Sod

The bloody dryer has packed up again.

This time it is blowing air out of the house (unlike last month when the vent blocked due to a titanic buildup of fluff), but only cold air. No sign of ignition attempts by the automated wotsit that sets the gas on fire no matter how long I lie on the cold concrete floor with my eye pressed to the spy-hole.

So Tomorrow, instead of doing what I wanted to do, I shall be stripping off the casing, dismantling the bunsen burner and attempting to identify and replace whatever broke between yesterday and today.

Again.

Bugger

Just when you think life can't possibly get more shbleepy, it proves you wrong

Last Tuesday, Veterans Day, Mrs Stevie came home with the news that a biopsy she'd had done was not, as we had first been told, clear of all nastiness and that she had in fact been diagnosed with the disease for which the cure is almost worse than the condition it addresses.

Fortunately, she had had a dental appointment a week and a half before, and the dentist had expressed some concerns. From there it was a dash to Doc rubberglove who didn't see anything to worry about but felt she should see Doc Teaspoon, my ENT specialist who not only does E's but has a passing acquaintance with N and, more relevantly in this even, T. He ordered a CAT scan and an MRI, and took a biopsy of the cheek material. He also sent her for a needle biopsy of her lymph node, swollen for some time during another illness but still big after two months and more. His initial examination of the material was optimistic and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

That Tuesday, however, the detailed lab reports came back with a very different interpretation of the facts.

Mrs Stevie has Oral Cancer.

We were scheduled in double-quick time for a visit with an Oncologist at Long Island Jewish, a hospital with a good reputation for oncological science. This is where the merely nerve-shredding business was taken to new lengths in human mental torture.

First, the appointment was moved from the afternoon to 9:30 am. Then the hospital turned out to be under renovation and the place looked like a bomb had hit it. We abandoned our car to a valet and went into the oncological building to ask for the doctor. We were, of course, in the wrong part of the bloody place, which everyone was able to tell us straight away, but no-one seemed to know where the right place was, exactly. We got directions, eventually, which led us in a great circle.

Mrs Stevie, ever the practical one, called the doctor's receptionist, who proved to have a grasp of the hospital's geography easily the equal of ours, which is to say that she knew where she was but couldn't recognize where we were. We finally got that sorted out and arrived in good time for the appointment.

Which is when we met Chauncy, who was to prove himself a complete waste of about three bux worth of chemicals and completely devoid of an I.Q.

His first act of anti-patient peace-of-mind terrorism was to produce a pad of forms containing no less than eight sheets of drivel that the doctor needed filling out, then explaining how to do that in an almost perfect imitation of Dustin Hoffman's brilliant portrayal of "Mumbles" in the movie Dick Tracy¹. He must have spent ten seconds on the entire exposition. Mrs Stevie, naturally, became quite hostile that she was asked to fill in her name and nothing else on four sheets of paper, something the otherwise idle receptionist could have done while we were trying to find the bloody place. To add insult to more insult, Chauncy the Waste of Air couldn't get our surname right. A name with four letters, only three of them different, and with an obvious single syllable pronunciation I might add. Still, it would soon be over and we would know the worst.

Or not.

We were shown into an examination room at 10:30, fully one hour later than "the only time the doctor could fit us in", where we waited another half hour before the great man put in an appearance.

Understand that we sympathized with the problems that an emergency operation that afternoon had caused the staff. We just can't understand why we were completely ignored and kept in the dark as to what the fbleepck was going on and when we might actually see someone with a medical qualification.

Eventually the doctor showed up and did a couple of exploratory examinations. He then told Mrs Stevie that she was young to be getting this form of cancer, that she was extremely healthy, had none of the usual risk factors for the disease² and that we had caught the disease early. The prognosis was therefore extremely good and the standard of care would be six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy, with surgery probably not needed unless a PET scan showed otherwise. He was quite definite that he wanted the PET scan to be done "today or tomorrow"³.

We left the office and went back to reception, where we asked the receptionist to organize getting permission from the insurance company to do the test. She refused. Mrs Stevie pointed out that the doctor had been quite specific. She said that we had to get our GP to sort it out. A few minutes on the phone resolved the issue - we had spoken of setting up a "referral" when what was needed was an "approval". The receptionist got quite snippy over the fact that we had a less-than-perfect grasp of the jargon of her field of expertise - medical paper pushing. She summoned Chauncy, the Complete Waste of Skin.

Chauncy listened to about two words of the request before going through all the same strategies to avoid doing what was needed that the receptionist had used. Each one was fielded and returned by Mrs Stevie, a far more fiendish disputant than this Chauncy moron had ever met. He finally asked us to have a seat and disappeared upstairs, ostensibly to do what was required. He mispronounced our name again, just for laughs.

By now it was nearly lunchtime, and that brought on two concerns. Firstly, Mrs Stevie hadn't eaten since the day before and was getting severely squirrelly due to blood sugar levels dipping south of healthy. Then there was the certain knowledge that Chauncy Fbleepckwit was almost certainly near his own lunch-break, which would be an ideal way to bust our balls again.

I waited 40 minutes more before I called my insurance company and began asking them if the forms required had been received (they hadn't⁴) and how I could get the process moving from my end. I did this at the top of my voice in the (vain) hope that one of the stupid cows sitting behind the reception desk would get a clue and intervene. I should add that for the last hour we had been the only other people in the place. Naturally, neither one did intervene, but between me and Mrs Stevie we did get the insurance company to fax the forms required to Chauncy Lackabrain's office. They also said that the whole process should have taken no more than 15 minutes, which we kinda knew since Mrs Stevie had had a number of tests organized that week by someone getting on a computer and spending time being helpful instead of being a complete twbleept. Within five minutes, Chauncy Fbleepace had reappeared waving the form in question, mispronouncing our surname yet again, claiming it was all sorted out, and so we left that benighted hole.

Mrs Stevie was fit to spit nails, and said that she had little faith that an operation that couldn't organize a trivial paperwork exchange or muster staff who could pronounce her name would be competent to cure the condition she had. I had to agreee with her. Since she was feeling down I decided to take her to the California Pizza Kitchen for lunch.

On the way there, she called the insurance company and discovered that despite us having done everything but fill in the forms ourselves, and despite the doctor ordering the PET scan be performed "today or tomorrow⁵" Chauncy Fbleepckhead hadn't actually faxed through the paperwork. Mrs Stevie called him, and in a conversation that escalated until she was literally screaming down the phone at this waste of skin she argued that yes, since it was her life they were discussing in fact he did have time to walk across the bloody office, write one six digit number on the paper he swore blind he had faxed and resend it.

Chauncy Lackabraincell opined that he didn't have to be spoken to in that fashion and threatened to get Deirdre, his supervisor, involved. I was astounded this poor excuse for a human being would be so stupid as to provide such a useful opening in a day in which he had so far done a grand total of nothing to help us out, and Mrs Stevie, of course, yelled that she would love to speak to his supervisor and that she not only welcomed the opportunity to speak to her, she demanded it. Chauncy Fbleepckbrain madly backpedaled and announced she wasn't there, but that on reflection he did have time to deal with this issue himself and would do so, now.

We ate a splendid meal⁶ and returned home. On the way, I suggested Mrs Stevie re-check the situation vis-à-vis the paperwork since I had no faith in the Idiot Chauncy.

As you might predict, the now fed and therefore calmer Mrs Stevie discovered that the paperwork had not arrived, at least, not as it had been specified and was either never received or sent with inadequate identification. Mrs Stevie went white with rage and began dialing. I spoke up:

"Don't bother calling Chauncy. He is just getting some sort of odd twisted pleasure from making you twist in the wind. Ask for Deer-dree" I said.

And that's what she did. She explained what had happened, pontificated on the smarts of a staff that claimed to be able to marshal the state of the art in medical help yet couldn't get one four letter, single syllable name right, and said outright that she had never been so shabbily treated in her life and had no confidence in the Doctor or his support team as a result.

For the first time that day, people from that hospital began reacting to her with some shred of human decency, and she was apologized to and assured that the problems were not typical and would be dealt with.

Mrs Stevie hung up and announced that the woman's name was, in fact, Deer-druh, not Deer-dree. I replied that since they hadn't got our name right I wasn't too bothered about a regional pronunciation difference in one of theirs.

The doctor's personal assistant then rang us back and said that he would now be dealing with Mrs Stevie personally. He had sorted out the paperwork and faxed it to the insurance company in the way that they asked him to, and as a result, no sooner was he off the line than the insurance company called with the news that the test was approved.

I was glad that someone had finally decided that just because it was Friday it was no reason to make the life of a patient any more miserable than the discovery of the potentially lethal condition that made them come to the hospital had. I do however have one remaining puzzle arising from this horseshirt that I cannot for the life of me reason out:

What in Azathoth's name did Chauncy the Fbleepckwit think he could possibly gain by his behavior?

Try as I might I cannot fathom a way in which he could come out of a day like that thinking he was somehow ahead, so why did he do it?

1. Bear in mind we were in an ear, nose and throat specialty clinic, and people might reasonably be expected to have problems hearing anyone trying to be understood and you'll begin to appreciate the brilliance of this dirkhead's behavior↑
2. Smoking, he meant. Neither of us has in over a decade and a half↑
3. It remains a source of puzzlement to me that so many doctors have no idea how the world they work in actually works - no insurance company will pay for an expensive medical scan on a patient's say-so↑
4. Big surprise↑
5. Impractical. It took three days to get her body ready for the scans↑
6. Although I nearly blew it by ordering some sort of spring roll as an appetizer that appeared to be vegetables packaged in a condom↑

Double Blast!

"Mike" from Huntington Hyundai just called with the news that the Fabulous Steviemobile, in for a service, is slightly self-steering on abrupt road-camber changes due to the new tyres I had fitted and not because the bushings in the front suspension have broken up, like they did on that horrible Dodge Junkpile Mrs Stevie was driving when I met her.

Oh good

Then he told me the service would cost me damn near $600 plus tax.

 Vile word redacted 

Blast!

I was looking out over the South weed field Lawn this morning in an effort to shake myself out of my usual early a.m. thoughts of suicide and get myself in the mood for a nice restful commute on the LIRR, when I noticed that after all that buggering about at the end of October the pool cover was on upside down.

Grievance Notice

The things people say in an effort to appear cool and hip sometimes drive me into a rage.

"Ramp up".

"Let's ramp up sales in the next quarter". "Ramping up the warp conatinment field, captain". "We expect to ramp up production on the new Chrysler LeBehemoth despite the complete collapse of any demand whatsoever for any model of Chrysler vehicle".

The phrase "ramp up" comes originally from the electronics industry, where the term "increase" was probably deemed by someone - no doubt hypnotized by the seductive squiggles on his oscilloscope - not to be doing an adequate job in the description department, and one might excuse electronics dweebs for doing that because, let's face it, they probably don't get out much. Once released into the wild, though, this phrase was substituted for the oh-so eighties "increase" in every bloody place it could be.

"We need to ramp-up the blueberry count in our wholewheat muffin products". "Ramping up the voter turnout should be our primary concern".

I feel sick.

Grok.

Never in the history of English language neologisms has there been a coined word that has been so over- and mis-used as "grok". I grind my teeth every time some twerp uses it in their blog or newsfeed in a misguided attempt to become one with the gestalt blogosphereing public.

I doubt even half of the idiots who use this have actually read "Stranger in a Strange Land", an attempt by an already aging Robert Heinlein to prove he was hip and still relevant in the crazy world of 1960s SF. You'll have to read the thing in order to see why "grok" doesn't mean "understand" and why in every single case that it is used in everyday English it could be replaced by the words "understand" or "get".

Any time I read something with this word in it that isn't "Stranger in a Strange Land" I just stop reading and label the writer as a twonk of the first order.

"Blogosphere".

Azathoth, is there anything more pathetic than a nickname given to someone by themself? Yes there is: the word "blogosphere", as though a bunch of disparate ranting gits formed some sort of consensus of meaning that the world should notice and thereby require a special collective noun with which to identify them. Shub-Niggurath on a bike.

Of course, this could just be me being old and grumpy. Maybe I should just try seeing it from the other person's point-of-view.

I just can't see myself ramping up my groking of the blogosphere any time soon, is all.

My Weekend O' Fun

My weekend sucked on the half-shell.

Of primary annoyance was the need to cover the swimming pool, followed closely by the fact that everyone was sick with some sort of cold-type inconvenience illness that precluded us joining our friends for their annual Halloween bash. Of secondary annoyance was the need to finish the set-dressing for our own Halloween display. Tertiary annoyances cropped up to fill any interstices of peace that inadvertently happened.

Saturday dawned and I leaped from my bed at the crack of noon to purchase a few more air pillows¹. I had evolved a theory in which more air pillows would result in fewer pools of rancid sumac-leaf/rainwater infusion. Inflating these is a challenge since, for reasons only known to the manufacturers, the air fitting on them is not the kind found on airbeds, rafts and rings, but a huge thing intended to "enable" one to fill them using a vacuum cleaner.

It takes forever.

No sooner had I floated these three Sausages of Pool Cover Elevation on the cloudy, green-grey surface of the miasma our pool has become than hurricane Zelda sprang up and blew them all over the garden, eliciting some class three Words of Power from your humble scribe. I lashed them down by means of hairy string and departed for our local Home Despot to obtain some rope. I don't usually bother with our local Home Despot these days on account of they never have all the parts I need to do a job, but I thought they could be trusted to have thin nylon rope on their shelves.

The reason I was going to use rope and not the brand-new wire hawser I had bought to thread through the eyelets of the cover and tension with my pool wire tensioning thing is that I think I'll be lifting the cover for the next few days while I attempt to clarify the water. I can't see the bottom of the pool yet and I'm not supposed to mothball it with nasties in it even if I do plan on throwing out the soup and starting fresh (again) next year.

At least I know why the water has been so cloudy of late. The Pool Robot Of Extreme Uselessness has fished up a truly astounding amount of half-rotted sumac seed pods from the abyssal pool bed. I guess there must have been a storm one day that swept this crap onto the solar cover and then washed it into the pool. Nature (and the fact that my family cannot lift a finger to help when it comes to the pool unless the help involves lying about in it) had done the rest. The filter was getting jammed after only an hour or so of the PROEU being activated. If only I had access to one of those nifty electric pool robots that continually sweep the floor of debris while the filter deals with the floating crap. Oh well.

The hurricane put in another appearance when I attempted to pull the cover into place too.

As the wind attempted to tear the 15-foot diameter circular tarpaulin of pool leaf denial from my grasp I held on a screamed some manful things². It looked for a while as though I might take to the air, but fortunately after several hours of struggle, man against the forces of nature, I managed to gain the upper hand and lash the cover down to the various scenic features in the immediate area. Then I started the pool robot.

Which ran for about five minutes before jamming.

When this happens there is nothing for it but to feed the hose that connects the robot to the filter pump through one's hands until the robot surfaces, at which point whatever is jamming it can be excised.

I should explain that the way the robot perambulates is that a heavy weight, hinged at one end, is wagged back and forth by the action of the water being sucked past it. It slams back and forth with a hearty CLACK-CLACK and on alternate clacks it inches forward, the water being sucked in under a circular rubber skirt that scrubs the floor, in theory. The problem is that leaves can be too large to pass the weight and then the whole thing jams and stops in its tracks.

The water, now almost at freezing point, was physically painful to touch, and within a few seconds I had lost all feeling in my fingers, which was to turn out to be a good thing. I inverted the robot, being careful to keep it submerged lest air get into the pump, and pried out the leafy stuff jamming up the clackety-gubbins.

A sad mistake.

As I reached in to remove yet another stalk, the weight suddenly took the initiative and began oscillating, CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK, each clack crushing the tips of my fingers quite nicely. Fortunately, as I said there was by now no feeling in them, so when I finally managed to extricate them they were mercifully numb. A good job too. The last time I had had fingertips that flat I had almost ruptured myself explaining it to the world.

Then I went and got my small compressor/vacuum and sucked all the fun out of the inflatable rings, tubes beds and whatnot. I have to use this device because the inflatables today have a safety valve that prevents air escaping of its own accord from the toys. It works surprisingly well, but forces some innovative solutions to the problem of getting the air out again. I've no room to store everything over the winter in its inflated state.

Over the course of the next few hours I managed to extract yet more pods and leaves from the pool, and the water seemed to be a tiny bit less cloudy. I went in for my dinner.

A short while after my meal, the heavens opened. I waited and waited, and finally announced my intention to go outside in the rain to check the pool and disconnect the robot (there are problems that can occur if it stops and restarts, caused by air collecting under the filter connector). Mrs Stevie suggested an umbrella, but I pointed out I only had two hands and would need them both.

As I opened the door the first flash of lightning sped across the sky. I dashed over to the pool as the heavens opened with a vengeance. As luck would have it, the rain had triggered the GFCI and thrown the breaker, disconnecting the pool motor. I returned to the safety and comfort of Chateau Stevie and resolved to turn it back on - on Sunday.

Sunday dawned and I got the pool robot started again, then went to finish up the Halloween display in the front garden, which is where I found the scat left for me by whatever it is that marks our lawn every bloody fall in this way. Whatever it is it has the world's worst diet, and it's leavings stink worse than anything else I've ever trodden in, including the half-rotted badger. I think it must be a possum. Some sort of scavenger, at any rate. Why it only comes around in the fall is a mystery. If I ever catch the bastard, it will regret the day its DNA zipped up I can tell you.

In due course I had hosed off every square inch of my shoes and the lawn (but still couldn't get rid of the stench) and installed the Eyes in the Alberta Spruces and the marching ghostly feet in the lawn. I'll try and get pictures, but honestly, I can never get them to do the scene justice. When it gets really dark, the effect is pretty spooky for your average six-year old (our target audience³). All that's left to do is lay out the gibbering heads on the porch and to set up the fog machine. Those we do on the day itself.

Then it was off to the Stevieling's confirmation ceremony, in which she was so busy reading the tract that the pastor actually had to knock on the altar rail several times to get her attention. Gotta love that kid. When did she grow up⁴? It seems like only yesterday I was holding her in the crook of my left arm, where she took up the space between my wrist and my elbow.

If I close my eyes I can still feel the weight of her resting there.

1. The 8x4 inflatable pillows used to keep the pool cover afloat↑
2. Indeed, so manful were the things I screamed that the neighbours sent round a deputation to complain, which made me scream some more manful things↑
3. One time I put fake spider webs all over the place in such a way that the kids would have to tear their way in, then they would find themselves ambushed by four of us in costume on their way out. It was so spooky none of the kids would go in and all we had for our trouble was a damn good freezing as we crouched in our hiding place for three hours↑
4. Lutheran indoctrination takes several years, and the average age of the young aspirants was 15↑

As A Matter Of Fact, Living Forever Is Pretty High On My Want List

The pacing in my life often resembles an old Donald Duck movie I once saw that was made to promote safety in the home.

Specifically, it resembles the scene where Donald Duck is taking a bath. He is very happy indeed, quacking a song at the top of his voice and scrubbing the sole of a webbed foot with a loofah, when the mains-connected valve¹ radio he has balanced on the rim of the bath falls into the water and he suffers several amusing seconds of graphic electrocution resulting in an abrupt change in mood. This sudden shift from warm and fuzzy to mind-bendingly hazardous danger is one I am well acquainted with.

Case in point.

A few weeks ago I was driving along the Long Island Expressway at some speed². I had had an argument with the members of the Stevie Millstone Party and was coming down from an impressive rage by listening to some public radio while cooling both my temper and my body by means of the superb air conditioning that forms such an essential part of the Fabulous Steviemobile's ambience. I leaned back and engaged the cruise control. I had just got into a relaxed groove and was for the first time that day getting my blood pressure down to safe levels when the air was rent by a loud CRACK!

I let out a manly falsetto scream while the car attempted some involuntary evasive action by crossing two or three lanes a few times.

In a matter of seconds I had used up my entire stock of class five Words of Power, regained control of the vehicle and ascertained that I had not, as I feared, been shot by some sniper and that some vital component of the car had not failed in order that I might experience severe injury first-hand.

Before anyone sneers at this assessment, I should point out that during my youth I had each front wheel shear away from the chassis of my TR6 on consecutive trips, and once the roof ripped off at 110 mph and gave everyone inside a damn good thrashing about the head which wasn't at all conducive to safe driving. On another occasion I was pulling out of a factory carpark at rush hour and the throttle linkage broke and the engine went, of its own accord, to maximum revs in works traffic. Cars have tried to assassinate me more times than I can remember. Not only that, idiot snipers are a real, if rare, fact of American life.

Once my heart rate had stabilised to around 400 beats per minute and I had the car going in a straight line again I looked around the Steviemobile and discovered the cause of all the fuss. A plastic waterbottle lay in the footwell with a small dent in it. It had clearly been drained by its owner on some boiling hot day, then abandoned after securing the airtight top in the natural place to dump garbage: the footwell of my car. Once the A/C was turned on, the car cooled down to bearable temperarture (I like to be able to keep luncheon meat fresh in my pockets when I select the temperature on my A/C) the air in the bottle had contracted according to the laws of thermodynamics until the plastic bottle had reached some crisis point and deformed suddenly.

If only the bottle's former owner had been present to appreciate this demonstration of Boyles Law.

1. US Vacuum tube↑
2. Or other. I wasn't watching the speedometer officer↑

The Pipes, The Pipes Are Calling

This weekend we took delivery of a brand new, cost me deep in't purse, all-singing, all dancing, microprocessor-controlled, blue LED-equipped¹ dishwasher.

The old one had worked fine for about 15 years, but had recently developed the habit of giving everything a good soaking then switching on the heater and baking the sodden food remnants onto the plates, forks and casserole dishes. This meant that we had to take recourse to washing dishes by hand and by golly that was Not To Be Tolerated by official edict².

Not being in the position of having a spare 900 bux for a new dishwasher (the 400 bux versions having been given the royal sniffing-at and having been declared not optimal replacement strategies by the higher-ups³) I decided to attempt repairs. After all, a dishwasher isn't a very complex machine really. You've got a plastic tub with a watertight door. Check. A pump motor that squirts water in and sucks it out. Check. There's a rotating spraybar or two, powered by the water jets. Check. A valve that opens to let water in, and another that opens to let it out again. Check and check. An electric heating element. Ow! Check. And a timer that tells everything when to work and when to stop working.

Aha!

It didn't take a genius⁴ to work out that since all the other bits were doing what they were supposed to be doing, just not doing it as many times as they should, that the timer was the prime suspect for whatever was going wrong, and accordingly I went online to ascertain how much it would cost to buy a replacement. I wouldn't enjoy doing the job, but I could sustain myself as I tried to undo rusted-in screws and took the occasional juicing from un-disconnected wires with thoughts of not having been skinned for a new dishwasher.

It transpired that I could get almost every part for the dishwasher except for the timer, which was no longer made⁵. Two courses of action were open to me.

1. I could attempt to buy what might be a working second hand unit from a scrap dealer or online auction site
2. I could buy a new dishwasher

The advantage of the first would be a possible saving of cash at he expense of some emptoring of the caveat. I say "possible saving" because scrap dealers now operate on the assumption that whatever they are selling is made of unalloyed 99.99% pure gold⁶ and online auction houses suffer from price exaggeration hardly less extreme due to shill bidding⁷ and witless snipers⁹. This can send prices soaring way beyond the actual market value of whatever it is that is causing such activity.

The advantage of the second plan would be that Mrs Stevie would release the agonizingly painful back-hammer armlock she had me in.

So, a couple of weeks ago, we went out on a Friday night to look at dishwashers, and after only four hours or so I managed to narrow Mrs Stevie down to the choice of either the on-sale Whirlpool Dishrattler DeLuxe or me going to Sears' cutlery department and stabbing myself in the throat. Since I would be required to remove the old dishwasher and put in the new one, we reached an accord, and it would only cost me 650 bux.

I drove home with mixed feelings. On the one hand the seemingly endless dishwasher selection process was over. On the other I was soon to be down the cost of not one but two middle tier drill presses. Put another way: there went all thoughts of that metal-turning lathe I'd had my eye on. I was able to put it all in perspective too, though Mrs Stevie displayed no empathy and just told me to stop crying.

The next day, Saturday, we went to Sears, before breakfast I might add, to seal the deal. We met with a very helpful chap who bore a strong resemblance to Paul Giamatti, who played the chief of police in The Illusionist with such verve, made John Adams come alive in the eponymous HBO film of the same name, and totally stole Big Fat Liar from the kid from Malcolm in the Middle. I was so convinced that he was the actor, perhaps researching his next role as a Sears' sales person, perhaps simply forced, as so many are, into a second job simply in order to pay the electricity bill, that I began ad-libbing lines from the various movies I had seen him in, trying to provoke a response.

Unfortunately, I was mistaken in my identification and all this served to do was to puzzle the salesman first thing on a Saturday morning and annoy the hell out of Mrs Stevie. Win-win from where I was standing (on one foot by then, the other ankle having been roundly kicked during my impassioned and inspired rendition of the "blue man" scene from Big Fat Liar).

The salesman disappeared for a bit, then returned and announced that the dishwasher we had laboriously selected was, in fact, no longer available. Mrs Stevie asked about the floor model and it was my turn to get annoyed, since said dishwasher was quite badly dinged up. Fortunately, Chief Inspector Uhl (as I had taken to mentally calling him), only offered to remove 10% of the purchase price, and even Mrs Stevie wasn't so demented by the laying-low of her dishwashing plans to go for that.

Of course, this was entirely according to the wily Uhl's plan, and he quickly sprang the second part of the trap when he offered to show Mrs Stevie the current models on a computer. In no time at all the dastardly Viennese Chief of Police had persuaded Mrs Stevie that her only hope lay in a top-o-the-line model, the Whirlpool Bone China Coddlermatic With Power Rinse and Ultra-Galactic-Noise-Suppression, 900 bux in change with a year's service contract.

Once again Sears' carpark rang with the anguished howls and hopeless sobs of a man whose credit is deemed three times more worthy than the Federal Government's.

The dishwasher was due in town Last Saturday, and after the mandatory four day sulk I did a dishwasherectomy and uncovered the pipes and the wiring. Not a pretty sight. The pipes were tickety-boo, because when I had removed the original dishwasher after we moved in, I had catered for the change in standard in which the water feed for the machines went from being on the left side of the machine when viewed from the rear to the right side (when viewed from the rear).

Soldering pipe in that 27" square cubby-hole was no picnic, let me tell you, and I had no wish to engage in doing it again. Luckily the stoptap seemed to be working just fine, with no drips once I had shut it off. For once it seemed that the anti-handyman demons were caught napping. The wiring, however was another story.

When I had installed the now-broken dishwasher 15 years ago, I knew very little of wiring or plumbing. I had, in fact, paid for installation to be done for me. The Mrs Steviedad had ridiculed me and announced that installing a dishwasher was easy. He had done his with a friend and it took no time at all. I took him at his word and cancelled the 100 dollar installation fee¹⁰.

The dishwasher arrived and I discovered three facts of life:

• firstly that the piping would have to be re-done
• secondly that dishwashers are supplied sans plug or even external wires, the assumption being that the installer can choose to wire them directly to a junction box or connect them using the cable supplied as part of a fitting kit
• thirdly that the wisdom of the Mrs Steviedad must be filtered through a fine mesh before taking it at face value

The fitting kit had been cancelled along with the installation of course, and I was forced to do a day's plumbing in sub-optimal conditions, acquaint myself with US electrical practice and code and improvise an electric cable with a plug on it¹¹.

When the thing was finally in place I thought to wonder aloud on why the Mrs Steviedad had thought this was so easy. Mrs Stevie then told me that his friend worked for the organization responsible for supplying gas and electricity to the entire length and breadth of Long Island, and it was in fact he who had done the work while her father had held the beers.

The socket I chose to plug it into turned out to be a circuit that also was called upon to supply the fridge, microwave and toaster oven in addition to the dishwasher. There had been many times in the intervening years between my installing the old dishwasher and being faced with installing a new one in which to regret that decision, but I could do little about it other than go and reset the breaker when the fridge compressor kicked in during a marathon cook'n'dishwash session. Lesson learned though. I would use the opportunity to run a new 20 amp circuit to run the fridge and dishwasher and do the job right this time. After all, I was saving time on not having to sweat pipe this time around.

I was sorry to lose the spare breaker slot, as I was hoping to use it for a dedicated TV/VCR/Cable box/Hi-Fi circuit and had already bought the parts, but needs must when the domestic wiring is on fire.

On the plus side I had a reel of 12-gauge Romex-type cable that would be just enough (as it turned out) to do the job. On the negative side I had to buy the breaker and a GFCI¹² wall socket capable of taking the load, and figure out how I was going to install the GFCI. I wanted to put it in a place already occupied by a wall socket, but there was the question of there being enough room in the junction box the socket was in to accommodate the old wires and wire-nut connectors and the deeper-than-normal footprint of the GFCI itself.

Here I hit on a spot of good fortune. It turned out that by dint of lying on my back and shuffling caterpillar-style headfirst into the dishwasher space, then banging my head on the pipes and impaling the back of my neck on the stoptap, I could peer up into the wall cavity with the aid of my trusty three-cell¹³ Maglite™.

When I did so, using iron control to restrict myself to only second class Words of Power, I could see that it would be possible to pull the original wires back from the junction box, and re-connect them in a new junction box I could locate behind the dishwasher. This would allow me to run the new circuit up to the junction box in the wall and fit the GFCI where I wanted it.

It would also allow me to make provision for fitting a proper ground since the original electrician had forsworn the modern concept of grounding all metal junction boxes with copper wire (now handily part of the Romex cable itself) in favor of an alternate scheme involving using two-conductor Romex and grounding through the next poor bastard to touch whatever was live, which would be me usually.

This I did, pulling the old cable out of the wall and reconnecting the various ends. It was a bit unpleasant, the old Romex being insulated with what looked like tanned lizard hide which had become sticky over the years, but not altogether unbearable since I had everything I needed to do the job and it was straightforward work. I would have liked to run new Romex and replace the old wiring completely back to the breaker, but that wasn't practical. It took from about ten am Saturday to about 3 pm to get all the work done and tested, and about half an hour after that the Machine arrived in theater.

The first out of job specification excursion event was the discovery that even though I had salvaged just about everything from the old machine in the way of hoses, I hadn't salvaged the one hose I needed which was the hose/90 degree manifold affair that is used to hook up the water supply, so it was off to Arse Hardware to get the parts required.

The next one was when I had everything connected, power cabled properly, water supply and drain hoses tight and so forth, then we tried to move the unit into the hole the old one had come out of.

It didn't fit.

No matter how I tried I couldn't get the machine to go back the final inch into the hole, which was important because the machine had to drop into a recess in the tile floor or it wouldn't accommodate the counter top. I pulled the machine out and removed the noise-reduction blanket and tried again. No joy. I pulled it out and carefully gathered the hoses and wire, each about six feet long and needing to coil themselves up gracefully as the machine was backed into position, and tried again, but it was no good.

"There's nothing for it" I said to Mrs Stevie, who was at the Thin-Lipped and Foot Tapping stage. "I'll have to remove the side from the counter top so I can crawl through the dishwasher hole and into the space behind the fridge. Then I can watch as you push the machine back and see what's causing the problem".

She snarled her assent to my plan and in no time at all I was crouched like some sort of African fetish doll behind the fridge watching the dishwasher bang up against the stop tap and the pipes leading from it. Mrs Stevie took the situation report and pulled the dishwasher back so I could attempt egress from my confinement, which I did after about five minutes of agonizing contortion. Mrs Stevie gave me time enough to get onto my hands and knees so I could crawl over the various knee-crippling hoses and cables and bang my head on the nail-encrusted wood of the counter before she began questioning me as to our course of action.

"What do we do now?" she snarled.

"Argh!" I answered.

Once I had extracted myself from the kitchen fixtures I surveyed the problem - which now included a stop tap that dripped on account of one of the thumps it had taken probably doing for the seat seal - with a jaundiced eye and came to a reluctant conclusion.

"I'll have to do some plumbing" I gloomily announced. "It'll have to be tomorrow though. I'm too tired to start soldering pipe in that little cubbyhole tonight. I'll burn the house down or something."

So we went to have something to eat at a diner, there being no room to eat in the house owing to all the kitchen furniture being moved out of the way to make room for the dishwasher installation, and on the way I stopped at Home Despot to pick up the needed parts.

The way I saw it the stop tap had to go and the piping needed re-routing into the wall cavity. I would cut off the whole assembly at the tee joint connecting it to the hot water supply, cap off the tee, split the pipe in a new location and solder in a new tee, ball-type lever valve and enough pipe to bring it up to the level of the wall, and install the original coupling. Unfortunately I had an appointment on Sunday which would involve me being away from home from 12 until 7 pm. This left two or three hours maximum on Sunday morning to do the work. I wasn't kidding about being too tired to do it that night; I've tried to crash through the tiredness barrier before and I always regret it the next day when I'm redoing whatever I screwed up last thing the night before.

Once we returned to Chateau Stevie I decided to try and get ahead of the game by constructing the bit of pipework encompassing the new stop tap, the tee piece and the curvy piping needed to accept the coupling in my secret experimental pipe manifold construction laboratory, or as Mrs Stevie calls it, the basement. That way I could reduce the need for pointing a long roaring blue flame at the woodwork and wiring in the house wall and I could make all the joints right-way-up instead of upside down.

It took about an hour, all told, but because I was tired the joints looked a right mess, and when I got a look at them the next day I was anxious as to their watertightedness. Only time and water under pressure would tell, though. I had been as careful as I could with the soldering, and everything should be OK despite the cosmetics.

I hoped. Picture here and here.

Matters were complicated by the need to shield the wooden studs and wiring from the heat. I keep a plate of steel around to use as an improvised heat shield for stuff like this, but I couldn't find it no matter where I looked, so I was forced to use an old, blunt circular saw blade as an improvised improvised shield. It turns out that the blade retains heat for quite some time and I received some of the nicest burns on my fingers I've ever had discovering that snippet. The studs I protected by dampening them with water.

I drained the water from the pipes and cut off the coupling, which I then attached to my new pipe manifold. So far so good. Then I cut the pipe at the tee, cleaned it up, applied the flux, slid the cap on and began heating the pipe. Picture here.

It became obvious after a while that it was taking much too long to heat the pipe to the proper temperature, and an ugly suspicion formed that there was water in the pipe. This turned out to be the case, and I immediately went to class three Words of Power with no compunction whatsoever. You simply cannot solder a pipe with water in it since the water turns to steam which carries off the heat. I cut the pipe again in the place I was going to place the new tee and tried again after allowing the pipe to drain. Once again it mysteriously began to fill with water and steam. I went downstairs and opened all the basement faucets. Still no dice.

I stopped and wondered where the water was coming from. Possibly the water shut-off valve was leaking, allowing water to dribble into the system. I shut off the water main at the stopcock. No joy. I finally surmised that the water was from a column trapped in a vertical run of pipe, which was expanding just enough to dribble into my pipe when I applied the heat. The only answer was to use the compressor to blow out the lines. Once that was done I got the pipe capped in no time (and set fire to one of the studs despite having dampened it beforehand, but I managed to quench the blaze before it got completely out of hand), but because the bits had all been heated and allowed to cool three times the joint was another ugly one and I was not a happy camper. Plumber. Whatever.

I attached the new manifold to the water supply and turned on the water. I was rewarded with no leaks from my new pipe, but a steady drip form one of the 50 year old joints which must've let go during the soldering of the new parts to the old.

This was a blow.

It is generally a bad idea to try and resweat old components because the original joint becomes brittle, oxidation in the pipe-pipe connection restricts the flow of solder and it is hard to get flux to flow down the tiny cracks in question, and the newer lead-free solder may not be fully miscible with the older super-leaded stuff. Normally I would cut the pipe and run a new joint in these circumstances. Today, however, I was running out of time so I wire brushed the joint as clean as I could using my Dremel tool¹⁴, brushed on some flux and ran some solder into the joint (after blowing out the pipe with the compressor again, of course). Picture here.

Wonder of wonders it worked. No drips. I put the dishwasher through a quick fill/drain cycle to check everything was tight and pushed it into place.

It wouldn't fit.

I did a little dance of pure rage, used my entire stock of class four Words of Power and once again crawled into the space behind the fridge. Mrs Stevie wasn't there to push the dishwasher today, but my rage gave me the strength of ten men. Would that it had given me their brains too.

I pulled the dishwasher into place and determined that one of the counter-top supports was fouling it now, just before I heard the "click!" of one of the front legs dropping into the well, locking the dishwasher into place and imprisoning me quite effectively.

"Well, that worked" I said to myself, banging my head hard against the wall to punish Mr Brain for yet another inappropriate ambush ploy. I don't know how I eventually dislodged the bloody dishwasher and gained my freedom. It is possible the class five Words of Power I used caused a momentary increase in air pressure enough to lift it clear of the floor and thrust it out of the cavity. I know some of the wallpaper caught fire.

I was out of time and so ran for a shower and left the house for my Dungeons and Dragons manly high-stakes poker game.

I got home around 7 pm and got to work with the wrecking bar and clawhammer, and in no time I had removed the offending support timber. Then I fabricated a new one from a piece of maple I had in the Basement of Deferred Project Storage. I had intended that piece of wood for a far more worthy project, but I was getting fed-up with this one. I slid the dishwasher into place just as Mrs Stevie returned home.

"Took you long enough" she sniffed.

1. The sovereign sign of state of the art sophistication↑
2. Drafted and broadcast by Mrs Stevie↑
3. Mrs Stevie↑
4. Fortunately↑
5. Of course↑
6. One might make a case for the various governments of the world nationalizing their scrap dealers and backing their currencies with The 1995 Ford Taurus Hubcap Standard↑
7. The process whereby one uses either one's friends or sock puppets⁸ to "bid up" an item as though it were desirable ↑
8. Multiple online identities that belong to the same individual, adopted to convey a false impression of democracy in action to serve whatever ends the nitwit owner of said identities has in mind, in this case, driving up the auctioned item's "value"↑
9. Who wait until the last few minutes of an online auction and then start bidding small increments in order to secure an item↑
10. It is a mark of how badly this event scarred me mentally that I clearly remember the amount involved despite Mr Brain↑
11. I used an air conditioner extension cord with the end cut off, if you're interested↑
12. Ground Fault Circuit Interrupt. It detects an imbalance in current flowing between the live wire and ground and the neutral wire and ground and breaks the circuitry if it exceeds a certain value. This value tends to be enough for you to get a mild belt on a rainy night if you grab a string of lit indoor-outdoor fairy lights for example, but good enough to blow and take out your elaborately constructed Xmas Light Display O Seasonal Merriment every Christmas Eve there is a hint of moisture or a snowflake lands within three hundred feet of the socket↑
13. "D" cells U.K. U2↑
14. A wildly underrated tool by many but God-like in my eyes↑

Status Report - Update

The grass is now cut.

All else is unchanged (except for the windowsill).

Ear Ringing, Knee Screaming

This blog has been about as inactive as a governmental banking oversight committee member of late, and I thought I'd explain some of the why.

My right ear keeps getting infected. Right before our Canada trip it got blocked and painful again and I ran to Doc Rubberglove who gave me some sort of secret government strength anti-biotics and it cleared up in three days. I got a referral to Doc Teaspoon, the ENT¹ which I planned to use when I got back.

No sooner did I get back than the ear got infected again. On one particular Friday I was forced to go to a wedding, which because of the ear I couldn't dance at and because I was driving I couldn't drink at². I sat for five hours drinking water that tasted of chlorine with a head that hurt so much I thought seriously about poking out the offending eardrum with a knitting needle. I would obviously need to see Doc Rubberglove again.

I was finally allowed to go home, and climbed into bed at about 1am. At about 4:30 am I was woken from my sleep by my left knee, the tendons of which were vying with each other as to how much they could hurt. I stifled a manly scream by biting Mrs Stevie and limped to the fridge where I fabricated an ice-pack from some ziplock bags and some ice cubes.

I've had this before, same knee. The last time it was so bad I went to the emergency room on a Sunday lunchtime (a place I've been exactly twice before in my life, only once in the US and that was involuntary) where the three year old "doctor" wrote "knee pain" under the Reason for Visit, clamped the leg in a wraparound aluminum splint and prescribed painkillers so dangerous they won't let you have more than 10 at a time. The outcome was that it took a month for me to recover use of the leg, and because the tw*t with the medical degree and the pen didn't write "acute" or note that I had to be carried in to his presence, my insurance refused to pay the costs of the visit, saying my condition "wasn't emergent⁴". I appealed, speaking with passion about controlled drugs, wheelchairs and the number of ER visits they could track me to. They were implacable, stating that I should have seen my doctor first. I was astounded. On what planet does a Doctor work on a Sunday?

Anyway.

Realising that the same problem was rearing its ugly head, I spent Saturday and Sunday in a recliner with my knee iced⁵ and on Monday called Doc Rubberglove and begged for an appointment.

Doc Rubberglove must have heard me coming and he left town leaving his partner in charge, the delightful Ms Doc Rubberglove. The receptionist tried to put me off by telling me Ms Doc Rubberglove couldn't give me a cortisone jab. I thought about the times I've had these jokes at my expense and said I would live with that. By now my whole face was on fire with the teeth on one side, both upper and lower jaws, all aching the worst I've ever experienced as an adult. The knee was almost unnoticeable beside that. Almost.

Ms Doc Rubberglove was most sympathetic and gave me cortisone pills and Vicodin⁶ for the knee and ordinary Amoxicillin for the infected head⁷. Mrs Stevie, in the meantime, found a Velcro knee-support that wonder of wonders actually made things better not worse.

I spent a week in bed, gradually getting better, too ill to do anything but lie there groaning, and went back to work the next Monday where more irritation faced me (a story for another time). Suffice to say I really have been too sick to post for most of the time.

For the rest of the time, I just had better things to do⁸.

1. That's Newyorkese for Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist. I was not, as might be inferred from the text, getting my ear looked at by some sort of motile oak tree with a Welsh accent↑
2. A minor mercy. The one drink I permitted myself tasted as though some sort of industrial chemicals had been substituted for the rum I asked for, and I feared for the eyesight of the other guests who were swilling the stuff as though there was no tomorrow³↑
3. Which might have been true for some of them if my suspicions about the chemicals were right↑
4. I am not making that up. They denied me in Furbish↑
5. Not the easy life of Riley one might expect. The TV was showing a 48 hour marathon of the world's crappiest programs on every channel and Mrs Stevie was mutinous when it came to making the tea↑
6. The same meds that Dr House takes. Wildly great painkillers that would squelch the agony to mere discomfort in no time. Which the insurance company downgraded to Generic Almost Near Vicodin Substitute that had almost no noticeable effect↑
7. Funny thing is I had forty anti-biotic pills and eight cortisone pills. The pharmacy shorted me on the count...for the cortisone pills. I'd never have noticed one from forty, but when I opened up the pack of eight and noticed there were an odd number of pills, a sudden second sense told me something wasn't right↑
8. A lie. Stuff happened. Watch this space↑

Mine, All Mine!

Just when the financial news couldn't look any worse, I get the Satisfaction of Lien letter from my bank.

Yazoo! Good news for once! After five years of onerous payments, The Fabulous Steviemobile is finally mine in every respect! Ahahahaha!

I wonder what that noise is coming from under the dashboard on the passenger side?

The New Weedwacker

So last month I decided I needed a new weed wacker.

My old one had become hors de combat due to the bump knob wearing out and the company that manufactired said knob, the reel the knob held together and the weedwacker it all screwed onto went out of business¹. Clearly Action was called for, and I took it by purchasing a brand new Ryobi shaft-drive weedwacker and brush cutter.

Weedwackers come in two types. The first has a curved shaft, the second has a straight one with a gear head at tha end to make the motion go round the corner. The first type of weedwacker has a flexible shaft inside the curved outer one, rather like a bicycle brake cable. The drive is transmitted around the gentle curve of the shaft with minimum fuss, but the inner shaft cannot be called upon to do heavier duty than weedwacking on account of it tends to twirl up like a rubber band if you do.

The straight shaft has a solid inner drive shaft and the motion is turned horizontal by means of gears. The solid shaft is much more businesslike and can be called upon to power saw-like brush blades and discuss-like edge trimmers and so forth. The new weedwacker came configured as a brushcutter (light duty though, it had a sort of rotary axe blade rather like an edging blade rather than a circular saw blade) but also came with two different string trimmer heads.

I got it home and pulled out the tools I would need to convert it from a brushcutter to a weedwacker. I had to dismantle almost the entire whirly end and rebuild it, but I finally got the job done despite Mrs Stevie whining about oil spills on the carpet. I would try it out at the weekend.

The weekend came, and I attacked the back "lawn", too overgrown to use a mower on, and it worked rather well except that the reel fell off halfway through the job. This was a puzzler. In all the time I had the other one it never once ejected the reel. It did all manner of treacherous things including attacking me when I was not looking at it, but it never dumped its reel.

I re-mounted the reel and finished the job. Remounting the reel involved stripping the damned thing down to its component parts and rebuilding it, but I got it done eventually.

Two weeks later I decided to trim the weeds around the outside of the property, on account of the bit next door to Crazy Joe looking like something off a Tarzan movie. I started the weedwacker and marched over to the grass, but there was no swish of string or rasp of cutting grass.

I looked at the business end of the weedwacker. There was no spool on it. I looked wildy around and there, in the middle of the road, spinning madly to no obvious effect, was the unmounted spool.

It took about a minute to spin down enough to tip over and strike the road with one of its strings, whereupon it leaped joyfully into the air.

Specifically the bit of air occupied by my head.

So, the new weedwacker is picking up where the old one left off.

1. About ten minutes after I bought the weedwacker if I have my dates right↑

But Occasionally There's Cake

While I'm Flickring, I'll share this beautiful sight that I was privileged to catch last week

Forklifts: Never Leave Them Unattended

I needed to replace some disks in a computer today, so I tootled off to the machine room, popped the bad units and made for the replacement disk cupbaord.

What I found beggars description, but I've got a few pix to prove I wasn't hallucinating.

1. Start here
2. Then go here
3. Then here
4. Here
5. Here
6. And finally, here

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

Yes, Explain It, Why Don't You

If there is one thing worse than watching the American economy implode, it's watching our president condescendingly explain things to the American people as I did last night.

It wasn't so much the smirk that the man perpetually wears in public. It wasn't the gall of someone who demonstrably cannot handle finance explaining same to the little people. It was both of those together, really.

Understand, I'm not suggesting the president caused the problem (though there does seem to be a disturbing pattern in which a member of the Bush family sits in the oval office and banks start failing), but it is happening on his watch and you'd think the man would take time out of his busy lame-duck schedule to get up to speed and have some ideas of his own other than to wait and see what happens, which is what he wants to do. I know this because that's what he's been saying in one way or another for months now as the clamour from the so-called market experts and economists he keeps around for laughs has risen to what must be by now unbearable stridency.

The man with the plan, Paulson the Secretary of the Treasury, was deliciously vague in that plan on what would be needed other than on two points on which he was quite direct (according to the press): The amount of the first Taxpayer-supplied installment (700 000 000 000 dollars which has been expressed as around 5000 dollars per person though I haven't checked the math) and the need for total legal indemnity for Paulson for whatever he has to do.

One can only speculate what high crimes are being contemplated in the name of capitalism.

One thing both the president and Paulson have been adamant about in the face of increasing public hostility is that they saw no reason to forbid the taxpayer-supplied funds being used to float the golden parachute "bonuses" and severance payments to anyone shirtcanned in a bailed-out corporation. It's easy to imagine why. In all likelyhood the people concerned have all at some time in the past stood naked in a cellar hung with banners bearing greek letters while they beat each other's backsides with a wooden paddle in the name of eternal fraternity.

Last night the press of public opinion finally bore some weight as the president read his carefully prepared speech which included the warning to all concerned that the funds would not, now, be available for departing executives to pack their pockets with. Not only that, government experts say the taxpayers will even get "most" of the money back, eventually, probably.

Well, it was a start, but I've some questions for the president and his pals in high finance

When I wanted to borrow money from these banks in the past, I've had to prove that I either didn't need the cash or that I did need it but could reasonably expect to pay it back with high interest. Anyone who has raised a mortgage knows what I'm talking about here. Instead of vague promises and a big bucket o' cash for the lucky few, how about these institutions sign a loan deal with the taxpaying public? How about they pay interest on the money they need to prop up their shoddy, ill-run businesses? How about the taxpayers get a direct benefit by having a tax credit equal to that 5 kilobux and perhaps half as much again in interest? After all, in these deregulated, zero-oversight days, doesn't each individual taxpayer have as much right to indulge in buying up bad debt as his/her high street bank and pension fund have been doing all through this sorry affair?

And just how you qualify for a "bonus" when you've helped steer your firm into financial ruin is beyond me.

Yesterday

Seven years ago...

I looked out of the south-facing window of my office with a sick certainty. The smoke was obscuring most of the building at the height it showed over the rest of the Manhattan skyline, but occasionally it offered a glimpse of the tower's silver skin. Smoke was coming out of the two sides I could see.

Given that I knew that the fire was burning jet fuel, it seemed likely that the vast open plan floors of that tower were now a sea of flame, and I knew that the fire escapes and the elevators were in the middle of the building. The core was steel, like everything else, but fires that big can heat the air until it is unbreathable and the steel would by now be very hot. The central shaft-like core would likely be a windtunnel now too, fanning the flames like a blowlamp.

The smoke was very thick.

I know nothing about building design factors, rescue techniques or how fires move about in buildings, but I was once peripherally involved in a building fire and looking at this one, with no precise knowledge of what conditions were actually prevailing in WTC 1, I knew that before long Manhattan would be treated to another Shirtwaist moment.

I couldn't watch that unfold.

I retreated into the middle of our office, a city block in area with lots of places there were no windows and went quietly into shock. It was much later that I found out that yes, people had had to make that terrible descision. I wondered if the poor buggers had any consolation, any sense of relief at all. Probably not. Just several minutes of growing certainty that they could jump or they could burn. I've always known what my choice would be in those circimstances, but I don't kid myself that the experience would be in any way enjoyable. That's probably why I was so sure of what would happen as I looked out at the steel and the smoke. So much smoke.

What a time to be, for once, right.

Tuesday Night and The Police

At Jones Beach, for one of their last concerts in their farewell tour as it happens.

Me 'n' The Stevieling 'n' Mrs Stevie had tix because it was my birthday present (my precious). Mrs Stevie provided said tickets, but I still haven't found out what manner of perfidious skullduggery she's feeling so bad about that it prompted a dig into the handbag of such generous proportions. No doubt it will all end in tears¹.

The evening was perhaps a little muggy, but we saw no sign of the promised thunderstorms, which was good because Jones beach is an open-air theater and wet comes in when it comes down. This was the Stevieling’s first real Rock concert and I wanted it to be as good as it could be. My night was slightly marred due to one ear being blocked (again) and making the whole affair one of glorious monophonic reproduction.

I wasn't disappointed though.

The opening act was Elvis Costello, who was superb even though I'm not a great fan of his recorded work ², and I enjoyed his set immensely. Sting came out and joined in on one song (the title of which escapes me now) and at another point he was surrounded by three guys "playing" guitars and dressed like he looked in 1977 (complete with black suit, thin tie, Elvis hairstyle and fat framed glasses) - the Police in drag of course. Hilarious to them wot was there.

It was the first time I'd seen The Police live too. In fact, apart from Fairport Convention (who play smaller venues all told than the 16k seaters like Jones beach) we haven't seen any groups since 1995, when we saw Yes on the Talk tour. At Jones Beach.

Anyway

The band were in good form and played forever, material from all their studio albums. I wasn't impressed by one of the arrangements, but it was more a case of "not to my taste" compared to the better known studio version than "naff". I won't even say which song it was because honestly, I was the only one not cheering like a loon at the end of it. Ergo, must've been me³.

The set list, as best I can remember it, went like thuslywise:

Message In A Bottle
Walking on The Moon
Demolition Man
Voices in my Head segue into When The World Is Spinning Down
Driven To Tears
Don't Stand So Close To Me
Hole In My Life
Invisible Sun
De Do Do Do De Dah Dah Dah
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
King of Pain
Can't Stand Losing You/Reggatta De Blanc/Can't Stand Losing You

Encore time.

Purple Haze
Roxanne/Secret Love/Roxanne
Wrapped Around Your Finger
Deep Blue Sea⁴
So Lonely

Encore time. Dos Maas.

Every Breath You Take

Everybody go home time.

Somewhere in there, probably in the first encore between Roxanne and Wrapped Around Your Finger, they played Next To You. Understand that I had no writing materials to hand and had to use an old stage magician's trick of making a rebus out of the whole thing as it happened. This involved storing stuff in Mr Brain⁵ and, well, the rebus broke on the drive home. It hardly matters, except to note the two glaring problems with the evening.

1) No Synchronicity I.

2) Although there were three huge TV screens, each of them showed the same view, usually Sting.

Now I'm the first to admit that Sting is a bang-up songwriter and performer, but there's three of 'em in the band and one might have thought that they'd put a camera on each of 'em. One would have been an idiot to have backed that thought with money though.

Even though Copeland is probably one of the most energetic and inspiring percussionists on stage when he's on form, there was precious little tv coverage of his work at the concert. Summers got some shots, but even during his one big solo, during So Lonely, when Sting walked to the end of the stage (and it's a wide stage at Jones Beach) to clear the area for Summers to work, the TV followed Sting walking stage left instead of watching the soloing Summers. This, combined with the stage setup involving Sting standing twenty feet away from the other two could lead anyone to believe that the rumours of friction between the band members is still alive and well.

But they played well, and they played long. We got our money's worth, and I share with the others fortunate enough to have been to one of these shows the no-doubt smug feelings of canary-stuffed cat.

The stage lighting effects were interesting too, with a sort of headband across the front hiding the gantry upon which various colour themes were displayed as each song played. At first they seemed to be inspired by the album from which the songs came (red led segments on a black background for stuff from Ghost in the Machine, shades of blue for Reggatta De blanc and so forth) but then they seemd to become more random, but in all honesty I wasn't watching the lights, much, and I could easily have missed a whole subtle subtext painted in light to reinforce and compliment the sonic wash of the compositions as they unfolded a greater narrative encompassing the whole performance. Like I said, I wasn't paying them that much attention.

I've already said that it's been a long time since I rock and rolled at an event of this sort, so I might just be out of touch, but it seemed to me that there were an awful lot of strobes flickering from the stage out into the audience. It occured to me this might be an attempt to prevent the hundreds of iPhoners from videoing the affair by futzing up the auto exposure of the teenytiny cameras. They were trying anyway.

Before the show started I became bemused by the faces around me. I looked at one guy waiting to buy a tee-shirt and asked "When did we all get so old?"

He responded "Well, everyone here's on drugs. Mostly Lipitor, but some Crestor and a few Blood thinners."

He wasn't wrong either. There were more than a few of the crowd who obviously had secret portraits in oils stashed somewhere safe, and the median age couldn't have been much under fifty, and the buch manning the Harley Davidson display looked like they might have been founder members of the Hell's Angels.

Bizarre moment of the concert: Sting came out for the second concert without his shirt (I'm told this is a "trademark: of his) and a total stranger waltzed over and asked to use my 7x10 binoculars to go nipple watching. Since the neck strap was tangled in my collar and I wasn't about to surrender the glasses to some strange woman I'd never seen before in my life I leaned over in order to let her look. After about twenty seconds An eternity when you are balancing precariously on one leg to accommodate someone who is showing no signs of going away when you desperately want them to I noticed that the Stevieling was ducking down to accommodate this nitwit and couldn't see the action herself, so I said "you're done". Nitwit pretended not to hear. I repeated "You're done" and pulled the binoculars out of her hands and told The Stevieling to stand up so she could see. Nitwit grudgingly left without so much as a thank you.

As always, it took over an hour for the carpark exodus to clear enough to make it worthwhile trying for home.

It was just great.

1. Mine↑
2. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I like Watchin' The Detectives and Oliver's Army but so does everyone in the whole world. Big deal↑
3. In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I have never cared for any of the songs from Ghost In The Machine, partially because of the nauseating Every little Thing She Does and the turgid Invisinble Sun but mostly because of the "woolly sounding" production on the whole thing. I regard this album as a low point in an otherwise notable (if all-too short) recording career↑
4. A Blues number I wasn't familiar with↑
5. Who is not my friend↑

The Joy Of CD Player Resurrection

So the first job upon arriving home last night was to attempt some sort of repair on the CD Player of Non-Workingness, that the halls of Chateau Stevie would once again ring with the works of King Crimson, Yes, Fairport Convention, Segovia, David Bowie, John Renbourne, Stan Rogers, Show of Hands, The Beatles, Quantum Jump, Dave Brubeck, Django Reinhart, Joan Armatrading, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Rick Wakeman, The Electric Light Orchestra, Mecca Bodega, The Police, Mike Oldfield, Squeeze, Laurie Anderson, Roxy Music, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Led Zepplin, Paul Brady, Steve Harley (with and without the rebellious cockneys) and a host of others sitting in the rotating CD Storage Tower of CD Storage including whatever crap Mrs Stevie and her henchwoman-in-training, The Stevieling put on it while I'm not there.

I drove home in the rain to put me in the right frame of mind, and upon arriving at Chateau Stevie conducted a survey of how best to excise the unit from the cabinet.

Owners of modern stereos may not remember that in the good old days between the "entertainment center" and the "ghetto blaster" eras, one assembled one's stereo system out of components that stacked, usually inside a cabinet made expressly to house such stuff and that gave access to the top for the record transcription turntable unit, or "record player" in Dadspeke. By the time Mrs Stevie and I bought this one, the state of the art was such that one need no longer buy each unit from a different manufacturer, but could buy matching amplifier/tuner units, cassette decks, turntables and, later, CD players. Our stuff is all JVC and was bought during the late eighties, usually as "last year's model" to get a whopping discount on the price of ownership. The CD player doesn't exactly match the rest of the stack because it came a couple of case revisions after the rest. The display is the same colour, but the buttons are of a slightly different style. I digress.

Our stereo is housed on several shelves to the left of and in the same cabinet as our TV set. The arrangement of the carpet and the furniture means that the unit can only be swung away from the wall by any significant amount at the other end of the cabinet. Not only that, but the way the wires had been tucked up in the cabinet when the stereo was installed, along with the rather miserable cable lengths allotted by JVC to the various interconnecting bits meant that just removing the unit from the cabinet would be a job not unlike that of changing the clutch on a Leyland-era mini - a job in which one works in a space just wide enough for one's hands, in an area one cannot see and therefore must explore by feel.

I erected a small tray-table in front of the cabinet and managed by dint of this and by partially removing one shelf to get the CD player out of the cabinet and disconnected from the sound and s-bus cables¹. The power connection was another matter and required the deployment of some class four swear words to get disengaged from the power tap on the tuner/amp.

Now I had the thing on a portable table it was a simple² matter to remove the case top and disengage the fascia (which contains all the controls and the display and has to come off so you can get at various moving parts) and place it in front of the unit for testing. I would have disconnected it an many points during the evening's "fun" but the ribbon cable was firmly attached at the chassis board.

The mechanism is as I described yesterday. CD slides are pulled back into an elevator mechanism, which lowers the disc to the transport/playback assembly. Take a look back if you want a more detailed description. I can't face writing all that again. Even thinking about it all gives me the shakes.

I could still hear a whirling motor for a few seconds when the thing was powered up, but it wasn't the motor used to spin CDs. Interesting. I postulated that a gear had disengaged from a shaft somewhere allowing a servomotor to spin freely. Now many of these mechanisms involve worm gears as the first step in getting the motion from the motor to where it's needed, which would normally mandate against forcing anything by hand. The worm gears used in this unit, however, were of sufficiently steep pitch that there was little danger provided one was gentle. The motors would freewheel obligingly if a light touch was used.

I discovered that by manually retracting the slide hook I could provoke the elevator to hunt up and down. That was one servo mechanism that was nominally working then. The disc tray would open, albeit not promptly and not every time it was asked to, so in principle that servo was mechanically sound too. That left the one that worked the slide retracting hook. By dint of gently prying open the CD single play drawer and painstakingly searching inside the mechanism with a flashlight, I found what I suspected: a worm gear lying on the chassis floor and a nearby motor with nothing on its driveshaft.

I had suspected something of the sort once I heard the free-running motor since one of the drawbacks of worm drives is that should the gear chain they are meshed with jam, say by having the linear mechanism it drives over-running its travel and bottoming out, the motor will, if it is turning in the right direction, cause the worm gear to climb off the drive shaft. If the motor is turning the other way it simply runs until the worm gear has worn away and won't grip the shaft any more. The dismounted gear was annoying, but not nearly as annoying as one that had self-destructed and forced a search for a replacement for the by-now obsolete original part would have been. I was, relatively speaking, in luck.

I tried a number of techniques to put the gear back on the spindle without dimantling the entire sub-assembly (something I was not keen to try since precision alignments were involved that I had grave doubts I could reproduce with the equipment in my workshop) but they all ended in swear words. I eventually had to remove the drive sub-assembly in order to get enough clearance to work, which involved disengaging a couple of dozen loose wires from snap connectors (JVC cheaped out on plugs to interconnect boards and components). This alone drove up the anxiety to Galactic Ultra Infarction levels. One dropped tool would result in jumbled wires and I'd never get them back in the right order again.

It took forever, but using a modified dental pick³ I eventually managed to persuade the gear end to go over the shaft, at which point I simply pushed gently on the CD slide retrieval hook while gripping the gear lightly with a haemostat and used the gear train to push the worm gear back into place in a reverse of the process that pulled it off in the first place.

I managed, after much cursing, to re-install the drive sub-assembly in the chassis, then had to remove it again because I couldn't reach to reconnect some of the wires. Reconnecting all the wires, I was then forced to work around them while trying to place screws deep into the chassis and get them in the proper holes to secure the player sub assembly in place, which required placing the screws using the haemostat. It was tedious with a capital Teed and I emphatically don't recommend the procedure to anyone.

I powered the unit on and ran a test.

It worked!

The CD loaded, slid into place and was properly positioned in the playing mechanism and spun up. Stopping it caused the CD to unload as it should. Result! I looked at the clock. It was almost 10 pm. I'd been struggling with the bloody thing for over two hours.

I put the case back together and spent several minutes trying to reconnect the power to the tap on the tuner/amp by feel before I was successful, then connected up the data and sound wires and replaced the unit on its shelf. Drawing breath I loaded In Reel Time⁴ and was rewarded with the opening strains of "Reynard the Fox". Mrs Stevie came running out.

"It's working? You fixed it?" She asked in amazement.

"Yes and yes" I answered, smugly

"Took you long enough" she sniffed, and returned to her internet friends.

1. The units communicate with each other and the tuner by means of a rudimentary data network. This is so that when you press the CD button on the tuner, the other units such as the cassette deck, record turntable or radio shut down gracefully. It also enables one to box clever when making tapes, pausing the tape when the record ends and so forth. A really useful feature, long superseded↑
2. Ha!↑
3. Which had to be bent into a new shape using my trusty Leatherman pliers. All this bending eventually broke the point off the pick and it will have to have its point reground before I can use it for the modelling tasks I bought it for in the first place. It all makes work for the working man to do↑
4. Fairport Convention↑

Returning Happiness At Chateau Stevie

There was cake.

I got home around 7 pm, with the weather clouding over and the humidity hovering somewhere between "unbearable" and "intolerable". My feet were cooking nicely and all I could think of was hopping in a shower to cool off prior to consuming the repast The Stevieling had promised to make for me. The house was in darkness, and I thought it possible that once again LIPA¹ had made bad atmospheric conditions immeasurably worse by arranging a power cut so none of the fans in the house would work.

I trudged, sweat-drenched, into the front room and made for the kitchen, there to dump my briefcase before dashing to the lavatory to relieve my bladder, much swollen due to the two pints of water I had consumed in order to stave off dehydration on my commute home.

"SUPRISE!" screamed a choir of sonic assassins comprising of the ringleader and master of ambushes, Mrs Stevie, the until-now dear to my heart Stevieling, The MrsStevieDad and MrsStevieMom, Bil the Elder and his partner in crime, Ms Bil the Elder. I let out a manly shriek, incidentally breaking two crystal wine glasses at the back of the crap storage closet that masquerades as our china cabinet, leapt the customary two feet in the air and span round to face my ambushers. Everyone laughed. Once my heart had returned to what I understand is called "sinus rhythm"and ceased trying to make it's own cowardly escape by way of my rib cage I joined in. A merry jape indeed and not only was my urgent need for the toilet completely forgotten, it was now unnecessary. Thank Azathoth I was wearing dark trousers.

We repaired to the gazebo in the garden, a sort of frame tent with anti-mosquito netting walls, where Mrs Stevie had set up a table and would server a meal of barbecued steak, asparagus, spuds, corn on the cob and I don't know what-all else. It was delicious, and only slightly marred by the heavens opening and delivering several gallons of wet into the ground on which everything stood.

I should explain about the Gazebo. We used to have a very elaborate one with fancy details in the steel corner pieces. We placed it on an area of grass under some shade trees². It was great fun to use for dining at night, and The Stevieling used it to study in most nights. Unfortunately, it caught a strong wind during the early fall and hung itself over our back yard fence, badly bending a couple of the struts. I repaired them and we used it again the next year. That year I was less dilligent about removing the large picnic table from it after use each day and that killed all the grass that formed the floor. Then the tent part ripped and last year I didn't bother with the thing. This year, Mrs Stevie wanted a new one, so I re-sodded the grass area on the site (my plan to deck the area having foundered on the rocks of financial reality) and we acquired and erected a new gazebo on the site. The grass did well, and we opened the whole affair for business on July 4th, when we had a barbecue.

It rained all day.

I had planned for this contingency by adding a twenty-foot by ten-foot tent to the construction, but the land slopes downward at Gazebo point and some lightweight bogs and swamps formed in there. I didn't know since I was galley-slave for the day and didn't get to sit down until the late afternoon. Then we had a July 6th barbecue and the weather did the same. Two days of trampling, dark and wet, in which it wasn't possible to remove the table and let in some light, has pretty much killed the new grass. It is all very tiresome.

Anyway, we all had a very nice dinner and things weren't too bad until an impromptu monsoon chose to visit us. In no time at all we had to abandon Gazebo and return to the stifling environs of Chateau Stevie, where Mrs Stevie announced she had coffeeand cake waiting. I let everyone bolt, but I had to move the table out because the ground was so soft now it would actually start sinking into the lawn if I didn't, so I got much soaked before I could seek refuge from the rain. It was pitch dark by now, but fortunately the lightning playing around the sky provided enough illumination for me to finish the task. I reflected that at least I was finally getting the shower I so desperately wanted and needeed.

I joined the others and attempted to lighten the mood with some music. This was a mistake, and things began an inexorable slide into fiasco and recrimination from that point.

On Saturday I had come into the house in the afternoon to discover that someone had turned on the stereo, and that it had been cooking itself for hours. The glass door to the stack was hot to the touch and there was no where for the heat to go since the ambient temperature was Swelter Factor 9 and had been all day. I let out a yelp and grabbed the X10³ remote I use to control the various appliances in that room, and cut the power. This was also a mistake, because I wasn't aware that Mrs Stevie had been listening to a book on disc and had paused the CD player rather than stopping it.

For those who have never seen the inside of a rack-mount CD player, I will explain. Our unit, a JVC player of 1987 vintage, has a single play drawer and a six-disc magazine. The magazine has six slots containing slides which hold the discs. The single play drawer also has a slide, though you could be forgiven for not knowing that since it looks like part of the drawer when it's open.

When a disc is inserted in the unit and the drawer closed (or magazine inserted) the disc simply sits in the slide and the slide sits where it was put. When the "play" button is pressed, an elevator is positioned behind the slide, either one of the magazine slots or the single-play drawer, and a hook extends and withdraws the slide (with its disc load) inside the elevator. Once the slide is inside the elevator, the whole assembly descends to the transport mechanism, which spins up the disc and contains the laser transcription head.

It is all very interesting to see and always induces colly-wobbles of no mean magnitude in your humble scribe when he contemplates the shear number of micro-switches, elaborate gear trains and electric servo motors needed to pull it all off. Not only is there the obvious motor/reduction gear/rack and pinion affair necessary to just open and close the drawer, there is another to pull out the slides and a motor/reduction gear/spiral rack and pinion arrangement needed to drive the elevator. That doesn't include the simple solenoid that ejects the magazine, which only has about four moving parts and is therefore a model of mechanical brevity where this CD player is concerned.

Back to the party.

When I powered up the CD player, the display showed gibberish. It said it was playing a disk, but that there was no playable surface under the head (it said it in different terms, but I'm an old hand at interpreting Hi-Fi displays and translating to real world conditions and I'll spare you the blow-by-blow account of the display, which would require several diagrams copyrighted by JVC and yet more of this interminable drool). I ejected the single play tray, which wouldn't eject at first, then coughed up the disc Mrs Stevie had paused so many days ago, which had a gratifying amount of filth on it, being a public library disc. I loaded In Reel Time, a fake live album by Fairport Convention that is always popular, turned the volume way down and pressed play. I was rewarded by the sound of a fast spinning motor and no music to speak of.

Five minutes of fiddling did nothing but persuade me that the CD player was now hors de combat and drive my temper a little south of bad. Mrs Stevie denied all knowledge of course, then fessed up to pausing her disc "to take a phone call" on Saturday. I slipped into being lightly livid. It is one of my bugbears that the women in my house treat our technology as both indispensable and indestructible. They treat it like it was Lego or Playmobil and look completely surprised when these delicate precision instruments respond by falling apart. Mrs Stevie would have none of it though. She wanted to serve the cake and was not going to put up with any nonsense just because the CD player wasn't working. I loaded the disc into the DVD player and grumpily went to do the candle thing.

Though I wasn't in the mood for cake any more, I was considerably cheered when Mrs Stevie unboxed it only to find that the icing had sloughed off the cake and formed a puddle around the base. This was a temperature-related infrastructure failure that anyone could understand. The cake now sported upon its upper surface a sort of Dali-esque message of felicitous wishes me-ward, distorted beyond anyone's ability to extract the original sentiment, bare sponge-cake sides and a stylish crater of buttery goodness gluing it all to the box it came in. To this, Mrs Stevie added two or three handfulls of decorative candles, which she lit. The heat from these was so intense I was forced to improvise a Red Adair-like shield from aluminum foil and the lid of the cake box in order to blow them out in the time-honoured tradition of spreading one's respiratory infections to all who wish one well. Even so I lost a half-inch of hair (already in short supply) and both eyebrows to the blaze before it was extinguished.

At the height of the recriminations my sister called to gloat that she was still almost three years younger than me. Apparently, this is a source of yearly amazement to her. I conveyed my traditional wish that her house wastepipe be struck by lightning while she was bathing and she hung up so my mum and dad could have a turn. I don't remember the details of their call other than that they still loved me and would continue to do so no matter what I did. I thanked them for that and they went back to whatever they do when they are out of sight of sane people.

Eventually everyone went home and left me to wonder how I was going to resurrect a dead stereo. I'm not sure, what with the preponderance of mp3-based music currently fooling those who either don't care about music quality or who can't hear it no matter how Hi the Fi, that affordable rack-mount CD players are still available. I got blindsided by the overnight disappearance of the LP in 1987⁴ so I take nothing for granted any more.

But there was cake.

1. The Long Island Power Authority, the source of electricity for the poor bastards who live under their evil dominion↑
2. One of which was the incorrigible niusance that I half cut down two episodes or so ago↑
3. A way of using your house wiring as a control network for your lights, radio, anything that plusg in. I can operate a number of living room things from a single wireless remote control↑
4. Which is why we bought the CD player in the first place - you literally couldn't buy an LP any more in Deer Park or its neighbouring towns. I went out to get a record and ended up having to buy a CD player. It took weeks to get over the shock↑