Worrying

I’m worrying tonight. Not so much about the election; I still think the Dems will take the House and not the Senate, but it will be enough to put the brakes on the Bush-league destruction of America. The things I’m worrying about are closer to home.

The Boy was supposed to go to the senior center this morning for part of his community service. So I went upstairs to start trying to drag him out of bed… and he wasn’t there. Nor was he in the guest bedroom, the recliners in the living room, or the couch in the detached garage. Some time in the middle of the night, he slipped the leash. Flew the coop. Took a powder. Blew this pop stand. Rode off into the sunset. I didn’t find a note or anything, nor has he called all day. I have a pretty good idea of where he is, which isn’t good: at this point, I’m pretty sure he’s going to fail the drug test he’s supposed to take in a couple of weeks… and then it’s most likely off to jail with him for the next 11 months. But that’s his choice. We’ve tried to help him make better choices, and he doesn’t want that kind of help.

What really worries me is that Mrs. Fetched has had an “issue,” in the Biblical sense, for going on three weeks now. She’s scheduled to go in for an ultrasound tomorrow, which I hope will locate the problem. Obviously, this hasn’t done her much good. By the numbers, she’s healthier than I am — she doesn’t suffer from cholesterol or high BP (she enjoys every bit of them both, ha ha) — but she’s run-down all the time and this definitely hasn’t been helping. Working in a chicken house is debilitating all by itself; OSHA and the NLRB would be all over any company that subjected their employees to those conditions, but farmers (or their families) are free agents. I’m not sure the chicken houses have brought on this current problem, but I sure hope that her docs will tell her to stay the hell out of there from now on (not like she would listen or anything, but still).

So tonight I worry. Tomorrow I will probably find out it was all for nothing (I hope so, anyway).

Haggard over Haggard

hag•gard (adj.)
1 Looking exhausted and unwell, esp. from fatigue, worry, or suffering

How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! For you give a tenth of your mint, dill, and cummin, but have neglected the more important matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.…
How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but on the inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that its outside may also be clean.
How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside but inside are full of dead people's bones and every kind of impurity. In the same way, on the outside you look righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
—Matt. 23:23-28

The spectacle surrounding the sordid Rev. Ted Haggard situation is simply… craptacular. If you’ve been hiding under a rock, or avoiding the media in hopes of dodging the negative political ads, here’s a brief recap: Rev. Haggard, the former head of the National Ass. of Evangelicals (oooh, appropriate), has been whipping up the fears of the fearful for years, keeping gays stigmatized and Republicans in office. In the last week or so, a gay prostitute came forward with claims that not only had Haggard hired him for sex about once a month for the last three years, he helped Haggard buy meth. After the denials came the partial confession (“I bought the meth, but didn’t use it”), the resignation from his church and the NAE, and finally an admission of “sexual immorality” (which in the evangelical mindset is the Express Ticket to Hell).

Many have come to expect such hypocrisy, unfortunately, from people such as Haggard — the Jim Bakker/Jimmy Swaggart scandal of the 1980s was simply the most visible and well-known example. The thing that angers me most, as a Christian, is that such people make us all look bad by association. They encourage Christians to act like Pharisees and vote for moneychangers, while paying (at most) lip service to “the least of these.” They skip past the many occurrences of “fear not” found in the Bible, and play on the fears of the ignorant.

In the end, someone who is so adamant about persecuting gays had to have some issues. How best to deny your own gay tendencies, which you have been taught almost from birth to abhor, but to go around attacking other gay people? I mean, look at the guy. Is that not one of the creepiest smiles you’ve ever seen? I wouldn’t have let someone looking like that baby-sit my kids to begin with (good thing; he and The Boy might have swapped secrets of how best to hide a drug habit).

For every Haggard that falls on his face, though, there are dozens — hundreds — ready to step in and take their places. I fear that they will have to answer for God for the things they have done in His name.

Rosemary and visitor

There are many things I don’t know about plants. One of the things I didn’t know was that rosemary blossoms in the fall.

A little patience (and double-checking in view mode) is required to get good macro shots with this camera. If you click to get the larger image, though, you can get a good look at a tiny insect down on the bottom flower. He didn’t seem to be fazed at all about me getting less than a foot from him.

That yellow string-looking thing behind the upper flower is part of the parsley plant. The heat and drought knocked it way back, although it’s starting to recover with cooler weather. There were several stalks that didn’t hold themselves up, and that probably kept them alive, but now I need to stake them up so they’ll get what sun there is at this time of year. Rosemary, on the other hand, is one of the hardiest non-weed plants I’ve seen. Heat doesn’t bother it, drought doesn’t bother it, winter doesn’t bother it, getting run over by a minivan doesn’t bother it… you get the idea.

I’ll have to clip it a little before too long — I’ll be making a batch of beer and boiling rosemary into the wort really mellows it out.

Trick or treat’ers

Ready to scoop the candy! Yes, that’s Daughter Dearest with the wings.



So far, we haven’t had anyone come by tonight — what I expected, unfortunately.

The Bikes of Autumn (and the rest of the year)

With the Moonshine Festival out of the way, so also goes October. Perhaps now I'll get to rest on weekend mornings. It would be good start to not have the $#@&!! phone ring at 7:30 a.m. But I digress.

Like all good festivals, Moonshine starts off with a parade. What makes this parade different is that it ends with a cavalcade of bicycles, rolling out on the bike tour. During my vacation posts, I mentioned that road cycling clubs are up in this (red) neck of the woods. Some of them are actually working with the planetary DOT and the county to put in bike lanes, er, down the road. And they have already laid out 30-mile and 62-mile routes. Both routes run right past FAR Manor (this particular shot is just up the road).

Naturally, laying out a route that long takes some marking and signing. Since posting signs on the DOT right-of-way is a hassle, the easy thing to do is get out a spray can and mark the road itself.


Not all the marks are completely serious. You get on some of the less-travelled back roads (which are safer for cyclists anyway), and you can have a little fun with your spray can without dodging cars.

This particular marker is not far from where Lobster’s family lives.


Along the highway, heading out of town. Both routes take the side road up ahead.

That’s my car up at the corner. The wide angle shot makes it look a long way off, but it’s really no more than 100 yards or so.


On the hill approaching FAR Manor from the north. This is a steep enough climb that speeding on a bicycle would be difficult indeed.


I really hope that they put the bike lanes in — I haven’t heard of a cyclist getting pasted by some yahoo in an F250 yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Rodent Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

clacka-clacka-clacka

“And what’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All-State Daughter Dearest

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

w00T!

Oh no

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

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

Hot air

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

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

Go Tigers!

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

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

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

The Mobile Office

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

That was so 2nd millennium.

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

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

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

Good News on The Boy front, for a change

Yeesh, Wednesday already?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventeen Years Ago...

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

"Farf."

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

"Farf."

"Unh."

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

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

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

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

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

Cha-ching

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

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

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

Shorties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What little things are on your mind today?

Silver Linings, part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver Linings

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

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

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

Now all the outbuilding needs is Internet access.

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

Fall Plants

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

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


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

This is one of the better pods.


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


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


…and they’re growing everywhere too!


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


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

Product Design

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

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

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

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

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

SNAP

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

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

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

M.A.E. Not Be Coming Back

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

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

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

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