Interlude With Annoyances

Mrs Stevie was complaining to the Stevieling via text that I wasn't responding to her texts on Saturday while she was in Michigan at a wedding.

When informed of her distress at my silence I immediately texted:

Sorry I didn't see your message, I was busy trying to put all the parts of the dryer back together. The good news is that I managed to get the seized-solid motor turning again. The bad news is not for much longer to judge by the noises coming out of the bearings. I can't get the motor out of the dryer so we shall have to buy a new one.¹

I think I just saw a rat in the back garden.²

So: how's your day going?

That should keep her long-distance nagging down to a minimum.

1. A three-hour struggle of man vs machine in a World Gone Mad which I just can't bear to re-live, so you'll have to imagine it. Poke around in the index and you should find a similar event from three years or so ago↑
2. True. No sooner do I think things can't get worse than nature shows me how they can. So, I am destined to become The Mad Rat Poisoner Of Auld Deer Park Towne↑

Canada Trip, Day 2

Dawn came and went and we snoozed on.

We arose, rested, around 8pm and went for breakfast in the chain restaurant downstairs, marveling as we did at the incredible heat in the hotel corridor despite the outside temperature being extremely mild. Sadly, despite the restaurant being part of a chain we've used with great success in the past, today breakfast was inedible with the most bland, plastic-like sausage I've ever personally noshed on.

We were expecting a visit from Ali, the guy who had rented us the car and who had very kindly offered to pick us up at our hotel on Sunday morning and drive us out to the car hire dealership, and he showed up exactly on time to ferry us across town and temporarily sell us transport for the week. It took about 15 minutes to get there and sign the paperwork.

"I'm going to give you a truck" said Ali, waving in the general direction of the window. I could see a line of white Toyota pick-up trucks parked along the service road. All of a sudden the extremely reasonable cost of the car hire (about what a small subcompact would have rented for in New York) made sense.

"Er...We''re gonna need a King Cab" I said. "We have three people we're moving around."

"Yes, yes, yes. I am renting you a King Cab truck. Here, let's go and have a look."

He grabbed the paperwork and led us out the door to the biggest damned truck I could have imagined. It towered over me. It was half as wide again as the Steviemobile and seated about 27.

"I present to you your truck. A most sensible vehicle for this part of Alberta."

"And the mountains of Afghanistan" I muttered, noting the knee-high door sills and bumper lifted from a Chieftain tank. "Do they push-start many bulldozers in this part of Alberta, or is the appeal that one may safely pass over any stray bears one might encounter?"

"Most unsafe to drive over bears, sir" he replied, seriously. "They have learned to roll over and tear out the brake and fuel lines with their mighty claws as you drive. It is most unsafe to coast with no brakes in this part of Alberta and expressly against the terms of the rental agreement."

"I have no intention of driving over any wildlife" I said.

"However" he spoke over my protest "the Ford Leviathan Supa-Kab Turbo-X is fitted with under-frame bear-proof plates upon which their claws cannot find purchase, allowing you to drive over bears, cougars and many other examples of the local wildlife with no danger. Moose pose a separate hazard and you may either buy Moose collision insurance or simply avoid them."

"Where is the boarding ladder kept?" I inquired.

"Ha ha. Let me show you the correct technique. You open the door thus, take a small run up, leap thus and grab this bar, hauling yourself in."

"I'm sorry, Ali," I said. "I don't think..."

"Shuttup and get in!" came the voice of my beloved from somewhere inside. "It's perfect and we are taking it."

Before I could protest the mighty metal beast gave off a mechanical shriek and the engine burst into life. I held on desperately as the terrible suction of the engine's air induction gubbins aspirated huge volumes of air and a passing cat, mixing it with a half gallon or so of vaporized gas so it could be exploded in one of the cylinders before doing it all again.

Mrs Stevie stamped on the accelerator and a terrifying howl rent the air as the coffee-can sized pistons were driven down in their cylinders with about the same force needed to launch a space shuttle then rammed back up by a super-massive crankshaft surely salvaged from the Titanic. The vehicle was visibly trying to flip over on its back as the Newtonian sums were figured out by a universe so unnerved by this behemoth that it was forgetting to carry the odd one.

"Stop making that howling noise and GET IN!" snarled the truck-crazed Mrs Stevie.

"I don't wanna" I whined, but she reached over, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me into the cab, almost suffocating me in the luxuriant nap of the Unicorn Hide upholstery.

Once inside with the doors closed we were isolated from the devastating ambiance pollution of the truck, and I began to see the appeal of the thing. Mrs Stevie spent two seconds reviewing the dashboard instrumentation, which looked like it had been lifted from the fire-control console of a battleship, and testing the build-quality of the various controls by wiggling them, then drove down the curb, up the opposite one, across twenty yards of snow ditch, a small herd of elk and the three lane carriageway that was pointing the wrong way, over a crash barrier and finally onto the other three lane carriageway where she combined driving at speed with attempting to figure out what each switch, stick and button did. I assisted her by pointing out possible collision hazards such as buildings and other road users while she practiced unannounced lane changes.

"Stop that screeching and stop cowering in the footwell like that!" she snarled playfully.

We reached the hotel eventually, where a problem raised itself. Everyone else was driving some variation of the vehicle we had, yet for some arcane reason the parking spaces were laid out for the vehicle we thought we'd be renting - a small to mid-sized sedan. Each monster truck was parked with its tires brushing the painted lines. Some people had just decided to park in one and a half spaces, which seemed very sensible when you consider that each truck probably represented a 60 kilobux investment.

I foresaw a problem. Mrs Stevie cannot see-saw a vehicle to save her life. She does not have whatever gland it is that enables one to reverse and steer productively when attempting to shift a vehicle horizontally a few feet by going back and forth, so if her space does not permit the operation to be performed only with forward-direction steering maneuvers she can and does perform five minutes of going backwards and forwards only to end up in exactly the same place she started in.

Mrs Stevie drove back and forth a few times in a futile effort to park inside the lines and far enough from other vehicles to ensure the safety of our Door Ding Deposit before realizing the Ford Leviathan Supa-Kab Turbo-X was in fact only two inches narrower than the stall and giving up. I encouraged her with playful banter and the occasional bout of good-natured laughter until she stopped the truck, whereupon she punched me. I protested that it wasn't my fault she couldn't park to save her life, but this statement of fact only served to trigger a stream of invective and hurtful language.

We went back up to the room to collect The Stevieling, who had very sensibly decided to sit this episode out, and to allow me to change my underwear. The Stevieling was scowling at the television, which was playing an episode of Big Bang.

"Why are you watching that show?" I asked. "You've always said you hated it."

"It's that or the weather, golf or the news" she replied.

"Local news might be a worthwhile use of time" I said. "Call it orientation."

"I do not require orientation in the various ins-and-outs of running a fresh produce stall."

"Eh?" My confusion was palpable.

"Today they are running a special report on the benefits of local produce and where you can find it."

"But I know for a fact there are twelve more channels you could pick" I said, a little bewildered at her obstinacy.

"Six in French, which I do not understand, three weather channels, two channels programming for the 2-4 year old audience and the channel menu. Are we leaving for Granny and Grandad's now?"

"Yes" snapped Mrs Stevie. "Hurry up so I can show you the truck they rented us."

And so we trooped into the hallway, where we were greeted by tropical temperatures again. The entire time we were there the corridor was somehow kept at something like 100 degrees Fahrenheit¹ . The outside temperatures were a blessed relief, being somewhere in the low 70s with no humidity to speak of. Very comfortable for me.

The elevator doors had just opened when Mrs Stevie's phone rang. It was the StevieSis, telling us to come to the parent's house because the StevieDad had fallen and an ambulance was on its way.

We made good time to the parental manse, set on a mountainside about five miles from the hotel, and a few moments after we had entered the house a team of EMTs arrived in a palatial ambulance loaded with high-tech diagnostic equipment. I have never seen such a modern and well-equipped ambulance outside of a TV show.

The EMTs were on first name terms with everyone as it turned out they had been to the house many times before. They determined that the StevieDad had to go back to hospital, whence he had only just emerged after an operation a few days before, and he cheered up. They loaded him and the StevieMum into the wagon and off they went, followed by The StevieSis in The StevieMum's Ford Explorer and us in the Leviathan Supa-Kab Turbo-X.

Mrs Stevie's head was swiveling from side-to-side all the way down the mountain.

"Stop looking for bears to drive over" I said. "You'll put us in the ravine."

"Shuttup. I'm driving" she replied.

We got to the hospital and were immediately confronted by the usual hospital problem - where to park. The miniscule car park seemed to be full every time we arrived, but by driving around for a mere 20 or 30 minutes a space would open up and the Comedy of the Parking would commence as Mrs Stevie would attempt to fit the Leviathan into a space dimensioned for a Volkswagen Beetle. Eventually she put the beast in a stall and we figured out the pay-and-display machine calculus that had us buying a 24 hour pass every time and it was off to find The StevieDad.

The StevieDad was upset about the abrupt derailment of our planned day, and concerned for the rest of our visit and the upcoming wedding. It turned out he had good reason because he had an undiagnosed infection that was to keep him in hospital for the next two weeks.

The hospital has a strict policy about visitors in the emergency room - as many as you like until they get busy. This was good as the entire Canadian Battalion arrived in theater at about the same moment in time. Some of us had to wait in the lounge with comfy chairs while others hovered around the bedside making comforting noises. We rotated in and out of The StevieDad's bay.

We took turns to alternately reassure him and nag him about using his walker until he was properly enraged and ordered us all from the emergency room. I pointed out - quite reasonably - that he couldn't enforce his order on account of leaving his walker in the bedroom, and that if he hadn't left it there he wouldn't have fallen in the first place. I was about to mention the purple veins pulsing on his forehead when one of the electronic boxes he was wired up to started wailing and a stern² nurse arrived and ordered us out.

I should just like to say at this point that during the visit I was constantly impressed by the amount and up-to-dateness of the technology at the fingertips of the Grande Prairie medical infrastructure. They have much newer, better and cleverer stuff than the hospital I visit every so often, and they pay for it all with a sales tax that is less than the NY sales tax. So the next time one of my American Readers listens to the tired old "Canadian Health Care" calumnies I want them to remember this - it cost my parents NOTHING for this excellent care in a state-of-the-art hospital with polite and friendly staff.

We chatted for a bit with The StevieMum and left her with The StevieDad - she wouldn't leave him until he'd been checked in - and went for lunch, promising to return a bit later. We killed some time in the original town center, making a point of popping into Wonderland, an excellent old-fashioned toystore that has a bit of everything in it from Legos to Marionettes. We used to shop there for Canada-specific Playmobil toys for The Stevieling and we did as we always do and loudly bemoaned that we no longer had a kid young enough so we could buy all the awesome new stuff "for her".

That last is true by the way. You could and probably still can buy Playmobil figures and playsets in Canada that cannot be had in the USA. Other parents would often marvel at the Inuit figures and extras in The Stevieling's collection - sleds with dog teams, seal hunters with complete miniature tool sets³, an igloo and so forth. I used to have no respect for Playmobil toys but 20 years down the road, having seen the play value for myself (and having secretly played with some of the stuff because it was so awesome) I have 180'd and recommend them everywhere I can.

We dropped by The StevieDad's ward later that night to nag him about his walker some more, but after only five or ten minutes of playful badinage he became agitated and had to be sedated. I think it might be something to do with his age because he doesn't drink that much coffee. Old people are known to be testy and have short tempers, as was demonstrated when I sat on his gouty foot shortly after we arrived. I don't think having a catheter shoved into his bladder improved his mood for the better either.

We went round to the StevieNiece's house to meet Mr StevieNiece and the StevieNiecelings, including the new baby who I may have mentioned is the most beautiful human being on the planet. We all got to hold her while she slept, though the women hogged her so I didn't get enough baby-holding time. I'll let you into a secret I've so far managed to hide under a gruff pantomime of indifference toward the child: I miss having a baby around the house. I never really recovered from New Daddy Syndrome and little miss StevieGreatNiece is adorable.

Mr StevieNiece is an affable fellow who had his life planned out ahead of him then had the rug pulled out abruptly right after he got wed to The StevieNiece. He has fallen on his feet though, and has a job that, like many in that part of the world⁴, takes him away from home for long periods but pays very well indeed. He and The StevieNiece had invited us to eat with them and he made steaks using a French technique I've never come across before.

The steaks were vacuum packed and cooked slowly using hot water, then removed from the bags and grilled.

I know. It sounds terrible, but the steaks were the most delicious, evenly cooked steaks I've ever personally tasted. For the first time I ate pink steak and enjoyed it. Normally, a steak that color will be raw in the middle and well-done on the outside, but these were cooked evenly and completely all the way through. Perfect, and we were angling for more steak meals ever afterward. He clearly would like to be cooking for a living but as he said to me, the market for an upscale restaurant in Grande Prairie is not large enough to keep one open long. I think his characterization of the town as "Burgerville" was perhaps a trifle harsh, but I could see what he was saying.

The boys showed us their special racing car beds, fabricated by Mr StevieSis their grandfather. He is an excellent carpenter and very inventive in conjunction with The StevieSis. Over at their house the boys kip down in bunk beds made up to look like a pirate ship. The racing cars were sleek, professional looking things that would have fetched a couple of hundred dollars in New York apiece. When I asked granddad what he used, he said "two sawhorses and a jigsaw".

Once the boys were in bed we went downstairs to sip drinks and talk while the women of La Famile Stevie hogged the baby. We had a bit of fun watching the boys on the video monitor their parents had set up while we spoke of jobs and family and when was I going to get to hold the baby for Crom's sake? The StevieNiece and Mr StevieNiece are looking at buying a bigger house and we spoke about properties for a while until it was time to leave.

On the drive home we once again took note of how closely packed the houses were. It seems insane that with all the space they have the developers insist on building houses so close to each other you can touch two by walking between them. The fire risk is substantial.

Our route took us past the railroad and I was surprised to note that the long lines of colorful grain cars that had been a fixture of the landscape on every visit were nowhere in sight. It was harvest time, but all I saw were some small, anonymous gray twin-bay hoppers. Next to the Real Thing these were drab toys. Where were the real grain cars? I wanted to photograph them up close for once. Just my luck they were not around.

We drove into the hotel car park, where Mrs Stevie spent a few minutes lining up the truck with the stall and then we retired, exhausted from the day's events and Mrs Stevie's parking.

1. It occurs to me now that it is possible one of the foreign staff had confused Fahrenheit with Celsius when setting the thermostat. There were many South American people working in the hotel, though I was under the impression that the USA was the last bastion of Fahrenheit. Why people get bent out of shape about that beats me, but it drives some of my UK and Australian forum-buddies into fits of apoplexy at times. Neither scale is used for important stuff, and in real life you only need a five point scale - Hot enough to kill, too hot for the clothes you are wearing, just right for the clothes you are wearing, too cold for the clothes you are wearing and cold enough to kill↑
2. By Canadian standards - she omitted to bracket "everyone should leave now" with "If it wouldn't be too much trouble I think" and "if that's okay with everyone, eh?" ↑
3. The toolsets were confiscated a) because they were too tiny for the small kid The Stevieling was then and 2) The Stevieling would have had a fit if she had found out what those Inuit Playmobils were having for dinner↑
4. Which is basically a way-station for those traveling to and from the oil fields and diamond mines↑

Canada Trip, Day 1

The day dawned at around 5:30-ish and this time we weren't flopping around like the living dead in the back of a limo about to pull into La Guardia airport.

The reason? I had put my foot down on the subject of getting up three hours after midnight so we could once again experience the dubious pleasure of participating in the Early Morning Meeting Of Modern Air Transport Infrastructure With The Realities Of Weather Conditions No One Saw Coming Despite A Tower Full Of Radars And A Crew Of Meteorologists.

Last time, as the attentive reader will recall¹ We stood from 6 am til about 10 am on a line euphemistically called "the express check in line", missing all the connections Mrs Stevie had meticulously planned and putting us wheels down and tempers flared sometime in the late evening. Never again, I vowed².

This time we would start the journey at a civilized time and allow the airline, whichever one we would be using but probably Air Canada since they are usually the only game in town for that journey, to have their two-hour delay and resulting mass riot in the check-in on their own sans La Famile Stevie. We would arrive after the fun was over, allowing the aeroplanes to catch up with the schedule, and all we would have to do would be to avoid the larger puddles of blood left by those too inexperienced to know better.

"Fine" snapped Mrs Stevie. "You sort it out then!"

"Eh?"

"I'll leave the details to you!"

Well, I'm not normally moved by pathetic whining and complaining, and neither, it turns out, is Mrs Stevie because no amount of pathetic whining and complaining would get her to reverse this unreasonable new policy. I bit the bullet eventually and decided to employ ... technology.

There are hundreds upon hundreds upon three that I know of services that allow a would-be traveler to sort out the nightmare of long-distance point-to-point air travel, as any trip into the Land of the Steviemum is.

Why point-to-point? First one must immigrate to Canada and go through their customs. This used to be a simple matter of exchanging a few words with a smiling Canadian official who would wish you a pleasant stay and politely ask after your relatives. Now, however, the Canadians have moved to the American Model, which involves scowling, queuing and waiting forever.

In any event one must get off the aeroplane in an international airport and go through the process of getting back on another before it leaves without you or your bags. Yes, your bags have to be fished out of the chain-of-transport and taken by hand through the never-moving lines of people waiting to be allowed to catch their flight.

Once past that you must fly horizontally across Canada to either Edmonton or Calgary if you are of a mind to visit the Stevieparents. Once there, you must cool your heels for two and a half hours due to some sort of universal law. It doesn't matter how late your flight is or whether it arrived on time, two hours thirty minutes must be spent trying not to fall asleep.

This is harder than it sounds as Edmonton sometimes turns out the lights and clears all service personnel from the outlying gate areas so an area of peaceful twilight prevails. The odd moose wanders across the runway as the first July blizzard blows in³. A sense of peace descends on one anzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Calgary, on the other hand, is usually abuzz with at least three or four people per square mile, but the airport management have cunningly countered this intolerable overcrowding by installing enormous comfy chairs for people to await their connecting flight. Comfy comfy comfy is the order of the dazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Once the sleep hazard has either been avoided or negotiated, one must board a "puddle jumper" for the flight to Grande Prairie. These, in previous visits, have been the shoulder wing, twin turboprop Dash 8 type which is so small the average carry-on wheely bag is too large to go in the cabin area and must be dropped off on a cart prior to climbing the boarding rope.

This year we flew on a much larger Q400 and could board with our bags, but I'm getting ahead of the story⁵.

I used Expedia to find us a flight that would a) leave around noonish and 2) would allow over 2 hours at each stop to cushion the various outrages that fate and the airline industry could deploy to slow us down. The only fly in the ointment was that we'd have to leave from La Guardia and return to JFK, which introduced the possibility of limo drivers not finding us or dropping us off in the wrong place.

Well, that and the fact that no matter how long I looked I could not find an inbound route that didn't have us immigrating in Toronto International Airport, aka Minas Tororntor, citadel of despair. I comforted myself with the sure knowledge that it had to be easier going through the Canada-wards version. No-one could come close to the sheer amounts of unnecessary buggering about and unnecessary lack of getting organized that the American-ward side typically subjects people to. They've been Doing It The Hard Way since forever, long before 9/11, and you can't buy field experience like that for money.

I also booked us into a hotel in the middle of Grande Prairie. Mum and Dad are now too old to have us as guests and though my sister kindly offered us all manner of alternatives we decided that in order to allow us some extra freedom we haven't had in previous visits we would put ourselves somewhere where we could come and go as the mood took us, and where we could walk to the center of town if we felt so inclined. This, naturally, sparked The Great Accommodation Crisis and I have no doubt deeply hurt my sister, who after all is family and wanted to save us the bother and cost.

Part of our decision to board abroad as it were was that with a wedding that week, the Steviesis would have her hands full and be wigging-out without the hassle of having others underfoot⁶. Part of it was to be, for once, independent. And there were other factors I'm not going into on account of the misery of the whole thing made me seriously consider ditching everyone and going to Australia by myself instead and I don't want to talk about it any more.

Mrs Stevie relented after seeing what a stellar job I was doing with the moving, sleeping and so forth arrangements and decided to organize a rental car before I scored a hat trick and bragging rights for the next five years. She used my credit card, which made the same sort of noise bacon makes when you press a fresh rasher down on a too-hot griddle with a metal spatula⁷.

We couldn't print the boarding passes yet though. That could only be done 24 hours or less from the actual take-off time of the first part of the flight. Oh well.

I began receiving a sleet of e-mails from Expedia both about my vacation and spamming me about other great opportunities in world transit. They also suggested I go to Jet Blue's website to confirm everything, which I did about a week before we were to fly. I was told I could reserve seats only if I was prepared to pay a $200 fee for "early reservations", which made me roll my eyes as it had been the case in other years that the airline preferred to have the seating well-sorted as far ahead as possible. I ponied up, and was able to reserve seats on every flight we would be involved with in both directions, so it wasn't that bad.

It also turned out to be a wise decision as was demonstrated when they badly overbooked the Edmonton to New York flight and families were split all over the plane to their great annoyance. Naturally the rows we were seated in were the last ones called for boarding on every single flight, causing some problems with finding space for our carry-on bags, but again, I'm getting ahead of the story.

Perhaps most annoyingly, having dunned me for monies to book our seats, and having taken ticket monies that formed a contract promising we could take a single piece of carry on baggage, personal items such as cameras and a single checked bag each, Westjet (our carrier this time) sent me a missive gibbering about how it was that the Commonwealth Games were being held at the same time we were traveling and we should pack the minimum we could travel with or unspecified and unpleasant things might occur.

My reaction to this was that if anyone was going to have their bags sent on a different flight it would be the bloody athlete packing too many sets of skis or an extra kayak, not Mr Bottomless Wallet and his entourage traveling within the luggage limit set down by the ticket agreement. Bloody cheek.

Anyway, eventually the day of our departure dawned - and I stayed in bed! I rose around 8:30 am, rested and ready for the day's out-of-plan excursion events.

The limo arrived a little early, just as I was discovering that not only did we have a very slow leak from one pipe of the water heater, we had a much faster one from the other pipe that was corroding the top of the containment vessel quite badly and required swift and immediate action. I put a cut-off vitamin container I used to hold 20-penny nails under it⁸ and ran upstairs to make a cup of tea using our Keurig machine.

Keurig tea is not as good as real brewed tea but it is hot, drinkable and fast to make. I grabbed a "sippy mug" that had once held some sort of beverage from 7-11 and selected "maximum volume", and beverage in hand dashed out of the house, and boarded the limo where I was greeted by a foot-tapping Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling.

"You can ride up front" they snarled in unison, so I climbed in beside Ed the Driver and we were off.

We made good time even though it wasn't still dark outside, a point I made a few times to Mrs Stevie until she playfully threatened to strangle me. I took my first sip of tea and generous amount escaped the "leak proof" lid to cover my hands and shirt with hot, sticky beverage (I take sugar). I used a pocketful of tissues to staunch the flow and caulk the lid but the blissful element was gone and when we arrived at La Guardia I derived great pleasure by binning that Demon-Infested cup with extreme prejudice.

Check-in was, for the first time ever, the experience promised when you print out your boarding passes at home; a quick, essentially painless operation.

Of course it couldn't last.

The out-of-plan excursion events started in earnest with the brusque "security check", in which Mrs Stevie was identified as having terrorist knees. I'm not kidding here, her knees were flagged as being "suspicious". She offered to show the man her knees but he waved his hands in panic and told her to lower her dress immediately.

I can understand this. The thought of being confronted by Mrs Stevie's legs has oft-times induced panic attacks in me too.

Once at the gate she stomped off, muttering about knees, to buy whatever the local equivalent was of a Triple-Kaff Clawhammer Latte and I overheard someone talk about silencing cell phones, and thought I'd better do that too.

Whereupon I discovered mine was missing. A quick search followed by a slow search failed to turn up the device so I went back to the security check-in to see if I'd left it there. I had a clear memory of placing it in a tub so it could be x-rayed for hidden rocket launchers. No. It wasn't there.

Mrs Stevie gave me a ten minute speech on how stupid I was between sips of her rocket fuel beverage, but it didn't include any new information, being basically an ad-libbed re-hash of various familiar themes that she has, in my opinion, over-used over the years. At least it took her mind off the knees business. Then she gave me her cell phone so I could cancel the service on mine.

This took a while as the phonebot at the other end of "customer assistance" line wanted menu selections and the cell phone kept activating the screen blank function⁹ preventing selection. Not only that it kept overhearing the PA announcements the airport was piping in as attempts to use the voice recognition menu selection algorithms. The resulting chaos drove me to the brink of apoplexy, but eventually I got the job done.

So the holiday would be spent sans portable comms. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. On the one hand the convenience of the phone was lost, on the other I had deliberately left my laptop at home so as to not be tempted to do work stuff.

Once the Cell Phone Annoyance had been dealt with I was able to cast my eyes around and take surprised note of the sheer number of screwed-down iPads littered about the place. There were approximately two iPads per would-be traveler. Clearly the airport management were using Vision to move the business of cooling one's heels in their airport into the 21st century.

This proved to be a double-edged sword of annoyance when I decided to go and buy a coffee from the swank island restaurant situated not fifty feet from me, the same one Mrs Stevie had used only half an hour before. It took 15 minutes and the help of passers-by before I could figure out the iPad menu and payment device's menus, and eventually had to be walked through it by the person who would serve the coffee.

I still had to ask by mouth for a lid for the cup, and though I didn't order it and hadn't paid for it I was brought an unwanted slice of delicious-looking gateau completely unsuitable for a stomach about to undergo 8 hours plus of flying and immigration. I sent the cake back and retained the beverage. Only cost twice what Starbux would charge for the coffee too.

As I carried the "sealed" cup back to my seat I found that although the menu selection was totally 21st Century, the lid technology deployed was in fact far below the accepted norm for 1930, and hot sticky coffee leaked freely all over my hands and clothes. I realized that a holiday annoyance theme was revealing itself.

When we were called for boarding, after everyone else was safely seated with their twelve carry-on bags stowed, we walked onto the plane with our single bags and began the long and tedious search for overhead stowage. Important tip: Row 12 boards last.

And finally we sat and belted in. And sat. And sat. And sat.

I wasn't concerned at the delay as I had programmed 2.5 hours to transit Minas Torontor which should leave plenty of cushion for late arrival, bleeped-up luggage carousel and immigration. But boy was I bored.

Eventually we were told that the issue was that there was only one runway available that day, and so there was considerable congestion on the taxiways. Yes, we were stuck in traffic at the airport.

One hour late we pulled up to the runway where I could see that not only were outgoing planes using the same runway, incoming planes were too! They had only one runway for both sets of traffic! I had assumed they had one runway outbound!

It still beggars my imagination that La Guardia could muster more iPads than they had travelers, but could only organize one bleeping runway for everyone. Way to prioritize spending, airport management.

We arrived in Minas Torontor with two sets of flights being cancelled due to this dilly-dallying and ours "being held for us", and lined up at the carousel for our bags so we could run - the 2.5 hour cushion having succumbed to other people's incompetence. We got one bag of the three we had put on the plane, and the carousel ran dry. It stayed that way for the next ten minutes, starting to deliver bags again at exactly the time we should have been taking to the air in our connecting flight.

We grabbed our remaining two bags when they finally put in an appearance (together) and were hustled to the slowest line possible for immigration by an annoyed airport staffer who clearly thought it was my fault the bloody planes were late and the bleeping baggage belt was up to its internationally-famed usual standard of not very good at all.

Our appointed immigration agent was perhaps the slowest one I've ever seen in action. Not only were there the standard "Who are you and where are you going?" questions, there were detailed interrogations about where people had been and what they had seen before boarding their flight, as if she were trying to trip the travelers up with a detail she knew but they didn't on account of them not being a family of people on vacation but some sort of terrorist cell. The fact that everyone had regional Canadian or New York accents and had documentation to indicate that they had indeed arrived from where they said they had was not a factor.

Indeed, so slow and "methodical" was our agent¹⁰ that the disabled person line cleared before she got to us and we were called by a different agent entirely. We were by now fifteen minutes behind the advertised take-off time of our connection.

Grabbing our bags and rushing for the plane we were happy to see it held so we could once again attempt to find some stowage for our three carry-on bags. Other passengers encouraged us to hurry up until two other families boarded after us, at which point they became the reason for the delay.

We were temporarily held up again by someone sitting in one of our seats. She looked puzzled at being asked to move, but in the face of our just-checked boarding passes and the somewhat irritated cabin staffer standing behind us she got up and went to sit where her own pass told her to, but not before petulantly whining "I didn't know there was assigned seating", which was so absurd we just ignored it. All I knew was I wasn't changing seats since I'd paid a premium for ours.

And so we took off and flew for four and a bit hours and landed in Calgary, not much later than we were supposed to. This gave us time to eat in a casual dining restaurant near the gate. Unfortunately. The less said about the experience the better. "Very Ordinary on every level" is the kindest thing I can come up with.

Then we boarded the small Q400 for the flight to Grande Prairie and were met by The Steviesis and family, including my Niece and her beautiful new baby girl whom I didn't get to hold for long enough on account of the women taking all the baby-cuddling time and my nephew and his beautiful bride-to-be.

We eventually decamped for the hotel in a humongous Ford Leviathan 4X4 King Cab courtesy of Mr Steviesis - a very long-suffering and decent bloke who doesn't deserve the life he has inherited but who is always at the front when volunteers are needed and who looks after my folks better than they have a right to expect. I suggested we dump the cases in our room and return to the almost deserted hotel bar for a cocktail or a beer or both and the day wound down nicely as we caught up over strong drink.

The holiday was on!

1. What do you mean, you dozed off four words in?↑
2. Again↑
3. An exaggeration⁴ ↑
4. Most years↑
5. Quit cheering in the cheap seats!↑
6. I estimated she was at Wig Factor 1 when we arrived. By mid week she was oscillating between that and Wig Factor 2, remarkably calm on the whole. At the Stevieniece's wedding she had run a solid Wig Factor 5 for two days straight↑
7. For real. This little jaunt ended up costing one arm, and after taxes one leg too↑
8. I emptied out the nails first↑
9. A preventative measure against ear-dialing that replaces the annoyance of unwanted keystrokes mid-call with the rage-inducing annoyance of having to bugger about with different buttons and menu icons when you should be listening to instructions. Seriously, by the time you get the keypad open (again) the menu is being re-read in Croatian↑
10. I counted the people immigrating and could confirm that every other agent was clearing three to five people to her one↑

AT&T Are Also The Antichrist

More telecoms perfidy.

So I went back to the store in which I bought the WiFi hotspot and the new plan, only to be told "We don't do tech support. You'll have to go to Islandia, where the help and support center is only open after you leave for work and closes before you get back".

I returned home in high dugeon and called AT&T tech support and this time got kicked up to level 2 support fairly quickly and in no time the device was fixed. I was feeling good, which of course meant I was about to receive a good, solid kick in the hurtybits.

This materialized at about one o'clock in the morning when Mrs Stevie (who deals with the phone bill) let out a yell and announced to my about-to-retire ears that our bill for this month, which used to be a matter of some 160 bux or so, and which should have been that plus about 12 days of the promised 180 bux per month the new plan would cost was in actual fact showing as more than 500 dollars.

I had originally wanted a separate data plan just for my hotspot which would have set me back about 60 bux a month, but the salesdrone persuaded me adding the data usage to the plan we had would be cheaper, and quoted a price of 180 dollars per.

Naturally, this news came with bitter recriminations over the itemized bill which claimed amongst other reasons for the usury that I had overused the texting facility. This is doubly absurd in that a) I text a grand total of about 500 characters a month when I am in a loquacious frame of mind because my fat thumbs, carpal tunnel issues and the tiny phone keyboard make texting a nightmare and 2) we are supposed to have unlimited text and talk time on our plan!

So now Mrs Stevie and I must get on the phone to AT&T again to find out what the bloody blue blazes is going on.

The worry and aggravation of this all meant that I was still awake at 2:30 am and am now sitting at work feeling like death warmed over. Not only that, the stress seems to have set off something that feels like the start of an attack of pancreatitis. I hope it is only "something like" and not the real event.

Because that would be all I needed.

AT&T Are Satan Made Manifest

I recently added a cellular wireless hotspot device to our AT&T "family" plan, along with adding a 10 gig data allowance per month.

All went well for a day or so, when the mobile hotspot downloaded a firmware upgrade and the display became slightly less useful. The prominent green "progress" bar depicting my data usage went all-green 24x7 rendering it a useless waste of space. However, the data usage and the number of days left in the billing cycle were displayed so I just went with it.

The weekend rolled round and I expected all these values to clear since I was at the end of the "days left" countdown, but that did not happen. The device has been showing "0 days left" for three days and the data usage count, while rising, does not reflect this billing cycle's usage.

Not only that, I keep getting text messages on the thing urging me to set up some sort of online account. I would do that but Mrs Stevie takes care of the phone bill¹ and has her own account already up and running. I am not so wet behind the ears that I would set up a second account so that AT&T's billing automation can bleep itself to a fare-thee-well and give us a month's extra grief sorting it all out, so, the store we used to upgrade the service and activate the device not opening until a helpful 10 am weekdays (two hours after I am miles away in Jamaica peering myopically at the destination display to see where my connection is) I called AT&T's "help" line.

For five minutes I listened to annoying music and witless adverts for more services I don't need and don't want (the logic of trying to upsell people already having trouble with their product is bewildering to me) and I was connected via a scratchy, hiss-filled line to someone whose accent was from near the Gulf of Oman. I could barely hear him.

Ignoring the irony we both attempted meaningful communication but I could only hear one word in three and one of those was "password", something I wasn't handing out on a bet (because I don't know it - Mrs Stevie's account, remember). Eventually this stalwart decided to kick me up to level 2 support (the people who have less script, more knowledge going for them) and I got three more minutes of adverts and then - silence.

The bleepers cut me off.

So another win for American Technology. The company that at one time defined the telephone business cannot organize a simple firmware upgrade that doesn't nerf a brand new device and then cannot organize a clean line on which to address the issue.

Good here, innit?

1. I take care of the mortgage so it all "evens out". Her words↑

Quick Update

Just back from Canada. I'll post of the horrors and inconveniences later, but should just like to mention two items of interest:

a) My new grand-niece is irrefutably the cutest human being on the planet.

2) My nephew, who somehow became 29 while I wasn't paying attention, is now the proud owner/operator of a new wife. I look forward to comparing wounds with him in the near future, and to gifting him with a copy of Uncle Stevie's Bumper Book of Wifely Treachery, Ambushes and Other Infamies Visited Upon The Innocent Author By That Vile Harridan For No Reason Whatsoever so that he may avoid much coming-to on the lawn and learn from my experience.

More later.

The Word For World Is "Suck"

Yesterday, Wednesday, I awoke to find that the entire water content of the sky had been dropped on Long Island.

Islip, about 15 minutes drive from Chateau Stevie, recorded 13 inches over the course of Tuesday night. This is the normal amount of downward-happening wet for the months of June through August combined.

This heavenly largesse has served to point out two important facets of Life on Long Island: Uphill Drains and Downhill Drains That Never Get Cleaned.

The various Suffolk County¹ towns surrounding Chateau Stevie this morning are actually a bunch of houses and car-roofs poking out of a collection of freshwater (euphemistically speaking) inland seas.

Remember: this state once provided the manpower and brains that build the machine in which six men rode down to the Moon's surface and in which they flew back up to their spaceship afterwards. One might expect that in the intervening forty-five years The Great Drain Secret might have succumbed to the same mighty intellects. One would be wrong.

Wyandanch was now a wonderful new Great Lake thanks in part to Uphill Drains, carefully planned and installed a couple of years ago in the face of modern ideas on the Laws of Physics, and partly because the one drain that would have provided the semblance of urban civil engineering of the 21st century at work was blocked, I imagine by an amalgamation of garbage, leaves and road salt left over from winter. I don't have to work my imagination hard when I make that judgment, because I used to have a drain that got blocked every fall in the same manner.

I've written about that drain elsewhere, but for the lazy the problem was that sometime in the past a passing Brontosaurus had trodden on the cast-iron grid and cracked it, then the road crews had built up the road to about six inches above the drain so all the crap would accumulate there. Street sweepers, somewhat rarer these days than Brontosauruses in my neck of the woods, only made matters worse as they carefully collected as much superannuated crap as possible and swept it into the drain.

The drain was also a hazard to traffic in that a car wheel could easily buckle if the vehicle wandered too close to the curb and crossed it. I tried to get the town to do something about it, but my complaints fell on deaf ears until a cyclist drove down it and was injured. After I explained to the nice but clueless cop who was waiting to chew my ear when I got home that day that the drain was not my responsibility and that I was sick to the back teeth of complaining to the town about it, it was replaced.

The drain across the road gets blocked too, and until my drain was replaced we had our own Great Lake every year. I would unblock the drains with my trusty sidewalk scraper as idiots would drive into the foot-deep water to splash me while I worked, abruptly lose control of their vehicle and come close to hitting me³. Now the lake forms only on the other side of the road and the people who bought the house from the elderly lady who lived there for years have two kids who can bloody well stir their stumps and unblock their own drains.

Where was I?

Oh right. The Lake at Wyandanch made getting from the car⁴ to the platform a challenge, especially as wuckfits would deliberately try and splash passing pedestrians. It was quite fun listening to the funny noises the engines made after the unexpectedly deep water sluiced up into the works of those cars I can tell you.

Some of the fun might not have been deliberate sadism. There is a tree branch obscuring the view of the drivers who make the corner and when in leaf it completely blocks the sidewalk. In winter, when the leaves fall off, it presents hard, sharp twigs at eye-level to make the morning commute that more exciting.

This reflects back on the secondary problem of the drains (the primary problem being their often not being put in the same place the water will want to go), which can be stated as nothing gets done in New York until something bad happens. The concept of preventative maintenance is completely alien to the NY Psyche.

Trees overhang powerlines and the railroad, begging someone to cut them down before the high winds of the Fall blow them down, but every November we have power outages and LIRR delays and those in charge of the infrastructure have the nerve to act surprised, as though no-one could have predicted the inevitable chaos. Drains do not get cleaned until property is under water and insurance claims are coming in thick and fast.

The sheer amount this idiocy costs the taxpayer in settling lawsuits and service costs is breathtaking. When the Metrocard was introduced for real⁵ nothing was budgeted for cleaning the card swipes, with the result the turnstiles stopped working after about 6 months. In the late 80s we had an important and heavily-used bridge that was part of the New York State Thruway fall into the river because not one penny had been spent on maintenance in decades. That made the buggers sit up and take notice, all right. Of course, now there was the problem that we needed a new bridge and some way of getting the old one out of the way of the boats.

My train was delayed twenty minutes that day, but since that was a train to Atlantic Terminal I didn't care. When I have to change trains the problem of a ten minute or greater delay is really brought into sharp focus as the missed connection typically introduces a twenty-five minute wait for the next train, time in which the LIRR infrastructure can fail some more. I've had days that got so bad I've got on a train back to Wyandanch and written off the three plus hours wasted and tried to salvage the rest of the day doing something fun if not productive.

In any event, the rain didn't stop falling until about one minute before the train arrived, ensuring that everyone was soaked through. In my case I had an umbrella, but the rain sluiced off that onto my backpack which was so wet it was still damp when I got home that night. I was in a training course for most of the day (I managed to swing an in-house C# course I've been trying to get for months) so I kicked off my wringing wet sneakers so my feet could dry out while I became conversant in various topics of the New Paradigm.

When I got back to Wyandanch and opened my car door I was hit in the face by a miasma composed of superheated air, water vapor and stench of something dead. The air was obviously because after raining the day had become hellish hot, the water vapor was from what had run off me during the drive to the station that morning, but search the vehicle as I might I could not find a cause for The Stench. I drove home with the windows down, thinking maybe I'd forgotten to lock the doors and the car had been used as a lounge by some passing homeless person, but I know I did lock up.

Best I can come up with is that something had washed up under the car and rotted for a few hours, though I didn't see any evidence for that when I pulled away. Could have been something dead snagged on the various hooked doodads under the car now I come to think on it. Perhaps The Steviemobile was haunted by some long dead revenant, bent on exacting vengeance on the living for whatever reasons such things usually harbor. I dunno.

Either way, The Stench was gone this morning so either the dead animal caught up under the car fell off as I drove around last night or The Revenant caught sight of Mrs Stevie on her way out to work and decided the competition was too stiff.

1. Long Island is broken up into several administrative bits. From west to east: Queens and Brooklyn, which belong to NYC and don't count as Long Island, Nassau County, famous for its method of calculating property taxes and for it's periodic public wars over how and when to change its method of calculating property taxes², and Suffolk County which runs east to the Sea. And north and south to the sea if we are being absolutely accurate, but that is true for all the bits of Long Island except for Queens where you can hit Brooklyn by going south and Brooklyn where you end up in Queens by going North which is why we don't include them in the general geography of Long Island - it's too confusing when giving directions to the beach.↑
2. Essentially they work out what your property is worth using a formula written in 1933, fudge the figure for bits of property that are taxable but weren't invented or in common household deployage in 1933 like central air conditioning, swimming pools and hot tubs, then refigure for 2014 dollars using another formula↑
3. I finally got a clue and would park my old Excel in the middle of my side of the road with the hazard flashers on. Would-be splashers were forced to stop and pull around at slow speed and those coming from the other direction would always stop and rubberneck. Kamikaze idiot problem solved↑
4. Which I parked on a slope so the engine would survive any more inundation - others were not so fortunate and the scrapyards are full this day of waterlogged cars and manly pickup trucks↑
5. There was a false start a couple of years before↑

The Suck Goes Ever On And On

Unbelievable numbers of outrages were perpetrated at my expense in the last month and a bit, so many that I could not put fingers to keyboard for the angst.

To start with: Another birthday. The less said about that the better, except to note in passing that the high spot was a hibachi dinner avec les In-Laws.

They did not enjoy the experience. Not sure why.

Work then; source of many Outrages Served over the years. I was cornered by my boss, who demanded "Are you going to retire soon?"

After a rather confusing back and forth it turned out I wasn't being fired in an overly circuitous fashion, but seconded to the database department "for half my time" because I already knew a bit about database administration. Training in the finer points of the technology that have happened in the intervening decade since I last took DA seriously will be made available ... later.

Mentoring in the finer points of New Age DBA-ism was promised but has yet to appear in favor of an alternate plan implemented by the middle management of the department in question: I take over the script management duties of a now-retired staff member and don't bother anyone else with questions.

Questions to said staff member on the subject of what, where, how and who (when it isn't working like it should), were met with "dunno" and "I just type yes". He then left a week earlier than planned so I was flung into the deep end of what turned out to be largely manual drudge-work.

I found one task so monumentally pointless I simply rewrote the code¹ to make a best-guess stab at whether the task should run and proceed without the need for me to mindlessly wade through it all typing 'y' or occasionally 'n' - because I like to think that if nothing else I at least added informed decisions to the process based on solid knowledge of how the cogs turn.

As for the mentoring - to date it has manifested in a determined and utterly bewildering drive to make getting a proper toolset, defined as "what the bloke who left had", as difficult as possible. I am not joking when I say that the process has born a striking resemblance to that described by Douglas Adams as the SOP of Vogon bureaucrats. I'm eight weeks into this galling nonsense and to date no progress has been made.

So we can all see how this is going to play out. My guess is that I'm being used as a stick for each side of a hidden management struggle to hit the other with. Winner gets to decide whether or not we hire another consultant to replace the retiree.

So anyway, I stayed late off the books a few nights to get educated on my own dime² and in the fine tradition of no good deed doer being left without his hands being given a good going over with a coal-hammer, by doing so left myself open to further Outrage Perpetration at the hands of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road.

It went like this:

I left work extremely late, much later than I like to do on account of being parked in a known haunt of footpads and tow-trucks after 11pm. On the principle that I do not like to attempt boarding already full trains at Jamaica³ I rode to Penn Station via the Subway's fine A train service, disembarked to find a Ronkonkoma-bound train in-station with he driver nerving himself up to go.

Huzzah! I shouted. "No cooling my heels for half an hour wondering how much time this bloody job has wasted in such manner over the course of my life", and I leaped aboard.

The train pulled out of the station and entered the tunnel under the East River in a businesslike fashion. Passengers were in good spirits. Then the train abruptly ground to a halt and the Air Conditioning quit.

"This not look good" said Mr Brain, and he turned out to be understating the case quite severely.

The crew bustled about, and I overheard conversations that told an ugly tale of either the third rail power being out or the train having completely shorted out something vital for its use of said power. Such was the complete and utter collapse of the train infrastructure that they couldn't tell which situation was pertaining.

And so the air grew warmer and damper and the passengers rather less happy with their lot.

"Never fear!" cried a young voice over the PA. "A rescue train⁴ is being dispatched which will tow us back into Penn Station. We will keep you informed"

It was bad, then. No-one believed a word of this drivel of course, we were all too long in the commuting tooth for such subterfuges to be accepted at face value. But the chap who had been volunteered to speak to us had used The Phrase.

Any time the Bloody Long Island Rail Road says "we will keep you informed" they are a) lying and 2) sending the clear message that there is no possible way the situation can be remedied by the crew.

No sooner had The Phrase been uttered than a complete collapse of morale overtook the passengers. Widespread moaning of the most pitiful kind was augmented with the clutching of heads and cries of "Why me?"

We sat in the growing damp heat, only the periodic "updates" on "the situation" to raise our spirits, but those of us in the rear car who could clearly see the platform of the station no more than 300 feet behind us were not easily buoyed by tales of "rescue trains". Indeed, we formed an entirely reasonable and workable plan in which a second train be run up behind us and the end doors opened so we could use it as a drawbridge to the station. It took us about five minutes to iron out all objections to it on technical grounds, but the Bloody Long Island Railroad has a long history of "passengers last" and our plan was brutally rejected out of hand.

After about 20 minutes the hot, sweaty air was filled with choking diesel fumes as a "rescue train" was run up to a few feet from us (neatly blocking access so our eminently sensible and extremely workable - and fume-less electric - "bridge train" plan was rendered moot). It sat there for almost an hour.

Eventually something go the various crews moving. I can't say whether it was the end of the tea break, the signing of some vital overtime agreement or what, but they started moving through the train and pretending to do stuff. However, they could only do stuff in sequence. There was no multitasking despite a multitude of boots-on-train.

I finally moved onto the "bunch of incompetents" side of the passenger dialogue when the team stood in the rear car arguing that someone needed to walk 12 cars up to the front of the train and push a switch. Understand, there was no counter argument. Everyone agreed the switch needed pushing. But no-one actually began walking switchward. They just all talked about doing that.

Morale hit a low point when a nice lady walked through the train distributing Emergency Water in what looked like juice boxes. These were apparently issued by the Coastguard, which made about as much sense as anything else that night. Until then I never knew water had an expiration date. I refused to drink any on the grounds that I couldn't see what I was drinking and was by then paranoid anyway from all the diesel fumes I was breathing.

Eventually someone did walk up and push the switch, which was the signal for the driver of the "rescue diesel" to go from standing still while polluting the barely breathable as it was air to Ramming Attack Speed and we were all tossed around while the delicate business of coupling took place. This involved more ramming and a complicated drawbar assembly. One might wonder why a "Rescue Diesel" wasn't fitted with a compatible coupler to start with. One is doomed to wonder forever.

We pulled back into the station to see the next Ronkonkoma train leaving on-time, about half full of passengers. Realizing that there was about to be a riot of indignant passengers who had been promised a rise in ticket prices as a result of an agreement struck only three days before⁵ and realizing also that no judge in the world would contemplate punitive sentencing under the circumstances, the Bloody Long Island Rail Road fished a new train out of their yards and, an hour and twenty minutes late, we left for home.

I got home sometime around 11:30pm, where I got a good nagging from Mrs Stevie on the subject of not coming home in a timely manner.

1. That never in a million years originated anywhere but in a browser window in answer to a google query or my name isn't Tarquin J. Fimbletwonk↑
2. Literally in this case, as I invested in copies of the Software Vendor publications concerning the relevant parts of the product I've been told I'll be dealing with↑
3. Not the good one, the one where you can freeze to death in winter trying to catch a train to Wyandanch that has enough room for one more passenger in it when the doors open.↑
4. The unwary reader is probably conjuring visions of some real-world International Rescue-like operation, a model of quiet efficiency and a beacon of hope. That reader is about to be brutally disillusioned↑
5. Narrowly avoiding a threatened strike↑

Hand Jivers on the LIRR

Today I have been cursed with hand jivers during my commute.

I recently was asked to take up new duties involving Oracle Database administration, and so - my not having used Oracle since a small mountain fell into the water just off the Yucatan shore and having a boss who believes that training is something for other people than me to get - I have been hitting the books during my commute.

Many of these books are paper monsters, but the ones I was trying to use this morning are electronic and concern the most tediously uninteresting internal details of the software it is possible to imagine. I was staring at my laptop hard, trying to stay awake and alert while also trying to figure out what the author was blithering about and whether it was ever going to be important.

Working hard to prevent this was the woman sitting opposite me.

From Wyandanch to Mineola¹ she held a loud and animated conversation with the woman sitting in the seat behind me. I donned headphones and dialed up Steve Hackett's Voyage of the Acolyte at volume 11 but she was still coming through clearly. Not only that, she was augmenting her side of the discussion with sweeping hand gestures of the kind normally used to direct aeroplanes on and off runways. Sometimes she grabbed a large book or her immense "smart" phone and waved that.

Every sweep of her hands brought them into my field of vision. Never before has a fellow traveler come so close to getting a bunch of fives in the kisser as she did this morning.

The day passed in a blur of excuses and blame-passing, as usual and I raced to the station and boarded my train home, which is as I type horribly overcrowded².

I am trying to get to grips with the arcane science of resource locking in a high-concurrency database environment, something marginally less interesting than toothache.

And sitting opposite me is another idiot engaged in a lively conversation with the passengers across the aisle augmented by sweeping hand gestures.

1. Or: From when I got on the train to where she got off it↑
2. Probably due to the train having some large multiple of two cars missing from what would be required to carry its load of passengers. I'll know when we get to Wyandanch and get dropped off two miles up the platform³ ↑
3. The short trains and off-peak ones stop at the far east end of the platform, which is doubly f*cktarded as they demolished most of the car park so just about everyone has parked at the west end↑

The Miracle Of The Bird

So after I got the radiator cover back on the wall and screwed down tight again we walked around the building but could find no holes from the outside into the radiator.

The radiator cover had no bird-sized holes in it or gaps between it and the wall either.

While we were searching the place for avian access points the pastor wandered into theater and demanded to know why The Stevieling had her parents in tow and why we were carrying tools. She explained, to some understandable doubt on tghe part of the cleric until backed up by Mrs Stevie.

"But how did it get in there?" he said, in exasperated tones.

"We don't know " said The Stevieling. "Weird, eh?"

"You should call it The Miracle of The Bird" I opined. "It would be a monster draw. You'd be fending off the punters with a stick."

"I don't think .. " the pastor began, doubtfully

"Suit yourself, pastor" I said, "but if this were a Roman Catholic church there would already be a shrine erected to it."

Mrs Stevie took the opportunity of the pastor's speechless indignation to punch me in the head and hiss "shuttup!" at me.

I shrugged and wandered around to the pastor's office where I noted the pipes that went through the wall into the radiator.

" think the bird must've got in through there" I said.

"Idiot! How would the bird get in the office?" snarled Mrs Stevie.

I looked pointedly at the door, then at the double doors to the outside only a few feet beyond that.

"You're right" I said. "It's a miracle. Since I'm an atheist and have no useful input on how those work, I'm going home."

My Family And Other Animals

The Stevieling has always had a connection with animals.

All kids have an affinity for animals of some sort, which explains the proliferation of petting zoos, but The Stevieling's connection runs deeper than that. It is as though there is some sort of psychic connection or law of the universe at work.

When she was four we took her to an "adventure park and petting zoo" and she was invited to go up on stage for a presentation involving various animals. I think the idea was that she be gently scared and provide some harmless comic relief for the parents present.

The presenter brought out the first animal, I forget what, and she promptly hi-jacked the stage and the presentation by bombarding the poor sod in the Aussie-style bush hat with machine-gun questions about the life, diet and problems involved in housing the beast and suggestions on how the current methodologies could be improved. Mrs Stevie and I were in hysterics, as were most of the other adults present.

Bwana Hat then produced a guaranteed kid-scarer, a baby alligator which he lowered to the stage. It immediately began its party-piece: running like crazy with windmilling legs. He, of course, held onto the beast's tail and waited for the screams to start. The Stevieling jumped up and down, clapping her hands in glee and shouted "Oh! Let him go! Let him go!"

The next star of the show was to be a baby bear of some sort, but Crocodile Squeegee, no doubt with visions of liability clauses dancing in his head, announced "I think you'd better sit down now!"

Later that year we visited Sea World in Florida. The Stevieling had expressed a burning desire to touch a dolphin so we sought out the dolphin pool, which used to be a voluminous but I should think boring for the dolphins oval pool with waist-high walls from the people side.

I was pleased to see that this deplorable state of affairs had been addressed, and the beasts were now housed in a much bigger irregularly-shaped pool that featured a rocky littoral at one side.

My heart fell as I saw the crowd around that pool, which took up all the available space with deep water next to it. Obviously the dolphins had just been fed which meant my plan to lure them to the waiting Stevieling with fish was doomed to failure.

Understand, The Stevieling was an angel about stuff like this, and bore disappointments that would have most kids screaming a blue fit with a shrug and a happy smile. This, naturally, worked to make me even more determined to get her what she wanted, but I couldn't see anywhere we could stand by the pool to have a go. Every linear inch of wall space was occupied by adults and larger kids.

The dolphins were in the middle of the pool, teasing the humans as they do.

Eventually a hopeless spot opened up. It was an inside right-angled corner right against the shallow rocky part of the pool where the water turned into a sort of broken rock morraine. A dolphin would have to be mad to try and get close over the sharp rocks there, but I let The Stevieling stand by the wall so she could at least see them. She bellied up, barely able to see over the wall, and stretched out her tiny hand, palm outward.

Bugger me if one dolphin didn't immediately begin swimming directly toward her.

When it became obvious that a dolphin was going to come close in to shore, a new and unexpected problem arose. All the stupid adults standing around the pool surged toward the inside corner containing my kid. I braced my hands against both angles of the wall and fended them off, and watched something miraculous happen. The dolphin swan up into the shallows, over those sharp, sharp rocks - to this day I don't know how - and parked itself within easy patting reach of The Stevieling's little hand. She patted the animal a couple of times, the dolphin turned and swam away and she said "Okay, we can go now", oblivious to the consternation of the adults around her.

Much later in her life I tasked her with mowing the front lawn for me while I made an emergency trip to Home Despot. I explained how the mower worked, got it started and warmed up and left for the store.

Now I had mowed that same small area of grass for more than a dozen years and found nothing in it other than grass and an alarming number of dandelions, so I was nonplussed when I arrived home to find the lawn half-mowed, the mower standing in the middle of the lawn and no-one in sight. I found the family in the back garden with a box full of rabbits, each about the size of my thumb.

"Where did these come from?" I sighed, already half sure of the inevitable answer.

"The front lawn. They were in a hole" said the Stevieling anxiously. "Can we keep them?"

"Absolutely not. Put them back where you found them" I said in tones that brooked no nonsense.

"But the mother will eat them now" wailed The Stevieling. Mrs Stevie was no help whatsoever.

"Phone your Cannuck Cousin. She has worked with animals and knows about rabbits¹".

After being reassured by her cousin that no, the baby rabbits would be fine if they were replaced in their nest the animals were put back in the unfeasibly small hole they'd been found in and a return to lawn mowing was negotiated.

I think I've already spoken here of the time she found a squirrel in a garbage pail and reached in to pick it up, earning a bite and an afternoon in the Emergency Room of Good Samaritan Hospital for her trouble. Only my kid would not think it more appropriate to simply tip over the garbage can so the animal could escape.

And so to the latest Stevieling Animal Escapade.

The Stevieling has a job as assistant deacon at the local Lutheran church, and was away a couple of weeks ago doing her janitorial duties when we got a call from her. Mrs Stevie spoke to her for a while then passed over the phone with "a look" on her face.

"Hullo daughter. Wassamarrer now? " I asked.

"Can I borrow some screwdrivers please?"

"Why do you need tools?" I asked, my spirits beginning to droop in anticipation of the answer.

"I need to dismantle a radiator."

"What? WHY?"

"There's a bird trapped inside."

"How do you know there's a bird in the radiator?"

"I heard fluttering and I saw a beak."

"A beak? Are you sure?"

"Positive. Through the slits."

"Argh. All right, I'll get some tools and come over. Don't do anything until I get there."

A bird I could not believe, but a rat or mouse was possible and we did not need another bite and another lost afternoon in the land of the sick and screaming. Mrs Stevie decided she would also like in on this fiasco in the making, probably flashing as I was on the time I all but dismantled the sofa for an item the kid had in her pocket.

I grabbed my favorite Slotted and Phillips screwdrivers and we headed out to the church. We met The Stevieling who let us in and walked us to an aging baseboard heater about a foot tall, maybe four feet long and about four inches deep, one inch of which looked to be the brown paint it was covered in. I looked in it, and banged on it, but I saw no sign of beaks nor did I catch the merest suggestion of fluttering.

"You're sure about this?" I said, eying the painted-over screws with distaste.

"Very sure" she said, with feeling.

"Okay then" I said, and got to work.

The screws were of a variety of types, lengths, metals and probably thread pitches. Some of them might have been hand made. I could swear one looked old enough to have been salvaged from The Ark. The paint, when the screws broke the seal, proved to be several layers and colors thick. I came to the conclusion that the brown was actually the result of years of interaction between the various paint layers³ rather than a coat of brown paint. Eventually I got them all out while Mrs Stevie stood by with her arms folded in that helpful way she has and The Stevieling opened a nearby door to the outside world.

The radiator cover proved to be painted securely to the wall and would not release, so I just pulled the bottom up from the floor and bent low to see what I could see while visions of being face-bit by a rat danced in my head. I was turning to express my disgust at my wasted time to The Stevieling when with perfect timing a large bird, Starling-sized or so, burst from underneath the metal cover right by Mrs Stevie, causing her to shriek most rewardingly, and flew out of the door.

"I told you I saw a beak" The Stevieling said, smugly.

1. Mrs Stevie had almost been caught up in a scheme my niece had cooked up to gain a fleet of rabbits in spite of her mother's absolute rule of No More Pets² by having adults "own" them and foster them with her↑
2. They had the makings of a small petting zoo by then↑
3. Experiments The Stevieling had undertaken in her seminal Third Year Period had proved beyond doubt that if one uses enough different colors one inevitably converges on brown↑

AAaaAAaaAgony, Far More Painful Than Yours!

When you feel like your fingers ... have been slammed in car doors!

The old body has been giving me gyp for months now. My right index finger and thumb are tingling and get downright painful if I lean on my arm at any point. My upper arms (both sides) ditto. I've already referenced the Leg Mutinies I've suffered En Disney and I think I've spoken of my treacherous back once or twice. If I were a car it would be time for a new one.

Most recently I started getting twinges from Mr Back, the little finger on my left hand has started locking up and the bone where that finger joins the hand is quite tender so I decamped for Doc Rubberglove's House of Pain to see what could be done in terms of a quick paint job to hide the rust and some sponge cake to stop the differential knocking in corners¹.

Doc Rubberglove is in new digs these days, having made so much money ministering to the sick that he could afford to not have to share a roof with a pediatrician. He's been there about a year now and I've been to see him there three or four times so the first problem was I forgot how to get there, got lost and had to resort to the GPS. The GPS punished me for not using it in months by resolutely refusing to find a signal until I had spotted something vaguely familar enabling me to switch from dead-reckoning navigation² to piloting³ and get on the right road a good four seconds before the GPS began smugly telling me I was right. I later punished it by driving home so circuitously while ignoring its strident cries of alarm that by the time it had re-planned the route I was already off the re-planned plan so it had to start again. AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Where was I?

Oh right. On a previous visit to get a shot to make my alergies go away Doc Rubberglove had given me the "quick fix" version and told me to pick up the "long term" version from a local pharmacy and come back. This I had done, so one of the items on the agenda was shoot me full of slow-release cortiosone, for that is what the "long term" version was.

It transpired I had in fact got about five doses in that vial, and Doc Rubberglove said I should be able to use it next year if I store it correctly, so bonus, I suppose.

Of course, cortisone shots are a medical joke. You get one in your leg to fix your knee and your elbow feels ten times better while the knee now hurts more on account of the needlestick. Also, get one in your arm and it feels okay until you get about five feet from your car, when it suddenly feels like you've been kicked in the shoulder by a bad-tempered horse. I've alluded to this very phenominominomimumum before many times, and to the proper way to bear up under the pain, which is to stumble around crashing into things while clutching the arm and wailing "why me?" in a manly fashion until either the pain subsides or you are run over.

Doc said he'd stick my left arm and perhaps that would help the problem with the little finger. Then he had a brainwave and said that he'd give me a second dose directly into the hand, a plan to which I foolishly agreed.

The arm jab went about as usual with me bravely suffering the pain with only one or two light whimpers. The hand jab was an entirely new level of Medico Perfidy altogether.

First came the freezing spray.

"It works by evaporation" Doc Rubberglove giggled, spritzing it liberally over my hand.

"So I gather" I giggled back. "Some sort of ether formulation by the smell."

"Hold still" he responded, waving a small hypodermic in the air. "I'm going in!"

"CRIKEY THAT"S PAINFUL" I shrieked, biting my other hand as the doctor had apparently neglected to offer me the customary squash ball before driving the needle into what felt like the main pain generation gubbins of my hand.

"Hold still!" he reassured me in playful, snarling tones. "I'll just change my grip so I can squeeze the plunger with increased ferocity! There we go!"

"ARGH! ARGH! bleeping bleep of a bleep!"

"I need more leverage! I might be hitting bone here! HOLD STILL!"

Eventually it was over. Not only was my finger still not working, my entire hand felt like it had been run over with a steamroller. Result.

"I want more freezing spray before you do that again" I snarled.

"Freezing the skin won't decrease the pain unfortunately" the good doctor sniffed dismissively. "This we just proved, advancing the cause of medical science."

"I mean to take the stuff nasally next time" I riposted. "Kindly have some decanted into a suitable insuflator before putting me to the question next time."

I drove home one-handed, and got about halfway home before the horse kicked me.

Well, played, Doc. Well played.

1. The old bodges are the best ones↑
2. I think I am here and I want to go there-ish so I need to drive a straight line thataway↑
3. I know where that is with respect to something else on the way to there so I'm good to go↑

Backdoor Man

Things fall apart.

Case in point: the frame of the back door to Chateau Stevie was looking a bit naff a couple of weeks ago, so I poked it and had the almost orgasmic experience of having part of the house disintegrate under my mouse-like touch. A good six inches of the wood frame at the top left was rotten, punked and completely in need of replacing.

This induced a minor panic in me. I'm no longer the young go-getter who wielded the mighty Tiger Saw and ripped apart the old back door frame and who installed the pre-hung Stanley door in its place. In fact, the prospect of trying to put in a new frame had me well scared.

My carpal tunnel issue is now a constant problem and just holding things like tools in my hand is a challenge. Also, the last few jobs I've done have gone pear-shaped alarmingly quickly, requiring days to drive in a screw or replace a faucet washer as ancillary jobs spontaneously bubble out of the quantum vacuum to complicate the task at hand.

But when the panic had subsided, I recalled that the door frame is in two parts; the actual frame that houses the door, and the so-called "brick-mold" that is fastened to the frame and is the part that gets snugged-up against the wall of the house. I might be in luck, I thought.

I removed the storm door (which is basically mounted in an aluminum frame screwed to the brick-mold) and got busy with Finesse, my claw hammer. In less than an hour I had the rotten wood removed and could see that although the frame was beginning to show signs of damp damage, it was salvageable with a lick o' paint.

Finding brick-mold was a saga though. Home Despot only had plastic brick-mold, which has the advantage that it cannot go rotten but requires the same sort of glue as one uses on PVC pipe to stick together and a different glue to hang it all on the door frame. I asked whether the glued-on brick-mold would support the weight of the storm-door and received no assurances from the in-house expert that this would be the case.

Paint me purple and call me Susan but I have more faith in screws and nails in these circumstances than space-age glues, and the wood had lasted about 20 years with only one paint job after all. I saw no reason to move into experimental materials, nor to add whatever they call the morbid fear that the expensive and heavy storm door¹ will come off in someone's hand, or worse drop off in the night during a storm to my list of worries and phobias². Luckily I finally tracked down good old-fashioned wood brick-mold at Blowes, Home Despot's chief competitor.

Then there was the problem of finding a decent way of edging the siding.

Chateau Stevie is clad in stylish³ aluminum siding of a particularly nauseating color that I'd change in an instant if I had the money, and siding like this requires channel section to make the edges look nice which had been mangled when I pulled off the brick-mold. When I installed the door it had been stuck to the brick-mold with 25-year silicone sealer⁴ and it had torn when I tried to part it from the wood.

The problem is that no-one makes the stuff in the brown to match the rest of the trim, and I don't possess a bending brake⁵ to form my own from coil stock, which they sell in ten inch widths painted brown on one side and white on the other. I had a go, using my extensive collection of Black & Decker model 225 Workmates, a rubber mallet and a long piece of Melamine as an improvised⁶ bending brake, but it didn't end well and Mrs Stevie yelled at me about not hammering at midnight.

Eventually I discovered some pre-made channel section that would work well, but it was white not brown. I sighed, and accepted that the universe was once again working solidly against me, and went with white in the hope it wouldn't be so noticeable against the white fame of the back door, and it wasn't, really.

Getting the new brick-mold to fit where the old one came off was a challenge as the usual anti-handyman demons had infested the job-site and the brick-mold "wanted" to fit to a 1/2 inch smaller door frame, which would induce problems in re-fitting the storm door. I suspect the siding had shifted. By force of will (and hands and at one point a foot too) and some carefully selected class three Words of Power I managed to get the blasted thing back on in the same position the old piece had occupied.

Once the wood was cut to size and nailed in place with an almost perfect miter (these never work right in real life) I was ready to paint.

Or nearly. Turns out the door-frame footing had extensive rot too and I wasn't in a position to replace it. I took a chisel and dug out the rotten wood, revealing two large triangular divots, one each end and about four inches long and about an inch deep, running to the edges of the footing. I needed a quick and easy fix for this, and luckily I had one to hand.

First I cleaned out the divots and made sure there was no bad wood in there. Then I built dams out of duct tape on the ends of the footing so that I had a large triangular hole rather than a slot. Then I dug out my Alumilite casting resin.

This stuff is a two part, 50-50 mix resin with a three-minute set-up time. The only issue would be that the resin has a lower surface tension than water and will find any gaps in whatever container it is poured into. There were certain to be small gaps between the tape and the wood as I couldn't burnish it along its entire length (some of which was under the house). I ran a bead of five minute epoxy resin along the wood-tape boundary. That is thicker than treacle and did the job nicely. Then it was a matter of mixing up small batches of resin, around 20 ml or so, and pouring it into the cavities.

One unforeseen issue with this is that the Alumilite is partly thermosetting (needs temperature to set hard) and the setting process is also exothermic (gives off heat). The relatively large masses of resin allowed heat to build up to very high levels. This was good in that the resin set up very, very quickly. But it also got so hot that it caused water to boil out of the wood, and that left the top surface looking like the inside of an Aero candy bar, all bubbly. But once it was sanded it looked good and worked just as I had intended. Once it was painted it looked as good as new.

The frame got two coats of outdoor primer, and two thick coats of outdoor eggshell white, and it looked great. There were some issues with the back door doormat being covered in resin drips and paint drips but as I said to Mrs Stevie: Pfft!

Last weekend I finally tracked down the screws I needed to re-hang the storm door and on Sunday I got that done, just in time for the storm on Monday.

1. When the glass is installed↑
2. Chief of these is Sinogastrophobia, a morbid fear of under-ordering in Chinese restaurants↑
3. In 1945↑
4. For once that wasn't marketing hyperbole↑
5. A machine that puts sharp folds in sheet metal↑
6. And completely naff↑

Mrs Stevie Chases A Sure Thing

More stuff keeps happening despite my earnest wishes that it wouldn't.

Take yesterday. Mrs Stevie called me at work:

"When are you going to be home?" she snarled.

"I don't know. Who is this?" I cunningly responded

"Shut up and listen! We've won a 50 inch flat screen TV. We have to go to the car dealership to collect it." I could hear the phone handset creak as she squeezed it in coffee-induced rage or possibly excitement. Over the years I've sort of lost the ability to tell the difference to be honest.

"The car dealership is going to give us a giant flat screen TV?" I marveled. "I don't think so. They argued for twenty minutes before topping off your windshield washer fluid on your last visit, and that was part of the service you paid for.

"I'm holding the paper right here in my hand", she countered. "Our names and address are written under 'WINNER' in big red letters right next to a picture of the TV that we have won. It also says in black and white, well white and a sort of sea-blue color, and I quote: "You are the winner of this magnificent prize!"

"It says 'and I quote'?"

"Of course not, idiot! I was quoting what was wrote".

"I don't think so", I said.

"I. READ. IT. FROM. THE. CARD." I could hear the block capitals crackling down the wires. Also a few too many full stops.

"No, not that. I don't think we've won a telly. What does the small print say?"

"There is no small print", she growled.

"There's always small print", I confidently riposted.

"Who's the paralegal? I think I'd see small print if there was any since I've been over the card with a fine tooth comb. No small print. We have won a flat screen television."

"Prediction: No, we haven't. Try going over the card with a magnifying glass. Hair care implements are rarely helpful in these cases."

"I'm going over to the dealership right now, where I shall take delivery of one (1) flat screen television nominally sized at 50 inches diagonal width."

"Wasted trip. Why would anyone give us a TV gratis?"

"Kindness!" she snapped.

"Kindness? In New York? In the 21st century? Aimed at us?" I was bewildered why the woman had been taken in by this obvious scam. Normally she sees this sort of nonsense coming a mile off. It's been years since I managed to pull the wool over her eyes myself.

"I'm not going to talk to you any more. I am going to get my television. You aren't allowed to watch it. Goodbye."

I pondered for a few moments on the problem of where we would put such a huge thing in our cereal box sized hovel, then got back to work.

I arrived home to find the Stevieling busy composing a Garage Band opus¹ and Mrs Stevie glaring at our superannuated Phillips Magnavox 27 inch CRT telly.

"So, where's our new television?" I said, rubbing my hands together at the thought of 1080p visuals dans Chateau Stevie.

"It was a scam", snarled Mrs Stevie. "There was no television, just a slimy car salesman who cheated me out of my television."

"Never mind", I said.

"Tell him about the coin", chipped in the Stevieling.

"Here", said Mrs Stevie, tossing me a silver dollar-sized coin in a plastic coin protector. "They said I won this instead of the TV."

I looked at the coin. The head on the obverse had none of the sharpness of a properly minted coin. It looked like a copy of one made from a poorly done rubbing. The coin itself was too small for the case, rattling around inside just like a real coin doesn't. To top it off the motto on the other side read In God We Trust Copy. Rarely have I had such a poorly made piece of junk in my hand. It had pretensions of being a "replica" of a gold $50 piece.

In the same way as a bar of Cadbury's Old Jamaica has pretensions of getting you squiffy at Christmas. Indeed, as I read the word "gold" on the coin I distinctly heard Long John Silverish say "Laced with Jamaica Rum flavor" in my mind's ear.

Today Mrs Stevie called me up to call me names. When she paused for breath I said "pity about the TV", whereupon she gleefully announced she had denounced the car dealership on Yelp. This appears to be a website on which to complain about things.

Words failed me at this trivial misuse of the internet.

1. New iPad for her 21st birthday↑

Doubleplus Good

Well this isn't creepy at all.

Celebratory meeting on the village common at 8pm to denounce neighbors by torchlight!

Bring a bottle and a list of suspected traitors.

The Miracle Of Indoor Rain

Watch and be amazed!

This nonsense brought to you by the Long Island Rail Road and the cold front moving in with extreme prejudice from the midwest.

A pity my phone couldn't do it justice.