Hot air

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

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

Go Tigers!

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

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

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

The Mobile Office

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

That was so 2nd millennium.

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

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

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

Good News on The Boy front, for a change

Yeesh, Wednesday already?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventeen Years Ago...

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

"Farf."

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

"Farf."

"Unh."

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

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

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

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

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

Cha-ching

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

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

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

Shorties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What little things are on your mind today?

Silver Linings, part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver Linings

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

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

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

Now all the outbuilding needs is Internet access.

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

Fall Plants

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

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


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

This is one of the better pods.


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


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


…and they’re growing everywhere too!


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


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

Product Design

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

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

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

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

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

SNAP

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

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

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

M.A.E. Not Be Coming Back

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

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

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

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

Non-restful weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Toys

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

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

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

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

Crunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Accusations Fly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vacation, by the numbers

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

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


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

On the Pinellas Trail

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

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

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

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

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

At Solar’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escape from FAR Manor! Part II

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

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

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

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

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