Ding dong, the witch is dead

I see that crazy old harridan "journalist" Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer. Some people make the world a better place by being in it; others make it a better place by leaving it. Ivins falls into the latter category. For years she's been a one-note Bush-hater, always reading from her list of the world's problems, and blaming everything on conservatives in general and on President Bush in particular. Before the local newspaper dropped her column (readers mostly ignored her), my eyes trained themselves to skip over her section, just like they do for Maureen Dowd's column (another Bush-hater, but more fanatically self-absorbed and self-important).

I would surmise that all of her political venom and bile contributed to Ivins' relatively early demise at 62. Oh well. There are many more of the tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd out there to continue beating Ivins' one-note drum... but at least Ivins could string more than three words together into a coherent written sentence. The louts who would presume to take her place can only grunt slogans provided by the communist Workers World Party.

On to the next death watch. Perhaps the death of another loony left ex-journalist, Helen Thomas. She's getting up there; it's about time for her to kick the bucket. For some reason they still let her attend White House briefings, perhaps just for the comedy factor when she asks her off-the-wall questions. Or maybe they just have a required quota of half-witted "journalists" that they need to attend each press conference. Wait - all journalists are half-wits, by definition, so that can't be it.

Snow

I took some pictures in Bowmansville, NY last week, when I had an hour to kill before flying home.

This tree has seen better days.

I thought this creek was pretty.

Notice how monochromatic the scene is? That's how the world looks to color-blind people all the time. It's not so bad, really. Shadows and contrast make up for color.

This is the cemetery there.


Lots of these graves are from the 1800s, both early and late.


Many stones are leaning, they've been there so long.


The wrought-iron fence is rusting slowly away.


All of the McArthur girls are here...May, Maud, and Hattie. I think they were all very young. I didn't scrape away the snow to find out.

The gentleman on the right has been here a long time. How do I know? I can't even read the stone anymore. But I DO know...

...he's a Revolutionary War veteran. You don't see too many of THESE medallions in the jungle, mainly because the jungle wasn't settled until the early 1900s.

It was EXTREMELY cold. I took these pictures in seven minutes flat, before my hands froze solid and I had to stomp back to the car and pry the door open with my foot.

Cats

Valkyrie in Position A. Position B is on her back, snoring gently.

From left to right: Jesse, Wolfman, and Blackie. Blackie is slightly puffier than Jesse, and a whole lot skittery-er. He has a notch in his right ear, left over from a fight when he was a kitten. Also, I'm told his eyes are gold, whereas Jesse's are green. Or is it the other way around.

Vera-Ellen Westmeyer Rohe

I'm watching the last film that Vera-Ellen made, in 1957 ("Let's Be Happy"). I have never seen her in anything else except "White Christmas" with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney. Vera-Ellen is the one on the right, Danny's love interest. I can never take my eyes off her in that film; she is so beautiful, and such a strong, vigorous, yet graceful dancer.

She moves like she weighs nothing, and in fact she did almost weigh nothing. Born in Cincinnati Ohio, she went to the same dance studio as Doris Day. She took up dancing as a child to overcome health problems, and her mother turned it into a career spanning more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in musicals. But because Vera-Ellen was a severe anorexic, she began aging quickly (which is why she took pains to conceal her wrinkly neck in "White Christmas"), and retired from films after 1957, when musicals fell out of favor. She died in 1981 at age 60.

Such a wonderful dancer, like Cyd Charisse in "Singin' in the Rain." But better, I think. She seemed to have a youthful exuberance that Cyd didn't. But wonderfully graceful in the same way.

Living two days a week

It occurred to me that I tend not to write much during the week, and when I do write, it focuses almost exclusively on the weekends. My existence is compartmentalized; I breathe deeply and quickly, and live 7 days' worth in 2 days' time at home on the weekends, and then I hold my breath and merely go through the motions of living one day at a time on the road, always the same routine, same work, with minor variations of irritants and inconveniences to help me distinguish one day from the next. I rarely talk about work to my wife, because she has no real frame of reference to assign any meaning to what I tell her, and it's all the same stuff every day anyway. I tell her about people I meet, events I saw, but I don't tell her about work, because it means nothing. Likewise, I don't write about it here, because it means nothing.

But my life at home means something, and the things I do there stand out in my mind, stepping forward out of the seamless blur of mundane tasks that I perform during the week. I find it hard to conceive of a life lived at home. I did it for awhile when I was young, and it was excruciatingly boring. I fear that it will be terminally boring if I ever come in from the road.

Organization

After I got home Friday afternoon, we ran a bunch of errands... returned the second chandelier (which was also bent and unusable, just like the first... we are getting used to bare wires sticking out of the ceiling over the dining room table), and bought a bunch of 2"x4" lumber. Why, you ask? Because we were going to build shelves out of it. And build we did, an 8-foot-long unit that is 8 feet high and 2 feet wide, with 3 shelves, using 3 of the 12 2'x8' sheets of half-inch plywood that we bought a couple weeks ago with the intention of putting down a floor in our garage attic (only to discover that it wouldn't fit up in there because there's too many crossmembers holding up the roof). It took us three hours to build the shelves. My wife designed them off the top of her head, and carefully measured them so that they would hold 18 62-quart plastic bins on the bottom shelf, 12 in the middle shelf, and at least 6 on the top shelf. It turned out VERY well, and is very sturdy, and by the end of Saturday we had them loaded up, which in turn emptied out a good chunk of our guest bedroom. I went through a whole box of 4" galvanized deck screws and one drill bit which snapped off when a partly-built section fell over as I was pre-drilling the holes for the screws. At that point I decided just to drill the screws in without pilot holes, and discovered that deck screws are in fact engineered to do just that. Duh.

We also took a few hours to work with our neighbor Bob to pull the vines out of our trees. Bob's tree pruner is lighter and easier to handle than ours is, and with the blade on it, it's very good at pulling down vines. You stick it into a clump of vines, and then start twirling it like spaghetti on a fork. Then pull the mass of vines down. Quite Easily Done. We worked a couple hours until my shoulders couldn't take it anymore, and then we went back to shelf-building.

Sunday we went to an art show at the airport. That was fun. They had bands. This is the local high school jazz band. They sounded worse than I remember my jazz band sounding... but we never got to play fun venues like fairs either.

I played bass in jazz band. My friend Becki played the piano. I didn't look nearly as cool as this guy did, unfortunately. And, I think they should have thought to bring an extra mike stand for the sax solos.

The art show was the usual art show kind of stuff. We see things we like, but we can never buy them because (a.) they cost hundreds of dollars, and (b.) there's no place to put them in our house. Lack of space can be a helpful dampener on spending.

A 1949 MG TC.

A 1957 MG something or other. My wife spent a couple years running around in her friends car just like this one. Many fond memories for her. It's a cute car, but I've seen sewing machines that are bigger than its engine.

My favorite... a 1983 DeLorean. There's something timeless about its smooth, blocky, angular, paint-free shape. Or maybe it's very dated... it depends on how you look at it. But I sure liked the look of them. That, and a Lotus Esprit (the white submarine-car in the James Bond film, "The Spy Who Loved Me"). Similar shape. Probably equally unreliable. But the Lotus has a nearly perfect power curve from its engine, which is why they make such good race cars.

A 1950 MG TD. My wife wants a '53 MG TD. Either that, or a Camaro. I'd feel better if she drove the Camaro. At least she'd have some protection around her if she got hit by some blind old lady in a Lincoln Continental. If she was hit in this little MG, they'd have to sweep her up in a dustpan.

This drawbridge is fun to watch go up and down. I don't miss the blaring boat horns though, signaling that they want to go through. Once in a while the bridge gets stuck. I don't know what they do to get it unstuck. Perhaps there's a tanker truck full of graphite parked somewhere nearby. But even when the bridge operates normally, some people (usually snowbirds from Ohio or New Jersey) get VERY upset that the bridge is impeding their ability to get across. They'll get out of their cars and go up to the bridge tender's tower and bang on the locked door and scream and curse. I like to think that those Type A people are working themselves up into a heart attack. Then when they die, there'll be a nice estate sale to go to. You can get great bargains at those things.

Oh, and the locksmith came Sunday morning and looked at my safe and pronounced it healthy. It turns out that the metal plate that fell out of the lockwork was in fact NOT the relocker plate (a very bad thing to have fall out, because dislodging it locks the safe permanently in the event of tampering or safecracking) but a shield that was supposed to keep the bolt bars from binding as the cam rotates to withdraw the bolts from the door edges. The locksmith was completely at a loss to understand how the shield plate had ever been attached, however. Although a hole drilled through the plate fit neatly over the end of the cam axle, there was no groove on the axle for a retainer clip to hold it... nor a hole in the axle for a cotter pin... nor was the plate welded to the axle. The locksmith was baffled. So he took some pictures to send to the safe factory to ask them how they attached that plate. Meanwhile, he charged me nothing. That was a good thing. So now, I have all my toys safely locked away, warm and dry. I was very pleased to see that there was no evidence of rust on any of them, after two months of exposure to the salt air.

Next task - set up my reloading bench again!

Why I left Colorado

I've been watching the rest of the country (especially Colorado) get slammed by storms in the last couple weeks. In Toronto, it was 14 degrees Fahrenheit and it snowed. One of the reasons I left Colorado was because of the snow. God must hate me, because of COURSE I would be assigned to work AGAIN in a place where it snows. And the wind howwwwwls all day. Why humans live in Canada, I don't really know. Maybe because they can't all live in the jungle like I do. But it certainly seems (at times) like they're willing to try.

Toronto is basically just like Chicago, only with more clumps of high-rise apartments. It's just as sprawly, but the weather is ickier. I hear that it's nice for a couple weeks in the summer. I'm sure it is. But I will never see it. I am cursed to only work in Toronto in the winter months. Oh well.

Sunset at the beach

We ran down to the beach just as the sun went down. As we came over the bridge, we could see the sun blazing over the horizon, but when we descended to the beach, 40 feet lower, we couldn't see the sun anymore, just 30 seconds later. Very frustrating. But I did get some good pictures.


On this one, you can see the entire disc of the moon, with Venus (I think) below it. My camera is annoyingly slow to fire, so I used this to my advantage by sitting the camera on my mailbox after we got home, pushing the fire button, and stepping back, letting it auto-focus and fire by itself. I just couldn't hold it still enough on my own.

A night at the airport

I always avoid Chicago O'Hare like the plague, because to go through it is to be stuck there when you miss your connection or your flight is cancelled, because O'Hare is always suffering from massive delays and cancellations. Well, O'Hare managed to f*ck me over anyway, from 500 miles away on Thursday night. My plane that was to take me out of Buffalo was coming in from O'Hare, so we thought. Delayed because of weather, it finally got there an hour after it should have departed Buffalo. So we got to Dulles in DC an hour late, just missing my flight home to the jungle. I waited in a line of 100 people at the United customer abuse counter for half an hour, then realized had United's phone number on my mileage card in my pocket, so I just called them and rebooked the next available flight on Friday morning. I kept waiting in line, figuring I could get a voucher for a hotel, but the line wasn't moving since there were only 2 agents to abuse 100 people. By that time it was 11:00 PM, and the flight out was at 8:30 AM the next day. I also heard people in line talking about the fact that the nearby hotels were all booked up.

So I figured, by the time I find a hotel, get a cab there, get a smoking room (because that's all they would have left, without a reservation), get to sleep, sleep badly, get up, get a cab back to the airport, and go through security... I would have gotten almost as much sleep as if I just slept in the airport. So that's what I did...found a quiet spot behind a ticket counter in concourse B (one of the newer concourses at Dulles), spread out my coat and laid on it, put my head on my backpack, and went to sleep. The cleaning crews came through at 3 AM and woke me up, but after that, I slept til 6, when the gate next door began a departure and there was much babbling on the intercom.

Sigh.

Driving to Toronto

Wow, it sure is less hassle to drive to Toronto (from Buffalo NY) than it is to fly. The Buffalo airport is relatively small, kind of like the Orange County Airport in California. It's only 20 minutes to the border. There, the US Customs grill you worse than the Canadians do. The US Customs ask you questions like where were you born, where are you going, how much money do you have with you, and are very stern. The Canadian Customs are like "hey, come on in, eh." Once you're through, it's an easy drive up the QEW expressway to Toronto (about 2 hours total), around the west end of Lake Ontario.

There are huge tall bluffs on the west end of the lake, far inland. It looks like that's where the lake USED to be, tens of thousands of years ago. Now the water level has sunk several hundred feet. There's also lots of wineries and orchards on that end of the lake, all bunched together in a narrow strip of favorable climate (I had no idea the climate there was favorable for growing anything except mold or lichen). And there's a big wrecked sailing ship, beached on the rocks. It looks like it's been there a long time.

I'm driving to and from Toronto because I have to (until my work permit is renewed). But I may just keep driving because I want to - because I really, really, really hate YYZ Pearson International. And I'm not able to rent my own car in Canada because the required insurances make it cost too much. But I can rent my own car in Buffalo. Those two things, plus a pleasant drive every week, make it much more attractive than flying.

A busy weekend

At Christmas, our kitties (Valkyrie, Wolfman, and Jesse) line up for the start of the race - to be the first to get to the Christmas catnip! Blackie is non-competitive so he didn't bother. He looks just like Jesse - when you can see him at all.


"Whoa... like, dude... I feel so... funky..."

(and yes, I HAVE talked to Jesse about catnip. After all, if you don't talk to your cat about catnip, who will? But... Jesse's 14 and a know-it-all. You can't tell him anything.)


"I can stand up, I'm not stoned. Really. Just give me a minute. Oh, hell, I'll just lie here for awhile."

An osprey nest near our beach.

Osprey pair in their nest. Those nests get REALLY big and messy.

Sand castle. Addy's castle, apparently. We like the drizzly sand that Addy put on top. Very rounded, melted and cool-looking.

Our favorite beach motel, now unfortunately closed permanently because they didn't understand the law, and they closed the hotel for more than a year, trying to fix it up and sell it as condos. Alas, it's only grandfathered to be a hotel, not condos, and since they were closed more than a year, they lost their grandfather clause and now can sell the hotel ONLY as a single-family residence. No one will buy it. Over a million dollars invested in renovations, for naught.

Our favorite room, #6. Many happy memories of listening to the surf while lying in bed.

An egret hunting. This picture turned out weird - very ethereal.

It was a flat, foggy day. I like days like this. We're not plagued with surfers, that's for sure.

We had a busy weekend. We had a visit from an aluminum company on Friday, who spec'd out screening in the front lanai and putting a roof over it, and putting windows in our back lanai. He thinks we can put tile on the front lanai roof, which would be good because the alternative is just a flat aluminum roof, which will look like a shack. If we can find more barrel tile and lay that on the new roof, we'll be good. We had another appointment scheduled with another aluminum company that afternoon, but they never showed up. We didn't bother to call them - if they don't want our business, we'll take our money somewhere else. That's a common problem in the jungle - contractors and skilled tradesmen are VERY unreliable. Word of mouth is the best way to find someone decent.

I replaced the ceiling fan in the guest room, which needs to have air constantly circulating to prevent mildew from forming among all our stacked boxes. The existing fan was making alarming wow-wow-wow sounds, so it had to go. The new one is silent and bigger, so it moves more air. Very nice. I have two more fans just like it to be installed in the office and the master bedroom. We bought another fan, a big 60" one, for the living room, which I may install next weekend or the weekend after. We also bought a new dining room chandelier, which I installed in time to have friends over for dinner on Saturday, only to discover that two of the arms were bent and one was even welded crooked onto the chandelier, and so it hung crooked. That's what we get for buying cheap Chinese junk ($138 still), not the nice Chinese junk. The chandelier was up for dinner, though, and none of our guests commented on the horrible job I did of doubling up the swag chain. Sunday I took it down and returned it to Lowes, and got the only other unit they had. I got it home and assembled it enough to tell that it, too, was bent and would hang crooked. That will go back next Friday. We can't find a chandelier we like, unfortunately, at any of the stores in our area. We may need to put up the ugly swag lamp we had, until styles in the stores return to something we like. By "we", I mean my wife, since I like halogen and steel, and our house is decidedly beachy, not modern.

We also bought six sheets of half-inch plywood, and had them cut it in half lengthwise, thinking that we would slide it up into the attic so that we could stack boxes up there in storage. I didn't think we had enough space in the attic to put anything up there, but my darling wife insisted we did, so we went ahead and got the plywood. When we got home, and she couldn't even get INTO the attic because of all the cross-beam supports that were in the way (necessary to hold up the heavy tile roof), we realized that it would NOT work after all. So now we have lots of long plywood strips that are not useful. Since we desperately need shelving in the garage, I would rather buy steel shelving and use the plywood on that. But L would rather have me build the shelves from scratch out of 2"x4"s. I don't want to do that, since we can't move them easily, but then, this house is our last house, so where will we move them to? Nowhere. Plus, I built my reloading bench out of 2"x4"s and plywood easily in an afternoon, so I'm sure I could knock together a five-shelf eight-foot-long unit in a weekend. If I can find the circular saw.

The shed continues to languish, unbuilt. My darling wife spent a sweaty day shoveling sand from the high spot in the corner of the yard, to the low spot where the shed needs to be. However, it still may not be high enough. We had a long chat with our neighbor, idling our car in front of his house on our way to the hardware store. He's a home inspector. He suggested that to prevent flooding of our shed, we bring in a load of moar, which is like shell and sand mixed together, and build a frame of railroad ties, and fill the frame with the moar. Then lay the pavers we bought on top, and then build the shed. But at any rate, he suggested moving the shed further from the lot line. Currently we have only three feet to the back line. The minimum is six. And he pointed out that the county and/or the power company and/or the phone company has the right to get back there to repair the telephone pole, and they may need the shed moved to get back there. So we may need to hack out more of the jungle and move the shed forward. In addition to that, we might also bring in a load of shell, dump it at the back end of the driveway and spread it out to form more parking area alongside of the house, then build a canopy to park the car under, to keep the sun and rain off of it. This is all because the garage will be long-term storage, apparently.

My wife is working hard to get rid of stuff, though. The garage is now half-filled (instead of full-to-bursting), and the guest room is all filled with boxes. They represent 30 years of acquisitions, including stuff that I have bought her since we met. I share some responsibility for the mountain of possessions, though I don't have many possessions of my own. I've gotten much more cold-blooded about getting rid of stuff, and not acquiring more. I will need to get rid of a pile of books, and my mug collection, and various other trinkets that just sit and do nothing. My wife is planning a giant garage sale in March with our neighbor Tami. Whatever doesn't sell, she says, we will donate. It will require many trips with the SUV to get the stuff gone. But eventually it will be gone.

I went fly-fishing with a friend Saturday morning. He's a retired nuclear safety engineer. He's married to a retired schoolteacher, who's friends with my wife in a garden club. They're snowbirds...they spend their summers in a cabin in Maryland or someplace, so it's hard for them to make friends down here since they're gone half the year. So my friend suggested we go fishing, and I said sure, because I've talked about fishing since I got down here, and never went. Kind of like shooting, really. He wanted to show me how to fly-fish. I've never done it before, but he said I was a natural. We went to a secluded spot in a park near us, and fished in the Intracoastal. There were big fish jumping out in the channel about 50 yards away, but we couldn't cast that far. I could get about 25 yards with my spinning rod, and a fly rod only casts about 15 yards. But fly fishing is a much more active form of fishing... it takes several whips of the rod back and forth to flip the line out far enough, and then you have to reel it in and try again. We didn't catch anything, but that's fine with me because I'm not sure what I would do with it if I did catch something. We had some bait (frozen shrimp and sand fleas) but the fish weren't interested. Just as we were getting ready to call it a morning, I lost his fly off the end of his line, so that put a definitive end to our outing. He wasn't concerned - he says when you tie your own flies, it's like 2 cents per fly. Similar to reloading, really.

D'Oh!sie

I'm enjoying the public spat between Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell. It's unfortunate that Trump is sullying his name by engaging in a war of words with an ill-equipped (but very loud and obnoxious) opponent, but it's amusing to see Rosie display more and more of her true nature with every angry paranoid outburst. Of course, every time Rosie goes on a tirade, it gives ABC, "The View" and Barbara Walters a black eye, also, and that's a nice bonus. It's just accelerating the death of the MainStream Media (MSM) and broadcast television, both of which have long outlived their usefulness.

I only read about all this online. I don't actually watch the show, or television news. It's kind of like reading about a battle that ended a week or a month ago - you can only appreciate it in a detached, historical kind of way. But the idea of two giant egos writing nasty public letters to each other and about each other just makes me laugh.

Jazz is the same in any language

I turned on the car radio tonight, and heard Neal Hefti's arrangement of Count Basie's "Li'l Darling." I was instantly transported back to high school, playing that song in the jazz band, and our band director was struggling to hold us back, to keep us from rushing forward (it's a very slow, swingy piece, hard to stay together when the beats are so far apart). What the heck, we were kids. But it was interesting to hear again, and to feel all those memories rushing back unbidden.

After the song was over, the DJ began talking in his hushed golf-announcer voice, and it was a moment or two before I realized he was speaking French. Half of the words were English.... Neal Hefti, Count Basie, various other jazz names I should know and don't. He spoke them with a flat American accent, and flipped seamlessly back and forth between French and English, so quickly that he had me half-fooled into thinking that I could actually understand French. God forbid.

He played other songs that I knew, and had played in my high school jazz band, and the trip home passed by in mere seconds, until the signal faded under a mountain of concrete as I descended into the bowels of my apartment building's underground parking garage. My trip down memory lane was over. But it was fun listening to familiar jazz tunes, and interesting to think that the familiar music is the same, regardless of the language in which it's presented.

How to win without really fighting

I've been playing Quake 4 lately. Sure, it's over a year old now, but I'm just pleased as punch that it actually runs on my new PC, which is unburdened by a 3D video card (which is allegedly required to run this game).

There's a fun map, "Xaero Gravity," named after a character from Quake 3 Arena. It features three platforms floating in space, connected by bouncy ramps that let you jump between them. There's also a higher platform, over which is suspended a large heavy cube. If someone jumps on the high platform to get a better vantage point, and someone else shoots a target above the cube, the heavy cube comes down and squishes the first guy.

I like to hide on this platform here. There's usually no one on it, because everyone else spawns on the platforms to the left and right. I wait, and watch the high platform. If someone from my team lands on it, I ignore them, and let them harass the enemy below. If someone from the opposing team lands on it, I squeeze off one shot at the red skull target at the top of the screen, above the cube. SQUISH. It doesn't score me or my team any points, but it reduces the opposing team's score by one, because each enemy I kill that way counts as a suicide (death without being killed by anyone else - he's killed by a falling cube). I can stay alive for ten minutes at a time, carefully plinking and squishing enemies. Eventually they wise up, and one of them bounces over to my platform and kills me. But usually my team is way ahead in points by that time.

Monday haiku

Haiku is supposed to be three lines, of 5, then 7, then 5 syllables. It should also reference a season. I regard it as mental masturbation, but it can be fun.

a slice of blue sky
peeking through the low gray clouds
hints of coming spring

buds on confused trees
bulbs of disoriented
flowers in the soil.

The Ontario
winter does not yield its grip
lightly, and it fights.

Pale Canadians
blink in surprise at the sharp
blades of sun, stabbing.

Four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon...

...after you've slept, and eaten, and washed, and cleaned, and puttered around all you can, and you've run out of things to do, you're forced to sit quietly and be with yourself. I can do it for awhile, but then I start having regrets. Regrets about things I should have done, people I should have been nice to, people who were nice to me but I failed to recognize it. On a cold grey day in the Great White North, the sad ghosts of memories crowd into my high-rise apartment room, sitting there, watching me with their hollow dead eyes. I'm used to them. We don't talk much, but it's a comfortable silence as we sit and watch the television together, watching the made-up memories and regrets of strangers flicker in phosphorescent half-life across the screen.

Toys

If I can save enough money, I want to get one of these. It's a DeLisle .45 ACP bolt-action carbine, the quietest firearm ever invented. Only 167 were produced, and they were used by the OSS during covert missions in WWII. It lives and breathes again, and I want one. It's only $2,000.

But, in reality, I need one of these more.

I need an old beater truck to move all the stuff that we seem to be either buying or getting rid of at any given point in time. One of my friends recently bought a brand-new truck, and I have truck envy. But really, I just miss my beat-up F-15o Bronco. It was big, black, rusty, and scary-looking, with very real-looking bullet-hole decals down the side. People tend to scatter when you drive at them with a big truck. No one's afraid of a Toyota Camry. It sure would be nice, though, to have a big truck with a big bed that can haul lots of stuff. The Bronco didn't have a big bed, and that was annoying. But a big 4x8-foot bed would solve a multitude of problems. Maybe a Tommy-Lift would be better, or a dump bed. Hmmm.

Dead Like Me

If you haven't seen it, you definitely should see the TV show "Dead Like Me." It ran on Showtime channel back in 2003 and 2004, and was cancelled after two seasons. It's in reruns on the Sci Fi Channel now. It's about a crew of undead people who died before their time, and they are drafted to be grim reapers, led by Rube (Mandy Patinkin). They're required to get jobs, apartments, and earn a living like anyone else, but they also have to take souls from people who are about to die. It's very witty, dark comedy. The music is done by Steward Copeland, the drummer from The Police. It's a wonderful show.

In one scene from the first episode of season 2, Roxy the meter maid (one of the reapers) is attending the morning meeting of meter maids at work. Their boss is haranguing them, and the scene seems oddly familiar... the lighting, the camera work, the closeup shots of people reacting to what the boss is saying. Only when the boss says, "Hey! Be careful out there," do I realize that they're consciously spoofing "Hill Street Blues," which was a popular police drama that ran from 1981 to 1987 on NBC. Then we see the metal garage door roll up, and all the meter-peoples' three-wheeled Cushman scooters begin rolling out (just like the police cars used to do in the opening credits for "Hill Street Blues,") and the "Hill Street Blues" theme starts playing, and I just busted out laughing. It was very funny. It would be completely lost on anyone younger than 20, but hilarious for the rest of us.

Sick in the Great White North

The Great White North is in fact cold and gray and wet, eh? And I am suffering from a nasty cold. Thankfully I have a bottle of DayQuil, but I have three bottles of NyQuil back in the jungle, and I am loath to buy a fourth bottle here when I just have to take it home and put it up on the shelf with the other three. So I am suffering through it with Benadryl instead.

I am staying here this weekend to try to make the most of being here, since my work permit has expired. I submitted my renewal 30 days before expiration, as the Canadian Immigration website suggested. However, it's taking CIC over 60 days to process, not 30 days. While the wheels of Canadian bureaucracy grind slowly, the nice gentleman at Canadian Immigration recommended that I stay here another four or five weeks to wait for my approval to come back, because if I leave, I may not be able to get back in. Pshaw, says I. I have family at home in the jungle, as well as work to do at home. So I will stay one weekend here, then go home, and hope for the best to get back in when I return. We shall see what happens. Meanwhile, it is just as well that I stayed here, instead of going home to infect my darling wife with my cold.

Two interesting people

On the plane, there were two interesting people.

• One was a pretty girl, college-age, who reminded me of my best friend's wife. She had long straight hair, and was endlessly combing it with her hand. I wondered to myself if she realized that her hand is dirty, and touching her hair constantly will just make her hair greasy. But as the plane took off, she closed her eyes and put her head forward on the seatback in front of her, and I realized she was prone to anxiety or airsickness. Fortunately her seatmate took notice and talked to her for the next half-hour, to take her mind off her discomfort. She seemed quite grateful.
• The other was a developmentally-disabled boy, about 15, and he blinked constantly and kept making loud honking noises like a party noisemaker. His mother sat next to him, obviously long resigned to his behavior, and she visibly seemed to shrink into herself with her head down as the long line of passengers filed past to find their seats. The boy honked all the way to our destination city... I was glad I was in the back of the plane.

A busy holiday season

In no particular order:

I've done something to my right wrist. I think it was probably yanking too hard on fallen tree limbs and vines, hauling them out of the underbrush, and then sawing a heck of a lot with a bow saw. We cut down five trees in one day (small trees, to be sure, but still). That's a lot of sawing. My wrist hurts when I bend it like this. (KRRRIIIKKKKK) (Ergo, I won't bend it like that no more.)
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Our neighbor, who likes to wander over with a drink and chat while we slave in our yard, came home at midnight on New Year's Eve, and proceeded to set of a lot of fireworks in his front yard. Apparently fireworks are de rigeur in the jungle on New Year's Eve. At least one large rocket came down and hit our house, which upset my wife mightily. In the cold light of day, though, we agreed that since he's generally very quiet, and he should only do this once or twice a year, it's not worth (a.) complaining to him about it, or (b.) doing something to get back at him, like starting up the chainsaw at 5:00 AM, because it will only devolve into a Hatfield & McCoy-style feud, which we don't need.
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We hosted a nice dinner the other night with four of our closest friends, who came over and saw our new house for the first time. My darling wife fixed a wonderful meal of British food - shepherd's pie, salad, chocolate cake with heavy cream on it (I forget the British name for it) and hard rolls. (My wife hates shepherd's pie, but she'll fix it for me anyway, just like she fixes meatloaf for me, which she also loathes). It was a nice meal, and we talked until almost 10:00 PM. It was a most enjoyable evening.
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We installed half of the pavers for the shed (15 of 30, each of them 20 inches across and 55 pounds), and had gotten them all nice and level, when we noticed that we had chosen the lowest spot in that part of the yard, which would ensure that the shed will be flooded during a rain. So today we pulled them all back up and stacked them neatly. We will then shovel all the dirt from a nearby high spot over into the low spot, and hopefully that will even it out.
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We bought white roll-up blinds for the lanai, since we figured out that the black feral cat we've seen hanging around actually SLEEPS on our back stoop, and probably has slept there for years. That causes our cats some consternation and caterwauling, so we figure that by preventing them from actually seeing each other, that will stop most of the feline fireworks that have gone off a couple times in the past few weeks. So far, it seems to work. And, the blinds keep the wind-driven rain from soaking the lanai. Next project - rip out the lanai back wall and install sliding glass doors and and accordion-style metal hurricane shutter-wall to draw in front of the sliding glass doors. That will cost a pretty penny.
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Actually, before that happens, we're going to screen in the front lanai. This may entail putting a roof on it, where there is none now. We would like to put on a tile roof, to match the rest of the roof.
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My wife's PC suddenly couldn't see anything with Internet Explorer. "Internet Explorer could not open the search page" was the error we'd get. I could ping servers out on the internet, so I knew I had a good connection, but I couldn't see anything with Internet Explorer. A quick call to our ISP, and 20 minutes with a nice Filipina lady, and she finally led me to deduce that my firewall was blocking Internet Explorer. Somehow, on my firewall's list of programs that it watches, it had set Internet Explorer to "Block Always." All other programs are set to "Permit Always," but somehow IE had been blocked. I know my wife didn't do it, and I know I didn't do it - it did it by itself. That's just as weird as the day that my cellphone switched its ring to my friend's voice, all by itself. Instead of a ring, it would start talking with his voice. I recognized the conversation as one that I'd had with him on the phone back in the summer. I didn't even know that my phone could record conversations, much less set that recording to be the ringtone. I was baffled by that one.
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We bought several new ceiling fans (with lights!) for cheap at Lowe's, on sale. We'll install them next time I'm home.
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I saw that Denver Bronco cornerback Darrent Williams was killed in a drive-by shooting New Year's Eve in downtown Denver. That, plus the horrific snowfall they've had in the past month, reminds me of why I moved away from there. We don't have snow, or drive-bys, in the jungle. If one attempts a drive-by shooting, the jungle denizens are quite likely to shoot back. That's why we're all so polite to each other. Plus, we're all generally of a homogeneous ethnic group. That seems to reduce crime as well. At least, that's been my experience in the past few decades, having lived in three major cities, all "diverse," and all afflicted with the same problems of crime and poverty. In my travels, I've observed that communities that are NOT "diverse" tend not to suffer from those problems. Ergo, I now live in the jungle.
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I was watching a "magic" show on TV with some British guy about to hang himself from a gallows. I noticed that they put the knot behind his head, instead of to one side. If you're going to hang someone for real, you put the knot to the side, to ensure that the neck snaps when he hits the bottom of the rope. Otherwise, the hangee is much more likely to survive. Also, use a strong but relatively thin rope (1 inch thick does the trick). Mr. Magician had a 2.5 or 3-inch-thick rope. The thicker the rope, the more surface area of the neck it covers, and the more support it provides to the neck, reducing the chance of neck breakage or strangulation. I quit watching since it was clear he was NOT going to die.

However, I did watch the full cellphone video of Saddam Hussein's hanging. It was pretty anticlimactic. I didn't feel anything, watching it, other than a sense of grim satisfaction. Now, if we could just hang Ramsey Clark (his 1960s-totalitarian-leftist-radical-psycho lawyer, who tried unsuccessfully to turn the trial into a circus, and was ultimately kicked off the case because of it). That would be very satisfying. People like that deserve a good hanging. A nice flogging first, in public. THEN a hanging.
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I bought a half-dozen Sterilite tubs, the 32-quart/30-liter variety. They are just big enough to hold one layer of CDs standing on edge, in 4 rows side-by-side, with about 30 CDs to a row. They are the perfect storage medium for CDs. Now that I've archived all of them to a backup hard drive, I can stash the physical media in the attic, where hopefully they won't melt.
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Our oldest cat has been throwing up regularly, three or four times a day, for the past two months, while losing weight precipitously (he's down to 9 pounds, half of his original weight). My wife tried feeding him tuna and turkey off our plates, instead of feeding him Science Diet cat food, which he'd been eating for years. Miraculously, he stopped puking. Apparently he's developed an allergy or something to Science Diet, and he was starving to death because he couldn't keep anything down. He seems to be doing better now. But he's 18 years old, and despite our efforts, he is not long for this world. He's been a good cat. He's Mr. Personality. I will miss him a lot when he goes... puking and all.