker with grassy dunes marching up from the shoreline. “I always liked Lake Michigan; too bad they didn’t have nude beaches up there.” They watched the volleyball game for a quiet moment.

“OK, Dad,” Mike said to break the silence. “I give up. I didn’t shock you with the nude beach. So what’s happening?”

“Shocked you, though,” Dad grinned. “I pretty well know you, son. You’re not much different from me when I was twenty-eight, even if you were on the way by then. Anyway, I was just going to make sure you were coming by —” Wait a minute, a prolonged one. Dad’s image reanimated with a worried look. “Trouble,” he said.

The volleyball game disappeared just as Mom popped in, sporting a grainy image that indicated a real-time meatspace scan. “Hi, son, I — God!” she gasped. “What do you two think you’re doing?”

Mike and Dad quickly added swim suits. “And a good afternoon to you too, Mom,” Mike replied. “Dad and I were just playing Shock Each Other. He won.”

Dad glared briefly at Mike, then stood to face Mom. “You ought to try it some time,” he said. A quick subvocal, and a four-foot schlong sprang from his swim suit, complete with sound effect.

“You wish,” Mom hissed. “Fifty-six years old, and that’s still all you think about.”

“Uh, Dad,” Mike said. ”You broke the rules. No caricatures.”

“Woop,” replied Dad, and returned to normal proportions. “You’re right. Congratulations, hon; you won your first game of Shock Each Other by default.”

Mom ignored the attempted deflection. “So when did you ever look like some long-haired idiot?”

“When we met,” Dad said evenly. “Don’t you remember?”

Before Mom could respond, Mike spoke up. “Good to see you, Mom. You don’t usually visit by VR; what’s the occasion?”

“Well, I was going to make sure your dad didn’t forget to ask you if you were coming by tonight —”

“Which is what I was about to do before you butted in,” Dad snapped. “Besides, didn’t you ever figure out that this is what VR is all about, to be what you always wanted to be?”

Mom smirked. “You never wanted to be a nudist. Besides, the resort is just a few miles up the road, where it’s always been.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dad retorted. “You’ve got to stop looking at just the face value of things —”

“Uh, you guys are running up a tandem bill with this little discussion. Maybe a change of scenery would be appropriate,” Mike suggested. “How about the golf course?”

Mom looked skeptical. “I don’t golf —”

“No probble, Mom. You’ve never come to visit our masterpiece; just sit in the cart and enjoy the view.” Dad laughed and nodded as the beach dissolved and all three stood before a black iron sign. The sign read, in animated dripping blood:

MOUNT SAINT CARDIAC
The golf course from Hell!

Mike and Dad had created this elaborate construct several years ago as a practical joke on a few golfing friends of Dad’s. The friends thought it was hilarious, and told other friends. The word spread, and father and son quickly found themselves adding and refining. Soon, Mount Saint Cardiac became the place for people who wanted a break from real-world golfing. It was one of the most popular golf-oriented constructs in VR, running neck-and-neck with the authorized virtual St. Thomas. The visitation fees they made from Cardiac usually paid the entire family’s monthly VR connect charges with enough left over for a weekly gold outing in meatspace.

Mom looked even more skeptical. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy this. It doesn’t look like my idea of a good time.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Just come on, will you? You won’t enjoy it if you don’t give it a chance, that’s for sure. Here, hop in the cart.”

“That’s a cart?” Mom goggled. The golf carts at Mount Saint Cardiac looked like a cross between a black 1970 Corvette Stingray and a plain golf cart. It had an open top and the back end was rebuilt to hold a pair of bags, but the rest was one evil-looking vehicle. It purred menacingly as it rolled, driverless, to where they stood.

“It’s safe, Mom,” Mike reassured her. “This is VR, remember? You can’t get hurt.” Mom climbed into the passenger seat, Dad took the driving position next to her, and Mike grabbed handholds on the back. “Hit it, Dad.” The motor roared, tires squealed, and they fishtailed up to the tees on Number One. Dad grinned like a maniac and whipped the cart into a power-slide that slung the rear next to the tees.

“I see your driving hasn’t changed much,” Mom remarked dryly as they climbed out of the cart.

“One big difference,” Dad deadpanned as he and Mike selected Cardiac Drivers — clubs with heads roughly the size of a bowling ball sawn in half. “No tickets here, and nobody wrecks.”

Number One was typical: 570 yards to the green, with the tees on the edge of a sheer cliff far above the fairway. The sign, which showed the layout and the hazards, named it Over the Edge. Dad and Mike both teed off and watched their balls land in the fairway below, then everyone climbed into the cart.

“Another good thing about this course,” Mike chattered. “You can’t lose your ball even if you try.”

Mom looked around. “So how do we get down there? I don’t see a path.”

“Here, I’ll show you,” Dad grinned. “Remember the name?”

“Over the Edge — nooooooooooo!” Dad floored the accelerator. The cart roared, tires howled as they spun around, and Mom shrieked as they vaulted off the cliff. Before they dropped more than a few feet, the cart spouted wings and became a glider. As they descended, Mike picked himself up from the back of the cart, laughing hysterically. “Mom — you should have seen — your face,” and again fell giggling to the floor.

“I ought to slap you,” Mom growled, then allowed herself to smile as the cart landed and folded its wings away. “So what other surprises do you have in here?”

“Oh, every hole has its own little personality,” Dad replied. “Like Boa Boa. When your ball hits the fairway, a big snake slithers out and swallows it. If you stomp on him, he coughs up the ball and goes away.”

“Your snake phobia gave us the idea for that one, Mom,” Mike continued. “Another hole is pitch dark, except that the green and your ball glow in the dark. The idea is for you to remember where you are — in VR where you can’t get hurt. Here you can overcome whatever fears you might have, since they really aren’t here.”

“Psychotherapy?” Mom looked skeptical and a little sarcastic.

“Funny thing, Mom: some shrinks actually bring their clients here. We get email all the time from people who said this place has helped them out some way.” Mike chattered on about other comments they received, while Dad steered them to a picnic area in the shadow of an erupting volcano. They sat in the lush grass and watched the lava flow endlessly down.

“But what’s the point of all this?” asked Mom. “Just entertainment? Or is there something else to it? You know I don't go virtual, or whatever you call it, very much.”

“Sure, it’s entertainment,” agreed Dad. “But are you talking about the golf course, or VR, or the entire Net?”

“All of it, I guess,” Mom sighed. “I know people go to work over the Net all the time, and there’s lots of games, and stuff like this place — but why do you go around looking like that, twenty and hair down to your back?”

Dad sighed in turn. “What’s the whole point of an illusion — or a fantasy world, if you’d rather — if you can’t control it? There’s a part of me who’s still twenty, and will always be twenty no matter how old I get on the outside. Here, I can let him out.

“But what about you? Haven’t you ever wanted to look different?”

“Well, you know I’ve always wanted to lose weight,” Mom grimaced. “But what’s the point? I could look like a supermodel here, but that won’t change anything.”

“It might change how you see yourself,” Dad replied. “Here, let me work your image. Now don’t look at me like that; I’m not going to do anything weird in front of your own son.” Dad went Wait a minute, then reanimated. “You wanted to be thinner? Here you go.” Dad reshaped Mom’s image into a young woman’s, made her hair longer and pulled it back into a tail, then replaced her generic floral print dress with overalls and a flannel shirt.

“Hey Mom,” Mike grinned. “You look gooooooood.” He subvocalized a full-length mirror so Mom could see herself.

Dad winked. “You know, women in overalls always did turn me on.”

“Uh, guys, I’ve got a board to finish fixing,” Mike said, recognizing his cue. “See you tonight in meatspace.” He dissolved and was gone.

Mom looked at Dad and grinned shyly. “So now what?”

“We go for a ride,” Dad replied. He whistled, and two horses with full tack trotted out of the woods. “Somewhere a bit more traditional. This can be your fantasy, too.” The scenery shifted, becoming a grassy meadow, with hazy mountains in the distance and a chuckling stream nearby. The horses ambled over and drank.

“Let’s go somewhere different,” Mom countered. “How about that beach? We can build a driftwood fire when it gets dark.”

“You’ve got the idea,” Dad replied happily. They mounted up and rode across the dunes.

Are we there yet?

A while back, I wrote a letter about the oil crunch to come, probably sooner than later. It looks like it might be getting started.

This IEA¹ graph, from their Oil Market Report, shows world oil production from 2002 to the end of 2005. As you can see, total production seems to be levelling off — only in the last half of 2005 do you see production for two quarters in a row lower than the previous quarter.

Better news is in the text of the report: production climbed to 85Mbpd in December, resuming the steady climb (US production was hosed up by the hurricanes, and is slowly coming back on-line). But what the text giveth, another graph taketh away: follow the link and compare the "World Oil Supply" and "World Oil Demand" graphs. Demand is consistently outstripping supply, which suggests the reserves that Western nations have been building up for an emergency are being tapped and slowly(?) depleted as well.

So are we getting close to Peak Oil? The graph above suggests world production is starting to plateau, although it may well be a temporary hesitation while the Gulf of Mexico producers get their collective act back together. OPEC et al can still increase production, but it’s getting more and more difficult. My crystal ball is a little murky, but I think we’ll see another year or two of increasing yields before the trend turns the other way. The wild card is the deteriorating situation in the Middle East: military in Iraq, diplomatic in Iran. As bogged down in Iraq as we are, we can’t make a credible threat to Iran.

What’s more important is the difference between demand and supply. Unless Americans suddenly get rational and park their SUVs, permanently, demand will continue to climb. But even if we could control our own consumption habits, we can’t control China’s and India’s increasing thirst for oil: anything we leave on the table, Asia will grab with both hands.

The only thing I know for certain, the era of cheap oil is over.

---

¹International Energy Agency, a consortium of energy-consuming nations.

Dangit

Mrs. Fetched baked some salmon last night, with some potatoes etc. on the side. I put the leftovers into two microwave plates — one for my lunch today and one for The Boy after he came home from band practice.

As things really went, Lobster ate The Boy’s plate... and The Boy ate my plate.

Hey Solar-bro...

Gimme a call tomorrow morning, 8 a.m. would be great, let me know that Dad got there OK... OK?

Thanks!

Camera shakeout

Seems that the photography industry has started quietly shaking out: Konica/Minolta is throwing in the towel and Nikon is dumping most of its film cameras to concentrate on digital — quite a turnaround in attitude at the iconic manufacturer.

Film is going to be around for quite a while — unless you have massive thousands of bucks, digital is going to lag film’s quality for some years to come. On the casual/consumer end, a lot of people still have good film cameras and aren’t ready to drop $350–$400 for a decent digital just yet. But for those of us who have them already, the quality is fine for snapshots and 5x7 prints (if you don’t look too close). The best part is that we can blow through the equivalent of four rolls of film in a day, keep the good shots, and make the bad stuff disappear with no guilt, extra cost, or waits for processing. It’s also nice to not have to keep a scanner around when I want to put my pictures on my blog.

One of the neat things about digital cameras is that many of them have a video mode, so you can take at least short clips of video. My camera takes video at 320x240, roughly equivalent to VHS quality, and can manage up to 3 minutes at a time (which about fills a 128MB card anyway). iMovie, to my pleasant surprise, converts and upsizes its AVI files so I can edit them and even mix them with DV video from my camcorder. Some digital cameras can take full-screen 640x480 video, which would require the biggest flash cards you can afford since it would require about 4 times the space of 320x240 video.

But that’s where things will head, eventually. Flash memory will continue to get cheaper (I’m thinking about a 512MB card for my camera), processors will continue to improve, and I expect solid-state camcorders to start pushing into DV territory in the next few years.

The Boy and His Pills

The Boy gets a pair of trips to his endocrinologist each quarter — one to draw blood, one to get the results. As we expected, his sloppy maintenance resulted in an A1C score of roughly 10... if you don’t know what that means, it’s not good; it should be around 7. After a stern lecture from the doc, who went into graphic detail of the slow painful death (piece by piece) that awaits him if he doesn’t get his act together, he confirmed that The Boy is indeed a Type II rather than Type I. “He would have probably hit 500 and ended up in the hospital over the summer if he was Type I.”

This is very good news for The Boy: it means he’s down to typically one injection (the Lantus he takes at bedtime) per day, with the Novolog as a backup if he needs it. Of course, he still has to poke himself and meter his glucose, but that’s no big deal by comparison.

I took an empty pill bottle and had him put a few of his pills in it to keep here. His regular supply is at his apartment, but if he comes home for a weekend or whatever he’ll have them even if he forgets his normal supply. (We also have a backup glucose meter.)

A great laugh for Zork players

Former or current, it’s pretty funny. But he left one question unanswered: where’s a grue when you need one?