A Grim Reminder

I couldn't persuade Mrs Stevie I had Beri-Beri or Dengue Fever and so I was forced to accompany her to a wedding reception on Saturday evening.

Wedding receptions are tedious at the best of times:

a) The music is always too loud no matter how it is being generated. I've had serious ear damage inflicted by a demented harpist with arm muscles like a blacksmith's and a yen to channel Hawkwind as I walked up the aisle, and what a determined teenager can accomplish with only an iBook, an amplifier and two speakers half the size of an old-style English phone box should be banned by international treaty as I found out at the Stevieling's graduation party. This wedding featured a nine-piece band c/w four voice chorus up front harmonizing fit to bust the eardrums. Status Quo were less earsplitting when I saw their farewell tour in '84¹.

2) They are boring. Let's face it, when there's no food on the table I'm faced with drinking or joining Mrs Stevie on the dance floor, where the inverse square law of sound intensity means that the music goes from merely painful to stroke-inducing.

Then there are the speeches, which are typically too quiet to be heard after the sonic re-creation of May 18th on Mount St Helens, incoherent owing to the Best Man having had fortyfying drinks² beforehand and now either having lost the carefully written speech, forgotten the once-memorized speech or simply forgotten how to read, and - when all is said and done - just un-entertaining.

Young men need to learn how to steal from the best, mash it up so it sounds educated and erudite and steer clear of saying anything directly about the groom's history or the bride's, because only in a Hugh Grant, Kevin Kline or John Cleese movie is that ever going to be funny and even then it won't ever end well for the speechifier. This evening the Best Man went with too quiet and incoherent, covering all bets. If he said anything compromising either the bride or groom, no-one heard it or if they did, they couldn't understand it.

™ ) The never to be sufficiently damned napkin folders. American restaurants employ a corps of highly trained commandos who lie in wait for me to take my eyes off my place setting, at which point one leaps in and before I can beat them away with a breadstick or the table centerpiece they have grabbed my napkin and folded it into whatever signature shape that particular restaurant favors.

I hate having other people handle my napkin once I am using it. Stupid, I know. The risk to health is no more than from the person who originally laid the thing out, but once I'm using it HANDS OFF! I don't care that it is no longer shaped like a cone or a triangle or the space shuttle. It is mine for the duration bleep it!

♥ ) The expense. The wedding gift. New dress for Mrs Stevie. New shoes for Mrs Stevie (worn once and then added to the shrine to St Imelda Marcos in what used to be a closet). Hairdressing (Mrs Stevie). Nails (Mrs Stevie). This time I was expected to look 'acceptable' and so had to have a haircut too, but I drew the line at a manicure and cut my own nails. Mrs Stevie was unimpressed with my efforts and got all bent out of shape but I told her the wounds weren't deep and would heal before the big day and anyway I could wear gloves if they didn't and who knew you can't cut nails with wire cutters?

þ ) The more expense. The invite specified Black Tie which meant I'd have to hire a set of trousers with a stealth stripe down each leg, a shirt that had been crossed with a concertina and which had a collar that was last in fashion during the Relief of Mafeking, a waistcoat and jacket that had textile-coated buttons and pretend pockets and a bow tie³.

Now all rental tuxedo rigs come with studs and cufflinks patterned with a central disc (usually black) and "silver" rims but I planned to use a set of Victorian antique gold studs I'd been given years ago and pair them with a pair of truly impressive 3/4 inch diameter crystal cufflinks I was given when I was 15 or so. This juxtaposition of high quality owned (the studs) with high quality rented (the clothes) and Kitsch-Quality cufflinks that looked like they should be on the wrist of Grey Lensman Kimbal Kinneson and that had no intrinsically valuable part about them would surely mark me as a man to be reckoned with, accessorizationally speaking.

Mrs Stevie found the studs but claimed not to know "anything about" ugly 1970s cufflinks and presented me with a set of links and studs that looked like the rental ones except that where the rental ones were made of steel these claimed to be 14 carat gold. I wondered where they came from and Mrs Stevie coyly asked if they might not have been part of my own wedding costume. This was clearly a cunning ambush ploy so I countered with a fake attack of sudden gastric distress and hid in the bathroom until she found more urgent things to be annoyed at.

And so it came to pass that we rolled up at the wedding dressed to the nines, where it turned out there were about eight of us dressed in Black Tie rigs not counting the wedding party itself. Everyone else not in a dress or carrying some sort of musical weapon was wearing a perfectly ordinary suit and tie. All evening I puzzled this and eventually came to the only possible answer: that these days "Black Tie" was code for "Don't turn up in Bermuda Shorts, sandals and an Ozzie Osborn T-shirt". Which happens, because I've seen it.

Mrs Stevie insisted I dance with her and I put up a spirited and animated argument against this, but since we were on the dance floor at the time it apparently just looked like I had capitulated and was doing some sort of lame old person's dance from like 1990 or something.

"It reminds me a bit of our own wedding reception" I said once the band had stopped for a rest and the ringing in my ears had subsided.

"It should!" snarled Mrs Stevie. "We had our own reception here 29 years ago next August!"

"We did?" I said, brightening somewhat. "Well that explains the pall of dread and horror that has been hanging over the affair all night."

Shortly thereafter Mrs Stevie drank five cups of the lethally strong Espresso they were serving at the Viennese Hour⁴, got one of her migraines and demanded I drive her home. The trip was, for once, a quiet affair devoid of the usual critique of my shortcomings. Indeed, possibly due to some confluence of the Lutheran calendar, Mrs Stevie seems to have taken a vow of silence, not speaking a word since that night.

Bonus.

1. First in a continuing series↑
2. As in forty fbleep drinks↑
3. I have plenty of bow ties but they are all real bow ties and all too small for my neck these days↑
4. An over the top dessert affair. Look it up.↑

Anatomy Of A Fiasco

Last week I was the epicenter of a confluence of screw-up the likes of which the world hasn't seen since it got biffed by another planet and the moon was spat out.

It started innocently enough, oozing good intentions and only a whiff of brimstone™ in the air.

For the last year I've been husbanding a set of computer jobs that were written by a since-retired employee to some scheme only he knows. Operational issues arising from user-requested expansion of scope meant that the first job had been belted with the bodge hammer so hard and so often it was now a rat's nest of scripts scheduled all over the clock which worked to do one job - mostly.

The scripts had been amended often, sometimes by someone with only a tenuous grasp of what the update would mean¹. They also had to be de-scheduled occasionally. The retiree had done this by hand but I wrote a script to do it automatically² because I was going on vacation during one of the de-scheduling windows.

Later, I was asked to come up with a filewatcher, a database thingy that reacts to files arriving in a directory. I could not get the blasted thing working, so I wrote one in perl. It worked, indeed is working as I type, very well indeed. Not only that, I realized that for once I had designed something with so much flexibility that it could be used to replace the Rat's Nest code.

The Rat's Nest jobs essentially look for a file that gets transferred into that computer and do things with it. It adopts a technique of checking for the file by name and sleeping for half an hour if it doesn't see it. Problems arise in that the file has a date component as part of its name and files with the wrong date must not get processed - unless they must³.

Crossing midnight is especially nasty and causes all sorts of bugs to appear. I've been denying requests for longer run windows on all the other runs that do the same sort of thing for months because I don't want to inherit the same problems as the retiree did. Almost sorting out this issue actually had the Retiree making three copies of RatsNest.sh with slightly different code and running them in different time windows, which (nearly) covers all the bases and traps the incoming files. Sometimes more than once, which is a problem.

By replacing RatsNest.sh with SteviesSpiffyFilewatcher.sh all would be well. The umpteen different ways of doing the same job would become one thing. It was tested. What could go wrong?

I set up a sort of fake run to run alongside RatsNest.sh in order to see what could go wrong. Nothing did⁵.

One fly in the ointment was that before I could replace any late-night process, I would have to have the long-ago requested but yet-to-put-in-an-appearance remote computer access facility. This is a set of credentials that would allow me to use bleep to bleep and access the work computers from my laptop. I had been waiting for months for the go-ahead. It arrived at the end of last year. I tested it and it was, after a few teething troubles, dead good

Other projects got in the way of my implementing Project Unrestrained Genius, but last week H hour, D day, S script was decided upon and I adjusted the scheduler to turn off all copies of RatsNest.sh and switch on PureGenius.sh⁶ and I went home.

A sad mistake.

Naturally, I had made a spelling mistake that I hadn't picked up on. I learned a long time ago that if I don't see a problem in fifteen minutes of looking for it I never will, and have adopted review procedures to negate this⁷, but this was a small error I didn't know was there and missing iit was easy.

But I had planned for just such a screw-up and would be there with my trusty laptop to fix things on-the-fly should All not Be Well. I detected things not being well around 9:30pm (an expected email did not arrive) and activated remote access.

The remote access software announced it was going to update itself, and promptly did so, and that was it for my remote access. I struggled with the software in a World Gone Mad for two hours but couldn't figure out what had gone wrong.

All things being equal, I would then have done what I used to do in 1986 - jump an the next train west and work at my desk to fix the issue - but our office management has sent many emails telling me that unless I add my name to a special list ahead of time every time I need to get in I won't be allowed in after office hours.

I think you can see things were escalating nicely

I went to bed determined to takle the first train in that would arrive around 7 am, but was so worried that I couldn't sleep. I got up at 4:30, showered and ran for a train, just missing one and having to wait until 5:40 for the next one. I finally got into the office, fixed the typo and ran the scripts. I mailed out to everyone I could think of about the situation, who was to blame and why, what had been done and when and grabbed a cup of tea. It was about 7:20 am.

At around 7:40 am I became aware that my email client had disconnected from the email service, and that my explanatory mea culpa was still sitting in my outbox. A frantic series of phone calls revealed the ugly truth that everyone switched to the new cloud-hosted Office 365⁸ service a few days before was now working as they did back in 1986, sans email.

I began another frantic series of phone calls to the people I'd been mailing, but no-one was picking up. Turns out that the process I had screwed up was an essential part of the early morning processing and everyone had been up since three trying to figure out what was wrong.

I gnashed my teeth (again) at the paucity of documentation left me by the retiree, and ran upstairs to try and find anyone in the affected user group to tell face-to-face what was happening. Since none of them had been migrated to the failing cloud email system, they found my tales of dropped email service unconvincing, only reluctantly coming around when I suggested their quiet morning didn't mean no-one had problems, just that they couldn't tell anyone about them. Once I had them convinced I had to stand around for five minutes so they could all shout at me.

It transpired that another part of the organization had pushed out a "patch" that had nobbled the network connectivity to the Office 365 cloud, but I didn't find out about that until it was all over bar the punching.

On returning to my desk, one of my colleagues mentioned that he was getting emails to his phone, and an idea formed⁹. I would send out the mea culpa email from my personal account and see who yelled back at me.

Unfortunately my personal email account's name is one of those Fluffybunnystevie.net sort of names and a good 50% of the recipients would simply bin the incoming mail even though I sent it with the subject header AS YOU LOVE LIFE DO NOT BIN THIS EMAIL¹⁰.

It worked, sorta. Two of the upper management wrote back to say vile things in SHOUTY CAPS about me and my extreme incompetence, and mock me for my stupid email account name. About three hours later the cloud email service came back online and my original email went out, causing a reprise of SHOUTY CAPS and a stream of "me too" Replies to All that gave the cloud service a good workout.

So, all things considered, not my best work.

I have at least six more scripts that need replacing with the new style code, so I redesigned my new changes rollout checklist such that in the event I lost remote access nothing happens¹¹ and poked around, eventually discovering the secret extra step needed to provoke my laptop to connect to the remote service. It seemed that all the Incompetence Demons had fled and gone away.

I can't wait to have another go.

1. My favorite being the calculation of yesterday's date that would occasionally result in the nothingth of any given month↑
2. And was shouted at by the retiree's Luddite colleagues when confronted by the new code↑
3. All computer programmers⁴ recognize this requirement. Users supply it disappointingly frequently↑
4. Now termed "developers"↑
5. Naturally this roused my paranoia to new levels, but weeks of testing provoked no anti-programmer demons to manifest↑
6. The original name was too long↑
7. By grabbing someone who doesn't know what I'm doing and explaining the code to them. Works every time↑
8. Now Office 364.5 since it took until lunch time to fix things↑
9. I never learn↑
10. Now I come to read it back, perhaps the subject header could have been better worded↑
11. Which is what I should have done in the first place; turn off the old processes and turn on the new ones from home using the remote access service instead of doing that at work and planning on rolling it back from home↑

Now That's A Pretty Song

We Shall Wear Midnight from Wintersmith by Steeleye Span.

Steeleye Span were at the very leading edge of the wavefront of the modern UK "Folk Rock" scene back in the late 60s through the mid 70s and haven't lost their touch it seems. This 2013 album, inspired by Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching young adult fiction, is a recent find, bought sound unheard and turns out to be a delight from track one through the last one, which happens to be the achingly bittersweet pretty song in question.

In point of fact the entire album is made up of pretty songs, not a clunker in the mix, and has a brief voice-over by Sir Terry himself on one track.

Recommended.

Let The Wind Blow High, Let The Wind Blow Low

So last Thursday saw the arrival of the belated November gales¹.

I arrived home after attending the leaving party for a colleague and found Mrs Stevie lounging about oblivious to the stench of smoke and burning rubber in the living room. I ran around looking for fires but found none, so contented myself with opening a couple of windows to allow some air exchange to happen, putting the stench down to combustion byproducts of yet another "cooking experiment"².

I could still smell burning rubber ten minutes later, so I checked the basement again for a furnace mishap. Finding none I muttered "perhaps I'm having a stroke". Mrs Stevie offered some kind encouragement along the lines of my needing a brain before that could happen, so I decamped outside to see if this was another case of stenches originating in the garage³.

I was testing the air outside with the Steviesnout to eliminate the next door neighbor as a culprit⁴ but the air was clear.

It was while I was engaged in turning around and ingesting large volumes of air snoutwise that I first saw the damage the high winds gusting about had wrought on the fence, which was drooping in a manner that said eloquently that all three non terminal fenceposts had sheared off, and that the fence was now only held together by the half-rotten rails to which the palings were fastened.

I yelled some emergency Class Four Words of Power and dashed for the driveway and the pile of fenceposts replaced after they were sheared-off the last time the wind blew the fence down, put by for just such an emergency.

In a titanic battle of Man Against The Elements In A World Gone Mad I dragged the mighty, half-rotted timbers over to the sagging fence, pushed the fence back to an approximation of upright and braced each snapped off post with an older snapped off post in the manner like that used by the Riders of Rohan to brace the door of Helm's Deep against the Orc Hordes of Mordor in the movie The Two Towers.

This is where Hollywood was shown to be full of bullshirt. When Helm's Deep's front door was braced, it stayed braced and closed in a satisfying and encouraging manner, and did not burst open the wrong way and tear out the hinges. When I used the same technique on the fence, it fell over the other way, requiring me to run around the entire property line to the other side with more antique snapped-off posts and brace it from the other side, whereupon the bracing on the other side fell away and the fence flopped forward again, forcing me to rinse and repeat, all the while being blown hither and yon by the weather. I was soon forced to re-use many of the Class Fours.

Eventually I had the fence secured, but had noticed that the back fence, the one separating me from Crazy Joe, was flapping alarmingly. Upon climbing around one of the bushtrees half killed at Mrs Stevie's request⁵ and almost losing an eye a few times to bare branches I discovered that one (and only one) post had snapped. Could have been much worse.

Unfortunately, that post was directly behind the bushtree and I could only reach it with one hand. Bracing was out of the question because a tree was in the way. Replacing it would also involve deforestation. I realized gloomily. When I put the posts in, I did so from Crazy Joe's side of the property line. That wasn't going to be an option this time. In any case, some sort of immediate Action was Called For, before the wiggling of the fence cause cascade failures.

I realized that I might be able to lash the post to the bushtree and restore at least a semblance of stability to the structure, so I dashed inside and down to the basement o' wonders and rope storage, where not a week before I had seen a coil of the same rope I used to manufacture the Stevieling's tree house ladder. Naturally, this was nowhere to be found this night.

I grabbed a short length of rope I used to deploy the submersible pump and ran outside again, not really with much hope. The rope was too short for the task I needed it for.

It was while doing the Impotent Rage Against The Forces Of Nature Dance that I saw the coil of rope hanging from the swimming pool deck, and so was able to enact plan "Lash The Fence To The Tree Before It bleeping Well Falls Into Crazy Joe's Driveway" after all. This involved my poking one end of the rope between the post and the fence (with the tips of my fingers because the post was just beyond arm's length) while fending off the sharp bits of the vengeful bushtree, then running around the other side to fish it out (with groping fingers because the rope was just beyond arm's length) while fending off the sharp bits of the vengeful bushtree, all by the light of the Moon.

I finally secured the post to the bushtree with five or six turns of the rope, pulling the rope taught by tugging hard with both hands while bracing one foot against the bushtree and chanting the Magic Tightening Words. It was a great triumph, and I turned around to survey the temporary⁶ repairs only to see that all the braces had fallen off the front fence, so I had to go and fix that all over again.

It was all very trying.

1. The same ones that claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald↑
2. The women of Casa Del Stevie are fond of taking foodstuffs and creatively incinerating them fifteen minutes before I get home. After the last effort of The Stevieling I played The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's Fire at her at volume # 11↑
3. Like when the smell of solvents in the basement turned out to be gasoline leaking from the generator in the garage↑
4. He has a cast iron stove as part of his heating solution and has been known to burn some pretty noxious things in the past. Tyres had not featured until then, but there is always a first time↑
5. Mrs Stevie hated the way the previous winter's heavy snows had made the branches of this dendritic evergreen bushthing splay out and demanded I saw them off. It turns out that dendritic evergreen bushthings only grow on the outside of the area swept out by the tree's branches, and once the branches are trimmed back, they never grow in again. We are now the proud possessors of a tree that resembles the tail of an old lady's poodle, green and bushy at the top, ugly and revolting at the bottom. Should've done what I did before and used string to bonsai the damned thing back into shape↑
6. Should be able to replace the posts etc by next summer if the pudding-like ground ever dries out↑

Expecting The Best, Planning For The Worst

Spotted this loose in the wild among the used book vendor product descriptions while browsing Amazon (US site) for Haynes "U-Boats" manual (just out of interest you understand; not actually planning on passing myself off as Commodore Schmidlap and obtaining a non-nuclear submarine with which to terrorize the Atlantic shipping lanes)

Please remember to leave your feedback after your purchase. It helps other Amazon shoppers know we are a responsible and reliable seller. Thanks and we look forward to severing you!

Presumably the vendor also stocks Samurai katanas.

Ever Outwards, Into The Fields Of Suck

So we got back from Florida on Sunday evening, a trip so uneventful¹ that I couldn't be arsed to post about it.

I returned to work on the following Tuesday, to discover that there was still no hot water on my floor, and that inexplicably no-one had burned the place to the ground so we could be relocated to One World Trade Center². A quick e-mail to facilities re: the hot water situation and it was "spend all day emptying my e-mail inbox, flooded with automated messages from some vendor software monitoring tool and therefore unable to send on some crucial business e-mails to me while I was on vacation, so my e-mail would start working again time".

I'd told my employer that I would be out of e-mail range and therefore unable to work while on holiday (a philosophical stance to which I hold firmly) but I'm not so callous as to leave the stand-by guy with no safety net. I had arranged for three of the most important confirmation mailings sent out by scheduled jobs to be forwarded to my own e-mail address, and checked it on a daily basis when I had net access so I could, in an emergency, offer Mr J. On-the-spot some sage advice on where to start looking for holes to plug. I had seen no e-mails at all.

This is because when the vendor-supplied monitoring thing sent a blizzard of useless e-mails to me, each the size of a telephone directory, it filled my meagre in-box probably in hours. The default action in these circumstances is to still accept incoming mail, indeed, to exacerbate the space problem by launching daily "your mailbox is full" mailings from the Administrator, but to shut down outgoing mailings. This had cut off a) me from the information stream and 2) my employers nose from his face.

Now we have an archival "Vault" that is supposed to take the body of these mailings and store them somewhere vast and roomy, leaving only a linking mail in the inbox, but perplexingly it doesn't trigger on a full inbox condition, only on the age of the mailings themselves. Not only that, telling the vault to archive a mailing takes almost 12 hours to actually action the request, so archiving everything for safety was not an option. The metaphor I need here would involve adding a pair of ears to the severed nose lying at my employer's feet by deft self-use of a straight razor.

Given the obstacles placed in my way preventing the job being done the right way, I took my own sweet time figuring out what could be deleted forever.

Wednesday dawned and I was invited to join everyone in celebrating the Chinese Lunar Year by partaking of a luncheon. The group putting this on called for everyone on the umptytump floors to arrive on a staggered schedule. Naturally, everyone but my group went at noon with the result that the line for what was an excellent buffet-style lunch was longer than that I suffered to experience the Despicable Me ride in Universal Studios only a week before.

Work over, I arrived in Wyandanch, perl of the east, in the pouring rain that evening and drove home. There I discovered that sometime during the day an "unhooked phone" situation had developed in Chateau Stevie's voice comms infrastructure. Re-seating each phone didn't fix the problem. Unplugging all the phones didn't isolate the problem. Neither did disconnecting the alarm system from the phone line, once I remembered that was a possible source of problems.

It was all very annoying.

I decamped to the Basement of Crap Storage and traced the place where the one phone line becomes a star topology of individual cables branching all over the house. I'd installed that about twenty years ago using parts from Radio Shack and it had worked flawlessly since. My plan was to disconnect the feed line from the outside of the house and install a jack into which I could plug a phone in order to test the line. Naturally this meant excavating several metric tonnes of crap so I could reach the junction box.

The issue is that the phone company now only takes responsibility for the phone line that arrives at the wall of Chateau Stevie, leaving all internal wiring to Yours Truly. I wanted to get a head start on the inevitable "Not at the pole, your problem" argument that was sure to be used by the phone company technicians by demonstrating that there was no line problem inside the house, or in the event there were, to deal with it quickly.

It was around that time when I remembered that Radio Shack, my go-to source for the little plugs, sockets, wire and so forth I'd need to enact plan Install Another Phone Connection Point To The Outside Line And Demonstrate That All Is Well Inside Chateau Stevie, was no longer in business, at least around me, and that every retail store they'd operated in my locale was a distant memory.

Additionally, although the phone company had been called, and although they had assigned the case to their Ultimate Galactic Top Emergency Awooga Awooga classification, they wouldn't actually have anyone at Chateau Stevie before noon Sunday, and that was before the snow complication.

For late last night it began snowing, and it was snowing even harder this morning when I fired up the fabulous Steviemobile and began what is certain to become a commute I will end up regretting.

I began well by finding I had forgotten my cell phone just as the train began leaving the station with me in it. I didn't think to panic at first, but then the reality set in that the phones at Chateau Stevie are hors de combat and I can't remember anyone's cell phone numbers because I use the autodialer in my cell phone to call them and I don't want to talk aboiut that any more. Then I did the Bonehaed Dance and used some well-chosen Class Two Words of Power (I'd have used Class Threes but there were women present).

Thus reduced to the same levels of family support I'd had in 1984³ I would have to hope that the Steviemobile's traction control and a folding snowshovel would suffice to get me home, and that the Bloody Long Island Railroad cound be relied upon to deliver me back to Wyandanch in a reasonable time-frame.

I'm bleeping doomed.

1. Bar the usual unpleasantness at the entrance to the Goethals Bridge courtesy of one's fellow drivers and the usual Sunday evening traffic jam on the Belt Carpark Parkway courtesy rubbernecking dolts who can't pass even the flashing runway approach lights at JFK without slowing down for a look and apparently have never seen anyone digging their car out of a snowbank with a snowshovel of all things. Thank you bleeping New York Hicks↑
2. You leave them one job ...↑
3. Nil↑

Another Plan Is Shredded

Over the course of Thursday I was put upon by several "well wishers" getting hysterical over the weather situation, all urging me begin our trip on Thursday evening instead of Friday morning.

Naturally I ignored this unseemly panic, putting it down to colonial lack of fortitude and storm panic¹. After a few hours of this I took a look at a few weather websites, just out of interest you understand, and decided that despite my natural tendency of being a center of calm in a maelstrom of panic perhaps I was erring on the side of stiff-upper-lippedness and that an early start would indeed be wise, given the Armageddon levels of snow, ice, sleet, frogs and boils predicted to land on our route south. I called Mrs Stevie and informed her of my decision.

"Thank god you've finally seen sense" she snapped.

So when I got home, naturally events took a turn for the truly naff. First I had to walk the Stevieling through starting the snowblower, resetting the breakers, shutting down the water supply and phoning the furnace repair guy when the heating decides to perform its yearly act of sepuku².

Then I had to deal with that ruddy cabinet. Two of the clips that supported the collapsed shelf had sheared, leaving their mounting pins embedded in the little holes in the cabinet sides. These had to be dug out with a variety of sharp pointy things before I could begin repairs. The Stevieling had scored some new clips with which to repair the collapsed shelf. However, they had oversize pegs so I had to drill out the mounting holes in the cabinet. My drill's battery was, as always, flat, so I had to spend twenty minutes charging it before repairs could commence.

By the time I was done with that I needed a shower, and then I had to pack so it was about 9 pm before we were rolling. I was desperately trying to get some sleep, but Mrs Stevie kept up a barrage of questions until we reached New Jersey, when I snarled at her to stop. The deal was she would drive the first few hours and I would sleep, then we would trade off, but she was cheating.

And it was hell. We traded off in Virginia and I drove through North Carolina, at the far southern edge of which our halfway hotel was waiting for us. Sometime around 5:30 am I was only holding it together with the thought that I only had twenty more minutes of driving to do. Then I realized that I was reading the GPS display incorrectly and in fact there was an hour and twenty minutes to go. I admit morale slumped for a second, but I used all my inner reserves and pulled myself from the pit of desperation.

"Stop that moaning and sobbing!" snarled Mrs Stevie. "I'm trying to sleep! How can I do that if you keep howling "Why me?" every ten seconds?"

We reached the hotel³ around 7:30 am, and were able to get our room so we could sleep away the day. Fortunately there was no-one in it, so the threat of having to find somewhere else to slump until the 4 pm check-in time was abated. The news from New York by then was dire and we took shameful advantage of everyone's sympathy for our driving ordeal by snow.

Mrs Stevie was upset that our room was at the rear of the hotel (where we knew security Klieg Light illumination fallout and idling tractor-trailer noise could be intolerable during the night), but I reassured her that we'd be all right as the room faced away from the offending truck park. As we pulled the covers up to our chins a truck drove up the side road and executed an emergency stop, dumping the contents of the compressed air reservoir in a percussive explosion of sound. To judge by the noise the shifting load made he was hauling scrap bells and cymbals. I cringed and prepared for maximum rage venting but she was already fast asleep. I decided to follow suit.

Four hours left me awake but exhausted. I dared not sleep longer for fear of not being able to sleep that night, and then being dog-tired for the next leg of the drive. We got up and went out for lunch, then frittered away the day exploring Lumberton and its surroundings before turning in again.

We woke to find it was snowing. We checked out of the hotel and had a leisurely breakfast, and were on the road again by 10 am, rather later than we usually set out. By then the snow had stopped, leaving the place looking like it had been frosted lightly with sugar. So much for the Great Lumberton Blizzard of '16.

Light traffic meant that we made good time, arriving at our destination, Orlando, around 5:30 pm. There was the usual back and forth in which timeshare people attempt to get us to sign up for a sales presentation⁴ and we turn them down, and we were finally allowed to go to our villa, unpack and collapse into bed again.

Sunday dawned and we were woken by Mrs Stevie's cell phone. A call from her mother to inform us that her father had died.

My Father-in-Law had suffered an abrupt and severe dip into dementia some months ago. He lost much of his vocabulary and often did not recognize people he'd known for years. He wasn't violent, but he also wasn't the man who had been flabbergasted when I told him I intended to marry his daughter and hoped he'd give us his blessing. That man had left the theater a while back. Sometimes he'd be more lucid than others, but the truth is the road he was on was a cruel one with no good ending. I may be being callous here but I think he was lucky. He died peacefully in his sleep the day before his 86th birthday. He raised three children and had four grand children. I could wish for such a good end.

His will called for his body to be donated to medical science, and my Mother-in-Law had been expecting the event for some time so there was no need nor desire on her part for us to return to New York. So we didn't, which shocked my mother when I called her with the news. As I explained to her the roads wouldn't be clear for days (the road outside Chateau Stevie had yet to be plowed) and we weren't needed.

What I didn't say was that Mrs Stevie is the first-in-line go-to person for all such emergencies in that family, and that part of the purpose of driving to Florida was to give the other in-town sib, Bil-the-Elder, the chance to step up for a bit, which to his credit he did in a heartbeat. In truth I think his father's death hit Bil-the-Elder the hardest.

He and my mother-in-law did call us as we sat at dinner on Tuesday evening, to find out how to spell 'Czechoslovakia' - which was a bit odd given that they have access to a computer with just as much ease as I did at that time. We gave them the answer, which was required for The Mrs Steviedad's death certificate, after firing up our portable hotspot and doing a Google search⁵ because of my many accomplishments, the spelling of Czechoslovakia was not counted among them⁶. Apparently, Mrs Stevie's grandmother had been born in Hungary, like her Grandfather, but a change in national borders had moved her into a much more perplexingly spelled homeland (that no longer exists because of another re-arranging of map borders).

And so the vacation we have been looking forward to for almost a year has been nobbled by bad weather causing us to have to drive through the night, leaving us hobbling about half dead from lack of sleep for days afterward, and the expected, long-overdue, humane yet ill-timed passing of my Father-in-Law, which has naturally left Mrs Stevie feeling both sad at her loss, conflicted over the mercy the death has been for her father (and, by extension, everyone who had feelings for him), and guilt-ridden over her not being there when it happened. Her grieving will be a long process. Mine was short and unexpectedly intense, occurring while Mrs Stevie was taking communion.

We had decided to visit the church for the morning service after she got the news on Sunday. Though I don't have any belief in God or an afterlife, I'm not an evangelical atheist and Mrs Stevie is devout and needed the comfort the service and speaking to a pastor would bring. I normally only attend church at Christmas, for the carol singing. Naturally, I do not take communion.

It was as everyone else was involved in the ritual and looking the other way I was suddenly overcome with a profound sadness, and began crying silently. It was a surprise. My Father-in-Law and I haven't really done much deep bonding since I married his daughter; indeed, we developed a healthy disrespect for each other (for much the same reasons it turns out). Luckily I was able to pull myself together before any Lutherans noticed and attempted "fellowshipping".

And so the holiday began, with me agreeing to two days in Universal Studios in exchange for no other theme parking at all. Monday and Tuesday were forecast to be the only warm, rain-free days before Friday so that's when we went.

Mrs Stevie was anxious to show me the Hogwartz Express ride that links the two Harry Potter themed parts of the parks, but to do that we had to buy a so-called "park-hopper" ticket for me (Mrs Stevie already had a one year pass with some time left on it that would work for her). These are attractively priced at slightly less than a Lear Jet, and so it came to pass that on Monday I was led sobbing, clutching a smouldering wallet and wailing "Why me?" into Universal Studios, Mrs Stevie Alone knows what sub-title, and we made our way to Diagon Alley, which I hadn't seen on account of it not being built the last time I could be persuaded to set foot in a Universal theme park.

I have to say that Universal had finally got the bit between their teeth with the Harry Potter thing, realizing that what Potter-Heads want is not a bunch of roller-coasters dressed up as dragons or griffins and given some daft Harry Potteresque name. No, what these fans want is the opportunity to buy Harry Potter themed memorabilia.

Now in the first Harry Potter themed attraction, Hogsmeade village, there is the admittedly jaw-droppingly accurate rendition of Hogwatrz, which houses a fine simulator ride that allows the riders to feel like they are riding along with the Quiddich-crazed broom-mounted actors. It is, when all is said and done, not bad at all, even for someone who has never read the books and had to be forced to go to the films⁷. The stuff inside to stop those on the hours-long lines from going mad and rioting is of an excellently high quality too. A credit to the engineers and artists involved.

There is, however, a serious lack of expensive theme-bling purchasing places, the market being mostly served by "Olivander's Wand Shoppe", which attempts to make up the difference by selling resin cast wands for about 50 bux⁸. You can find Hogwartz shirts, ties, scarves and hats in the Gifte Shoppe that terminates the ride inside Hogwartz⁹, but that's about it really.

But in Diagon Alley all this has been redressed with not only another Olivander's Wand Shoppe and the inevitable post-Gringotts Bank ride gift shoppe, but also a shoppe that sells everything from the Gift Shoppes attached to the rides and caps and gowns for each of the Hogwatrz Houses and hats of the sort sported by the various teachers that have graced the place. Here we start seeing the proper amount of cosplay leverage being applied.

Another innovation, retrofitted rather half-heartedly to Hogsmeade after being included in the newer Diagon Alley, is the interactive shoppe windowe displayes activated by waving specially-fitted wands in a variety of magical-seeming and Potteresque ways. Each such display is indicated by a brass plaque in the sidewalk containing the particular gesture and "magic" phrase to be uttered in order to make whatever it is do whatever it does. A window display can be made to glisten with lights, rain can be made to fall outside the public conveniences, and so forth. Some of the ideas were quite clever. Some not so much.

We had lunch in "The Leaky Cauldron" in which the food was not very outrageously priced and was of a gratifyingly high quality. Should I ever be back in that park again, I'll be lunching in The Leaky Cauldron and if you are in the park you should too. The food was all of a distinctly English feel - Bangers and Mash, Steak and Lamb stew with Guinness, a huge ploughman's platter. I had the bangers and mash and apart from the fact that it came with a helping of disturbingly healthy steamed vegetables it tasted authentic to me.

After lunch we partook of a number of rides, including the simulator thing built into Gringotts Bank, which was okay, waited in vain for the dragon perched on the bank's roof to breathe fire and went home groaning about ankles and backache.

The next day we attempted to ride the Despicable Me ride. This ride either has hours-long lines or is broken every time we have been in it's vicinity, but today we were goo to go with "only" a forty minute wait. Yazoo!

I should point out that the Despicable Me movies are a guilty pleasure for me. I love them. They are for me what Marks Brothers movies are for others. Visual candy of an irresistible type.

Within forty minutes we were standing next to the doors to the ride. Then came a twenty minute improvised quiz given by the attendants, which largely fell flat on account of the audience being about 90% Brazilians. Since there was no bilingual English/Portuguese presentation provided, this, while merely horrible for us English speakers must have edged into intolerable. I pondered aloud; "I think the ride is broken".

"The ride is broken" came the announcement. "Go away, come back later".

Naturally this produced the most incandescent rage in Mrs Stevie who demanded to know why we should get on line and queue for hours again. She was immediately offered express passes allowing us to cut the lines, but her rage was not abated, even after we rode The Mummy (an excellent ride by the way) with no wait at all. We wandered over to The Simpsons simulator ride (ex-Back To The Future, same motions but different 3D movie playing as they happen) but were told it was down all day for maintenance.

Flames shot out of Mrs Stevie's ears at this news.

I stood well back, then hustled her to the Hogwatrz Quidditch Nonsense, which for a mercy was not only working, it had no lines whatsoever. A ride on that calmed her frazzled nerves and soothed her temper and I suggested we get lunch, which we did in The Three Broomsticks, the other Harry Potter themed restaurant. And the food was not bad at all, though not as stellar as we'd had in The Leaky Cauldron the day before. This restaurant had food more tailored toward an American palette albeit with an overriding "English" feel. Spare ribs and chicken with chips rather than bangers and mash.

We wandered out and rode the train back to Diagon Alley and watched the children having fun. We strolled into the Olivander's Wand ten minute participation theater thingy, in which children get to re-enact the wand-buying process from the first Harry Potter movie aided by actors and special effects. If you have kids or have had them, you'll get this thing. If not, not so much. We were in there with only one other family, so the boy and girl got to do the magic wand waving and were the stars of a small show. Mrs Stevie was smiling sadly at the end, and I realized once we were out of there that we were both intensely missing the young Stevieling, who lived for this sort of manufactured magical experience and brought a massive buy-in with her.

Mrs Stevie was looking about with such a lost expression on her face that nothing would do but that I march her into the gown store to get properly attired and thence to Olivanders to acquire a Shoppe Dysplae Actyvatione Wande. There we selected a suitable model from the bewildering collection of differently shaped wands.

And so it was that I got to walk around aimlessly watching the properly robed Mrs Stevie behave like a big kid, waving her wand at various books and scrolls and posters and I don't know what-all else, bringing thunder and rain or a disconcerting blast of frigid air here, animating a large poster depicting a skeleton or making the quidditch ball set levitate there. Brass frogs were made to spit water, fairytale books were made to open and reveal telescoping 3D tableaux, and a bunch of singing shrunken heads were magically silenced. My legs hurt as they always do when I have to walk slowly or stand about for long periods¹⁰ but for once it was worth it to see Mrs Stevie enjoying herself without recourse to lethally strong coffee.

And to top it off the dragon perched on the roof of the bank was breathing fire very impressively every five minutes or so.

And I have to say that the set dressing involved in the Harry Potter parts of the park is of exceptional quality. They've gone all-out to make it as believable as it could be, given that the premise is so darn silly. Dumbledore lectures people in line, the newspapers on the walls can be read and the pictures in them are animated. The paintings on the wall all address the people in line and argue with each other, and although that trick is Old Hat - I first saw this sort of thing in the Disney Haunted House ride - it is all very convincing.

I was completely worn out by the time we decided to try and ride that Despicable Me thing again, and the line for the train back to the other park was long and involved long flights of stairs. Luckily, one of the staff saw us and, probably taken in by Mrs Stevie's costumed elegance and smiling face¹¹ and perhaps by my moans of distress, offered to move us up to the platform in the lift provided for people with strollers, wheelchairs or scooters¹². This was good on two levels. A) No stairs and 2) We jumped about two hundred people in line.

So a word about the Hogwartz Express. You board it on the Despicable Me/Men-in-Black/Simpsons side at Kings Cross station, and a Pepper's Ghost arrangement means that as you step under an arch you seem to pass through a brick wall just as they did in one of those movies. The trick here is to play to the crowds and mug for the people who can actually see the magic happening. My favorite way of wowing the crowd is to walk backwards, giving a jaunty wave. The cries of amazement from the onlookers are a nice reward for one's theatricality, and help mask the cries of alarm of those children one steps on because one can't see them.

The ride itself is a rather fine mock-up of an old Great Western 'Castle Class' locomotive Hogwartz Castle and some corridor coaches. The passengers are boarded eight to a compartment and when the train sets out a very convincing series of scenes is shown through the window of London and the Hogwartz environs while the frosted glass between the corridor and the passengers is used to show a shadow show telling a story involving Harry, Ron and Hermione. You get a different show depending on which direction you are traveling. It is all rather clever.

And we got to ride the Despicable Me 3D ride, which was working and was fun¹³ and is recommended to anyone who enjoys the movies. Like everything else in both the parks, the ride is too short for the wait normally involved, but that is now the norm. Only you can tell if any theme park experience is worth however long the lines are. I draw the line¹⁴ at an hour.

Anyway.

That was our theme park quota for this visit. It was all gravy from then on, with much lazing around and some quality kissy-face predicted on account of all the robe and wand buying that had gone before. What could go wrong?

The Stevieling called two days later to tell me the furnace had shut down.

I told her to deploy a small electric heater and to call our go-to guy. Who didn't respond to several calls, so we looked up other options. One of those did respond and said they'd send someone around at three.

At two thirty, the Stevieling called to say she'd blown a breaker by running the heater on the same ciruit as the microwave, then making some sort of melty-cheesy thing. I never was clear on the details, but decided after three or four minutes of confusing cell phone mediated back-and-forth that the recipe involved was non-germane and did the dja-dja-dja-dja-dja Grimace Chant and the Wavy Hand Jive of Let's Forget This Bit And Move On. Naturally, although I had walked her through the process of resetting the breakers before I left, I had to do it all over again over the phone because she was so nervous she had forgotten everything we spoke about.

At three the furnace repair guy showed up and I got a call so he could explain his theory, which was "the pilot light has gone out and I'll charge 149 bux to relight it".

I said "Fine, but you should know that this furnace has had this problem many times before, and every time the pilot has shut down because of a failed thermocouple".

He opined that it might be the case, but he felt that the wind might have just blown out the pilot.

I said "Fine. But in the last twelve years this furnace has had eight thermocouple failures. I'm told by the guys that have serviced the furnace that this particular model is known for eating thermocouples. This was not mentioned by the people who sold it to me of course. So, for my own peace of mind would you please fit a new thermocouple before you re-light the pilot?"

He waffled for a bit, made some comment about the position of the pilot and thermocouple and agreed to add a new thermocouple to the bill, which he'd have to call home for the cost to install. He then pointed out that there might be more things hiding behind a failed thermocouple that could not be detected until the thermocouple had been replaced. I told him I understood that, mentally preparing myself for job escalation and bill inflation

Long story short he replaced the thermocouple, everything started working, and I was another 400 bux light in the purse. I got this news as we drove to dinner, which was marred for some fellow diners by the toxic stench coming off my credit card and the litany of class two Words of Power I occasionally snarled to no-one in particular.

And tomorrow we drive home. What new ambushes does life have in store for us?

1. The ailment that causes people to run to the supermarket and buy up all the toilet paper upon being informed that rain is expected↑
2. Which, as it happens, was Thursday morning around 8 am↑
3. In Lumberton, North Carolina↑
4. These are actually getting annoying. It used to be "Are you interested in Theme Park tickets?" and we'd say "No" and that was that. Now they won't give us the parking pass until the power sell has been attempted. Only when I said "I'm sorry ma'am, but we've had about five hours sleep in the last thirty six and my temper isn't what it might be as a result" that we were given the vital document and allowed to go on our way↑
5. We not having had the perspicacity to carry a Websters Dictionary with us at all times↑
6. Curiously, I now find I can spell Czechoslovakia with relative ease, but have forgotten how to operate a slide rule. This Means Something↑
7. What Mrs Stevie calls a "sour-faced curmudgeon"↑
8. Which isn't bad if you are a Harry Potter cosplayer I suppose. Serious money changes hands in the Star Trek cosplay hobby↑
9. All rides in Universal Studios exit through a gift shop↑
10. The front of my thighs go numb, but first they hurt like hell. This started in the late 80s. I've had tests, but no diagnosis↑
11. And the fact we are obviously seniors by our matching silver hair↑
12. The electric sort↑
13. Though not as much fun as it would have been eight hours earlier↑
14. Ahahahahaha!↑

Delays and Disasters

So today is my last day of work before taking a "restful" vacation with Mrs Stevie in Florida, and events are already conspiring to make of this a classic trip.

We will be making the trip over two days, starting on Friday. Mrs Stevie wants to get to our mid-trip hotel sometime around 11 am apparently. I surmise this from her statement on Tuesday: "I want to be on the road by 5 am".

Mrs Stevie takes vacation transit issues seriously and always has us moving to a chorus of owl hoots and bat squeaks. Even if the trip is from our timeshare to some "attraction", a trip which can be no more than about an hour in almost every case and is usually on the order of ten to twenty minutes, we must be moving before dawn. There is no reasoning with the woman on this. One can only flatly refuse or place impossible conditions on one's acceptance of the start time.

"I'll do it provided you have packed before midnight Thursday" I said, choosing the latter stratagem.

Mrs Stevie opened her mouth to say "all right" but I cut in: "Because in all the years we've been together, not once have you scheduled me for an early rise without then crashing around the domicile until 2 am packing. I can't get any sleep while you are doing this. If you do it this time I'm staying in bed until I feel like travelling."

Of course she agreed, and of course she will renege on the deal and get bad tempered when I am moving at less than Startled Jack Rabbit speed two hours after she has finished packing.

"I'll drive the first leg" she offered, which means I'll be tired and forced to suffer her infuriating foot-on-the-gas, foot-off-the-gas driving that has me nauseous in about five minutes and screaming "For the love of bleep use the bleeping cruise control!" shortly thereafter. She will be snotty after this "incomprehensible" behavior and end up demanding that I drive if I don't like the way she does it.

I cannot sleep in cars at the best of times. I could not sleep in a parked car in a dark parking garage having been up for thirty six hours straight after the Great East Coast Power Cut of Whenever-It-Was. Why she thinks I will welcome the chance to try as the rising sun slants directly into my eyes while she is engaged in stress testing the accelerator cable linkages during the Southern State Parkway Grand Prix is beyond me.

Anyway.

I arrived home last night (Wednesday) to find her madly perusing weather websites while the weather channel blasted out from the TV. I knew from my Weather App that there was a snow storm forecast to be moving North on Friday. Naturally. This was not an unexpected turn of events, for I can tell when Evil Spirits have begun to interfere in the doings of man, at least, when they are interfering in the doings of this one.

"I'm thinking we should start our trip on Thursday night" she said avoiding eye contact.

"Absolutely not!" I responded.

I had no intention of driving through the night after a hard day at work dealing with the insane stuff people dream up as urgent requests despite having been reminded several times in writing that I am going on vacation and not to wait to give me their complex, error-prone stuff but to let me have it while there is a chance I can actually get it done and working as they want¹.

"But there's snow predicted for Friday" she wailed.

"Friday evening. We'll be long gone before then" I said.

"Friday evening in New York!" she riposted. "We'll be driving through falling snow in Washington DC!"

I should explain, lest the fiendishness of this ploy is lost on the reader. Mrs Stevie was trying to raise the spectre of 1996, when we were trapped for three days in the snow-bound capitol and nearly went mad from being forced into each other's company. She was looking for me to scream and agree to her idiot Start Driving Last Week plan in knee-jerk reaction to the trauma that other experience induced in us both. Sadly for her I am made of sterner stuff.

"Nope. We will drive as planned and hope for the best. I don't care if glaciers are calving icebergs into the Potomac. I am as firm as the Rock of Gibralter on this. Have you started packing yet?"

That last bit was the deflector shield against further improvisational travel planning, as I knew she had not. I decided to shut down the discussion by asking if she had actually cleaned all the crap out of her bus yet. She uses the thing like a shed-on-wheels and until the piles of whatever had been moved out we couldn't move our luggage in.

"Yes" she snapped to that and that was the last I heard about driving through the night. Triumphant in my having triumphed, I wandered into the kitchen.

"Stop that screaming" snapped Mrs Stevie. "The Stevieling discovered that one of the little plastic wotsits that keeps the shelves in place had disintegrated. She was afraid the shelf would collapse and so unloaded all the mugs, cups, plates, saucers, bowls, commemorative soup tureens, anvils, sash-weights and stirrup-cups onto the stove-top. And every other available flat surface. I call it very responsible of her."

I deliver what the women of the house are pleased to call "the rant" about once a month on the lack of accumen displayed by people who load kitchen cupboards with heavy crap with no thought to the consequences despite the events of family history specifically pertaining to the inevitable outcome of such behavior. We actually had a cabinet tear itself from the wall and disintergrate messily some years ago because of the sheer number of jars of liquified foodstuffs placed therein, heaviest stuff to the front of course².

Despite this, I still find heavy crap stocked at the outside edge of a shelf instead of snugged up to the wall³ and three times more stuff in any cupboard than it can safely support. Most of the cupboards are so full of crap no-one knows what the hell is at the back anyway, and so that stuff is more properly thought of archival weight than, say, tinned potatoes with a sell-by date somewhere in the middle of the Clinton administration.

In the bedrooms the technique is to cram drawers full of clothes until they won't close, then cram more stuff in them, then push them closed while ramming the clothes down "so they'll fit". The clever part is then acting surprised when the bottom of the drawer explodes out of its frame. This usually ends up locking up that drawer and the one below it. In the past I've had to remove all the undamaged drawers above an awe-inspiringly overpacked one so I can remove the debris a bit at a time, eventually excise the sqaure frame of wood left over so I can dismantle it and make it into a drawer again.

In the Basement of Crap we see a different variation on the technique. Here we may find many examples of cardboard boxes stacked one upon another with nil regard for the contents of each nor the admittedly staggering load-bearing properties of cheap corrugated cardboard. Thus a box of anvils and anchors will be at the top of a five box stack, and the now collapsed-flat box of treasured heirloom glass Christmas tree ornaments inhertited from a Great Grandmother at the bottom.

So I decamped for Home Despot to see if I could find some replacement shelf clips. I wandered around the place to no good effect while the PA announced at regular intervals that they were closing soon. I found hinges and door knobs and drawer slide hardware but no shelf clips. Nor did I find any Home Despot staff to help me shorten my search. I don't know why I bother with our local Home Despot anyway, since it almost never has everything I'll need to do a specific job. If I need a broom they will have broom heads but no handles. If I need to replace a piece of plumbing they will have everything but one component absolutely essential for the job at hand. Half the time the aisles I need to use are blocked off with concertina gates so stock can be ruined by careful use of a forklift anyway.

This morning, Thursday, I arose early after a disturbed sleep. I had woken up around 2:30 am with what to others might feel like an anxiety attack but which I know of old is the opening chords of Pancreatitis Symphony of Agony, Opus 1, Number 13 on your songsheets. No worries, I would just go on a liquid diet for a couple of days and forestall the screaming, thrashing around and begging for death's sweet embrace⁵ these attacks always induce. Of course, the prospect of the resulting bladder chaos while attempting an epic transit of Interstate 95 was not lost on me, but needs must when the anti-holidaymaking demons have crapped in your shoes.

So I was tired and not at all in the mood to hear Mrs Stevie's jaunty "The Ronkonkoma line LIRR service is suspended" as I made my way toward the shower. Yes, once again one of the IQ Brigade had parked his or her car on the tracks and learned that they were still in use even though just a minute or two before there was no train in sight.

Naturally this had happened in the single track section, and naturally this had meant not allowing trains through the wreckage field until every police officer on duty had had a look. Trains had been lollygagging around waiting for a gap to be made in the twisted remains of the car and for everyone to please get out of the way since 6:40 am, around the time I was running "Stevie Among The Cavewomen⁶" in Mr Brain to help offset the prospect of driving through a blizzard with pancreatitis and Mrs Stevie both giving me what-for.

Mrs Stevie kicked The Stevieling out of bed with instructions to drive me to, and I quote, "anywhere you need to go", before decamping for her own place of work with the usual salvo of slammed doors. The temptation to order the young woman to take me to JFK and a waiting flight to Tahiti was momentarily overwhelming, but I told her I'd drive to Babylon and sent her back to bed. The poor thing had been up half the night texting, after all.

I drove to Babylon, to the small pay-to-park carpark I found a while back, grabbed my trusty Altoids Tin O' Quarters from the well of junk under the dashboard and made my way to the computerised ticket generation machine, where I found an SUV marked for the Babylon Town Parking Enforcement Militia, with two crew crouching inside. They were parked so as to be looking directly at the machine, obviously hoping people would assume they were there in the event of a problem with the machine, but I surmised they were on a mission much more sinister.

The process is as follows. You park your car in a yellow numbered stall. If the number is unmarked or has a red number, you won't be able to buy a ticket for it. Some assume this means Free Parking, leap into the air, click their heels and cry "Yazoo! One in the win column" before sprinting for their train, some quarter mile or so away.

A sad mistake.

For those spaces are reserved for others, those too exalted to require payment for their parking needs. Red spaces are for firemen (I believe). Unmarked spaces are for people on town business or permit holders or whomever. Just not for the likes of me.

So, once at the machine you must remember the number of the stall you parked in, optionally sprinting back to your car to find out what it is. I recommend taking a photo with your phone so this scenario is not repeated several times. Then, you punch in the number using the machine's keypad and, when prompted, feed the machine quarters until you've paid for your anticipated stay, judging this by the listed costs and the displayed amount the machine thinks you've deposited.

Naturally the height of the machine and the position of the rising sun are all arranged to make this more difficult than it strictly needs to be. If you've done everything right the machine gives you a paper receipt which may be produced and waved indignantly when you are dunned for parking violation fines.

Now I believe that the machine rats-out those who use it, broadcasting the space number to waiting Babylon Town Enforcement Drones, so that they might, for example, mosey over and check all the stickers on your windshield say what they are supposed to say. Many an innocent driver, pushed for time and caught between working to feed and house a bunch of shelf-overloading ingrates or taking a day off to attend to piffling New York State law requirements like vehicle inspections, has returned home in the late evening to find a piece of expensive paper slid under his windshield wiper.

Well those two will be on a hiding to nowhere since everything is in order on the fabulous Steviemobile, down to the now-useless parking permit issued by the Town of Babylon but no good for this car park in the Town of Babylon. To them I say: get a real job, one you can tell your neighbors about without them slashing your tyres while you watch TV at night.

And so it was that I got to ride to work on a clean train with clean, unripped seats, which ran on wheels approximating roundness in shape, on an elevated track safe from the incomprehensible parking habits of morons.

1. As opposed to the way they said it should in their dimwit user request↑
2. Where the laws of physics can work their best↑
3. The Mrs Stevie Method of Shelf Loading makes the shelf or cupboard a crowbar with which to tear out the screws holding it to the wall. Moving heavy crap in toward the wall reduces the so-called moment arm involved dramatically, changing the dominant Destructo Forces from tensile, pulling forces into shear forces attempting to snap the screws off laterally⁴. It is the difference between undoing the wheel nuts on your car using only your fingers, and doing so by using a tyre-iron, standing on the end and bouncing up and down while chanting the magic wheel nut-losening words↑
4. Which may be accomplished by simply using enough heavy crap to do the job↑
5. Not joking here. This is about as painful as I can imagine anything being; anything that leaves you capable of explaining matters to anyone within hearing range anyway↑
6. A sleazy story of time travel, with much nudity and gratuitous goings-on out of sight of Mrs Stevie↑

Another Tedious Year Begins Tediously

So I decided to take a few days off around Xmas and New Year.

Not like I would have done in my youth in the UK, where it would have been a from-the-day-before-Xmas-eve-through-a-couple-of-days-after-New-Year's-Day affair¹ of drinking and driving and trying to get snogged by a disappointingly short list of candidates², but I was looking forward to kicking back and maybe doing some lazy board-gaming with some pals while my Carpal Tunnel issues played an accompaniment on my radial nerves.

Fortunately, this planned period of creative inactivity and light to moderate medical distress was interrupted and replaced by something infinitely more tedious when one of the downstairs bathroom walls showed signs of shedding a huge section of tiles. The new grout cracked, and when I finally couldn't pretend not to notice it any more and gave the tiles a poke, a three foot on a side square of tiles moved back and forth so as to suggest a prime development space had become available for an ambitious young patch of mildew looking to expand rapidly in an area of low competition for resources. "How lucky for me" I thought and spent Xmas deciding what to do³. Then Mrs Stevie noticed and announced that Something Must Be Done Immediately (Idiot).

So I started by numbering the tiles with a sharpie so I'd know how they used to be arranged.

I've been in the position of having to re-use removed infrastructure before and know well that no matter how well the old parts are cleaned up and made as good as new as can be managed⁴ they never regain their "universal fit" qualities but instead form a fiendish jigsaw that resists going back together even if the parts are placed exactly as they came off - because some of what is going on involves flat sides becoming tapered requiring ingenious 3D assembly techniques and a large vocabulary of exotic language.

I refer my readers⁵ to the nonsense I had to go through one Martin Luther King Day when the previous evening's howling gale had torn off the siding from the house and strewn it about the lawns before dumping damp snow on it and then freezing it all into one 30 ft by 15 ft diorama for a description of the process when ad-lib techniques must be used. Suffice to say it is not a process to be adopted voluntarily.

Once I had a 6 tile by 6 tile square marked out archaeologist-style (the size determined by scientific poking to see when the wall stopped moving about and behaved like a wall again) I used Mr Dremel tool fitted with a special attachment and a carbide bit to clean out the cracked grout so I could prise out the tiles.

I broke the bit.

So I departed in a cloud of Class Two Words of Power to Home Despot and bought two new bits, which showed me just how expensive carbide tool bits can be when I scanned them at the self-serve checkout. Fortunately no children were harmed by my surprised vocal reaction to the price demanded, though I had to defend myself against a trumped-up charge of shattering a box of light bulbs placed some ten feet away from the checkout and my tinnitus started acting up again. I returned to Chateau Stevie triumphant, credit card smoking, and changed out the broken bit for one of the new ones and started in on the grout again.

I broke the bit.

So I fitted the Dremel with the third bit and that one lasted until the end of the job. Mrs Stevie demanded to know why I was crying as I worked and I explained the cost that had been exacted on my wallet due to premature bit failure. Fortunately I was already half deaf from the tinnitus and the earsplitting shriek of the Dremel tool in the confined space otherwise Mrs Stevie's surprised vocal reaction would have done serious damage to my hearing.

As it was all that happened was that another row of tiles loosened up on a different wall. By then I was too overcome with emotion to invest any more at this foul turn of luck. Mrs Stevie grabbed the receipt for the bits and departed vowing to replace the defective parts⁶. Tool working (and working well I should say), Mrs Stevie snarling at someone else; the day was beginning to look up. In quite a short while, all things considered, I had all the grout that was going to yield to the Dremel out from between the tiles and was able to carefully prise one gently out from the matrix for examination.

Three dozen tiles cascaded into the bottom of the bath, mixing themselves face-down quite thoroughly in a manner not unlike casino card dealers use in games of poker. It is a genuine miracle none of the bloody things broke. My guess is all the shrieking had driven off the evil spirits infesting the tilework. Either that, or Entropy was as taken by surprise as I was by the debacle and forgot to have a say in things.

That made three pieces of luck that day: a) No breakages, 2) I had evaded the usual Brain ambush and numbered the tiles before they perpetrated their mutinous dash from the tyranny of vertical imprisonment and þ) Mrs Stevie was so busy giving some poor innocent at Home Despot what for that she was out of theater and in no position to offer her usual hurtful commentary on the sudden out-of-plan excursion events had taken. Result.

So I carted the tiles downstairs and cleaned off the remnants of the old glue and at least three different types of grout - one of which seemed to be made from concrete and guano and had the hardness of diamond - using my table sanding machine. Of course, my shop vac was upstairs because I had used it to suck up all the non-tile debris as I worked, and the thought of wrestling the damned thing back downstairs again to use for dust collection duties and then back upstairs for more debris containment as project Glue The Tiles Back On The Wall Again progressed was so unutterably repugnant that I decided the hell with it and simply donned a respirator mask and cleaned up the tiles in an atmosphere of finely ground dust.

It added a frisson of danger to the whole affair, as both the furnace and water heater were still active and I had no idea if one or more of the components of the fine dust now hanging everywhere would prove to be essentially long chain unsaturated hydrocarbons like flour or sugar or coal. If this were the case, the moment the thermostat⁷ tripped and the burners ignited I would be carried from this earthly domain in a bright flash, the sound of a thousand heavenly whale-sized tubas and more thermal expansion than would normally be judged to be a good idea in a confined basement. I idly wondered if I would notice, or would consciousness flee instantly as Mr Brain was dashed into soup and sprayed hither and yon and serve the bugger right if you ask me.

I might have pursued these cerebral pontifications on matters of celestial philosophy and stuff to the point of achieving True Enlightenment had I not fed my thumb into the sanding machine and achived a new record for the number of Class Four Words of Power shouted into a full-face respirator in a single minute instead. Still, one must take the victories life offers I suppose.

Having cleaned the tiles of what detritus I could and having distributed it in a fine layer over everything in the basement including a pile of freshly laundered, er, laundry, I returned to the bathroom in order to assess the state of the wall and see why the glue had failed in the first place. It seemed that the glue, an adhesive undoubtedly made of chemicals banned these days either because of the frightful danger they pose to humans merely by coming under observation, or because of the protected and/or extinct nature of the animals ground up to make them, had simply stopped being glue.

The wall was also not suitable by today's standards as a bathroom wall either, in that it was ordinary gypsum board and not backer board, nor had it been treated in any way to make it resistant to damp. It was, however, completely undamaged, with only a tiny colony of mould starting which I exterminated with bleach. I reasoned that the wall had served for about fifty years as it was so it would make it for another year (the bathroom is scheduled for complete replacement) and I would simply use more modern glue known to cause cancer in rats in California. Which is what I did, my not being in California nor caring overmuch about the health of rats.

Combing on the glue into the almost square but not quite patch of wall (a couple of tiles had bravely clung on when the rest had moulted) was challenging for Mr Back, who wasn't slow in telling me about that, but eventually I had about twice as much glue on the wall as was called for. Well, it was the first time I'd ever done this. You think you can do better, turn up the next time the wall collapses. Then I started fitting the tiles back into place.

As I said before, I wasn't so naive as to think that the small bits of cement-like grout I couldn't shift from the edges of some of the tiles wouldn't have an effect on the business out of all proportion with the amounts of material involved, and if I could have got the stuff to shift I would have but needs must when one's luck is blowing from the septic tank vent so I took the precaution of working from the outside of each line of tile in to the center, and was rewarded with having to spring each final pair into place as I had expected. I was delighted that the vertical spacing was preserved, so that the last row of tiles actually fit without my having to pull off all the lower courses again and get glue all over everything, which is par for the course.

True, there were a couple of places where the tile went back very slightly crooked but the way things were there was no room to use the spacers I had bought to impose linear order to things. These are little plastic crosses that one places in any of a number of clever ways to keep tiles looking neat as you lay them. The problem here was that a) there was still some traces of old grout where the plastic needed to seat and 2) these tiles were so old they had moulded in spacers. You don't see these any more, but it used to be that some tile brands had little nubs on two of their four sides so that they self-regulated their spacing. These had become apparent when I started in with Mr Table Sander and were a major cause of everything now being harder than strictly called for.

I stuck sheets of polythene over the tiles and took a shower and joined Mrs Stevie for some well-earned New Year's Eve snacks. Time was, we'd have had about 8 people in to share these but as time has gone on the couples we used to invite have less time and less inclination to spend it with us. A shame, but there you go. I used to enjoy those New Year's Eve parties and the New Year's Day brunch after. Mrs Stevie was getting sick anyway. The Stevieling had a party to go to so it was just us. We sat and bickered while we binge-watched some Netflix show or other⁸ and ate cheeses of all nations but mostly America and nibbled on salty pepperoni and drank wine. This resulted in me getting a ferocious dehydration hangover, so the evening wasn't a total loss.

I used part of the evening to re-string the bag of the kite The Stevieling had given me using purple paracord originally intended as improvised Japanese-style wardrobe for Mrs Stevie but re-purposed for anything else but that after I had shared the idea with her and we'd had a frank exchange of views on the subject of string bondage lingerie.

New Year's Day dawned and I grouted the wall (again) and dealt with that other line of loose tiles dislodged by acoustic shock using a technique known as "the bodge job". It's still holding so job done. The Stevieling demanded I get the shower back in commission as I was working,. She sounded just like her mother, which brought a tear to my eye. She distracted me just enough for me to run the frantically spinning carbide blade of the grout remover over the back of my hand. The resulting Medical Grade Words of Power - deployed in to cauterize the wound before the blood could get in the grout and discolor it - drove her from the room and removed the need for tedious explanations. One in the win column, there.

I stuck up more plastic to keep water out of everything and retired to the sofa to drink Southern Comfort and play Nintendo, which is what I should have been doing for two days already.

1. I once attended a week-long party in this period in which the party-goers simply moved to the next house on the itinerary and went home briefly to wash and change sometime in each afternoon when no-one was looking. Come to think of it, one event from that is worth a Tales From Someone Else's Misspent Youth post, so watch this space↑
2. Over the years I learned to save my eardrums by careful observation of my intended target before suggesting some light to moderate germ-swapping, but my judgement was often badly impaired by the spirituality of the season and generous applications of rum in my late teens and I spent more than one Xmas Holiday suffering damage like unto that incurred by attending a Hawkwind concert↑
3. These things must not be rushed↑
4. A process experience shows starts well but gradually becomes subject to lower and lower standards as the utter tedium of the job starts to eat into the old brain↑
5. Both of them↑
6. It is easy to overwork Dremel wheelpoints, to give them their correct name, but I've been using the tool for nearly 30 years and am aware of its limitations and the best practices when using it. Not only that, I had read and understood the instructions for once↑
7. Or whatever the device that does the same job in the water heater is called↑
8. Honestly can't remember which ones. We'd already done Broadchurch Mk2 and River and abandoned Haven in disgust so it wasn't any of them↑

Post Xmas Status Report 2015

Ho! Ho! Ho!
Look At This Visa Bill!

Life has been possessed of a particularly piquant bouquet of suck of late.

Item 1) Chateau Stevie Dilapidation Study.

Subsection 1): Ceilings - all showing critical levels of paint leprosy. Urgent repainting required sometime around the summer. Of 2013.

Subsection 2): Upstairs Bathroom - Bathing facility still waiting any sort of action. Now almost two years sans shower or bath up there. Tiles piled in garage along with cement and grout. Management beginning to suspect talk of carpal tunnel woes are variation of lead swinging.

Actuality is hands really hurt and I'm dithering over the matter of needing a new valve body for new taps that don't stick and do other annoying stuff. Also, walls too far out or pipes too far in. Tiles will result in taps being behind wall. This judged to be sub-optimal for actual bathing use in simulations. Action is called for, but not in title case.

Subsection 3): Downstairs Bathroom - Wallpaper peeling and mouldy. Metal "temporary" drop ceiling fixtures rusting. Metal door jambs¹ rusting. Fixtures and fittings banged up and in urgent need of replacement. Recently re-grouted tiles now falling from wall and in urgent need of being glued back again before they fall out during Mrs Stevie's ablutions. Basically, if it isn't mouldy it's rusty. Crisis imminent. Awooga!

Subsection 4): Living Room Hardwood Floor - in urgent need of either sanding and re-varnishing or covering up with a carpet and never being spoken of again. Action is called for.

Subsection 5): Kitchen - Not falling down or rusting². Can be left for another year.

Subsection 6): Office - cannot be entered owing to amounts of crap littering the place. Needs emptying and stripping pending being converted into something useful for Azathoth's sake. Can be left indefinitely

Subsection 7): Upstairs bedrooms - Source of constant arguments between me and Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling. Nothing gets done and the women don't take my threats seriously, which is a strategic mistake on their part, as they are about to find out. Action pending receipt of Amazon order for pitchfork, barbecue starter fluid and long-reach strike anywhere fireplace matches.

Subsection 8): Exterior - not too bad if you don't count the garage door³ or the fence⁴.

Item 2) The Incompetence Of The Long Island Rail Road.

Subsection 1): Timeliness - They haven't got any. Late trains are now the norm on the Ronkonkoma branch.

Subsection 2): Common Sense - They haven't got any of this either. They continue to prioritize eastbound trains through the single track chicane that runs from Pinelawn through Wyandanch to Deer Park even when peak traffic is competing for the route in the westbound direction. Late eastbound trains in the morning inconvenience very few off-peak travelers. Late westbound trains in the morning disrupt the peak traffic patterns for not only the Ronkonkoma branch but also the extremely popular Huntington Branch and the Oyster Bay branch too. This situation is blamed on "congestion in the single track section" but is actually more accurately attributed to congestion in whatever passes for a brain in the LIRR's dispatcher's office.

Subsection 3): Chutzpah - they have plenty of this, proudly proclaiming that trains are running "on or close to schedule" on the P.A. System as if that were something that needed to be waved about on a working rail transit system.

Item 3): Xmas.

Subsection 1): The Stevieling - made out like a bandit this year despite my announcing that because I'd forked over for yet another extremely expensive unexpected job on her car⁵ I would not be going crazy buying presents. Mrs Stevie compensated for this - and I quote - "Scrooge-like behavior" by showering her with gifts from Santa⁶. The kid seemed happy. Anyway, she deserved some reward for being put in charge of making the dead sections of Mrs Stevie's indoor shrub of festive merriment light up. I let her quit after five hours and seventy replaced bulbs, and just turned the tree around so the dark bit faced the wall.

Subsection 2): Mrs Stevie - got theater tickets for shows all so popular the tickets must be paid for with human limbs, wireless headphones for the TV so that she can watch while I'm trying to sleep in the front bedroom and the Hallmark dolls house tree ornament for this year, part of a collection I've been contributing to for 28 years. The Stevieling contributed some really neat stuff, combining store bought items with artistic presentation in a stunningly original way. She won Xmas this year by sneakily adding talent to the competition, which I think you'll agree was a low blow.

I got both of them T-Shirts from The Chipshop (a UK-style pub in Brooklyn) and placed giant musical singing bows⁷ on the boxes that jiggled about and sang of the delights inside the gift wrapping they were attached to, but her box of roses that was really candy and tissue paper beat me to the Oscar this year.

Subsection 3): Me - I got Hess Trucks even though Hess doesn't have many gas stations hereabouts since the Speedway merger and you couldn't buy the trucks at the one Hess gas station I know of anyway, since they were an Internet Only deal⁸.

I also got a kite I had ordered and handed to the Stevieling upon receipt instructing her to wrap it as her Xmas gift to me, thereby saving herself some much-needed cash. This she did, pausing only to cut the paracord drawstring of the storage bag in about six places in the process. I reassured her that it didn't matter and moved on.

Mrs Stevie gave everyone books about wildlife that have "polarized glass" motion pictures⁹ which show animations of each animal - cheetahs running, octopuses squishing in and out in that fascinating yet disgusting way they do, polar bears leaping into water in order to bite chunks out of sea lions and so forth. Very spiffing indeed.

We also all got English-style Cadbury's chocolate cookies, chocolate fingers and so on from Santa, so the results of my blood work this quarter should throw Doc Rubberglove into a tizzy.

The Stevieling gave me the Lego Movie Wii game, but it turned out that it only works on the Wii U. Nothing would suffice but that I immediately order a Wii U from Amazon so that the child would not be devastated, a selfless act on my part that was the proximate cause of some hurtful words at my expense from Mrs Stevie insinuating a hidden agenda. I pointed out that I had only expected the kite and that would have sufficed, but that now I had the game I could not break the Stevieling's heart by returning it. Mrs Stevie harrumphed a lot but couldn't come up with a counter-argument and so I won and Everything Is Awesome.

Mrs Stevie gave me an aviator's watch, saying it would be better for when we went out than my Casio PAG240¹⁰.

It is dead neat, with a flyback 12 hour stopwatch for doing fancy navigation work in the old Electra while traversing the rainforest canopy above Brazil in search of this or that lost city, and a sliderule bezel that not only lets one calculate square roots when the whim strikes but can convert many everyday amounts – European Kg to proper Lbs and so forth - and should one be aloft in a Sopwith Camel with only a sight-glass fuel gauge it allows one to figure out how many gallons of gas one has left given the fuel weight in lbs one started with and the duration of the flight.

The bezel is a bit stiff, but I suspect the silicone grease in the o-ring has dried up. I shall have the bezel removed and the o-ring re-greased as a priority so that I may be ready for any aviation-related adventures that crop up.

Item 4): General health.

Subsection 1): Me - my hands hurt all the time and I can't get a decent night's sleep because of it. Doc Rubberglove says I need access to prescription drugs my insurance plan doesn't cover. So much for "the best health care system in the world" (although that is a Republican mantra I haven't heard in a while - maybe they've figured out that a healthcare system no-one can afford can't possibly be labeled "the best in the world" or maybe they read my post about their having Taxpayer-Funded Healthcare For Life and are afraid that catchphrase might get picked up by the media¹¹).

All the shenanigans with parents this year meant I never got round to scheduling the surgery I need. Doc Rubberglove has offered a shot in the wrist that he says will relieve the problem for a bit. I will find out on January 4th. In the meantime I have to reduce my intake of the drug he gave me as an experimental treatment because although I do get a good night's sleep when I take it I am loopy all day from the side effects. Good 'ere, innit?

Subsection 2): The Stevieling - Had three of her wisdom teeth removed last month and was very poorly for days. Her head swelled up to twice its normal size, and the extra mass was all around the jowls. Her head went pear-shaped. The dentist wouldn't take out the fourth wisdom tooth for some reason, which I must pursue now I think of it. The Stevieling's explanation of it didn't make sense, though in fairness to her she was told why while coming around from the general anesthetic.

Subsection 3): Mrs Stevie - has presented me with a bill for 12 thousand dollars to replace her teeth with bionic equivalents. It seems her own teeth have all died as a consequence of her radiation treatments.

Truth to tell this is something of a relief. I was worrying what the savings-decimator would look like this time, and now the waiting is over and the uncertainty gone¹². Still, I suppose she needs teeth so she can gnash them at me. I asked the dentist to tell her the teeth had been worn out by lethally strong coffee but he refused, so I will still have to endure her coffee-fueled rages and the facial twitches that make conversing with the woman such an adventure. Any inadvertent but understandable sniggering during one of her variable-facial-expression-augmented perorations can result in a reaction of the most violent stripe.

Subsection 4): Everyone else - My parents are in assisted living due to events rather than decisions, and not doing so well. My father is wheelchair bound and can only move his left arm. My mother has issues with her hips, knees and feet. Both are very depressed about leaving the house they had lived in for so many years and being so far away from Grande Prairie. My Father-in-law has developed Advanced Altzheimer's and requires a full-time nurse. My Mother-in-law is going deaf. So much for the elders of the family. Nothing good to report. Golden years my arse.

The young family members are doing well, though some of them are pointedly ignoring us. I approve of this snottiness, and return their indifference tenfold. Fbleep 'em. I'm ignoring all of my distant family, and have done for years. Dunno why. I just feel no real connection to people I haven't seen in decades. Then again, looking back I always was a selfish bastard when it came to family.So fbleep me as well. I totally deserve it.

Conclusion: I made it through another year. Not sure there are any lessons to be learned other than:

1) Don't get cancer.

2) Fix up the house before it falls over and sinks in the swamp.

3) Make sure the drawstring is out of the way before you start hacking away with the scissors.

4) Don't get old.

5) Clean out the upstairs bedroom for fbleep's sake woman! How many fbleeping sets of clothes that don't fit do you need anyway?

That about covers it.

1. a feature of the Chateau Stevie architecture that are a large part of its "charm" and which add many opportunities for exercising one's command of Words of Power to any job involving replacing walls↑
2. if you don't count the hole in the ceiling over the cabinets by the fridge caused by damp↑
3. paint leprosy↑
4. falling down thanks to ants, termites, hurricanes super storms and dry rot↑
5. A loaner from a relative who knows an easy touch when she sees it↑
6. All probably purchased on my visa card↑
7. The Stevieling and Mrs Stevie go crazy trying to save old bows from Xmas gifts despite our house having at least three large bags of colored bows gifts for the tarting up of in it. Any gift bearing a bow is unwrapped to the Shrieking Shrikes of Xmas Wrapping howling about saving the bows. I react badly to this nonsense by deliberately destroying any bow beyond salvation as the first act upon receiving a present. This year none of my presents from the Shrieking Shrikes had any bows on them, which suits me just fine↑
8. And now command idiotic prices on Amazon from cynical and opportunistic vendors who took advantage of the limited number of toy trucks made to come up with a scheme whereby others will pay for their children's college education↑
9. That is what we called them when I was a kid but as far as I can tell they have no polarized glass in them, and are engineered using a variation of Fresnel lens technology↑
10. A replacement for the better-in-certain-ways PAG40 that Mrs Stevie gave me and which I managed to terminaly break while changing the batteries in a spectacular demonstration of incompetence↑
11. Which would be neat↑
12. Every time I get a decent-sized float put by something comes along out of the blue and wipes me out to the last cent. One year I managed to put away four thousand dollars, only to be presented with a bill for a replacement driveway that fell in and some fencing that fell down: $4000 exactly. This year, having paid off the house, I had a little under 12K stashed in the vaults. The bill for the work Mrs Stevie needs doing is almost 12000 dollars to the penny. The front wall falling off event also cost exactly what I had in the bank at that time to put right too. I'm at the point where I want to get builders in to do the bathrooms just so whatever cosmic cash-triggered smiteostat is involved gets triggered and saves me the angst and worry of uncertainty in 2016↑