The Great Quake Of '11

And right after I posted that the building started bouncing like unto a boat on a choppy sea.

Our emergency director (yes, we have someone who directs such things) came on the PA to say he thought it might have been an earthquake and that we should stay inside because there was no danger but if we went outside we shouldn't congregate near the buildings because stuff might fall off them onto us.

I am not making that up. We were safe in the buildings - that might at any point disintegrate and fall onto the revelers outside.

I logged onto Google to see how long it would take to get something to show - about three minutes. The main event was in Virginia about nineteen minutes before. Odd, I always thought shock waves would be faster than that. Nineteen minutes from Virginia to here? That's one laggardly aftershock, but typical of the "just so good and no further" thinking that permeates everything these days. Bah, etc.

I signed onto the USGS website and they asked me to report my observations, so I did. They explained that the observations they were looking for were those about the Earthquake, not on the deplorable slipping standards and lack of backbone in today's youth, so I gave them a gripping tale of one Englishman's struggle to find sanity and relevance as his world bounced up and down around him, a metaphor for the current state of the world made manifest as unthinkable disaster was upon him. The poignancy of his wind-up robot toppling helplessly into the chasm formed between the Ultrasparc Workstation and a pile of unread manuals was of particular note, throwing the whole insane business into harsh relief and causing him to cry out against the forces of nature assembled against his very life in a World Gone Mad.

It took forever for the site to finish uploading my report because the servers were swamped by panicked idiots writing "What I Saw In the Quake" minutiae.

But now I join the ranks of frontline journalists, those who brave the vicissitudes of nature to get the story out to the public safe in their homes. I too, have stood on the abyss as disaster not of man's making loomed large.

You heard it here first.

The Still, Small Voice Inside My Head

Deep inside my head there's a notion stirring, something very, very scary.

I don't know when it started, but it seems that it's been with me a while now. Maybe it started with the birth of my daughter. I don't know. That's just conjecture, a bit of pop psychology, back-of-the-cereal-packet stuff. Truth is, I don't know.

I'd guess it was also born from the observation that the vast majority of people in the western world now seem resigned to the steady degrading of Standards of Anything. The rest of the world always seemed to think that the current Standard of Everything in the west was a bad idea and the sooner we got back to the stone age the better, but the current crop of Clever Young Things seems to have accepted that Things Will Get Worse and that the correct response is to just sit back, watch the TV and accept it, and the Venal Old Things with the power are only too happy to play along.

The voice in my head is whispering that I may be living in what unimaginably far future generations will regard as the Golden Age of Everything, the apex of What Was.

How utterly [Terrifying | Depressing].

Delete as appropriate.

Up Yours, Bob

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by.
Then my blasted GPS quit.
It took hours to find my way back to the other road
Where there was a chance I could hitch a ride
Out of this sodding wood.

Top O' The World, Ma!

So, The Stevieling graduated high school.

Not sure what happened. One minute she was walking around the house in bib-jeans with a pink and white cloth baseball-style cap turned backwards on her head and a stick pretzel clutched in one hand for all the world like a munchkin Oscar Madison, the next she was filing into a too-warm hall to spend an interminable time listening to people give incomprehensible speeches (Life Lesson kids; when the metaphor takes longer to convey than the plain language message it seeks to obscure, consider just saying what you mean and getting the hell off stage¹).

As she walked up to take her diploma (frame²), I couldn't help wondering why my four year old was wearing that oversized gown and standing in that line. I had to stop myself from getting up to go and fetch her out of the Big Kid line and found I was rehearsing reasons a four year old might understand as to why she couldn't take part yet.

And so a party was planned.

Mrs Stevie decided that the Church Gym would, once again, serve handily as a great place for a post-school knees-up, and the parents of one of The Stevieling's friends, upon finding out we had a hall, asked if they could wed their celebration to ours. Turns out The Friend's dad is a chef and he offered to provide the food for the evening. We considered this for about a second and a half before taking his arm off at the elbow.

And thus, a joint party was planned.

On the Wednesday before the party I had to take a day off work³ to deal with a green card issue. I was to be biometricized it seems. For all my other green card pix I was ensuited, but being as how I was within four weeks of advancing geezerhood I decided to wear a nice Hawaiian shirt. I did, however, make a concession to propriety and had a haircut, after which I wandered into Al Sands Toy Soldiers & Whatnot.

Now I used to buy my hobby supplies from Al, but he gradually reduced his stock of stuff I care about by the expedient of arguing bitterly with the suppliers over this or that. I try and give him a little of my money on occasion, because he is a local business and I, for reasons I cannot work out, have a sort of thing about supporting such institutions when I can⁴.

Anyway, Al leapt up at my appearance and yelled "I have a new line - Airsoft Guns!" His smile was alligator-like and his eyes bugged out alarmingly in his zeal.

"Wossa Nairsoft Gun?" I responded, ruining his moment of triumph.

"BB gun that looks like the real thing! Just look at this Glock!" He waved the safely bubble-wrapped weapon of individual destruction at me.

"Glocks look like that? I thought they were black. That thing is transparent. And I don't remember any gun that has a big orange ring around the shooty-end" I said, dubiously.

"Well, if they didn't do that you could get shot by a cop under the mistaken but understandable impression you were waving a Glock around" he responded, peering into the works of the weapon, which were clearly visible through the transparent casing.

"Nice exposition" I counter-responded. "Naw, I'm not interested in that sort of thing."

"I've got a French assault rifle" he wheedled.

I sucked my teeth and said "Nope. Not interested"

Al played his trump card: "I've got a Thompson over there, in the back of the shop.'

"Ooh, where? Lessee" I masterfully evaded. "How much?"

"Hunnert bux, give or take." He had come up behind me and was not where I expected him to be, but hovering about six inches from my back in vulture-like anticipation.

"Argh! Don't do that! No, not interested. It's got the straight mag. Plus, you know, it's see-through" I said as I attempted to regain control of my heart-rate.

"I have that model with a drum magazine for the same price" he purred.

"You bastard! No. Nonono. If I bring a machine gun home the missus'll kill me and jump on my body until it comes to bits. I haven't got time for your nonsense anyway. I have to get biometricized." And with that I vaulted over Al as he made to low-tackle me and ran for the door.

And I got biometricized, which meant I had my fingerprints taken again and my photo taken again. The only difference between the biometric nonsense and the non-biometric nonsense was that they no longer needed the picture to show my right ear⁵ but insisted I take off my glasses because it seems the computers that will form the first line of defense vs the terrorist masses and which are the underpinning of this bio-nonsense cannot work out what my face looks like with them on⁶.

So that's all right then.

On the day of the party I drove out to collect my dry-cleaning and stopped off at Al Sands House O' Odd-Looking Gunz and bought the damn Thompson c/w Drum Mag. Yes it was see-through with a bright orange muzzle. Yes it cost two limbs. Yes it was a 1941 model rather than a 1920s one (no forward pistol-grip, other stuff too nerdy to mention). No, I have no idea what made me do it. To this day I cannot explain the urge, which was irresistible. I mean, I've never owned a BB gun, and never wanted to.

I drove home, assembled it, put the battery on charge and had a think. One thing was obvious: this must be kept from the knowledge of Mrs Stevie at all costs, at least until I had a decent story worked out as to why we needed a Transparent Fake Machine Gun C/W Orange Muzzle. I decided the perfect place to hide it was in the middle of the bed in the front bedroom.

Then it was off to help set up, disguise the gym as a not-gym and so on.

When I got there the decorating was in full swing, with big poster-sized displays of photographs of The Stevieling and her friend, one display per ex-student. I found Mrs Stevie fretting.

"What's up?" I asked

"They have baby pictures. We don't have any baby pictures!" she wailed.

"We have hundreds of baby pictures" I said, 'just not here. So go home and get some." I was feeling in manly pro-active mode, what with now owning a fake weapon of mass-inconvenience. Amazing what a little faux fire-power does for the old juices.

Decorating went on until we were all fed up to the back teeth with it. The friend put up a collection of his oil paintings, using duct tape to stick them to the walls. This meant that unless an adult went around periodically pushing hard on the frames, a cascade of art would happen about three times an hour. Tables had balloons. The food was unbelievably magnificent in both quality and quantity, and the kids whole family showed up to act as kitchen staff. I thought I was going to be washing up, but they had it covered. The guests would be eating off plates that looked like real china with real cutlery (thanks to Mrs Stevie) and one of the friend's neighbors made a huge cake as a gift for the graduates.

I went home to get changed just before things got started, and discovered a crimp in my brilliant hide-the-machine-gun plan: The baby pictures were stored in the front bedroom and Mrs Stevie had clearly been in there and seen everything!

I did The Bonehead Dance and used some class three Words of Power, then went and took the battery off charge, loaded the gun and had a few test shots in the garden, which proved a calming thing to do. Returning to the hall I found the party just beginning and everyone seemed in good spirits.

Around 8 pm or so, our best man, Jeff the Kung-Fu Accountant, accosted me and I told him about how I'd bought the machine gun, hidden it in a foolproof place only to have fate intervene and urinate down my back.

Jeff commiserated, all the while pretending to roar with laughter, then informed me that things were about to get orders of magnitude worse and pointed over my shoulder, his face almost bright red and wringing wet from the tears he was crying (obviously in sympathy of my future fate at the hands of the Vile Harridan who was bearing down on us).

I needed a brilliant plan. My mind whirled, a cascade of psychedelic creativity as a thousand options were individually selected, run in simulation to conclusion and rejected on the grounds that death by strangulation was not an option here. Only one plan would offer a chance, a mere chance of survival. It was a long shot, but I was out of options. Turning to face her I adopted my best contrite expression.

"Sorry about the machine gun" I said.

Mrs Stevie screwed up her face. "What machine gun?" she demanded.

Jeff tried to distract her by collapsing to the floor in fits of simulated hysterical laughter while I showed the world The Bonehead Dance again. That daft woman had not even seen the thing! She'd walked right by it and it hadn't registered in her brain! On the one hand, I had pulled off a brilliant camouflage in plain sight ploy. On the other I had ruined it with premature and unnecessary confession! Damn and blast!

It was about then that the Pastor of the church hove into view and spotted the balloons. These were a problem he said. We shouldn't have them in this hall he said. Every time people have balloons in here, they break loose and get caught in the ceiling fans and it costs a fortune to get them untangled, he said.

Mrs Stevie assured him that the balloons were nailed down good, and somehow got him to stop obsessing about them getting into the fans, and the party continued with the kids performing some sort of group epileptic fit on the dance floor to music that sounded like a recording of a Mardi-Gras parade played backwards and the adults alternately eating and complaining that there was no alcohol (Church, remember?) or that their hearing aids had been blown out by the fiendish Sonic Cannon being fired at them from across the dance floor. Fortunately my eardrums quit around 9 pm so I didn't have to hear any of it.

And a good time was had by all.

It was during the post-party clean-up that disaster struck. Around 1 am I was getting punchy and a balloon got away from me, floating up to the ceiling. It was dead noticeable.

Mrs Stevie stamped her foot in rage. "Now what are we going to do, idiot! Pastor can not come in here and see that tomorrow!" She went on in this vein for some time, and when she paused for breath I spoke.

"I think I can get that down" I said, peering at it speculatively.

"How?" she demanded, 4/5ths anger the rest suspicion.

"Well, I have a machine gun" I said.

"Gogeddit!" she snarled, so I did.

Carefully assessing the target with my experienced marksman eyes, I selected single-shot mode and removed the safety catch. With a quick check to see what would get hit by ricochets, I put two shots into the balloon, only to hear them rattle to the floor.

"I don't think this will work after all. The BBs are bouncing off the mylar" I said, with regret.

"Keep shooting, idiot!" she snarled.

Rarely do I get such carte-blanche permission once Mrs Stevie has assessed whatever it is I plan on doing. A few, a very few occasions in which reasonable actions got out of hand and, for example, burned the finish off her grandfather's table in a sheet of flame⁷, or dropped a tree on her new car⁸, or killed a vast swath of the front lawn⁹, have over-sensitized her to the possibility of sub-optimal outcomes and thus most times a blanket ban on such activity is pronounced "before anything bad happens".

Thus it was I needed no further goading to action. My manly juices started flowing in earnest as I selected Full Auto mode and with the traditional cry of "Top O' The World, Ma!" I put about two hundred rounds into that blasted helium-filled terrorist. A large flap tore in the face of the balloon but it still stayed buoyant. I poured on more lead¹⁰ and eventually it began to descend, slowly.

It was then that The Stevieling came in. "Dad! What are you doing?" she cried.

"I'm firing a machine gun in church. What does it look like I'm doing?" I said, pausing to give the drum spring a few cranks¹¹.

"You can't do that! Mom'll kill you" she said. It's remarkable how like their mothers girl children can sound post-puberty.

"Relax! Mom said I had to do this. Would you like a turn?" I answered, and was gratified to see her face light up. My genes are not completely recessive, then.

And so it was that that balloon was machine-gunned until it no longer looked like a balloon. A check showed it had trapped about two hundred BBs inside it. Truth be told I think The Stevieling was right when she opined it was the weight of them that finally brought the thing down.

Best party ever.

1. And for Azathoth's sake try and understand that listening to Robert Frost get lost in a wood is only interesting and pithy the first time you hear it↑
2. For some arcane reason the actual diploma was sent through the mail weeks later. All she got that day was a book-like mount for the thing↑
3. Which again, was a tortuous decision that consumed about half a jiffy↑
4. I am regarded variously as an eccentric or an idiot by the younger people whom I meet as a by-product of my hobby. I try to point out that saving four bux by buying something from Amazindeal Dot Com just moves the owner of the hobby store we are standing in that much closer to shutting up shop, but they don't understand. They cannot process the chain of cause and effect, and are incapable of acting in their own long-term interests. The Internet Generation. We has one↑
5. A bizarre requirement of Green Card pix of Yore↑
6. It is a mark of my growing maturity that I didn't "innocently" ponder out loud what would happen if I shaved my beard, or carved it into a new shape. I wish politicians wouldn't use Star Trek episodes as the basis of their yardstick on how great technology will be in a given situation. What a dangerous waste of money this whole biometrics scam is. Now a well-educated terrorist can steal your passport or whatever from a distance without ever seeing the damned thing because it will blurt out its innermost secrets (like your fingerprints, photo and bio-history) to any properly formatted radio request. And lest you think this is American Nonsense At Its Best, I was biometricized for my British passport years ago.↑
7. The Mamod Live-Steam Traction Engine Fiasco↑
8. The Foolproof Maple Pruning Method Debacle↑
9. The Maladjusted Lawn Fertilizer Spreader Screw-Up↑
10. i.e. Plastic. This thing fires 6mm plastic BBs rather than .45 caliber bullets like the original↑
11. The magazine on the original Thompson was spring-fed, and the firer needed to wind it up before spraying lead everywhere. The BB version requires the key be turned to keep the supply of BBs in the vertical feed constant. You get about thirty shots before you run dry↑

Idle Thought

The Space Shuttle has been declared officially obsolete, 30 years after the design was first used to get people into (low) Earth orbit.

Not before time. We don't want our brave Astronauts zooming around in antiquated 7-seater spacecraft designs.

No, what is needed is a (hypothetical) new (as yet undesigned) replacement (as yet unfunded). Until then, our International Space Station-bound Astronauts will take advantage of the generous (and costly) help of our Russian friends to ferry them to and from the floating junkpile of science in the well-tested 3-seater Soyuz spacecraft.

A forty-five year-old design.

Pooled Resources

Oooooooh

De skimmer gate's connected to the - leaky hose

De leaky hose's connected to the - debris exclusion colander thingy

De debris exclusion colander thingy's connected to the - pump rotor

De pump rotor's connected to the - short hose

De short hose's connected to the - base of the cylindrical tower of fossilized diatoms

Or is it the top?

No, it is the bottom

De top connector of the cyl - or is it the top?

De instructions were around here - somewhere

Where de hell did I put those damned - instructions?

I'll figure it out from - first principles

Gah!

Oh wait, De instructions are written on a sticker on the - cylinder of fossilized diatoms

De top of the cylinder of fossilized diatoms's connected to the - long hose

Ha I knew I had it right - all along

De long hose's connected to the - pool water return gate

De power cord's connected to the - timer

De timer's connected to the - pump motor

Argh! De top of the debris exclusion colander thingy chamber has - blown off!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De valves! Close them before the pool floods the - neighborhood!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De liquor is kept in the - left kitchen cabinet.

Another day in paradise

Another Perfect Commute

Just when you think things are as bad as they can get, they prove your imagination is not up to the task.

I'm writing this from my morning commute. At Farmingdale a couple of young men got on the train. The very large one sat next to me and almost crushed my laptop bag. The one with the jailhouse tattoos sat opposite me and has been steadily picking his nose all trip.

I've managed to keep my gorge down so far, but he just wedged a wad of chawing tabackee in his mouth and so I will now be treated to him spitting the juice into a coffee cup when he can spare a hand from digging out nose excreta.

I can't wait to see what awaits me when I change trains at Jamaica.

Enraptured

Thank Azathoth for The Rapture

I finally get some much-needed elbow-room and no longer have to share breathing air with those smug beggars with their turning the other cheek¹ and all that nonsense about living forever in my father's kingdom. Take one look at what people have done with the kingdom they had to start with and take a wild guess at what a past few thousand years² of their occupying The Afterlife will have done to the place.

Odd thing: It sounded for all the world like Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were stamping around this morning in their usual pre-church opening barrage. It is unthinkable that they would get "left behind" since Mrs Stevie holds a black-belt in Lutheranism and The Stevieling is perhaps the only truly good person left on the face of the planet (as of pre-rapture yesterday). A bit too spacey, but that won't hurt her if Lutheran views on How It All Works are right. I must have been experiencing waking dreams.

I'll miss the kid.

1. As long as it's your cheek↑
2. The numbers will vary depending on whether you regard the Word of God as literal or clever allusion³↑
3. Or as I have it, "mostly bleep"↑

What's Up? Doc?

So, last month I took some advice I've been offered many times over the years by friends, acquaintances, total strangers and family and got my head examined.

It wasn't my idea I hasten to add, but I had reported to Doc Rubberglove complaining that the cough I hadn't shaken since Thanksgiving was leaving me with day-old headaches and in one case almost made me pass out.

I've been serially sick since mid-November and spent every holiday in bed begging for an end to it all. every time I was starting to feel well some twillup would come into work hacking like a Dickensian consumptive and it would start all over again¹.

The coughing would cause violent headaches which would, as I say, last all day. I would also get disoriented, at one point having to sit down for a few minutes while the world stopped spinning.

"It could be an aneurysm just waiting to blow!" screamed the doctor, driven mad by the thought of a procedure that he wouldn't be able to perform himself (and therefore bill for). "You need a head MRA."

"Wossat?" I asked, highly suspicious and still sporting bruises from the last round of "tests".

"It's like an MRI, but with an 'A' in it where the 'I' should be. It detects aneurysms. Mostly".

And so, after An Interlude With Insurance Paperwork it came to pass.

On the appointed evening I presented myself and announced that I was there to get my head examined. I was made to fill out some paperwork, which by some miracle of twentieth century technology had finally been mostly done from the extensive computer records that get sent everywhere except to the clipboard with the ballpoint pen, usually, giving the patient something to do in the four hours before they actually see a doctor. This paperwork was mostly a survey of the metal I might have in my body. Then I was told to lie down on a platform, a plastic gridwork mask was fastened over my face and I was slid into the magnet for the most boring ten minutes I've had since the last time I was in a Magnetic Resonance Scanner.

These machines are basically a huge magnet with a radio source and some really smashing computers hooked up to them. They put you in the magnet, which is really strong, and all the rotation axes of the hydrogen atoms in the water in your body line up along the lines of magnetic force like a bunch of bar magnets. Then they shine "white" radio noise through you and all those atoms suck in exactly one photon of a given frequency of radio "light" and flip over to point the other way. The frequency that each atom likes to suck on depends on the local geography, who its neighbors are and stuff like that. Then they switch off the radio waves so that - and this is the clever bit - the atoms can flip back. When they do that they take their own sweet time, again depending on local factors, and they spit out an identical photon to the one they swallowed. See, it's hard to sort photons out from the sort of radio sources we can make cheaply, so you catch and detect them on the way back. Clever, like I said.

Where was I?

Oh right. You do this over and over, varying all sorts of stuff I left out, and then you let the computer have at it using Fourier Transform techniques, which is a hard sums way of taking a gazillion goes at the same thing and averaging them out so they make a lot of sense. Then more computers and clever software use that data to draw the pictures.

A true miracle of engineering and science. An object lesson in what the human race can achieve when its cleverest minds get cracking, given enough time and money³.

While I was lying in the noise and boredom I suddenly felt my wedding ring and the silver ring I wear on the matching finger on the other hand begin to jiggle around. I would have taken off these items of jewelry⁴ but they shrank a few years after I put them on and now they won't come off. I alerted the technician to the situation by falsetto shrieking, thrashing around and other restrained and manly methods of indicating All Was Not Well, but he told me to calm down and not to worry.

Easy for him to say. I didn't mind having the rings melt under the influence of Extreme Applied Science⁵ but there were two reasonably good fingers inside them that I use, off and on, on a daily basis.

Still, it wouldn't do to not be seen to have confidence in the man behind the big desk o' knobs and dials - I was British and in danger of letting the side down in front of an American who deserved to see the legendary British Stiff Upper Lip in the Face of Adversity at work, so I relaxed and let the test proceed with only an understandable amount of minor whimpering and the odd bladder leak any time the machine went "clonk" too loudly.

Eventually it was over and I was about to leave when the technician asked me if I wanted the pictures.

"Doesn't my doctor get those?" I asked, my face contorting as I attempted to parse any hidden meaning from the technician's question.

"Of course" he answered, "but you get a copy too if you want it."

This was a first. Normally getting a look at the pictures medical technicians take of your insides is marginally more difficult than getting a look inside Fort Knox without an invitation. Of course I said I wanted the pictures, and so I had to hang around another half hour or so while they were burned to CD-ROM along with the viewer to properly display them.

This was boffo on many levels. I would get to take a look at pictures of yet another of my organs, always a joy unless it's the skin - I've grown a little tired of that one to be honest⁶ - I would get to see any problem with the pipes and conduits before Doc Rubberglove could sell me on any bogus "brain transplant" procedures that were not needed and it would prove to that vile harridan Mrs Stevie that contrary to her Theory of Me I emphatically do have a brain in my head.

I rushed home, booted my laptop and inserted the CD-ROM. Then I figured out the viewer software and it was all aboard for a quick journey through the hippocampus with stops in the medulla oblongata and visual cortex.

The first thing I noticed was the old brain was less wrinkly than in pictures I saw in school textbooks. "This not look good" I thought, then realized that I was thinking it with the brain in question. The recursion of that had me crossing my eyes while I tried to figure out if I was on safe ground, rationalization-wise here. I had no desire to blow out part of the damned thing in a stupid accident because of inadequate warnings on the CD-ROM or "everyone knows" precautions I was unaware of due to not having been to medical school and having an education that didn't include MRAs because they hadn't been invented yet then.

I eventually sorted it out and went on to find the part where the arteries show up. They looked OK to me, but as I said I have no formal medical training, just what I picked up from watching "E.R." on the TV, and most of that made me feel unwell.

This was the point when Mrs Stevie came home and in-theater.

"Excellent timing, wife!" I said. "Come and see the pictures of my brain." Boy was she in for a come-uppance.

"It's see-through!" She said. "That doesn't look right. Where everyone else has brain cells all you have is what looks like two lengths of cable TV wire hovering in the middle there. I'd get that looked at if I were you"

"What? No you daft woman! That's just the way that picture came out! Those "wires" are the major blood vessels! Look, here's a picture of the outside"

"Looks a bit smooth to me. I've seen one on the internet. It's supposed to look a bit like a big pile of sausages, all wrinkly. That looks like an odd-shaped balloon"

"What?" I screamed incredulously. "The only time a brain looks like sausages is if you make one out of sausages! You can't use the fake brain from that How to Haunt Your House at Halloween website as a baseline to assess brain wrinkliness! These pictures show a brain, a real brain mind you, in the very pink of health! The only surprising thing is that nowhere are there old pan-shaped scars on it or bruises that spell genuine copper bottom! That brain is in excellent condition and will go for years yet!"

"Pfft! You'd be better off with the sausages if you ask me." And with that she went out to do whatever she does when she isn't harassing me.

The whole thing gave me the worst headache I'd had in months.

1. I was close to murdering one of our consultants who refused to leave his post no matter how much phlegm he vented into the office biosphere and who kept the circle of adult→child→rest of kindergarten→child (again)→adult+world going relentlessly the entire time²↑
2. This stratagem has backfired somewhat inasmuch as the budget has expired and all consultants are now being furloughed for 10-20 pay-free days.↑
3. Of course, most of the money belongs to one kind of person and most of the vision lives in the minds of another sort, but that is just another symptom of The Human Condition↑
4. Especially the gold one. I can't tell you how many times that has ruined a blooming romance over the years↑
5. Especially that gold one. See comments above↑
6. It's too big for one thing, gets too red in summer and has little tags sticking out of some of it that I have to get taken off sometimes↑

Who Knows Where It Goes?

The underside of my right forearm feels like there's a small amount of weight, a shade over 7 pounds, lying on it much of the time, a phantom from the day the new-born Stevieling was placed there, her head in my cupped hand.

This day, at about 20 past one in the afternoon local DST, On the fifth (or was it the sixth) floor of Good Samaritan Hospital, 18 years ago.

I Have Seen The Lights

Since it is nearly the end of February we (i.e. Mrs Stevie) decided it was time to take down the Christmas Tree.

Years ago we had invested in a very nice artificial tree with pre-installed lights. You take it out of the box, you unfold the branches and arrange them "realistically" and you plug it in. There's an optional "festoon with as much crap as the legs will stand without collapsing" phase which Mrs Stevie is a great fan of, but essentially that is it. No driving all over Christendom trying to find a tree without great big holes in the foliage, no mucking about trying to find a way to prop it up, no sticky pine goo everywhere and most importantly, no waking up the next day to the sight of a propped-up tree skeleton surrounded by a sea of fragrant and impossible-to-vacuum-out-of-the-carpet needles.

I mentioned last year how I had replaced a very large number of lamps in one section of the tree, and how over the Christmas period I was witness to chain-blowing lamp syndrome as the short-when-blown mechanism of each lamp functioned as intended, possibly for the first time in the history of the lamp design. This happens because as each lamp shorts out there is a little more voltage applied to the rest of the string, which shortens the life of the remaining bulbs. Each blown lamp makes matters worse.

Usually this isn't much of a problem because the mechanism is notoriously unreliable, and given to the well-known "one goes out, they all go out" effect. I'm currently working on a theory that this is due to the extremes of temperature the lights undergo when hung outside. However, this theory fails to take into account the fact that everyone has experienced the effect in self-strung lamps that have never been outside the house after the seal on the box they came in was broken. Turning off an entire string of lamps saves the rest of the bulbs at the cost of removing years of life from whoever it is that gets delegated to get the bloody things working again.

I had insisted that before the tree get crammed back in its box¹ that I would replace all the bebuggeréd lamps, and Monday being a holiday in New York and me getting the day off, I decided that that would be the ideal time. Next time I'll just go an lie down on the railway tracks² and save myself the angst.

I had done some post Xmas snooping for el-cheapo light strings which could be raided for spare lamps³ but there were none to be had because the world is currently in the process of stampeding into the era of LED Xmas lights. I therefore was reduced to ferreting around in my Olde Lyte Collection and found four strings of colored lights I'd forgotten I had, that dated from before we owned this house. Dirty, yes, but a quick test showed that twentymumble years on they were still in perfect condition, light-production-wise so they were fit for purpose. They also gave me pause because since microprocessors became dirt-cheap light strings have featured a control box that delivers 20-odd patterns of flashing, none of them ideal and most of them annoying. Thank Azathoth only the neighbors have to see the things. These lights, however, had a control box with a knob on it that adjusted the speed and nothing else. The light would "march" along the string at varying speeds or stay lit and that was it. Perfect for twinkling effects.

So perfect I didn't want to junk them any more.

I had an inner argument with myself for a few minutes and decided to compromise. I would strip out the lights as planned, but keep the wiring harness so I could use it for driving twinkling netlights later on.

In no time at all I had removed and washed the bulbs and classified them by color, and so it was that I had 75-ish lamps for tree-lamp replacements yesterday.

First job was to pull the tree apart so I could work on each section. During this I knocked over a side-table with the remains of The Stevieling's lunch on it and got yelled at. I was forced to endure an harangue on a trumped-up charge of clumsiness before I could start work, but I tuned most of it out so I can't recall the details. Then I began changing the blown bulbs for good ones.

This involves the usual process of finding a good string and removing one bulb (which for maximum enjoyment should then be lost so you can waste hours searching for the bulb and, more importantly, the unique fitting it is mounted in and without which the whole tree is so much junk). This will be the test instrument. Then you remove each dead bulb, testing it by plugging it into the good string to confirm it is blown. Assuming it is dead, you pull the bulb from the fitting, insert a replacement bulb⁴, trim the wires to length and bend them over the base of the fitting, test the result to confirm it is still a working bulb and plug it back into the place the blown bulb came from.

Eventually the string I was working on would burst into magnificent radiance as I finally found the one bulb that had failed to short itself properly, which would speed the process by not requiring me to test each bulb from that point on. This was important because I ended up replacing well over 50 bulbs⁵, most of them in that one string that was so troublesome over Christmas. It turned out that, as I suspected, there were clusters of bulbs hidden deep in the tree which had blown and which I couldn't see to replace and therefore my intra-Xmas repairs were already overloaded from the get-go.

I eventually finished up and we loaded the thing into its box and then the three of us paraded out to the garage to attempt putting it back in the storage loft. This involved me steering it into the proper place some seven feet above ground while the womenfolk pushed and heaved. It used to be that Mrs Stevie steered while I pushed, but I figured out who was getting the better half of that job a couple of years ago and suggested we swap so she wouldn't be hurt if the box fell from the shelf during loading.

The threat is real enough; it's just that after watching my savings evaporate in the financial crisis, my house disintegrate at each puff of wind and my health depart for a better deal in some teenager's body, I no longer view death by archived Xmas Tree as a particularly bad thing.

1. And for some reason we can never remember how we got the bally thing in the box the year before and have to go through lengthy trial fits that erode everyone's post-holiday joie de vivre and induce the usual Tax Return Season Rage↑
2. I'm told death by hypothermia is not that unpleasant, and the steel rails will conduct the cold nicely. The danger of being run over by a train is minimal these days↑
3. For reasons that escape me it is often cheaper to purchase a string of 150 lights, strip them out and junk the wiring harness than to buy loose bulbs. This, to me, indicates an economy wildly out of contact with the real world, but I'm told I am stupid by just about everyone I raise the issue with, and you can't argue with facts like that.↑
4. Getting the wires into the holes in the base of the fitting is a lengthy process worth a posting on its own, but I'll omit it for brevity, just remarking that it depleted the reservoir of Class Two Words of Power considerably over the course of the afternoon↑
5. Lest you doubt this, I still have the swollen fingers to prove it↑

The Smiting Continues Apace

Yesterday, Sunday, I rose at the crack of dawn, donned gloves¹ and went outside to clear the debris field that was now taking up the concrete patio that runs alongside our garage.

Mostly made up of twisted, bent Aluminum siding of a bilious yellow color I've never cared for but cannot afford to replace, there were veins of silver-coated expanded polystyrene sheets, often snapped into interesting shapes by the wind that ripped it from the wall after ridding the house of the Siding That Should Not Be and that blew sheets of it all over the neighborhood. It would have been an interesting sight had it only happened next door. Oh well.

Moaning a dirge of hopelessness to keep my spirits up I began to clear the yard, transporting the siding to a sheltered area of the lawn by the fence (there was the forecast of more foul weather to come and I've had the experience of trying to excavate this siding from a frozen snowbank before when the patch at the opposite corner was torn off a couple of years ago almost to the day - it was a Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend job excavating it, thawing it and putting it back on the house). It was not one I hope to repeat in this life. Nor would trying to clear the promised snow from the rear of the house be simple if there was a field of razor-sharp Aluminum embedded in it.

I soon had a pile of siding on the lawn, a pile of expanded polystyrene weighed-down with a bucket full of pool chemicals in one corner of the concrete patio and a field of nails all over the concrete patio. It seems the wind had shaken the pile of crap for some time after it had landed, allowing about a pound of nails to dribble down to ground level. What a wonderful example of mixed-particle sorting under turbulent conditions! What a complete pain in the fundament to clean up.

So I didn't, telling myself the musical jingling that accompanied a walk across he patio as nails embedded temporarily in the soles of my boots then dropped free was a pleasant change to the "wocka-wocka" sounds of siding only partially uninstalled from the wall of the house alerting me to the sudden gusts of wind that were buzzing around me trying to claim credit for the mighty work I was witness to.

Then I went round to the East Lawn to survey the damage there.

It was fortunate that I had been sobbing helplessly from the debacle on the patio and was thus unable to summon more than a groan at the sight of my once magnificent fence, now missing a panel. From the way some of the others were flapping it was obvious I was about to witness a complete and catastrophic failure of the infrastructure, fence-wise unless something was done soon. Action was called for.

There followed the usual nonsense at Home Despot as I attempted to find six pressure-treated two-by-fours that were a) straight, 2) unbowed, þ) not corkscrewed and ♥) not dinged-up to the point of unusability by the forklift used to load the banded bundles of wood onto the racks. It took forever.

Then I removed and replaced the lower rail on the fallen panel, added rails to the corner panel that was about to rip free in the light breeze that was blowing when I returned to Chateau Stevie, did the same to a couple of other panels that were looking very sad, and lastly, installed the fallen panel.

I should explain. The reason so much damage had occurred was that the fence rails, the long lengths of wood to which the fence pickets are actually fastened, were not made of cedar as I had assumed when I bought them, nor were they made of pressure treated wood. They were, in fact, just untreated spruce, what the termites and carpenter ants that infest these parts call "breakfast". The insects work from the rear of the wood, the bit that is sandwiched between the cedar pickets and the rail itself, so everything looks good until it suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrates and the fence becomes a pile of loose pickets on the sidewalk.

There are two ways of repairing such damage. The Proper Way, in which the old rail is removed in a tedious and time-consuming process and replaced with a more durable length of wood, and the I Haven't Got Time For this Crap Method in which the more durable piece of wood is laid on top of the rotting rail and secured top the fence posts, then the fence pickets are either nailed or screwed to it, which saves time at the expense of looking really horrible as the old rail falls apart and leaves dangling nails as a lingering Tetanus threat when it falls apart. I used the latter method this day as I was sore wounded and down-at-heart and just wanted the day to end.

Replacing the panel was a job and a half too. First, these panels weigh quite a bit and are a challenge for two people to work with in a tight spot. Next, replacing this panel meant I had to walk around the entire property any time I needed to get to the other side, which I did, a lot. Third, frost heave had raised the ground so much the bloody thing wouldn't fit back in the hole it came out of and I had to hack at the frozen ground for quite some time to prepare the way and still had to sit on the (freezing) sidewalk and lever the damned thing into place with the mighty Stevieplates before I could drive the screws.

The neighbors had already been given much entertainment and were pleased with the performance that entailed me sitting on the ground, kicking the fence into position and thrusting with all my might to keep it there while I drilled new pilot holes, switched bits, dipped each screw in a mysterious fluid (liquid soap, old fencebuilder's trick to prevent the screws jamming half in) and then drove it home with a battery-powered drill and rage-powered Words of Power.

It was all very trying indeed.

Mrs Stevie hoved into theater as this was going on and demanded to know whether the fence was fixed or not. I informed her, over the course of the next three minutes, that it wasn't and made enquiries as to what mental processes were at work that could infer such would be the case given the extent of the destruction and the size of the workforce deployed to deal with things. She responded in kind, visiting such much-explored territory as my genetic heritage and quality of my gonads (though what that has to do with fence reconstruction is beyond me). After that, the conversation deteriorated somewhat and harsh words passed between us, until finally she playfully punched me in the head and went inside so I could continue working.

The Stevieling swept up all those nails, which was nice of her.

I woke this morning to see it was snowing and had been doing so long enough to leave three inches of white inconvenience all over the shop.

1. I call the right glove "Juan" and the left glove "Quixote" so that each time I wear them I Don ...↑

Another Day In Paradise

Spent today, Saturday, goofing off, watching other people play Warhammer Fantasy Battle (a colorful tabletop game involving dozens of painted plastic and lead miniatures that eats time and cash like they're going out of fashion).

On the drive home I got caught behind a cop car which was busting chops by driving slower and slower as it proceeded up a virtually empty Deer Park Avenue, obviously trying to provoke someone into passing so they could be stopped and ticketed for some petty thing, so at the first opportunity I took a right and drove the back way back to Chateau Stevie. Thus it was that I was privileged to see a panel of my 15 year-old cedar fence lying face down on the sidewalk.

I parked the fabulous Steviemobile¹ and ran inside and told Mrs Stevie.

"Well, I was trying to call you but you weren't answering your phone. The wind went crazy about half an hour ago and blew the fence down" she sniffed. "It also pulled the siding off the side of the garage'"

"WHAT?" I screamed. "All of it?"

"Damn near."

I ran outside took one look at the scene, clutched my head and moaned. The siding had peeled off the side of the house from the roof line to about seven feet from the ground and had dumped itself as a collection of twisted metal all over the yard. Then the insulating panels, made of expanded polystyrene, had blown off, revealing the tatty asbestos shingles that the house was equipped with by the original builder².

I plan on running the costs of this disaster through the house insurance because those bastards canceled my policy abruptly after twenty years of premiums. Not because of anything I had done, but because some actuarial gimp had calculated that Long Island was now a hurricane-prone area³ and recomputed the cost/risk ratio.

This unannounced move effed up my mortgage payments for the first time since I owned the house and took a while to sort out because it triggered default notices on my account.

Oh yeah. These gits are charging me for hurricanes that haven't happened, so they can bloody well pony up for the siding-wrecking gale that did. But the costs may be high on account of those Azathoth-damned shingles, which are now classed as a hazardous material and will cost much to get rid of.

The wind, which has been gusting strongly for the last 24 hours has now died down.

Its work is done.

1. now suffering a suspected hole in the exhaust after dinging it up in snowbanks around Boxing Day↑
2. A Mr Gak Eisenberg, who knapped flint arrowheads and hunted Mammoth and Giant Sloth in his spare time↑
3. because the climatologists say we are "overdue" for a big hurricane - I wonder if these people are solidly behind the anthropomorphic cause of Global Warming since the same climatologists are saying so↑

Health,Wealth and a Working Dryer

Well, one out of three ain't bad.

The regular reader ¹ will know that I was sick over Thanksgiving, sick again over Christmas and sick in the early New Year. All respiratory infections, and thus all made me short of breath.

Once the illnesses were finally over, imagine my surprise to find I was still feeling short of breath. Not "gotta suck air as fast as I can" short of breath, but in the middle of my chest there was the feeling you get at the same time you are sucking air trying to make it go away after a really long run. The same feeling, sans pounding, that you get when someone really cute announces they aren't entirely averse to the idea of removing their clothes in your presence and will let you touch them afterwards.

I had a long think, interrupted by memories of some of the young women that actually enacted that scenario in my presence², and remembered that in my case this feeling had once been my body's way of saying "Hey, guess what? Your pancreas's capillaries are all blocked with that stuff that looks like toffee again. Prepare for unspeakable agony!" and the clarion call to start ingesting nothing but clear liquids until I was capable of straightening up and not screaming every 30 seconds as I was wracked by spasms of sensation of the sort that alter one's perceptions to the point one can see God.

It generally took a few days.

Accordingly, I switched from solid food to Ginger Ale, and in no time at all I felt like I'd been kicked in the kidneys and was peeing clear, odorless fluid that all-but fizzed. Amazingly no pancreatitis occurred and so I started eating again. The feeling came back, faded away, came back stronger and finally moved in permanently. Then my legs started hurting really badly

Time to see Doc Rubberglove.

The doctor's staff was obviously in need of some entertainment because they got me an appointment the next day, so reluctantly I announced I was taking a sick day in order to deal with the chest discomfort and the slipped disc I suffered when I leapt into the air and clicked my heels upon being told I would have to take Tuesday off. Anything is better than the Tuesday meeting.

That night I celebrated by laundering some clothes and popping them in the dryer.

The next day, around noon I departed for Doc Rubberglove's House O' Humiliation, noting in passing that The Stevieling must have loaded the dryer with clothing before she left for school as it was tumbling away to itself.

The Doctor's staff weighed me with their special scale that adds 50 lbs to your true weight and stuffed instruments in my ears and up my nose, though they couldn't actually muster enough energy to even pretend they were looking into said cavities. I don't blame them; I've seen what's in there myself and there are limits. Then a med student tapped me in various places, fondled a few limbs and declared the doctor would be with me "soon".

A mere half hour later Doc Rubberglove breezed in and prescribed an EKG³ which involved sticking electrodes to my (hairy) chest, running some sort of inkjet printer for five seconds, then ripping off the electrodes and writing down the ones that caused the loudest screams of pain. Then, while the staff went out to watch re-runs of it all on the surveillance system I was allowed five minutes on Doc Rubberglove's Patent Electric Fog Bong, which didn't cure the problem but made me care slightly less.

Eventually the Doc stopped prevaricating around the bush and scheduled me for some tests, effectively using up the rest of my day in medical froofaraw. It was all very trying.

First there was the Chest X-Ray, for which I had to drive to the other end of the island so some young woman could irradiate me with enough monster-creating hard X-Rays⁴ it made my ribs glow in the dark.

While I was there, another young woman ultrasound-scanned my legs in case I had a thrombosis or phlebitis or whatever a blood clot in the leg is called. The gel used to make the ultrasonic gubbins work properly got soaked up in my leg-hair and thus when I made my way to Good Samaritan Hospital for blood work I had shiny legs that shone with a sheen that would have looked not out of place on the head of someone around 1985.

It felt nasty too. which was, I believe, the point. Naturally, when I showered that evening it turned to glue, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

I drove to the hospital, having no idea whatsoever where the outpatient lab was. Never mind, I would drive past the Emergency Room drop-off on the left side of the hospital looking for signs saying "Lab", and park at the back if I didn't see any sign and check in at the information desk at the Baxter Pavilion in the rear of the hospital. It's actually more of an annex than a pavilion, but that was a conundrum for another day.

There was no sign for the lab

So I parked and walked to the Baxter Pavilion doors. Once inside I noted with a class three Word of Power that there was no-one at the information desk, and from appearances hadn't been since the desk was installed. Another plan foundered on the rocks of reality then. No matter, the hospital is really one big building linked together by zigzaggy corridors; I would simply walk them until I discovered a sign for the Lab.

A sad mistake.

I managed to walk to the front of the hospital in only about 15 minutes, where a young woman barely out of the Zygote stage laughed at my English pronunciation of "Laboratory"⁵ before directing me to the right side of the hospital. I then traced a zigzaggy path in which a straight-line distance of what could have been no more than 300 yards became about a half-mile of staggering and moaning. I hadn't eaten since the previous night because I knew that any blood work Doc Rubberglove would order would require an 8 hour plus fast, and since it was now around 4 pm I was getting a bit spacey.

Finally I found the lab and had the blood drawn, two tubes of it.

"Is that it?" I asked dubiously.

"Yep" answered the technician.

"How come? I have these tests done every three months and they always take four tubes full".

"Nah. We can do most of the tests with just this one". He held up a single test tube of blood with an anti-clotting agent added to it.

I knew it. I knew it was not necessary to suck out pints of blood for those damn tests. Those bastards at Gouge Laboratories (my usual blood thieves of someone-elses-choice) were clearly inflating the bill and bleeding me dry into the bargain. Gits.

I asked the girl manning the desk which would be the quickest way back to my car (I had no wish to repeat the epic journey I made on my way in) and was told that if I went out of the door and walked about three hundred feet I would be in the carpark.

And so I returned home in high dugeon, and went downstairs to unload the kid's stuff from the dryer.

When I opened the dryer the awful truth became apparent. I was greeted by no outrush of warm, moist air, and the clothing in there was mine. The damned machine, instructed to dry until the heat sensor indicated the clothes were done, had broken down in such a way that the clothes had tumbled for about 36 hours.

Again.

I unloaded my dry and very, very soft clothes and one towel. Then I sighed and pulled the lint filter, and removed the mattress of downy lint that had been sucked off the towel as it was pounded into submission for a day and a half.

Fortunately, Doc Rubberglove had decided to hedge his bets (and mine) by scheduling a Stress Test for the next day, so I had another day off in which I might scavenge a few hours in which to effect dryer repairs.

And so to bed and the sweet oblivion of Lethe.

Wednesday dawned and, once the women had decamped, I got up and removed the dryer faceplate and drum. I jumpered the door switch circuit⁶ and started the dryer so I could observe the gas jet in action.

Or not, as it turned out. The igniter didn't even glow⁷ so with a sigh I pulled the entire machine (what was left of it) out from its niche and removed the rear panel.

As usual, this was accompanied by the sudden deformation of the razor-sharp pressed steel panel and the consequent infliction of a couple of dozen minor wounds to hands, face, upper arms and anything else not covered by clothing.

I spent some small time bleeding, crying out in pain and so forth, the stuff that Mrs Stevie categorizes as "wasting time", and got back to work.

A quick poke around with the multimeter showed a suspicious open circuit on one of the components.

Aha! Or, after a bit of thought, perhaps not.

Some of those components are supposed to be open circuit until something happens ⁸ so I had to pore over the circuit diagram for a bit to confirm my diagnosis, then jumper the component and check that the dryer lit when the circuit was closed, which it did.

Okay, so I would get a replacement from Sid's Appliance and Taxidermy Store on my way back from the cardiologist, who apparently was not planning a stress test, just an initial examination according to the human I finally was able to speak with after a battle with the phonebot- no need for towels, shorts and a change of shirt then, and most of the day not wasted in gasping for air in the quest for health.

I excised the mutinous part and put it...somewhere. I remember it was on a small table at one point and I remember distinctly picking it up, but that would turn out to be the last I ever saw of that particular piece of junk. Then I drove to the cardiologist, who took one look and said that he wanted me to have an echocardiogram and a stress test. Right now.

And so I had my chest hair dry-shaved in patches, then the bare spots scrubbed with a scouring pad because "we need the skin to be more sensitive". It worked, too, and much kudos to the scouring pad-wielding nurse who gave her eardrums in the cause.

After that I was hooked up to another EKG machine with industrial strength sticky pads and was made to walk very fast on a treadmill until my vision became tunneled and I was begging for mercy and/or death with every ragged breath.

There was a Big Red Button for turning off this Torquemadaesque Machine, but it had been placed cruelly out of reach of anyone likely to need it.

I was allowed to dangle from the handlebar of the treadmill for a few minutes while my lungs sucked in volumes of life-giving air, then it was time for the ripping off of the sticky pads which revived me by the expedient of exposing the stuff that grows underneath my skin to the air.

Next, I was conducted to a room where an attractive young woman attempted to stick more pads to me but failed on account of the wringing wet condition of my body (which now resembled that of a mange-riddled Gorilla that had been fished out of the East River) squirted yet more gel all over me and began to use ultrasound to show a student my heart (and presumably gather important health-related data) but got discombobulated when I asked if I could have a look.

She made up some excuse for having me lie on my left side (the machine was on my right) and I acquiesced rather than provoke her into some inventive "test", but I felt - and still feel - that if anyone is going to look at a person's organs using technology that person's insurance is paying for, then top of the list of gawkers should be the person who is lying on a hard couch covered in gel with holes shaved randomly in his chest hair.

She spent the rest of the exam driving the probe into my chest so hard I have bruises.

Well, too bad for her. I've been married to Mrs Stevie for 22 ambush-filled years now. Her attempts were pitiful compared to the ministrations that vile harridan has visited upon me at the drop of a hat.

Mistress Ultrasound wanted the student to practice on me and I agreed to let him do so on me provided part of the process was him showing me my heart.

"You really want to look at it?" she asked.

"Damn straight. It's my heart, I wanna see it too" I snarled.

I was somewhat short tempered by then on account of the bruises and the gel which was doing for my patchy chest hair what the other woman had done for my legs 24 hours before, and the fact that once again I hadn't eaten all day.

It was eventually over, and I was conducted to the certificate- and bookshelf-lined office the cardiologist lived in when he wasn't actually examining anyone.⁹ He waved me to a chair and told me that according to the tests he had done he couldn't say why I was short of breath. He said he'd be happier if he could've run a test with radioactive dye, but my insurance company wouldn't agree to pay for it. Once again I was confronted with direct evidence that the American Health Care System is dysfunctional¹⁰. Oh well.

So I left the doctor and prepared to talk to Sid, or perhaps Sid. Which was when I got my first inkling that all was not well with my foolproof "component replacement" plan.

I emptied my pockets and searched the contents. I searched my car. I drove home and searched the house. I searched my car again. All to no avail.

There was nothing for it but to do without. I did the Bonehead Dance, then drove down to Sid's place where Sid and Sid were in residence, and described the part using mime and interpretive dance. I did okay too, against all expectation, and in a surprisingly screw-up free session with my socket set I had the dryer reassembled and working.

True, I did manage to crush a connector into a wad of useless brass with my Leatherman pliers, and I got a teensy shock when my finger brushed up against that connector's mate because I'd forgotten to unplug the dryer but all-in-all a fiasco-free repair, mostly, if we ignore the losing of the part debacle, the squished connector screw-up and the amps up the knuckle joint of my little finger inattention to detail.

If only the Doctors could pull off the same trick with my body.

1. there is one, but I've forgotten where he lives↑
2. Alright, all three of them↑
3. Why is an electrocardiogram an EKG and not an ECG? First order obfuscation so the plebs don't pierce the miasma of jargon the medical community throws around to avoid telling you what exactly is wrong with you↑
4. Has no-one but me seen The Quatermass Experiment for Azathoth's sake?↑
5. I was exhausted and starving and couldn't be bothered to concentrate on accommodating Americans and their crazy pronunciation and slipped up by saying "la BOH ra tory" instead of "LAB rote ury"↑
6. The dryer is designed to cut off power to the motor and shut down the gas jet when the door is opened as a safety measure. Part of the process of removing the front panel involves prying apart a connector that hooks the door sensor into the machines electric circuitry. It goes without saying that the designers viewed the practice of firing up the dryer while it was in bits as dangerous and had designed the circuit so that with the door sensor disconnected nothing would work. However, they then undid all of that careful handyman protection-from-self work by including a circuit diagram (taped inside the control console so it wouldn't be found by just any incompetent fool, only by those with access to tools) from which it was possible, with the aid of a multimeter, to figure out how to run a bypass with a u-shaped bit of wire. We handymen laugh at such concepts as danger and culpable liability. Actually, we usually don't spot them in time but it amounts to the same thing↑
7. Plunging me into new territory. A glowing igniter but no flame is a problem I've fixed twice before↑
8. usually something getting hot given that a dryer only does two things other than sit in a room: it gets hot and it spins one component, slowly↑
9. I'm absolutely certain that there is a company somewhere that supplies doctors with appropriate bookshelf fillers. There's always a large selection of books with the name of the specialist's target organ(s) on the spine - there was actually one called "The Heart" front and center of the case directly behind this one - and a selection of new, worn and worn-out spines crammed in there. All too convenient, if you ask me. Who in Azathoth's name would actually read something titled "Congestive Failure Modes of the Human Cardio-Vascular System"? ↑
10. Either the doctor is asking for too many tests or the insurance company is being overly tight-fisted at the risk of my life. I can guess which is the actual case in point here↑

New High Price, Same Old Crappy Service

I mentioned a few inches back that the Bloody Long Island Railroad had raised it's prices as of the first of January.

What I forgot to relate was how on the second day of this new Luxury Priced service¹ the Bloody Long Island Railroad, having a problem somewhere at the east end of the Ronkonkoma Branch and needing to reduce the traffic load² canceled the only straight-through train from Atlantic Terminal³, announcing that we would be accommodated on a train at Jamaica.

Now only someone who works⁴ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could think that loading a trainful of people onto a train that began it's journey at Penn Station during the height of the evening rush hour was a good, or even workable, idea, and certainly only someone who works⁵ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could be so blissfully ignorant of the fact that the train they chose was already the most overloaded train in the schedule.

So it was that we were loaded onto a train that normally doesn't stop at Jamaica and since there were already no free seats and no space to stand in the vestibules by the doors we filled the walkway space between the seats. Naturally the sensitive fellow commuters realized that we were not personally to blame for this inconvenience to them, or they did after one thick bleeper complained a little too loudly about being crowded, at which point I looked him right in the eye and snarled at volume 11 that if he thought anyone standing in the aisles was there by choice he must be suffering from brain damage, and that he might consider that he at least had a seat and hadn't been thrown off a perfectly good train for the convenience of some idiot dispatcher.

This provided some relief but as soon as people needed to get out tempers became frayed. Everyone was wearing huge down coats and most of the commuters that day were of robust size before they put the coats on. The aisles are wide enough to accommodate one person. Not a situation conducive to amity.

This hell went on forever, or at least, it seemed to. Finally I was able to disembark myself and begin the long walk to my car⁶ over inadequately cleared sidewalks.

To sum up: The Bloody Long Island Railroad managed to deliver exactly one and one-half commutes under the new Luxury Pricing before bleeping up and bleeping everyone leaving from Flatbush Avenue Atlantic Terminal where they breathe.

They even forgot to have someone call the Guinness Book of Records so they could claim the Worst Excuse For A Railroad In The World award.

1. The price is now a luxury, the service remains execrable↑
2. There is no other explanation of the bizarre nonsense I am about to reveal↑
3. nee Flatbush Avenue↑
4. A loaded term and one that implies much that may not in fact be true, but none other fits the purpose here↑
5. See the previous footnote↑
6. The evening trains and all off-peak trains stop as far from the West End of the platform as they can in order to maximize the inconvenience to passengers. Everyone on those later trains has had to park in the East end car-parks and people traveling East need to use the ticket machines at the extreme West end of the platform and in inclement weather will be sheltering in the station building, also situated at the extreme West end of the platform. Each evening the platform becomes a jam of people walking West en masse while others sprint East over the icy platforms trying to catch the train before it leaves.↑

Snow, Babylon Town and The Bloody Long Island Railroad

This miserable tale of incompetence begins at the end of last year.

On Boxing Day¹ to be precise.

In the early evening it began to snow, reasonably heavily, and the snow continued to fall into the following morning (which was a Monday, and therefore a work day). The situation was complicated no end by sustained winds estimated at 40 mph. We usually get wind gusts in this sort of weather, and strong winds, along with the thermodynamic consequences they bring, soon had the electrical wiring failing and snow drifting to ridiculous heights. The back door of Chateau Stevie was blocked by a drift that covered the door handle, which required that I actually remove the glass from the storm door and dig from the house out, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

The Stevieling grabbed her outdoor things and began digging for all she was worth, clearing a path from the front door to the gate and thence to the curb. As she dug, the wind helpfully piled up snow behind her rendering her efforts moot. I called her inside once I realized what was going on. I couldn't tell if it was still snowing or whether it was the stuff on the ground being moved about with extreme prejudice by the wind. I certainly wasn't going out in it, so Mrs Stevie was forced to stay at home being as how the driveway was unnavigable. Snow had drifted up over the door-sill of her Odyssey peoplemover anyway.

The wind dropped around 11am and I was unable to maintain the fiction of inclement weather preventing snow clearance operations, so I was dispatched outside with a shovel and the keys to the garage, where I store Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

Playtime!

The first job was to move two feet of snow from the front of the garage and get some room in which to pull the Mrs Steviemobile, essential since there wasn't enough room to drive Troll between the vehicles. Normally I would have parked my car in the side bay of the drive (our drive can accommodate 5 vehicles easily) but that has been occupied for almost a year by Mrs Stevie's old Taurus estate wagon, now used as a shed for crap. I know his because th one time I wanted to use the vehicle for the purpose envisaged by its designers I was informed that I couldn't because it needed to be cleaned out first.

That was in June.

Eventually, by a series of two-foot back and forth movements, I was able to move the vehicles apart enough to ensure safe Trollway. Once again the neighborhood rang to the mighty engine-noise of Troll as the magnificent machine made short work of the inconvenient whitestuff, hurling it into Mr Singh's garden in a twenty-foot arc of manly domination over all things snow.

Once again the neighbors shook their fists in friendly salute to my superior tool-deployment versus the elemental fallout. Many of them eyed their snow shovels and I could see the calculation being run again as to which was more desirable: the top-o-the-line Jet-ski or that summer sale snowblower they had sniffed at and walked by disdainfully.

All during the summer I had seen them hooking up their little aquatic motorbikes while sneering at the nascent figure of Troll as it sat sleeping in the garage, hugely inapposite in the heat of summer. Well the Jet-skis were under several feet of frozen water and the snow-shoe was on the other foot now! Ahahhahahaha!

I made short work of our driveway problem, taking less than half an hour to clear the entire thing. As I was finishing up, widening the access to the road, the kid from across the street came over and asked if I was managing, because he had "a better snowblower" and would do the drive for me.

Now I used to give the local kids all the snow-clearance business they could handle, but since I bought Troll clearing snow is actually fun and I look forward to it. Besides, he was way too late out of the gate.

I gently turned down his generous offer and so was spared the financial negotiation that would have followed. It also freed me from one chore: I was on the point of going across the road to dig out their drive for them since when the snow is bad and I have the time I usually try and dig out as many of the neighbors as I can.

Funny thing. As I was getting ready to go over to Mr Singh and dig out the fleet of cars he has in his driveway (he has a fleet of young adults and teens too) the same kid asked me if I would help them dig out their driveway. I could see he had amassed a gang of five or six shovel-wielding pals, but saw no sign of this monster snowblower.

Of course I said I would, and was then flabbergasted when the young man issued a set of instructions as to what needed to be done and disappeared completely out of theater with his gang!

So I did what I was intending to do anyway and cleared most of the snow from their drive and a path to their garden gate. It required shovels to finish the job but all the shovelers were nowhere to be seen ² so I left with a shrug. I could have done more but if they weren't worried about it then I wasn't either.

I did what I could for the Singhs, though their drive always causes Troll problems. Last year I busted a shear pin in the driveshaft on the Singh's driveway. This year I couldn't get traction. Don't know why.

Then down to help Pedro, who had a small snowblower that would take forever to do the job, then down to Mike's, his next-door neighbor³ and back via Crazy Joe's (who had had a plow come and shove all his snow somewhere else before I could deal with it).

That was Monday.

Tuesday dawned and I decided to go to work, there being no earthly reason why there would be a problem now. The LIRR website said trains were running (a distinct improvement over Monday when they had stopped running so abruptly people had been stranded in what passes for waiting rooms all over the system, most of which have no facilities, water supplies or heat so a human interest story was only hours away) so I fired up the Steviemobile and drove to the station.

The roads had only light traffic that day, most people deciding⁴ to stay home again.

Even so there were about the same ratio of nitwits threatening life and limb. The Town of Babylon (the civic and financial body responsible for the snowplows hereabouts) had decided on plow parsimony and the main drag to Wyandanch Station, Acorn Street, had been plowed as a single track route which made driving up it much the same in terms of excitement and anticipation as a rural Canadian logging road. All it would take is one truck ⁵ coming he other way for disaster to strike. But such did not happen that day, and I was thus set-up for the booby trap the Town of Babylon had set for me.

The car-park for the station is bisected by a V-shaped road which trucks often use to bypass an inconvenient traffic light. During the night this had happened, which led me to the mistaken conclusion that the road and the car-park had been plowed. As I turned into the road, it became apparent that the snow had not been removed so much as mashed about and the Steviemobile was soon yawing around as the snow level exceeded the ground clearance of the crankcase and sundry other underframe parts, rendering the Steviemobile like unto a boat. Thank Azathoth for the traction control, which acts to keep any wheel that slips from robbing drive thrust from the vehicle by applying the anti-lock brakes an a per-wheel basis⁶ which in turn has ensured I have been able to get where I'm going in weather that has challenged four-wheel drive vehicles.

So I tobogganed along the road, the car yawing occasionally, but surprisingly little given the circumstances past the car-park that was still a pristine field of unbroken white thanks to the lack of diligence of the Town of Babylon and their inadequate plow fleet. I realized as I went that the car I had passed that I had initially assumed was in the car park was in fact on the road and stuck in a snowbank, the driver having made the same mistake as me but having a better memory for where the road should have been had turned earlier than I had to his great inconvenience. It went very much against the grain for me to just leave someone thus mired, but there was literally nowhere to stop without getting stuck myself.

The Stevieling was not pleased to find a parent hoving into view and ruining her snow day with his presence.

It boggles the mind that 24 hours after a snowstorm has subsided, even a bad one, that what I'm told is the busiest station on the Ronkonkoma branch has a) no plowed space in the car-parks (plural) and 2) its main approach road so inadequately cleared to posed an actual hazard in and of itself.

Days later the carpark finally got plowed, sort of, but berms of snow were left everywhere that blocked otherwise completely clear spaces, rendering them inaccessible. The LIRR got into the act too by not clearing the sidewalk approaches to the station. Indeed, one day I was astounded to see that although the path to the station was icy and in need of salt application in just one unthawed place, the LIRR service crew were sweeping up cigarette buts from the platform.

I looked at the crew. I looked at the path. I turned to a newspaper seller and said "Is this a joke? Are we on camera?" He just shook his head

Two weeks later another snowstorm hit.

This one lacked the howling wind with which to drive the snow into huge drifts, so it made up for that by increasing the amount of snow precipitation. We received about 15 inches of soft, fluffy white snow all over Deer Park and its surrounding towns over the course of that Sunday evening, so Monday morning commenced with my breaking out Troll again and throwing all the snow in the driveway as far from the driveway as 8 horsepower whirly gubbins could manage.

Operations were complicated by Mrs Stevie's enormous peoplemover thing blocking the path, so I asked her to move it over a tad so I could squeeze Troll between our cars. I was then treated to a breathtaking display of ineffective backward-and-forward maneuvering that otherwise increased the Trollway between the vehicles not an inch. I bore this with my usual stoicism, limiting myself to stamping my feet in increasing frustration and waving my fists for emphasis while giving voice to level three and four Words of Encouragement, but all was in vain and eventually I had to evict the woman and get behind the wheel myself⁷ and edge the vehicle closer to the fence.

Then it was a simple matter to climb out of the passenger-siad door and recommence snow rearrangement operations, culminating in driving each car backward into the road and clearing off the foot-anna-bit of snow on every remotely horizontal surface there before reparking them in the now-clear driveway. Mrs Stevie had been wasting time digging out the back garden by hand while this important work was going on, but as soon as she had a route to the road and a vehicle that didn't look like something that would be more appropriately found sticking out of one side of the Titanic she leaped into the shower declaring her intention to depart the scene for work.

I had already showered, and the LIRR was proudly announcing train service on the local news channel on the Ronkonkoma branch so I just departed, or at least I tried to.

Nicolls Road (the one directly outside Chateau Stevie) had been plowed in the night and therefore had a few inches of snow that was already beginning to be packed hard into ice by the occasional vehicle. Deer Park Avenue, the main avenue that crosses Nicolls Road was plowed and salted, but only in one lane each way. This made for interesting driving conditions as people plowing out their business driveways spread snow over the clear road which formed icy skid-pans every few hundred yards. Acorn St, the main drag to Wyandanch Station had not been plowed, but had been traveled by a gazillion tractor-trailer rigs which had squished all he snow into a slippery white lunascape. Driving it was akin to riding a "Wild Mouse" roller-coaster, something I vowed never to do again after the Hershey Park trip in the summer.

It was at the Wyandanch station car-park that the real fun started.

I could see a bucket-loader had plowed the road into the car-park, and could also see the loader plowing part of the car-park so I pulled into the road.

A beautiful job had been done removing the snow, such a contrast to the job done in the previous storm. The car-park entrance was perfectly clear and the loader had moved to another part of the car-park so I pulled in on the wonderfully clear track it had left with a blessing for the driver.

Which turned straightway to the foulest curse in my lexicon when I discovered that the entrance to the car-park was all that had been cleared, and that the car-park itself was a fifteen-inch deep field of unbroken snow apart from the tracks left by a four wheel drive vehicle sometime in the past. That stupid bleep in the bleeping bucket loader hadn't even cleared enough room to turn around in, and so I found myself on snow, tobogganing on the floor-pan before I could stop.

Which meant I couldn't stop now come hell or high (frozen) water because the traction control wouldn't be able to get the car moving again if it bogged down. The traction control system is good, but it's not a miracle worker. My only hope was to follow the tracks and hope they ended in a flattened area wide enough to turn around in without stopping.

It was a good plan with every chance of working I told myself as I stood outside the now-bogged-down Steviemobile. It was just that there was so much unplowed snow that it had piled up in front of the front bumper and that could only end one way. The Steviemobile isn't a bulldozer.

But it does have a very good traction control system that would see me clear if I could improve the odds a little. I hadn't brought a snow-shovel as I would have had to leave it in full view and that would simply be an excuse for someone to bust a window and steal the thing, leaving me to find a cold car full of drifted snow with a flat battery when I got back at 7:30 or later that night⁸ so I was reduced to stomping the snow flat around the car and kicking away as much snow as possible behind and in front of the wheels. This in turn gave me just enough room to rock the Steviemobile until it got a grip and a mere 60 minutes later I drove triumphantly into my driveway and declared a Snow Day.

The next day the car-parks were still not plowed so I parked in a space in a side-street. This had only been half-plowed so I was forced to drive back and forth into a small snowbank until I had formed a track in which to park the front wheels of the car in order not to create a collision hazard for anyone trying to drive along the street with the rear half of The Steviemobile.

On Friday I managed to find a route through the car-park that had been plowed, but since none of the spaces had been cleared I was again reduced to making one by backing in and out of where I thought a space was. I backed in because by now the snow had gone through so many freeze and thaw cycles it was pure ice underneath a thin crust of snow and I couldn't be sure of getting out if the drive wheels weren't on clear road.

It is clear that the Town of Babylon is on its uppers. It'll be interesting to see what civic service is next to degrade past the point of usefulness. Interesting in the Chinese sense, as they say.

It has taken me a few days to knock out this post, and it's now a full week after the last snowfall. Today, Martin Luther King day, I was driving past the Wyandanch LIRR station car-park.

It still had not been plowed.

1. December 26th, a day all civilized people include in the Christmas Holiday↑
2. I never got so much as a wave of thanks either↑
3. Who it turned out had agreed to pay the Fantastic Disappearing Snowshovelers to do the same job, but if they hadn't showed in the time it took me to get there then they weren't coming at all↑
4. Wisely, as it turned out↑
5. Or, for than matter, a bubble-car↑
6. The axle of a car is not solid because a car is wide enough that when cornering the inside wheel takes a much shorter path than the outside wheel does. If the axle were solid, one wheel would have to slip. In reality, both wheels take turn, real-world physics being a democratic process, but they do so unpredictably which gives the vehicle "interesting" handling characteristics. This is gotten round by having a sandwich of gears that allow the wheels to move at different speeds while still getting power transferred to them from the engine. This is what is inside that big bulge you see in the middle of the rear axle of monster trucks. In front-wheel drive vehicles, the device is hidden inside the gearbox. There are a number of surprising things that happen as a result of this arrangement when the wheels aren't where the designer expected them to be. For example, if you jack both wheels off the ground and spin one of them by hand, the opposite wheel turns too, but in the opposite direction! Another side effect of the design is that the power goes to the wheels in direct relation to the ease that they turn, so if one wheel gets on ice or snow, it will spin like crazy but the wheel on dry ground will get no power at all. There are any number of ways to mitigate this. The Steviemobile is engineered to apply the brake to the spinning wheel, thus "tricking" the differential into sending power to the other wheel, the one capable of moving the car. Clever, no?↑
7. A lifetime childhood spent playing with Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky products have given me a keen insight into when one should be turning the steering wheel and when to apply drive in the proper direction in order to "walk" a vehicle sideways in a small maneuvering space↑
8. Why yes, I do speak from experience here↑

First Commute of the New Year

Dag-bleeping blasted bleeping bleep of a bleeper son of a bleeping bleepety-bleeper!

$299 for a monthly ticket?

On this sorry excuse for a railroad?

bleep!

The Crap Goes Ever Ever On

A Day in The Life of Yours Truly.

Awake after a grand total of three hours sleep. The rest of the time spent coughing up a lung thanks to infection spread by thoughtless clod of a colleague. Reflect that next month the LIRR ticket price will soar to a new high, as will the subway metrocard costs. Contemplate choking to death on own rage at same. Alarm goes off.

Shower. Bath plug-hole blocked again, so end up paddling in mixture consisting of own sloughed-off night sweat, soap, water, Head 'n' Shoulders shampoo and dandruff. Wonder why skin on feet so red and tender. Tread on removed bath plug bruising right sole severely.

Limp out of shower, attempt to dry off with towels rendered water-repellent by various laundry chemicals.

Dress. Discover no clean socks that fit feet, so don toe-socks bought during 70s in France.

Assemble gear for commute, including chapstick for badly chapped lips, and highly acidic wart removal stick for troublesome planar wart on thumb. Place each in its own pocket to avoid possible confusion over similar packages.

Exit house, discover car windows frozen solid.

Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class two Words of Power to melt ice. Lose ten minutes in this way.

Drive to station along frozen half-plowed roads also used by idiots in SUVs. Attempt to find parking spot without ice or broken glass in it.

Buy coffee from Indian gentleman in station.

Hear announcement that train is operating "on time". This is an automated message triggered by the train not having arrived two minutes after the posted time.

Train rolls up three and a half minutes later. Board train.

Discover coffee undrinkable swill. Train picks up loud clods at Farmingdale, then Bethpage. Drink coffee to cheer self up.

Arrive in Atlantic Terminal bursting for a pee. Visit brand new washroom. Discover that after a public information promotion that cost millions on the subject of coughing into one's elbow to avoid spreading disease on the MTA, the LIRR (part of the MTA) has no soap dispensers in the men's washroom. This mirrors the situation at Jamaica. Wonder at acumen of MTA morons who think that coughing is a Public Health problem but unwashed hands after stall use aren't.

Arrive at work and deal with increasingly annoying stuff until lunchtime.

Eat lunch - typically something from one of the three places in easy reach - Chinese food, Pizza or a Kebab. Consider killing self in order to introduce element of variation to lunch.

Deal with more annoyance. At around four pm split lip. Reach for soothing chapstick and, without checking, apply generous coating of acid-laden wax to cracked, bleeding mouth, burning off both lips.

Descend to subway for train to Atlantic Terminal. Delays cause train not to arrive until LIRR train departure imminent.

Run through Atlantic Terminal and board crowded LIRR train.

Ride home in slow train rocking so hard head cracks against window while attempting to snooze.

Pick up car, windows frozen. Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class four Words of Power to melt ice.

Drive home.

Eat.

Go to bed.

Dream of the cold peace of oblivion.

Repeat four times.