The Road Less Travelled (Due To Traffic)

This morning I was up early, after a disturbed night due to Mr Brain "not feeling sleepy yet"¹, in plenty of time to catch the 8:01 which goes directly to Brooklyn instead of taking a Penn Station train and changing a Jamaica (not the good one).

Or so I thought

The plan survived contact with the real world for about the time it took me to drive to the traffic lights at the end of Nicolls Road, at which time a complete ninny made sure that although there was plenty of time to negotiate the left hand turn, half the traffic queued up to do so would cool it's figurative heels at the lights for one more cycle (from 90 seconds to two minutes or more, depending on some arcane and as-yet unexplained formula known only to the Secret Order of the Traffic Light Timing Illuminati Of New York²). Well done that fbleeping schoolbus.

Of course, once we had the green light, a selfish wuckfit in an Osamamobile decided that although he could exit the gas station that lies next to the traffic light at the rear and get in line without any fuss, he would exit from the front entrance, pull across the traffic and stall the line so he could get across the light. I am a reasonable man, but this sort of behaviour has me hoping that the vehicle's driver has his cell phone battery explode the next time he makes a call (probably while exiting the car park or attempting to reverse: SUV drivers are people of very small brain in general). All this meant that no sooner had I made the left but I was stalled at another light.

Enough was enough. I pulled onto the shoulder and made the right into the supermarket carpark. Ignoring cries from inattentive shoppers, who really should pay more attention to their surroundings and not jibber-jabber on cell phones while pushing a cart full of groceries through the car park, I turned into the drive-thru for the pharmacy and thence onto the side street by the school. By this method I was able to rejoin my commute route sans jerks in armoured personnel carriers.

But the worst was yet to come

The road to the station was blocked by a slow-moving SUV, that was driving (it turned out) to one of the local, trackside businesses. I hate these people with a vengeance because they always drive at five miles per hour under the speed limit. They are in no hurry, since they are 15 minutes early for work. They can also be characterised by their turning technique, which is best described as "swing as fully left as you can, then make the right turn without the benefit of a turn signal of any sort". Often, after swinging out then turning, the vehicle will come to a dead stop while the driver assesses some almost-hazard in the driveway, such as parked cars or a landscaper's truck pulling out. Thus is the road blocked off completely. At times like this I fantasise about that rooftop turret-mounted disintegrator death-ray³.

Reaching the carpark at last I was dismayed to find that all the spaces were taken. The Rich Gits had returned.

When Wyandanch was served by diesel trains, the commute was cold and smelly but there were relatively few of us. On the day that electrification happened the ridership from Wyandanch trippled. Why? Rich Gits who normally commuted to their law forms and marketing companies out of Babylon or Huntington realised that they didn't need a parking permit (which costs money) to park in Wyandanch. The invasion was on.

During the summer, the Rich Gits mostly migrate to foreign countries or go east to The Hamptons, leaving space for the actual commuters who live in the area to park. Tuesdays through Thursdays the parking gets scarce even then, due to Lawyers travelling to court in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Lawyers, of course, are Rich Gits too gittish to contemplate taking time off, but even they baulk at working either side of a weekend.

I sighed and made to turn right onto Straight Path, heading directly towards the station and the Wyandanch grade crossing. It took me a good two minutes to get out of the car park, due to gits turning left across my path into it (a pointless exercise since they could see that their fellow gits had taken all the available spaces). Finally I managed to get onto Straight Path only to drive into a traffic jam. What I had been fearing had come to pass: the gits had dithered me into a direct confrontation with the 7:55 to Penn Station, which had arrived and caused the grade crossing gates to drop.

This was annoying on several fronts, but most irritating was the fact that I actually wanted to turn right before the grade crossing and so didn't actually need to be stuck on the traffic at all. Second most annoying was the sight of at least three schoolbusses ahead of me, which would ensure I would be delayed even further, possibly long enough to miss the 8:01 and force me onto the 8:16 and a change at Jamaica (still not the good one)⁴.

It turned out the schoolbusses were the least of my problems though.

For no readily discernable reason, the bloody train parked with its doors open and showed no signs of getting under way even when there were no more passengers on the platform. Clearly they were intent on making me wait in traffic until my own train had caught up, leaving me no time to get to the West car park and sprint to the station itself before it had left me cursing on the platform. This was not to be born

I had come to rest right next to a side street, so I turned right and drove quickly through the back streets, ignoring the playful screams of the children waiting for their schoolbus, who leapt athletically from my path as I made my way west towards what I hoped would be a parking space. As I drove I returned the friendly salutes of their parents, who waved and called out their greetings as I passed. I was cheered by their spontaneous demonstration of neighbourly regard, and when I finally reached the carpark, was doubly pleased to beat by a hair the enraged driver of an SUV who was too busy attempting to text message while he drove to see that I was going for the same parking space.

I steeled myself for a frank exchange of views with this individual, but saw the 7:55 had finally got itself rolling. There was no time to lose! The 8:01 ia always on time, as much as the 7:55 is almost always bloody late, and once the damn train was clear of the station section and the signals changed my own train would be in and out like a shot. I broke into a stiff walk and was rewarded by arriving on the platform to the sound of the gates coming down again.

The mission was still in jeopardy though. I wanted a newspaper and was damned if I was not going to have one, so I grabbed a dollar from my wallet and veered into the station to buy one.

And ran into that most insidious thing, a woman trying to pay with exact change for her bagel and coffee, while not actually having the basic smarts to have her money outside her voluminous handbag before she began the transaction.

I was in no mode to encourage such behaviour. I placed my dollar in the shoplady's hand, grabbed two quarters in change from the pile left there by commuters who understood how to speed buy stuff, politely elbowed the dithering woman out of my way and grabbed a Daily News from the newspaper stand⁵, then sprinted for the train.

Which I managed not to miss despite the best attempts of the entire western world to prevent me doing so.

Gits.

1. Mr Brain is not my friend ↑
2. An organisation as yet to reveal themselves to the general public, but that I have inferred to exist and to be the root cause of the various dubious and outright iniquitous traffic light configurations and timings on Long Island. I have contempt for them, and the public officials who have yet to acknowledge them or confess to the craven granting of absolute authority of all things traffic lighty to a hidden cabal of ultra-powerful old-money interests whose agenda has to be suspect, given their monomania for traffic flow control and anonymity ↑
3. The one I could have had if only scientists had spent some time doing science (instead of wasting time recalssifying planets and lakes as not-really-planets/lakes) and invented stuff people actually want and need. Let's face it: If my car flies this entire blog entry doesn't get written. What wastes of good breathing air today's so-called "brains" are. No doubt even as I type some "clever" young thing is busy on a breakthrough theory which will prove conclusively that the Atlantic isn't an ocean any more or that Asia really shouldn't be called a continent ↑
4. Due to a New York state law that decrees that schoolbusses stop at grade crossings while the driver checks that no trains are coming. This is for the safety of the children. Sometimes, when the bus stops, the doors fly open, granting the children easy access to the fast-moving traffic. I don't know what this is for ↑
5. Also used by such ditherers to hold their excess baggage while they look for thet ellusive nickle hiding amongst the dried-up chapsticks, bunches of obsolete keys that don't fit anything, collections of left-hand-only gloves and other handbag cruft, thus ensuring that fellow commuters with exact change cannot circumvent the ditherisation of their commute and actually catch a train ↑

My Neighbours Killed My Grass (Or Watched While Someone Else Did)

Another week, followed by another weekend. What fun.

On Saturday I discovered that the people who had dumped a tire at the side of my house while we were in Philadelphia, on my little grass verge, had also dumped something, probably antifreeze to judge by the empty cannister they left with the tire, and saved me the trouble of trimming about ten square feet of grass by the relatively straightforward and simple method of killing it. Perfect. I'd ask the neighbours if they saw anything, such as a license plate or maybe a landscaper's business name on the side of a truck, but it wouldn't be worth it because a) they never see anything on principle and 2) they were probably involved in the dumping. I am partly to blame that people don't realise the area isn't some abandoned industrial lot rather than the side of my residence because I don't cut that grass every week and it can get pretty horrible looking, and also the kerb is weed-infested and I don't weed-whack very often.

I used to. I stopped because my neighbours used to invite their entire clan over on a Sunday (my usual grass-cutting day) and they would park over the bits I needed to weed-whack. Then, certain individuals would empty out their ash-trays onto my property line before departing. Some of them would leave other stuff, like beer bottles in the grass, or cigarette packets, or, well, anything their little hearts felt was not appropriate for their cars any more. I was once power washing the fence with detergent and asked them to move their cars (so their paint wouldn't get marked by the splashback) and you'd think that I'd personally threatened to kill each and every firstborn male child in their clan. I can appreciate that it was inconvenient, moving the cars from my side of the road to the other side, forcing an arduous ten-second drive and an almost impossible three-point-turn onto people already exhausted from their trips from Queens. Wbeepers.

I'm seriously planning on putting a sign on my fence that reads : "Neighbors: Because of the amount of illegal dumping and property damage we've experienced over the last few months, I've been forced to position hidden security cameras to cover this area. Please be advised that my entire property line is now under surveillance 24 hours a day, and modify any behavior you don't want on the record accordingly. On the plus side, all acts of vandalism will now be refered to the police and footage of such acts posted to my website for maximum humiliation of the animals involved, so you can sleep easy in your beds."

That'd pay the buggers back for their years of harrasment.

Sunday I used to actually cut my own lawns (as opposed to the grass where people can see it) which had been left for far too long and choked the mower as a result. The day was brightened by the Stevieling and Mrs Stevie opening hostilities upon their return from church, and by my running over a hose and cutting a hole in it. It was, of course, the hose to the sprinkler that reaches the new bald spot in the side verges. I had set the mower to cut closer than usual and hadn't thought about the consequences of that on the other infrastructure.

Oh well. It gave me the chance to get out of the theater of war and go to Home Despot for a repair kit.

I like to use the sort of repair kit (yes, this hose-mowing has happened once or six times before) that comes as a plastic insert and two outer plastic clamshell clamps. The insert is oversize and difficult to fit without Stevie's Magic Method™: a kettle of boiling water.

I cut the hose with my Sears razor shears (a great tool which looks like a pair of heavy-duty pliers. One jaw is a plastic-faced anvil, the other a three-inch razor-sharp blade. These things are perfect for cutting hose with (even better than a lawn mower). Once I had a pair of good straight-cut ends to work with I undid the clamps enough to slide them over the hose ends, then I pushed the insert into the hose ends as far as I could. Picking one end to start with I then slowly heated the pipe with the boiled water, which softens the hose enough that it will swell and allow me to push the insert in more fully. The process was repeated until the insert was fully seated, and then I did the same with the other side of the joint. The last task was to slide up the clamps to the joint and tighten them. Job done, nobody scalded and most importantly, no fingers severed.

Speaking of hoses, earlier in the week I'd noticed that none of the sprinklers were working. I'd turned them off at the faucets during a rainy spell, but was sure I'd turned them back on again four days later.

And I had. It turned out that all four of the little battery operated inline sprinklers I was using had dead batteries in them. I've never seen that happen before, and batteries usually last a season and more. These were changed only a couple of months ago.

I took the four timers into the house and removed the batteries. My first thought was that some water may have leaked into the battery compartments and shorted out the terminals (it's happened) but the batteries were all dry. Once I fitted new batteries, three of the four came back to life as expected, but the fourth just made a high-pitched electronic whistling noise. This was curious because as far as I know there are no audio components inside the timers.

Fortunately, I keep an extra timer on hand for things like this and was able to replace the whistling unit. These timers are fairly good for the money (about 25-30 bux, depending on where I buy them) and typically last for years although I've had one disintegrate after only a season and two broke down after only two seasons.

When I say "disintegrate" I mean that literally. The timers are small, drum-like affairs with a dial and a rotary switch on the top, an inlet and exhaust port on the sides, opposite to each other, and an unscrewable base-plate for getting at the battery. There are no other features. One loads a battery, presses the only button and is greeted by a green flashing LED. One then selects a time corresponding to the nearest hour and presses the button. More green flashing. One then selects the sprinkler start time and presses the button. The LED flashes red, or on newer units, blue, indicating one should select the frequency of watering desired in hours and press the button. Then one gets some more green flashing and sets the duration of the watering period, presses the button and one is off! Simple. Easy to remember.

But remember, these things also spend their time exposed to the elements. They get heated up in the sun, then abruptly cooled when they open their internal valves to do some watering (typically at the hottest time of the day). They get the full value of the sun's ultra-violet rays, always a bugbear for plastics of any kind, which weaken and become brittle as a result. It is because of this, and also because the spring terminals for the battery are under pressure which is transmitted from the (screwed on) baseplete to the (glued on) faceplate that one of my new timers suddenly and unexpectedly ejected its faceplate one day.

I know what you're thinking: But you are handy with tools and enjoy a challenge like this. Why didn't you just fix it and throw it back into use, Stevie?

Well, I would have done just that, but the two little wires that connect the battery to the electronics were pulled from their sockets and I don't know which way round they are supposed to be reconnected. I can just plug them in, but the sockets aren't polarised or called out with paint or anything, so I've been waiting for a unit to go belly-up so I can dissect it and find out what's what.

Which is why I'm not too unhappy this sprinkler timer went south after a mere ten years or so in service. A touch of the razor saw and the sprinkler will soon yield all its secrets to me.

Why did all the batteries go dead together? I don't know. Maybe running the timed valve mechanism without water in it caused the motors to overload.

While I was out getting the repair kit I thought I'd also check into replacing the swimming pool filter with a diatomaceous earth one. The pool has been out of use since the Stevieling poisoned it and I haven't been able to get rid of a slight milkiness that is the result of stuff too fine for the filter cartridge to screen out. This was tested by allowing the pool to settle for a week, at which time it became crystal clear but had a filthy floor, then running the Pool Robot of Extreme Uselessness, which soon had the pool water looking a bit cloudy.

It also jammed up the filter, since I had added to the pool about three doses (way too much) of the magic blue juice of dirt aggregation, a compound that causes microscopic dirt particles to clump together. They clumped enough to hgum up the filter, and a lot of the fine stuff was finally filtered out, but the last of is just won't screen.

I did some research and discovered that sand filters and diatomaceous earth filters, although a lot more involved piping-wise and a lot heavier (of course) can screen out crap ten times smaller than filter cartridges can. This looked promising, so I nipped over to the local pool'n'chemical place and talked it over with one of their managers. I thought that it being the end of the season there might be a considerable reduction in price on these "start of season" type items.

We talked about the various issues, and finally cut to the chase. The manager said that the diatomaceous earth version of the rig would cost about 550 bux all told, and the sand version would cost about 330. I have long schooled my face to remain impassive during opening negotiations so that I can maintain the upper hand in bargaining without looking cheap and blowing the deal. It took all my skill, but my facial muscles bore no trace, of that I am certain, of my inner reaction to this somewhat higher than expected infrastructure cost. I think I might have left the place with my dignity intact had I not involuntarily screamed "How much?" at the top of my lungs.

I sat on the sofa that evening and contemplated the weekend as I watched one of the Inspector Lindley mysteries on PBS. Not much achieved, it was true, but I consoled myself that it would soon be a new week and I could at least return to work.

Once the show was done Mrs Stevie told me to stop crying and go to bed.

Garages: Never Go In Them

Once I'd had time to sit back on a rock-hard train seat and go over events, I realised that I had entirely forgotten to relate the sprinkler's contribution to the story. I'm adding it in today (9/12/07) so if you've read yesterday's version and need a bit more cheering up, you should re-read this entry.

The past weekend was one so packed with incompetence-induced danger and near death experiences that it has taken me 36 hours to calm down/heal up to the point I can speak of the events that took place during it.

Things began (as they so often do) with Mrs Stevie requesting on Friday evening that I get a bloody move on and clean out a space in the garage loft for the Stevieling's crap like I promised. I pondered a while and finally agreed I would start on Saturday if she released the half-nelson she had me in at once.

Saturday

Saturday dawned and I began my day as I traditionally do by drinking a huge cup of tea while watching whatever Japanese Samurai movie is showing on the Obscure Movie Network. Then I ran some errands, and finally, around noon(ish) I was ready to start.

The Plan called for me to empty out the right side of the garage, sort out the crap from the good stuff, throw away the crap¹, shovel up any crap left by Mr Rat², disinfect the floor and replace all the good stuff. This would make space for me to get to the ladder to the loft and enable me to continue work in discarding the "valuables" stored there.

There wasn't room on the (four car) drive to accommodate all the stuff at one go so I decided to tackle it in two stages (not the best plan when it came time to disinfect the floor, but needs must when the Devil has it in for you).

I pulled out an amazing amount of cardboard in the form of flattened boxes that had held Christmas lights, bicycles, storm doors and landscape lights, and binned it. A good start to the operation. Then I removed the 24 foot extending ladder from it's slot on the floor, which entailed having to move all the crap that was on top of it first, which allowed me access to a plethora of old garden tools, lengths of timber, storm doors, sheets of plywood, sheets of masonite, two old doors kept to do duty as trestle tables, a trestle table and four ten-foot long by one foot wide planks of that white el-cheapo knockoff Formica clad chipboard that is used to make naff furniture from. This allowed me to clean off the floor with a shovel and broom and I made up a bucket of hi-test bleach and water and scrubbed the floor good and clean.

Once that was dry I was able to replace the wood, doors, planks etc³ and move on to the second stage. This involved removing a barrel we inherited with the house and had decided to turn into planters next year⁴. I rolled it out of the garage and stood it on end in the driveway. I know it seems a bit of a waste to cut up a perfectly good barrel, but in all honesty this one has seen better days and is only good for Pirate Ambience or planters now. It was used to store some foul-smelling purple liquid I disposed of in a manner likely to have won me a summons had I been spotted at the time. We later got a visit from one of the Genaro kids who claimed it was his dad's homemade wine⁵. Add to this that the outside of the barrel is coated with a fetching pattern of white paint spatters and blue paint overspray from something. Add to that the fact that wine barrels in a real winery only have a limited lifespan, which is many times less than this one held the dubious Vintage Genaro. It really doesn't have much going for it.

I removed all the stuff piled on top of the barrel, dislodging a bottle of Windex which dropped a few inches onto one of the bottles shoulders. The plastic spray bottle, which had been in the garage since about the time dolphins decided that life on land was a big fat nothing and opted to do all their future evolving in the sea, had become brittle and naturally shattered, spilling Windex all over the barrel and the floor. Clearly the anti-handyman demons were awake and alert.

Once the barrel was gone, I discovered two things: Firstly, that it had been wedged against the wall with two examples of the world's biggest turnbuckles. These things look like they might have been used to lift locomotives off the tracks. Secondly: That Mr Rat had used the space behind it for a latrine, and had attempted to nosh on the various delicacies in the vicinity despite the manifest unsuitability of said delicacies for the purposes of consumption. Mr Rat had attempted to dine on two rolls of 6 mm plastic sheet and a bag of potting soil fortifier (a sawdust like substance with no nutritious value I could discern), washing it all down with Fantastik, a household grease-shifting cleanser. Why a bottle of this was behind the barrel is beyond me, since I'm not impressed with the stuff in general, but it no doubt presented the rat with a refreshing beverage with which to wash down his sawdust aû sheet-plastique. I've seen nor heard no sign of the rat by the way, other than the fewmets and results of attempting to eat fundamentally non-edible things in my garage. I'm pretty sure that it eventually quit the place in disgust and was trapped by Crazy Joe⁶.

I cleaned up the floor and scrubbed it with bleach, then had to find something to do while the floor dried.

The barrel was filthy, and I thought I might power wash it, just for giggles. I dug out my "Husky" power washer, bought a couple of years ago when my trusty Karcher finally bit the dust⁷ and a big disappointment to me since. The adjustable nozzle jammed several times and now has adopted an orientation ninety degrees off the best use angle for a start, forcing a painfully unnatural posture when using it to clean a fence or deck. Today, it had been infested with anti-handyman spirits from stem to stern. First I couldn't attach the nozzle no matter how hard I pushed the damned thing into its socket, then the bloody motor wouldn't develop pressure consistently, cutting in and out making for a usable cleaning cycle that was about a second long before the pressure died away and the pump restarted. I tried everything I knew to fix this blasted thing, but it was determined to not be helpful. During one of the attempts to find something obviously not attached properly, the water feed nozzle snapped off and the hose sprayed water all over the place. Luckily I had decided earlier in the day to listen to the excellent "Car Talk" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR, and had wound the driver-side window down so I could use the car radio for that purpose, so much of the spillage was soaked up by the car's upholstery, instrument cluster and carpeting.

I gave up on the pressure washing, and decided to help matters along vis-à-vis the floor drying (which it wasn't) by installing a fan. This worked quite well, but left me with nothing to do but ponder stuff idly. I know what you're thinking: these are perfect conditions for Mr Brain to pull one of his shenanigans. You are not wrong.

I noticed that the small ex-vegetable garden⁸ had become a forest of weeds and sumac saplings, with an average height of about five feet. This was a bit much, and I resolved to take Action at once. I retrieved my hand pruner from the kitchen and sallied forth, but the task was a daunting one. If only there were some way of speeding things up.

There was.

I had owned for some time a perfectly good electric hedge trimmer, bought to deal with some bushtrees in our back yard. I had never actually taken it out of the box in all the years I'd had it, for a very good reason: these tools come factory-infested with the most virulent stripe of anti-handyman demons, and fiasco is sure to eventuate when they are deployed for use. Consider: Do you not know at least one person who has cut through their own extension cord while attempting to use one of these things?

I was nine years old the first time I saw one of these deployed by a neighbour as I walked to school. The man finished off his hedge with a little well-deserved flourish and there was an almighty bang as the evil-spirit infested thing cut through his extension cord.

At the time I laughed because, callow youth that I was, I simply assigned the accident to the poor man's incompetence. What did I know of hedge-trimmers? As the years rolled on I began to realise it simply wasn't possible for all those cut cords to be due to the lack of owner-operator brain cells. Something eldritch and not explainable by science⁹ was clearly going on. Add the demon-infestation to The Mr Brain Issue and you have quite a potential for cock-ups. I know a no-win situation when I see one.

However, I thought about it for a bit and came to the conclusion that provided I kept my mind on the job and was actively trying not to cut my own extension cord in two, I should be able to press the hedge-trimmer into service for mass overgrown weed and triffid clearance with little danger.

A sad mistake.

I had to use the cord currently supplying power to the fan, but that was alright since the floor was mostly dry by now. I unpacked the tool and plugged it in. I switched it on and observed the snippy parts work. I checked the extension cord was not near the blade. I began to trim weeds.

It was, at first, a great triumph. The weeds fell like, well, weeds and the tool showed no tendency to generate a fiasco. I walked deeper into the overgrowth at which point the evil anti-handyman spirits caused the cord to pull out of the tool. And again. And again.

In order to thwart this petty behaviour I gathered a loop of cord and re-examined the arrangement with a view to avoiding a cord-cutting debacle. It all looked well and good, and the weeds retreated in disorder in the face on my superior technology.

I finally reached the sumac tree growing in the corner and decided I couldn't expect the hedge-trimmer to cut the main trunk. It was just too thick and there were specific warnings against cutting over-thick stuff with the tool in the instruction booklet. I decided to cut off all the thinner branches, which would be possible if I turned the blade so it was cutting vertically (not recommended in the instructions). It worked rather well, and as I cut off the penultimate branch I gave a little flourish. The tool ground to a halt.

I checked the swimming pool and the filter motor was dead too, indicating that the GFI had tripped. I asked Mrs Stevie to reset it, which she did, but the hedge-trimmer refused to start. I thought I might have somehow damaged the mechanism, though the blade didn't have any obvious damage showing. Then I saw the cord had been neatly cut about eighteen inches from the end, and was hanging by a shred of insulation.

Bah.

Properly chastened, I returned to the garage and replaced all the stuff that I had on the driveway, then went indoors to lick my wounds. This served two purposes. It gave me some much needed salt, and told me to get a shower in no uncertain terms. The loft-clearance would have to wait until Sunday.

Sunday

Sunday dawned and it was back to work. I pulled out the mower, the halogen work lights, the sack truck, the antique kid's peddle car, some boxes of crap and finally, Troll the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness, and positioned them around the driveway, then got to work. I also fished out from the back of the garage a box of broken glass, which I tossed into the garage entrance for dumping into the recycling bin after breaking a couple of big pieces up with a block of wood. It also contained a shirtload of galvanised steel washers. What I had thought to be a mouse, and now believe to be the rat, had attempted to eat these washers and had succeeded only in destroying the box they came in. I had transferred them to a bucket, which had been knocked over into the box o'glass shards. This box was a handy place to dump broken glass as I came upon it some years ago, and I had just forgotten to throw it out at the time. Now I needed a way to get the washers back out without slicing my hands to ribbons.

The answer was one of the magnet stacks I used to create the bewildering super powers when in my Mighty Magnetotron¹⁰ persona. I wrapped the magnets in a brown paper bag, then used that to collect the washers from the glass shards. It was a great triumph, if I do say so myself.

While I was at it I moved a couple of short rolls (about twenty feet or so) of the plastic-wrapped fiberglass insulation I found that will do nicely to replace most of that lost (from the bathroom ceiling during Domestic Flood Xena) to the front of the garage. I cannot seem to find it in the stores and its plastic wrapper - which helps prevent fiberglasser's rash - and kraft paper backing is perfect for the job. I also moved some rare, out-of-print games that a friend had given me when he moved to Atlanta a few weeks ago to the same area temporarily.

No sooner had I done this than the sprinkler that waters the garden and the very end of the lawn fired up to remind me I hadn't turned off the valve. It is a heavy-duty "Rainbird" type that turns by means of a percussive swing arm powered by the stream of water. By sheer chance it was facing the garage, the very left-most end of its travel and the trigger point for the reversing mechanism. Also, for maximum fun, the mechanism decided to park for a bit without moving, no matter how many times the swing arm was hit with high-pressure water - a process that not only powers the turning action but also quite incidentaly causes the spray to be momentarily widened in effect¹¹.

I was looking the other way when the Sprinkler of Inconvenient Wetness fired up, and at first Mr Brain could not, or would not believe what the Eyeball Twins were reporting¹², so it took a few seconds for me to act. I leapt over to the inline valve and shut it off with a little twist and a big Word of Power. Then I inspected the damage. I dried off the games with a paper towel I had forgotten to leave inside the house, but the insulation had to be left in the sun in the hope the kraft paper would dry before the damp penetrated and got caught in the plastic wrapper (like happened with the original in Domestic Flood Xena). Many and terrible were the incantations at that time, and passing church-goers with small children did flee in horror before them.

I climed into the loft.

The first thing I did after that was make a note about the eight citronella torch inserts sitting in the loft. These are about the size of a tin of baked beans and have a conical cap with a wick in it. they are full of citronella oil, which is like scented kerosene, and fall over and leak really easily. The second thing I did was to knock them over and spill citronella oil all over the newly cleaned floor, forcing me to deploy the cat litter of oil absorbtion and also some swear words of anger channeling.

Then I junked out some boat seat cushions Mrs Stevie had decided she needed when her dad junked out his boat, some wood shelving I had put up there years ago and forgotten and some timber that used to be a swing I built for the Stevieling when she was four.

I was happy to see that one of the timbers was a cedar 2x4 left over from the deck project ten years ago (what you might call a deckade). The back yard cedar fence has a rotten top rail and I needed a replacement for it. I was less pleased to discover that while the fence required a straight piece of timber, this 2x4 was rifled.

In two directions

Well, the day wore on with me transferring art treasures from the loft into the garbage and working up a sweat of classic proportions. It was very hot and humid on Sunday and the environment seemed to trap the air so it could be superheated under the roof of the garage. Dehydration was a constant problem, and I put it down to that that I let down my guard and allowed Mr Brain to try and kill me again.

The ladder I used for accessing the loft was one I inherited with the house. It was all wood, and wracked badly when used. I cut it in half, put one half in storage and deployed the other as a loft ladder. Of course, I had to do something about the wracking. My solution to this vexing problem was to cut two pieces of plywood and nail them, one across the top of the ladder, one across the bottom. The plywood was the width of the ladder and about a foot tall, giving plenty of bracing. The only fly in the ointment was that I had to be careful to use the second rung when ascending or descending and not stand on the edge of the plywood by mistake as it could detach from the ladder with disastrous consequences, since I had used nails and not screws to fasten the plywood sheet to the ladder siderails. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Without really concentrating I stepped up with my left foot, placed my hands (clad in nice slippery leather work gloves) on the ladder to steady myself and raised my right foot to continue my ascent. Just before my right foot reached the rung, the plywood's nails unlatched from the wood of the ladder and my left foot was carried through the ladder while my center of gravity shifted with no regard for my safety. This happened so fast I was denied the chance to reinforce my grasp on the ladder with my teeth and my leather gloves slipped off it, allowing me to fall in a graceful arc to the concrete floor some three feet below. I yelled out an inspiring cry, a challenge to the forces of evil at work in the universe if you will, then crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust. I might have been seriously injured, but I had the good fortune to land squarely upon the box of broken glass shards, which deformed under me rather like the steel of a car deforms in a crash, the glass inside absorbing the energy of my fall by breaking up into even smaller pieces. It was all very invigorating.

I lay on the ground and pondered the matter of the box of glass under my back. It would be of passing interest, I thought, if I were to stand and find myself resembling Godzilla with a twin row of glass "scales" projecting from my back. Always assuming that I still had command of my various bits. There is, I remembered, an awful lot of important wiring running down the average back, and nature hadn't arranged for resilience in the circuitry in the event of a break.

Well, lying around pondering the whichness of the why wasn't getting the job done, and Mrs Stevie was due home from her church picnic and would take a dim view of any horseplay while on the job. I leapt to my feet over the course of two or three minutes, checked my back for glass then lurched around the garage for a bit to reacquaint my body with the idea of upright ambulation. Then I did what anyone under those circumstances would do: I grabbed the ladder and Mr Tiger Saw and turned it into matchwood before it could do any more damage. During this process I stood on the traitorous plywood sheet and drove a nail through the sole of my shoe, narrowly missing driving it through the underlying sole of my foot. Another customer for Mr Tiger Saw then.

I decided that natural incompetence, Mr Brain's perfidy and the ever-present anti-handyman demons had taken the day and suspended operations in the garage, possibly forever. I informed Mrs Stevie when she returned home that she could finish moving the various bits of crap, mostly the Stevieling’s old rocking horse, around to make room for more crap, and spent the rest of the day cutting up deadfalls so the garden refuse guys would actually take them away. In this I was ably aided and abetted by Messrs Workmate and Tiger Saw, to whom I should like to give my thanks.

Then it was off to Home Despot to buy a DIY socket end to repair my extension cord with, which I did despite the dire predictions of failure, death and destruction from the resident eletrical department Doomsayer and returned home to fit it.

It was, for once, a fairly businesslike thing, as aftermarket plugs in the USA so often aren't. The socket opened up like a clamshell and revealed a straightforward screw terminal arrangement and a two-jaw, reversible cord-grip. It was the work of a few minutes to fit the cable to it, but I felt the cord-grip was too agressive in the best-fit configuration (the other one would let in water, a definite no-no), so I took the jaws down to my basement workshop to see if I could widen the profile a bit.

And lost one of the jaws when it pinged out of the vise and shot across the floor, never to be seen again.

Knowing that once again I had been driven from the field of endeavour by the cruel and sardonic anti-handyman spirits, I hoisted a white flag and retreated to the shower.

It was several hours later that I realised that although I had consumed about three pints of iced tea since my shower, I hadn’t peed once. I was so dehydrated the liquid was being absorbed by the manly Stevieframe before my kidneys could get at it.

Either that, or my kidneys went south in the Loft Ladder of Certain Death Fiasco.

1. As opposed to the usual scheme of just putting it all back in the garage again when I was finished ↑
2. Who thankfully hasn't actually been found to be resident but who did grace us (apparently) with a visit in which he enjoyed Chateau Stevie's native French Cuisine Signature Dish: Escargot De La Jardin and used the place to deposit several dozen times his own weight in fecal matter ↑
3. But not the ladder, which even when collapsed down to 12 feet needs almost the full length of the garage to lay down in. 'tis a mighty thing, with a load-bearing capacity of 250 lbs and a rope loop you can pull to shoot the end up into the sky - which makes it almost impossible to control and on at least one occasion has precipitated a fiasco of the most publicly embarrassing kind as it fell on me. I've used it a couple of times to access dead tree branches and the chimney. Every time I've been absolutely terrified. It is a long drop to the ground for the top of the thing ↑
4. Mr Stevie doesn't know about the "next year" bit. Mum's the word ↑
5. Wine made "Genaro Fashion" (ibid). the mind boggles, the stomach churns ↑
6. Current theory is that the guy at the other end of the side street adjacent to the fabulaous Chateau Stevie who renovates old classic cars in his shop was the source of the rat in question. The guy had a number of wrecks in an overgrown area to the side of his garage. The land was cleared, possibly at the militant request of his new neighbours who put a gazillion bux into renovating their new home. Everyone thinks the rats came from there, moved up the street by way of the nitwit who left out open cans of catfood for the strays in the area, and on to Crazy Joe's other neighbour's land where they established an underground sanctum sanctorum beneath his shed. Joe eventually broke the news to me that he had been catching rats on his land (after things got so bad he called in the professionals) which was the first I had heard of it. I checked the property for burrows, warned everyone to be on the lookout, but no-one ever saw a rat. The rat in the garage was singular and remarkably dimwitted in that it tried to eat a variety of non food-like stuff in there and completely missed a box of microwave popcorn that I had stupidly left in there last year when my Dungeons and Dragons manly high-stakes poker game was disbanded. ↑
7. I wanted another Karcher, which had given me good service even if I had expected a longer service life from it than I got. I needed a replacement in a hurry and found that Home Despot had discontinued their relationship with Karcher and started one with Husky. This, by the way, is fairly typical with DIY centers. No sooner do you develop a liking for a product than they stop selling them ↑
8. More properly: vegetable ex-garden I suppose ↑
9. Or by the sorry excuse we have for scientists today, who are far more interested in reclassifying Pluto as a not-planet and Lake Huron as an unlake than actually getting their fingers out and doing science ↑
10. I would shove a stack of magnets up each sleeve and stand beside colleagues, declaring "I am The Mighty Magnetotron. Bow before my awesome powers, mortal!". Their unruly cries of "Fat Chance" would be silenced as I waved my arms and their computer monitors went all gooey, like a Dali watch or something from a sixties movie about LSD. It was great fun until the bastard bosses replaced the CRTs with non magnetic field sensitive LCD screens ↑
11. It is this very effect that makes adjusting the things so "refreshing" and that killed my cell-phone's internal charger at the start of the sprinkling season ↑
12. Vast incoming streams of life-sustaining but insulation- and game-wrecking water ↑

Well, I Should Hope So

I've spent the holiday weekend, along with large parts of the previous week, suffering from an ear infection, a sore throat and cough.

It quite put a damper on the visit to Philadelphia (of which more in a later post) and I finally sought the aid of Doc Rubberglove, who gave me some drops for the ear and some mild sleeping pills so I could get some damned sleep (a commodity in short supply of late).

Yesterday I was idly reading through the list of cautions on the pill bottle. Number one was a doozey

"May cause drowsiness"

The Long Island Rail Road/ Mineola Civil Engineers Take My Breath Away

This weekend, service on all lines passing through Mineola will be disrupted because they are taking all the tracks up.

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
Why are they taking up all the tracks?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
Why, so they can put in a truss bridge where the old Roslyn Road grade crossing was.

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
So they are going to bridge the tracks with a road bridge? Why do the tracks have to come up for that?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
They are not bridging the tracks with the road, they are bridging the road with the tracks.

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
But...isn't the road at the same level as the track bed? How will that work?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
Yes. They plan to dig down under the iron bridge they will install this weekend and take the road down under the tracks and back up again on the other side. It'll be great not to have to wait at that darned crossing, won't it?

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
But..

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
Look! All the work is easy to see! They've already dug the holes either side of the tracks for heaven's sake! Just look next time you go through Mineola.

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
But isn't Mineola notorious for its bad drainage?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
Yeeeeees...?

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
And Aren't these "holes" the ones that filled to brimming with rainwater three times this month, forcing the construction teams to flee before the coastguard had to be called out?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
I hardly see what...

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
Won't all the water that normally pools all over Mineola during a mild drizzle now drain into the under-bridge roadway?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
What are you getting at?

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
Don't we call a pit dug into a badly-drained area a sump?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
Would you mind coming to the point? I'm a busy person you know.

Fleet Scribbler, Reporter, Daily Stevie:
Are you completely, totally, barking mad?

Mr N. Bonaparte, Spokesdrone for the Faceless Goons In Charge:
I don't know. We need to comission a study on that question

Good Magic You Can Do In The Office

Frank the Crickdancer¹ has a can of hard candy that he allows everyone to nosebag from at need.

The candies are of various unconvincing "fruit" flavours, and come in a variety of colours. In any one can, about half the candies will be red and the rest made up of yellow, green and the ultra rare white ones that are everyone's favourite (naturally).

Frank pioneered this very welcome social benefit program some years ago, about the time I came back to work in this hellhole at this site, and I was fascinated at the lengths people would go to to secure the white candies, and the quality of their complaints once that colour was exhausted and they had to make do with yellow, green or red ones. At the time I was also turning my spare time to mastering some basic close-up magic skills such as the French Drop, the Gypsy Switch, the Glimpse and the Warm Frankfurter². Mr Brain long ago throttled back all restraint when it comes to practical jokes and so the stage was thus set for merriment and amateur conjuring shenanigans, with the aim of blowing what passes for Frank's mind.

I bought three cans of the same candies, and separated out the white ones. Each day I would wait for a good moment when Frank was reading from his terminal, palm a white candy, walk over to his can and open it, fish inside and declare loudly "oooh! White one!". Frank would look over and see me pull one of the highly prized candies from the tin with seeming ease. Other people were rooting through the tin for several seconds to achieve the same result of course, but somehow I was able to open the tin and find a white candy just sitting there waiting for me.

Each night, once I had the office to myself, I would add a few of the other colours, mainly red, back into Frank's can from my collection. The effect (which he didn't seem to notice) was that the level of candy stayed about constant for over a week but that the can was gradually becoming all-red country as the other colours were eaten by our freeloading colleagues.

Frank also liked the other colours, and was himself begining to have to root in the tin for a considerable time to uncover a yellow or green candy. I however always opened the can, exclaimed "Oooh! White one!" and plucked the shangri-la candy off the top of the pile with no effort.

Frank began to take notice. Two weeks went by in which it seemed that no-one but me could get a white candy from the tin no matter how they searched it, yet all I did was open the lid to find the object of desire sitting right there. Frank began to puzzle aloud over it with the freeloaders who came to search for white but left sucking red.

Finally, Frank's can was down to eight red candies rattling loosely in the tin with plenty of empty space between them. Anyone who opened the tin could plainly see that no white candies were present. It was time for the Whammy.

I waited until Frank and I were the only two in the office, and asked him if I could have a candy. He, of course, said yes (I've never heard Frank deny anyone candy) and checked the can contents with a smile on his face. I opened the tin under his watchful stare, exclaimed "Oooh! White one!" and pulled a white candy from it. I held it long enough for him to see it really was white, and popped it into my mouth.

Frank's reaction was a thing of beauty. He jerked backwards in his chair so hard he almost fell out of it. His eyes actually bugged out of their sockets³. He spluttered. He grabbed the can from my hand and looked madly into it and then at me several times, all the time making "Wha wha wha?" noises.

Penn and Teller are absolutely right. Using cheesy magic tricks to explode your friends' frontal lobes is just about the most entertaining use of your time in the whole universe.

1. Frank teaches people "Irish Folk Dancing". I asked him once if it was anything like "Riverdance". He said: "No, it is traditional stepdancing. Less flamboyant. Folk-dance." I said that a more rural, less flamboyant version of Riverdance would be "Crickdance". It stuck ↑
2. A saucy sleight of hand of my own devising that was tried once, and only once, in a darkened cinema upon an unsuspecting Mrs Stevie ↑
3. Although I'd read the phrase many times in books, I'd never actually seen anyone do that before. It quite turned my stomach and almost ruined the trick ↑

Weather Considered As A Metaphor For the American Condition

Why is is raining?

Why is it so cold even I am begining to consider wearing a jacket?

When the son of Osama Bin Laden has already said that the murderous pigfbleeper only uses disposable one-use cell phones, how is tapping my land-line sans warrant helping to catch him?

How are we ever going to be able to explain Guantanamo Bay to our grandchildren?

Romance Chez Stevie

The Stevieling has been packed off to confirmation camp, a week of calisthenics, theme parks and brutal indoctrination at the hands of organised religion¹.

No sooner was the little sod darling safely packed in the minibus than Mrs Stevie cast a look in my direction and said that now we were alone, we could "do stuff".

I was puzzled. Rain had soaked the ground for days, so mowing the lawn was precluded. All the dishes were in the dishwasher. I knew for a fact I wasn't allowed to fiddle with the laundry after an incident last Tuesday involving some highly coloured polo shirts and a bottle of chlorine bleach. What on earth could she be hinting at?

Mrs Stevie reached out towards my face. I parried her with the hook-shaped steel bar I lock across my car's steering wheel² and yelled my signature war cry³ all the time watching for her next attack. Mrs Stevie used some harsh words on me, and I realised she was attempting to open negotiations of an intimate kind rather than trying to kill me again.

This was unexpected, but not unplanned for. I have many contingency plans for various eventualities laid by, and although I had given this one a low probability of arising I had allowed for the possibility and was prepared.

Once home, Mrs Stevie said "What's your pleasure?" and I promptly handed her a thick manilla folder with that very thing spelled out in terms that brooked no ambiguity. Mrs Stevie read the first three pages, which detailed the Elizabethan backstory her character should be familiar with and some of the pretend "Laws" my stern Witchfinder character would be holding her under, examined two of the diagrams and the list of accessories required, went bright red and yelled "never!" just as I entered the room with some of the wardrobe items.

I was disappointed, and not a little put out that she hadn't voiced her objection until after I had begun getting dressed, but my plans included this contingency and I promptly handed her a well-stuffed legal envelope containing "scenario 'b'".

I could tell Mrs Stevie was intrigued by the notion of taking the role of an ingénue wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille, but felt that I had perhaps overstepped her suspension of disbelief by placing her character in the same cell as the infamous Marquis De Sade (to be played by yours truly), two quarts of hot honey and some anachronistic technology when she shrilled "In your dreams!"

In rapid succession and increasing stridency she dismissed elaborate fantasies based on Flash Gordon, The Matrix, The Story of O, Battlestar Galaxative, Lord of the Rings and Night of the Living Dead.

I admit to being a little put out by her sustained negativity. After all, it was her idea to "do stuff".

Eventually I twigged, and suggested a nice restaurant meal, to which she readily acquiesced. Of course, she whined all afternoon about some of the material I had given her. It's her own fault.

She should have just said "Let's eat" at the start.

1. For given values of organised. These are Lutherans we are talking about, after all ↑
2. In the ludicrous belief that the thieves will not figure out for themselves that a small slot can be cut in the steering wheel and the hook released prior to car theft ↑
3. "Help!" ↑

Bad Magic

I was "fortunate" to catch a segment on the Sci-Fi channel a couple of days ago, featuring this Derren Brown chap, who "they" claim can do amazing things seemingly by mind control. Given all the hype this bloke has had over the last month, I was expecting a baffling but entertaining few minutes of conjuring distraction. Hah

The trick as advertised: Brown would pick Simon Pegg's¹ ideal birthday gift without being told. The selection would aslo be written down, put in a sealed envelope and kept by Pegg for the week before the program was filmed, so we could check it wasn't a cheap trick. Sounds great, no? The stuff of great magic.

What really happened: Brown did a long spiel about how he gets his "marks" to change their mind about what they want and pick something he, Brown, has selected instead. Simon Pegg was asked what he wanted. He said a BMX bike. A red one. The box is opened and the red bike is produced. The signed, sealed envelope is produced, and proves to contain a letter, written in what Pegg describes as his own handwriting, that says "Leather Jacket". Brown insists that Pegg originally wanted a leather jacket but had his mind controlled to pick the bike.

As he explains this, the video of his spiel is re-run with selected subtitles pulled up to show that the message "Red BMX Bike" was hidden all over the place in it. Exit Pegg, wheeling the bike and saying "why I would choose a leather jacket is beyond me. I have loads of them."

I hope, for Brown's sake, that the rest of his act is better than this, 'cos this was a stinker. Even the Pegg wasn't convinced,as his comment shows².

What I think the clever part was: Brown being able to duplicate Pegg's handwriting. Even cleverer would be to somehow get Pegg to write "Leather Jacket" himself, though that would be a bit dodgy unless Pegg is in on the trick from the get-go (then, why go to all the trouble of sealed notes?).

How I think the trick was done: Pegg wrote down "Red BMX Bike" and sealed the envelope. The envelope was gipsy-switched³ with one containing the "Leather Jacket" note. Pegg signs envelope (we didn't see this bit happening so I can't be more precise). Now all brown has to do is buy the bike, wrap it and book the studio time.

Look, getting together with the actor a week before is OK. The trick can still be a stunner at that point. Selecting the ideal gift: A great (if old) effect. Socks off all round. The trick was busted with the lame, totally obvious "changed mind" gimmick. The same device is used by psychics (I was going to write "fake psychics" but really, why waste the font on a redundant adjective?) and is called "one ahead". If memory serves you can find out how to do that trick in Penn and Teller's excellent "How to Play With Your Food".

I can't see that anyone would be fooled by this awful trick, but if you were, please drop me a line. If enough people are that conjuring-trick blind that this was entertaining for them, I may have a future in television.

1. The actor from "Shawn of the Dead" ↑
2. It goes without saying that Pegg didn't select "Leather Jacket" as an ideal birthday gift, Brown did ↑
3. Or switched in some other fashion. The Gipsy Switch⁴ can be learned in all its glory by purchasing and studying The Klutz Book of Magic ↑
4. Along with a bunch of other stuff that will knock this stunt of Brown's flat on its backside ↑

Status Report

Pool water: Opaque1. Foot: Infected2. Ear: Blocked, Whistling3. Stevieling: Full of the Joys of Spring4. Mrs Stevie: Militant5.

So that's all right then

1. New filter ($54.38) obviously isn't working properly at all ↑
2. Prescription anti-Alberta Trench-Foot medicine supplies running low ↑
3. Again ↑
4. The attentive reader will note that it is actually late summer. I can't wait for the start of the school year to catch her by surprise (again) ↑
5. Mrs Stevie recently hit a milestone, age-wise. The Stevieling was, for once, paying attention and reminded her mother of the exact count involved as part of the appeasement gift-giving ceremonies. All gifts subsequently judged unsuitable for assuaging the wrath of the goddess. Well done that child ↑

Glug

During the early-late hours of Wednesday a storm of epic-ish proportions swept through New York, pausing on its way to dump a few inches of rain on or about the Steviemanse.

Awakening at around 6 am to bursts of lightning and crashings of thunder, I had the thought that I might have left the lid off the 5 gallon bucket I use to store various pool chemicals, and that once full of water a serious amount of unscheduled chemistry might get itself underway. Action was called for.

I leapt from the bed and fantically sought out a pair of swimming trunks¹ and an old pair of sneakers, then de-alarmed the doors and ventured out into the vertical tsunami-in-progress. In a matter of seconds I was waterlogged and probably doing a passable impression of a Notre Dame style Gargoyle with water sluicing from my body any way it could².

The concrete patio was awash as the pipe that moves the water way from the base of the downspout was overwhelmed. Probably blocked, but also it was never designed to convey the truly staggering volume of water that was being pointed at it. I took a look, and moved on.

Once in the vicinity of the pool I was temporarily out of the rain because of the young maple tree growing next to it. I muttered a few light-hearted swear words as I contemplated the benefits of being (relatively) dry at the expense of possible shredding due to shrapnel should the tree be struck by lightning, much of which was flying around the sky in a wanton fashion at that moment.

I found the bucket lid securely fastened, thanked whoever had had the foresight to put the lid back on and turned to go back into the house.

Which was when I noticed the waterfall sluicing down the siding from what was obviously a blocked gutter. Magic. I shouldn't have been surprised. Every bloody time the weather gets hyperpluvious this damned gutter ends up getting blocked.

The now almost continuous lightning precluded getting out a ladder and fixing things the right way, so I put a hastily formulated "plan B" into operation. Grabbing the downspout firmly in both hands and muttering a small number of swear words designed to ward off a lightning strike, I rapidly lifted and dropped the pipe so as to displodge the blockage.

A cascade of crap-laden water dropped on my head from above, but the flow from the downspout did increase a little. I tried again. More freezing water with a soupçon of rotten leaves aû roof-shingle grit fell upon me from on high, but this was no time to focus on the negative aspects of the process: more and more water was issuing from the downspout! One more shake would get the wretched thing working again and prevent the house from flooding (again). From some well of inner strength barely suspected, I summoned one more burst of resourcefulness and gave the pipe another shake.

Which was when the gutter, overloaded with freezing cold water, twigs, rotten leaves and about a hundredweight of grit washed off the roof shingles, overcame the relutance of the securing spikes to let go and tore from the soffit, releasing much of its bounty o'er the Steviebod.

"How refreshing!" I screamed to the heavens³, before grabbing the hosepipe and making my way back though the maelstrom to the flooded patio where I attempted to wash out the vegetation blocking the Pipe o' Drainage. In this I was almost entirely unsuccessful, so I threw down the hose in disgust and went back inside to get a shower.

I'd never noticed before, but roof-shingle grit is one of the stickiest substances I've ever come across. It took nearly 30 minutes to wash it out of the various places it had become lodged, by which time I was in no mood for nonsense. Fortunately, during this whole debacle, Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling had departed for places unknown, so the major sources of household nonsense were mercifully absent.

I dressed and made my way from the house to the car. The rain had stopped and the sun had come out in fine form, boiling the water from the swampy landscape and turning what should have been a less humid morining into a tropical hell-hole of humid horror. I took refuge in the fabulous Steviemobile, started the engine and dialed the A/C up to 11. The humidity was sucked from the vehicle as volumes of frigid, dry air flowed into the cockpit. I felt my skin dry. I felt my clothes dry. I felt my hair dry. I felt the temporary crown let go of the tooth it was mounted on.

So it was off to Doc Tugmolar to get it put back in again. While I was there I insisted on a sanding and grinding to make the damn thing less inimical to the soft tissues of my mouth. He grumbled and complained, but humoured me once I mentioned the small matter of the outstanding bill.

I thought about going into work afterward, it being only about noon by now, but the LIRR was in an advanced state of chaos again (Lake Mineola was just one of their problems that day) and the entire subway system had closed down in sympathy, so I decided to fix the gutters instead.

1. It being light outside, and Mrs Stevie having made her views on adpoting a nil-attire approach to yardwork clear during the Domestic Flood Xena Fiasco ↑
2. And several ways I wished it wouldn't ↑
3. In case the neighbours were watching. Appearances must be maintained at all costs ↑

Fun At The Dentist

The tooth that I recently had root canalled has been giving my gyp again.

For the last two months I've been able to crunch ice cubes with no problem, but the merest sideways pressure on the tooth has caused me some pain. I eventually went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago, and was fobbed off with some prescription strength mouthwash that gave me a sore throat and some story about "ligaments", but only after the dentist on duty (not my regular guy) had spent a few minutes trying to lift the crown off again with a slide hammer. She was unsuccessful in her bid to take off the crown, but completely successful in driving me mad with pain and in getting co-authorship rights on several new swear words.

I gave the mouthwash a week, and the tooth another, chewing mostly on the other side of my mouth, but to be honest, the pain only went away because nothing pressed on the side of the tooth. Once it did, it was another trip to ouch city. Action was called for.

I happened to be in the area of the dentist on Saturday and, although I was in my yardwork togs and hadn't cleaned my teeth since breakfast, I popped in to make an appointment. The dentist's staff instgated a different plan, and whisked me into a chair where I tried to escape pleading other appointments but was told I would be waiting "about two minutes" to see the dentist.

Ten minutes later the dentist came in and had a look. He said he wanted to lift the crown, and before I could gainsay him he had Mr Slide-Hammer in my mouth and had applied several hefty, agonising tugs to the crown, which eventually let go of the tooth stub and allowed my head to slam back into the chair pillow. He said he'd be back in a few minutes, and if I could hang around he'd put in a temporary crown. "You shouldn't be here more than 40 minutes" he said.

That was the last I saw of him for almost an hour.

When he finally did arrive, he said he wanted to rebuild the crown and that he felt that would fix my problem. Until that date, though, he would manufature a temporary crown from some sort of body-filler putty. Which he did, and a mere two hours after going into the dentist I was allowed back into the wild.

The new temporary crown is made of something that has odd properties. When wet with saliva it is mirror smooth, but when washed in water or any other beverage it takes on the texture of sandpaper, and has turned the side of my tongue to raw hamburger. On Sunday I was so pissed off that I took some 600 grit emery paper, wound it round a Q-Tip and attempted some D.I.Y. grinding of the surface. It had no effect, except to make my mouth taste of 3-in-1 oil owing to the fact the emery paper was torn from a sheet that had been used to remove some flood-induced rust on a tool. My method includes wetting the wet-and-dry abrasive with oil. This method is not suitable for filing teeth it would seem.

The temporary crown is otherwise a fab thing. I am able to eat with it just as I could with the permanent crown, and I can clean and floss it like a regular tooth too.

And it hurts when I press on the side, just like it did before the dentist "repaired" things.

Commute Cock-Up

This morning I actually managed to catch the 8:01 train that takes me directly to Brooklyn without the tedious need to change trains at Jamaica. I was, I thought, going to be early to work for once this week.

Well, that was the plan.

It survived contact with real life for about 45 minutes, just long enough for our engineer to spot the dead body lying at the side of the tracks and bring our train to a halt.

Apparently, maintenance crews had reported a guy stealing cable from the tunnels that morning, and had given chase but had lost contact with the theiving git and given up the search. As a precaution, our train's engineer was asked to reduce speed through that section of the tunnels and report any dangling or otherwise damaged cables he could see. We never found out if he saw any cable, because the shock of seeing the body caused him quite a bit of anguish.

The railroad, having finally been informed of the situation (there was initially some trouble getting radio contact with the higher echelons) promptly suspended service on both tracks, shut down the third rail on ours and thereby stranded us with no air conditioning while we waited for police to arrive, which took another twenty minutes. During this time the high command sent the driver and another crewman out to ascertain whether the idiot corpse has become unliving as a result of being hit by a train or by touching the third rail. From what I could overhear, which was just about everything since I was seated behind the cab and no-one was keeping their voices down, the dead man had suffered massive head trauma from what appeared to be contact with a fast moving train. That said, the body was wedged between the third rail and the wall and there was a definite stench of burned hair in the air. I'm told this was fortunate, as the ex-thief stank to high heaven and most of the way back. Whether the nitwit was struck by a train, then incinerated by a spot of third rail contact, was electrocuted and fell into the path of a train post mortem or was simply struck by a train while something else fell on the third rail and burned I don't know¹.

Each time the crew opened the door to the cab, which at this time was configured to block the forward view, there would be a surge of gawkers trying to get a glimpse of the horror. Periodically, this not being a problem directly attributable to the LIRR and therefore something they could talk about, we got informed that we were waiting for the police. The guard spoke of "a fatality on the tracks". I pondered over the question of when we began using this term as a euphamism for "body". After all, what the guard was really saying was "There's a dead idiot on the tracks". Not much of an earth shattering revelation I agree, but Mr Brain was just enfatalitying time. More waiting in a steadily warming train. More promises of police.

Who eventually arrived in force, and who required another thirty minutes to properly assess the scene. While this was happening, the crew announced that we would soon be running backwards to East New York where we would be transferred to another train, which would run down the other track. The other track still had power, but no trains were yet allowed down it on account of there were now about fifteen people running around out there, a maintenance crew, some EMTs and a fire marshall having arrived in theater during the course of events.

Eventually we did move, west towards Brooklyn rather than back east to East New York. I smiled, which attracted a comment from a fellow passenger as to why. I explained that I had just remembered that the last three times I'd been held up on an LIRR train, a plan had been formulated, explained several times at great length, then the train had eventually simply gone where it was supposed to in the first place. From this we could infer that the LIRR's stated policy during emergencies is to formulate plans as camoflage for waiting until whatever problem is plaguing them to go away, then carry on as normal.

When we got to Brooklyn, I was amused to see how many people checked out the front of the train for blood. Those not in the first car would not know that the fatality was not caused by our own train, but had just been found by it. There seemed to be an air of disappointment about those who couldn't see any hard evidence of the grisly death.

So it was that although I took an earlier train than any I caught this week, I ended up getting to work two hours late thanks to an idiot with an eye for the main chance but none for the trains.

1. I don't care either, since I think that it was just come-uppance for a thief who was endangering my life by compromising the electrical integrity of whatever it was. Block detection? Signaling? Communications? Whatever it was, it was needed for whatever job it was installed for and any light-fingered git endangering my life by nicking bits of it got what was coming ↑

Pool Fun

I got a phone call last night as I was passing through Hicksville en route to the fabulous Steviemanse. 'Twas Mrs Stevie, who wanted to know if I was going to join her and the Stevieling for a "family swim" in the pool when I got home.

This transparent attempt to assuage my wrighteous wrath over the poisoning of the pool by the Stevieling was tempting, if only I could confirm one thing.

"Is the water clear yet?" I asked dubiously, knowing that it took three days and much effort on my part to clarify the bugger when I kick-started the pool this season.

"The Stevieling says so" answered Mrs Stevie, which reassured me not at all.

I eventualy arrived home and donned swimming gear in the hope that the pool had fixed itself in spite of the attempts to kill it, and found the womenfolk a-frolic in the water. The Stevieling was vacuuming again. This time she had assembled the equipment in such a way as to guarantee air would be drawn into the system. I attached the hoses properly with a growl and took a look at the water. The bottom of the pool was a misty blur, obscured for the most part by milky particulate matter worse if anything than yesterday.

"Did you not notice how cloudy the water is?" I sighed. "I'm not getting into that, and if you take my advice you'll leave it and get a shower ASAP".

Mrs Stevie ceased her youthfull frollicking, looked hard at the water, let out a squeak and exited pool right, followed by the perpetrater of the pool poisoning. I did some checking. The filter pump was running but the water pressure it was building was poor. I diagnosed a blocked filter and removed the cartridge for cleaning.

Mrs Stevie, sensing a need for hitherto absent middle management, came over to advise me on how to do the job. I pointed out to her the green-black folds of the filter, then spent about two minutes washing off one fold to expose the underlying white filter accordion pleat. I pointed out the existence of about two hundred similar folds around the circumference of the cartridge cylinder, and asked her to estimate how long she thought it would take me to get the filter clean enough to effectively remove the rubbish from the pool. I pointed out that the last time I had had a filter this badly clogged, I had ended up buying a new filter. As she opened her mouth to enquire as to the cost of doing that, I mentioned $54.38 or thereabouts as an estimate of doing so. I ended our little tete-a-tete by pointing out that there wasn't a word on the English language to describe exactly how much I loathed cleaning a badly crocked filter, and she suddenly remembered she hadn't had any coffee for an hour or so and left to remedy the situation.

With the filter installed again, I discovered that the pump was still not shifting any water to speak of. Blast that kid! She'd finally done it. She'd de-primed the filtration system and I would now have to get it going again the hard way.

Water pumps often won't draw unless their pump-chamber (whatever design it is) is full of water. The old hand-pumps you see in Western Movies won't draw if you don't keep the cylinder full of water, which is why you sometimes see a bucket of water standing next to such pumps. The draw pump is usually a simple piston and clack-valve affair that pulls water up into the cylinder as the piston rises (when you push down on the handle). A valve then drops closed to trap it and when the piston drops another opens to allow the water to be forced out of the spout. Sometimes the second valve is installed in the piston itself so the water gets pushed out of the spout by one side of the piston as the other is sucking up the next load.

The pool pump is a rotary type, using a high-speed spinning disc with vanes on it to propel the water through the pipes. The water enters at the middle of the disc and vanes then throw it to the outside where it drains off. Both these systems rely on one simple fact of physics: the water is relatively uncompressable and forms an excellent seal around the valves or vanes of the disc. Air, on the other hand, is easily compressed, and leaks past the primitive leather seals of a draw pump and just swirls around inside the rotor of the pool pump, preventing either pump from drawing water. To get it working again the pump must be filled with water. This process is called "priming the pump", a phrase you might have heard used metaphorically in other contexts, particularly at the start of a manly drinking binge. I digress.

Grabbing the hosepipe I turned off the filter pump and blew water backwards through the system. It took forever for this to dislodge the air from the pump rotor, long enough for me to reflect on what other vengeance methods I could bring to bear on my sabotage-obsessed daughter. I decided that encouraging Mrs Stevie to participate more in her life would fit the bill¹ and powered up the pump. I was rewarded with a veritable torrent of water circulation.

Taking another look at the water, I decided to try a straight eight hour cycle and simply rotated the timer clock dial to achieve that, not being in the mood for lengthy reprogramming in twilight and mosquito conditions. Only time will tell if the water will come clean without recourse to a new filter altogether.

By now my feet were soaked with poluted pool pondwater, which interacted with the wounds on my toes² to produce great pain with every step, so I decamped for a shower and a change to dry footwear.

Thus ended another day in paradise.

1. And incidentally fix that vile harridan's chops too. They deserve each other ↑
2. Caused by a virulent and treatment-resistant strain of athlete's foot I picked up in Canada years ago (in a swimming pool, ironically). It flares up occasionally, stripping the skin off my toes in less than a day if I don't get prescription-strength stuff on it tootsweet. This week was made more lovely by a breakout of Alberta Footrot on Monday. I stop anyone else getting it by wearing thick socks at all times and scrubbing places I walk barefoot (such as the pool ladder) with bleach when I'm done. So far, I am, predictably, the only one to have fallen foul of this dastardly Cannuck germ warfare ↑

Darn That Kid To Heck!

When I opened the swimming pool this year, I asked for help from the family in maintaining it. Specifically, in doing the daily pH/Chlorine content assay and vacumming the leaves out of it. The Stevieling volunteered.

The Stevieling means well, but she is a teenager and has a teenager's attention span, so the "daily" routine is sometimes "once every two days" and the vacuuming happens when I ask, as I did on Saturday.

Now it has been very rainy of late, and the pool has overflowed several times. When I say that, you shouldn't picture a dramatic event involving water coming over the lip of the 15 foot wide, four foot tall Cylinder of Water Retention, since the skimmer sits at a height of about 3 foot six from the pool base. When the pool overflows, the water pours from the skimmer/filter assembly which is hidden at the back of the pool. This device is the place the water is drawn into before being sucked through a coarse-weave "leaf-basket" and then through the cartridge filter itself.

One of the side-effects of heavy rains, besides Overflowing Skimmer Syndrome, is that the water becomes acidic, requiring a small amount of sodium carbonate be dumped in the filter while the pump is running. The amount has decreased over the years because the pool water has achived a buffered state - it chemically resists a shift in pH. It used to require careful rebalancing after a group swim (sweat is acidic) or after any rain, but now a couple of ounces of sodium carbonate after a heavy downpour is about all that's needed¹.

When the vacuum is required, the intrepid vacuumer has to assemble an involved but not complex series of components. First the filter pump has to be switched off and the leaf trap cleaned out. Then an adapter consisting of a circular plate with a pipe sticking up out of the middle of it must be placed over the leaf trap, so that when the pump is switched on (NOT YET WAIT UNTIL I TELL YOU!) water will be drawn through it rather than through the side of the pool. We attach a 90 degree bend adapter to the pipe so it pokes through the wall apature of the leaf trap, and it is this to which we will attach the vacuum hose. We fix the hose at one end to the vacuum head, a triangular assembly with a series of stiff bristle brushes on it, the whole being attached to a long pole. We submerge the vacuum head and make sure the pole handle is wedged in the fence (LOOK OUT GRABBIT GRABBIT GRABBIT GAH NOW IT HAS TO BE FISHED OUT WITH THE END OF THE DECK BRUSH DAMMIT!) and carefully feed the pipe under the water to exclude trapped air before we attach the end of the pipe to the adapter and switch the filter pump on again. Now the water is being sucked up from the vacuum head and not from the pool surface, and the floor can be cleaned. Extreme care must be taken not to allow air into the pump or it will lose its prime and cease to pump water at all. If the pump is allowed to run in this way for too long a time it can break down due to bearing failure or overheating, since it is a so-called regenerative system and relies on the water it pumps to cool it². If there are stubborn stains on the pool floor, which is a tad wrinkled in places owing to incompetence when erecting the pool, the job can even involve the need to get in so the proper amount of elbow grease can be applied. Leverage being what it is, when the pole is at full extension the ability to apply force to the scrubbing brushes in the vacuum head is minimal. Needless to say, the water is always cool and by late summer can be very cold indeed. Not my favourite job, this.

I asked The Stevieling to vacuum the pool on Saturday, thinking we might use it on Sunday. Of course, Sunday afternoon was notable mostly for the spectacular thunder and lightning with a side order of deluge, so swimming was not an option. She did the vacuuming and did a nice job from what I could see too.

Yesterday rolled round and the thremometer in the downstairs thermostat took a trip off the scale. Not only that, the air filled with sweat making what was only unbearable, intolerable. Within seconds of leaving the car my "24-hour" protection threw in the towel³. Throughout the day I comforted myself in the sure knowledge of a soak in the unheated bliss of the pool that night. I promised myself an hour of up-to-the-neck-in-cold-water-ism at the very least, and even the commute home in which the A/C failed was made bearable by the thought of the swim to come.

It was not to be

When I got home I ran the mower over the grass verges so I wouldn't have to do it that weekend, and made my way to the pool. I thought I'd check the filter, make sure there was a chlorine tab in it as so on. The first thing that happened when I released the leaf skimmer lid was a tidal wave of water gushed over my "corporate casual" slacks. Spiffy. This water was suspiciously cloudy too. That was when I discovered the vacuum adapter plate was still in place. This was very bad because the filter was running. When these two things are true, a vortex forms at the pipe and air is sucked into the pump. Except that there was no vortex. I put my hand carefully near the pipe to find minimal suction. I walked around the pool to the water inlet and put my hand over that. Almost no pressure at all where there should be a torrent.

Letting out a curse I turned off the pump and pulled off the adapter plate, to discover a thick layer of dead leaves in the skimmer basket. I emptied these, but it was difficult because they had been well sucked into the basket weave for a few days and had become integrated into it. I pulled the filter and examined it. Filthy. I placed it on one side while I syphoned off some of the water in the skimmer in order to clean out the crap that had fallen out of the filter as I was removing it⁴. I washed out the filter with a hose for about five minutes, which didn't get all the muck off it but dislodged most of the macroscopic crap that had been vacuumed into it and reassembled the system. Then I started the pump and crossed my fingers that I wouldn't have to reprime the bloody thing. That would entail getting a hose and blowing water backwards through the system until all the air was flushed. It often takes three or four reprime/restart operations to get the darn pump running properly once it is aerated. Sometimes, though, the air in the system can be blown through it by the pump itself if the rotor hasn't gone completely dry. This proved to be the case this time and the system "rebooted" cleanly⁵.

Which was more than can be said for the water in the pool.

Left to fend for itself for three days with nil filtering⁶, zero chlorine⁷ and a pH dropping dangerously low⁸, the pool was now 5300 gallons of milk. There was nothing for it but to shock the pool, rendering it unusable⁹. Not only that; if last year's experience was anything to go by, I was in for days of increased maintenance and re-shocking before the water would clear.

I was so furious that I did something I've never done before. I went inside, logged onto our computer and changed the Stevielings password, locking her out. When she got home I told her that for doing something so monumentally stupid she was losing her computer privileges for a week for every time I had to shock the damned pool. If things went badly, I explained, she'd be in school again before she got to look at youtoob or The Order of the Stick. Maybe then, I said, she'd learn to pay attention to detail when she did a job.

Mrs Stevie waited until the Stevieling was out of the room, then castigated me for using the word "stupid". She felt "thoughtless" would be more appropriate, and so it would if I cared about being politically correct. I didn't, I felt hot and angry, and for once not sorry one little bit for any hurt feelings. That pump had operated for 24 hours of duty time with no water cooling it. It could easily have burned out, putting me in the frame for over a hundred dollars for a replacement and the hassle of plumbing the bloody thing in, priming it and Azathoth knows what else. It could have shorted and set fire to the wiring, given the absolutely tat state of nearly everything it has been my sad duty to pull out of its hiding place into the stark light of day. Check out the New Bog never-ending saga for a recent example. In this case "stupid" was the mildest damned word I could think of, and the word anyone in the outside world would use if they were to be subject to the Stevielings lack of attention to detail. Of course, that wasn't why I used the word.

I used it because it was hot and I couldn't have the swim in the lovely cold water I'd been thinking about all day.

1. The pH is important because if it gets to low (meaning the water is acidic overall) green algae will start growing like there's no tomorrow. If it goes too high (meaning the water is alkaline overall) it causes scale to form on the various bits in the water, including the moving parts of the filter pump, which can fail as a result. The trick is to keep the pH at between around 7.2 or so. Water comes out of our taps at about pH 7, but has no dissolved chamicals in it. Buffering the pool involves having dissolved acid and dissolved alkali in the water so that an increase in acid (or alkali) causes a chemical reaction reducing it's impact. The usual acid is "Muriatic Acid", which turns out to be a formulation containing Hydrocloric Acid (no surprise there) and the favoured alkali is Sodium Carbonate. ↑
2. Exactly the same as the fuel pump in the early model TR6 as it happens. I digress ↑
3. Which was a shame because I could have done with that towel to mop the sweat off every inch of my body. As it was, I did what everyone else did and just let my perspiration roll down my legs to pool in my shoes (my underwear having become completely innundated within the first minute of outdoorsmanship) ↑
4. Otherwise it falls slowly into the pipe, then gets sucked through the pump when I restart the system and gets blown back into the pool to filthy-up the floor again ↑
5. Pathetic Dweebspeek for "The system started like it should have" ↑
6. Instead of the usual 4 hours, twice a day vigorous filtration program I faound to be mandatory by experimentation ↑
7. Instead of the usual 5 ppm or better I and others regard as mandatory ↑
8. See note 1 for the importance of pH in swimming pool chemistry ↑
9. Like it mattered at this stage. No-one in their right mind would swim in that lake of liquid botulism. It was like something Professor Quatermass might have cooked up after a night on tequilla jelly shots ↑

The Natives Are Bewildering

Why has Crazy Joe¹, my next-door neighbour from hell, taken to walking his dog in my driveway, creeping out Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling? I'd ask him, but every time I end up in the same space as him and the dog he retreats at a speed I'd never have believed possible for a 70-ish man with a hip problem.

The motive behind this bizarre behaviour has been a hot topic of conversation in Chateau; Stevie, and we think that maybe we've hit upon a possibility.

A while back, Crazy Joe confided in me that he had caught a rat in his yard and that the guy next door to him had found a rat's nest under his shed. I greeted this news with great joy, never having had the good fortune to have lived in a rat infested hell-hole before. I assured Crazy Joe that I hadn't seen any rats, and I checked the land for burrows or signs of furry freeloaders and didn't find any, but I have uncovered signs that our garage was used at some time by a rat to eat snails and evacuate it's bowels in. No sign of any actual rat though, but watch this space: I'm mining the garage this month. I've only managed to extract gangue crap like old tent poles, decking offcuts too short to use for anything, two old swimming pools and a truck jack that does not work so far, but I expect that I will strike gold any day now².

We figured out that the guy at the other end of the street, who runs an antique car restoration business, had cleared some land and moved some old junkers that had been overgrown for about fifteen years and that the rats might've come from there. They migrated up the street, attracted by the nitwit halfway down the road who leaves open cans of cat food out for the cats in the area. Once assured of a regular food supply, they scouted out new digs under the aforementioned shed and it was rat heaven. This situation was addressed, or so I was assured by Crazy Joe, and we were now rat-free.

My current theory is that Crazy Joe disapproves of the jungle our old veggie garden³ has become and suspects a rat condo has been built therein. He may be using the dog as some sort of rat detector. Should that be the case, I would let him in the garden so he could either satisfy himself we are rat-free or find the buggers for me so I can begin the process of ridding the universe of them, were he to stick around long enough for me to make the offer.

We did see a young possum a few weeks ago, in one of our trees. This could be mistaken for a rat if you were in the position of never having seen one or out at night without your glasses on. What I assume was the same possum was spotted by me hiding under our kitchen⁴ sometime around the end of May, so maybe Crazy Joe is also labouring under a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps he is a Possophobe and is being driven out of what remains of his mind by the thought of a baby possum marauding about in the grounds of the Steviemanse and loitering sub kitchen with intent. Perhaps he has just found a new way of being an annoying git.

If only he would stand still long enough for me to ask him why he is in our driveway.

1. aka Firework Joe↑
2. If I don't strike rat first, of course↑
3. Which he can probably see if he leans out of his upstairs bedroom window while a family member hangs on to him ↑
4. It overhangs the foundation, thereby creating a space in which weeds and sumac trees can grow unmolested by the weed-whacker ↑

August is here!

Pinch, punch, first day of the month!

Elbow, shove, another rush-hour ride on the Subway.