The Downside of Spring

Very few things in life are purely good or purely bad, and that includes spring. The downside to spring, of course, is yard work. It was quite warm, bordering on hot, over the weekend, so there wasn’t much excuse to stay inside.


Mrs. Fetched decided that the entire front bed needed to be tilled up so she could re-arrange it. Figuring it would be easier to till up without the stepping stones in the way, I pried them out of the ground and stacked them off to the side. There were 25 of them all told, some of which were buried under dirt or plant-sprawl. This wisteria was hiding two, maybe three of them. I just probed around with the shovel, heard the tonk, and pried out the stone.

The hard part was when I started tilling around a couple of the butterfly bushes along the driveway: I’d forgotten those beds were graveled (easy enough to do when the gravel is covered with dirt, grass, and leaves). The Mantis about shook my arms off before I was done. We covered that area with mulch cloth and eight bags of pine bark. I also appropriated three of the stepping stones so I could cross it (on the way to Studio FARfetched) barefoot.


Brown Thrashers are Planet Georgia’s bird, which is appropriate. They get into your business, attack their reflections in car windows, and roost in inconvenient places. Like the little porch in front of the studio. They’ve been roosting there at night through the winter, and I’ve shoo’ed them away I don’t know how many times (and ducked many more times when trying to go in and they freak out). Although it was rather warm in the studio, I had stuff to do; the thrashers kept flying back & forth outside, waiting for me to leave.


Here’s one of this year’s houseguests, perched in the dogwood outside Studio FARfetched, waiting for me to get back to the yard. They’re going to love it when I replace the burned-out light bulb on the porch. I figure I’ll wait for the young to get gone, then I’ll put tack strips in the rafters. They can use one of the several bird houses we’ve put up around the manor.


The upside of spring, of course, is that I’ll be riding the motorcycle to work. Daughter Dearest is getting Cousin Splat’s parking permit, so she can drive herself to school…

Pretty weeds

One certain sign of spring at FAR Manor is that the weeds start waking up and (in some cases) offering bribes. One of the prettier weeds, the wild violets, are nearly impossible to eradicate. I even poured old kerosene on them over the winter, and they only died off temporarily. The lawn mower passes over them and leaves them pretty much unscathed.


This is what they look like up close and personal.


A few of them, for whatever reason, are more white than violet. I have no clue.


Here are some cheerful yellow flower-weeds popping up amongst the violets (and the grass).


Cutting one yellow flower-weed out of the herd.


Mrs. Fetched buys a lot of flowers and plants them in various places. She doesn’t really have to bother, but she likes bigger blossoms and putting them where she wants them. These don’t get out of the grass and are nickel- and dime-size. What do you want for free?

Stuff (mostly good)

Another collection of things, too short by themselves to merit their own post…

New computers! We made a pilgrimage to the Apple Store yesterday, and came home with a new MacBook. The fun part was walking by the Dell kiosk (on the way to Godiva, Mrs. Fetched wanted some goodies) with a big grin and a new Mac. The “specials” involved big rebates on printers, so I also grabbed a Canon Pixma printer/scanner/copier — $10 after rebate, and we needed a copier anyway. Mrs. Fetched and I agreed on a very similar model last year, to be bought when needed. The difficult part, as usual, is finding a place to put it.

I also ordered Daughter Dearest a used G4 Powerbook, which should be here tomorrow or Tuesday. One of the things I really like about new Macs is how they can transfer all your old files over, and let you pick up right where you left off. In my case, the iBook was dead — but the drive was sitting in a USB enclosure and “get files from a partition” was the right incantation to copy it all into the new MacBook. Clutter and all. I really need to clean things up.

A smaller gadget is the Blue Snowball mike. DD’s chorus teacher asked me to mess with his, and I had to get one of my own. Podcasts should sound a little better.

Boyfriend issues: The boyfriend’s career at Home Despot is coming to a close as of Tuesday. It turns out he’s allergic to pine straw, which isn’t good when you’re working the Garden section. He’s also thinking about heading back to Indiana for a while — personally, I think he’s better off on this planet(!) but it’s his choice and he himself admits he’ll probably be back in a few weeks. Daughter Dearest has been working hard to accept that he won’t be around for a while, but it seems to be taking. He got a new iPod nano yesterday too.

Plastic: In the last while (about a year), I’ve taken to writing “CHECK ID” on the back of credit/debit/gift cards instead of signing them. It isn’t any inconvenience — my driver’s license is in the same wallet, after all — and it’s interesting to see how many few cashiers actually look at the back and ask for ID. About 1/3 or 1/4 of them do. That sounds bad, but it would be enough to trip up someone who got my wallet and wanted to have a good time at the mall. Of course, they could buy gas at the pump safely, but that’s about all they could dare to do before I could call in and get my cards invalidated.

Weight: Down to 202 as of this morning. 3 more pounds before the celebration!

Well, that’s about it. My friend from SC just rolled in.

Yup, I jinxed It

I said winter had just gone by, and this morning and tomorrow morning are around above/below) freezing.

Stay warm, wherever you are.

No Test Left Behind

A post on 43 Folders today linked in turn to a Brian Kim post about things that schools should be teaching: personal finance, communicating effectively, social skills, sales (yuck!), and time management. While I think the important things about sales would be covered in communicating and social skills (which themselves are heavily related), there’s some good points to chew on here.

I responded in part to the 43 Folders post: “On one hand, I find myself wishing I'd been taught time management in high school — on the other, I probably would have (as Kim says) regurgitated the answers to pass the class then promptly forgotten about it.” Another response thought that school should teach kids how to change a tire and iron a shirt.

While it’s certainly a valuable life skill, time management just wasn’t relevant for me in those days. School days were pretty well planned in advance: I’d get up, eat, catch the bus to school, go to classes, ride the bus home, do housework and homework (what little I didn’t finish in study hall or history class), eat supper, run 5 miles (I was on the cross-country team), then usually do what I pleased in those 2–3 hours before bedtime (the softball field a couple blocks away in season, reading or messing with electronic equipment otherwise).

Time management and personal finance might be more relevant to kids these days than it was for my generation. Like many of us, today’s kids tend to have more discretionary income and less time. But when I was in school, “home ec'” (as we usually called it) was primarily a cooking class — even then, I wondered where the "economics" part of it went. We learned more about money management in shop class, where we had an assignment to list what tools we would/could buy with $100 then had to justify our choices. But if there is an existing class that would be ideal to cover these topics, home ec' is it.

Of course, today’s NCLB-driven schools are focused primarily on teaching kids how to pass standardized tests — and doing very little to teach useful life skills. Nowadays, they don’t even give kids time to visit their lockers between classes… if they’re even assigned lockers. Instead, they drag around knapsacks loaded with 30 pounds of books and other materials (I'm not exaggerating). How could you even teach them time management when you don’t even give them the time to do the planning that’s a part of it? Where in this avalanche of SAT cramming is there time for learning real necessities like basic home and auto maintenance, meal planning (including nutrition and cooking), writing, or planning a budget? Today’s school curriculum is well-suited for anyone who can afford servants or contract labor for such things, but 99% of the kids are getting short-changed.

Daughter Dearest had a finance job for a few months, entering stuff into QuickBooks for a small local company and helping with the payroll(!). While she was constantly afraid she’d make an expensive mistake, she probably learned more about bookkeeping and finance during that one afternoon per week than she did in her entire school career. (They amicably parted ways a couple of weeks ago; between school and chorus, there isn’t much afternoon left for work. That may change, now that she can drive herself around.)

Most of the things I can do (and blog about here) are things I learned on my own, either because I was interested (electrical, early on) or needed to fix something (plumbing, much later). No school taught me how to cut and glue pipe, or how to solder. I learned how to cook and clean long before I had home ec' in junior high (not because I wanted to… hi Mom!). I also learned how to type before I had typing class (but this was something I did want to learn). Bookkeeping… now that was practical, I learned how to balance a checkbook in bookkeeping class. As was the basic math that is pretty much a prerequisite. College English was the only humanities class I actually enjoyed in high school, but that was more about honing the writing skills I already had (I learned to type because I wanted to write a novel).

(I’m sure I wrote this once before, but can’t figure out for the life of me where.) In a better world, schools would evaluate each student, identify their talents, and tailor their education to develop those talents (and throw in the basic life skills things I’ve been ranting about). But an intelligent move would raise taxes… OMG, we can’t have that!

Getting Ready for Spring

Ready, set…

The hedge in front of our garage is getting ready for spring. On the other hand, it will bloom all year around if it gets a mild winter like the one just gone by¹. It started sprouting bulbs in early February; they got frostbit so the hedge just shrugged and started another round. Check out the top right picture from last year, this is what it will look like when it blooms. We’re supposed to wait for it to stop blooming to trim it, but it never stops!

I’ve been planting herbs — garlic some friends gave me (and some more that I bought to eat but sprouted), marjoram, and basil. Lots and lots of basil. I’m going to be the Pesto King this year.

---

¹Of course, now that I said that, we’ll get a late frost. But the extended forecast shows us staying above freezing by a reasonable (for March) margin, so…

That Driving Beat

The weekend started with Dad arriving safely, on his way back north after six weeks or so in Florida. There also occurred a driver’s test, a time change, and what would a weekend be without The Boy throwing multiple TB errors?

Daughter Dearest had an appointment for her driver’s test early Saturday afternoon. The Boy invited himself along, because he was supposed to surrender his driver’s license and get a picture ID, so that was fine. The DMV facility tends to be crowded on weekends, with long waits — fortunately, the appointment held up and Daughter Dearest did her thing: and passed. Barely. The Boy was waiting impatiently for his number; he was starting to make noises about leaving while DD was still taking her test. But shortly after that, about the time she finished and went in, his number came up and he went in too.

Daughter Dearest came out, waving her new license and grinning (naturally). A few minutes later, The Boy came out with a similar grin. “They said my license isn’t suspended!” (Like Solar, I suspect that a clerical error has occurred and will eventually get fixed.)

I dropped The Boy off at Ryan’s, where he met up with Mrs. Fetched and her parents — he was still hungry after lunch, because he hadn’t eaten Friday night. Daughter Dearest wanted to try out her wings when we got home, offering to go to Home Despot to get a bag of potting soil for me (that the boyfriend was working there had zippo to do with it, I’m sure). No problem, as far as I was concerned, although Mrs. Fetched was quick to inform me that DD needs to be re-attached to our insurance now that she has a “real” license — they met up at Home Despot, as her mom wanted some flowers and other necessities.

The Boy’s demeanor, which had been marginal up to now, went to hell in a handbasket — probably because he figured that with a non-suspended license, he no longer needed us to drive him around. Yesterday afteroon, he started badgering Mrs. Fetched to let him use “his” car to visit his usual friends. He agreed to be back by 7:30, and naturally a TB03 came up — he called and asked for an extension to 10 so he could take a friend home, then Mrs. Fetched called him around 11 and hold him to be home in 15 minutes OR ELSE. He made it.

As soon as he was home, he and Mrs. Fetched got into it (it was 11:30 p.m. by now) and a TB09 came up. He decided that he had to move out right away (TB01) and demanded a phone. We said no and he went into Badger Mode. I matched him.

“I need a phone.”
“Shut up.”
“I need a phone.”
“Shut up.”
“I need a phone.”
“Shut up.”

After a few rounds of that, he (to my surprise) cracked fairly quickly and made the mistake of asking why.

“Because you haven’t done even the smallest of the things we told you were the conditions for living here — why should we give you anything?”

“Why are you trying to change me?”

“Well… you need to change. You’ve screwed up your whole life trying to do it your way.”

That went over like a lead balloon. Surprisingly, there were no TB04 errors. But Mrs. Fetched could have saved me some trouble had she told me he was supposed to stay at her parents’ place — the Evil Twins had come for an overnight (their dad had therapy in Atlanta) and were in his room. I told him he could use the phone down there for all I cared, and go wherever he wanted from there. He began to object and suddenly changed his mind.

On the way down, he told me to “not come looking for him.” Fine — I figure we can catch him at the jail sooner or later if we get the urge.

He lasted here two days longer than I expected. But as far as I’m concerned, he can stay away until he starts straightening his life out himself. We can’t help him until he’s ready to help himself.

Weekend Cinema

Since Dad’s in for the weekend, I had too much going on to post Friday Night Cinema. But this is too good not to share.

The Escape Pod podcast recently plugged a new video series called Stranger Things. They describe it as “…a free 30-minute television series of original speculative-fiction stories, released monthly via the Internet. Stranger Things lives adjacent to the moody worlds of Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick.”

Their first episode, Sacred Cow, is dark but very well-produced. Go check them out before they go commercial or something!

Programmers. Argh. (3.0, when “RTFM” is Just Too Much Effort)

I had to bang out an emergency project today — well, they’re all emergencies these days, but that’s beside the point. Knowing it had to be done today, I seriously considered working at home; I decided not to because The Boy is around and I didn’t want him interrupting me with spurious requests for money, car keys (missing driver’s license notwithstanding), a ride to somewhere, blah blah blah. There was also some camera work to be done, which usually involves my physical presence anyway.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Instead of The Boy, I had people popping into my cube all day and committing Documentus Interruptus — some of them were asking about the project I was trying to get done in spite of the interruptions. It was difficult at times to hold my tongue. Worst, though, was a programmer from down the aisle.

“Where in the manuals would I find Voice Quality Metrics?” “There’s a description in the Feature Guide, and instructions in the Troubleshooting Guide.”

“Where in the manuals would I find Loop Diagnostics?” (same answer)

At one point, I was about to get into The Zone — a rare state where I can out-produce just about anyone — when he popped in and barked my name a bit too loud, causing me to jump several inches.

“Sorry. Where would I find Loop Voltage Management?”

“Description in the Feature Guide. Instructions are either in Management or Provisioning, I can’t remember.”

“How could I find out?”

“Um… have you tried looking at the table of contents?”

I think he got the hint, because he didn’t come back the rest of the day.

The second most annoying visit was from the Vietnamese guy in Tech Support, who waved his hand alongside my head to get my attention (I have my iPod going most of the day, partly because the guy across from me is on the phone being Super Consumer Advocate half the time). Naturally, he wanted to know about the emergency project he’d just delayed.

I’d seriously considered, early on, grabbing a conference room and closing the door so nobody could find me. In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.

I never did get to the camera work. Maybe tomorrow.

If you want to see the previous installment…

TB02: For a day or two, at least

TB02: The Boy comes home (again)

The Boy called the house yesterday, getting Mrs. Fetched. “Can I bring some stuff home?”

“Like what?”

“My guitar, amp, clothes…”

“What are you really asking?”

“Can I come home and get my life straightened out?”

While we’re both all for that, long experience has taught us that The Boy is better at making the right noises than following through. We both quickly agreed on a list of conditions: keep normal hours, stop smoking, pocket that stupid lip ring while at the house, find some new friends, and plan to be around the house most of the time. In return, we would help him save his money and get him ready for tech school.

It turned out that his belongings — including a puppy, of all things — were split among two places, so we had plenty of time to let him know what we expected while we gathered it all up. I finally asked him the $20,000 question: “Are you ready to agree to all this?”

“To a point,” he said.

“There is no point,” said Mrs. Fetched. “There’s either do it or not live with us.”

He was already planning on not being around most of the time, and that after we told him we expected him to not do that, so I don’t expect he’ll be at FAR Manor tomorrow night. Or maybe even tonight: he agreed to help Mrs. Fetched with the chickens but didn’t get up this morning.

At least Mrs. Fetched and I are agreeing on something. Bailing out of FAR Manor and downsizing would prevent a lot of this; there wouldn’t be room for him….

To Move or Not to Move

In my last post, I disclosed my Master Plan for getting out of FAR Manor and away from the bane of my existence.

Funny how life will throw you a curveball. A night or so later, I saw this rather disturbing article. I showed it to Mrs. Fetched, who understood the charts pretty quickly.

It’s one thing to look at a theory and understand that it makes sense; it’s quite another to see potential proof. If the Saudis have really topped out their oil production, despite tripling their drilling rig count in the last two years, then “it” will hit the fan in a year or two.

The question is, where would the best place to be when it happens, here or in the city? Definitely not the 'burbs; if design they have, the design is around cheap transportation… and that’s going to get hard to come by. In fact, I expect to see the urban poor displaced to the suburbs as the inner-city areas rapidly gentrify. There are three ways to look at it:

1) The “Earth” (very good book, by the way) scenario: we muddle along, staving off major problems with new technologies. People start carpooling or working from home, and the electrical and phone systems continue to work well and improve. In this case, staying put would work just as well as anything else.

2) The “Crash” scenario: the economy goes to hell in a handbasket for some time, while everything readjusts to new realities. Utilities become unreliable, and suburbs empty out as people go either to the city or to the country to find work. In this case, it’s a toss-up: we might be better off staying put and becoming landlords, or not.

3) The “Olduvai” scenario: we’re all screwed, so it doesn’t matter.

I suppose I should point out that I tend to have a gloomy outlook on our collective future, and have since I was in high school. The graphs in the referenced article could well be completely wrong, and the Saudis will continue to pump as much oil as needed for as long as needed… in which case, getting out of here is clearly the best course of action. But getting Mrs. Fetched to go any closer than Outer Suburbia would be a hard sell: when she and Daughter Dearest were in Savannah, she complained about all the night-time traffic keeping her awake.

However, she’s on board with one of my oldest dreams: to become more energy self-sufficient. Time to start looking into wind systems.

When is beach grass not beach grass?

Answer: when there’s no beach. Then I guess it’s broom grass. Mrs. Fetched says so anyway, and I have no reason to doubt her.

Shortly after I took this picture, I got the weed-eater and cut it all down — I figure it will come back better now that it’s gone to seed. Before that, I zapped the frondy border plants that are supposed to be cut back every year. I cleaned up some of the big garage, finding three washer hoses (all bad, according to Mrs. Fetched, so why were they in there?), several half-used bottles of motor oil, infinity dead ladybugs, and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff that will get carted to the community yard sale (I think they start next month). Daughter Dearest’s boyfriend got an NTSC monitor for his PlayStation, one of four that Mrs. Fetched had laying around from her analog editing days — to my surprise, he took the smallest one because it wouldn’t require a lot of space. I think I’ll take the other three to the yard sale too, mark them as “gamer monitors,” and see if anyone bites. Somewhere in there, I put the wick in the kerosene heater, but I think I need to dump the old kerosene and try again.

But I digress. I also began a pine eradication program harvested my mulch garden. I’ll let them dry out for a month or so then feed them to the chipper-shredder. We transplanted some bushes, then I got the Mantis out and tilled up a bed and planted some garlic that my friends gave to me. I covered the dirt with some of the brush grass, hoping that will keep the dogs from digging in it. Finally, we fixed the weatherstripping on the bottom of a door. Yeah, it’s been a busy day, but it beats chicken house work. :-) Besides, it’s part of my escape plan: we can’t get away from the chicken houses unless we sell FAR Manor, and we’ll have a better chance of selling it if the place is cleaned up. So I’m going to work on getting rid of stuff we don’t need, which will make the rest easier to keep tidied up!

March has definitely come in like a lion. The claws (heavy storms) went well south of us, but the roaring wind is still with us and probably will be through tomorrow.

Losing Cool

We now return to our regular topics.

Monday morning started off with a case of DDPMS. As I do most weekday mornings, I called up the stairs to make sure Daughter Dearest was moving. I heard a muffled response, and called back, “What?” She flung her door open, snarled, “I said I’m up!” and slammed the door. A few minutes later, she stormed into the kitchen and started in on me calling up the stairs instead of coming up: “people [by which she means her boyfriend] are trying to sleep!” I explained I was just trying to give her a little privacy, she snarled a justification, and I called her by her mom’s name. From her non-poker face, she looked both stung and peeved, but stuck a sock in it. Neither one of us said much on the way to school, which was fine with me. She’s showing signs of getting over herself, thankfully.

Speaking of the boyfriend, he’s starting a job at Home Despot. But unlike the lumber yard summer job I had between years of college, you don’t just start working. You have two days of orientation, some unspecified training time, tests… heck, it’s easier getting a job in hi-tech and the pay’s better. The orientation isn’t a simple matter of watching a dull video at the store you’re working at… no, they have to have this idiotic idea of “centralized orientation,” which involves driving to a Home Depot located in the middle of some of the worst suburban Atlanta rush hour traffic. To top it off, it starts at 8 a.m. and they warn you that being late means getting shut out of the orientation until they do it again next month! All this for a crappy retail job? GMAFB.

Since I used to work in that area, back before traffic got impossible, I volunteered to drive him down there. After all, I knew the back ways. We left at 6:30 and barely got there at 8 — in fact, we got there at 8:03 but they were either bluffing about the lockout or their clocks were slow. He hooked up with some people who will be working at the same store as him, and they’re carpooling tomorrow. But on the way down, I got a familiar whiff of antifreeze — which did nothing to improve my mood, seeing as the Civic has a new radiator complements of The Boy’s mishap last fall. But the car wasn’t overheating, so I got to work and reminded myself to look at it more closely at lunch.

A quick trip to Subway, and this time I saw a trickle of antifreeze running out from under the car. I popped the hood, and saw it was leaking from the same hose I tightened a while back. It was still tight, but definitely dripping. I called Mrs. Fetched and told her I’d need her to come down to pick up the boyfriend and take me to an auto parts store for a new radiator hose. Traffic was terrible on the way to Home Depot, and we were stuck in front of a Pep Boys — 10 minutes and $10 later, I had a new hose and we continued the crawl. Although it was night when we got back to the Civic, the hose was right on top and took all of two minutes to replace (it was cracked underneath). It took longer to go into the office and get some water to replace what had leaked.

One overheating problem takes care of itself after a week, the other is a simple repair involving only a screwdriver. If only all of life’s problems were that easy to fix.

Universal Healthcare: Necessary but not Sufficient

Family Man wrote a brief post about the state of what could laughably be called “healthcare” in this country, after he found that his insurance wouldn’t cover a stop-smoking medication (WTF??). My response got a bit long for a comments page, so I decided to put it here.

This actually started with a trip to the chiro-cracker today. A little money shook loose and we were all feeling somewhat kinked (in the neck & back, not the other way), so Mrs. Fetched called them up and got us back on the monthly plan. There’s a big whiteboard behind the counter, where they usually flag their evening seminars and the like; today it had a bunch of negative statistics about the medical profession. I have a feeling there was a lot of FUD involved, but the things that stood out for me were the huge number of unnecessary surgeries (for whatever definition of “unnecessary”) and the number of emergency cases due to drug interactions or allergic reactions to drugs. Both of those could be attributed to the profit motive — in other words, a system devoted to healthcare rather than profitcare would naturally attempt to minimize both.

In the system we have today, everything in the medical system is geared toward maximizing profit. Providing some level of healthcare is necessary to keep people from demanding change (although that has begun, and may be too late to stop), but that hasn’t been the primary concern for quite some time. We’ve all heard of — or perhaps experienced — the assembly line-like visits of “managed health care,” and read the articles about people with cancer or other major illnesses whose doctors have their hands tied by HMO bean counters. The Boy’s diabetes medication, now that he is not covered by our insurance (not at home and not in school), is pretty much unaffordable for him. Drug companies have to recoup their “research costs,” although much of that research is funded by taxpayers (that is, you and me) and their marketing budgets are often higher than their research budgets. Then, of course, you get episodes like Merck trying to downplay (or even hide) serious side effects with Vioxx — because, after all, there’s money to be made.

FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.

(The numbers were on Wikipedia, take with an appropriate amount of no-salt.)

The other side of the coin, of course, is how the profit motive promotes unhealthy activity — smoking this cigarette makes you cool, drinking that soda improves your life, open a beer and you’ll immediately be surrounded by Hot Babes™. This processed-to-hell-and-back "food product" is soooo easy to fix and tastes great! (just don’t look at how much sodium & cholesterol is in it) Oh, and by the way, watch this TV show and that TV show — it’s much more relaxing than exercise.

Now you have a McMansion you can barely afford and can’t get rid of, and you spend two (or more) hours a day commuting to/from a job that stresses you out. Your spouse works a similar job, so neither one of you have the time or energy to fix healthy meals. Breakfast is a sausage and egg biscuit in the car, lunch is a dash to the burger stand, and supper is a pre-packaged whatever.

So one day you wake up: you’re 45 and your weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol are in the “sucks” range. The doc diagnoses your spouse as “pre-diabetic” (you don’t exactly know that that means, but it sounds scary) and tells you both to get some exercise and start eating better. Oh, and by the way, here’s your prescriptions.

But we don’t have time to take care of ourselves! We have a lifestyle to maintain!

And you, one might say, are the “lucky” ones. You make your weekly pilgrimage to Wal-Mart, buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need and gripe about how shoddy it is, without a single thought about the people wearing the blue vests. They have many of the same problems as those of us “comfortably” in the middle class, but when the time comes to make that trip to the doc, the price tag attached to those prescriptions is simply beyond their means.

More and more people are standing up and demanding universal healthcare. President Clinton tried taking the initiative, but it was shot down by the usual suspects and their shills in Congress and talk radio. But these days, even Bush-league must at least pay lip service to the grass-roots demand that something be done. Katiebird has a series of articles on Eat4Today that are simply titled, “Cover Everyone” — great stuff.

Universal healthcare will help those folks in retail jobs, not to mention people who can't find a job that can put food on the table, but it isn’t enough. For many of us, from the middle class on down, our very lifestyles have become toxic. We’ve bought into the mantra of “more” (try chanting it, drawing out the ‘O’), not realizing that it has given us less: less time because it’s wasted in a long commute, less money because we buy too much house and fill it with too much stuff, less health because we don’t take the time to exercise or eat right. We’re on a treadmill, all right, but it’s not the kind we should be on.

There’s no pill that can cure lifestyle problems (unless the drug companies are hiding a formula that will make people resistant to marketing… not likely), but it’s our lifestyle that is making many of us sick. We could create a perfect health care system that covers everyone, but the Constitution won’t let us ban marketing or even destructive lifestyles. I’m not sure we could even legally ban unhealthy food (especially since a certain amount of things like carbs, fat, sodium, and cholesterol are necessary nutrients). No, if we want health for ourselves and our neighbors, it has to start with us. We should work to Cover Everyone — that’s only right — but we also need to invent a better way of life, one that will keep us out of the doctor’s office in the first place.

Podcast from FAR Manor #4 — News, phones, music

After an unwanted January hiatus, I have returned to the podwaves! I’ve got the latest news from the free-range insane asylum, cellphone chatter, and an interview with Daughter Dearest’s band.

Listen up! direct link (14.7MB MP3) | archive page (listen online)

Here’s a shot of the band, practicing in the big garage…



…and their Myspace page, with more music and even a logo!

Contents:

00:00 - Intro
01:51 - News from FAR Manor
04:33 - Shiny Things, the all-cellphone edition (scoring iPhone predictions, Samsung Sync)
09:33 - An interview with the band “Short Buss”
23:52 - Wrap-up

Thanks to everyone out there listening to these podcasts. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to leave comments here, on the archive page, or email text (or even audio comments) to FARfetched58 at aim.com.

Production Notes
Audio was recorded using an XtremeMac MicroMemo iPod accessory, a Samsung Sync, and a Blue Snowball USB mike (and that’s why the audio changes here and there). Audio files were edited on a MacBook Pro, running 10.4.8, using Audacity 1.3.2 beta.

Theme music: “Jump Around” by Psycho Maniak (no link/contact info available — help!).

Audio content hosted on:

Friday Night Cinema

Why waste gas and money to see a movie? Friday Night Cinema brings free flicks straight to your screen!

If you can open them, that is. Living on the leading edge has always required someone to work the help desk — and tonight, you’ll see what the helpdesk worker (A.D. 150) had to deal with…

Cam This Thing

Coming in from work Tuesday, I hit the garage door opener, and saw the door twitch and stop. Figuring I just didn’t hold the button down long enough, I did it again and this time it worked.

Then it turned out to be the last time. After that, it would move an inch or so one way or the other, then stop.

Mrs. Fetched took it better than usual; inconvenience usually puts her in a foul mood. She seemed to enjoy the sight of Daughter Dearest and her boyfriend holding up the door as she backed Barge Vader in & out of the garage, though. But she told me (on several occasions) where to find the manual for the opener, and asked me to fix it (if possible) before they got back from Savannah.

With she, Daughter Dearest, and Barge Vader safely out of the way, I got the ladder and had a look while the boyfriend pushed the button. It quickly became apparent that a bumper (attached to the chain) was in the wrong place. The arm that connects the door to the mechanism was pushing alarmingly far, so I figured something had jumped the track somewhere. Getting out the manual, this is what I found:



The “down limit cam” (circled in the above drawing, in the position where it should have been) was instead all the way around the pulley, where the red X is. Figuring the “up limit cam” was similarly shifted, I had the boyfriend hoist the garage door so I could measure the amount of necessary travel. I moved the cams where I thought they should be and tried again.

This time, the door stopped going up about two feet short. That cam was in the right place to begin with, it seems. After a few iterations, I got the cams in the right place and drove my car back inside for the night.

If only paying off the mortgage were so easy.

Spring has sprung?

Well, maybe not, but it’s definitely going to be a bit warmer than it had been the last two weeks.

But The Boy got sprung today. Seems the legal system still does most stuff by snail-mail, and the President’s Day holiday put all that behind by a day. But the judge’s office faxed the waiver to the jail after she signed it, and they turned him loose.

Naturally, Mrs. Fetched was stuck at the chicken houses, helping to bring in the new batch of chicks — so he walked to his apartment. She went by there later, and found nobody at home, so they must have gone out to celebrate or something.

I get a few days of freedom, too: Mrs. Fetched is taking Daughter Dearest to Savannah for the All-State Chorus performance. Well, I have to work tomorrow and Friday, so one day of freedom. If that: I’ve been committed to attend a birthday party. I’ll deal, especially since Daughter Dearest’s boyfriend is stuck here too.

Oh, speaking of freedom, M.A.E. moved out today. She really hadn’t been here much anyway, but she got all her stuff this evening. That didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would!

Hyacinth

Hyacinth

I got this for Mrs. Fetched on Valentine’s Day, and it had three blooms on it then. It has been busy in the last week!

I also got a shot with Clickzilla; it’ll be interesting to see how much detail got picked up on that film thing.

Best Euphemism EVER

“Accidental Ingestion of Airborne Protein” — it sounds so much more pleasant than “swallowing a bug.”

Visitation

We went to see The Boy today, on his scheduled visitation. He looked resplendent in his orange jumpsuit, let me tell you. He should be out either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on whether they count Friday as a full day.

I can’t tell if he’s learned anything from this or not — he makes the right noises, but he’s good at that. I think he’s going to come home for a day or so then go back to his apartment. The bad part about that is that he’ll be back in with the same friends that got him where he is; the good part is that he’ll be closer to wherever he finds work (which is important since his driver’s license has been suspended for six months).

The preacher met us at the jail, and he gets a pass to come in any time, so he’s going to have some one-on-one with The Boy tomorrow. I hope that goes well.

Good News, Bad News

Bad news first. Things at work have been absolutely crazy the last week or so. Trying to catch up, I brought a couple of projects home with me that are getting down to the wire. I managed to finish the first one this afternoon; trying to decide whether I want to do more than poke at the second one tonight.

The good news is that the documentation projects have rescued me from a weekend of chicken house duty. Given a choice between the two, I’ll take the work work any day.

We have snow flurries outside, and a good fire inside. Stay warm. Family Man, do some extra slacking for me tomorrow….

Friday Night Cinema

Looks like the warming trend starts next week… right on time. But tonight, it’s too cold to get out and you have no cash anyway. Never fear, Friday Night Cinema brings free flicks right to your computer screen!

With The Boy in the clink for the next 5 to 10 days, maybe something longer than the usual short-short would be appropriate. How about…

A blast from the past, all the way back to 1938: yes, it’s Reefer Madness!

Days of confinement

Looks like this is more of a short-term kick in the head. The Boy reports to his probation officer tomorrow, a cop picks him up and carts him to the clink. He spends up to 10 days there, on a “2 for 1” basis: every day of good behavior is one day off. So if he doesn’t screw up, he’ll be there 5 days. He doesn’t get to smoke, so that’s probably going to be the worst part (immediately, at least).

More importantly, he loses his driver’s license for six months — and worst of all, loses the chance to have his record deleted after he completes his probation. No fun.

Hello Again

Guess who’s back at the free-range insane asylum?

Yup, M.A.E. her own self.

When we last saw M.A.E., she was on her way out the door to move in with her new boyfriend. That lasted all of a week or two, when she found out he had been playing around on the side all along (or was she the one on the side?). She wound up with her psycho mom for a while, then landed with some people in the next town south. That blew up last week, precipitated by the same thing that got her out of FAR Manor (spending the night with some “people” they didn’t know) and she finally got around to asking us over the weekend if she could come back here.

Mrs. Fetched and I were both against the idea. Neither one of us thought she’d learned much, or would be willing to deal with The Rules — but our renters need some help with their grand-triplets (the mom is there but not helping) so we thought maybe she could stay with them. That isn’t happening either. However, she’s lined up a place with some friends who have moved to Virginia, so Mrs. Fetched decided she could use FAR Manor as a staging area — basically, her tax return will pay for a bus/train ticket on outta here. In the meantime, she’ll be spending a couple of days per week dealing with the triplets. I think this will be good for her; she’s always fancied herself a daycare worker.

That’s the plan, anyway. I figure she’ll be here for months. Oh well: I don’t get to walk around in my undies anymore, but she always makes for interesting blog material.

Abandoned Farmhouse

Abandoned Farmhouse

This long-abandoned homestead caught my eye a couple of weeks ago on a sunny weekend afternoon.

How Much Weirder Can Life Get??? (UPDATED)

Here’s one straight out of the X-Files.

Russian fishermen don’t know what they caught, but they ate it anyway

This video is just… well, I hope it’s faked.

UPDATE!
The mystery is solved: Scott on Techcomm tells us, “It's a guitarfish (a.k.a. shovelnose ray, shovelnose shark), and they're actually very tasty fish.” Whew. Just knowing it's just strange instead of other-worldly makes me feel better. :-)

R.I.P. Lapdancer

The rework fix to Lapdancer, my iBook, seems to have been temporary — or rather, the fix let it live long enough for something else to happen.

I was happily plonking around online yesterday, playing some music, when I took my headphones off for a short break. Hearing the iBook fan humming along, I reached around to find things were pretty warm in the back. I decided to shut it down, but too late — it locked up before I could do it.

Coming back a few hours later, after things had cooled down, I started it up. I heard the chimes, but got nothing on the screen and the USB ports weren't talking either. I’m afraid that the heatsink I put on the graphics chips may have contributed to the problem.

So it’s definitely time for a new computer. Daughter Dearest’s iBook didn’t respond to the rework fix, although the technician told me to bring it back if it didn’t work and she would give it a second try. Maybe we’ll get one of them working.

Friday Night Cinema (double feature)

Too late to go see a movie! But don’t worry, Friday Night Cinema brings short flicks right to your computer, so you’ll still have time to brush your teeth and let the dog out.

Tonight, we have a double feature of commercials that (for whatever reason) were never aired — and both of them crank the laugh knob to 11!

Bottle opener

Answer the… phone…

Jailhouse Blues

I really don’t know how to finesse this one. The Boy went to his scheduled probation visit on Tuesday, they gave him a drug test, and you can guess how that went. They’re giving him until next Friday to report to the clink. He’s not too happy about it, obviously… and is trying to tell us he wasn’t doing anything like that. Um, yeah, right. Can second-hand smoke show up on a drug test? I really don’t know, but I still think he had a little something here & there. He just doesn’t believe in consequences.

He mentioned running, although Mrs. Fetched warned him what would come of that. I just wish they’d stick him in boot camp or something; he might learn to take some responsibility for himself.

Reality is Stranger Than Fiction

Here’s the plot. Work with me on this one, OK? You’ve got these three astronauts, two women and a man. One of the women gets jealous, drives 1600 miles to confront her, and gets charged with attempted murder. Great late-night movie plot, right? Oh, never mind.

All right, let’s say you’re a huge company and your product isn’t selling in Asia as well as you thought it would. What do you do: survey your potential customers to see what you could do better… or insult them?

Dang. It’s a good thing I never tried to become a novelist — you just can’t make up stuff as weird as what reality throws at you.

Surprised?

Looks like iTunes has problems with Vista. In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning and it’s cold in the winter. I don’t remember where I said it, but I had figured the development motto at Microsoft was “Vista ain’t done ’til iTunes won’t run.”

Microsoft, according to the article, “has a team working with Apple to make iTunes fully functional on Vista.” Call me cynical, but I wonder whether they’ll actually slow things down — whether they mean to or not.

In the News

From The Register, of course…

From the “Quit While You’re Ahead” department: you bet WHAT on that hand?

OK, I remember what high school was like. I could understand shucking your clothes and running amok in the cafeteria… but what’s with the grapeseed oil?

Questions abound.

Friday Night Cinema

Man, has this week ever gotten away from me — still haven’t finished the podcast, and now it’s going to be a January/February edition. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have time to sit through a full-length movie right now.

It’s winter out there, so let’s warm things up with a FLAMING TUBA!

Hello Wet Snowy February

This isn’t the first time a change of month has been somewhat dramatic.

4–5 inches of snow in front of FAR Manor

We were up pretty late last night; some co-workers drove all the way up to FAR Manor to avail themselves of Mrs. Fetched’s video editing services. As always, it took several hours longer than expected; they didn’t get out of here until nearly midnight (and she charges by the hour, cha-ching!). But they were happy, and that’s what counts.

So the weather dudes were predicting possible light icing and up two 2 inches of snow “in the higher elevations.” Oops.

The good part is, we were up so late wrapping up with file conversions that I needed a good excuse to sleep late this morning. Looks like I got it! Unfortunately, I have to get into the office today; I have a critical project that needs finishing and I have to deliver the video files to the co-workers.


I’ll wrap this up with some more snow…

More snow

A second picture of today’s snow…


…and a video clip of last year’s snow, two weeks short of a year ago.

Stay warm and dry if you can. (Yeah, yeah, Solar, I know you will!)

Dreams Deferred Are Dreams Denied?

Some mornings, I hold my nose and see what commercial radio has to say for itself. I just skip from station to station as the commercials come on, until I get tired of it and retreat to Album 88. But a part of a segment caught my ear earlier this week.

One pair of chatterboxes was talking — I’m not sure if it was about someone who called in or how they heard about it — about a woman who was pretty sure her boyfriend planned to “pop the question” on Valentine’s Day. Amazingly enough, she had a problem with it: while she loves him, she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, and he earns about half what she does. The callers were predictably falling into the “marry him anyway” camp, even the one guy out of the five calls they aired. My own thoughts were rather uncharitable as well. But something one of the callers said stuck with me, and it came back to mind this morning: it’s good she has this dream, but could they not put off having kids until they got more financially secure and then she could do the full-time hausfrau career?

When I got out of college, I had a few dreams of my own — but as John Lennon said, “ Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” I wanted to be completely debt-free by now, and on track to retire by 50: I have a mortgage that might be paid off when I’m 73. I wanted a place that was as energy self-sufficient as possible: no money for as much as a single solar panel. I dreamed of being able to schedule work around my life: our lives revolve around four chicken houses that don’t belong to us.

Mrs. Fetched wondered why I didn’t tell her I had these dreams when I was objecting to the runaway psychotic episode that ended with us buying FAR Manor. I did, repeatedly, and not just then. She just wasn’t listening.

So after thinking about it, I’m not sure what the right thing is for the woman in question. It’s good to love someone. And yet, if things don’t work out and she has to scuttle her plans — especially if her potential husband is the reason — she could end up resenting him in the end. But if she marries someone else simply because he can support her dream, where’s the self-respect?

I’m glad I don’t have to make the decision for her.

The Bane of My Existence

Courtesy of Google Earth

Look upon its evil and tremble! Approach only with your nose held firmly shut against its stench! Tarry not, lest you find your weekends sacrificed to its endless need!

(It's a pretty recent shot, judging from the debris on the north side.)

Friday Night Cinema

It’s too cold to go out and catch a movie. Pour yourself something to warm you up and watch a short flick for free!

As I’ve written here before, I’m not the biggest fan of spiders. But this week, it’s OK to give them a little pity as we learn what happens to Spiders on Drugs.

TB01: This time for sure! (I think)

TB01: The Boy leaves home (again).

It was obviously coming: he asked to borrow the car Friday night, after Dad got in, and said he’d be back Saturday morning. As he had done this a few times in the previous week, and come back when he said he would, we didn’t think much of it. On the other hand, we weren’t exactly surprised when he didn’t show up Saturday morning. Or afternoon. Or evening. Or all day Sunday.

But when Monday rolled around, and still no Boy, Mrs. Fetched decided the car had been away from home long enough. It didn’t take her long to find it: at Lobster’s apartment, the second place she looked and she only went to the first because it was on the way into town. He handed over the key without argument, and she brought it home. Of course, he had all but run the entire tank of gas out of it, after I’d filled it up Thursday afternoon. He had to have gone 300 miles.

So Tuesday night, we’re scrambling to get things together so we can get Daughter Dearest to a concert — a warmup for a performance at the GMEA conference in Savannah, for which she leaves very early tomorrow morning — and who comes walking up the driveway wanting us to drop everything and move his stuff to Lobster’s apartment? The video equipment took up plenty of space, so there wasn’t room for his amplifier — he griped about that, but we managed to get him (and his other stuff) to Lobster’s and got down to the church in time for DD to get warmed up.

This evening, he stopped by to pick up his amp and a distortion pedal from the garage. He tells me (I’ll believe it when I see it) that he interviewed with a local phone survey company, the interview went well, and he hopes to be starting there next week. I hope so: an evening job will give him plenty of time to drag himself out of bed and get to it.

Trip to the docs

I had my quarterly checkup last week. The doc I usually see wasn’t in, so I got the other one. He plied me with many questions about how I was feeling, took an EKG (it came out normal), and my blood pressure was “low end of normal” (which sounds good to me!). Then it wrapped up with the blood draw to monitor my cholesterol and other things.

Last time I was in, my cholesterol was like 236. Not great, especially for someone not even 50. They put me on Lipitor; while its most noticeable side effect gives it the nickname RipItMore, I was expecting some improvement. Over the weekend, I fantasized about it getting all the way down to 170, then got back to earth and set myself to be pleased with any score under 200.

So the test results came in today.

154

Yeah, you read that right: DOWN 82 POINTS. If Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest had not been around, I would have been dancing naked around FAR Manor this evening!

Data recovery!

I got a disk enclosure at CrudUSA today — they didn’t have any Firewire boxes, just USB2.0. But it was only $20 and works OK with newer Macs. I spent a couple of hours digging the hard drive out of my iBook, which incidentally exposed the video chip that needs to be heated up. I'll craft a heat shield for it tomorrow (while working at home) and take it into work Wednesday. The computer took a minute or two to recognize the new drive, but it’s been fine since then.

Maybe I'll take Daughter Dearest’s iBook apart tomorrow evening. If that goes as planned, I can take them both in and get them both (I hope! I hope! I hope!) fixed at once. If the fix doesn’t work, it’ll be back to CrudUSA for another drive enclosure; then we’ll both at least have our data where we can get to it.

Weekend?

A “weekend” is when you try to compress seven days of living into two, so it seems.

Dad got here Friday night and spent the weekend; this is his break in the drive to Florida for a month or so. It’s always fun to have him around. We have long talks about whatever, joke about getting older, watch some football (more TV than I usually watch in several months), drink some beer, and just chill. He’ll be leaving tomorrow morning for the last leg of the trip.

Daughter Dearest had her second All-State chorus audition yesterday morning — and got a perfect score! She’s pretty happy about it, although the second rehearsal is mainly a formality to make sure the kids have been practicing the music. During the waiting-around part, she ran into a couple of old friends who are now at other schools, so that was also good.

Her band members came by to practice/rehearse this afternoon. As cold and rainy as it has been this weekend, the garage just wasn’t terribly hospitable. They retreated to the house a couple of times for hot chocolate, and indulged me with an interview for the podcast (I hope to finish it up by next weekend, you know how that goes by now… should be up a week from Wednesday), then called it a day. I need to order a couple of wicks for my kerosene heater.

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it absorbed much of the last couple of days.

As if the laptop wasn’t enough…

My new cellphone decided to get in on the act. I guess the first inkling that something wasn’t right was when the alarm didn’t go off this morning. The Sync has a really nice alarm on it; you can tell it when to go off and what days to go off (so you don’t have to remember to turn it off Friday night and back on Sunday night), and has a pleasant chime tone.

This morning at work, I checked the phone and found it was off. Turning it on got only to the initial screen… over and over and over again. I yanked the battery and tried again — same result. I ended up pulling everything out of the phone that could be pulled: battery, SIM card, and flash card, and let it sit for about an hour. Same result.

With Dad on his way, I wanted an excuse to leave work early anyway. Liz at the Cingular store took a look, listened to what I’d done to try getting its attention, and immediately went to the back to get me a new phone. I told her I’d downloaded a ringtone (they gave out a freebie for re-upping my contract, sigh) and she credited the bill so I could get another copy. I had to get “Brick House” for Mrs. Fetched’s special ringtone. The ringtone I’d made and the picture I was using for wallpaper were on the flash card, fortunately. I guess I’ll make sure I copy anything else I download onto the flash card from now on. The only thing I have to worry about now is my address book, and I can copy what I had on the old phone from my work computer.

I guess I’ll have to stop referring to them as Stinkular, if they keep up that kind of service. Then again, they’re going to be AT&T anyway.

Gone dark

My iBook has given me 3-½ years of trouble-free service, travelling pretty much everywhere, substituting as my work system for a couple of weeks when the old box died, taking pretty much anything I threw at it.

Until tonight.

I flipped it open, and the screen stayed dark. I fiddled with the keys for a while, trying to get a response out of it, but nothing happened. I gave it a few minutes to wake up, then tried the three-finger salute (which I’ve had to do only two or three times). I heard the startup chimes, heard the disk chattering, but the screen stayed dark. I hit F2 (increase brightness) to no avail.

Thinking — hoping — the cable through the hinge had broken (a common problem), I hooked it up to a monitor through the VGA port. Nothing on either screen.

This. Sucks. I was hoping to replace it earlier, but that didn’t happen.

Fortunately, my ancient beige G3 is still working. I’ll have to get my photos and music off the iBook somehow… I should be able to access it through the network. Maybe I’ll borrow my work laptop for a while, even though it doesn’t work with the VPN.

So do I want an iMac or another laptop? Decisions, decisions. Our stock is up at the moment; maybe I should just cash some in and go shopping.

Updated: Who’s Who and What’s What

If you’re a new reader, or just can’t remember who goes where in this free-range insane asylum, I keep a series of informational posts. It’s actually the page for June 2005, but I didn’t post anything that month — the only month in which I didn’t post anything since I started the blog.

There used to be a link in the sidebar, but it was a casualty of the upgrade. So were all my Techcomm links. And the link to Olivia’s blog got whacked too. Back to maintenance....

Winter yard work

Global warming aside, winters tend to be mild on Planet Georgia. At least they seem that way to one who grew up in Michigan. Mrs. Fetched got me doing what I’d planned to do anyway — cleaning up the yard. I’d taken care of the front yard a while back, but had an issue preventing me from going much further.

The perfect Christmas tree,
if you have a bucket truck

She wanted to move some plants around, as part of a master plan to run a driveway loop around the front of the house, so we tackled that first. A yellowbell that gets run over a lot (like it cares) already was in the way of the proposed loop route, so we moved it out back. Five cypresses that grow into monstrous Christmas trees have sprouted around the big one (pictured here), so we dug up three of them, moved one to the back, and potted the other two. We can’t think of a good place to put them, so I think they’ll go to her mom.

That left the leaves — and without a generator, the blower couldn’t reach past where I’d already cleared things out. But when there’s a will, there’s a way, and Mrs. Fetched is nothing if not willful. She brought the blower around to the back yard as I was raking out from under the steps (a corner that traps leaves) and suggested we could use an outlet on the porch. It then occurred to me that there was an outlet just inside the basement door, and that was enough to get us going.

Even with fewer trees out back, we had a lot of leaves on the ground. Once you get beyond a certain point, the blower really isn’t much help — you just have to wade in with a rake and plow them around with your legs. We eventually got them down into the moonscape where Buster T. Butthead has his run, so now he has plenty of nesting material. We loaded up a tarp and took some of them to one of the pens as well.

Some kind of holly…

While working on the leaves, I noticed the yellow berries on the backyard hollies — but we raked until things got dim so I had to wait until this morning to get pictures. The light was better, so it was probably worth the wait (and thank God for another day off!). I also dragged out Clickzilla and took a few more; I’m looking forward to seeing how those turn out (film, jeez, how did we ever cope?).

We also designated one of the beds as the Official Herb Garden. I’m not going to move what’s already established — the rosemary plants are happy as can be, and the parsley took a big hit during the summer but has started recovering with cooler weather. I was given a big pot of garlic, so that’s going to get planted shortly, and I have chives in a pot that need to be planted. I’ll get some mint and oregano when the spring shipments start.

The bottlebrush aka Pampas Grass is still looking good out there. Some of the trees have already started to bud out, which is not good — we have at least two months of Anything Goes weather ahead of us, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to get clobbered by March.

Now that I’ve upgraded the blog, I’ve also tied it to my Flickr account. I’ll be futzing with the layout later, perhaps today.

That Went OK

After making backups of the last 9 months or so, I finally bit the bullet and “upgraded” to the new Blogger. I might futz with the template this weekend, but the important thing is that it seems to have come over all right.

Auto da Fe

Stuff accumulates at FAR Manor — even cars. I have no idea how we’ve managed to amass a fleet of three small cars, two SUVs (The Barge and Barge Vader) plus a motorcycle… but there they are. Two of the cars are Civics: the red one with a stick that I drive (and have retrieved from the body shop after The Boy’s little mishap), and a green one with an automatic that will become Daughter Dearest’s once she gets her full license. I had to dink with both of them yesterday evening.

The green Civic wasn’t starting. Mrs. Fetched said something about the spark plugs, so I checked them: good guess, dear; the one I pulled was pretty worn. I got some new ones and got to work last night.

For whatever reason, Honda has to make this difficult — the plugs are recessed several inches down, and the long rubber caps are a bear to get off. In fact, two of them came apart as I tried to get them off. I figured I could do the plugs now, though, and replace the wires later.

Because the plugs are recessed so far down, you need a plug socket with a neoprene insert to get them out of their wells. But the insert holds so tightly, when you put the plugs back in you have to remove the insert… or the socket comes loose from the extension. So to save time and hassle, I decided to pull all four of the old plugs then put in the new ones. To prevent crossed wires, I stuck them back in their holes.

Clink.

Onosecond: that brief but seemingly eternal moment of time between Something Bad happening and your reaction.

A piece of connector had fallen into the cylinder! I imagined having to tow the car to the mechanic, who would have to pull the head to get the pieces out. Then it occurred to me that he would probably just fish it out with a magnet… and I had one. It took a few minutes to find it, and a few more to get one end so I could pull it through the hole, but persistence paid off. I then noticed a piece of plastic propped at the rim of the hole, so I stuck a piece of fuel line on a vacuum cleaner nozzle and got that — then tried to make sure there wasn’t anything else lurking in there by sticking the hose down into the cylinder. Getting nothing but greasy carbon after a couple of tries, I figured no news was good news. I put the plugs in and figure to get the wires Saturday.

Since it was Car Night, I went to the red Civic. Daughter Dearest bought me a pair of speakers to replace the ones in the front doors, which had gotten fuzzy then quit working altogether. I pulled the first speaker out, and immediately realized why they had stopped working. Splat’s older brother had installed the speakers, but didn’t bother to solder the wires or crimp a lug to them. Renewing my vow to smack the kid next time I see him, I got my soldering iron and my new roll of solder, and got to work. Now I have two working speakers, plus two new ones. Mrs. Fetched suggested I put the new ones in the green Civic if they’re needed. Not a bad idea.

Now tonight, I’m sitting at a gas station waiting for help. Y’see, I had another flat tire this evening. While I have a jack this time, the lug wrench has disappeared. And it’s starting to rain. So I can relate to Family Man’s mood tonight…

To sleep, perchance to snore

Mrs. Fetched took Daughter Dearest to the doctor early last month, because she was feeling run down all the time. I figured that whatever it was could be fixed by her getting some exercise and staying off the phone with her boyfriend in Indiana at night — when you’re 17, you usually don’t need to worry about chronic conditions, after all. Mrs. Fetched agreed with me, but the doctor thought she might have sleep apnia.

Now none of the Fetched family figured there was anything to this — especially Daughter Dearest. Even she figured she needed to exercise more and lose some weight. Nevertheless, the doc (who has been pretty good overall) scheduled her for a sleep test at the clinic next to the hospital. As Daughter Dearest is a homebody, who likes her bed, we figured this would throw some false readings. And yet, off we went one cold night — and found that we had to check in at the hospital. Inconvenience is the most sure way to rile Mrs. Fetched, and this is certainly no exception. But after checking in, we hiked back across the parking lot (quickly! it’s cold!) to the sleep clinic where the technician and a big ol’ pile of wires was waiting.

So he got to work, putting goop and a couple dozen wires on her head and elsewhere. Her attitude wasn’t exactly wonderful, so when I asked her which finger they put the tape on… she showed me!



This was before they put the airmask on her.

When we went to pick her up the next morning, she said, “I’m sure they’ll say I failed. I didn’t sleep well all night.” Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the results came in, but the data was stuff that didn’t reflect a restless night: she stopped breathing rather frequently and her oxygen levels dropped to 70 (they should stay around 90 or better), causing an erratic heart rate. When they turned on the airflow, everything went normal. So now she has one of those CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machines.

Mrs. Fetched figures I should have a sleep test, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if I do have sleep apnia — I’ve woken up on occasion feeling like I wasn’t getting any air. In my case, though, I tried the low-tech version: Breathe-Right strips. Mrs. Fetched had bought some for me in the past, but I never felt like they were doing my any good. I snore, but so does she. But this time, I noticed that when wearing them, I go to sleep faster and don’t wake up in the middle of the night (and I don’t snore nearly as much). So I’ll probably be using them for… ever.

That Floating Feeling

For whatever reason, I like wooden boats — must be a mid-life crisis thing. I have to occasionally combat the urge to buy a wooden sailboat kit (not only do I have the urge to get a boat, mind you, but I want to build it) by simple logic: I have little spare time to engage in either boat-building or sailing, and the only sizable body of water near FAR Manor is populated primarily by pickled powerboaters. Another powerful disincentive, that we had nothing suitable for towing a trailer, was nullified last year with the addition of Barge Vader to our fleet. But the lack of opportunity and high hazard potential generally do the job.

The substitute idea — a fiberglass/plastic kayak — is proving harder to fight. Not only are they affordable, I could carry something that light on top of my Civic and there are plenty of small rivers or mountain streams around here. I could even take it to the lake were I feeling sufficiently foolhardy, or even to Florida. The only argument I can find against it is that I would have to get Mrs. Fetched to help me leave a vehicle at the endpoint of my trip — and with Daughter Dearest about to get a full-fledged driver’s license, that would be less of an issue as well.

So last week I found myself, against my will, at Wal-Mart. Bored stiff, I picked up a “magazine” that turned out to be full of plans for home-built boats... including a couple of kayaks. It’s winter! So build it over the winter and take it out come spring. It’s 17 feet long! So tow it with Barge Vader. This was getting scary — fortunately, the kayak article itself provided me with an out: “you can drag it across a rocky bottom, but you shouldn’t.” Streams on Planet Georgia are nothing but rocky bottoms, and often shallow. Whew, dumb move averted by the source of temptation itself!

I’ve found I can replace the urge to get a boat with paintings of wooden boats. I found a small print at the community yard sale last year, now hanging in the outbuilding I’m now calling Studio FARfetched. The preacher’s wife remembered me looking for one, and gave me a numbered David Knowlton print (called “Misty Morning”) that they’ve had for a few years for Christmas. The frame is a little loose, but still hangs. We put it above the TV so I’ll have something worth looking at when I’m facing that way.

It would be nice to have both the time and the money for a boat. But we’d have to perform chickenhouse-ectomy first, I figure.

New Year’s Festoovities

Family Man described the quiet New Year’s the FFamily is planning. We’re going down to Big V’s — it will be interesting to see how it goes. I don’t think anyone will get wearing-lampshades smashed, after the Hallowe’en party she threw a few years back, but things could get interesting.

I think my favorite New Year's at FAR Manor was the first one, when The Boy and I built a brush fire in the burn cage out behind the big garage (Mrs. Fetched called it a night early on). We tended the fire, I drank some rum, we let it die down and said goodnight. It’s likely to be rainy at FAR Manor tomorrow night, so we won’t be able to repeat that one this time around. The rain should also put the damper on fireworks displays, although I expect a couple of people will choose to get wet and shoot them off anyway. Fireworks seems to be a Southern phenomenon; I certainly don’t remember people doing that in Michigan… probably because it’s usually too dang cold to stand outside at night this time of year.

Oh, and is anyone having (or had) a Festivus celebration? That “Airing of Grievances” part seems like a dangerous thing to try with the in-laws without some modifications (I’m thinking the grievances would have to be posted anonymously and not name names, although some things would be too obvious anyway). Letting Mrs. Fetched wrestle me to the floor might be fun, though!

Friday Night Cinema

OK, it’s probably Saturday morning by the time you read this, but you probably don’t want to watch this one at night anyway. Tonight’s feature is a departure from the normal fare — instead of a free short, you get a free feature-length film! Not just any film, you get The Corpse Vanishes, from 1942, starring Bela Lugosi. Thanks to the magic of copyright laws working the way they’re supposed to, this film has passed into the public domain.

The above link takes you to the details page on archive.org. Direct links:

• MPEG-4 (broadband)


• MPEG-4 (dialup)

Enjoy!

BLAAAAAAAGGHHH

So Mrs. Fetched called me at work today with a list of things to pick up at the grocery store on the way home. (She swears I forgot to get the shrimp, I swear she didn’t tell me. But I digress.) I grab the stuff and stumble across a checkout that’s both staffed and has nobody waiting behind the person buying one bottle of wine — hooray!

The other shoe was soon to drop. After ringing up the total, the little twerp at the register asks me: “Do you qualify for the senior discount?”

BLAAAAAAAGGHHH!!!!

I wonder if he’s getting a commission for every guy who goes back to aisle 18 to get the Grecian Formula goop.

Winding down

I will always remember Christmas 2006 as the first Christmas where I woke up to thunder. Talk about starting off with a boom….

Now that Christmas is over, the crazy time is starting to wind down. Of course, it doesn’t happen all at once — there are clearance items to buy (and put away for next year) and some shopping to do for Three Kings Day (aka Epiphany) on Jan. 6. We have our major gift exchange on Three Kings Day at FAR Manor — it gives us an opportunity (not always taken) to reserve Christmas Day as a religious observation, plus it gives us a week & a half extra to get presents (often at steep discounts).

Yesterday it was cool and wet; today it was cold and wet. Two of my basil plants are still hanging on; I’ve managed to remember to bring them inside on the coldest nights and the frost hadn’t got them yet. On the other hand, they’re not going to perk up and give me enough leaves to make one last batch of pesto… but I can’t bear to kill good plants. The third basil plant went to seed and checked out a couple of weeks ago; I’ve moved it under cover to dry out and then I’ll harvest the seed pods. I found a couple of seed trays laying around outside today; they’ve also gone under cover. I’ll plant basil and cilantro in them first thing next year.

I took this picture with my new smellphone; a Samsung A707 (The Boy dropped the old Moto, which prompted it to retire). It has a lot of stuff that I don’t really need, like an MP3 player and a 2.0 megapixel camera, but the price was right (after rebate, which Stinkular has been pretty good about honoring). I’ve started to go through the manual (which, so far, I’m not impressed with) to figure out how to set up the camera and so forth… but it beats the heck out of the Moto (which isn’t saying much, granted). It’s too nice to not worry about, though, so I’ll probably have to get a case for it soon.

Back to work in the morning for a few days, then another three-day weekend.

Buried treasure

My grandmother’s “Parker House” rolls were both a family treasure and the source of a running joke. Everybody looked forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, in part, because Grandma would make enough rolls for everyone to both stuff themselves silly and take some home. The running joke was when the daughters-in-law — and in later years, the grandsons’ wives — would ask for the recipe… Grandma would hand them some incredibly convoluted set of directions, or leave off some critical ingredient, or proportion the ingredients to serve a 4-H camp (which she did some summers), or nobble the recipe in some other way.

So some years back — before The Boy was born, in fact — Mrs. Fetched and I went up to Michigan to visit my family, and she met Grandma. Now while her family is mostly a bunch of straight-laced types, although they’re loosening up in their later years, my Grandma was drinking beer and cracking dirty jokes. If dictionaries had video, a clip of Mrs. Fetched meeting Grandma would have been next to the definition of “culture shock.” So something very predictable happened: Grandma made her Parker House rolls, Mrs. Fetched tasted them and quickly asked for the recipe, and Grandma handed her six pages. Mrs. Fetched didn’t even bother trying to make heads or tails of it, and just put it away when we got home.

Years went by, and along the line I learned how to make bread. More years went by, until last week Mrs. Fetched was trying to figure out how to get the house ready for Christmas dinner (and get some made) without straining herself. She came to me and said, “I still have that six-page recipe from your grandmother for her rolls. Do you want to try making them?”

“Sure,” I said — I’d wanted to take a stab at reverse-engineering the recipe sooner or later anyway. I thought maybe I could combine my bread-making knowledge and my tech writing skills to distill the actual recipe from the filler. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary: Mrs. Fetched pulled out the recipe, started looking through it, and found an index card with the real recipe on it! All those years, and “makes 12–16” was right there. Between the do this-es and do that-s on Saturday, I managed to clear the decks and make the rolls, doubling the recipe since we had a bunch of people coming in.

And… it was the Real Thing. The only difference was that the recipe says to cut the rolled out dough in a grid; I remember her using a round cutter, so I’ll have to get one.

We also got 10 lbs of snow crab, two large-ish shrimp trays, I made the rolls and boiled the seafood while the dough was rising, and some other stuff got brought in. The shrimp disappeared quickly, there’s still about 1/3 of the crab left (some of the best frozen crab I’ve had, the shells weren’t soft at all)… and five rolls out of 36. One of the ladies sat at the table and ate five of them, one by one. Yup, it’s The Recipe, all right. I think these rolls might be even more popular on this planet than the challah bread.

Sometimes, it’s good to not throw anything away.

Podcast from FAR Manor (#3) - news, iPhone speculation, early holiday memories

I battled an almost-flu kind of cold, chicken house duty, light-hanging duty, and a house full of indifferent people, to get this podcast put together. I hope you think it was worth it!

Listen up! direct link (10.2MB MP3) | archive page (listen online)

And the lights that delayed things by a couple of hours:



Contents:

00:00 - Intro (including special holiday music!)
04:35 - News from FAR Manor
07:00 - Shiny Things (digital voice recorder wrap-up, iPhone speculation)
14:00 - Stories of early holiday memories
30:40 - Closing comments, thanks
31:20 - "Rockin' Jerusalem" sung by the DCHS Chamber Singers

Special thanks to those who shared their holiday memories with us all:

• Mrs. Fetched


• OMIR the Storyteller


• Tallmom from C&J


• Shelly from Techcomm

Thanks also to Family Man and Olivia for their kind words about last month’s podcast.

Production Notes
Audio recorded with an XtremeMac MicroMemo iPod accessory, then extracted to iTunes. Audio files were edited on a G3 iBook, running MacOSX 10.4.8, using Audacity 1.3.2-beta.

Theme music: “Jump Around” by Psycho Maniak (no link/contact info available — help!).

Audio content hosted on:

What's in a name?

Ask the poor folks in this Swedish village.

Could be worse. They could live in Cumming, Georgia, instead of some place interesting like Sweden.

Serendipity

Sometimes, things just work out.

I went looking for sound effects on archive.org last night. I didn't find many, but I found a bunch of interesting and downright weird music instead. One of the better albums is the shortest, The Mosaic Effect from Simon Slater of Cold Sun. Very nice chill-out music for doing nothing in front of a fire, or just about anything else.

Saturday, after caroling and gift basket delivery, I took Daughter Dearest over to the school so she and her chorus could sing the national anthem at the Hawks game. (I found out after the fact that WGN was broadcasting the game as well. Sorry 'bout that.) She had planned for me to ride the bus with her, but there wasn’t enough room… putting her somewhat out of sorts. So Daughter Dearest handed the director my ticket, and he handed me a larger one, and I piled into a van full of kids and adults. What I didn’t realize was that I’d just been handed a suite-level ticket — the guy driving the van works for a place that rents one of the skyboxes at Philips Arena and he’d reserved it for us. Daughter Dearest wasn’t left out; she traded with a girl who had a suite ticket but wanted to sit with her friends down on the lower level. Everyone should experience this at least once in their lives — they cater in food, there’s a fridge with beer and soft drinks, and it has its own bathroom. With that kind of seat, who cares if the Hawks blew a 10-point lead and lost in overtime?

The payback is that I’m spending my so-called “vacation” time this week in the chicken houses, at least during the mornings. And I’ve caught a cold. But I’m going to get the podcast started (if not finished) tonight.

Catch Daughter Dearest in action... tonight at 7

Daughter Dearest’s high school chorus is singing the national anthem for the Hawks game tonight about 7 p.m. (EST). If you’re so inclined, you can catch see & hear them on Fox Sports South or NBA League Pass.

But before that can happen, we have caroling and gift baskets this afternoon. Two more weeks and it will be January, then maybe we can get a little rest…

Never a dull moment

Tonight, Mrs. Fetched is in the hospital, recovering from a hysterectomy. I can’t remember the full name, but it’s the kind where they… let’s say, punch a couple of skylights in the roof and take the equipment out the front door. It went a little longer than I would have expected, but they didn’t run into any major complications of the kind that would force them to change tactics.

So naturally, tonight would be the night that The Boy has to move out of where he had landed after last week’s episode. So now he’s back home, making the right noises but I’m skeptical about the right actions. He was trying to tell me his girlfriend needed a place to stay and she’d have to come here for a couple of days (this should sound familiar to long-time readers). Heh… she has parents less than an hour away; she can go live with them. I told him no way, no how, and feel pretty confident that Mrs. Fetched won’t pull one of her mind-changing stunts (not this time, anyway).

So much for a quiet night at home. Can’t seem to get one even when Mrs. Fetched isn’t here.

Post-Company Party Yawns

The company party was tonight, and was really nice this year. For one thing, it was on a weekend instead of after work so Mrs. Fetched came along — she doesn’t like doing the drive that I do five days a week. Heck, I don’t much like it myself, but someone has to deal with the cost of living. For another thing, they moved it from a restaurant near the office (last two years) to a club. Lots more room, better selection of food, and the bar served a great rum&coke. They cut back on the door prizes to offset the extra cost… but when you don’t win anyway, who cares?

But now I’m ready for bed. 'Night.

Next podcast… wanna join in?

I'm hoping to have the next Podcast from FAR Manor ready next weekend (16th/17th). My plan for this month’s final segment is “earliest holiday memories” — basically, the first thing you can remember that was related to the holiday season. My own earliest memory takes about a minute and a half to describe — two minutes, if I ramble about it — and that’s not long enough for a proper segment.

So here’s where you come in.

Think about it for a minute, then scrounge up a microphone, plug it into your computer (Sound Blaster cards all have a mike jack), and record it — give a first name (or a blog name, or whatever), how old you were at the time (you don't have to say how old you are now!), and what it was about. Then email the sound file to FARfetched58 at aim dot com (sorry, trying to confuse spammers’ address-guessers). Don’t worry about getting it perfect; if you stutter or stumble, just pause and start the last sentence again. I’ll clean it up for you. Also record a few seconds of silence at the beginning or end; I can use that as a template to remove background noise.

I know I can work with MP3, WAV, and any QuickTime format. If you have to use some other format, send it along and I’ll try to deal with it. If you have to put it on a cassette or CD, that’s fine too — but you’ll have to hurry and get it in the snail-mail… the USPS gets a little busy this time of year.

Thanks for reading and listening — hope to hear you soon!

My son, the graduate

The Boy passed his GED exam! And except for the math, did very well — he averaged 525 out of 600, and that was with the math pulling it down somewhat. Good enough, apparently, that he can apply for a Hope Scholarship.

The question now becomes: is he ready to take the next step(s)?