“Chigger Weed”

That’s what Mrs. Fetched calls them, anyway. It’s growing wild in front of an azalea along the driveway. Each flower is about the size of a dime.

I noticed them this morning while weed-eating, and decided to get a picture instead of mowing them down — sometimes, I’ll take the bribe of flowers or berries that a weed offers. But I wailed on a lot of briars, grass sprouting here & there, and small pine trees (and I’ve pulled up hundreds of the little suckers). I also ran enough sticks through the chipper to supply our mulch needs for the forseeable future, and used the Mantis that we bought at a yard sale last week to uproot all the weeds in between the sunflower rows.

If you’ve never seen a Mantis, they’re a cool little gadget — basically, a mini-tiller powered by a two-smoke chain saw engine. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and the way it bounces when it hits a rock is quite amusing. I got two feet of air once last night, chewing up the grass in a flower bed. It really does great when the dirt is soft, digs in and starts throwing rocks at you out the back. When it gets too much vegetation wrapped around the tines, I hang it in a tree and pull out the strings.

Here in the late afternoon, it’s too hot to work outside. I finally broke down and stuck the window air conditioner in the outbuilding.

Her First Job

I picked up Daughter Dearest from her first day being a waitress. She was exhausted, footsore, and had about $35 in tips.

Seems that the lodge’s idea of waitress training involves teaming you up with two more experienced servers and throwing you to the wolves having you serve a party of 57. She only messed up the drinks once, pouring unsweet tea into sweet tea glasses, and spilled a little coffee on her leg. Not bad for her first day. She’ll get used to being on her feet pretty quick; I figure it won’t bother her at all in about a week. We just have to make sure she has good shoes.

She’ll be doing this five days a week, all summer long. She’ll probably pull in $200 a week, which isn’t fantastic but not bad for a high school kid. It will be enough to get a car, or maybe a scooter or small motorcycle. (She has always loved the wind in her face.) They'll cut her hours back when school starts, probably to three evenings a week, but that will be enough for gas and so on.

Just think: In two years, God willing, we’ll be packing her off to college.

Pesto season has arrived!

My basil plant finally got big enough where I felt comfortable harvesting some leaves for pesto. Next thing I knew, it was blooming. I’m going to snap off the flower/seed stalks, mostly, so it doesn’t get four feet high overnight.

Click on the tight close-up to get a wider view.

Bee and Spanish Lavender

Taken in front of a Mexican restaurant yesterday. I just happened to have my camera with me. The bees were all over the lavender, but didn’t stay in one place very long. I just kept shooting until I got a couple of bees more or less in focus.

Lost in Translation

Another gem from Techcomm.

There were red faces in the Ordnance Survey office when its English surveyors returned from compiling a list of house names in mid- and north Wales. The results contained an unusually high number of properties called “Gwyliwch rhag y ci” or “Caewch y git,” better known in English as “Beware of the Dog” or “Shut the Gate.”

What’s worse than a song stuck in your head?

Answer: one stuck in your head that you’re dancing to.

This is all Daughter Dearest’s fault. Night before last, she introduced me to Cascada. iTunes has her album, Every Time We Touch, but for a whole CD’s worth of tunes I’d rather spend a couple extra bucks on the disc than download the songs and deal with even Apple’s lightweight DRM.

So yesterday we were out & about, Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest were getting DD some tan pants for her new job (she starts Friday). I figured instead of hanging around a clothing store, which is right up there with a trip to the dentist in my book, I’d pop into Target on the way home to see if they had the Cascada CD. They did, I called the wimmin to let them know, and headed on home.

So I loaded up the iPod and gave it a listen. Whoa... just the stuff I like: high-energy, massively upbeat. And then I started spontaneously twitching to the song, now well stuck in my head. Thank God I didn’t have any meetings today. As it was, I was constantly trying to keep a lid on it while anyone else was around. (If you want to hear what has been bedeviling me all day, hit the above link and select “Everytime We Touch” on her jukebox.)

It’s finally flushing out... maybe because I’m listening to DI.fm Hardcore and I have something external to make me twitch.

66(0)6

Today is June 6, 2006, considered the Day of the Beast by some (6/6/6, geddit?). JohnB on the Techcomm list dredged up some information that might be... uh, handy.

My personal favorite is 666F.

660 Approximate number of the Beast

DCLXVI Roman numeral of the Beast

666.0000 Number of the High Precision Beast

0.666 Number of the Millibeast

/ 666 Beast Common Denominator

(-666) ^ (1/2) Imaginary number of the Beast

1010011010 Binary of the Beast

1-666 Area code of the Beast

00666 Zip code of the Beast


Phillips 666 Gasoline of the Beast

Route 666 Highway of the Beast

666 F Oven temperature for Roast Beast

666 mg Recommended Minimum Daily Requirement of Beast

666i BMW of the Beast

668 Next-door neighbor of the Beast

766 Upstairs neighbor of the Beast

333 The semi-Christ

Daughter Dearest, photo artiste

Daughter Dearest had a little fun with the camera and iPhoto today, and came up with a couple of good ones. She was gracious enough to allow me to share them....

The Eyes have it


Self-portrait

This is SO true

Go visit Shout Out Out Out and click the link for “Forever Indebted.” The lyrics are quite rude, but sometimes The Truth doesn’t come in pretty packages.

For some light humor with family-friendly lyrics, try the next song down: “Nobody Calls Me Unless They Want Something." Perfect song for the Robot Dance, and I can relate.

I survived the weekend

The wedding shoot went OK. No dead batteries, no mangled tapes, nobody fell out of the balcony/hallway (which would have been me since I was the one up in the balcony).

So Daughter Dearest (who ran the third camera) applied for a waitress job at the iHop yesterday... and got a waitress job at the mountaintop lodge where The Boy used to work. I’m still trying to figure out how that worked.

Looooooong day

It began at 6 a.m. this morning (and I especially don’t like getting up that early on weekends) to help set up the church yard sale. It continued first with hauling furniture to the yard sale, then a quick shower and over to a wedding rehearsal (we’ve videotaping the wedding tomorrow & wanted to figure out where to put the cameras and what to shoot).

After the rehearsal dinner, we trundled home for a while. I just got back from picking up M.A.E. from her new job at Fire Mountain (which she is doing quite well at in the first few days, learning what she needs to and everything). So I’ve been going for nearly 19 hours straight.

Bedtime.

It never registered

As the time for refinishing the wood floor in our living room draws ever closer (i.e. we’ll get it done someday), questions come up. One of the big ones is what we’re going to do about the baseboard heaters lining many of the walls.

The baseboards are the original heating system in the manor. There’s an oil-fired boiler in the basement that used water from the original well (a second well was drilled somewhere along the way, because of the taste of the water in the first); the system would simply send hot water (steam?) through the baseboards. If I remember correctly, the house I lived in through high school (in Moline, MI) had a similar system. You would hear an occasional gurgle, and that was about it.

Over the years, a couple of problems developed with the system: the chimney cap came off, and a water pipe broke somewhere upstairs. The previous owners threw up their hands, installed a gas furnace (actually one upstairs and one downstairs), and shut down the baseboard system. The chimney is blocked up with a piece of tin, with a couple of bricks to keep it there, to keep rain water from running in.

A friend of ours used to do construction work, until he fell off a roof a couple of years ago and broke his neck. He cruises around in a wheelchair most days, but on good days he manages with a walker or even a cane. He’s trying to get back into the saddle, as a designer & supervisor if nothing else. So when we told him we were planning to refinish our floor, he advised against it — he explained the process, and the many things to go wrong, irreversibly so. But when we got quoted $4200 to have it done (which would about cover a new floor entirely), we’ve pretty much decided to take our chances.

It was the process of getting the quote that led to the question of the baseboards. A floor sander can’t quite reach the corners, so normally you cover that up with some molding. The baseboards protrude nearly two inches from the wall, and are mounted about an inch above the floor, so they’ll have to come off (the quote included removing and discarding the baseboard). When I mentioned that to our friend, he got a funny look and asked us why we wanted to take them out — hey, they’re not working anyway.

“Some people use them for cooling,” he said. “You bury a water tank and pump water through the system. It works about as good as air conditioning.”

“That system pulls water out of its own well,” I pointed out. “What if we just ran a return line to the well instead of using a tank?”

He looked awestruck. “That would be cold water coming out of a well!”

So I need to find and fix a water line upstairs, locate the original well, and run a return pipe to it. If it doesn’t pan out, there’s not a lot of investment involved. Low risk, potential high return, what more could you ask? But now we’ll have to remove the baseboards to do the floor and replace them afterwards.

Of Tires, Jobs, and Cameras

We picked up The Boy yesterday, planning to help him put a tire on his car (parked near some apartments close to the retail district). The tire part went by the wayside rather quickly: the rim he had was a six-holer, and his car is a five-holer. He (and a friend) came home with us anyway. I tried grilling some burgers & frying some bacon, got distracted by the guest(s), and ended up burning everything. Fortunately, Mrs. Fetched had some chicken in the oven.

So after borrowing the Barge, and a failed attempt at an unauthorized side trip, he came on home and spent the night with us. He agreed to help with the chicken houses in the morning, but it took me an hour & a half to get him moving after Mrs. Fetched left.... I ended up getting him there with the job about halfway done. I rigged a mulch bag onto the chipper and had barely started chopping some pine limbs when they returned.

With The Boy back, the next order of business was to get a tire for his car. He said his jack was no good, so I grabbed one we had laying around and off we went... only to find two tires flat. The one he knew about was ripped open pretty good, and the other (both of them were on the front) was showing metal at the corner. Fortunately, his “no good” jack turned out to be serviceable, and we hoisted both sides of the car and got the tires. We put the fake spare (which is flat) on one side and left the other jacked up, then went to get the tires.

Two hours and $150 later, we were back at the scene. The left side tire was giving us trouble, primarily because the jack wasn’t lifting high enough, but The Boy hit on the idea of putting the second jack under the axle and we got all the lift we needed pretty quickly. We told him he needed to either repay or work this off — he’s still sticking to his story of instant riches in August, but he said he’d work it off.

As I was getting ready to head home, Mrs. Fetched called — turned out she was just across the highway from us. Upon joining them, I wound up with M.A.E. as a passenger; Mrs. Fetched was going to get some groceries and she didn’t want to hang around. We got a mile down the road when she gasped, “Crap! I’m supposed to talk to the Fire Mountain people today about that job!”

“It’s 3:00,” I said, “and you’re supposed to be there some time between 2 and 4. Looks like a good time to do it.” I turned around at the builder supply place and took her back. Good thing... she got the job. They wanted to see if she cared enough to show up, she did, they needed to fill a position, everybody’s happy!

With a few minutes at home to wash my face and arms, we then went to see the guy Mrs. Fetched has worked with on video projects in the past. He’s retiring, selling his house, and leaving for smaller pastures. Mrs. Fetched has lusted after his XL-1 camcorder for a while, and he was ready to sell everything for fire-sale prices. She wound up with two pro-level camcorders, a seriously high-end tripod, and a VHS duplication rig, for $2700. Then he said, “I’m also going to sell my portrait camera.” He named a price for the entire kit that was ridiculously low. “You can turn around and sell it, or keep it, whatever you want to do... I don’t care.” This isn’t low-end stuff... a Mamiya RB-67 with several lenses, extensions, backs. Pretty much an entire portrait studio (minus lighting) in a hard-shell case. My first thought was a co-worker who’s single and a camera buff... he might want a medium-format camera. My second thought was that I’ve been taking a lot of product portraits lately, maybe I should keep it and stop wrestling with my digital camera. I could probably get a digital back for this thing, but it would be a) overkill b) hideously expensive.

I’ve floated by Mrs. Fetched the idea of starting our own documentation service — she does video, I can do text and still photography. We could pretty much cover everything between us. Maybe with some good equipment in our hands, this is the time.

The Third World: closer than you think

Mrs. Fetched’s mom bought a trailer from a relative; I think the motive is to fix it up and rent it out. The kitchen was in pretty bad shape, and some people we know from the private school where the kids used to go had some cabinets. So most of the morning was destroyed in the chicken houses, and the afternoon was filled up with this trip.

The cabinets were stored in a double-wide that I thought was dedicated completely to storage, with a mini-junkyard spilling outside. However, it happened to be occupied by a family. When I stepped inside, I marvelled that any one person, let alone a family, could consider living in this place. No carpet (or even linoleum) on the floors, construction material strewn everywhere, the ceiling water-stained and sagging everywhere. I’m sure there are worse places to live, but this looked like a little piece of Ramallah transplanted to Planet Georgia. The two goats tethered outside completed the scene.

It would be interesting to hear their story. The guy seems to be fairly well-educated (he knows what ex post facto means, for example) and has HVAC experience. I also noticed several PCs in various states of repair in the house, although I think it’s easier to get HVAC work than computer work these days. They were given the place by the people we know, and were glad to see us get the cabinets out — that half-opened what was once a master bedroom, and they might be able to clear the rest of the junk out and use that room now. It would be nice to see them get some flooring in there, though.

I heard that the term “dirt poor” was originally used to describe people who couldn’t afford to put in tile or wood floor in their house, so the floor was dirt — or perhaps it meant an earthen (or sod) house was all they could manage. Frankly, I think an honest earth house with a dirt floor would have been a more dignified home than this double-wide. Or maybe they’re just in the middle of gutting and rebuilding the interior... somehow, I doubt it. At least it’s a roof over their heads, even if it leaks here and there, but it’s only a step above being homeless.

There are places like this everywhere, tucked into little side lanes that you barely notice. If you look for them, you’ll probably find them. Then you’ll wonder what to do about it.

Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer

I have to confess that many years of using Macs, combined with a monkey curiousity that led to deep familiarity with the platform, has spoiled me: when my computer should be able to do something, I expect it to Just Work because it almost always does. And I get annoyed if it doesn’t.

The latest example began last weekend. Exploring the 43folders site, I found a clever little kit called the Hipster PDA. Like most geeks, I like low-tech when it works, and this is as low-tech as it gets: a build-your-own personal data assistant consisting of a stack of index cards and a binder clip. Sitting in the living room with the iBook, I thought to myself, “I’d like to try that. I wonder if I could find some index cards around here.” Then I glanced over at the lamp table, and lo! a stack of index cards, left there by someone and never put away, awaited. Figuring this was a Sign From Above, I put down the laptop and located a binder clip.

With a place to keep ideas, project tasks, and miscellaneous to-dos, my brain started suddenly remembering things I wanted to do around FAR Manor (and work) at odd moments. I could just whip out a pen and my stack, jot it down, and move on. I wound up with a rather intimidating shipping list for Home Depot, and a longer list of stuff to do around the house than I really wanted to recognize. I soon needed expansion memory (i.e. more index cards), and found the supply cabinet at work has both color and regular cards. Having found a useful way to capture and remember all those little things that could be done later, I started looking at it a little deeper, thinking about accessories (this is how male geeks keep in touch with our inner female: we accessorize our gadgets, not our wardrobe). Oh cool, how about some templates to print on the index cards?

So I downloaded the PDF, grabbed a handful of blank index cards, fired up Preview, and tried printing a few pages. The laser printer dutifully sucked in the cards, and spit them out — still blank. Suddenly realizing I needed to create a 3x5 page size, I did so and tried again... with the same results as before.

I went into full-blown troubleshooting mode at this point, trying all sorts of different things including installing new printer drivers and trying a different printer. Nothing worked, although at one point I managed to get the first two inches of a page to print at the bottom two inches of the card. It got late, and I gave up for a night that turned into a week.

Some time during the week, a thought hit me: if I could get the image to print at the top-center of the page, it should print on the card. I knew of two ways to make that happen — import each image into a page layout program by hand, one at a time, or use good old groff to do it all for me at once.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with *roff or other batch-style formatters, that’s the way most of us produced complex documents before 1990 or so. For books, or collections of books, not even the best GUI programs can yet match the capabilities of groff, and don’t even come close to matching their speed or efficiency. I’ve actually turned back to using groff at work because even FrameMaker is too slow and clunky to do what I need nowadays.

Once I hit on that idea, I had my printed cards in a few minutes. I opened a Terminal window and began the incantations:

$ pdf2ps diyp3h_core_1up.pdf diyp3h_core_1up.ps
$ for (( i=1; i<=84; ++i )); do
> psselect -p${i} diyp3h_core_1up.ps pg${i}.ps
> eps2eps pg${i}.ps pg${i}.eps
> rm pg${i}.ps
> done

Now I had 84 EPS files, one for each page in the PDF file. To do anything with them, I had to create a file of groff commands to put each index card at the top of an otherwise blank page:

$ ls *.eps | awk '{print ".bp"; print ".PSPIC $0";}' >cards.t

I opened the PDF, identified cards I didn’t want to print (and those I wanted multiple copies of), and edited cards.t accordingly. Finally, I stuck the cards in the printer and typed:

$ groff cards.t | lpr

The first couple of cards came out crooked, until I squeezed the paper guides together a little more tightly. My Hipster upgrade was quickly ready; now I just need some time to copy the data over....

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Fetched!

I still think I should have gotten you the Victoria’s Secret gift card, but I’m glad you liked the live flowers....

Justice, maybe

Lay and Skilling are guilty.

Unfortunately, I doubt that it will translate to real jail time. The two of them are already appealing their convictions, made bail, and all they have to do is stall and delay until January 19, 2007. On that date, Bush-league will write them pardons in a quid pro quo for all the campaign contributions.

Running on Empty

The Boy came by the in-laws’s place for Sunday dinner, a sort of post-Mother’s Day thing. He came walking in with his lip ring (gag) in place, but quickly sucked in his lip, said hello, then excused himself for a trip to the john. When he came back, he’d wisely taken it out.

So we ate, exchanged small talk, and then he asked me to come outside to talk after lunch.

“Where’s the oil filter on this thing?” he said, raising the hood of his car. It took a few minutes to find, probably because the filter was painted black. It’s on the front of the engine, about halfway down.

With that out of the way, the next question was, “Could you give me five bucks for gas?” I didn’t even have my wallet on me, and (as it turned out) there wasn’t anything in it anyway, but I told him I’d give him five bucks to mow the back yard (I’d done the front on Saturday). He was all over that.

From what he told me, he runs out of gas a lot. I think he’s wound up stranded more in the last few weeks than I’ve been in a lifetime. Being generally lucky, he usually gets a friend or friendly stranger to bail him out. It was kind of exasperating, and I suggested he just suck up his act, play by the rules, and move back home until he can get a better situation. This elicted a flight of fancy that was stunning for both its incredibility and deadpan delivery. I really think he convinces himself he’s telling the truth. Anyway...

(according to The Boy) Their band has signed up with some metal label and is going to be playing weekly at the Masquerade in Atlanta through the summer. Then in August, they go on tour and the $500,000 he has in escrow will clear. Uh-huh. Nice fantasy there, kid. Unfortunately, fantasy doesn’t pay the bills unless your name is J.R.R. Tolkien or Anne McCaffrey (OK, there are several other examples, but you get my drift). If it turns out he’s telling the truth, I’ll eat crow like a good sport in August. I’d offer to post a video of myself eating a real crow (cooked of course) but I’d have to shoot it, pluck it, clean it, and cook it. But worse, I’d have to explain to the in-laws why I’m doing that.

Baby wren on the loose

The baby wren decided to give his wings a try today, and ended up in the corner of the garage, with frantic parents dive-bombing Mrs. Fetched (who didn’t know what was happening) and tick-ticking away. For whatever reason, the parents abandoned garage when I came in — it may have been something to do with my bringing a car with me. I happened to catch sight of the little booger clinging to a fishing pole and ran to get my camera. The batteries were about shot, but I closed the display and managed to get one recognizable picture of the young bird, who had by this time migrated to a lawn chair. I’m sure the flash didn’t make him happy, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Seems to be a theme at FAR Manor: the kids leave the nest before they’re quite ready.

Lobster walkin’

Lobster’s been gone... six weeks as of tomorrow. No, he hasn’t tried coming back, and he pretty well burned his bridges anyway, but you hear stuff. A brief summary of his life on his own might be in order... a cautionary tale for any of you who are teenagers and are thinking you’d be better off dropping out and running off.

One thing Lobster seemed to have picked up on that The Boy hasn’t, despite repeated advice: don’t jump until you know where you’re going to land. He may have already had it planned to move to Big V’s (Mrs. Fetched’s younger sister, not exactly the most stable isotope on the periodic table herself) before we booted him, because he was there by nightfall. The private school he was going to is run by a strange Pentecostal (but I repeat myself) church, and has some odd but sometimes flexible rules. The relevant one here is that students are required to live with their parents while they’re in school. They flexed the rules to allow Lobster to stay in school while he was living with us, perhaps because we also (at the time) had our kids in the same school. However, they didn’t know Big V — so given the choice between going back to his parents’ place or dropping out, Lobster chose the latter. Hey, he had a roof over his head (although he told Mrs. Fetched even that wasn’t important), a job, and a truck. What more could he ask for?

I suppose he could have asked for some financial savvy. After wrecking his truck to the tune of $1100 for body work (and that after the mechanic cut him a break), he made a deal with a devil, aka Big V. He gave her the title to the truck and agreed to pay both rent and payments on the truck; she paid for the repairs and he got his (now hers, actually) truck back. Big V and her husband run a lawn-care business, so there was plenty of work available for Lobster on days he wasn’t working at KFC.

Sounds all well and good, except that Lobster seems to think:

a) the universe was created to wait on him hand and foot;
b) getting up early is for other people;
c) paying bills is for other people.

After about a week, he told them he didn’t have to get out of bed and work with them. They got him up, ungently, and he decided right then and there he wanted to leave. They helped him load up his truck and off he went. It wasn’t too long before he was staying in town with a co-worker. This was a useful arrangement for both of them; he needed a place to stay and she needed transportation.

Somewhere along the line, he got a girlfriend... and knocked her up. Oh thrill oh joy. He hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface of what that means.

When the universe revolves around you, keeping up payments on a truck is a minor annoyance. If you want to splash out for a hot date, or controlled substances (when you’re under 21, alcohol is a controlled substance too), or yet another traffic ticket, or nice clothes... well, why not? Paying people what you owe them is optional, right? It can wait.

Maybe it can, but Big V doesn’t. One might think she would be a little more sympathetic, having been on the other side of vehicle repos at least twice, but when it comes to what is due her, or what she thinks is due her (i.e. not the whole world, but a large portion of it), she can get as evil and heartless as any banker. After a couple of attempts, she blocked Lobster in good and had his truck towed away. (Yes, he deserved it. No, I don’t feel much/any sympathy for him. I’m just saying Big V doesn’t have a lot of room to talk in this arena.)

So Lobster now has: a job at KFC, no way to get to it, a pregnant girlfriend, and a few bags of clothes. Having repo’ed his truck, Big V is legally obligated to give him the difference between the value of the truck and what he owes her for it (I would say about $1000, maybe a tad more), but selective memory may need to be refreshed. I’m not sure I’m going to be the one to do it. But in any case, Lobster is really close to hitting Rock Bottom. I wonder how long it will take him to come to his senses; probably not any time this year.

It would be hilarious, if there wasn’t a baby involved.