Up Scope!

Two weekends since Christmas in which it didn't rain.

I know this because I used both of them for tree-felling. I badly need to replace two fenceposts snapped around Christmastime in high winds¹ but for the next eight weeks the ground was frozen solid (I possess no heavy plant or dynamite to deploy in such situations) and after that the ground rapidly became and remains to this day the consistency of overly-runny chocolate pudding. Fence-posts installed in such ground will simply fall over again at the first moderate gust of wind.

Every day the heavens open. Last week the temperature rose to a balmy 70 degrees or so for about three hours, with the net result that the pool cover, drained the night before but bearing a foot of water in the little pocket that forms to catch the rain every bloody day by the time I got back from work the next evening, in a trice became an incubator for an estimated four gazillion mosquito larvae (the sort with a breathing tube sticking diagonally out of their rear end. Do these things have left/right buttock tube ratios? Mutations from the stage-right affair normally seen? I digress). I was eaten alive as I attempted to reposition the syphon so I could drain another 15 gallons into the lawn (some of which has actually drowned).

I think I know the reason the weather has been so abominable of late. There can only be one explanation for all this wet.

My 401K administrator must have heavily invested my money² in New York Drought Futures.

1. An event that had me leaping about in the early hours of the morning in inadequate amounts of clothing applying emergency two-by-fours to hold up the fence and prevent further post snappage. A fence in post failure mode behaves much like a school assembly full of children in which one of them throws up; urgent action must be taken to avoid a cascade of unpleasantness as a runaway chain reaction develops↑
2. What little is left after the Dotcom Debacle, the Enron Fiasco and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Cock-up↑

A Question Of Etiquette

The young have it easy

I was brought up to hold doors for ladies (and brought up to assume all women were ladies come to that) and to let them go first.

So.

How does one proceed when arriving at the same time as a woman at a revolving door? What is the proper protocol?

Do I allow her to enter the carousel first, giving her the job of heaving the thing into motion? Do I leap in front of her so that I get the first place in the door and also the manly job of overcoming the door's inertia?

Or do I push in front of her, give the door a good spin, then throw her into the thresher-like embrace of the portal?

Sumac? Um, Lordy!

It was inevitable that the Great Triumph over the Intolerable Berry Menace¹ would provoke a manly desire to put the other trees on the property in their place, and this is the story of what happened on Mother's Day

For years I had been wanting to Do Something About the Sumac tree in our back yard. If you read about them on the internet you'll find that everyone is of the opinion that they are "bushes" or grow to "perhaps 20 or 30 feet". My Sumac tree towered to about 50-60 feet, so that shows you just how useless the bleeping internet is.

The damn thing shades the swimming pool until late afternoon so that the water never gets warm, and every Fall it drops small branches and leaves that sit on the pool cover and rot into a liquid with a truly indescribable stench. The sticks wll either take root and become more Sumac trees in a surprisingly short time, or sit on the ground forever in a layer of ugly indestructible non-mulch that is a pain in the rear end to get rid of.

When the pool is open the damned tree drops leaves, sticks and dirt into it constantly. This jams the filter, the skimmer and the Pool Robot of Extreme Uselessness.

These trees grow like weeds in my part of Long Island and I hate them above all planty things.

A couple of years back, Crazy Joe had a guy come and lop off all the limbs that poked over his side of he fence, a job that had two men climbing up an down it with spiked boots and small chainsaws for hours. I was happy to let them at it, but couldn't afford the cost of having the whole tree take down. In the summer, the cost of cutting down a sizeable tree (the trunk on this one is a good foot and a half in diameter) is around $450 and I just didn't have that kind of money floating around doing nothing. Still don't. Not only that, taking it down would be problematical as there was nowhere to drop the trunk. The swimming pool lay to one side. Opposite that was the gazzebo. At 90 degrees to that was Crazy Joe's yard, and opposite that was the deck for the pool. But it didn't stop me looking at it every night and wondering how the trick might be done.

The lack of a gazebo (it is a temporary frame tent-like affair that comes down each year and I haven't put it back up yet) had opened a window of opportunity, which I had used to get rid of the whatever-it-is tree that drops berries of various hues everywhere³. The success of this venture had me working feverishly⁴ on a plan to prune back the more troublesome limbs of the Sumac. I knew I was unable to bring the whole thing down with the tools at hand, but would settle for opening up the sky above the pool.

The tree rose about nine feet, then bifurcated and continued skyward as two trunks, each about eight inches thick. These trunks gradually tapered down over another fifty feet or so. The plan would be to tie my manly 24 ft ladder⁵ to the tree, then use it as a platform from which to deploy the even-more manly 12 ft long polesaw⁶ which would enable me to cut the offending limbs off in easy stages. This was essential since each one was around 15-20 feet long and up to three inches thick, and the previous excursion into Lumberjackland had demonstrated that the sheer mass involved would turn that length into a powerful momentum when the branch swung in towards the trunk. It would be entirely too easy to end up swatted from my perch and thrown a few yards into Crazy Joe's driveway, where my fall would be broken by a fleet of Chryslers, a jet-ski or the skidoo sitting to one side under a tarp. This was to be avoided at all cost, as was dropping wood on said fleet of Chryslers, jet-skis and so on.

I planned to do this on the Saturday before Mother's Day, but the weathergoons were predicting rain so I declared a Work-Free Day and went to see Jim at Men at Arms instead. It didn't, of course, rain so much as a single drop. Not being able to come up with a decent excuse for a second day's ease, I undertook the task on Sunday while Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling were out of theater.

There is nothing so exciting as standing in the crotch of an annoying tree, polesaw in hand, contemplating that first cut. Actually, it turns out there might be because I heard a strangled curse and Mrs Joe came running out of the house and, pausing only to shoot me an admiring look, leapt into her new-last-year car and drove it across the street in a cloud of burning rubber, only to park it again. I assume the pride of ownership and admiration for that car's performance hasn't worn off yet and the need to drive it, even for no reason at all, can be overpowering. I often felt like that when I had the TR6 some years ago, but I have to admit I couldn't get that worked up over a luxury sedan like the Chrysler LeBehemoth.

Anyway

The challenge was to drop the pieces of tree without them landing on the pool cover, Crazy Joe's driveway or me. This gave me about four square inches of ground on the pool side, much more on the other where I could use the area normally taken up by the gazebo. Additional challenges were the obfuscation of my view of the target branches by a) The young Maple that overhangs the pool (pruned back two months ago to let more sky through) and gives it a rural "swimming hole" character beloved bythe Stevieling and therefore sacrosanct, 2) The Sun, which was being difficult by actually being visible for the first time that year and was shining in my eyes and ♥) The main trunks of the Sumac itself. It was all very vexing.

I seemed to have the choice of several branches. There were two low-level ones within reach, one of which overhung the pool so I decided that that would be a good place to start. I hauled up the polesaw, pre-extended to 12 feet, and swung it out as far as it would reach. What a magnificent sight I must have provided the neighbours, who had formed a small crowd and been stunned into silent admiration when I dropped the whatever tree two weeks before, as I tottered seemingly on the point of falling from the ladder, yet miraculously recovering my balance each time by skillful use of the polesaw as a counterweight a-la Blondini, all the while screaming in a humourous high-pitched fashion.

I finally managed to get the saw positioned and activated the switch, immediately filling the air with shavings as the razor-sharp tool ripped through inches of wood as though it were wood. All the time I kept a eye on the cut to ensure that I cut only partway through. This way I would cause the severed limb to swing in toward the trunk instead of dropping vertically onto (and probably through) the pool cover.

Which is why it was so perplexing to me that the wretched thing did sever completely, and did fall vertically onto the pool cover. Well, half on the pool cover, half on the gunwale of the pool which took most of the weight and probably saved the pool cover from puncture. The limb rolled off the pool into the gap between the pool and the fence separating us from Crazy Joe, right at the base of the ladder, whereupon it released a collection of spring-loaded branches that locked it firmly in position.

I used up some class three Words of Power and descended the ladder with the intent of dismounting the saw from its pole and cutting the limb into more portable pieces prior to dragging it out of theater.

Before I could reach the ground I had to climb through the thickest portion of the severed limbery. This was a task not unlike climbing through a dropped coil of loose razorwire, and I had moved on to class four Words of Power before I had snapped off enough of the pokey sharp sticks to form a working area.

It took forever to saw up that bloody tree limb enough that it could be dragged to the lawn.

Then it was a case of reassembling the polesaw, reattaching it to the rope so I could pull it up after me, climbing the ladder and starting all over again.

This time I managed to drop the limb into the Arbor Vitae, where it hovered just out of reach then tangled in the fence, requiring a trip around the entire property⁷ to Crazy Joe's side so I could cut the snarled branches free with my trusty limb pruning shears⁸. The next limb fell onto the landscaped area next to the pool and mashed all the Hostas that Mrs Stevie had planted last year. Fortunately these things are more prolific and hardy than Sumac, and they all grew back in a couple of days. The skin Mrs Stevie removed from my hide when she saw the damage took a little longer, but that's another story.

There came a point, after I had removed five sizeable limbs from the tree, that I realised I wasn't going to be able to do any more without climbing the tree itself. There simply wasn't enough room to put up the ladder on another side of the tree so that I could continue the same way from a different direction.

I looked at the bifurcated trunks and thought about building a temporary platform nailed directly to the tree and working from that. I thought about putting U-bolts around the trunks with rope loops attached so I could climb that way. I thought about putting eye-bolts through the trunks to facilitate climbing "artificially". This is the way rock climbers do it when they use pitons, and I learned how to do it at school. I still have plenty of rock climbing gear even though I haven't done any since before I lost my virginity⁹ and it made possible some more adventurous solutions to the problem of the Sumac tree.

It was while I was doing all this thinking that I noticed a car stopped in the middle of the street outside Crazy Joe's house, and that the driver was looking at me intently.

I knew him from somewhere.

"Didn't I cut that tree down for you last year?" he shouted.

Got him! "No, you trimmed it for Joe two years ago!" I answered.

"You could kill yourself doing that" he opined

"I couldn't be that lucky" I answered dryly.

"I could take that down for you, you know" he offhandedly said as he examined his fingernails

"How much?" I asked skeptically.

"Hunnert Bux?" he replied with such conviction I almost fell off the ladder there and then.

"How far down would you take it for that?" I asked, trying not to sound too eager.

"As far as you want. You want it all down?" he confidently oozed.

"Down to here?" I indicated a point just above the bifurcation. I wanted the trunk to mount a light on.

"Sure! No problem!" he enthused.

"You know there's a pool back here, right?" I asked.

"I remember. It's not a problem. Really" he said.

"When could you do it?" I asked, waiting to hear the inevitable deal breaking problem.

"I could do it right now!" He said.

"You're on!" I shouted before he could reconsider.

Which is how I managed to surprise Mrs Stevie on Mother's Day by chopping down the hated Sumac tree. Joe (for t'was his name) grabbed a well-used 14-inch chainsaw, a bunch of ropes as thick as my thumb and some karabiners, donned a pair of spiky boots and swarmed up the tree and began destroying it in a truly impressive fashion. I dragged the fallen wood from the field of action when I could (some of it was too heavy to lift and required post-felling surgery with the Poulan 20 inch saw before I could relocate it), and acted as the all-important puller of ropes to bring dodgy segments of trunk down on my side of the fence rather than Crazy Joe's.

It was during one of these "assisted" fellings that Joe the Treefeller had his chainsaw knocked out of his hand by a spinning log as big as he was (which shook the ground when it touched down and dug itself a six inch deep crater in the lawn to boot), and it crashlanded two feet from me, still running. After my usual manly tension-breaking falsetto shriek, I retrieved the Ariel Saw of Extreme Danger and returned it to its owner.

I was relieved to find out that the anti-handyman demons don't confine their perfidy to me alone, and that my idea to use rope to influence tree trunk fallage patterns was professionally approved. I was impressed with the demonstration of the proper deployment of airborn gas-powered tools, something I myself have yet to achieve¹⁰.

It took days to chop up the limbs, logs and branches and drag them off the lawn.

1. I long ago found my life became less complex, or to be more precise, the explanations for the stupid things that happen as a result of stuff I do in my life became less complex, if I simply classified any result as either a "Fiasco" (something that would require an elaborate cover story or a patsy to take the blame²) or "A Great Triumph" (something that had either worked as planned, or a Fiasco in which all the evidence had been cleaned up so no one need ever find out. I arrived at this useful classification during my tenure as a communications software builder and installer for a large mainframe-based computer operation↑
2. AKA A Colleague↑
3. Stop Press! The tree has been identified as a sub-species of Mulberry Tree by a colleague↑
4. It later transpired I had a gum infection and the fever was due to British Teeth rather than high-speed ratiocination↑
5. Set to a manly 14 ft to avoid involuntary loss of bladder control↑
6. A ten inch electric chainsaw mounted more or less securely on a telescopic 12 ft pole. The uninitiated often regard this tool as an accident looking for somewhere to happen. I laugh at this overly simplistic assessment, which badly underestimates the danger involved. The only safe way to prune a tree using a polesaw is to get someone else to do it↑
7. The fence was originally built to keep the Friends of Crazy Joe away from The Stevieling, since they had endearing habits like urinating into the garden. I wanted to be able to feel completely secure that my two year old could play without any fear of her getting out or one of them getting in. There is no gate on that side of the property as a result of this policy↑
8. one sharp jaw, one stocky, blunt anvil-type jaw, all operated by three foot long handles↑
9. At which point life became more precious for some reason, and anyway I wanted to spend more of it doing activities that attracted more members of he opposite sex in them so I could try out my awesome new powers as often as possible without the usual agonising hand cramps↑
10. I've launched the workpiece on numerous occasions, usually backwards which is why I maintain large reserves of manly impact-absorbing relaxed muscle around my midriff, and it's also why my "scream and leap" reflexes rival those of the Kizinti,¹¹ and in one spectacular incident of mutinous brain perfidy I misused a table-mounted router¹² so badly it not only launched the workpiece (an eight-foot long spear of maple) across the basement, the recoil¹³ almost had the router in my face when the table reared up in the air in a very entertaining manner. I've had the usual fun and games when rotary high-speed tools (grinders, cutters and the like) are pushed out of design spec and undergo catastrophic failure, embedding pieces of usually red-hot stuff in the scenery and your humble scribe¹⁴. I've been chased around the worksite by inadequately attached but fully spun-up rotary tool bits. But aside from the low-altitude attitude problems with Mr Weedwhacker during starting procedures, I've yet to witness the heart-stopping majesty of a warmed-up and cruising nicely gas powered tool hedge-hopping around the place at nap-of-earth when it should be in my hands doing its job. The chance to observe the phenomenon from a distance (albeit not a long enough distance as it turned out) was valuable and enlightening.↑
11. A fictional race of warlike, spacefaring beings of felinoid genetic descent who feature in the Known Space stories of Larry Niven. I especially recommend "The Soft Weapon" as a good introduction. What was the question?↑
12. AKA "Poor Man's Shaping Machine"↑
13. Damn you Sir Isaac Newton!↑
14. Which makes a fine demonstration of real-world mechanics but paradoxically offers no insight to the centrifugal/centripetal discussion owning to the need to concentrate fully on the Locating and Removing Embedded Bits of Carbide Wheel From the Torso Question↑

The Intolerable Berry Menace Is Removed From Mrs Stevie's Skyline (And Placed On Her Lawn)

This sorry business began here. The events related here occurred about three weeks ago during a momentary lull in the torrential rain.

Oh c'mon, you know you want to.

Forget it brain. Some of the wounds have only recently healed, and I still wake in the dead of night screaming and rolling around tangled in the sheets after reliving the highlights of the last attempt as graphic nightmares.

Don't be a baby. You still have all your fingers.

True. I note your reticence on the subject of my toes and skin though, perfidious organ of ratiocination.

Pah! The nails grew back once they had turned fully black and fallen off, and the scars make us look more manly.

There is that. Nope! Not doing it. All my previous objections to felling the remaining trunk stand viz: It is leaning over Crazy Joe's yard and will certanly fall on his collection of prize vintage 1980's Chrysler vehicles.

Not if you bring the majority of the tree down in stages. Most of it can be cut so that it doesn't drop into Joe's yard. The last bit can be pulled with a rope so that it falls on our side of the fence. Newton, parallelogram of forces. Ring any bells?

Now we come to it! You are trying to kill me with a cunning "mistake" involving vector diagrams! Well answer me this, so-called "brain": How am I going to reach the various cutting points on the tree that must be subjected to saw violence in order for your miserable excuse for a plan to work?

The polesaw...

And don't start in with "the polesaw" because your scheme calls for numerous cuts to be made at something like the twenty-five foot mark and the pole saw is only ten feet long when fully extended. Yesyesyes I know it should be twelve feet but even with all the oil cleaned off the telescopic part the clamp doesn't hold it securely enough agaist the spring and it slides back two feet every time.

You could try tightening the adjusting bolt on the clamp.

Really? Which bolt is that then?

Right here, see? A couple of turns with Mr Socket and Hey Presto! Twelve foot long chainsaw-onna-pole! How manly is that?

An Interlude With Socket Wrenches Later

Blimey, it worked! It does stay out to twelve feet now.This'll work a treat on that...No! Nonononono. Oh you almost had me there! Luckily I saw through your seductive Polesaw Enhancement Ploy in time! There is no way I'm trying to limb the tree with a chainsaw attached to a twelve foot pole while climbing up said tree to reach the hard bits!

Calm yourself. No-one is suggesting you climb the tree. That would be madness, not to mention hideously dangerous in your state of bodily disrepair.

I'm glad we got that straight. Wait, what?

Not when you've got this here twenty four foot extending ladder lying hardly used on the garage floor.

Hmm. I do have a twenty four foot extending ladder that has seen very little use, don't I?

Yes you do.

Yes I do. Of course I get the heebie-jeebies every time I climb beyond about eighteen feet on it, which is why it sits barely used on the garage floor. It shakes about in the wind you see.

Yes it does, but you wouldn't need to extend it would you, not now your polesaw is a majestic twelve feet long? You could maybe make do with only fourteen feet of ladder.

I could! I could tie the ladder to the tree with this rope to stop it shifting about too!

You could! I'll bet the footing is as good as on the ground when the ladder is tied to the tree with stout rope, or even that length of ratty clothesline you hold in your hand.

Well I'm not sure about that...

Nonsense! Why with the mighty Ladder of Climbing, combined with the Ratty Clothesline of Ladder Securage, you'll be able to triumph against the Intolerable Berry Menace in no time!

You're right! I'll get to work digging the ladder out of the crap it's buried under.

 

Which was how I found myself standing on the top rung of the ladder¹, at times on one foot² while attempting to cut the branches in the upper part of the remaining trunk of the whatever-it-is tree wth a ten inch electric chainsaw fastened to a twelve foot fiberglass and aluminum telescopic pole³. It wasn't really that hard at first. I was able to get the ladder attached to a stable part of the tree in a configuration that allowed me to ascend the ladder through an old, venerable and above all spiky Arbor Vitae bushtree, sustaining only superficial flesh wounds as a result, then pull the assembled polesaw up to me with a length of rope. Then it was simplicity itself to grab the polesaw pole with both hands while wrapping one leg around the trunk of the tree. Then, getting a good grip on the well-textured bark with my teeth, it was possible with only a minimum of tottering back and forth on the ladder to get the saw positioned somewhere on the branch to be cut, engage the saw drive and hang on until the limb was severed.

My plan called for me to cut most of the way through, then allow gravity to swing the almost-severed limb inward toward the trunk where its kinetic energy would be spent thrashing the tree. Then I would cut the branch free to fall into the Arbor Vitae, partly to cushion the drop and reduce damage to the already punch-drunk lawn, and partly to give the ruddy thing a damned good thrashing for scratching me up to buggery and back. This plan worked.

Mostly.

I had not kept my guard up for treachery in the brain department, and so the first realisation that the ladder being tied to the trunk of the tree, anything crashing into the tree would a-priori be crashing into me too, was when it happened.

Words cannot adequately capture the sense of excitement engendered in me by the sudden sight of a large branch, maybe fifteen foot long and as big around at the base as my own wrist, arcing gracefully down to swat me from my perch with great force. I often find that in these situations it helps reduce any latent tension by emitting loud falsetto shrieks, a handyman version of Primal Scream therapy if you will. I have to confess that I defused a lot of tension as the day wore on.

In the space of maybe two hours I had removed all the branches from the tree and dragged them into piles on the lawn, forming a formidable structure remeniscent of the deadfall wall protecting the innocent dead from the contents of the Pet Sematary in the movie co-incidentally called "Pet Sematary". As I say, we are talking fifteen plus feet long affairs with a thickness of around two or three inches. A lot of wood. Now it was time to bring down the trunk.

Unfortunately this was problematical, since the trunk leaned decidedly over Crazy Joe's driveway. Dropping it that way was out of the question.

I ended up tying a length of rope around the trunk and tying the other end around one of the massive pruned limbs scattered around the landscape. By using a cunning combination of slip knots, sheer strength and hernias I arranged for this limb to be partially suspended so that the rope was under great tension. I then removed the chainsaw from its pole and undercut the trunk just above the point where the ladder was attached.

When it looked about ready to let go, I removed the ladder from the tree⁴, took up position an estimated two trunk lengths from Ground Zero and gave a mighty tug on the rope.

The partially-severed tree trunk gave a tremendous groan, as if the very earth itself were undergoing some sort of surgery, possibly dental in nature, with inadequate anaesthetic⁵ and the severed segment of trunk, encouraged by the elasticity of the rope and the weight of the tensioning branch, sommersaulted majestically through the air to land with a thump mere centimeters from my anxiously wriggling toes, which were clad in their usual protective cheap sneakers.

bleeping bleep of a bleep!" I yelled in sheer exhillaration, then I threw up for emphasis.

I popped indoors for a minute to use the toilet, and took the opportunity to rehydrate with a few glasses of orange juice as my electrolytes were obviously running low causing the old brain to make questionable decisions again.

One clean set of underwear later I returned to the theater of operations and brought down the rest of the tree by essentially the same technique, albeit with about twice the length of rope between the trunk of the tree and my tootsies. This time the tree attempted no Cirque Du Soleil acrobatics, contenting itself with a time honoured topple, culminating in an earth shaking "whump" when it touched down. Naturally, this extra length of rope had placed me very close to the piles of sawn-off tree limbs, and of course as the tree began to fall I wisely leapt backwards into their spiky embrace, in which I was dealt a goodly collection of flesh wounds.

Staunching my wounds with what was left of my tee-shirt, I broke out the Poulan twenty inch gas-powered chainsaw and began the arduous job of cutting up the assorted limbs, logs and whatnot, and such was Mrs Stevie's joy at having the tree removed from her skyline when she arrived in theater an hour or so later, she press-ganged The Stevieling into helping her bag the detritus for the garden refuse guys to take while I retreated indoors.

I was, by then, hors de garden chores due to extreme dehydration, exhaustion, and disabling ennui brought on by the sudden realisation that the superannuated members of the supergroup "Yes" are probably not just "on break". I spent the next fifteen minutes or so staggering around the house trying to remember where we kept the shower while my back tried to decide on whether it was going for agony or just almost-agony.

Still, Mrs Stevie was happy and that (I've been told⁶) is what counts.

1. Not recommended↑
2. Also not recommended↑
3. Really not recommended under any circumstances↑
4. A process involving undoing the paranoia-induced fist-sized granny knot I used to secure the wretched ladder to the tree in the first place, a titanic struggle of man against rope in a World Gone Mad that could easily have taken up four blog feet of narrative on its own, and did take up a good dozen class three Words of Power. I redact this saga of knotty derring-do out of consideration for my reader↑
5. Purest hyperbole. The thing let out a disappointing "snap", but I don't deploy these amounts of toolage or deplete my reservoir of curse words so drastically for a mere "snap"↑
6. By Mrs Stevie↑

Written In Paint On The Doors Of A Broken Elevator In An Appartment Building In Bellona

Mrs Stevie's head finally became unradioactive enough for her to have the PET scan.

This miracle of modern science apparently makes a picture in which cancer cells "light up", and as such it is the de-facto standard way of assessing the success of a chemotherapy/radiation treatment regimen. Mrs Stevie's oncologist called a couple of weeks ago to report that the cancer was in 100% remission accoridng to this test, so we declared a fortnight of celebraion in which we didn't shout at each other and cookwear was only used for the preparation of food. It is the only piece of good news to come down the pike in Lo! a very long time indeed. If only she could eat enough to sustain herself, we could call the whole business closed¹.

Still, Mrs Stevie is now well on the road to recovery.

1. As much as can be said for this bloody disease at any rate. Oncologists, as I've said before, never speak of curing it↑

So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright

Fallingwater, Lawrence Street, Brooklyn. End of February.

You can't make this sort of quality stuff up.

Spotted While Picking Up Mrs Stevie's Meds Around Christmas

Here's something you don't see every day.

I haven't seen one like it since.

Now That's A Pretty Song

Bad, performed by Luka Bloom.

Having audio taped the entire Live Aid concert as transmitted in New York (two tape recorders meant no break in continuity) I was instantly impressed by U2's performance of this song, and generated much bad feeling between my good self and the girls I shared the apartment with¹ by belting it out on volume number 11² . It is a song I've loved for a long time despite my not having a single U2 album in my collection.

Not even The Joshua Tree, and everyone has a copy of that. I've often thought about buying a yard of U2 CDs but have never actually done so.

Not sure why that is.

Anyway, I was in Sid's hardware Store on Jay Street last week and heard an absolutely beatuiful acoustic version of Bad playing on their P.A. system, so good I hung out in the store just to hear the whole thing. I was so impressed with it I initiated a search for cover versions as soon as I got home. I suppose I could have asked someone in the store who it was, but in all the times I've done that I've never gotten the right answer (and I've got the CDs to prove it too).

Amazon, Wikipedia and Google were not helpful when presented with my knowledge as search criteria, which boiled down to "Bad Acoustic". Much of interest did pop up, but nothing useful ³. Luckily The Stevieling had a problem with her iTunes account ⁴ and after I had fixed the issue (which essentially boiled down to Apple's design crew not having enough imagination to figure out how their stuff might be used in the real world ⁵) I scanned the available versions of Bad and located a couple of likely candidates. I thought I could use the free sample to positively identify the right song, but was all-but foiled by the clip editorial staff having selected a segment in which 99% of the sound is of unaccompanied guitar. This isn't the first time I've discovered that an iTunes sample clip, the one they presumably feel will hook an opportunistic buyer, is about as representative of the actual song it was taken from as a fried Mars Bar. Fortunately, I was able to positively identify the voice from the few words included and am now able to pass on the recommendation to you.

The piece is performed solo, accompanied by acoustic guitar. The guitar work is melodic and crisp in execution, and the vocals have just the right tremulous edge to convey the subject matter at hand in the proper manner (albeit a very different manner than U2 used).

I don't own a CD of Luka Bloom's music yet, but this song ensures that I will, soon.

1. Long story, love involved, none directly involving me↑
2. I've also got the bit where the concert organisers pulled the plug on U2, which was curiously not part of the DVD released purporting to cover the same concert in it's entirety↑
3. So often the case when doing internet searches↑
4. Again. Oh yeah, Apple's stuff "just works" all right↑
5. Again. Apple's designs are so much "better" I can't understand why they aren't the industry leader in everything. Oh wait, yes I can↑

Mrs Stevie: Breaks, Recent, Catching (NOT)

Well, the good news is that Mrs Stevie's emergency gall-bladder excision went well.

Sometime around 2 am on Wednesday morning she began having stomach pains (I'm not absolutely clear on this because Mrs Stevie often sleeps in a recliner since the cancer treatment started, on account of her falling fast asleep during the late evening while waiting for "The Daily Show" to come on and my cowardice common sense in not awakening her from a deep sleep being as how I don't want my face clawed off) . By the time the Stevieling kicked me out of bed to drive her to school the woman was doubled over in agony. I suggested a trip to the Emergency Room, which she vetoed. The night before I had brought home a burrito for her from a local Mexican fast food place (no spices or hot sauces involved, just soft meat which I thought she might a) enjoy since they are a favourite of hers and 2) the meat is almost liquid to start with) and I immediately put the blame on food poisoning.

A little later I gave her some Malox through her stomach tube (she was not keeping anything taken orally down) and that seemed to help. So she decided to take a can of the liquid food we still use to suppliment her inadequate intake of solids (she still cannot swallow reliably owing to the damage the cancer treatment wreaked in her throat). This turned out to be the worst idea in the history of ideas, and brought on another attack of pain that wouldn't subside even after a dose of Pepcid (which works by shutting down the digestion altogether and was a great help during my attacks of Pancreatitis).

Around noon, she asked me to call her G.P., who in turn suggested a visit to the G.I. specialist who had put in the stomach tube (technically a "peg" in docspeek) as she felt it might be an infection at that site, although there was no outward sign of that. This was a possibility that had occurred to me too, and the implications of that had me quite worried.

The G.I. specialist made a hole in his schedule and I hustled her there, where she began to become seriously ill. She looked worse than she had right after chemotherapy, which was truly scary. He took one quick poke at her stomach, paused to medicate his now-ruptured eardrums and told me to get her to the E.R. for an immediate cat scan.

The E.R. for once wasn't a complete zoo, and her condition was by now so visibly poor that they fast tracked her into a bed for observation and tests. It was by then around 3 pm.

We sat and waited, or rather, I sat and waited while Mrs Stevie entertained us with some impromptu screaming for about half an hour, at which point someone ponied up some Morphine. Which did no good, so it was on to something polysylabic beginning with "P" that did. That wore off after an hour, so we did our double act until they returned with more.

I was desperate for a pee but had told Mrs Stevie I wouldn't leave her. The hospital wanted to do an ultrasound test but needed her sedated because of all the screaming every time a waft of air hit the spot on her stomach they needed to ram the sonic probe into. Eventually I had to go. I was gone a matter of approximately five minutes, two and one half for bladder drainage, the rest for cell-phone calls to tell the family and the Stevieling what was going on. I've got the clock times of the calls and can confirm that bit to the second.

I returned to find her bay empty.

They did bring her back though, and around 6 pm a very nice young doctor hove into view saying that the tests indicated a problem with her gall bladder and that it would have to be removed that evening. We discussed the implications of the aftermath of the cancer treatment and the stomach tube being there while the pain meds wore off and Mrs Stevie once again burst into song. This time it took me quite some time to get medication since the doctor, now absent, had given strict instructions about the dose which were at odds with Mrs Stevie's views on the matter. We eventually prevailed and Mrs Stevie was drugged back into quiessence so we could wait some more.

And some more.

And some more.

Some time during this period the "this evening" part of the plan was aborted, but no-one bothered to tell us. Not only that; although we had filled in exhaustive paperwork concerning Mrs Stevie being admitted to the hospital sometime shortly after 6 pm, it was now around 9 pm and no-one could tell us when she would actually be wheeled into a room for the night.

I had to call the Stevieling again, which meant leaving Mrs Stevie's side (they allowed no cell phone usage in the E.R. for some reason). I told the pain-demented, drug-addled woman not to let them take her anywhere before I returned.

When I did return some four minutes and thrity-five seconds later (I timed it) They were trying to remove her again. I dashed in and confirmed they were taking her to a room, and allowed them to get on with it.

They took her to a lobby on the opposite side of the hospital, where an irritated staff nurse told them she had no record of Mrs Stevie having been allocated a room. Fortunately, it turned out that the architect had been as lackwitted as the patient-admission process and had given two sets of rooms the same numbers, so eventually (around 10 pm) Mrs Stevie was in a bed in a room and demanding more drugs with menaces. Once she had them I checked that the operation was not going to happen that night and went home to my own bed, arriving there around 11 pm. Mrs Stevie had given me a task list of stuff that needed doing at once, so it was well after midnight that I hit the sack.

I was woken from a sound sleep by the Stevieling rushing into my room and screaming DAD! WAKE UP! which, thanks to my having thrown off all the covers during the night, produced a very satisfying demonstration of human levitation for the child's education.

I took her to school, then gathered up some pyjamas, a robe and sundry other clothing, stuffed it all in a bag and went back to the hospital, where I spent a disagreeable four hours persuading Mrs Stevie that it wouldn't be long now. Finally they decided to take her up for the operation, having timed it to coincide with the wearing-off of the medication. Nothing enhances a session with the surgeon, anaethsetologist and sundry other medical types all demanding the same information and signatures than the onset of truly mind-altering pain. Sometime around 2 pm they wheeled her away from me.

I drove home, grabbed a bite to eat and just got the call (3:00 pm) from the surgeon that everything went well and that I could come back and see her in an hour or so.

So that's what I'm going to do now.

Life Goes On

Well it's been an annoying month here in Deer Park

For one thing, it keeps bloody raining. Understand that as an Englishman I'm used to a bit of rain, even a lot of rain. I've spent time in Wales, after all. It's just that the rain ought to go somewhere after it's dropped from on high, and on Long Island it doesn't.

The reasons for this are many and complex, but basically boil down to stupid bloody Americans not getting their fingers out and doing the job properly. I mean, this country once put a man on the Moon for Azathoth's sake! How in the name of creation is is therefore impossible to get the water to go from the land to the sea, only about 20 miles away at the thickest bit of the island? I'd suggest sequestering it in reservoirs, but that would take monumental planning and a bit of acumen.

Aren't I being just a tad jingoistic and maybe a smidgeon hard on the civic engineers of my adopted country, state, county and town I hear you ask?

Well, traditional hydraulic engineering typically gives a nod of the head to the notion that water generally flows downhill, gravity being what it is, and that therefore one should ensure that drains are placed at the bottom of hills or other inclined areas of ground. The design in general use on Long Island could, in light of this principle, be held to be either startlingly innovative, an attempt to push back the outmoded preconceptions of a field sterile of new thinking, or the work of a bunch of idiots. Irrespective of which viewpoint you cleave to, the net result is the same: the junction outside Wyandanch station is still underwater three days after a rainstorm despite having a brand new drain network installed only two years ago and despite having the roads resurfaced and regraded at the same time.

About that.

Over the 100 or so years roadbuilders have been accommodating themselves to the need for everyone and his dog to own and drive their own automobile on a resilient surface, a number of basic principles have evolved. One of these is that the camber of a newly laid road surface should carry the water to the edges of the roadway, and thence to drains set slightly below the road's datum. It should therefore come as no surprise that on Long Island this thinking is held to be archaic, needless nitpicking by those ignorant of the broader aesthetic ideals of the roadbuilder.

And on the off-chance that someone, somewhere actually got a fbleeping clue and did the job right, all it takes is a couple of passes with Mr Snowplow to tear five gallon chunks of the road up and either throw them at the cars parked in the LIRR carpark or leave them lying on unlit streets as a collision hazard. The holes get repaired around the end of October, which is to say someone shovels low-grade asphalt into them and, if we're lucky, attempts to roll them so the result is a bump only a few inches high, ensuring that next winter the snowplow will tear it right back up again. There's a side road in Wyandanch which resembles the site Messrs Armstrong & Aldrin puttered around in. It happens to be the one that has the only available parking after 7:30 am these days. I can only assume that the suspension parts business a few yards down the main street from the site in question also runs the snowplow concession. I digress.

Surely, you ask, not every drain on Long Island can be so badly placed? Statistics alone mean that some of them should be in the right place to funnel gallons of wet inconvenience to part or parts unknown just by chance. You're right, but you are forgetting the idiot factor again.

For drains to continue working they have to be kept clean. Ours seem to be constantly clogged by leaves in the autumn, sand (from the road grit) in the spring and discarded crap all year round. Considering the buckets of tax money New York collects from us Long Islanders, there seems to be precious little of it spent to clean out the bleeding drains. An occasional roadsweeper would be a nifty idea too, but we only seem to see one or two a year and they mostly serve to collect all the gutter-born crap and dump it over the properly installed drain outside my house¹.

Reader of this blog² will be aware of the natural beauty of Lake Mineola at this time of year. By some miracle they managed to get the new roadway that goes under the tracks to stay dry in the rainy season, but the rest of the place floods just like it always does. This is a feat that would challenge even the Disney Imagineers (who've managed all sorts of neat tricks with water over the years) and I have to wonder how they managed it. Logic would call for the underpass to become a thirty-foot ³ deep sump. I imaging that some fancy footwork involving pumps and massive amounts of electricity are involved, but I don't know for sure. It should be interesting in the rainy part of the summer, around the end of July, when LIPA typically begins not rising to the challenge of getting everyone their electricity in a timely manner ⁴.

And don't get me started on those pig-useless, waste-of-space idiots in the weather prediction trade. They can't even get the weather right over the next three days. Never mind the satellites and doppler radar, I reckon they could do with a new bit of seaweed, or maybe an office with a window in it.

Oh well.

1. The original drain had crap jammed in the grill. I spent hours every year cleaning it out with a sidewalk-scraper only to have it jammed up again a month later. I begged the town council to replace it but they ignored me. Then a truck backed over it and broke the grill. Once again I petitioned the town to do its duty, to no avail. Then one day I came home to find a police officer outside my house. She was not happy. A cyclist had ridden over the cracked, buckled drain - another victory for the IQ brigade there - and had been injured. She lectured me for some time about the state of the drain. Once she had wound down it was my turn. I pointed out that the drain was not my responsibility, buut the town's, and that if she felt the drain was dangerous she should tell the town to fix it. I wished her good luck and explained that I had already aprehended the danger to cyclists some years before and had periodically asked the town to behave in a sensible and responsible manner and spend some taxpayer dollars to avoid paying many times more in an inevitable lawsuit. The officer backed away from me as I was delivering my peroration, possibly because of the foam coming out of my mouth. A week later there was a nice new drain installed. Three weeks after that a roadsweeper filled it with crap↑
2. I think we're down to one now, including me↑
3. five fathoms↑
4. People still seem to be fighting the intolerable humidity by running air conditioners despite the fact that LIPA, a body invented to make up excuses why they can't deliver the electricity they are in charge of, tells them not to↑

Wait, Watt?

Two facts of life have recently collided in Mr Brain and produced some speculation on events that can only end, in my opinion, one way.

Fact One: Everyone is going bugnuts over the prospect of electric cars for all. Everyone knows¹ it's only a matter of time before the hated, smelly, inefficient, ungreen, socialist-medicine supporting, abortionist internal combustion engine is a thing of the past and people embrace clean, quiet, ecologically sound², capitalist, insurance lobby friendly, life-protecting electric tractive power.

Fact Two: Everyone actually really does know from bitter experience that neither Con Ed³ nor LIPA ⁴ is able to supply the current (ha!) demand for electricity at the height of summer, nor keep it flowing reliably during the dead of winter. Both of these august bodies have reaped their share of August bodies as people succomb to the heat and humidity without the benefit of the air conditioner they bought because the juice wasn't flowing that day. In technical terms there is a shorfall in generating capacity during periods of peak demand. They run public service ads to the effect that if you don't stop using their product they will stop providing it, which is a pretty odd model for a capitalist business to adopt I think you'll agree.

So my question is: Where in Azathoth's name is the power to charge the battery⁵ of the family car going to come from?

Ten years from now LIPA will probably be running public service ads to an audience of angry and immobile people suggesting they switch to convenient, cheap and portable gasoline as an alternative to the fabled electricity rumored to flow through the wires on odd occasions when no-one is checking.

1. I've already pontificated on the value of stuff "everyone knows" here and elsewhere↑
2. If we don't talk about the environmental "footprint" of the electronics industry needed to support this venture, or question the environmental impact of the batteries required to make it happen↑
3. Who supply electricity to New York City↑
4. Who supply electricity to Long Island↑
5. Yes, only one. If you connect two batteries together they form one battery. Add another and you still have one battery. Technical terminology is difficult for people who don't know how science works which is why they screw it up so often. Not only that, I can confirm after opening one that the majority of "D" cells are, in fact, "D" batteries, being formed from several disc-shaped cells stacked inside the case. Unless you put them end to end, of course. Then they would all be "D" battery. Funnily enough, I remember prising apart an Ever Ready "U2" (old UK name for "D") battery, only to find it was, in fact, a single, long U2 cell. If the manufacturers cannot get it right it's no wonder everyone else has trouble↑

Weather Report

Snow. Lots of it. Inches deep, drifting to a couple of feet in places, most of them inconvenient.

Salt. None I could detect. Not so much as a grain twixt road and tire.

Result: I ♥ my Traction Control Subsystem. The Steviemobile rules the slippyness! If it won't go it is because both wheels are spinning equally easily, and that only lasts for a second or so. Yes, it is so slippery out there that it isn't possible to pull away without wheelslip even in low gear.

Normally I would have simply taken one look at the conditions and gone back to bed but I've had so much time off of late that I really can't do that on a whim any more.

The Long Island Rail Road was suprisingly unaffected. Claiming 20 minutes backlog, it was actually more like 5 by the time I got into Jamaica - late, owing to my having to widen the Stevieling's kind attempt at driveway snow clearance so I could actually exit the driveway. She had dug an exit and in the process piled up two mighty ramparts across the drive with only the sally port open. Sadly, she had not judged the dimensions of the car quite correctly and so I was effectively walled in.

I eyed the defensive snow-works with a jaundiced eye and came to the reluctant conclusion that it would require the ultimate in snow clearance toolfoolery to correct the problem. I would also get rid of the bits the Stevieling had decided were not worth shovelling while I was at it, since we might need the space and the snow appeared to be of optimum consistency and depth for the rotating muncher of Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

Of course, the Stevieling had decided that the path from the gate to the garage door was one of the bits not worth shovelling, so I had to battle the forces of nature in a World Gone Mad just to get the bally garage door open, but once I had, it was all over for the snow.

Each winter I carefully top off the fuel tank, check the oil and fire up Troll's engine to avoid any cold weather shenanigans not essential for snow removal. I gave a running commentary on how important each of these was as I instructed the Stevieling to connect an extension cord to the power supply so I could fire up Troll. I emphasised how forethought in even the most obscure minutiae of engine maintenance and regular starting to circulate lubricants and prime the carburretor would pay dividends in such freezing weather.

It would have all been much more impressive, of course, if this year I had thought to turn Troll around so the whirly bit pointed outwards.

As it was I was forced to back Troll out into calf-deep snow (which naturally entailed my wading through it first) while vouchsafing the most potent Words of Power I could summon first thing in the morning. It turned out that even at the slowest speed Troll's ability to move through deep snow outpaced my own by a mile per hour or so, causing it to push me over in an amusing fashion¹ eight or nine times before I had the wretched machine liberated and oriented for snow removal.

Once pointed in the right direction though it was the matter of only a few minutes to widen the hole in the glacis of Fort Steviemanse and to pass on to ancillary snow removal. Fortunately there were no frozen newspapers or fragments of truck tire hidden in the Stevieling's mighty ramparts of snow², and the muncher made short work of them without busting a shear pin.

The rest of the snow was about nine inches deep and slightly damp, just about perfect for snowblowing, and in no time the neighbours were gaping in awe at the twenty-foot arc of white powdery goodness shooting out of our driveway and all over theirs. Mr Singh indicated with a wave of his hand that I was Number One in his estimation, and I don't blame him. How he must have struggled to shovel his drive at six thirty this morning. Now, with consumate ease, I was showing him a better way. I suspect he was also impressed by my howls of manly triumph as hectares³ of white inconvenience were made Someone Else's Problem.

All too soon there was no more snow in the drive and I was forced to cease and desist from snow removal and recommence commuting. It is truly mind-blowing how time-saving the snowblower is when the flakes are down. It's also the best fun you can have outside on your own with your clothes on⁴.

Thank Azathoth for Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

1. to judge by the noises coming from the Stevieling↑
2. Papers are a frequent hazard. For some reason a person or persons unknown keep throwing them onto our driveway so they will get soaked and freeze solid to the concrete↑
3. Well, square yards at the very least↑
4. After the nocturnal activities I partook of at the onset of Domestic Flood Xena, the subject of Outdoor Home Maintenance While In State Of Dishabile is one of heated debate in our area. There are basically two schools of thought on the subject: I say that when events dictate it, and sometimes even when they don't, clothing is optional if donning it would impede damage control operations or just not feel as nice. Mrs Stevie, the local Homeowners Association, The Deer Park Chamber of Commerce and representatives of the local Police Precinct say it isn't↑

Look Who's Coming To Dinner

Jack McDevitt has been invited to attend I-Con 28.

This forces a complete reversal of my previous stance, which can be worded as "I'm not going to I-Con this year come hell or high water", since I view McDevitt as one of the recent greats of SF and have yards of his books I want signing.

I-Con has for years been a staple on or around the end of March/beginning of April for La Famile Stevie, as a three day event (actually, Friday night through Sunday afternoon, and Friday could often be a bit of a let-down) on the grounds of the Stoneybrook campus of SUNY.

Although it has morphed a lot over the years, and the old regulars who made it such a great event are now largely absent¹, we have also changed in our expectations of it. We originally went mostly for the guest speakers. Then I started to get more interested in the author-driven events and Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling got more caught up in the SCA-ness of it all. Somewhere in there a whole Anime subculture sprang up and threatened to dominate the entire con.

And the prices kept rising every year. I was getting a bit tired of it to be honest, and when SUNY announced that they were renovating the campus and therefore were declining to host I-Con this year, and when I saw the absolutely dreadful "arrangements" the I-Con management committee had made I decided enough was enough.

The Hotel Ronkonkoma has (apparently) always been a staunch supporter of I-Con, being the "official" I-Con hotel, location of the con ball and banquet for some years now and the place where everyone goes to filk² and so the committee decided they would have to be kept in the mix. The only fly in the space-ointment is that the Hotel Ronkonkoma is nowhere big enough to house the entire Con, and the committee felt there was nowhere else in the vicinity that could take the overflow, so other sites were sought out.

They've ended up with three different sites. One in Brentwood, right next door (sorta) to the Steviemanse. Yay! And one in Islandia, only a few miles from the Steviemanse by car. Yay-ish. And, of course, the Hotel Ronkonkoma some 15 miles east. Yeesh! The committee feels that no-one will be more than 15 minutes from the next site, but neatly elide over the issue of getting between sites to attend consecutive eventsusing the Long Island Expressway³, so knowing what sort of things will be happening in each site is of primary importance. This information has been non-existent up until about a week ago.

Add to this the fact of Mrs Stevie's extreme poor health of late and you might understand where my "Not on your nelly" attitude was coming from.

However, I was informed last night that since Sam Gamgee from Lord of the Rings (The epic saga of the One Ring by J.R.R. Jackson) will be attending as Media Guest of Honor, the womenfolks would put a brave face on things and required tickets buying at once. I grumbled a bit but went to the website to check it out and saw that McDevitt was a confirmed guest. I immediately returned to the living room and told the women in no uncertain terms that they could sit at home on their fat butts if they felt so inclined, but as Asimov was my witness I was going to I-Con and nothing they could say would persuade me otherwise.

I first encountered McDevitt at I-Con some years ago, and it was there I bought Polaris and got it signed. It is a relatively recent infatuation of mine to get books signed by the author. In previous years I didn't get excited by the prospect and never bothered, missing chances to get my C.J. Cherryh, Larry Niven, Ron Goulart, Barry Malzberg and Harlan Ellison collections properly endorsed. This sort of treachery by Mr Brain is why I never got on in life. I digress.

These days at I-Con I follow interesting authors⁴ around from panel to panel, even if the panel subject is not obviously of interest to me. Sometimes this pays dividends and sometimes it just gives me a chance to sit down. Bit of a crap shoot really. But McDevitt was very entertaining, enough so that I bought Polaris and Hello Out There, and, with one minor reservation, they were well worth the finding, leading me to a new (for me) source of highly entertaining reading. As a result I own about a dozen of his works now, and I jump at the chance to meet him again, get him to sign the buggers⁵ and tell him that his previous visit paid off, at least for me.

But oh, those sods on the committee have arranged for the panels to be split over the Brentwood site and the Islandia one, which means I will likely end up missing something I want simply because it will cost a significant portion of time to move the handful of miles down the Long Island Expressway. They could NOT have made life more difficult if they'd set out to do so. And I still don't know how much racing around I'll have to do in the fabulous Steviemobile over the three days because they still haven't nailed down what panels will be where (they could at least make a stab at dividing them up by genre).

But Jack McDevitt will be worth the hassle.

1. Octavia Butler has passed away of course, Barry Malzberg was very ill last year, Harlan Ellison just hates to travel and hates to travel to New York even more, and I don't know what happened to George Zebrowski↑
2. Yes, "filk". Google it for Azathoth's sake↑
3. A-List contender for the much-prized World's Longest Parking Lot designation↑
4. Like Ben Bova, Charles Stross and Norman Spinrad to namedrop shamelessly↑
5. I make the authors add "I-Con xx" rather than a year so that in fifty years when the Stevieling is slinging out my paperbacks, she can at least get a brief clue as to where and when it all went down↑

Never Mind The Cancer, We're Talking Unauthorized Car Parking Here!

There is no disease so terrible the non-medical staff of Long Island Jewish Hospital cannot make the patients feel worse after a visit.

Mrs Stevie has finished her Chemotherapy and Radiation Treatments. She thought that she would immediately start to get better, but has been dismayed by the one to three month timescales quoted by the doctors. I don't blame her a bit, since the radiation has burned the inside of her throat so badly she cannot talk or swallow, and has damaged (probably permanently) her salivary glands so that her saliva is very thick. The pain and the occasional chocking fit this combination causes is close to a definition of hell on earth for her.

Chemotherapy has been explained to me as an attempt to poison the patient in the hope the tumor dies before he or she does, and judging by the side-effects, after-effects and sundry other effects I think that is a fairly accurate description. What I wasn't aware of was the cumulative effects that make the symptoms of chemo-poisoning get worse as each treatment is applied, nor of the chemo-inertia that makes the patient actually continue to get worse for a time after the treatments have ceased. Mrs Stevie has somehow managed to continue the regimen, mostly, although the fluoride tooth treatments that will save her teeth from being destroyed by it all make her so ill she stopped doing them without telling anyone. I guess they're her teeth so it's up to her, but it's worrying nevertheless.

Last Thursday we returned once more to Long Island Jewish Hospital so the surgeon could check her out. These visits to LIJ are a source of great trepidation since the non-medical staff that infest the place seem to think that their jobs involve pumping up the misery for all concerned.

I have told already of the perplexing doings of Chauncy, now on his best behavior since Mrs Stevie tearfully asked Doc Teaspoon (the ENT specialist) if he could take over her evaluations and was gently questioned as to why. Since Doc Teaspoon and the surgeon were ex-university buddies I have no doubt the word got back that there was trouble in paradise. It's all good fun until the cancer patient won't come back to the doctor because his staff are being idiots.

I have also told of the strange and awful Guardian of the Carpark, who seemed to think on our last visit that the intricate rules and procedures governing when he would unlock the barrier could be divined by some sort of mental osmosis. Thursday's visit was made ugly by this individual, reprising his role of Jobsworth Hitler in the pageant of our lives.

I was careful to arrive shortly after 9am this time, in accordance with the mantra "The Carpark Opens At Nine O' Clock"¹ only to find it wasn't, yet.

I got out of my car, checked my watch carefully to ensure there were a good two minutes elapsed since the putative barrier removal time, and beeped my horn twice while calling towards the booth that last time had a human in it: "it's gone nine, please open the barrier". I got back into my car and spotted the J.W. Hitler striding the long way round towards us.

He arrived in theater and flapped his hand imperiously to indicate he wanted me to lower the driver's window. Upon doing so I was asked if I had an appointment. I answered that my wife did, and that we were now late for it so would he mind opening the car park please. He demanded to know the name of our doctor, which I was initially reluctant to supply². He insisted. I heatedly asked why he was delaying my wife's treatment. He wouldn't budge. I told him the surgeon's name but he still wouldn't move, so I began shouting at the top of my not inconsiderable voice "Why are you trying to kill my wife?"

I was so angry it didn't occur to me to simply get out of the car with my wife and take her inside, leaving the carpark entrance blocked by the Steviemobile.

After the third or fourth iteration of my extremely high-volume question, J.W. Hitler finally realized that he had gotten all he was going to and that I was deliberately making a scene over which he could not make himself heard so he unlocked the barrier and walked off.

What is it with this sorry excuse for a hospital? They are supposed to be the premier cancer treatment center on Long Island, but I can tell them right now that Mrs Stevie will beg anyone who asks to go elsewhere (Sloan Kettering in Manhattan is a longer commute but the agro of LIJ more than makes up for that). I mean, what is the percentage in pissing off people who aree sick, some of them terminally so?

Never mind that J.W. Hitler clearly has issues with me³, why in Azathoth's name does the clinic have a car park assigned to it that isn't open for business when they are?

The surgeon took a look at Mrs Stevie and said that he was pretty sure the cancer was all gone now. They'll be doing a PET scan in about two months or so to check for sure. He also wants to see her again in a month.

I decided to apply a cunning strategy and scheduled it for 9:30 am, long after J.W. Hitler will have scuttled back under whatever damp rock he spends the rest of his day under. Of course, I am older and wiser than I was before that fateful November day when we first set foot in that miserable place so I am under no illusions that this appointment will be annoying little shirt-free. The Mordor-like Long Island Jewish Hospital has vast subhuman resources to bring to bear when it comes to slowing down the process of applying healthcare.

What I thought was, up until recently, a slight upside in the business - that Mrs Stevie was unable to speak and therefore unable to comment adversely upon your humble scribe - has in fact been turned into a new nightmare for me since she regained enough strength to retrieve a pen and a pad of paper.

I had naturally placed all such items well out of her reach in order to ensure a quiet convalescence, but in the last few days she regained enough strength to start walking about the place with a determined look on her face that spelled trouble for all in her path.

Now my once-peaceful after work session with Mr Telly is accompanied by the annoying sounds of mad scribblings, and key parts of the plots of the detective dramas I find so compelling are disrupted by the sudden appearance in my field of vision of sheets of paper, thrust into my face and shaken back and forth until I snatch them from her hand and read them. They generally contain philosophical works pondering the existence of fresh milk in the fridge and lengthy instructions regarding the care and feeding of the common or garden Stevieling, but occasionally wander into the familiar territory of genealogical speculations with respect to me, grievance lists and so forth, along with lengthy streams of crazed babble after she's had her pain meds.

Some idiot sent her one of those bells you see in 1930s movies about hotels, the sort you slap the button on the top to get a loud "Ding!" with. Now the house rings to the incessant and capricious dinging as the woman, stir-crazy from six weeks of hellish chemo and radiation-induce confinement, takes it out on everyone. I no sooner settle down at the computer than it's "dingdingdingscribblescribbledingscribbledingdingding" and I have to drop everything so that an urgent frozen sausage shortage outrage can be rectified or the Stevieling can be lectured-by-proxy on the need to properly coordinate the colors when she dresses. Telephone calls are especially tedious, what with one ear on the handset and the other filled with indignant dinging and rustling and attempting to read what is written while listening to whoever is on the line. If it is the Mrs Steviemom, who is partially deaf and has problems with her hearing aids, the whole thing descends into farce worthy of Fawlty Towers or Brian Rix.

The English language has no phrase that adequately expresses the degree to which I look forward to the return of Mrs Stevie's speech and the ending of the Time of Bells and Notes.

1. Da da () da da-da da da () da da - where () is an unvoiced "da"↑
2. My exact words were "what do you care, we have an appointment and the carpark opens at nine o' clock"↑
3. That I would be pleased to resolve one-one-one with the aid of Mr Crowbar in a frank exchange of views. I'm old and slow but my residual anger would carry a lot of weight and I think I could take the twbleept in single combat↑

More Stupidity, LIRR Style

Last night we got four inches of snow.

Naturally, this was a pain in the backside which cried out for the complete and utter failure of the snow plow infrastructure to get in gear, so that the trip to the radiation clinic that now forms part of my morning commute took almost 45 minutes instead of the normal 20 as idiots tried to get vehicles monumentally unsuited to the task to move in a controlled fashion on roads completely clogged with inches of snow. About halfway through this ordeal by snowstorm it began to rain, revealing a nice coating of ice polished to a high sheen by the morons I was sharing the road with who don't ever seem to get the point about not spinning their wheels for the sake of it.

By the time I got to the station a fine sleet was coming down. I drove to the small side street I now park on, and was truly impressed by the number of idiots determined to see how quickly they could lose control of their expensive vehicles. I decamped and walked to the station through an increasingly bitter icy drizzle. As I did so I narrowly missed being run over by one of the Long Island Panzerführen.

This one was a doozy. Back and side windows obscured by at least three inches of wet snow. Lights completely covered by same front and rear. Small patch of windshield scraped "clear" but the hood and roof retaining their nice deep cover of snow for camouflage purposes.

Which made it all the more puzzling why the idiot driving the Deer Park Fire Department vehicle, for such it 'twas, had bothered to turn on all his blue flashing roof lights. All that trouble to avoid detection by the other motorists was jeopardised by the bizarre need to light the blanket of snow from beneath with what looked like three watt blue bulbs.

I ducked into the station house, where the nice new computer display informed me that the next train was on time and was due in at 9:33 am. Mr Casio Wristwatch, now synchronised to Jamaica time, informed me that it was now 9:33 so I left the warmth of the station house and made my way down the packed snow and ice which coated the entire platform until I reached the aluminium shelter erected about halfway down. I usually don't ride in the front of the train to avoid noise from the train's klaxon.

No sooner had I completed this journey, all of about 60 seconds of travail, than I was privileged to hear a recorded announcement that the train was now an estimated eight minutes late. In the space of one minute, the train went from being "on time" (though nowhere in sight) to eight minutes late. Magic.

I passed the chilly time by observing the LIRR crew who had invaded the platform with snow shovels in the quest for a snow-free environment and passenger safety. They were very busy, shoveling like madmen, which is why I found it so utterly perplexing that they had chosen to begin work at the extreme East end of the platform. Since the station house is at the extreme West end of that same platform and passenger turnout was almost certain to be light at this time in the morning compared with the period from 6:30 to about 8:15 - not to mention the effect the weather was having on getting people to just stay home - this pretty much guaranteed that they would have no chance whatsoever of clearing any of the platform people would actually be using to board that next train unless it was really, really late.

The train pulled up a few minutes later and we all tramped out to the doors so we could board. We stood and we stood as freezing rain soaked us through, but at no time were we in any danger of being forced to get on the train. In all I estimate we stood around getting drenched for about 45 seconds before someone got a bleeding clue and pressed the "open door" button. By then my coat was soaked through, still is as I type in the early evening, and the change at a very windy Jamaica was pure misery as a result. At least I had the reason for the train being late.

There wasn't a single person on board the thing that knew how to work it.

Funny Thing, Irony

Probably one of the most debated coffee-house topics is that concerning what does or does not constitute irony.

Poor old Alanis Morrisette fell afoul of this one when she wrote a song about it. "It's like rain on your wedding day" she sang, and people said "No it's not. That's just annoying."

I don't know so much.

From where I sit, irony would appear to be a matter of context, which in turn demands knowledge of the culture in which the reference is being made. This would seem to argue that not only is irony not absolute, one man's annoyance could very well be someone else's irony.

Rain on your wedding day could be seen to be ironic in the context that your archetypical American Girl spends vast amounts of her young life dreaming about her wedding day, and when the actual thing hoves into view it therefore tends to be stage-managed to the nth degree in order to make everything comply with the vision of what it should be like. Given that the young girl's dream undoubtedly includes the entire day, the one uncontrollable thing going totally nails-up could very well be interpreted as irony.

At least, that's how it seems to me.

This thesis is born out by the scene in the movie Con Air, in which some convicts seize control of the aircraft in which they are being transported and begin partying hard while Sweet Home Alabama booms from the radio. Steve Buscemi leans across to another character and says that this defines irony: a bunch of people on a plane singing along to a song performed by a group all-but wiped out in a plane crash.

Well, yes and no.

It is ironic if you consider that the last thing these guys want is to crash, and you happen to know that Lynrd Skynrd were involved in a plane crash that killed half the band and put the rest in hospital, I suppose, maybe, although it's a stretch even so. But if you consider that only a small fraction of the English speaking world contemporary with the film's release would know that, well, it pretty much fails the test as badly as Ms Morrisette's song did. That is why the writers felt the need to have one of the characters tell everyone where the irony was of course.

Which is a round-about way of saying that I'm rarely sure I've correctly identified irony when I've encountered it.

Changing the subject: This morning I raced to catch my train, the 8:53 from Wyandanch (Pearl of the East) to Penn Station (change at Jamaica for trains to Brooklyn). I am usually on this train these days, which gets me to work at the extreme end of my "flex time" window and requires that I work late and miss my only straight-through train home, since I have the honour of driving Mrs Stevie each morning to her radiation treatments.

This drive is now made in silence since her voice is no longer audible. Many's the time I've begged for a halt to her shrill admonissions of my good self, but for some reason there's no sense of satisfaction in being able to get a word in edgeways when she's so ill, just a mood of crushing sadness tempered by the sure knowledge that the cancer is in retreat. No doubt I'll regret not making the most of this time once she is back to ordering and nagging at the drop of a hat. I digress.

Snow had been falling since about 5 am and was blowing around and covering up the windows and headlights of the cars most inconveniently. Once again the elusive Long Island Panzerfüren hit the streets in force. This year there seem to be flocks of idiots in white cars who do not see the point of cleaning the snow from their vehicles nor of turning on their headlights. The resulting montage pretty much defines the art of camouflage. White car, covered in irregular heaps of snow (yes, even on the hood/bonnet), small slot scraped in snow-covered windshield, producing a very good simulation of a mobile snow bank. Add in a swirling snowstorm to help in further breaking up the outline of the cars and you have the perfect hide from which to snag caribou or snap candid photos of penguins at play. Whoops, I digress again.

I got to the station with about a minute to spare, but I needn't have worried. The Long Island Rail Road was having one of it's "days" and the train dawdled for another eight minutes before showing up, allowing the would-be passengers just the right amount of time to synchronise their bodies to ambient temperature conditions. I've believed for years that we, the paying customers of the LIRR, have been the unwilling subjects in an unannounced and inadequately overseen series of experiments in human cryogenics performed by the rail road, and today was proof enough for even the most hard-nosed skeptic. We staggered aboard the train, snapping icicles from out earlobes and noses and greeting the train crew with the traditional curses and threats, thinking the ordeal was over.

A sad mistake.

The train proceeded as far as the next grade crossing, about a hundred feet down the track, then stopped for about ten minutes. It them crept to the next crossing and did the same thing. then it did it all over again. And again. And again.

In a mere twenty minutes we had arrived in Farmingdale, about five minutes west of Wyandanch by sedan chair. Another fifteen minutes saw us in Bethpage, where we were so late everyone seemed to have lost hope and gone home. Would that I had done the same.

There were periodic "announcements" by someone doing a fair imitation of Mrs Stevie. I heard the word "signals" but nothing else was intelligible. Each crossing was guarded by a convoy of MTA Police vehicles, lit up with flashing lights like so many full-sized Hess Trucks, leading me to believe the automated circuitry that raises and lowers the booms had gone bye-bye. What was most galling (as it always is) was having to watch the off-peak east-bound trains get priority over our west-bound peak train.

By the time we reached Hicksville we were 47 minutes late. This was so late that there was no-one there to board the train. Hicksville is a major hub for commuters¹. Finding it empty was more than a little surprising and a good indication of how badly screwed up everything was. The doors opened so we could all sample the cold air from the elevated platform, unshielded from the wind by so much as a single tree, about the time I should have been boarding the Brooklyn train at Jamaica.

By the time we reached Jamaica, we had missed all the connecting trains and I realised I could either ride to Manhattan and use the subway to get to Brooklyn, or I could wait for forty minutes on the unsheltered platform at Jamaica for the proper train. I stayed put.

Sometime around 11am, an hour after I was supposed to be at my desk, we pulled into Penn Station and I started getting ready to debark. It was then that I actually took time to read the many flyers littering the seats², which were from the LIRR propaganda arm and were trumpeting their on-time performance.

I'm pretty sure that was irony.

1. and a source of a particularly gittish species of commuter too, but that's another story↑
2. I am currently re-reading my collection of Jack McDevitt "Hutch" books and had brought along Cauldron, the latest in the series. It was very engrossing, much more than whatever the LIRR was trying to make me believe↑

Scrawled In The Empty Spaces Of The Pages Of "Brass Orchids", Pub. 197? by Roger Calkins, Bellona

Mrs Stevie had to visit the Oncology Surgeon last Friday.

Yes, once again she had to deal with the infrastructure of Long Island Jewish Hospital, including the clueless front desk and Chauncy the Fbleepkwit, and they hit the ground running by not returning her initial call made to schedule her appointment. She gave them a couple of hours, then called back. Then did it all over again, giving them a slightly shorter time to do nothing.

By the time I got home she had called them six times and still had no idea if and when they would deign to let her see the surgeon. That's the one person in this whole sad, sorry house of cards that actually does something useful for the patients who are, lets remember, all suffering from some form of malignancy in their ears, noses or throats and might actually benefit from a bit of coddling.

She got so fed up that she eventually called Doc Teaspoon, the ENT who dealt so effectively with my ear infection and who did the initial medical work-up on her tumor and who is a very effective communicator in addition to being good at what he does¹, to ask him if she could she him instead.

Doc Teaspoon was kind enough to spend some time on the phone with the distressed Mrs Stevie, talking her through the reasons why she really needed to see the surgeon, but also offering to get in touch with him and alert him to the fact that his front office were not representing his best interests. It seems they were at ENT school together or something.

So the appointment somehow got made for last Friday morning, and I took the morning off and drove her to Long Island Jewish Hospital so they could begin the process of annoying the living crap out of us.

The first act started when we drove in the front gate and Mrs Stevie instructed me to turn into a small car park just before the large multi-storey one I was aiming the car at. I wrenched the wheel over and we made a hard left turn, tyres and Mrs Stevie screeching, into the short driveway next to the ENT clinic where I brought the car to a halt in front of a yellow lift-arm type barrier.

Which didn't lift.

I sat there for a few seconds, then I noticed a sign on the card-reader next to my door which said: "Press button for assistance". Winding down the window I confidently pressed it, but was perplexed to feel no movement in it at all. It seemed to be a dummy plastic casting, painted to resemble a bell-push type button, which had been glued to the card-reader as a sophisticated car-park joke. I snarled at Mrs Stevie and started to put the car into reverse so I could back out into heavy traffic driven by distracted people looking everywhere but at the road while they tried vainly to figure out where they were and where they needed to be in this nightmare of a place.

I'm not joking here. There are few signs in this benighted den and some of the ones they do have point to places that have been dug up in some sort of hospital-wide renovation project that involves demolishing random roads and stringing chain link fence at random with no regard for roads, sidewalks or large sandy pits. I tried to remember Mrs Stevie was very, very ill and therefore excused bad judgment (she clearly didn't know as much about the car parks hereabouts as she insisted she did) and began to reverse.

Which is when I noticed the old lady who had pulled in behind me.

And the person optimistically signaling her intention to join us as soon as we would stop messing about and enter the car park, and who was therefore creating a reversing issue for the old lady.

I looked frantically for a sign of some sort that indicated whether or not I was, as I suspected, trying to get into some sort of staff car park where card-entry was the only way of passing the barrier or someone I could ask, but there was only the roads, holes in the ground and the traffic. I pulled forward enough that I could get out of my car and tried again to use the call button on the card reader by hammering it with Kung-fu like jabs of my finger, then my thumb and finally my clenched fist smashing it hammer-wise while shouting morale-boosting phrases.

Definitely fake.

I walked back to the elderly lady, tapped on her window and explained I couldn't proceed. Before I could ask her if she knew whether there was a secret knock or something, she had backed her vehicle smartly into the road, narrowly missing my foot, and departed for the multi-storey car park. I keep forgetting that the elderly frewuently had prior careers as NASCAR and Demolition Derby drivers.

As I walked dejectedly back to The Fabulous Steviemobile, an Osamamobile pulled up to the exit barrier. Before the driver could depart the scene I hallooed her and asked her if this was in fact a staff-only car park. She explained that no, it was in general use but probably hadn't opened for business yet, and suggested I visit a hitherto unseen security guard post in the multi-storey car park to see what was up. I blubbered my thanks, and ran across to the booth, only to be told that someone was already coming to help and that I should go back to my car.

In due course a well-dressed Indian gentleman arrived in theater waving a key. He was quite cross.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped.

I could see by my watch, synchronised to Jamaica LIRR time, that it was a couple of minutes past nine. My first instinct was to complain about the late opening, but I had a second thought that a more constructive suggestion might save the situation from deteriorating into nastiness. "Well, if there were some sort of sign to that effect..." I began in a neutral tone, smiling to show I was being helpful rather than pointing out the bleeding obvious.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped again.

"And if I had been made aware of that in any way, shape or form we would not be having this discussion. However, as you can see there is no indication of when the car park opens or what to do if you've already pulled into the entranceway before that time" I said, still trying to stem my instinct to go for the jugular.

"The car park does not open until nine o' clock!" he snapped, in tones of one trying to communicate with shirt-thick morons.

At this point Mrs Stevie let loose with a stream of dockyard invective that set the headlining of the car on fire. Mr The Car Park Does Not Open Until Nine O' Clock was saved from the worst of it by the simple fact that her voice was completely gone due to the effects of her radiation therapy. I just shook my head and said "Thank you. Think of me each time you have this conversation." and drove into the now-accessible car park.

We entered the clinic and got a second pleasant surprise. Chauncy the Sbleepthead was manning the desk.

I promptly began a holding action in which I distracted Mrs Stevie from her building rage by reminiscing about our early married life, and our first few months in the company of the Stevieling, who could charm the birds out of the trees at three months. Of course, this only served to remind Mrs Stevie of the time we had all gone to Florida for a big family reunion.

We had taken everyone to Disney, and on one occasion at the MGM park I volunteered to wait outside with the three month old Stevieling while everyone else went into the Muppet Theater². You may not know this, but July is the off-season for Florida, being so hot no-one would want to go there usually, and hence it is awash in Brazilian tourists who are used to the heat, know a cheap airline ticket when they see one and who have no concept of personal space. I generally avoid them whenever I can, and it was just bad luck that Mrs Stevie emerged from the attraction to find me surrounded by about two dozen young Brazilian women, all somewhere between the ages of 18-25 and all possessed with the sort of dress-sense that dictates the dental floss bikini as sensible Disney park wear and all in skin-to-skin contact with yours truly while they crooned over the "bella bebo" in Portuguese.

Needless to say this went down like a lead balloon, as did the accidental trip into the memory of it all while attempting to preserve morale under fire. Anyway.

During this, Chauncy wandered over and announced that we would be seen by the doctor soon. He apologised for the delay and explained that it was because of a surfeit of doctors crowding out the examination rooms. This spontaneous display of helpfulness was so shocking it completely derailed Mrs Stevie's line of attack. We just looked at each other in amazement. Clearly, someone had "had a word". He even got her surname right.

The surgeon eventually hove into view and took a butcher's at Mrs Stevie’s mouth. He blinked in surprise and said that the "primary site" appeared to be completely free of cancer. He owned to being very surprised at the rapidity of the remission and said he was impressed that she was responding to treatment so well. He confirmed that the swollen lymph gland was half the size it had been when she was referred to him (something she had not believed when I had told her, nor when two radiation oncologists had told her). I saw the weight come off her shoulders and she visibly brightened.

We were brought back to reality when we attempted to schedule a follow-up appointment though.

"What time did you want to come in? Eight thirty?" said the suspiciously helpful Chauncy.

"The car park doesn't open until nine" I parroted.

"Oh, that's right! Okay nine it is. What day? he responded.

"How about Friday?" I said. "I have meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"The doctor only has Thursday hours" he replied.

Mrs Stevie made a warble of puzzlement, but I saw where this was going. "Thursday will be fine" I said, and steered Mrs Stevie for the door.

"That's absurd! she rasped in her Rod McKuen voice as I helped her into the car. "It makes no sense whatsoever!".

"I know. Don't get upset about it. The world won't end if I miss one meeting" I said.

"But they were the ones who dictated the day we came this time! It makes no sense! How can they say the Doctor only has Thursday hours when..."

"...Today's Friday" I interrupted. "Yes, I know. This whole place is some sort of demented mental equivalent of an Escher drawing. Every time you try and make sense of something here, the definition of "down" changes and the whole picture abruptly changes. Don't get upset. At least we got out of the place in under three hours this time."

"Just thank Azathoth you don't have to be admitted" I added as I gunned the engine and made a break for the exit.

1. Judging from personal experience↑
2. One of the best Disney creations ever IMHO↑