Monday, Monday. Can't Trust That Day

Monday dawned, with a light drizzle that continued past breakfast.

This was a bummer because we had thought to go to Kennedy Space Center that day and take a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour one of the two now-idle shuttle launch pads.

Because of the renovation going on to accommodate the Elon Musk Space Craft of The American Way Of Life Made Whole Again¹ And Manifest In All Its Glory And Like That, one of the two pads was available for the public to walk around inside and make rumbling, whooshing noises² as they conjure up a replay of the many launches that actually took place on this very hallowed ground. Breath deep. There's traces of oxidizer in that air.

Or maybe it's guano. This is a nature reserve after all.

But walking around a big wet scaffold in the rain getting dripped on by the run-off from the girders is nobody's idea of fun, so we canceled. We had a week, after all, and the sun would have to come out sometime⁴.

So, around mid-morning, it stopped raining and Mrs Stevie decided that "we" wanted to go to Epcot.

"You want to go to EPCOT, right?" she snapped.

"No"

"What???"

"Doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Ever Popular Community Of the Future is exactly where I want to be on this fine day in Florida!"

"And no whining about your legs this time!"

"Can't promise that. The legs are old and mutinous."

"I said no whining!"

"Got it."

This would be a red letter day in that for the first time in ages we would have to buy tickets for a Disney Park⁵. We drove over at a leisurely speed, there being no need for haste, and in no time at all we were at the car park attendant's booth so we could rent a parking space.

I suggested that Mrs Stevie ask about preferred parking again as we were pulling up, which started an argument because the daft woman couldn't remember that we had done that same thing the last time. She rolled down the window to pay and we were engulfed in the usual cloud of radiator steam and tire smoke, which forestalled any more hurtful comments at my expense in the coughing fit that took her.

After parking, haunted by memories of that previous visit to EPCOT and the endless search for our vehicle among the hundred thousand others there in a World Gone Mad, I checked what the nearest pole said in terms of Disney Characters and numbers and repeated it one hundred times Or I would have but Mrs Stevie hit me at somewhere around twenty eight and told me to "shut up that stupid chanting". And so we went in search of "fun"

Two minutes inside the park we were engaged in a frank exchange of views on the subject of Dinner. I felt that we shouldn't eat at Germany again because I wanted to try something different for once⁶. Mrs Stevie vetoed England⁷. I voted against France because of the chance of snails. Mrs Stevie vehemently denounced the idea of Mexico, because of the chance of the Aztec Twostep - a canard I'm sure but there was no arguing. I suggested Japan and she went green and shouted about not wanting to eat anything raw that had tentacles⁸ - but I pointed out the strong possibility of Hibachi Cuisine and she subsided long enough for us to find out at the Guest Services office. Hibachi it was, at Eight Bells O' Clock PM in the Evening.

And we went forth to experience fun at all costs.

We stopped by various things we hadn't with the kids, such as the Sea pavilion, where we spent a lot of time gawking at various bits of marine life in tanks. The Manatee population has dropped since our first visit together, now numbering three (I think) where before they had six. Since they used to all be rescuees from power-boat collisions I guess that is good news. I dunno. The daft animals lie right where boats will pass over them and cut them with the prop, and you can't see 'em in the rivers to avoid them apparently.

In another smaller display I saw some very aggressive cuttlefish strobing at each other. These odd beasts would be stripey while asleep, then they'd wake up and realize there were six others in a comparatively huge space (the animals were about three inches long and the space about three feet in diameter) and they'd start threat displaying by rolling their dark stripes over their bodies from front to back like crazy. The grumpiest animals I've seen in a long while.

There's a huge aquarium at the back, in which sharks and other large fish swim. You can lose hours looking at the stuff in there. I went downstairs during a lull in the crowd and sat waiting for Mrs Stevie against one of the windows into the deep tank, and a manatee swam up and blew bubbles at me, which I think you'll agree was quite rude and entirely unnecessary behavior.

A little later it did the same thing to a small child who was delighted, which took me back to the years with the very young Stevieling who had a fascination for animals we thought would develop into some sort of career path, but didn't in the end. I sat watching the kid and smiling, then realized a parent was watching me and was not smiling.

I explained that I was remembering my own kid at that age and we traded parental talk for a bit and he left with his family to see what else was there. I turned to look through the glass and was startled into a shout by the manatee waiting in ambush to blow bubbles at me again.

Mrs Stevie fell in love with a T-Shirt in the gift shop depicting the seagulls from Finding Nemo with their "Mine" "Mine" "Mine" mantra daubed all over it, but wouldn't buy it there, which turned out to be a mistake since it transpired that that was the only place you could find the thing. She (and I) expected we would find it in the Disney Village shops too. Wrong!

If you have young kids and come to EPCOT you should bring them into the Sea pavillion and take them to the Finding Nemo-themed attraction. It is a clever use of technology and live voice-acting to allow the Stoner Turtle from the movie to interact with the kids in the front rows. Very clever and the young kids love it. I no longer feel that sound-synched chat avatars are a demonstration of just what a waste of space human beings can be. If it can be harnessed to entertain a child usefully, I'm for it¹⁰.

We rode the demented Soarin' ride, a sense-around simulation with unintended humor in the way it jump-cuts around the place. It shows you what it must be like to go hang-gliding on Demerol. We once again went for a spin on the high speed go-kart of g-forces, this time designing our own version of the Stevieling's laughable Yeastmobile, producing a design that the computer said beat the twin-turbo gas-guzzlers were up against on every test but one, and that was such an unimportant feature I've forgotten what it was.

So the Parent Green Annihilator joined the Parent Sport Annihilator in awesomeness - the Annihilator marque clearly has something to offer everyone and I'm quite surprised that no car manufacturer has approached Team Stevie about turning these futuristic designs into actual road-worrying vehicles. All I can say is that Detroit still lacks the vision it needs to take the world by storm and displace the Korean and Japanese manufacturers from their high horse(less carriage)s.

We took a ride on the spaceship simulator, which was still fun and made me feel sick as a dog. But we choose to ride the spaceship simulator...we choose to ride the spaceship simulator...we choose to ride the spaceship simulator, and to experience the Exxon World Of Energy¹¹ and do the other rides, not because they are fun, but because they are required. Or something like that.

Mrs Stevie said "let's go see the Captain Eo 3D show" at one point and I laughed and told her it was closed down. But she insisted we go look even though I told her she'd look like a twit when she was staring at plywood and "coming soon" stickers.

Naturally, the show was open for business as though it had never been hurriedly covered in plywood and closed "pending renovation" during those interminable Michael Jackson vs A.N. Oblivious Parent trials that were such a blessing to the failing newspaper industry of the Early Oughties. Seriously, they boarded the thing up so fast that I had to wonder if they found any skeletons of workers who didn't get out when they pulled down the boards post M.J. mortality and announced the advent of a renovated print. I guess it is cool to like Michael Jackson again.

Captain Eo is a 3D movie from the dawn of the CGI-assisted 3D technology era. It is the story of a rag-tag band of, well, actually I don't know what they are supposed to be. Let's call them Space Rangers, who are sent to give a gift to the evil (naturally) queen but who lose it on the way and are forced to combat her rage and clone warriors with choreographed dance, which - against all expectations to the contrary - works like a charm and all is well.

George Lucas was involved, and one of the crew is that daft elephant that plays keyboards from Star Wars. There's a cute CGI cat with bat wings too, but boy does the movie steal from the early 80s SF zeitgeist. Every piece of scenery looks like it was lifted from the third deck of the Nostromo post-infestation, and the HM Eviltrix is a cross between the Alien and the Borg queen woman¹². The dance numbers are pure Thriller and you just have to love that 80s big hair look¹³.

The print was nice and fresh though, so some work had been done.

We had coffee and dessert in France. We took a ride on the water taxi for no better reason than we couldn't remember ever having done that before. We wandered around Italy and Mrs Stevie bought jewelry for The Stevieling and was flirted with by the Italian zygote who sold it to her so I finally got to sit down and rest my aching legs without having my ear chewed off. We wandered into the museum in Morocco and I lost track of time looking at Berber and Tuareg jewelry and stuff, and marveling that stuff made in my lifetime was considered museum-worthy.

Then we wandered over to Japan and I bought each of us a cotton kimono to supplement the silk ones we already had which couldn't be reliably dry-cleaned and which were now collectors items apparently. I'm more than a little sure that the cute little saleschick¹⁴ was the same one who sold me the Stevieling's kimono six months before.

And then it was upstairs for a fine Hibachi dinner with six much younger people from the West Coast who were kind enough to speak English and not some sort of dialect of gibberish just to annoy the crumblies, and who were very interesting people to boot.

We got kicked out just as the firework display started, and although the World Showcase is carefully designed so that just about everywhere provides some sort of mass vantage point, I can recommend the balcony running around the Japanese restaurant complex as an especially fine place from which to do one's pyrotechnic observation.

And so we wandered out the long way round the lagoon, being some of the last out of the park as a result, which was sort of a funny feeling. I hadn't dawdled past closing time in a Disney Park since before The Stevieling had been born. It wasn't that I missed doing that, it just brought on a sense of how much water had flown under the bridge since then. In fact, the bridge in question was washed out long ago thanks to erosion of the abutments by the water flowing at breakneck pace under it, but I believed that if I squinted I could still see parts of the now submerged structure.

"Stop that sobbing!" snarled Mrs Stevie. "If you can't do anything useful, look for someone official so I can tell them when we parked and they can use their magic thingy to tell us where the car should be."

"No need", I said. "Our vehicle is in "Pluto, row 9, slot 115".

And, for a mercy, so it was.

1. After those idiot wbankers showed everyone just how unworkable it all was by turning he knobs up to 11 and blowing out the woofer↑
2. People who just stand around looking at NASA infrastructure are shorting themselves on the experience, as I told Mrs Stevie³ during the misunderstanding at the Saturn V exhibit some years ago. You've paid 50 bux to stand next to the rocket, no-one, no-one can stop you re-enacting the magnificent launch sonics in all their glory, even if he is a real astronaut↑
3. Who disapproves of rumbling, whooshing noises↑
4. True, but irrelevant as it turned out. Watch this space↑
5. For ourselves. Stripey Bill will remember that I had had the dubious pleasure of forking over funds for The Boyfriend's ticket last time we were in the area.↑
6. Or as I put it at the time, I was sick to the back teeth of Wiener Schnitzel and stinky sauerkraut↑
7. Just to be difficult. She likes English deserts more than I do↑
8. A previous experience in which she and I were taken to a sushi house against our wishes⁹ had placed just such a dish in front of the person to her left↑
9. Neither of us see the attraction of eating raw fish for fun↑
10. Don't bother yapping at me about "how useful can it be?" You came to Disney for Walt's sake. Don't do that if you can't enjoy it on its own terms, 'cos you'll be wasting your money↑
11. Sometimes. We missed it this day due to buggering around in other places↑
12. Which means Paramount stole her from Lucas and Captain Eo I suppose↑
13. Actually, I was only a partial fan of it myself, though when combined with the American Football Shoulder Pad Look and given a spritz of Nipponesque™ it could suddenly become the sexiest look in the world - see Rachel from Blade Runner for what I mean↑
14. While I find just about all young Japanese women deliciously cute, this one was especially notable in the "don't let Mrs Stevie find out" stakes↑

In Florida, Sans Stevieling

Sunday dawned, and got underway without us because we were kidless and undriven Disneywards¹.

We arose and had a leisurely breakfast. The weather was clear but cool for Florida, and a quick check on the local news showed that further north the weather was giving it some stick and showing the people of the Eastern Seaboard a thing or two in the line of freezing their lugnuts off. I felt sorry for them, but it wore off over eggs and toast.

We decided to waste the day just driving around in each other's company for the hell of it, because we both had distant memories of that being pleasurable rather than the mobile argument of recent years. So that's what we did, driving way up 192 to see what happened when Where It's All At moves to somewhere else.

When we first bought into the Orange Lake Cash Cow that end of state route 192 (which is shaped like a hog-leg) was well in the country and all the motels, hotels and timeshares were miles away on the other side of I4 (which sort of bisects 192). As time has run on the land around OLCC has been bought up (for fabulous prices) and developed into gifte shoppes, restaurants, and (you guessed it) hotels, motels and timeshares. This, in turn, required the installation of a spaghetti nest of roads and the flyovers which provided shelter from the elements and a dousing in filth during the last visit.

Now the foot traffic through this area has increased, which would necessitate the development of new places for those weary feet to rest a bit, but offsetting that is that some if not most of the parks and attractions have en-suite accommodations now. Disney, still (I would hazard a guess) the major draw of the area, has themed hotels and timeshares in the various parks or adjacent to them. The monorail passes through one hotel on its way to Epcot (yes, through, via a huge atrium) and that one is one of the oldest on the property. Costs have risen generally too, which makes a stay inside Disney not as unattractive price-wise as it once was.

The upshot of all this is that while once the hotels and motels around Oldtown were once in the thick of the visiting population, we've noticed that they look a bit run down and money-starved of late, and Mrs Stevie wondered aloud what Kissimmee would look like west of that, and where the real people of the area lived and shopped. So we went for a look.

Personally I think there is nothing so depressing as passing through a town or a neighborhood where the money has gone away. I used to spend days walking the Welsh countryside around the village of Corris², and in those hills stand numerous tiny abandoned hamlets, shells of buildings that lost their purpose with the collapse of the slate mining industry somewhere around the beginning of the last century.

Mrs Stevie and I had once had to pull off the main drag on our way to Florida so we could get some supplies for the baby Stevieling, and had driven a few miles on the pre-interstate road that had once carried traffic south. The town we stopped in was a couple of languid businesses barely hanging onto life and a bunch of collapsed abandoned structures. It was appalling to see the damage the arrival of I-95 and the departure of the traffic had wrought. In those ruins and the slate shells of those buildings hidden in the foothills of Cader Idris were the unspoken ruins of people's lives. I've been busted flat three times in my life. The thought of having it happen again at my current time of life is, to put it mildly, terrifying.

And so we drove into a mild version of the same as we motored west along interminable strip malls. The abandoned properties began to outnumber the viable businesses until there was a noticeable change and we were in Normal People Land. The strip malls didn't stop, they just changed in emphasis from sneaker factory outlets and Ye Crappe Shoppes to Chinese Takeaway restaurants and less flamboyant supermarkets and a comic book store, which we decided to stop and look in as it sold board games too.

I tootled around in the store and picked up a couple of things that looked intriguing³ and we set off back toward Touristville. We also stopped at a Walmart so I could buy cheap sneakers. My old ones were falling apart and Would Not Do.

It was in the car park of the Walmart that Mrs Stevie spotted a flock of birds infesting a small tree and became irrationally enthused on the subject of wildlife photography at the exact same time as I was putting all the non-sneaker things Mrs Stevie had found to buy in the back of the van.

Mrs Stevie is an inveterate photo-ditherer, buggering about needlessly in front of some ephemeral thing she wants to immortalize until whatever it is gets fed-up with the whole business and departs for somewhere less annoying. The canonical example is the time she took The Stevieling in her christening dress and attempted to photograph the happy, smiling and laughing child. The Stevieling was still too young to have developed any strength in her tiny legs and so needed propping up in any seat. Mrs Stevie did not want cushions in the shot, and so what transpired was a comedy of ditheration and needless sodding about worthy of Buster Keaton.

Mrs Stevie propped up The Stevieling and retired to the spot she judged best for the photo point-of-view. The Stevieling sat balanced precariously on her little bottom, smiling and being cooperative. Mrs Stevie dithered, and dithered some more until The Stevieling's small motions upset her balance and she began slowly to tip sideways onto the cushions of the chair. Once she was at an angle of about ten degrees she began, not unreasonably, to cry, and Mrs Stevie leaped over to sit her up again and play with her until she cheered up, which seeing as how The Stevieling was such a happy child she did almost immediately, whereupon Mrs Stevie repeated the exercise.

About ten times.

Each time The Stevieling's tolerance for the whole tedious affair got shorter until she was crying inconsolably in her chair, at which point Mrs Stevie snarled “Why won't she stop crying?” which induced me – in a fit of sympathy-induced madness – to tell the woman exactly why and all thoughts of photography were forgotten so that a frank exchange of views could take place.

Anyway.

Mrs Stevie was pointing her camera at the birds but not doing any of the other things necessary to capturing an image of them, least of all alerting me to what she was doing. And so, when I slammed the tailgate closed, all the birds flew away.

I turned around to see what she was doing and was subjected to a stream of the most virulent hate-speech on the subject of the size of my brain. She was not moved by arguments predicated on my not having eyes in the back of my head, nor on my suggestion that if she was waiting for the birds to line up in a given way she was on a hiding to nowhere since we were in a car park and if not me, someone else was bound to slam a door or two before they did scaring the annoying little sods.

She yelled at me some more and wondered out loud if she would ever have the chance to photograph such a large collection of such unusual birds in a tree small enough for them to be at just the right level. I said probably. She said Oh yeah, where? I pointed to the tree just behind her where a new flock of the same birds had gathered to watch the fun. She whipped up her camera. She dithered. Someone slammed a car door off in the distance and I ran for the safety of the wagon as the skies filled with birds and vile swear words.

Properly equipped with Cheap Sneakers and a picture of the Annoying Birds “we” decided I should also visit a sneaker outlet store to see what I was missing. These factory outlet stores used to be good deals with low prices for over-produced lines in the 1990s but they seem to be everywhere now and the prices have climbed quite steeply too. The first sneaker outlet store I went into was also the last (I vowed).

It seemed to be full of South American youth, loudly arguing with anyone who would stand still long enough, and sneakers running the gamut from bilious yellow through bilious green to bilious purple. To be sure, there were sneakers in the traditional white, but they seemed sized for giants or gnomes, or to be designed for feet of unearthly geometry. The South American youths seemed to feel blinding neon footwear was De Rigeur so I suppose I am somehow missing the point again (though I still can't imagine what manner of being would wear those other Non-Euclidean sneakers). A grand waste of time, and one in which it began to rain.

We headed back toward Oldtown, where we paused for a look to see what was left of the attraction. I think I've mentioned before that it used to actually be a place themed for "The Good Old Days", with a genuine antique carousel and various Olde Tyme Shoppes including a General Store in which you could buy 5 cent bottles of Coke in green bottles. But every year one of the old businesses closes down and is replaced by something less "Old Tyme".

All that is left of that Old Town ambiance as was is the photography business where a couple of times Mrs Stevie and I and whomever we were with had masqueraded as depression-era bandits or Persons from The Wild West (they have the biggest wardrobe and bestest props of any fake photo place I've seen and they don't use photoshop, they use scenery) and the ice cream parlor. The place is now filled with T-Shirt vendors, go-kart tracks and catapult-powered "rides" of the most idiotic sort.

It is, however, a favorite place for various motor clubs to meet and hold competitions, and that day there was a parking lot full of Corvettes on display, from fully loaded modern wedges of meh (sorry, Chevvy, I don't care for the boring look of the post-Stingray Corvette) to lovingly restored originals from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mrs Stevie was entranced for once in something I was interested in so we spent a while after the rain wandering around the display of American Motoring Might.

In the 1970s the conventional wisdom of the car modder was that the only American car worth having in England was the Stingray since once the hydraulic lifters had been pulled out and replaced with ordinary tappets the car could not only do an easy ton⁴, it would stay in a stright line while doing so⁵. The Stingray and the Mustang (which gave lie to the "only car worth having" mantra by being lethally fast⁶ if rather less stable at high speed and a tad on the ugly side; never was much of a fan of the 1970s "fastback" concept myself) were both very popular in the UK of my early driving years.

I'm told that a whole generation of American Airmen made quite a killing importing Stingrays and Mustangs (at U.S. taxpayer expense) and selling them to the local youth. You could see dozens of examples of both on the roads of Norwich of a Saturday night, as there were five US air bases within a 40 mile radius of the city in those days.

After buying a new teapot and a bag of humbugs, then sating ourselves on cars and ice cream we wandered home to discover The Git had parked his Escalade as far to the right as he could and the other side neighbor had parked as far to the left, gifting us with a nice long walk from car to front door in the pouring rain.

I made sure to check the wagon's doors were locked with a double press of the lock remote. I don't normally do that as it sounds a loud blast on the horn and Mrs Stevie apparently had done a deal with the Burlington Northern Railway on a surplus horn from a defunct SD45-2 diesel-electric freight locomotive when she selected the options for this wagon. It made the putty fall out of the villa's window frames and loosened the screws holding the little brass numbers to the front door when I blew it.

I was careful not to stand in front of the van when I did this because a previous experiment had induced a concussion and bleeding eardrums and Mrs Stevie had punched me hard in the face once she had been released from the Emergency Room. To judge by the screams coming from inside the villa, Mrs Stevie's choice of automotive accessories was appreciated.

We retired with a smorgasbord of fruit and wine and cheeses to while away the evening, and about half an hour later the front doorbell rang and a couple of security staff stood dripping outside. We invited them in and offered them towels and hot tea from our new teapot as they quizzed us about some disturbance next door involving a klaxon of some sort.

I said I'd not heard anything unusual, but perhaps an emergency vehicle needed to cross the lights at the entrance of the complex while they were on red and had sounded the klaxon in question. The trees that had originally screened this part of the property had been cut down and the highway noise was certainly more noticeable than when we first bought into this part of the club, so a fire truck needing to break the law in the interests of the community as a whole was my best guess. The officers apologized for disturbing us and went next door to talk to them about it all.

It certainly was a puzzle.

1. Unkind souls might wonder why we bothered at all, then↑
2. Yes I know there's two of them right next to each other. I'm abbreviating Upper Corris and Lower Corris for the sake of getting on with it and not getting bogged down in details most people would only experience through the wonder of the ordinance survey or Gogglemaps™↑
3. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus Edition and book one of Y: The Last Man, though I somehow resisted the lure of the wardrobe-sized Ogre board game, possibly because they wanted a hunnerd bux for it↑
4. 100 mph↑
5. A boon on the comparatively very narrow English roads↑
6. The lethal part is true; I had an acquaintance years ago who grew a beard to hide the frightful scars he won rolling one of these beasts at Warp Factor Argh!↑

When The Going Gets Good, I'm Outta Here!

So, what with the weather and the wounds and the general malaise brought on by the realization that yes, this probably is all that there is, I have had no will to write of what I laughingly call "my life" and the things that fray it at the edges.

However, recognizing that my public¹ is out there and hungry for more of the goings on and goings off at Stevie World Of Naff², I shall now relate the events that occurred during the trip Mrs Stevie and I took to Florida sans Stevieling during the last week of January.

And what a treat you are in for, dear reader. An epic crossing³ filled with thrills, chills and books on CD!

Things started promisingly when we set out on the Friday around 10 am (reasoning there was no need to rush into things⁴) and got as far as the first turning back toward Chateau Stevie, whereupon I discovered I'd left my sunglasses at home and we went back to get them. Normally this would have put a damper on the mood, and today was no exception as I was forced to listen to a litany of the most vile slanders and stuff dragged up from the past that normal people would have forgotten by now. It quite made me yearn for the time I leaned on Troll's muffler.

We set out again And I made a bee-line (assuming we are talking about drunken bees here) for the Southern State parkway despite the muffled cries of the GPS system safely locked in the glove compartment, which had different ideas most likely involving a five hour sojourn in the Manhattan Friday Morning Traffic Jam. Fortunately I know my way from Chateau Stevie onto Interstate 95 south, once having had to drive between Washington DC and Long Island every week, and so was not even remotely tempted to let that demon-infested GPS⁵ advise me on so much as when to draw breath.

Traffic was heavy to motionless as we merged with the Belt Parkway and only the drone of the CD player as it read from Patricia Cornwell's "Predator", a book so relentlessly awful on every level that it proved impossible to switch off. No sooner did Mrs Stevie opine that surely this was the worst realized character ever to see print or that surely this must be the most unbelievable event ever written than someone even more two dimensional would walk on stage or something ridiculous would happen.

Outside of the self-published rubbish one can find on Amazon for the Kindle reader I can't think of a time I've had a worse experience in the hands of a published writer⁶, and if I hadn't stopped reading Cornwell's "Scarpetta" books after the one that had the Libyan Terrorists burst in right at the end (on account of she had gone stupid) I would have been disgusted.

This torrent of naff carried us through the Staten Island Roadworks Crawl and the New Jersey Roadworks Stop For A Bit Every Now And Then. We were again well behind schedule as far as the trip was concerned, not as badly as in the summer but bad enough, and Mrs Stevie had put her foot down (on various soft parts of my anatomy) and insisted we would stop overnight in a hotel "at the halfway point" rather than attempt "that hellish drive" again, so I was concerned that the halfway point might actually become the third-of-the-way-there point lest we not be able to find a room for any price.

Eventually the traffic lightened up and the book came to an end. Mrs Stevie and I pondered whether the abridgment was due to editing for time or because the reader simply couldn't take any more of this idiotic story and skipped to the end, but the effect was the same - a blissful silence in the vehicle that obviously needed filling, and so Mrs Stevie fired up another tale - "Dance of Death" by Linda Fairstein.

This story had a lot going for it: decent characters, neat murder plot, but it went all over the place and had so many characters I lost track of who was who. At one point I fell asleep and missed twenty minutes, but it didn't matter because so little had happened that I could pick it up as it went along.

One disturbing fact was that even though were driving South as fast as the State Police would let us, when we stopped for gas the weather was still very windy and bitingly cold, well below freezing, which was worrying. There was no snow, but until you've felt the windchill on temperatures already not funny at all you've never been cold. The Steviemobile had experienced a couple of days in New York when I thought the engine would not turn over, so thick had the oil in the sump become⁷.

In New York we were seeing the sort of weather they get in Canada and those people put electric heaters in their engines and have electrical supply plug-ins for hotel parking spots to mitigate frozen engine oil. I'd seen a bad winter in Maryland in '96 and had no wish to see whether they'd laid in so much as a bag of sno-melt in the interim (they had not). The Southern States were about to get caught with their collective trousers down by the storm system buggering up life in the Northeast and I had no wish to be in the middle of an object lesson in Civic Thermodynamics.

We decided to stop near the border of South and North Carolina, but had to drive quite a bit longer than we had planned (it worked out to a bit over 13 hours in the end, including the Forgotten Sunglasses Fiasco) and actually drove past the hotel we had settled on, ending up in another.

We checked in, pulled the bags we needed from the pile in the Honda Odyssey ⁸ and, after arranging the heat to be a little more aggressive, went to bed around midnight.

Saturday dawned and we leaped out of bed, showered, dressed, breakfasted and got back on the road after gassing up the wagon again. It was still cold enough to freeze your tongue to the car if you licked it, so I made a note not to do that again.

"Will you drive first?" demanded Mrs Stevie.

"Yuthsp" I replied.

The day drew on with the weather only beginning to get reasonable for the geography after about another five hours, well into Georgia, where we celebrated the end of "Dance of Death" by stopping for lunch. Traffic was not heavy, and the Southern States had taken the rather radical step of not ripping up large tracts of the Interstate to slow things down so we had made good progress as the story reached the bit where bleep and bleep grabbed bleep but were bleep before bleep could bleep his bleep⁹. The food was good too. Things were looking up, which should have been the clue that trouble was brewing.

Fortunately the anti-vacation demons were impatient and so rather than infesting the vehicle and disabling it in some expensive and maddening way they decided to nerf our in-car entertainment and make us choose as our next book "The 8th Confession" by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. Now this was an interesting tale, nominally by a famous action/adventure writer of some stature but actually by some woman whose name was printed in small print in the same color as the big "8" on which it was overlaid - at least, large parts of it were by her as I find it hard to credit that James Patterson would obsess over clothes and yo-yo between extremes of feeling about men so much as happens to the female lead character in this pile of bleep, and I didn't hear one word about ammo or calibres or anything remotely manly from any of the male characters.

This story went to the polar opposite of the Cornwell disaster, and characters were so richly detailed neither of us could keep track of them. It didn't help that they were annoying.

In fact, annoyance was the ambiance of this audio book too, as it was read by a lady who had seemingly been a Marine Corps Drill Sergeant in a former life and who bellowed out the first few words of each new chapter in the same manner R. Lee Ermey used whenever addressing Vincent D'Onofrio in "Full Metal Jacket". She also used this technique when a new character hoved into view which prevented sleep at the wheel. On the downside, it prevented sleep in the passenger seat too. I could have used a small bout of sleep to escape this tedious and loud book.

We pulled into Orange Lake Country Club at around five pm, whereupon a young fellow smilingly invited us to check out his special offers on tickets to here, there and everywhere. He flirted with Mrs Stevie which meant I didn't have to, which cheered me up initially. It was all going swimmingly until he casually mentioned that to receive this bounty all we would have to do would be to attend an hour's presentation on the new timeshare in Pennsylvania - at which point I flatly refused to have anything to do with it.

He was nonplussed¹⁰ and asked how we could be sure we wouldn't be buying another timeshare.

"I'm sure! I snarled. "Look at us; I'm nearly sixty and she's a hundred and four! Of course we aren’t going to buy a timeshare in Pennsylvania. I'm broke and she's got one foot in the grave!"

I was saved any further argument with this idiot by Mrs Stevie having one of her irrational rages. While it got us away from the dratted salesdrone I felt it was a bit strong that she should blame me for the annoying sales pitch and that chasing me around the clubhouse threatening to insert a beach umbrella into me was a trifle undignified.

We made our way to the villa we hadn't seen for over a decade and discovered that the orange tree that had given us so many delicious juicy oranges the last time we were there was now some sort of ornate bush from Mexico that produced flies. I'd also forgotten that the parking space for this villa was not in front of it (because of the tree-come-bush) so we'd be relying on the neighbors 'getting' that and leaving space for us, which they didn't. I don't know why they felt it important to make us walk further through the weather when their own cars could be parked in front of their villas and still leave space for us, but there you go.

One guy was so incensed by the situation that we went out later that night to find an Escalade parked so close we couldn't open the driver side doors and he couldn't open his passenger side doors either. He must have had to unload his passengers and then re-park in annoyance mode to pull that one off. We countered this ploy by not rising with the dawn. He was a family man and had dates with Disney calling for early starts. Our time was ours.

It was refreshing to see that some people could hold onto their gittism even in the teeth of a good time though.

1. Now assessed as a badger named Stripey Bill living in a set somewhere in the New Forest, though I suspect my Google Analytics Evaluation Purposes Only Edition account may have been hacked and this is in fact a bored teenager named Stripey Bill↑
2. A working title↑
3. More accurately, since we were driving South, then North: downing and upping, but that sounded too rude to put in the body of the text↑
4. An error matched only by that made when Napoleon said "Let's go get those Russian bastards lads. No need to take your coats, this'll be a doddle"↑
5. uk: SatNaff↑
6. A lie: The Seventh Seal by I Had A Pre-Emptive Stroke After Reading His Daft Book And Forgot His Name Forever Thank Azathoth was exquisitely dreadful↑
7. Oil gets thicker with cold, thinner with heat. Multigrade oils are a way of having oil that is thin enough to start a cold engine but that stays thick enough to work when the engine is boiling hot↑
8. Me: one, Mrs Stevie: Four↑
9. No spoilers!↑
10. I'd always wondered what that looked like↑

White White White Is The Color Of The World

It's snowing again.

It started this morning but was light enough to laugh off. By four I decided to bail out of work because train delays were already happening and I could see myself being the victim of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road and their inventive cancellation policies.

A good thing too because it took an hour and a half to get back to Wyandanch, Pearl of the West where I had a long walk through blistering cold blizzard to find my car was snowed in. Fortunately, Mrs Stevie had insisted I pack a folding shovel so I could bury myself in the event I decided the End had come so I was able to dig out.

It's midnight and it's still snowing hard.

Azathoth alone knows what tomorrow's commute will be like.

Another Fine Mess

Late on Thursday evening it began to snow, and it didn't stop until noon on Friday.

The Bloody Long Island rail Road had pre-emptively initiated plan "run only as few trains as you can get away with" and most of those didn't run as the eight inches or so of snow (much less in places) brought the railway to its knees. The new snow clearing machine (they only bought the one) was nowhere in evidence although they drove us nuts in the fall singing its praises an those of their brilliant "planners" for having the audacious forwardness of thinking to actually acknowledge that in winter it snows and that the ridership is beginning to notice that the Bloody Long Island Rail Road didn't seem to have any sort of mitigation system for getting the tracks cleared. No doubt they were waiting for better weather in which to give it a push round the tracks.

Once the snow stopped falling I pushed the snow away from the front door¹, dug a path to the garage and prepared to fire up Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

First I had to get some power to the extension cord for the electric start, for I was not in the market for the dislocated shoulder and pulled muscles so often the result of attempting to start a small engine in extremely cold conditions by means of the recoil starter².

The only source was the multi-point adaptor that is part of the Chateau Stevie Xmas Illumination Extravaganza, but the lights are on a light sensitive timer that were then bathed in daylight and hence the power was off. It is possible to turn the power on with a rotary switch on the timer, but doing so requires clambering behind the overgrown Alberta Spruce hedge in front of the front bedroom wall, and there was eight inches of snow piled up all over the place complicating matters.

Heaving a sigh of resignation³ I waded over the snow to turn on the power, but immediately had to confront a new problem; the self-inflating tree c/w snowman honor guard was buried under eight inches of whitestuff and the fan unit would in all likelihood overheat and short out were I to follow my inclination to ignore it.

So I spent ten minutes exhuming the wretched thing and kicking out an air path, freeing the guylines and untwisting the drunken snowScotsman which had been twergled in the night's wind, cutting off the flow of air to that part of the sculpture. Only then could I clamber into the narrow space between wall and trees to switch on the power and spend another two minutes rattling extension cord connections to get the lights on.

I connected Troll to the power pumped like mad on the Rubber Bulb of Carburetor Primage until I could feel resistance under my thumb, switched the magneto on⁴ and pressed the starter.

There was an ear-splitting ratcheting sound as the starter kicked over, then the hearty ear-splitting chugging of the engine began, clouds of blue chocking smoke belched from the muffler and once more we had life, life, LIFE! AHAHAHAHAHA!

It took only about an hour to clear the driveway, moving cars into cleared spaces and mowing the snow where they had been moments before. In places the snow was over two feet thick around the cars where it had been drifted by the high winds., Then I nipped next door and helped Mr Singh's son dig out.

On my way back I ran out of gas, so I lugged troll into my driveway by sheer manly strength, undid the gas cap and leaned over to double check I really did have no gas in Troll's tank. This was when I made a mistake I've made before and hence feel all the more stupid for making that day. I placed my hand on the muffler to support me as I peered into the tank.

The next few minutes were a blur of pain, improvised dance and class four Words of Power.

The muffler is essentially a cube-like metal box with a pipe sticking out the side. The flat top is deceptive and completely exposed to the air and to passing flesh. It is very easy to lean on this thing because a number of controls for the restarting process are in close proximity to the damn thing. It begs to be leaned on, and I feel like a wuckfit for not inventing some sort of clever lean-prevention device before now. I could make a muffler-guard but it would heat up itself and pose a similar threat, albeit mayhap a slightly cooler one. I have a nice second degree burn across the entire width of my palm on the fleshy part of my hand, the part that rests on a surface as I type.

I completed operations with snow pressed on my hand to kill the pain, and a further four hours with ice on the burn.

I usually don't bother with cold water or ice for burns⁵, preferring to let the pain crest and die away, but this time I couldn't. The pain was quite indescribable and beyond my power to bear. As time went on I found that cool water would kill the pain completely, and after about six hours I took some expired near-Vicodin generic substitute⁶ and was able to stop soaking my hand and go to bed.

As I type I have a huge patch of cracked skin biding its time before it breaks open and poses a huge infection risk.

So life as usual then.

1. At least I didn't need to remove the glass from the storm door and dig my way out of the house like I had to last year↑
2. aka The pull cord starter↑
3. My resignation was summarily declined↑
4. Won't make that mistake again↑
5. I've hit myself with the mufflers on the lawn mower, weed-whacker and chainsaw in addition to the one on Troll, but never in such a large-scale manner↑
6. God bless the American Medical insurance System↑

More Of The Same

Today, as I was setting off for work, I got a call from the doctor I employ to carve off the bits of my skin that have decided to explore the third dimension, asking if I could come today instead of tomorrow.

So I began the first working day of 2014 impersonating Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from the Lynch Dune movie.

As I type the blizzard that was the reason the appointment with Doc Snipsenburnz was shifted is howling outside, and the Bloody Long Island Rail Road has responded by announcing a "Holiday Schedule" for tomorrow (Friday).

That's right; there will be less trains right at the time they'll need more trains to cope with breakdowns and stranded suckers customers. This despite them crowing about their new snow plow all last month. More money wasted there then.

So, no change in the Naffness Index.

The Unbearable Tediousness Of Being

Dinner tonight with my mother- and father-in-law.

This in lieu of any sort of real New Year's Eve party. We're not running one this year and no-one we know is admitting to us they are either.

Azathoth's gonads, I'm sick of 2013.

Will this tedious bloody year never end?

Hanging's Too Good For 'Em

Today on NPR: "And tonight, that's New Years Eve Night..."

This from a radio station whose broadcasters belligerently and prominently pronounce the "p" in "exerpt" and who host regular grammar-nazi festivals where the works of people who've become famous for their songs or books are held up to ridicule as linguistic dolts by people We The Listeners have never heard of.

A couple of months ago one smug git who shall remain nameless droned on for nearly a quarter of an hour in an oily voice over the Daily News using the word "Controller" instead of "Comptroller" (it's a public office). Apparently this guardian of language was the only person in New York (including your humble scribe) who didn't know that both forms are in common and acceptable use and have been since mid 1984 when I was first in a position to notice. Eventually he paused to draw breath and his engineer was able to get a word in edgeways to tell him the facts of the matter.

Then he went on for another two minutes of the possible political ramifications of the Daily News picking one form over the other until his phone-in expert commentator told him that he didn't think it was as significant as it might be in the Washington Post - which prides itself in such subtle and therefore largely unnoticed wordplay - and suggested they move on.

Gordon Bennet!

Now Playing

Cloud Atlas.

I'm fascinated by the movie, which does itself no favors with its folded and refolded plotting laced with internal in-jokes and references so that one can only really get an appreciation of it by repeated viewing, which of course means that it cannot really impress the critics with its cleverness because they get to see it once, as a linear experience, before they have to write about it.

The music is quite pleasant, by turns electronic or classical chamber style. The cost of acquisition is a bit on the steep side, but that is par for the course with soundtracks in the post vinyl world (I don't recall soundtrack LPs costing that much more than their popular music counterparts).

Anyway.

That's what I'm listening to on my iPod.

Catching Up

Deck The Halls With Boughs of Meh

It's Boxing Day, and I have posted not of late, so:

The weekend began with the traditional erection of the Self-Illuminated Bush of Festive Merriment and the subsequent discovery of more than half the tree to be what is technically called "dark". A wail rent the air, but it was cut short when Mrs Stevie rammed a cushion over my face before demanding that I "do something about this tree". A plan formed immediately in Mr Brain that involved a dumpster (UK - skip) a can of gasoline (UK - petrol) and a box of Swan Vestas (US - strike anywhere matches) but Mrs Stevie clarified that what she meant was that I should correct the illumination issue and not "get creative".

Well, last year I bought a string of two hundred bulbs for just this tedious fbleeping job. Flashing back to that episode I inquired testily whether or not Mrs Stevie was absolutely sure she had located all the plugs involved in the intra-tree power distribution network, and was assured that there was less than no chance that a repeat of The Not Plugged In Fiasco of Extreme Annoyance was under way, so I swapped out maybe three dozen bulbs with some I had pre-sorted and removed the bases from¹ then went to look for the string of bulbs.

I couldn't find it.

Mrs Stevie went out and bought some fairy lights from the local drugstore, and was very proud of the half price offer until it transpired that the bulbs from this set were so fragile that they blew immediately upon being plugged into a "good" string on the tree for a test. So I went out and bought some heavy-duty lights and started swapping in bulbs, checking each pulled bulb in a good string so I didn't replace good bulbs and waste resources.

I've mentioned before that this tree has the only lights that fail in the way they are designed to do, with one bulb usually not taking out the whole string but shorting itself out. This is good because the rest of the lights stay on, but bad because they are now slightly overpowered and will suffer shortened lifetime as a result. What usually happens is that a rapid cascade failure now occurs in which bulb after bulb blows and shorts itself so the rest can have a go.

I replaced three dozen or so bulbs in that lower string I mentioned, but in this one higher up the bulbs seemed good, meaning that one bulb had blown and failed to short out. I tested bulb after bulb, making my way around the tree, sobbing to keep my spirits up, when I encountered the two plugs that were not plugged into the adapter hanging next to them. I plugged them in and was rewarded with singed retinas as the tree lights burst into life.

I may have mentioned out loud some doubt in my mind as to Mrs Stevie's powers of observation and ratiocination but the ensuing frank exchange of views did no one any credit to be honest.

I went down to the basement for a sulk and immediately found the missing string of lights. I decided to shout at them for a bit, wait for the women to disperse, have some tea and retire to bed to avoid any more Christmas prep.

Monday began the least Christmassy week before Christmas I've ever personally lived through³ with a light snowfall. The news channels were bleating about three inches accumulation of snow. My estimate was closer to one flake. Nevertheless the Bloody Long Island Rail Road decided it was enough and enacted Operation Fbleep-up, resulting in me getting to work sometime around noon. Then it was a round of being volunteered to fix some code that was "not working right" and muck around trying to get a balky perl⁴ installation working and it was eight in the evening, resulting in me getting home around midnight.

Magic.

Tuesday dawned and we were all looking forward to the informal Xmas lunchtime drink organized by Mr Partytime, a former colleague and right old raver known to run the best parties in the known universe from personal experience. Except the lunchtime enbeveragation attempt failed miserably when the organizer of said event simply didn't bother to come to work. Everyone promptly said "If he can't be bothered, neither can I" and that was that. Like I said, the least Christmassy Christmas was being built here, on a foundation well-laid.

Wednesday began and the Bloody Long Island Rail Road decided to celebrate the Three Wise Men getting stuck in traffic on the Jerusalem by-pass⁵ by breaking a few rails. Now I wouldn't mind⁶ but We the Ridership just bought a brand new clever track machine for them that is supposed to detect rails in danger of breaking before it happens so they can do something pro-active to avoid delays. The Bloody Long Island Rail Road is the only organization I know of that can throw such huge amounts of money at a problem and miss. Every fbleeping time.

It's good here innit?

Thursday, and I took a half day so I could Make Merry at yet another unofficial Xmas Cheer Event⁷ and it turned out to be four Englishmen, one Chinese guy and an American sitting at a bar with one straggly set of Xmas lights (the owner "couldn't find anywhere that sold lights⁸").

Then there was the music. Nothing says "Christmas" like Bob Dylan trying to see how long he can play the same note on a harmonica without passing out.

One Englishman and the Chinese guy were drinking cola, and they and two of the English guys that were drinking beer went back to work after two pints. Pathetic, really. I decided to just go home at this point rather than keep up the pretense.

Friday was, to be honest, just a long drag of meh as I tackled the Web Page Occasional Generation Or Not issue.

It was a doozy too. The code had been written by a clever consultant engaged in Job Protection coding, using a language in which it is possible to write so-called "obfuscated" code, code which looks like it does one thing while sneakily doing a quite different thing. There are contests to come up with the best tricks, but no-one but the consultant would ever deploy such stuff into the enterprise.

Fortunately, I haven't the usual evangelical stance held by my colleagues when it comes to Unix editors⁹, and I use a graphical editor with language-triggered color styles. What this means is that when Mr Consultant pulls a clever linguistic fast-one, I can see it coming a mile away and see it for what it really is. So I often get volunteered fixing The Code That Should Not Be.

I was assured that the scripts were running properly, they just needed some adjustment for "something weird" that a better man than I had spent weeks trying to find without success.

The job involved some data capture, the mailing of the report to a central server, the triggering of another script as a result of this and the building of web-page versions of the report as a result. It is, in fact, a fairly straightforward and not at all arcane thing involving well-understood components. But it seemed that some but not all of the web pages weren't being built. Being me I looked for easy and quick fixes but none of them worked by close of business¹⁰.

Then the weekend happened. The less said of it the better. The tedium was broken by Mrs Stevie demanding the installation of an inflatable Xmas sculpture sent to use some years before by my Sister and Brother-in-Law - the Canadian Kung-Fu gang - in revenge for something we had perpetrated on them the Christmas before. This is basically a bag of nylon cleverly stitched to make it take seasonal shape with lights inside and a fan unit in the base to keep it puffed-up. Ours had suffered a broken stand leg in transit, which I was always getting around to repairing.

I repaired the broken stand leg on the fan unit by gluing it. I didn't think the glue would result in a lasting bond but had a brainwave. I had some quick-set casting resin in the basement. I would mix a cupful and pour it into a cavity in the leg, thereby conferring great strength. Sadly, the resin hardener had "gone off", a condition I was first alerted to when I realized that the goo in the leg was not as hard as plastic but more resembled warm toffee. Thus another fiasco was enacted. I applied duct tape to keep the goo from getting everywhere and soldiered on by testing the fan unit, plugging it into the wall.

What I expected was the slow formation of a six foot snowman. What I got was the rapid inflation of an eight foot tall Xmas tree sculpture, some four feet across the lower "branches", flanked by two four foot snowmen. Mrs Stevie was alerted by my screams as I was rammed back over the sofa and crushed under this perfidious green balloon of death. As usual she quickly assessed the situation and offered carefully considered advice.

"Stop bleeping around with that thing and get it onto the lawn" she snarled, playfully.

I managed to hook a foot under the cable and yanked out the plug, at which point the whole thing turned into a bag and draped itself artistically over the living room and me, triggering nightmare parachuting flashbacks. I was so overcome with emotion at this turn of events that I refused to have any more to do with the wretched thing and Mrs Stevie was forced to deploy it herself, muttering about "useless lumps" and pondering "how hard could it be anyway?"

Which of course are the Magic Anti-Handiman Demon Summoning Words, aka The Words That Must Never Be Even So Much As Uttered At Any Cost.

The evil spirits struck early. She lost one of the tie-down stakes in the lawn somewhere after putting it down on the ground so she could be distracted. Hopefully this will give her some insight into the nature of life, "small" jobs and the shoals of anti-handiman demons that infest any seemingly simple piece of apparatus, and not complain any more of half hour jobs turning into all day sagas or barbecues assembled with missing bolts or handles.

However, I guyed the wretched thing using three stakes so we could get on with our lives and turned it on to test it again in situ. It inflated into full magnificence, but a problem revealed itself: The snowmen were stitched to the tree to constrain their pose, and the one on the right¹¹ had torn free. I patched the small hole the damage had caused but could not get involved in finding nylon cord and restitching the thing, so we were stuck with a tree flanked by two snowmen, one standing proudly and waving to passers-by, one slumped drunkenly on one side. I offered to find my old inflatable Lowenbrau bottle so we could make it look like a Scotsman making merry in Sauchiehall Street but Mrs Stevie got The Look in her eyes and went thin-lipped so I left her to it.

When I finally reached work on Monday after another needlessly dragged-out commute I went digging in the file system of the web server and discovered the web pages that were "working" hadn't been updated for three months. Now everyone and his dog was telling me this process was working, and Mr Consultant was really very clever when you peeled off all the annoyance, so I entertained the notion he might be doing something unobvious that would put a false-seeming date stamp on the files holding the web pages.

I entertained it for about three hours until common sense re-asserted itself and I went for another look at the logs from the various bits and pieces and discovered a rather boring and straightforward problem that the unhelpful error in the log was obscuring¹². It turned out that someone clever had decided to move the software library to a different file and the scripts were pointing at the wrong place. Once that was fixed all the "weird problems" went away. Not only that, the process was now actually working rather than relying on word-of-mouth that it was.

I took Christmas Eve off and used the time to clean what I could reach of the house. More meh, and I pushed the Dyson vacuum cleaner to the very limits of its design by attempting to use the wand attachment.

If you've watched that smug git Dyson on the TV you've no doubt marveled at his cleverness and bought into his "I just think things should work" mantra. We did, which is why we bought the Dyson DC25 cleaner (the original "ball" model). What Mr Dyson has done is rather clever - he's adapted a well-known technology from the grain industry and mated it with modern brushless electric motors to give the world a bagless vacuum cleaner. If only he hadn't made it out of plastic.

What no-one talks about is that emptying that canister in a house with real dirt in it means you get filthy as you struggle to dislodge the clot of hair wound around the central core of the mechanism that blocks particulate the dirt from emptying out. The canister on ours, once a space-age thing of transparent beauty, has been scoured into filthy grey translucence by high speed dirt particles zooming round and round, sandblasting the inside of the cannister. The process took about a month at most.

When I washed out the HEPA filters after three months as directed by the manual, the one in the ball wouldn't reseat properly and whistles every time I use the vac. The high speed carpet beater, without which the cleaner will not clean, "no loss of suction" notwithstanding, gets clogged in an eyeblink with long hair shed by any of the women in the house, requiring the mechanism be field stripped every time it is used. Even then, the high spin speed means that the drum of the beater "blade" has slots melted into it as the hairs act as tiny bandsaws. I once got some nylon cord caught in it. If I hadn't seen it happen and immediately scrammed the motor it would have sawn the beater in two. As it is it has a nice slot milled into it at one end.

But best of all is the hose and wand attachment. The hose is sprung to collapse into itself, yielding a three-foot hose that will "expand to fifteen feet" on our model. Well, you can certainly pull it that far if you have muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the effort is such that cleaning will probably not be happening. Not only that, you'll have to anchor the cleaner itself as it weighs about four pounds and the pull on the hose when extended more than about two feet easily exceeds this.

But even better is that when the hose is blocked enough for a vacuum to form in the hose - as it will when you clean drapes or furniture or suck up anything too wide for the crevice tool's throat - the contractive force in the hose becomes like unto the gravitational pull of the Sun and the cleaner will shrug off the anvils and concrete blocks you have used to hold it down and come running over to see what's going on.

Nor will you have any limbs free to use in self defense or leaping out of the path of the charging appliance as you will have dug both feet into some handy leverage point and be using both hands in a sort of power-lifter's stance in order to fight the spring-in-the-hose's pull. It is all very tiresome and had me shouting "I too think things should just work Mr Dyson, but when I say it I mean it!" as I scrambled to avoid the high-speed onrush of the dastardly machine.

When you factor in that the hose is attached to the locking collar for all the attachments by two thin plastic tabs rather than a steel insert as is actually required for the strain involved it is just a matter of time before the whole thing snaps off. The time involved is, by experiment, two years and one week. I repaired ours with a metal tab and some duct tape rather than spend 50 dollars on a new hose (with the same stupid design problem). Hoover's "stolen¹³" design¹⁴ has a much more sensible but much less clever-looking coiled hose that makes no attempt to collapse itself, because Hoover actually have people who use their products whereas Dyson simply has a lunatic hipster fan base.

Anyway.

In the evening we all rendezvoused at the in-law's place for a family reunion with the New England chapter of the gang and a ritual gift giving that was actually a very pleasant evening and a final letting up of the anti-Xmas gloom that had descended like some sort of psychic smog on the land. The nieces and the Stevieling were having a ball talking about stuff no-one else could understand in a language all their own. I've never felt so old.

There was a bright spot when Mrs Stevie gifted one niece with some comic books graphic novels she had been jonesing for but had said were unobtainable collector's items. The look on the young woman's face was priceless, and Mrs Stevie scored a much-needed win in the kudos column from the Young and Restless lobby.

Some years ago the niece's mother (Bil the Younger's wife) had scored such a hit on me twice in a row by providing an Xmas gifting of the Peter Gabriel "Us" album, which remains a favorite to this day, then, the next year, finding an almost-impossible-to-score copy of the old Peter Gabriel CD-ROM package that included a tour of the studio while they were making "Us". I mentioned to her that I still had the album front and center in my iPod and that the Stevieling and I spent meny happy hours exploring the CD-ROM. Indeed, the memories of having my toddler sitting on my knee demanding (and getting) various videos from the CD-ROM so she could sing along are some of the sweetest I have. Mrs Bil the Younger was visibly pleased that presents she'd given me were such a hit at the time, and was quite surprised to find I was still playing with them instead of doing useful stuff.

Xmas day is all ours. We typically film ourselves opening our prezzies, though I've never actually mixed down the results into a movie for anyone to actually see. This year I had neglected to obtain tape for the camera and although the area drugstores were open they only had VHS-C or the newer subcompact tapes available. I, of course, needed the Sony format 8mm tapes. This sort of thing is what I should have been doing on Xmas eve but I'd been too busy with chores and could have sworn I had a couple of blank tapes in the bag anyway. Pfft.

I gave up looking after my third Drugstore and went home and instructed the family to use the Stevieling's digital camera. Then I couldn't find the tripod. It lives in one place. It has always lived there. It has never lived elsewhere. This day, it was gone and everyone plus dog was denying complicitness. A detailed search didn't turn it up¹⁵ so that was that. Double pfft.

I normally wear my Mitsukiku kimono for the gift dispersal and unwrappage ceremony but today I was already dressed for the world and couldn't be bothered. This was a minor disappointment for the ladies of Chateau Stevie because they had decided to get in on the act this year, Mrs Stevie wearing the lilac kimono I haven't seen in years and the Stevieling wearing the floral one I bought her at Epcot last summer.

The haul was a good one, I think. Mrs Stevie got her Doll House tree ornament (I've bought her one every year we've been married under pain of a punch up the throat) and tickets for two Broadway Shakespeare productions in which she'll be sitting on stage as part of the show itself. I also got her the second season of Game of Thrones on DVD, but the Stevieling got her the same thing in a better package so that was a flub.

The Stevieling got mostly stuff to help her in her college life and also cash for a holiday she's taking in Florida in a few days when she goes to stay with The Boyfriend. Her mother is not all together happy with this plan, but I pointed out that the Stevieling is a woman grown and does not need our permission any more. I'm not happy either, but I'm a pragmatist, and maybe this is the long-awaited sign of maturity I've been keeping a weather eye out for. The kid bought her ticket and laid her plans months before she told us anyway, so her sneakiness gland seems to be fully developed. So long as she is safe and happy that is all I care about. The Boyfriend, for all his faults, worships the ground she walks on.

I landed a Shakespearean retelling of Star Wars from the Kung-Fu Canadians, which is a brilliant gift, solidly in the gold, and some DVDs of various movies I've professed a liking for, a really annoying magnetic flashing safety light c/w window hammer and seat belt cutter, and bestest of all, the Stevieling gave me this years Hess Truck and Mrs Stevie gave me a rotary zip saw.

The zip saw is sort of like an angle grinder retasked for mounting small (about three inches or so) cutting blades, with a guard so you can't easily saw off your fingers while using it¹⁶. I've seen one advertised on TV and it was claimed it would cut backer board. The regular reader will know I once wrote off many beloved tools attempting to cut backer board, so if this works as advertised it will fill a need. Of course, Mrs Stevie is actually hinting that I should get on with doing the wall in New Bog which I had to pull out after the builder had put it in because it wasn't right and I don't want to talk about it any more.

This year's Hess Truck is bloody marvelous. It is a proper truck for starters rather than a helicopter or space shuttle or fire engine, with lights and sound effects. It comes with a caterpillar-tracked backhoe that also has lights and motive power! The little tractor zooms around climbing obstacles or just pushing them out of the way. Easily the best truck/load pair since the truck with the front-dump quad in the back¹⁷. I must get them both out together so I can evaluate which is best and if they look good together and other stuff which is not playing with toy trucks but serious adult evaluation and study.

Santa gave us a couple of games too; one from the Cranium guys which will be good at parties should we ever hold another one, and King of Tokyo which is an easy and enjoyable knock-out game using giant monsters who vie with each other to become King of Tokyo (which then presumably gets stomped flat) using a simple Yahtzee-like dicing mechanic. It's a fun way to kill 15 minutes or so.

So, not a bad end to the Christmas that Never Was, Nearly.

1. To replace a bulb on the tree one must remove the bad one by flipping up the locking tab and pulling out the bulb, typically shearing the tab off in the process. The bulb must be tested using a known good string (so you must in fact remove two bulbs, which introduces the possibility of misplacing that one) and if it is bad, replaced with a good one. The bad bulb is pulled from the plastic base,² and discarded. The process is repeated with the string of "spare" bulbs. The wires of the good bulb are straightened and fed into the base from step one, and folded over once the bulb is seated so they run up the sides of the base. This is when you discover you cannot remember where the empty socket is on the tree. It is all very tiresome, especially if you end up somehow replacing the bad bulb with itself, and have to go through the whole process again↑
2. which for some reason has been manufactured to some tree-light standard so that no bulb will ever just fit a socket from a different set even if they look like they should when examined with a powerful magnifying glass↑
3. Things weren't helped by the fact that although Christmas Day is a Wednesday, I took only the Tuesday off. In my youth in the UK a mid-week Christmas was the excuse for a week off and heavy merry-making with pals. Nowadays I have no pals and can't take strong drink without lying down in great stupor so what was the point?↑
4. A scripting language that is standard SOP in the Unix world unless the System Administrator who "owns" the box hasn't bloody installed it yet↑
5. Jack-knifed camel train caused tail backs and delays↑
6. A lie. I'd mind quite a bit↑
7. The official Xmas Cheer Event had somehow contrived to not happen at all, which shows that I was not the only one not feeling the Christmas spirit this year↑
8. Another one not feeling Xmas Atmos↑
9. Which can be summed-up as "If you don't know EMACS you are a clod, and there is no need to use any editor other than vi anyway"↑
10. So not really that quick then, as it turned out↑
11. As you view it↑
12. Microsoft have a reputation for unhelpful error messages but the ones that come out of the Unix shell are much more horrible at times. It's just that Unix people stick together and stick to the party line almost as rigidly in the face of adversity as Apple people do↑
13. Per Dyson↑
14. Pot, meet kettle↑
15. Though it did turn up my old three-years-lost digital multimeter↑
16. Though sawing a leg while holding it is a distinct possibility↑
17. Though the price is soaring to compensate. Hess Trucks used to come in at around 16 bux. This one cost almost twice that↑

Calling Cthulhu

I'm a big fan of Xmas as you both know.

What one of you may not know is that I've been a big fan of the roleplaying game "The Call of Cthulhu" (and the cosmic horror fiction the game is derived from) since the game was published in 1981¹ and have luxuriated³ in the tropes of "The Cthulhu Mythos" for decades as a result.

Therefore:

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me
A statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the second day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Five Squamous Thynges
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-ground lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-made lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-made lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-made lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Eleven cultist henchmen,
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-made lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Twelve Brides of Dagon,
Eleven cultist henchmen,
Ten Tcho-Tcho rituals
Nine servile shoggths,
Eight runes from R'lyeh,
Seven scrolls from Xiccarph,
Six Leng-made lenses,
Five Squamous Thynges,
Four blasph'mous tomes,
Three hellish chants,
Two yellow signs
And a statuette of Thatte Whych Shoulde Notte Bee!

May your senses reel as you confront the ultimate cosmic horror of Christmas.

1. Actually, I was a fan of the stories of Clark Ashton Smith² long before that↑
2. One of the stable of writers that make up the so-called "mythos canon"↑
3. Some unkind souls might say "wallowed"↑

The Leaves Are Falling

Over the last week the weather has finally decided to become properly Fall-like and make the leaves come off the trees.

This should have happened weeks ago of course, but we've been baking in unseasonably warm weather and the trees have been spraying pollen like it's going out of fashion. Everyone and his dog has alergies and sales of anti-histamines have been through the roof.

But that has now become a thing of the past and as a result of this and the prevailing wind patterns my drive has been ankle deep in leaves for days. Action Was Called For.

So I spent an hour looking for the spout that turns my leaf blower into a leaf vacuum and chopper-upper, then another looking fruitlessly for the special bag needed to catch the leaves. I tried improvising a leaf bag from a plastic leaf bag¹ but it proved to be infested with anti-handiman demons and promptly split. So it was back to a rake and stuffing the bags by hand.

I couldn't find the rake but decided to use a yardbroom instead to save another hour's searching

And eventually I ran out of bags so the job came to an end. I piled the bags on my grass verge and went inside to wash and groan in pain.

Overnight Hurricane Zelda blew in, damaged he fence and threw the bags all over the place, whereupon I think one was struck by a car. It looks like that from the humongous split in the bag anyway. I think I mentioned that I had no more leaf bags.

So that's alright then.

1. A sort of oversized transparent ventilated trash bag left by the town government in the hope the residents will use them to clean up. Fat chance, when all they have to do is leave the leaves and let them blow into my drive or along my fence line↑

Tuesday Bloody Well Should Be Dead, Cat Stevens Notwithstanding

Looked out the window this morning prior to getting ready for work.

Recently bodge-repaired fence leaning drunkenly after weekend five-minute mini-gale had given it a damn good thrashing.

Plus: Snowing.

So that's alright then.

Yardwork, Chateau Stevie Style

So I decided on Sunday to stop buggering about and start doing the house-maintenance stuff that has needed doing for well over a year.

A Quick list: Paint the ceilings (two years overdue), Retile the upstairs bathroom (one year overdue but with excuse - the need to sort out the wall I let a builder install), tidy all the crap up that is making our house look like a hoarder's dream (ongoing), mow the front lawn and grass verge and put the sprinklers and hoses away.

Clearly, this heavy schedule called for a good breakfast so I went out looking for one. It took me an hour to find a diner that had a breakfast bar - the only option since every diner was so mobbed by inexplicable crowds of people a table or booth was out of the question unless I was willing to kill an hour waiting.

Breakfast had scarcely commenced when I noticed that part of the case of my beloved Casio PAG-40 chronometer c/w compass, barometer, altimeter and sundry other functions had broken away from the watch. So that was all right then.

After breakfast I nipped next door to the AT&T phone store and explained to the teenager manning the store that I was sick of my phone and weary beyond the will to live with the damned thing's informing me while I am listening to voice mail that I have an incoming call and that I need to press "accept" to interrupt my current call, only for it to lock the bloody screen which requires two separate key options to unlock, at which point the "accept" button becomes unresponsive to repeated pressings, resulting in the phone suffering increasing numbers of high-speed impacts with the nearest wall. The sales"man" then showed me the latest version of the very same phone I was attempting to crush in my hand to illustrate my rage. Another win for a company that has been in the business of communication for almost a century in one form or another.

Once home I dug out the weed whacker and attempted to load wire onto the spool. This spool is specially designed so that wire can be loaded without dismantling the spool to do it. One simply cuts a 3 foot length of wire, pushes it into the hole on one side of the spool until it jams inside the reel, at which point one presses the tabs to release the inner spool so the wire can be threaded out of the other hole. The inner spool is refitted and the wire pulled through until it is even on each side of the spool. One then attempts to turn the bump knob to wind the wire onto the spool. Eventually one gives up, removes the inner spool and winds the wire by hand and refits everything together (having found all the parts that got lost in the previous five minute battle to wind wire on a spool in a World Gone Mad) and Hey Pesto! Instant ready-to-whack tool!

Naturally the weed-whacker was feeling recalcitrant in the matter of starting and it took several minutes of pulling the string and chanting the Magic Start Words before the thing burst into ear-splitting life.

And so to the weeds growing from where the curbstones meet the tar, in which can be found many things dropped by my neighbors - beer cans, cigarette cartons, supersized soda cups etc. I simply allow the weed whacker to pick these up and sling them out into the middle of the road. I'd bag such garbage but, hey, I hate the neighbors for dropping it there in the first place. Yes, I know it is them since you ask.

Next up I filled the mower with oil (the kid does something with it that causes it to burn oil - I suspect she loads it too heavily - and I've had to tell her in plain terms that the mower should never "start smoking" (the indicator she uses that it is time to knock off for the day). Once the motor was not in danger of running on dry bearings I ran the mower over the grass and the various other things the neighbors left for me in the grass.

That done, it was time to collect the sprinklers and drain the hoses. Some people blow these out with compressed air but I just throw one end over either the pool deck railing or the kid's old treehouse monkeybars and pull it through until the whole hose has been elevated to about 6 feet or so. Works like a charm and fbleeps up my bad elbow in no time flat. I unbolted the timer and valve assembly from the sillcock, and nothing jammed or required even class one Worlds of Power to loosen. Everything was going well.

Too well, of course

I noted that the pool cover was drooping very low and threatening to tear through the eyelets used to secure it due to the eight of water on top of it. So job one would be to drain the cover, which is done by lobbing a hose into the middle of the pool cover, where the green soup can be reasonably expected to be the deepest, connecting the other end to the sillcock and running water through until no more air is seen bubbling out.

Sounds wrong, I know, but this is science at work and science often sounds wrong, looks unpleasant and smells disgusting.

Once the air is expelled from the hose and a continuous column of water can safely be assumed to exist inside the hosepipe, the sillcock is turned off and the hose disconnected from it, allowing backflow to start. One now has about ten seconds to get the hose end from where it is to the drainage are one has chosen before the clean water currently gushing all over the place (but mostly over oneself) from the hose turns into green or brown tinged reeking filth from the pool cover.

Provided one does not hold the end of the hose too high and allow the drainage to stop the miracle of the syphon will drain the water uphill over the rim of the pool, then down into the hostas and overflow into the neighbors driveway as planned. Gravity pulls the water form the high lagoon of filth to the low garden, and the molecular bonds of the water keep the column whole so that the weight of the water in the lower end is enough to draw the water up over the rim of the pool. The only way this can fail is if the uphill part of the journey exceeds about 36 feet or so, when a phenomenominuminom called Torricelli's Vacuum will stop science from working properly and save the neighbors from paddling through toxic reeking sludge to get to their cars.

The water level in the pool was abnormally low, which I'm hoping was due to evaporation and not a leak in the liner. We didn't open the pool this year and I haven't even looked at the liner in over 12 months. So I decided the best plan was to top off the water to relieve the tension on the tether points of the cover.

A good plan, and one that should have been simple in execution, but was complicated by the fact that the leaky "gun" on the end of the hose had stopped working completely.

I tried unscrewing it, but that was when I remembered that I had not been able to remove it last winter and had put off the job of trying until, well, now apparently.

I deployed Vise Grip pliers combined with Robogrip Pliers to grap the gun and the hose end and twisted with all my might to no effect. I went and got Mr Hacksaw from the basement and sawed a slot carefully in the gun at the point where the screw thread was (being careful not to go too deep for fear of dinging up the end of an expensive Goodyear rubber hose) and tried again, but it was no good. I even used Finesse.

"Finesse" is what I call each and every one of my hammers.

I belted the bejaysus out of that gun and derived much satisfaction thereby but gained no advantage in the removing it from the end of the hose stakes. I used my Leatherman tool to cut away the rubber cladding and by doing so liberate the shattered insides of the gun left by my use of Finesse.

There was nothing for it but to go back to basics and use fire.

I made what seemed like the thirty seventh trip to the basement that day and dug out Old Faithful, my Bernzomatic propane torch. Returning topside I could find no evidence whatsoever of the half dozen barbecue lighters we have that get underfoot at all other times a rummage through the kitchen drawers is called for.

Letting out a manly bleat of resignation I flopped down on the back steps and focused my eyes on Mrs Stevie's Wurlitzer Class Barbecue c/w electronic starter. A plan formed, and for once it didn't result in me running around with my clothing on fire while the neighbors stood round applauding. I lit the torch from the saucepan warmer ring, setting the torch to full roar as a safety measure as soon as it caught.

Since - in the outdoor light - the flame is invisible, I have found it efficacious to have some sort of cue that the torch jet is hot. Many wounds have been painfully suffered in the winning of this knowledge. The roar of the flame works well as an aide-memoire as long as no-one talks to me while I work.

Heating the remains of the gun with the torch eventually made the cheap zinc-based metal expand enough to allow me to unscrew it using the Vice Grips and Robogrip pliers, and to deploy the undamaged hose in topping off the pool again.

Pausing only to grip the still hot jet of the torch in my right hand and to use some carefully picked Class Fours as I hopped around the garden in the traditional Pain Reduction Dance of Non-Utility, I packed up and returned my manly tool might to the basement for the next time I'd need it.

Mrs Stevie returned home as I, glowing in the satisfaction of a Job Finally Done, was checking water levels and demanded to know why I hadn't fixed the loose palings in the cedar fence yet.