Rodent Death

B1-66er has a rat problem, perhaps brought on by too many years of not cleaning up his apartment. He has, as part of his rat extermination project, decided to clean his place up. Cleaning up is a good idea, but sometimes it's easier to just take what you want with you and leave, burning the place down behind you. On that other hand, that’s probably not a good way to either endear B1 to his landlord or get his security deposit back.

Mice I've had to deal with. Large fields & woods mice, mind you, but still mice. Rats, not so often — they like to hang out at the chicken houses, since there's fresh meat on the hoof and it's an evil place anyway. I've killed the little SOBs with snap traps, well-thrown shoes, poison, water, (the Natural Way) cats & dogs, winter, and hand-to-hand combat — sticks, shovels, a hammer — whatever is hefty, swingable, and available.

Details follow. If you’re not the kind of person who enjoys stories about Chicken House Hell, you probably want to skip this entry.

• The latest one was when I was removing copper pipe from under the house, part of the old heating system, decommissioned under the previous owners. Except for the area where the water heater (and the old oil-based boiler for the registers) live, under the master bedroom, the rest of the basement is one big crawl space. The entire crawl space area is covered with plastic sheet to form a vapor barrier (which incidentally keeps water leaks from making musty smells). To make a long story short, as I was getting started, I put my hand down on the plastic and felt it squirming under my hand. I snatched my hand back, and could see a largish shadow crawling away under the plastic. Since a hammer was in reach, I grabbed it and started whacking. Hearing a satisfying squeal of pain, I whacked it once more and got to work.

• Before I moved to FAR Manor and became FARfetched, I was Dirt Road, living in an extended double-wide in the woods, nearly 1/2 mile from the nearest pavement. I caught plenty of large-ish mice with a pair of snap traps, those that got through the perimeter patrolled by two cats and a dog. The mice were a bit too big for regular mouse traps, but an out-and-out rat trap would have really made a mess. The bail would come down and hit the mouse, not cleanly across the neck, but along the back of the skull — still a fatal blow, but one that would make their nasty little eyes bug out somewhat. I often found the traps upside-down and/or moved up to a foot away. Often, the skull would pinch the bail, making it hard to shake the dead rodent loose without touching it.

So one night, Mrs. Fetched and I were wakened by a POP. “What was that?” she said.

“Rodent death. The mouse trap just went off.”

clacka-clacka-clacka

“And what’s that?”

“I think he’s flopping around in the trap.”

“Gross!” she cried. “Do something with it!”

We walked into the kitchen and flipped the light on. The mouse, whose size approached that fuzzy grey line separating “large mouse” from “small rat,” treated us to one final twitch and expired. A small pool of blood lay several inches from the trap; probably shot from its exploded eye. “YUCK!” opined Mrs. Fetched, and fled the scene while I cleaned off the floor and shook the mouse off the bail out back.

• Yes, I said “winter” was one of the tools I’ve used to deal Rodent Death. I learned that there can be worse things than a mouse inside: there can be a mouse under the house who scratches the floor joists under your bed while you’re trying to sleep at night. It stayed fairly warm under the double-wide all winter, probably helped by the occasional leak in the heating ductwork. This was January 2000, and the storm we called “Ice2K” knocked out power on a Monday and kept it knocked out for 5-1/2 days all told. Having learned a little something from the 1993 blizzard, we had a generator and I ran it for an hour or two every month to keep it from gumming up. The Boy and I hoisted it onto the back deck and we ran extension cords through the back door and into the house. We had lights, radio, and an electric space heater — but the furnace outlet we’d found some time back and noted for future use had disappeared. Fortunately, we had plenty of firewood (another thing we learned from ’93) and could keep the living room and kitchen warm. But not the space under the house.

Thursday brought two significant events: the joist-scratcher gave up the ghost and it occurred to me to have a look at the furnace control box. Finding a schematic conveniently printed on the back side of the control box cover, I chopped off the female end of a long extension cord and spliced the wires into the furnace. I plugged it into the gennie, and was immediately rewarded with the hisssss-whoomp of a live furnace. Hooray — warm house and no more mouse. That kept us going until Saturday morning, when the power came back on.

• Sometimes, you get lucky. One night, I heard a rustling noise come from a paper sack, along with a frustrated squeak. I quickly closed up the top of the sack and took it outside, shaking it a bit to disorient the prisoner and get Megabyte’s attention. Megabyte was my fat cat, a brown-mackerel and white pattern I learned to call it, and he watched with interest as I laid the sack on the ground and opened the top. Out shot the mouse, and Megabyte took it from there.

• At Chicken House Hell, there are real rats, albeit with short tails. Like B1’s new friend kind of rats. There are mice too, but rats make for easier targets for a swung stick or shovel. But most of the time, the in-laws’ myriad dogs are around to do the job. I missed this particular episode personally, but Mrs. Fetched told me all about it. Duke, the alpha dog, trapped a rat and it bit back — latching onto Duke’s lip and taking a wild ride, getting flung and spun every which way before Duke got his own teeth into the situation. That usually doesn’t happen; the dogs get the better of the rats much more quickly and cleanly on average.

Of course, deterrent is better than war. Mrs. Fetched hasn’t grasped that; either that or she would rather have mice in the house than cats. But there’s nothing like a cat (or a terrier, if you’re a dog person) for issuing a warning. Only the most desperate or foolish rodents hang around where they can smell something bred to hunt them.

All-State Daughter Dearest

Daughter Dearest told me this morning that she’d gotten the word: she made All-State Chorus this year!

w00T!

Oh no

I think this is going to be stuck in my head for a while. Click the link that says "This Song" if you dare. You risk getting it stuck in your head too. You Have Been Warned.

I would normally blame the tequila (that we confiscated from M.A.E.’s belongings) that I’ve been drinking tonight — neat — but Daughter Dearest has reacted pretty much the same way. Dang. M.A.E. bought decent tequila. I wonder how she managed to afford it. Of course, less than 1/4 of it was left by the time I got it.

Hot air

Daughter Dearest managed to get this shot somehow. Things happen quick when you're in a car, and the time it takes the dig the camera out can be far longer than the time it takes to lose the shot. To compound matters, the balloonist was coming down, I think in a weedy field next to the highway, and pretty rapidly.

I don’t blog much about politics, but it’s kind of like the way things are going for the Republicans this year. Blowing hot air for all they’re worth, and still sinking. At least we can hope it keeps going that way.

Go Tigers!

In my mind’s eye, I see a custodian bringing a dusty box out of some nondescript storage room.

A whole case of Industrial-strength Whoop-Ass, vintage 1968. The Detroit Tigers must have put it away for future years, then forgot about it until someone found it after the first game of the division playoffs.

Before, I was hoping St. Louis would make it just because I dislike them less than the Mets. Now I’m glad they made it so we can have a rematch of 1968. I was (really) home sick from school the day the Tigers won the 1968 Series, and saw it on TV. 1984 was a sort-of anti-climax; the Padres were outmatched that year and everyone knew it. I’ll have to break some habits and park me arse in front of a TV for a few nights coming up…

The Mobile Office

Current music: 1.fm Trance
It used to be that moving in the office was something you started hearing about long before it actually happened. There would be an alert that we would get moved in a few weeks, which would pass uneventfully and then we would forget about it. After a few months, the move alerts would come around again; sometimes it would again fade off. But eventually, the facilities people would bring around big stacks of flattened cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape on a Thursday, we would spend Friday marveling at how much stuff we had stuffed into 64 square feet, and spend the following Monday unpacking and pretending to try getting some work done.

That was so 2nd millennium.

Companies these days operate in Internet time, and moving is no exception. The feint-parry-thrust that once took weeks has now been compressed into a couple of hours. You hear the first rumor around 10 a.m. and you’re sitting in a new cube by 4. Fortunately, the facilities people do most of the moving for you nowadays. Virgil comes around with the cart, loads all the stuff you're not using at the moment (including the contents of the overheads and lateral), and sets it up in the new cube pretty much as it was. You’re left to clear the decorations off the walls, grab the Ethernet hub off the floor, and the phone and laptop off the desk. The only heavy lifting involves a 21" monitor. Spend an hour at the end of the day setting up the new place, get some work done, go home.

Even the phone is an instantaneous switch, thanks to the magic of VoIP. You yank the phone out of the Ethernet jack at the old place and plug it in at the new place. Done. No farting around with the PBX and maybe missing a call you didn’t want to take anyway.

The best part is that I can look out a window from my chair, for the first time in years (if you don’t count working at home). Just in time for winter to set in. This time of year, I need all the sunlight I can get.

Good News on The Boy front, for a change

Yeesh, Wednesday already?

So I had just pulled into church for choir practice this evening, when I got a phone call. The Boy’s number came up on the caller ID, and I was immediately thinking: what does he want this time?

“I took the GED pre-test today, and passed everything. Even the math part.”

Doubly good news — not just that he passed, but he finally got arsed to take the freeking test in the first place!

“Yeah, so I take the real test on November 17. If I pass that, I’m going to tech school to be an electrician.”

Another piece of good news: he’s finally looking at a Plan B if his music career doesn’t happen. Not a bad choice either; it’s a skill that’s usually in demand. He should do well at it; I taught him how to solder when he was 4, and I’ve done plenty of wiring myself (although I draw the line on this side of live circuits).

So if he’ll stick to this, maybe that’s a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Seventeen Years Ago...

At 4 a.m., I was only slightly awakened by Mrs. Fetched.

"Farf."

As anyone still 90% asleep would, I answered, "Unh."

"Farf."

"Unh."

"Farf, get up and help me clean up the bathroom floor."

The comment from left-field woke me up some more. "Whaaaat?"

Staggering into the bathroom, I saw a bunch of clear, jelly-like something on the floor. Someone's water had broke, obviously. I don't remember if I actually helped or just stood there gaping while Mrs. Fetched did the work - it wouldn't be the last time.

A couple hours later, we were at the hospital. Some time during the morning, Daughter Dearest arrived, nearly a month ahead of schedule (the result of a car wreck two weeks previous). She was physically OK with the early birth; not so much mentally. She would wriggle the blanket over her head (amazing to watch) and scream bloody murder when I had to change her diaper. To this day, I've never figured out how a five-pound baby can produce eight pounds of crap in one sitting.

But happy #17, Daughter Dearest! Standing taller than her mom, and still as feisty as on the day of her arrival.

Cha-ching

The guy who would do the work on my Civic finally got around to coughing up an estimate yesterday. He thinks he can put the back bumper back together, but it needs a new front bumper, radiator, and radiator mount — all but the latter can be found on the aftermarket. What’s harder to find is either the $1800 it would take to do it, or the motivation to come up with the money in the first place. I only paid $3000 for the car in the first place, after all. I would have said “do it” without hesitation for $1000 or less, and would have had to think about it for $1500. Right now, I’m ready to write it off, because there could well be some damage to the front end beyond the radiator that isn’t easy to see. On the other hand, if $1800 would also fix the air conditioning and fix the alignment issues I’ve been having, it could be worth it. Mrs. Fetched points out that we probably wouldn’t find anything as good for $1800, so it may get another chance.

In other news, The Boy finally had his court appearance this morning. The lawyers worked out a plea arrangement (and as it turns out, they were the only ones on the morning’s docket that had settled on something) that got him a year of probation and fines. I think the judge would have liked to slap him, but given that his case was the only one ready to finish up, she may have felt pressured to accept the arrangement.

Between the fines, the fees, what he had to pay the lawyer, and the other things he has to do (like take a DUI course and have periodic drug tests), he’s going to be out $2000. Personally, I would just as soon have seen him get a trip to first-offender boot camp, except that the penal system shows itself incapable of handling diabetics. Mrs. Fetched would like to see him have to get his GED as a condition of his probation. Even with just fines and probation, this is going to be hanging over his head for a long time to come.

Shorties

A handful of things that didn’t necessary merit their own posts…

Fury asked for a close-up of the yellow flowers growing all over the manor grounds; here it is. They’re about the size of a nickel. Whatever they are, they’re very prolific. Click on the picture to get something larger than life.

Mixed emotions: some time last night, I dropped my smellphone in the driveway. The Boy found it, after someone either stepped on it or ran it over (or Mrs. Fetched’s dog played with it). The screen, amazingly, is OK; but everything else seems to be in worse shape than it looks. The keyboard doesn’t key, and it doesn’t recognize the sync cable. I stuffed my SIM card into an old Nokia we had laying around, and it worked, so whoever smooshed the Moto didn’t do a good enough job. Yay, maybe I’ll get a new phone with a decent camera — boo, new phone = extended contract.

Daughter Dearest came down, asked, “are you blogging my singing?” (She’s working on a piece for her All-State Chorus audition on Saturday.) I hadn’t planned to, but since she said something…. Then she saw the flower picture and forgot about it. Man. She’ll also be 17 on Saturday — I hope the audition judges give her a b-day present, although she’s good enough that she really doesn’t need it.

Wow, did the Tigers open up a can of Whoop-Ass on the Yankers or what? I hope they have another one for the A’s. And one more for the Series. I might have to get interested in baseball for a couple of weeks.

Driving the Sunfire makes me miss my Civic. It does what it needs to, getting decent gas mileage in the process, but it feels as heavy as a truck in some ways. I’m sure new struts (like the Civic got) will help, but I don’t think it will ever feel as nimble. Not to mention the stereo. Or the lack of cruise control. Or the two-acre dashboard (seriously, I’m thinking of Velcro’ing some plants up there).

I guess kerosene heaters are like the last consumer product that don’t try to be idiot-proof and are designed to be serviced by the end-user. I haven’t tried firing it up yet, though: I need fresh kerosene, at $3/gal. I’ll probably get to it Thursday night or maybe over the weekend.

What little things are on your mind today?

Silver Linings, part II

Mrs. Fetched’s mom was given a small double-wide with water damage, which she plans to set up as a vacation rental. For now, though, it’s a major remodeling project — she’s ripping out sheetrock and cabinetry, neither of which were that great even before the water damage, and gathering materials for the rebuild. As it turns out, our friends who helped us with the floor have a bunch of construction material they need to get rid of… so Sunday was another someone-else’s-agenda day.

But once again, a silver lining appeared in the dark cloud of non-relaxation. During the afternoon, they would hold up some prize and ask “does she need this?” every few minutes. Now that I have a refrigerator for the outbuilding, and it’s starting to get cool on Planet Georgia, I’m also thinking about improving the heating situation. I’ve used an electric space heater in winters past, which has been almost adequate, and really want a propane wall-mount heater in there. I have the heater, but need some installation work (and a tank). So I grabbed the flexible gas lines when they came up.

And then a kerosene heater appeared. I said, “I might be able to use that until I get gas installed.” So into the truck it went, little knowing that I was about to get a crash education in the care and maintenance of kerosene heaters.

Getting the thing home, I got to work. There was a humonguous mouse nest above one side of the tank, and dirt dauber nests, as usual with anything not stored in a house, filled every hole and caked several surfaces (the dirt dauber is a wasp, but a docile one, more annoying than scary). Between chipping off wasp-caked mud with a screwdriver, and blowing out general dirt with a compressor, I probably lightened the thing by a pound or so. The adjustment knob turned only a couple of clicks, and the ignitor lever moved maybe 1/4 of the way across, even after the cleaning. I’d never dealt with a kerosene heater before, so I really had little clue. My first confirmation that all was not right came from reading the instructions on the side: it told me if the ignitor batteries were dead, I could lift the chimney and light the wick with a match. I couldn’t lift the chimney.

Like any good geek faced with such a problem, I turned to my trusty iBook and typed "Everglow P-E12" (the make & model) into Google — and was rewarded with a link to a manual and all sorts of other info. Yee-haa! The chimney (or rather, the catalytic converter) was supposed to come off, so I applied a little force. As it turns out, you’re not supposed to store these heaters with kerosene in them, and this one had over 3/4 tank — it must have been sitting for a few years, because the kerosene had gunked up and glued everything together. I would have figured they would have known better. Following the instructions, I got to the wick (varnish-glued into place, which is why the adjustment knob wasn’t turning much) and got it loose. I scraped and wet-sanded off most of the gunk and some of the rust, and put everything back together. Now everything was acting like it should, but it was too late to do much of anything with it. I sent the website owner a thank-you email and went to bed.

This morning, I found an reply with some further advice about getting it going (drain the old kerosene and put a little wood alcohol in the fresh fuel), with some encouragement: “Even rusty, it is worth rebuilding. Nothing modern comes close to the quality put into that old heater.” He also confirmed my suspicions, which I’d guessed by reading his website, that it will likely need a new wick and it’s probably going to cook me out of the outbuilding if I use it in there. It will be good for winter nights in the garage, though, and as a backup in the house when the electricity goes out.

Oh, and the friends have a friend who’s an HVAC guy; he’s more or less lined up to install the gas heater in the outbuilding as soon as I can find a tank.

It’s nice to luck into useful stuff, but frankly I’d like a break for the next couple of weekends instead.

Silver Linings

Yet another non-slackerly weekend, with Mrs. Fetched volunteering me to help out the church at the community yard sale. Getting up at 6-something on a weekend bites, there ain’t no two ways around it. The mercury hovered at just over 40 degrees this morning, and the sweater I grabbed at the last second was barely enough (if that) to keep the chill at bay. It didn’t help that the restaurant on-site wasn’t ready to serve coffee until an hour after I got there.

But every cloud must have a silver lining, and I managed to find one. A community yard sale means that most sellers will be there, because most buyers will be there, because most sellers will be there. A wonderful example of recursion. To cut a long story short, I found a small refrigerator for $10. It wasn’t quite as big as I would have liked, and the shelves are missing. But it has two major things in its favor: it works, and I saved $100 over buying a new one. Of course, I had to go buy some beer for it on the way home. Even better, Mrs. Fetched thinks we might have some shelves that will fit it if we dig around (and I think we have an ice tray or two). The guy selling them had two, and I grabbed the better one: no rust on top and the seal looks good.

One of the nice things about it is that I can keep the beer in the refrigerator, which is in the outbuilding, which has a lock, which means I can keep The Boy from scarfing my beer. Once I make another batch of beer, I’ll probably be able to keep 12 bottles in it at a time. It’s also quiet, putting out a hum that I wouldn’t even notice in the house and easily gets tuned out over the iPod and whatever I’m reading.

Now all the outbuilding needs is Internet access.

We were supposed to shoot a football game today, but Mrs. Fetched didn’t know where, and wasn’t sure if it was at 3 or 3:30. Running out of gas just above (literally) a gas station was the final straw; we coasted to a pump then went home. While I enjoy that “work,” it was nice to not have to deal with it after getting up way too early.

Fall Plants

With the advent of cooler weather, the fall flowers (and weeds) are coming in. Some of the weeds are offering fairly decent bribes this time around, and the regular plants are also doing well. I haven’t done a pictorial in a while, so…

This bottlebrush (or whatever it’s real name is) is the centerpiece of the flower bed in front of FAR Manor. This is the best I’ve ever seen it; I noticed it this morning when the sun was shining on it as I worked at home. To give you a good sense of perspective, the tops are about seven feet high.


The butterfly bushes, on the other hand, have been relatively scraggly with their blooms this year. We get blooms in the spring and fall though, which is probably why we haven’t ripped them all out of the ground in self-defense — they’re invasive and would take over if we let them. Not that it’s all bad; they were nearly swarmed by butterflies today.

This is one of the better pods.


The goldenrod sprung up on its own, and is very bright this year compared to its usual muted yellow. It’s growing around the butterfly bushes, and everywhere else, and contrasts nicely with the blue of the butterfly bushes.


These weeds are offering us a cheerful bribe to let them live. The blooms are about the size of a nickel; I guess it’s some wild variant of a daisy…


…and they’re growing everywhere too!


Kind of ugly, but in a soft feathery way. I pulled up a bunch of these last month and a zillion more sprung up. They stand 3 to 4 feet tall.


Some other colors will come in soon. I especially like the muted orange of some of the wildflowers that will start showing off before long.

Product Design

This is something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, it was almost 17 years to the day after the wreck that brought Daughter Dearest into the world a month early.

As part of our personal campaign to reduce gas consumption, we bought a used Pontiac Sunfire a while back. It has a few glitches — A/C doesn’t work (surprise), the suspension needs attention, and the stereo is possessed by a demon that doesn’t like bumps (it turns itself to full volume when you hit one) — but it gets over 35 mpg. You can put up with a few quirks for that kind of gas mileage.

So we let The Boy borrow it one night (about a week before he wrecked my Civic), and he ended up staying with our friends because he got a flat tire near where they live. He put the fake spare on, but it was thumping and he didn’t want to drive it. So we went to take care of things, figuring the donut was just low on air. I aired it up, then Mrs. Fetched saw the bulge in the sidewall. Turned out The Boy made a wise decision for a change! He must have hit a pothole pretty hard, because the regular tire had a dented rim and was cut, although he swears up & down that “it just went flat.” I drove it as far as a gas station along the highway, and decided The Boy was right about the thumping. The manager said it would be OK to leave the car there if we parked it around the side. No problem.

Mrs. Fetched was in her “do something NOW” mode, and her first thought was to use the Civic’s spare. Nope: it's a four-lug wheel, and the Sunfire is a five-lug. “Hey,” she said, “isn’t his Lumina a five-lug wheel? We can go get the spare out of the trunk.” Aside from it being a 30-mile round-trip, sure. But she was determined to get it done, time and space be damned. Light too — it was getting dark, so we grabbed some flashlights. Then when that spare turned out to have large holes in it, she had me jack up the car (which took a while) to get a tire off it. Just to keep the axle in the air, I put the spare on and left it jacked up.

With a tire in hand, we headed back to the car. By this time, I was getting rather disgusted with the whole situation, not that it mattered. I got the jack out of the trunk and started cranking away. It took a long time to get enough air under it to get the new tire in place, and the jack was slightly leaning but not badly. I started wrestling the tire onto the hub, and —

SNAP

The fender came down onto the tire, almost catching my finger in betwen. Another tenth of a second, and I would have had a hard time typing “yhnujm” for a long time, perhaps permanently. The jack was buried under the car. Fortunately, a guy just getting off work from the Ford dealership across the street and gassing up his vehicle saw it happen and came over with a hydraulic jack. Hooray, some decent equipment arrives on the scene! We got it jacked up… and it turned out the lug pattern on the Lumina’s wheel has a slightly larger radius than the Sunfire’s. So we’d wasted an entire evening, and I’d almost lost a finger, for nothing. Figures.

My peevery got diverted away from Mrs. Fetched, though, when I saw the jack. Definitely not a safe design, with forks instead of eyes where the scissors go into the bolts. The jack may have still collapsed with eyes, but it would have been a lot slower and would have given me more time to get my fingers out of the way. This is what happens when the bean counters want to “get another 0.3 cents out of the per-unit materials costs” — product safety ends up getting compromised.

Under no circumstances should accounts ever be allowed to dictate product design, unless it’s for something like accounting software or machinery. Let them live with their own decisions, instead of endangering the rest of us.

M.A.E. Not Be Coming Back

When things happen, sometimes they happen quickly. Last week, M.A.E. started going out with some guy she met at work. This weekend, she wasn’t around much, and that spilled over into the regular week. This evening, she called Mrs. Fetched to tell us that she was moving in with his cousin.

Mrs. Fetched immediately sprung into action, bagging up all M.A.E.’s stuff and printing out a sort-of invoice of what she owes us — various stuff like rent, phone, gas; it adds up to $1200 and change. Mrs. Fetched was trying to figure out what she could put down for her title: borrower, lessor, etc. I said, “I don’t know, but I think our title would be ‘bagholders.’”

The Boy hasn’t been around much either of late. He got peeved last night when we wouldn’t drop everything and take him to see the kid who was in my car with him when they wrecked it. About 10:30, someone came in & out and that was the last we saw of him. He didn’t show up for work this morning either, although he called them and said he was “stranded at McDonald’s.” I wonder why.

We (including M.A.E.) were a little conflicted about this change. I really hope it works out for her, and not because I get to traipse around the house in my underwear again. It’s closer to her work, and (probably more importantly) her new boyfriend. We’re not holding our breath about getting paid, and that’s fine if it means she can put a life together for herself otherwise. I just hope things don’t go drastically wrong and end up with an emotional wreck washing up on FAR Manor’s dreary shores.

Non-restful weekend

Hey at least Family Man had what he aptly calls a “slackerly weekend.” Me, I barely got a chance to do any work work, let alone slacking.

Mrs. Fetched has a little beer money (well, if she drank beer it would be) coming in from videotaping our nephew’s park/rec football games. We did this when The Boy was going to the private school a couple of years ago, and have the drill down: she has one camera up in the announcer’s booth and gets the action from above; I have the other one on the sidelines (a monopod is a wonderful thing for this kind of work). She mixes our tapes together and furnishes the coaches with a DVD so they can see what worked — and what needs to be worked on.

So Saturday morning, she takes off early as I’m dragging myself out of bed and left me with instructions: grab the camera and the monopod and be at the field by 10. Since my car is probably toast, I asked her to leave the keys to the Sunfire where I could find them. To make a long story short, she didn’t. Well… I gave Solar a hard time because he was “channeling Dad” (stressing out over minor things) as I helped him set up his home theater system… now it was my turn. Hey, it wasn’t my fault that Mrs. Fetched didn’t leave the keys where I could find them; why worry about it? It could well be because I love being behind the camera about as much as anything that I can do with my clothes on. I get really cranky when people start talking over the audio or walking in front of the lens — imagine what entirely missing a gig would do to me.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I could bungee the monopod to the cargo rack on the back of my motorcycle and sling the camera bag over my shoulder… and the bike’s battery wasn’t up to starting it. Arrrrrrrgh!!! I plugged in the trickle charger and continued my (fruitless) search for the car keys. After 15 minutes, about the time Mrs. Fetched wanted me there, I came back out in a final act of desperation and hit the starter button — and the bike fired right up. Woo hoo! I grabbed the camera bag and boogied on down to the field. Things were starting to go my way, and the previous game going overtime meant I got there with plenty of time to spare. Nevertheless, I had something to say to Mrs. Fetched before I screwed on the monopod and took the field. The game was a good one; the nephew’s team won 7-0 in a squeaker, getting a couple of controversial calls (but good calls, according to my tape) that went their way toward the end.

That was pretty much the high point of the weekend. That afternoon, I got dragooned into helping distribute feed in the chicken houses. Tyson has this bad habit of creating unfunded mandates — more work for the growers with no corresponding pay increase, although the in-laws recently got a new contract with better terms. There’s a movement afoot to unionize the growers, you see. But I digress. Back when, they used to send out a crew to unload the chicks at the beginning of a grow-out cycle; now they leave it to the growers. Some genius recently decided the growers should drop feed flats along the sides of the feed lines and fill them up, to make it easier for the chicks to get to the feed (there are already flats running down the lines with spouts)… and naturally, they leave the implementation (but not the decision) up to the growers. So. You fill an end-loader bucket with feed and scoop it into the flats and the regular pans, for some reason. It takes two buckets and well over an hour to do each house, and we did three (out of four). In my opinion, a complete waste of time unless you like a sore back.

Now a couple of years ago, a friend asked us if he could leave his go-karts in our detached garage (and let us use them). We didn’t need the space at the time, so we said OK. We played around with them, but they have no suspension and the ride is punishing off-road. Nevertheless, I used the big one on occasion when The Boy was down at the creek and I needed to get him home right away, but mostly they’ve sat unused. Now Mrs. Fetched wants the space back, and the friend wants to sell them. And the nephews have got wind of them, so they wanted to have a look at them.

The larger of the two karts is big enough to seat two adults, and has a 10HP motor with electric start. Since it was the closest to the garage door, we pulled it out first. The battery was completely shot (no surprise), to the point where it wouldn’t take a charge, so it wasn’t going to start at all. The smaller one will seat the two nephews, and has a 6HP motor with pull-start. There’s a toggle switch on the side of the motor, which I assumed was the kill switch. The gas tank was bone-dry — a good sign, that means the carb won’t be gummed up. I seem to remember a problem with it, but couldn’t remember what, so we rolled them back inside for the night.

Sunday after church, Mrs. Fetched surprised us all: “We’re not going to bother with that last house today. I’m going to rest, maybe take a nap.” What actually happened is that she and Daughter Dearest went shopping, leaving me to my own devices. My first thought was to see if the Sunfire would work with my trunk-mounted bike carrier, but the answer there was no. I guess I could have pulled one or both wheels off and stuffed it into the trunk for the short drive to Nimblewill, but there was already a tire in the back (which needed to be put on the car). I did that, tweaked a loose valve on the motorcycle that I heard still clicking after the valve adjustment, then decided since I was already greasy I might as well wrench on the karts.

I attacked the smaller kart first, since it didn’t need a battery. I pulled the spark plug, cleaned it off, and checked the toggle switch — yup, it’s a kill switch, up to run, down to stop. Next step was to see if it would run, so I dumped some gas in it and started pulling. Amazingly, it coughed to life after four pulls. It took a minute to get running, since there wasn’t a choke (I found the primer later), but after that I jumped on and gassed it. Off I went, down the driveway and into the grass along the road and back. It had a hard time going up the driveway; I’m not sure if the clutch was slipping or the tires just couldn’t get enough traction on the gravel (probably both), or if I was just too heavy for it. But hey! it ran! I borrowed a grease gun and filled up the lube point for the clutch/chain oiler.

Figuring they should have fresh oil, and the big one needed a battery anyway, I pulled the dead battery and went to Auto Zone. I put the battery on the trickle charger and changed the oil in the small kart… so that one’s ready. I drained the old gas out of the larger kart’s tank and rolled them back into the garage. I’ll tackle the rest of it today, and the nephews can try out the little one this afternoon.

New Toys

Wednesday, IT figured out what the last problem was setting up my MacBook Pro and brought it over. Sweeeeeet. I spent part of yesterday and today installing the other software I need and formatted my first documents on it this morning.

How much faster is it than my old work computer? I guesstimate about 15 times faster, and maybe 5 times faster than my iBook. I got a similar performance improvement switching from FrameMaker to groff. So the documentation suite that first got transformed out of Frame, four books totalling 750 pages, required half a day to create PDFs using Frame on the old 300MHz G3. Now it takes less than a minute. There is no longer any pain associated with accommodating last-minutes additions or changes — I can basically churn out a new version at a moment’s notice.

I told my boss, and he said, “You can get a lot more done now!” I said, “I love the smell of productivity in the morning. It smell like… slacking in the afternoon.” He thought that was pretty funny.

I was going to get a similar laptop for myself, but Mrs. Fetched confiscated the money I’d squirreled away for the purchase to pay for her cameras. And now she thinks she’s going to confiscate my Saturday for the chicken houses. I want to take my mountain bike to Nimblewill and ride around instead, but it occurs to me that I don’t have a car at the moment, thanks to The Boy. So I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow.

Crunch

The Boy has probably borrowed my car for the last time. He told me he would be home from band practice by 11, and I told him that if he wasn’t home by then, don’t bother asking again.

So about 9:30 last night, we got the call: he’s in the ditch, nobody’s hurt but can we get there quick? Dammit. He was barely able to give us directions (communication has been a problem with him for some time), so we jumped into Barge Vader and drove the way he told us until we saw blue lights. I mean, he couldn’t even tell us if he was on the left or right side of the road. When you’re a kid, a car wreck without injuries is the worst kind: without a little blood to evoke parental sympathy and concern, you have nothing to shield you from parental wrath. Other Brother found that one out when he rolled a Gremlin back in 70-something — after the doctor said he was OK, just some bruises and scrapes, Mom & Dad jumped on him.

Anyway, back here in 2006: The Boy was sufficiently shook up by having put the car he loves into a ditch, that he was totally straight with the cop. Band practice wrapped up about 9:00, so he zipped down to visit a friend of his. The friend found his dad’s rum, and they split a shot before deciding they had to go to a store. Away they went, and The Boy has always had a lead foot (what he does to the gas mileage is like siphoning out a gallon of gas and pouring it on the ground). So when he looked away from the road and got into the grass, at 95 mph, his friend panicked and grabbed at whatever he could — which happened to be the emergency brake. He locked up the back wheels, and they crossed the road, took out two mailboxes, and ended up in the ditch next to someone’s driveway — about four feet from a telephone pole.

The cop told it like it was: “One drink puts you over the limit for under-21. I could write you up for DUI, reckless driving, and underage possession. You’d go to jail for any of those,” and proceeded to write him up for… too fast for conditions. The car wasn’t so lucky; I think I used up the last of its luck with the deer a couple of weeks ago. It was hard to see what kind of damage was done in the dark, but both the front and back bumpers were less than intact (not sure how he managed to hose the back bumper) and the hood was bent up a little. The radiator is also broken, which isn’t surprising (it has been the primary source of trouble all along). If the front end isn’t bent up, it might be repairable.

But if this is the kick in the head that The Boy needed to get his act together (and it might have been), I won’t mind losing a car. On the other hand, cheap reliable cars that get 40mpg are hard to come by; teenagers with attitude are a dime a dozen.

Radio FAR Manor, where the hits just keep a-comin’.

The Accusations Fly

My first day back at work went mostly quietly. The IT peeps are holding onto my new computer, claiming they can’t get Sametime (a Lotus proprietary chat client) to work; I figure they’re looking for an excuse to not let it go because the MacBook Pro is a far cooler machine than what they usually have to deal with. Three meetings, which is four too many, and catching up my email pretty much did for my day. It wasn’t so quiet around FAR Manor.

First, M.A.E. went into the local Dollar General to get some deodorant. Pretty simple: go in, grab your brand, pay for it, leave. Except that the cashier asked her to come back in as she was halfway out the door. She asked M.A.E. some dumb question, then called her back in when she started out and accused her of shoplifting something cheap.

M.A.E., like ’most anyone would be, was offended. She shucked her jacket and said, “Pat me down if you want. But I didn’t steal anything. I have a job.” The manager checked her over and let her go. I suspect that M.A.E. will be getting her deodorant at Fred’s (a store, not Solar’s neighbor’s cat) from now on.

It gets “better.” Some cops came to the door and started asking about the whereabouts of The Boy. Seems that some buttmunch fingered him and Cousin Splat for defacing the church last year, and the cops fell all over themselves to believe it. The case is solved! So they think. As they’re getting ready to leave, here comes The Boy walking up the driveway, getting dropped off from work. They immediately start browbeating him with crap like, “we know you did it, you might as well own up to it,” (if they knew, why didn’t they just arrest him? freekin’ fishing expedition is what it was) and “you seem pretty nervous.”

The Boy answered the first one as well as could be expected: “I’m going to mess up my own church?” I don’t know how he answered the second one, but I would probably have said something like, “yeah, getting rousted by crooked cops always gets me nervous.” They got about as far with Cousin Splat as they did with The Boy, and the latter can be a cool customer when he wants. (For the record: The Boy is an expert liar, but I don’t think he or Splat defaced the church door. He might know who did it, but that’s it.)

After a rather upsetting experience, Splat and The Boy went to talk to the preacher. As for Mrs. Fetched, she has decided to not vote to re-elect the sheriff this time or ever again. It’s only taken him two terms since becoming a Republican to get corrupt, better than average.

Things didn’t take long to get back to normal. :-P

Vacation, by the numbers

Not the way I would prefer to go… even back to FAR Manor.

Come back later and check below this post — I’ll be backdating posts I started over the week and adding pictures here and there.


Days not in the office (including weekends): 15
Number of calls from co-workers: 2
Percentage of times they already had what they were asking me for: 100
Miles travelled (by car, approx.): 1300
Miles travelled (by bicycle, approx.): 40
Number of gas stops: 4
Best price for gas: $2.02, Lake Park GA
Amount of beer consumed: (I lost count)
Weight gained (pounds): MINUS 5 (yeah, I lost weight, woo hoo!)
Birthdays celebrated: 1
Age of birthday girl: 70
Home theater setups installed: 1
Home-improvement projects started: 2
Number of strips needed to finish the hallway: 7
Days of rain (including today): 2
Nights of rain: 4
Days without Internet access: 10
Age of Solar’s cat: 19
Stories started: 3
Hooters T-shirts bought for Daughter Dearest: 1
Bottles of dressing bought at a tourist trap pecan outlet for Mrs. Fetched: 5

On the Pinellas Trail

Mom’s tennis match went about twice as long as she expected, so she wasn’t really up for a ride. I filled a couple of water bottles this time, especially since it was early afternoon, and drove to a park near the Pinellas Trail. There I switched from motorized to self-propelled transportation, jumped onto the trail, and headed south.

This area in general is more bike-friendly than most of Planet Georgia, although that’s changing quickly. There are bike trails on my planet — some, like Silver Comet, are quite a bit longer than Pinellas, and bike lanes are starting to make a welcome appearance along suburban highways. The area around FAR Manor is even getting a lot of attention from road cycling clubs these days, and I live only a few miles from some great mountain bike trails (more on both some other time). What attracts me to the Pinellas Trail is: 1) I’m not working when I’m nearby, 2) I only have to drive a couple of miles from where I’m staying to reach it, 3) If Mom or Solar aren’t doing anything else, I can have some company.

Yes, that’s a bike shop off the side there. Can you think of a better location? For a clever slogan, click the picture to get the full-size version and look at the sign at the top left.

This part of Florida is pretty flat — if you want hills, you pretty much have to make them yourself. Fortunately(?), there’s a good reason to make some hills: some of the main drags are four to eight lanes wide and busy all the time. Therefore, the occasional overpass adds a little more resistance than the occasional headwind or off-road tires provide. But just a little. The climbs that top out at FAR Manor are longer and about as steep. My mountain bike is geared for hills and off-road duty, so I just put it in the middle gears and rolled on up. Most everywhere else, you can select a (high) gear you’re comfortable with and spin the miles away. If you’re in better shape than I am, you could probably ride from one end to the other (and back) in a few hours.

The south end of the Cross Bayou bridge, looking back north. I rode just a little farther than this, to the top of the Park St./Bay Pines overpass, before turning around and going back. What with having to double back at one point and get a picture I forgot, I covered about 18 miles total.

At Solar’s

For reasons having little to do with the guest beds, I’ve again started waking up at night since I’ve been down here. Part of it is the less-familiar environment — to say Pinellas County FL has a far higher population density than the part of Planet Georgia surrounding FAR Manor doesn’t do justice to the contrast. Maybe this will help: at FAR Manor, I can stand on the roof and not see anyone else’s house, even if I try. On the patio behind Solar’s house, I need only turn my head to clearly see four houses and a fifth behind some foliage. If I were to climb onto the roof, I could probably see a dozen or more. But that’s nothing: Mom’s porch is on the third floor and faces the Intracoastal, and you can see a half-mile stretch of totally-developed barrier island from there.

But here, the morning’s soundtrack is surprisingly dominated by nature at the moment: jays and other birds screeching and chattering; a soft breeze stirring leaves. Humanity provides a counterpoint, occasionally coming to the fore: a train honking a few blocks away, a siren. Traffic hums in the background, sometimes blending with the wind whisper. An air conditioner buzzes to life, even at 10 a.m. Saws and other power tools make their presence known, but not nearly as often as I would expect — something is always under construction here, and you want to do most of your work in the morning before the heat gets overbearing.

Looking around, one is reminded that not all wildlife finds it difficult to live around people — squirrels and many birds actually thrive in our presence, not to mention bugs — and plants are even more aggressive here than on Planet Georgia. Some invasive species like the Brazilian Pepper spread here like kudzu does at home. Tall trees have half the back yard in full shade now, and the neighbor’s trees provide evening relief. A cedar fence surrounds the back yard, providing privacy and a nice walkway for lizards. The grass is still getting established, but it looks better every time I come down. Semi-wild plants surround the trees and poke through the fence, reminding me how quickly nature would re-take this territory were humans to retreat. Considering that the previous owner, in Solar’s words, “used it as his private landfill,” the back yard is thriving.

Solar bought the house as a fixer-upper and really fixed it up, with the help of Mom and some of his friends. It’s small, but a single guy really doesn’t need more than this. He even re-converted the garage back into a garage, although it’s still climate-controlled and he often leaves the door open so the cat can come in. He should get some before-and-after pictures up where people can see them. Indeed, he enjoyed the fruits of his labor so much that he bought the house next door and (again, with help) flipped it. Not too much flipping going on these days, though; the housing market here has cooled off a bit. Interesting to think that when this house was built 40-odd years ago, that it was about the average size for a family of four.

Mom’s birthday was yesterday — happy milestone, Mom! — and we celebrated here. Solar grilled salmon, and it was fantastic. He brushed on a marinade of honey, mayo, and olive oil and let it sit for about an hour, then we spread on some pesto (basil from yours truly) and grilled the fish on a cedar plank — similar in principle to hickory chips, I’d just not heard about it before. Wicked Stepfather and Solar’s girlfriend are both not fish people, so she got chicken and he got steak. Salad and asparagus made up the side dishes. Ice cream cake with not nearly enough candles, and a successfully terrible rendition of “Happy Birthday,” was the dessert.

Speaking of Mom, I’m waiting on her to come by — we’re supposed to take a bike ride. Hearing a car door, I look out front. Mom’s not here, but Fred has come by. He’s a humongous orange and white cat with a busted tail (severed nerve). The tag on his collar says he belongs to a particular neighbor, but in another way the entire neighborhood belongs to him. Solar keeps a little container of kitty treats out front, where he has a smoking bench in front of the window sill, so this is Fred’s second home. In a lot of ways, Fred is many things that Newt (Solar’s cat) isn’t — Fred is good-natured, loves attention, has short hair, and (like I said) big. Newt has gotten cranky in her old age, but that’s actually an improvement… when she was younger and had enough energy to care, she had a nasty temper (although she was actually pleasant to be around at Christmas). Now she’s just a cranky old long-hair cat who isn’t eating much, although she tried to munch a lizard and Solar wouldn’t let her.

Looks like lunch and a solo bike ride are on tap for the afternoon.

Escape from FAR Manor! Part II

While the northern part of Planet Georgia is starting to slip (with a sigh of relief) into fall, it’s still summer in points south. This became apparent as I got through Atlanta (contending with stadium traffic, at least the Falcons won), and I spent a few hours trying to direct some of the breeze into the car to cool things off. Afternoon wore on to evening, and the sun finally got low enough that trees along the side of the road provided some shade. Clouds and even a little rain cooled things off further.

The trip from FAR Manor to my mom’’s place takes 8-9 hours when I’’m by myself, or 10 with passengers (or more if there’s holiday traffic). I don’’t drive any faster, it’s just that we make more stops. On my own, I stop twice: once at a rest area, once for a combined gas & food break. My mountain bike rode on the back, where it put up enough wind resistance to affect the gas mileage. It’s a boring drive, and I won’’t dwell on it further.

One thing about September here is that the evening sun lines up almost perfectly with the east-west roads... so if you’’re heading west, you need good sunglasses. But again, the clouds came to the rescue, and I got in without any trouble.

This morning, I decided to give both myself and the mountain bike a good workout. I rode up to Sand Key Park, about a 15-mile round trip, and waded into the Gulf. It’’s still pretty warm, but not the warmest I’’ve ever seen (that would be Biloxi, MS, in 1980). Gulf Blvd. has bike lanes on both sides of the road (mostly), and is flat compared to Planet Georgia, where level roads are the exception. But had I been thinking, I would have ridden south instead of north: a tailwind going out means a headwind coming back. I also didn’’t think to bring water, which meant I spent $2 for a bottle of Gatorade at the park’s vending machines. Pricey to be sure; but I figured $1 for the fluid and $1 for the bottle, and refilled it from the drinking fountain. Shake it up to get the chlorine to fizz out, and it was fine. I also soaked my shirt in the shower thing as two-wheeled air conditioning before riding back.

I was pretty ripe by the time I got back; into the shower I went while Mom fixed a sandwich for lunch. And that’’s been my day so far. At least I can slack on the exercise the rest of the day and tomorrow with a clear conscience.

Floored (or, the anti-weekend) [UPDATED]

I forgot to mention why there are 20kg weights on the floor, and slipped in another comment here & there.

We ended up checking out Friday. I had Mrs. Fetched agreeing to stay through the weekend, then The Boy started flaking out and generally becoming insufferable. The phone calls started coming with uncomfortable frequency (I now know what not to take next year… smellphones). Seems like our corner of the county just comes apart if we’re not there. Mrs. Fetched promised that we would take the entire week next year, and the chicken houses wouldn’t get in the way. I’ve had her reassurances, several related to buying FAR Manor not the least of them, not pan out far too often to put much stock in that. But we’ll see.

My boss called again on Friday morning, as we were packing up, with some more issues — if I’m so indispensable that I have to be online all through vacation, they should give me a title and salary to match. Either that, or hire me some help.

Home and unpacked, Mrs. Fetched got annoyed anew at the white carpet covering much of the house. With us both home, chicken houses not an issue for a little while, she decided that we should try putting down the hardwood floor in the hallway. We called our friends for advice — he did all kinds of construction work before he fell off a roof and broke his neck a while back. He can walk with support, and at least advise on construction projects, nowadays. Not only does he have the know-how, he has the tools. We spent much of Friday evening ripping up the mark of insanity (white carpet), gathering material and cutting the jambs in the hallway (six doors in 18 feet, GAFB) so the new flooring could be tucked under.


This morning, up dim & early to return the jamb saw to Home Despot and pick up the advisor. It took us a couple of hours to get as far as you see here. On a couple of occasions, he got down on the floor and helped — one of the few times since he had his accident that he’s done any construction work. I was concerned for him, but realized he needed to do it — he lasted about 10 minutes before he got to hurting too much though. Working through the day, me measuring and Mrs. Fetched cutting pieces, making sure they fit into place, laying down glue and finally pushing the pieces into each other and tapping them in. We got over halfway through before giving out.


Part of the slowdown is the nature of the flooring underneath. Check the first pic again: there’s plywood running up the center of the hallway, but that lighter stuff to the right of the hammer is crappy particle board. Not only is it particle board, it’s mostly higher than the plywood. I took a chisel to what you see there to even it up (the only good thing about particle board is that it chisels down well), but there’s a definite slope to the floor, left downhill, near the end of the hall. That’s why you see two 20kg weights there: it’s pushing the floorboards into the glue. As we toiled away, Mrs. Fetched said on several occasions that Leon (the guy who originally built the house that has become FAR Manor) was notorious for cutting corners. She knew this all along, and still wanted to buy this house?

Mrs. Fetched is confident that she can finish the job with a little help from The Boy. Good thing, because I’m off to Florida tomorrow morning.

Escape from FAR Manor! (day 6, Mrs. Fetched escapes)

Mrs. Fetched has joined me here in the refuge. As I am typing this, she is fast asleep in the bedroom after being up all night supervising the chicken removal. We actually left FAR Manor a little earlier than I’d expected, but naturally ended up getting here a little later than I’d expected too. Stop for lunch, grab a few more groceries, take care of the car insurance (and the lady was in a gabby mood)… it adds up quick. The rain pouring down from yesterday evening until about two hours ago didn’t exactly speed us along, either.

I didn’t get the video of the chicken catching machine like I’d hoped. Turns out the cat porch was infested and Sprite & Aries were totally flea-bagged. I ended up running into town to grab a fogger and arranging an overnight stay with an animal boarder who would also flea-dip the little darlings. The cats were not happy about getting stuffed into a carrier — how I managed to do it without getting my arms shredded can only be explained by Divine Intervention — and were even less happy about sharing a room with several loud yappy dogs, even if they were all in separate cages.

While I waited for Mrs. Fetched to get ready, I finished the tub-caulking job I’d started last night. I’d already taken care of the grout — most of the grout along the tub was loose, but some had to be chiseled out — and ran the caulk. This morning, I vacuumed the chunks of old grout out of the tub and caulked over a couple of areas that were a little thin. That should keep the water where it’s supposed to be, anyway.

One good thing about being home yesterday: the Battery Fairy brought some fresh juice for my iBook. It’s nice to have a mobile laptop again. I dutifully boxed up the dead original battery and dropped it off at the UPS place for recycling on the way to the refuge. Another thing I no longer have to worry about.

A little sun is shining across the trees outside as I type on the couch. I hope that means the rain has moved off for the rest of the week. I took a looooong walk around the resort yesterday with my camera. I’ll post photos either here or on Flickr when I get a chance. I really should have done it yesterday while I had Internet access, but they’ll keep. I was too busy catching up with my blog-buddies.

We’re holding out the possibility to extend our stay here through the weekend. We’ll have to switch units, and it’s $120, but Lord knows Mrs. Fetched needs a break at least as much as I do. She’s flopping back and forth; currently in the “no” column but we’ll see how she feels in the morning. As the office is right across the parking lot from here, if she changes her mind I can have the paperwork signed before she has a chance to change it back!

Escape from FAR Manor! (evening)

On the subject of what day it is: Keith Oibermann has said all that needs to be said. I shall otherwise remain silent.

Evening on the deck provides its own symphony. But at this time of day, the cosmic mixer turns down the nature track and turns up the sounds of humanity: the flat snapping as I open a beer, echoing off first the condos and then a hill across the lake; a car bringing four ladies (a little older than me, I think) from their day’s outing; the buzz and whirr of an air conditioner starting up. Insects chirp softly; you almost have to listen for them. The geese of morning are elsewhere — they spend much of their days near the picnic area, perhaps trying for a handout.

Sunlight sparkles on the lake’s ripples, nearly blinding before thin clouds come to the rescue. Once in a while, a breeze stirs the trees and shakes loose the occasional leaf. I catch the occasional whiff of a charcoal grill; someone in Mountain Shadows, perhaps.

The spider insists on building its web next to the swing. I knock it down in the morning, and it rebuilds by evening. Someone ought to put this spider in charge of New Orleans; it’s patient and persistent, and couldn’t do a worse job than the Bush league.

I wonder why I stayed at FAR Manor last night. I should have known how it would go: I got about six hours of sleep, then when I woke I was too keyed up to drop off again (I tried). At least I took care of a loose end from work; a customer wanted a table of LED patterns that indicated problems and what to do about them. I had it mostly ready on Thursday, but forgot about it in the panic mode of that last day at work. I emailed it and got a “just what I was looking for” back, so the day wasn’t a complete washout.

Mrs. Fetched was sort of jerking me around last night, though. First it was, “Are you going back?” then “Aren’t you staying?” Then when I agreed to stay, she was like, “You don’t have to stay.” Sheesh. Such is the challenge of taking a vacation a mere hour away from FAR Manor; the evil of the chicken houses has a gravitational field that extends so far. For now, though, I will enjoy not having the TV on as I digest my supper.

Escape from FAR Manor! Inside the resort

The condo I’m staying in is small, but has the essentials for a week: two bedrooms, a bath, full kitchen, and the living area shown here. I’ll be shuttling between here and FAR Manor until Wednesday, at which point Mrs. Fetched will join me until it’s time to check out on Friday.


Not caring much about TV, but wanting a little music, I grabbed some powered speakers and found a convenient place to put the iPod. You can pretty much hear it everywhere inside the unit without turning the volume up very much at all.


Plans are simple for tomorrow: bicycling in the morning, a swim in the afternoon, fix pasta in the evening. Tuesday will be a non-vacation day, although I volunteered to help Mrs. Fetched get the chicken houses ready for the catchers. I hope to get some video of the catching machine in action that night or Wednesday morning — it’s pretty hilarious, watching the chickens get rolled into the cage.

Mrs. Fetched plans are: stay up all night Tuesday while the catchers do their bit, then ride up to the condo with me and sleep most of the afternoon while I put a nice supper together.

AT&T Microwave facility

On GA115 between Dahlonega and Cleveland GA.

Oh deer!

Back at FAR Manor for a couple of hours. Daughter Dearest isn’t working today, so I came back early to get the vacation posts in. Be sure to come back in a couple of days; I’m going to add some pictures to those posts when I get a chance.

Talk about dodging a bullet. Just a few miles out of the resort, a doe popped into the road. I got on the brakes and she stepped up the boogie. Still on the brakes, thinking perhaps the first deer was already across (Mrs. Fetched will tell you “there’s always two”) and I was clear, a large but still-spotted fawn leaped out. I stood on the brakes, to no avail. I think God picked the thing up and threw it, because I didn’t hear the expected thump when I would have hit it. I saw it coming toward the windshield and thinking, “oh great,” but it cleared the windshield… and landed on the roof! THUMP THUMP-THUMP THUMP of it kicking around, trying to get some traction, then it rolled off. I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was going boogity-boogity back the way it came.

Thinking that must have been the first deer I saw running back, I stopped and got out to look. No fawn lying dead off the road, even in the woods a little ways. No damage to the front of the car, and just a few scratches on top. Some hair managed to cling to the car the rest of the 40 miles home. Looks like we both dodged a bullet.



The only other thing I can say is: Whew. Thank God.

Escape from FAR Manor! (morning on the deck, day 2)

The second day of vacation is starting out tons better than the first. For the first time in I don’t remember, I slept the entire night through. Ten hours. I think I mentioned I haven’t been sleeping well lately, or maybe it was to Mrs. Fetched.

Except for someone’s little yappy dog across the lake, it’s quiet out here on the deck. A flock of geese forage in the lawn below, grunting softly. Crickets and a jay off in the distance compete with the occasional whisper of car tires.

Beyond the next row of condos, the lake is still and almost glassy. Beyond the lake is Mountain Shadows, one of those places where you build a house around your camper. If I’d had it to do over, I would have bought one of those places instead of a timeshare: you can come up whenever and stay as long as you like; a few people live there year-round. Everyone is really friendly.


Anyway. Now that the yapper has shut up, the only sour note in this audio-visual symphony is a spider web that I somehow missed seeing when I was sitting next to it on the porch swing with my coffee. Whack that, have a bowl of cereal, and then… jog, walk, swim, read, write, whatever, until I pick up Daughter Dearest this afternoon.

Vacation reports may be a bit spotty after this. See you in a while, though.

Escape from FAR Manor! (Vacation, day 1)

Note: Depending on when I can find a tube (the Internet is a series of tubes, you know), these posts may appear later than their dates. I'm going to backdate them to the day I wrote them.

OMG. If all vacation days were like this one, I’d just work. As it is, I may end up being the exception and saying I wish I’d spent more time at the office. At least there’s a happy ending.

You know it’s not going to be a wonderful day when the phone rings at 5 a.m. and you find that the power is out. In the course of things, we found that the house phone was out as well, but the office phone that woke us up obviously wasn’t. But I digress. When I picked up the phone, the line was dead — in my sleep-deprived state, I forgot that phone has a flaky hook switch. I also didn’t catch details like the night light and clock-radio being dark. It took flipping two light switches, and nothing happening either time, for it to penetrate my thick skull.

“Power’s out,” I told Mrs. Fetched on the way to the bathroom. “Did you forget to pay the electric bill?” (Being half-asleep does little to stop my lame attempts at humor.)

“It is?” she mumbled.

In the bathroom, I could hear the alarm from the chicken houses… seems the situation was more widespread.

“That must have been Mom, then,” said Mrs. Fetched (a good bet; nobody else would call us at 5 a.m. unless it was a wrong number or a prank). “I need to go start the generator.” The chicken houses have backup power, which helps to keep them, you know, alive during a power failure.

I lay awake while she was gone, not from choice, until she returned. I knew that a major feed incident in #1 had all but buried a feed hopper, and I’d already volunteered to help shovel feed in the morning. So when she said she was going to start that at 6-ish, I said, “I’ll come. I’m not going to get back to sleep anyway.” A little breakfast, and away we went. After making a dent in the pile, we did the daily walk-through. That took us to about 10:30.

After a shower, I sat down to check email and what all my blog-buddies are up to, and my smellphone rang. My boss. “Those documents you uploaded to the intranet are coming back ‘File Not Found’.” Serves me right to trust anything built or maintained by IT — just because it worked that last X times doesn’t mean you should ever trust it to work this time. I checked my work email, found another person with the same problem, then turned off the VPN and emailed everyone from my home account. Lotus Farking Notes is still screwing up attachments, which it has been doing for the last few months now, and now the web-based client I’ve been using has been following suit at least for forwarded attachments. Words to live by: in a crisis, don’t depend on IT. Or: “IncompetenT” begins and ends with IT. (OK, rant off.)

Noonish, we went out to eat. On the road, Mrs. Fetched started in about me calling the insurance company about the load we’re taking about against my life insurance. That reminded me about other calls I wanted to make: activate my debit card, order a new battery for my iBook, and let the phone company know the business line was acting up again — the hum was loud enough Thursday night to kill the DSL.

By the time we got home, The Boy had returned from his job and I was about dead. He went with Mrs. Fetched to shovel feed, and I crashed for a couple of hours, waking up about an hour later than I wanted (and just as Mrs. Fetched returned).

Her Imperial Highness was put out that I hadn’t made my calls yet. I’d committed the Ultimate Sin of inconveniencing her: she expected me to take M.A.E. to work; it was 4 p.m. and I had to make the calls now. Never mind that the one she wanted was to Alabama and thus gave me an extra hour. I could have called from the car, but she was already in high dudgeon and even less inclined than usual to listen to reason. Fine: I used the time to make the calls (check’s in the mail, debit card active, battery ordered) and get stuff together (i.e. packing for vacation). The fourth call, to the phone company, never happened. Just to make sure, I took an old phone out to the interface box and plugged it in the test jack. No hum. Loosening and tightening the screw terminals cleared it all up.

What with one thing and another, I didn’t make good my escape from FAR Manor until about 6:30. I stopped in Cleveland to pick up some essentials, and learned that I was in a dry county. I thought such things no longer existed… but then I remembered the sorry excuse for a Pretendersent we have these days….

An hour on the road, a half hour spent grabbing groceries (and a fruitless search for beer), ten minutes to check in, twenty to unpack: at 8:30, I called home to let everyone knew all was well (except for the beer).

I fixed a sandwich for supper and entertained myself with some music out of my iBook and reading some ancient (older than me!) Bell System Practices about maintaining 197/198-type switches (those old step-by-step boogers — am I a geek or what?). Then… blessed sleep.

Two glorious weeks of vacation, the first two-week vacation of my working life. I’ll be bouncing back & forth for a few days to FAR Manor, but Mrs. Fetched will join me here for a couple of days starting Wednesday. Next Saturday, off to Solar’s for a week in Florida.

Appropriate

The community yard sale was yesterday. We finally stopped talking about it and actually took a pile of stuff over there to sell. After booth costs, we cleared about $110 and came home with several empty boxes. Less stuff, more money — it’s a good thing. I might go next month with just some books and surplus electronic devices (old Macs, commercial-grade VCRs).

This afternoon, I crawled under the house and cut (and removed) a bunch of copper pipe while Mrs. Fetched and The Boy yanked out the old registers from the living room. I think I only left two registers uncut, and those are on opposite ends of the house (one in our bedroom and one across from the washer & dryer). Lots of copper and aluminum to take to the recyclers, and now we can remove the furniture and rent a sander.

A little later today, I split up the rest of the Romas my mother-in-law gave me and put them on the dehydrator. If I can get another 5 pounds or so, I should have enough dried tomatoes to get me through the winter.

And now you know why it’s called Labor Day weekend.

Hey Solar...

I seem to have lost your phone number. Gimme a call when you get this, OK?

Do-it-yourself camper

Lordy, my cellphone camera bites. But I refuse to be shackled to Stinkular for two more years. Anyway...

Zinged!

Standing outside at the in-laws’ this evening, after eating watermelon: Mrs. Fetched, Daughter Dearest, me, and Mrs. Fetched’s mom. And a bunch of half-grown herd dogs, putting their cold noses on bare legs and so forth.

After one dog nosed Mrs. Fetched, she jumped and complained. Daughter Dearest said, “Did he stick his nose up your butt too?”

“No.”

Then the mother-in-law chimed in: “He was just smelling your ‘cats’.”

I was the last one to get the joke. Daughter Dearest was shocked that she said it, but I’ve been around them long enough to know both of them will zing you when they feel like it.

Shorties

A few bits and bobs that don’t merit their own posts…

***

A guy at an OEM company we’re dealing with at work goes by the name of “Raining Cao.” I guess that’s not as bad as Wayne King (say it out loud).

***

Q. Why are northern nudist camps better than southern nudist camps?
A. It's colder.

***

Is Blogger ever going to fix the blog search? You’d think at a site owned by Google, that would be the last thing to break. But it hasn’t worked for at least a week. I think it broke about the same time they rolled out the new “Blogger beta” that has had a somewhat spotty record to date. Homeless Guy was unable to post for several days; he thinks he lost 200 readers to the glitch. I guess it’s fortunate for me that I didn’t get invited to try out the beta, given how search is(n’t) working.

***

Lobster really seems to have gotten it. He was talking to Mrs. Fetched last week and saying things like, “I was an idiot. Why didn’t I finish school?”

***

Mrs. Fetched’s video business has started picking up again. A local performance boating place is having her clean up some video they shot, and we’re doing taping for a park/rec league football team. “My” “new” camera perches on my monopod like it was made to work the sidelines. I made some mistakes last week, probably because it was the first time in nearly two years that I’ve done sideline camera work, and had an unfamiliar camera to boot. Mrs. Fetched gets a wider view from the sound booth… I’ll have to see if she can get a still of my backside down on the sidelines or something.

***

The Boy is doing sheetrock work now. I have to get him up at 6 a.m., but at least he gets moving with a minimum of hassle. The only friction right now is from band practice; he does this twice a week during the week and gets home around midnight. At least he’s getting some money here and there; he should soon be able to get his car fixed. He needs to get himself an alarm clock that will Do The Job though… when he gets his own place, I’m not coming over there to get him up every morning.

***

Hello, Ernesto. I was starting to wonder if we would (thankfully) have a dud of a hurricane season. All it takes is one, though, in the wrong place… and as warm as the Gulf is, it’s definitely the wrong place. Gas prices have been dropping for the last week or so (I saw $2.69 on the way home), but not even election-year price manipulation is going to overcome the panic that will ensue when people hear “hurricane in the Gulf.” I suspect prices will turn back around by the middle of next week, unless Ernesto fizzles out. Pray it happens, not for the gas prices but for everyone who lives along the Gulf.

***

Off to bed. I have a very non-relaxing Saturday to look “forward” to.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part IV

Continued from Part III
(start at Part I)

IV. The Passives (reprise)

“Babe?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever think things would be… I don’t know… different?”

She looks up from her book, slightly concerned. “Different how?” she asks guardedly.

“I don’t know,” he sighs, silencing the voice of his god with the Mute button. “I mean, we have all this shit, or at least we’re making payments on it. But we sit here most evenings, we don’t really have a clue about what our kids are doing… and did you have any dreams when you were younger?”

Her mouth tightens involuntarily for a moment, caught between annoyance and amusement. It’s finally happened, she thought, he’s having his mid-life crisis. Aloud, she says, “Sure. Didn’t you?” Let him talk it out.

“Yeah,” he laughs nervously. “Kyle kind of reminded me. When I was his age, I wanted a Super-8 movie camera. I was going to interview a ghost in a haunted house… make my own movie, like Kyle and his friends. But I couldn’t afford it, and neither could my parents.

“What about you?”

Trapped! he had opened up, now it’s her turn. “Well…” she waves her book. “I wanted to be a reporter, an investigative reporter. I guess I’d have been a cross between Lois Lane and Woodward and Bernstein. But we couldn’t afford J-school —”

“J-school?”

“Journalism school. I got a scholarship for Annenberg, in California, but it wasn’t enough. I went to vo-tech, and it was good, but… well, I started a mystery novel about an investigative reporter, but never finished it. It probably wouldn’t have gotten published anyway.”

“Hey, you never know. You can prob’ly write better stuff than that,” he gestures dismissively at her paperback.

“This book won an award,” she sniffs. “I didn’t even try to get mine published.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I don’t know. And I’m not sure why we’re even having this conversation.”

He laughs. “You say we don’t talk enough all the time; now we’re talking and you don’t know why.”

She opens her mouth to retort, then stops. “So what brought this on?”

“I guess it was Kyle and his movie-making buddies. He’s supposed to be home in a little bit. Hey, what do you say we walk down to the Thurmans’ and see what they’re up to? That’s where he is.”

She looks at him for a moment. “You know, I don’t remember the last time we went out for a walk. It might be nice.”

To be continued…

Making something of bleeps and boops

Sometimes, following links takes you to some odd places.

This particular oddity odyssey started with a MacDevCenter article, which led O’ReillyNet, and from there to an article on BoingBoing.

Near the bottom are two links to audio files. The first is a short, silly thing made of System 7 MacOS beeps over a funky beat; the second is a complete song whose soundtrack seems to be made up entirely of Nintendo snippets and MacOS beeps, plus the MacOS startup chime. The strangest thing about it is that it works.

Go have a listen and be amazed, amused, or disgusted.

He’s back!

No, not The Boy, although he was gone for a couple of days. I’m talking about this guy:


There’s a lot of weird bugs in the world, but to me the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth stands out as one of the weirdest.

The butterfly bushes have been a little scraggly this year, up to the last week or so when they finally got the idea. We have to cut them back pretty severely each year to keep them from taking over the manor grounds.

When You Rule the Tools

About a week ago, I complained about our tendency as tech writers to become slaves to our tools. Tonight I provide a counter-example — what becomes possible when you, the technical writer, is in charge of the tools.

At work, we’re building a box with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities and routing. Since that’s a fairly well-explored theme, we contracted a company in Taiwan to supply the Wi-Fi router. Like most routers for home networks, this one provides a web-based interface to configure the box, with links to context-sensitive help and a global glossary. As it turned out, the help that they furnished us was already owned (copyrighted) by another company. Since I work under the same department as the people driving this particular product, they brought me a working prototype and asked me to rewrite the help.

I’d seen an earlier prototype a few months back, so I already knew what was there. This time, though, I hit “View Source” in the browser — and was presented with a mishmash of HTML and <script> tags. Digging a little deeper, I realized that every single string in the web interface was being written by ECMAScript (the polite name for JavaScript hockkkk, ptui aka JavaSchit). The strings were stored as variables in files called language.js and langcont.js. The names explained the method to their madness: translating the interface requires changing only two files instead of 30.

Looking at the text itself, I was less than thrilled — we make stuff for cable companies; the help text talked about DSL and even ISDN, but not cable — and I had some better descriptions for other terms. The bolded term was run into the rest of the paragraph instead of broken out into a glossary-style list. I needed to add some cable-centric terms and remove the DSL- and ISDN-centric stuff.

So I fired up a text editor and got to work. It took all of five minutes for me to realize that I was going about it the wrong way. The string variables look like this:

h3='<b>Term</b> The definition…';

So if I wanted to add a new definition in between two existing ones, I’d have to either renumber everything following or create variables like h3_5 in between. Meanwhile, there was a corresponding <script> call in help.html:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">dw(h3);</script>

To turn down the bloat a little, they had created dw as an alias for document.write. But the thing was, for every term I inserted or deleted in language.js, I’d have to make a corresponding fix in html.help. Since this is tedious, repetitive, kind of stuff — and I’m lazy — I decided to let the computer do the work for me. With a few global search and replace runs, I turned my text into HTML and then banged out a couple of scripts to transform it into the format needed by each file. It took an hour or so to get the scripts working, but I’d still be pounding on it if I had to do it by hand.

This is the kind of thing that you can’t do, or at least do easily, in Microsoft Weird or even FrameMaker. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient. Sometimes, you even have to make tools to do a custom job on the spot. But when you rule the tools, the tools do the work for you so you can engage in some good old guilt-free slacking.

Disaster Averted

Shortly after getting home from work on Wednesday, Mrs. Fetched told me a tale of… “whoa.”

A while back, some friends of ours moved out of a trailer and gave us their large-ish propane tank so we could replace the ones we were renting. (For those of you who don’t have one of these, most people rent their tank and are locked into a single supplier. If you own your own tank, you can get propane from the low bidder.) Wednesday was the day when the incumbent came to cart off their tanks and install ours. They’re happy to do this... for a price, of course.

In this case, the price included three or four hours of labor. The regulator on our tank was shot, and had to be replaced. Then there was the minor detail of the old system being two small tanks ganged together; that gave them some grief too. The real fun started when they did the leak test... and found (and fixed) two leaks. Under the house. Next to the furnace.

Mrs. Fetched told me all that to complain about the $420 bill. “We should have just paid the $51 tank rental.”

“Um,” I replied, “Not that I’m all that fond of this place, but I would prefer it didn’t catch fire some night in October.”

“It wouldn’t catch fire, it would probably blow up.”

All the more reason to not worry about the $420… especially since the furnace is under the downstairs bedrooms. Not that I care so much about the house, but I would prefer not to have to escape in the middle of the night and try to remember grabbing my wife, kids, M.A.E., and laptop on the way out.

Whither Lobster?

The last time we saw Lobster in this chronicle, back in May, he had: no wheels (lost his truck to Big V); not much education; no permanent abode; and knocked up his girlfriend. I originally put “worst of all” in the latter item, but that seemed to give him the Attitude Adjustment that he sorely and truly needed.

Having a kid on the way seemed to give Lobster a focus. At first, he was quite happy contemplating supporting a family on welfare and his meager KFC earnings. But as he began to reflect on his situation (a miracle! in itself), he made peace with his parents (another miracle) and then moved back in with them (you could have knocked me over with a feather at this point).

The miracles just kept a-comin’ — he started working toward getting his GED (his reading level is atrocious though), got a job at the new Wal-Mart while continuing at the KFC, and (best of all) his pregnant girlfriend dumped him for another guy. So in less than three months, he has completely turned his life around… and life has given him a clean slate. I have no idea whether he’s managed to get a set of replacement wheels, but he lives less than five miles from both KFC and Wal-Mart now — he could ride a bicycle and save a potload on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Some habits, however, are a little more ingrained than others. I suspect he either gets rides from his parents or has bought a beater.

First M.A.E., now Lobster. I can only hope The Boy soon gets a similar attitude adjustment (minus the knocked-up girlfriend, of course).

Squiffed

I poured my self a generous helping of rum over crushed ice, and added enough grapefruit juice to fill the glass. But I’m not wasted as long as I can type typographic quotes/apostrophes & close my open HTML tags. :-P

Anyway, apologies in advance for anything overly silly I type in people’s comments tonight.

The Boy, by the numbers

[This list is now obsolete. Please refer to the current list.]

To make this blog easier to write (and read), I’m considering using a series of codes to describe The Boy’s latest misadventure… something like this:

• TB01: Left home (again)


• TB02: Came home (again)


• TB03: Said he’d be home, stayed out, hasn’t returned


• TB04: Had a tantrum, broke something


• TB05: Caught in a lie, insisting on his version of things


• TB06: Talks about getting a job, no follow-through


• TB07: Talks about getting a GED, no follow-through


• TB08: His band has been signed (again)


• TB09: Blames everyone else for his problems
  

You get the idea. I could just use a subject of, say, “TB04” and I wouldn’t have to type anything unless he threw multiple errors like Friday (TB04, TB05, TB06, TB07, TB09). He hasn’t been doing a very good job of managing his diabetes as of late (his A1C is 10, in the Very Bad range), and that doesn’t help — he goes completely off the rails when his glucose gets really high. And so we have one less phone than we did Thursday.

He now has less than two weeks left to clean up his act, before his court appearance. He now acknowledges drinking heavily and smoking various substances, shows no regret but says he quit drinking after a two-week binge (“I decided that was stupid”). His lip ring is gone, but the earrings are still installed and his hair won’t exactly impress a judge. He still has his head in an alternate universe, where looks don’t count for anything when going to court or job interviews. The hard part is that I agree with him partly — appearances shouldn’t make a difference — but as I’ve been telling him repeatedly, he has to deal with how things are instead of how they should be. The other minor detail is, as a high-school dropout, the facts beyond the appearance makes the job hunt difficult.

“I don’t want to work in a restaurant, or a gas station, or Kroger, or anything like that.” Unfortunately, without a diploma, that’s about all that’s open to him at this point. I think I got through to him on one point: he’s gone backwards in a big way this summer. He started out with a job, a working car, and a cell phone; now he has a non-working car, no job, and no phone. I didn’t even mention his A1C going up three points, but that’s as much a part of it as anything else.

Cool, man

I don’t think it broke 75 here today — it has been overcast all day, except when it was pouring down rain. It was kind of nice to get a day here like what we had last weekend in the NC mountains, even if I did get rained on some.

I just finished adjusting the valves on my motorcycle (two were seriously loose and a third was somewhat loose) and putting it back together, so it’s ready for when the rain clears out (which it seems to have done already). Looks like it will be in the 80s all week, with only small chances for rain, so I’m looking forward to enjoying my commute.

Professionalism, Rants, and Support

Techcommdood related a flare-up over Flare on techwr-l, a mailing list strictly dedicated to work-related communication by and for technical writers. He went on to say,

All facts removed, this was an inappropriate post. Why? Well, it offered little information and, well, it was a classic rant. You have to ask yourself, "What value did this add to the community?"

One word: none.

I don’t know about that. It pointed out some potentially serious problems with Flare, a fairly new help authoring tool (HAT) that’s trying to dethrone RoboHelp. MadCap (the company that produces Flare) stepped up and offered to work with the ranter to fix the problems, so maybe there’s a happy ending to come. Whatever: being a Mac user, neither MadCap nor Adobe (RoboHelp’s current owner) gives much of a rip about what I want or need.

Dood’s point was to decry the unprofessionalism of ranting on a public forum, whether directly or through an intermediary (as in this case) — of course, there’s Techcomm, a forum for tech writers that’s meant to be 95% rants and silly jokes, but that doesn’t really count. But there’s several kinds of unprofessionalism on display here, and they can all be seen in the ranter’s rhetorical question (caps lock removed): “Why should I pay $700 for a product and then spend my time doing workarounds to get it to do what it should do automatically?”

First, the ranter didn’t mention whether MadCap had tried to fix the problems before the rant, or if they were even aware of the problem. If you’re going to spend $700 for a piece of software, you should ask for help and expect to get it… and if you’re charging $700 for that software, you should a) make something that doesn’t break; and b) make sure your customers don’t get to the point of ranting about you in public. (The latter is often something that small companies like MadCap actually do better than larger ones like Adobe.)

The larger unprofessionalism is depending on some pretty $700 piece of software chrome to do your work for you. Face it, fellow tech writers, HTML (or even XML) is not rocket science. We complain about those icky tags, then we wonder why we get replaced by “technical writers” with a certificate education, at half the salary. Then there’s the whole issue of trusting your work to a monolithic database, which destroys everything when it gets corrupted (e.g. the late, unlamented ForeHelp), or any other software that doesn’t allow you to easily extract your work out of it (Word).

I’m not saying that we should be building help systems by hand — but we should certainly be willing to get involved at a much lower level. HTML-based help, after all, is simply a wrapper around a series of HTML (and graphic) files that provides (usually JavaScript-based) niceties like search and context. You provide table of contents and index files — and the content, of course — and that’s it. You don’t have to work directly with HTML — but you should be able to use what your authoring tool gives you to produce HTML, then be able to clean it up and prepare it for use with the help system. Yes, it takes a little time, but so does importing stuff into a dedicated HAT and fiddling with your content there.

Probably the most trouble-free help-building system I’ve seen to date is Mif2Go with FrameMaker to produce OmniHelp, an open-source help viewer. I’ve also used groff to produce HTML that works well with OmniHelp — everything can be modified to work the way you want it to, with no $700 “license fee” involved. Why are we not taking more advantage of set-ups like this?

It’s time to take control of our operating environments and to start living up to the title, technical writer. We’ve let the word become little more than a way to distinguish what we do from journalists and fiction writers for too long now, to our detriment.