Age Happens Tomorrow

Tomorrow I become old, entering the halcyon days of my 6th decade on this planet¹.
Mrs Stevie has agreed to give me a McNally Strumstick, a three-stringed thing that looks like a cross between a dulcimer and a balilika that went through the wash in a pants pocket. This despite the fact that having owned a guitar since my 50th birthday I have yet to persuade it to produce music in any way, shape or form²
I haven't been this excited since I asked for a train set for Christmas when I was two and a half and reportedly made myself so ill worrying about it the parents seriously considered holding Christmas early that year.

1. I just deleted the scathing rant on how so-called scientists had failed to deliver on any of the promise of my single-digit years on account of it being too bleeping depressing↑
2. I recently discovered a firm that makes nylon strings with steel string terminators on them so I restrung the beast. I can now report that I can play for longer³ and can make "F" with a barre⁴, albeit slowly. I've even managed a passable "C". Accordingly, I have hopes of producing an actual tune before the decade is out↑
3. In spite of the begging of family that I cease and desist↑
4. Which means I can make "G" the same way↑

And Then I Fix Something, Then Break Something Else

So, after the Garage Door Repair Triumph I guess it was inevitable there would need to be some sort of cosmic scales-balancing.

It came to pass that on the following Saturday I decided to do some yard work (pygmies having taken up residence in the shoulder-high grass of the front lawn¹).

I broke out the mower, last used by The Stevieling and did a quick check. No gas, no oil, all as expected. The Stevieling once admitted to me that she "worked the mower until it started puffing out blue smoke as usual ..." and was appalled to be interrupted by my outraged screams of outrage to the point that she refused to pay attention during my lecture on how in all the years I had used the mower it had never smoked blue and that when it did it was a bad sign that the engine was overworking and overheating and about to commit suicide.

I plan on letting her pick the new mower when (not if) she explodes the crankcase. The sticker-shock should be good for some remorse after the fact and fingers-crossed for some behavior modification, mower-usage-wise.

I cut the front lawn down to size and did the grass verges. As is my usual practice I did not collect all the rubbish my thoughtful neighbors leave on my property line, but drove the mower over it all to mash it up and spit it all over the road so it can blow into their driveways and shred their tires. They must hate this trailer-trash nonsense and the shredded 16 ounce drink cups, beverage cans, liquor bottles and cigarette packs it scatters about, but since it is their garbage in the first place they can bite me, the bleepers.

Overcome with exhaustion and ennui I went groaning from a dozen small aches and pains for a lie down and that was that, until Mrs Stevie insisted I take her out for ice-cream. I tried appealing to her sympathy for my aches and pains but I forgot in my distress that she doesn't have one.

The next day I replaced a board in the deck at the front of the house. The old one had become "punked²" due to the combined actions of damp and ants. I got a new cedar plank with no real trouble from Home Despot and deployed Mr Chopsaw and Mr Drilldriver for a largely trouble-free install.

True, I did peel back the nail of my left big toe and true it did bleed profusely until my skillful use of medicinal linguistics cauterized the wound, but that doesn't count and I don't want to talk about it any more. It's not my fault that an outbreak of Ultra-Virulent Alberta Foot Rot means I must wear sandals as much as possible - even when stout boots would be more appropriate - until the cream works and the skin on my feet stops dissolving. If the American medical system is so much better than the Canadian one, how come it can't cure a rural Canadian foot fungus permanently? Eh? Eh? You think I like going through this Cannuck horseshirt every year? You think it is good for sneakers to put them through an extreme bleaching every few days? And how do you bleach dress shoes or stout boots? You can't, so they cannot be worn until the fat lady sings!

Where was I?

I tackled the back lawns and the mower made short work of them. Unfortunately, the last season of mowing had been left to The Stevieling, who won't use the weed whacker³, and so there were a bunch of weeds growing, some with stems as thick as my thumb⁴. Also, a lot of hardy-looking growth - maple tree seedlings for the most part - had taken root in the joint between the foundation and the driveway and was threatening the infrastructure of the Steveiemanse. Action Was Called For.

So I deployed Mr Weedwhacker. and in no time at all I had removed the weeds except the ones at the side of the house. Undaunted, nay, emboldened by the epic levels of weed wastage I was dealing out with the weedwhacker I stepped forward, adjusted my stance, tripped over the old fencepost lying behind me, recovered by standing on the large diameter pipe that is the post for the Stevieling's basketball net, lost my footing completely and wiped the screaming hurtybits of the weedwhacker up the vinyl siding that replaced the aluminum stuff used everywhere else after the events related here had been rectified.

Now I wasn't too worried since I'd hit the house occasionally with the old McCullough weedwhacker once or twice, but the Ryobi weedwhacker is obviously made of sterner stuff and the vinyl siding isn't because in a trice I'd managed to cut two nice, wide, ragged slots in the siding.

I paused a moment to kick the clutter out of theater, reflecting that I should have done that before attempting weed whackage, and shut down the treacherous Weedwhacker of House Mutilation

Then I took a few moments to do The Bonehead Dance, mostly to give the neighbors something to watch as I chanted the ritual Words of Power such situations demand in order to drive away the evil anti-handyman demons.

That task completed, I departed stage left to locate one of the two dozen rolls of duct tape we have in the archives of Chateau Stevie, because it looked like rain and the siding doesn't do what it is supposed to do in such weather if it has huge gouges down to the framing in it.

Naturally I searched in vain for a single reel of said tape. I know for a fact that we have a reel of white, one of green and one of pink because who in heck uses such colors outside of certain adult-themed live-action damsel-in-distress websites where the color contrast with skin tones is deemed desirable⁵?

I eventually turned up a roll of black duct tape I used to repair something black years ago, but of course it was about to become a cardboard cylinder. My experienced eye said there was about enough to almost do the patching job but not enough to do it properly, and so it proved. I got the biggest holes covered but had to leave a pinhole and small crack open to the elements until we could find someone to come and fix the siding properly.

Such are the joys of home ownership.

1. And something worse, something I never saw and for which I only have the pygmy name: "Fuggarwei". It must be a fearsome beast indeed to throw such fear into such indomitable warrior-hunters. All day long I could here the pygmy point guards leaping up to peer over the grass screaming "Ware the Fuggarwei!"↑
2. So rotten it feels like a damp sponge↑
3. Very wise, in my opinion. The most mutinous tool in my garage, that↑
4. True, not a word of a lie. Actual thumb used for comparison. It is incredible what ordinary dandelions can become when left in peace to do their worst.↑
5. Or so I'm led to believe↑

I Fix Something Without Breaking Anything For Once

After a week's aggravation doing battle with the Bloody Long Island Railroad it was time to get the rubbery mud out of the pool¹.

The new plan called for all that stuff to come out and be replaced by something else, the exact nature of the something to be decided after I had had a good look at the landscaping cloth to see what was what. I'd soon have this pesky pool problem under complete control. Friday was July 3rd, a holiday² and since I was on forced downtime I set aside that day for rubbery mud removal operations. I sent the Stevieling, ordered by Mrs Stevie to remain in-theater and to help, to get the shovel out of the garage and she returned complaining that the door was stuck again.

For some reason, the Stevieling has an unerring knack of getting the cables of our beaten-up garage door to jump off their pulleys by just looking at them, though I should mention that the right hand side cable was not functioning properly owing to some loose strands getting jammed in the spring pulley works some years ago. The cable needed replacing yonks ago, but I couldn't get the U-shackle that secures it to the frame off and at that time was uninspired on how to cut the cable - a number of attempts having come to naught due to lack of space for hacksawing etc. - so I was putting it off. The door had gradually become harder to open as the cable deteriorated³ but my natural laziness and other problems forced the issue from my mind.

I heaved a sigh⁴ and climbed back out of the pool to see what was going on this time.

What was going on was that the right-side cable had frayed to the point it would not feed through the static pulley so the right hand spring was unavailable for door-counterweighting duty. It was also now made of so few actual strands that the lethality had swung up to Castle Bravo levels, and the proximity of the Stevieling triggered some sort of hitherto latent parenting hormone which sharpened my perception and brought that aspect into strong relief, clearing the buffers of all other concerns and excuses. Action Was Called For™.

For those not familiar with the standard garage up and over roller door, the way it all works is that the door is segmented rather like a roller-top desk lid is. At the very bottom of the door, on either side, there are buttons like those used on guitars to mount a strap. In this case they are used to mount the loop end of a steel hawser about an eighth of an inch thick made of braided steel wire.

The door has little wheels that run in curved tracks on either side to guide the door up and overhead as it is raised. To assist in lifting the door two steel cables, one either side of the door, run up alongside the frame the track is mounted to, over pulleys mounted to the frame and then horizontally alongside the track to pulleys mounted on the end of two-foot long springs. Each spring is tied to the end of the track with a length of threaded rod in order to present the illusion that one can adjust the tension thereby.

Having passed through the pulley attached to the top the spring, each hawser runs back down its own length to the top of the frame where it is attached by feeding it through a small hole carefully positioned out of any possible sight-line and back once again down its own length for a short while, where it is secured using U-shackles to bind the end to the return length of cable.

So, to sum up, each cable runs vertically from the bottom of the door, around a pulley and then horizontally for about ten feet, around another pulley attached to a spring and back towards the door frame, through a little hole and is strapped to itself to stop the spring pulling it out of the hole and towards the back of the garage at great speed. Got that?

When it is working properly the door is pulled down, stretching the springs half the distance the door has to move⁵. When opening the door the springs offer a counterweight-like assistance, negating part of the door weight.

Modern garage doors are made of lightweight materials and offer no real problem if the springs are not adjusted properly or if one of the two block-and-tackle arrangements fails in some way to help lift (though they still get stuck if the problem occurs when the door is open and the wires fall off the pulleys).

The door of the mighty Steviegarage is made of sterner (and much heavier) stuff, being of sheet steel construction. Indeed, I believe the individual hinged panels once did duty as blast doors on a battleship, so sturdy are they. I was once almost killed one summer when the lift mechanism failed because I raised the door too high causing both cables to come off their respective buttons, and the door dropped sans springs, cables etc to crash mere millimeters from my anxiously wiggling toes, showering my unprotected shins and thighs with pulverized concrete shrapnel from the force of the impact.

It was what my father calls "a bloody job" jacking the door open so I could fix it too. Since that refreshing event I always prop a two-by-three in the right-hand track so that in the event the anti-handyman demons strike the door's lowest guide wheel will be arrested before things get interesting.

Now I had been putting off fixing that cable for months. I'd tried to undo the damned thing at the end of last September when it first started to fray in earnest, but the U-shackle securing it to the frame would not come loose. Now I could see the cable was demanding attention. I briefly considered simply clipping off the loose strands, then realized I was looking at a death trap and heaved another sigh. I didn't want this damned thing guillotining the Stevieling the same way it had tried to do me. She doesn't have the life experience to know when to deploy a Two-by-Three of Safety. Also, I saw I had a replacement cable hanging on the garage wall ready to be installed, so I levered the door wide open and propped it with my trusty two-by-three.

I grabbed my socket set, my Dremel tool and a set of snap-on cutting wheels and set to work. First job was to cut the old cable away. Using Mr Dremel and a cutting wheel and operating mostly by The Force in the absence of an available point-of-view to the work area I cut the cable where it doubled back from the frame to the U-shackle.

The cable cutting went surprisingly quickly, though the spray of sparks produced made the Stevieling think I was about to burn the house down and I was obliged to demonstrate that there was little heat in the sparks to calm her. This I did by taking a piece of the cable and cutting it such that the stream of sparks was directed against my T-shirt.

"See?" I said. "No danger at all."

"Then why is your shirt smoldering?" she asked.

"Global warming" I answered. "It's a little understood scourge but we must be ever-vigilant for its symptoms. Well done. Now hand daddy that bottle of water would you sweetheart?"

The cable remained stubbornly attached to the door frame even though I had cut the bit just frameward of the shackle. This was because the cable had been bent in a U-shape since Brontosaurs⁶ walked the Earth and was less bendy than the new one I had slowly unwinding and tangling around my feet on the garage floor. No problem. I simply reached up and located the thing by feel (no sight-line, remember) and gave it a series of carefully considered and scientifically proper mighty twisty pulls to reintroduce the cable to the idea of flexibility all the time making appropriate manly whimpering noises to encourage it. I kept my face close to the safety of the steel door, using it as a shield should the spring decide to get in on the fun and give the cable some help.

Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

The cable suddenly ripped out from between my fingers and went screaming back toward the garage's rear wall, taking time from its busy schedule to catch me a glancing blow on the right wrist as it did so⁷. Naturally, since the Stevieling was nearby, I eschewed my usual store of class three Words of Power set by for such occasions and contented myself with some manly howls of pain and thirty seconds or so bent double, jumping up and down while clutching the bleeding wrist and begging for death's sweet embrace. Then I went and put a Band Aid on the wound and got back to work.

Once I had the old cable unhooked from the door I could remove the fittings so I could begin what might be a fruitless search for an open hardware store with the right bits in stock. I cut the loop end off the cable and the U-shackle from the rest of the cable and cleaned up the ends with Mr Dremel so I wouldn't poke holes in the car or me. I set the Stevieling to guarding the contents of the garage (chiefly Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness, the lawnmower and the genny) and dashed to Arse Hardware to buy two new U-shackles and the soft lead thingy needed to form the loop at one end.

All of which went without a hitch even though this was the day set aside to observe the July 4th holiday (which fell on a Saturday this year) and which I expected might make for me running hither and yon in the fabulous Steviemobile in a vain attempt to find a hardware store that was open. Returning home I took the figure-of-eight shaped lead thingy, fed the cable through one hole and back through the other to form a loop (using the original cut-off loop as a guide) and using a combination of mighty blows with Finesse⁸ and mighty Words of Power I crushed the fitting so that the loop was firmly secured. I grasped the finished job in my hand so I could make a close examination of the work.

Important tip: When hammering ductile metal aggressively heat is generated, often in disconcertingly large amounts that stay around in the workpiece for a bit.

After that it was a relatively easy task to hook up the new cable and run it through the various pulleys etc. and anchor it to itself with the new U-shackles, especially easy when I realized that if the door were retracted all the way to the end of the track I could actually see where I was working. This required some inventive work with levers and blocks but no limbs were lost so it is hardly worth going into in depth. I soon had the cable secured with lots to spare should it need slackening.

The first test involved me standing inside the garage while the Stevieling closed the door but not far enough for the latch to engage. I observed everything working smoothly as I attempted to keep all the newly adjusted parts in view in case they made a bid for freedom. Even with Troll and the lawnmower removed there isn't much room for evasive maneuvers in there owing to the large amounts of crap stacked everywhere, so a keen eye was essential lest it be gouged out by a high-speed ballistic U-shackle or a pulley making a run for the border, but it all looked good.

The second test involved opening the door, which was so easy compared to the titanic effort it had required for the last few months⁹ that the Stevieling ended up throwing it back against the stops. This was a tense moment because the loop end hasn't had time to become teardrop-shaped from time under tension, and can escape the button on the door if the cable slackens, which then means the door is not properly counterbalanced and will come crashing down in a re-enactment of Murphy and The Bricks¹⁰, so we made a note to tell everyone not to do that any more.

The third test was to close the door fully and check it would stay closed and not inch open, which is what happened the last time I adjusted the other side cable to tension it a few months ago.

It all went very well so I used Mr Dremel to cut off the excess cable, we repacked the garage with the crap we'd removed so I could work and decamped for showers and lunch.
Nothing got done on the pool.

1. According to the increasingly strident Mrs Stevie↑
2. Something to do with a celebration of a treacherous mutiny by a bunch of colonial ingrates not recognizing the inherent benefits of benevolent British rule↑
3. Engendering a potentially lethal situation, but I'm getting ahead of the story↑
4. Pulling several muscles as I did so↑
5. High school physics. Set up is like a block and tackle with a rope hanging from an eyebolt passing down and through a pulley in a block with a hook and back up to a ceiling-mounted pulley, thence to the floor. You reel in twice as much rope to lift twice as much weight through a given distance. Velocity ratio is 2:1 - the door travels twice as far as the spring stretches↑
6. We are allowed to have them again it turns out↑
7. Energy stored in spring was released. Spring retracted distance A. Thanks to velocity ratio (2:1) end of hawser moved distance 2A in the same time frame. Moving a given distance in half the time means that whatever it is is going twice as fast. The spring collapsed very quickly indeed so the hawser sped past at "better not get in the way" speed, shedding Cherenkov radiation as it went by my nose↑
8. My claw-hammer↑
9. Seriously. It required both hands and a powerlifter stance to get the thing open↑
10. Also depicted in the second Babe movie in the incident at the well↑

Fun In The Pool

So we¹ decided that eighteen months lying fallow was enough for the swimming pool and once again I would do battle with the elements, the Long Island Power Authority and backyard chemistry in the search for the life aquatic.

I actually spend more time in the pool when it is in commission than anyone else in the family, but that is mostly because I'm the only bugger who vacuums the sodding thing (which involves getting in and Mrs Stevie won't do that unless the water is warm enough to brew tea with). The solar cover produces an effect that sometimes fools her into believing that all the water is as warm as the top four inches, which is almost worth all the screeching when she rolls in from off her airbed or whatever flotation device du jour she is perched upon. I have been forced to point out that I did not invent physics, nor did I decree that warm water should rise, thus giving birth to the Solar Cover Hoodwinking Effect².

The pool had sat for two seasons, one with water, one without, which had done for the liner. The Stevieling had offered to have a go removing the debris and scrubbing it clean as a father's day gift, but hadn't actually done so, so it was me who discovered after cleaning out the now soaking and reeking debris (it rained after father's day) that the pool liner was holed, so we went out to buy a new one the week before July 4th, visions of floating away the holiday dancing in our heads.

The young guy who sold us the liner was surprised we didn't want a team of young, strong people to fit it for us, but I'd done the job (admittedly, not perfectly) the last time and didn't see any issues, and they couldn't deploy their people in less than two weeks anyway. The liner was obtained for a reasonable sum³ and we returned home as it began to rain again. The next day I pulled out the old socket set and the drill-driver with the batteries that won't hold a charge any more ⁴ and began stripping off the top rail of the pool. It went surprisingly quickly. Then came the removal of the liner retaining ring.

For those who have never seen an above-ground steel pool - an increasingly rare beast in this age of inflatable and resin-framed pools - they consist of a ring fabricated from sections screwed together (sometimes simply clipped together) which has a groove set into it to hold the wall. Ours has plates that clip the curved sections together and provide the place to mount the vertical pillar pieces. The wall is in turn a cylinder of steel you make from a long, rolled-up sheet by fastening the ends to each other with bolts. This is the bit you need help for since the steel has absolutely no strength in it until it is cylinder-shaped and can easily be badly damaged by the wind, or people falling on it. The ring goes on the floor, slot uppermost and the sheet of steel is fitted into the groove until it is a cylinder, then the ends are secured to each other with the bolts, and good quality duct tape is applied so the sharp bits are kept away from the liner.

At this point an earth berm is built against the inside wall of the cylinder to act as an easement for the liner as it transitions from flat (hopefully) floor to vertical wall. This stops the liner's seams popping. Then the liner is unfolded and gradually pulled free of folds and wrinkles⁵ and draped over the steel at the top to form a sort of vinyl cup with a steel outer. This process takes forever and can drive one to the very brink of madness as wrinkle after wrinkle is chased down and eliminated, only to cause more somewhere else.

The liner is secured to the steel using long flexible clips made of plastic, and over them a second ring of slotted steel is snapped, at which point the steel wall becomes very much more rigid. The second ring is made from the same components as the first, and on our pool has joiners that must be aligned with those in the base ring so that fake pillars made of folded steel can be screwed to them. This acts to make the top ring more secure and prevents the steel cylinder from popping out of the retaining ring at the base. Then the flat coping is attached and the skimmer fitted and so on and so forth until it is a mighty open-topped tank of watery amusement.

Things began to go wrong at the point I had the top ring completely removed and pulled out the liner so I could cut it up and throw the pieces to the waiting womenfolk for disposal. Under the liner, we had been persuaded to install what looked like rubber cat litter. This was, we were assured at the time, a great idea. It turned out to be the worst idea since Hannibal said "Get the elephants saddled. Let's go punch some Romans". No matter how carefully I worked it shifted underfoot as I installed the liner so I ended up with a pool floor that closely mimicked that of the natural seabed, with humps and pits that accumulated dirt. I was expecting to have the same sort of nonsense happen this time, but when I pulled up the liner I found that water had leaked into the under-liner space and turned this rubber madness into mud.

I need to digress a bit here to explain why the water was accumulating under the pool rather than simply draining away. A previous bad experience in which a pinhole leak in the liner of an older pool had caused a Sumac tree to throw out a root that grew up into the chlorinated water - and thrive therein. I'd had to junk the pool as a result and I vowed not to have the same thing happen with pool number three. So I cleaned out all the biomass I could find, then killed the ground stone dead with a formulation I bought from Home Despot⁶ and then I covered the ground with several taped layers of thick poly sheet used by groundsmen to keep weeds at bay. When It came time to add the earth berm I added a skirt of the same sheet to keep the rust-inducing earth off the steel. It turns out I did a really good job because water inside this arrangement does not drain away, no matter how much I want it to. It was over this that the rubber cat litter was carefully poured and spread.

Such was the scale of the out-of-project excursion this represented, Mr Brain shut down completely and refused to have any more to do with things. I did what I usually do in these situations and walked around in small circles doing facial impressions of a fish and waving my hands around cabalistically but Mr Brain would not re-engage gears so that was that.

I looked ruefully at the mess and suggested that I could re-assemble the tarp tent I'd used to keep the rain off during the winter⁷ and we could talk over matters over dinner at a local diner. Of course, the purpose of having other people around at such times is for them to supply the common sense missing during Brain Treachery, but naturally they missed the opportunity to do so.

So that's what we did. I attached the individual pieces of top ring to the pool edge to provide some rigidity, but didn't clip them together as that would involve struggling with the last clip, which has to be walked into place with the adjacent ring sections only half-attached owing to the fact that the whole thing is a sliding fit so the ring ends up being bigger than the pool until the clips are slid fully into place and I foresaw a mighty struggle of Man Vs Pool Parts In A World Gone Mad At Night In The Rain. Frankly, I wasn't up to all that by then. So I just clipped the ring segments onto the pool and slung a tarp over it to keep the dusting of light drizzle off the already wet-compromised inner gubbins

A sad mistake.

For while we were at dinner in the diner, the light sprinkles of rain apparently became a thunderstorm of epic proportions, and when I got home the tarp had trapped four metric tons of water in it and had collapsed again, this time taking the wall of the pool down with it, bending it in several places. Long and mighty were the charms I cast that night to drive away the evil spirits I can tell you. Luckily the rain made the chances of young children overhearing them minimal and saved the paint on the back door from blistering.

I disentangled the tarp, now full of cold rainwater thank you, from the bent and twisted steel and went about unbending and straightening the metal. The damage was surprisingly minor, a couple of nasty bends that would require me hitting them with Finesse⁸ for a bit, but nothing that a few class two Words of Power couldn't take care of.

Or so I thought.

The next day was a Sunday, so I got up and wandered outside to survey the damage again. I wandered up onto the deck I put up so I could service the skimmer with relatively dry feet and stared glumly at the shallow lake in the tarp. Well, I already had the submersible pump deployed from the liner draining operations, so I reached over to grab the hose so I could swing it to where I needed it and lost my footing rather spectacularly on the wet, slimy wood.

I grabbed for the safety of the mighty pool wall and all the curved slotted steel ring segments on either side pinged off the steel and span through the air to Azathoth-knows where (I was too busy to notice). The steel wall folded like an alibi witness confronted by Mrs Stevie and I went headfirst into the pool with a cry of distress worthy of Inspector Clouseau at his best. Luckily my body landed for the most part on the sharp bolt-ends poking out of the seam in the now-collapsed steel wall, but I could have been badly injured around the face had I not had the great good fortune of having it land in the tarp's two inches or so of freezing cold rainwater, backed by slimy rubber mud.

I only had time for one rushed class three before impact, but I made up for it with a stream of extemporized class fours as I attempted to get up. I pondered a bit as to how to get out of the pool without inflicting more damage, then came to the conclusion that the pool had not afforded me the same consideration, damage wise, so I simply stalked back over the flattened section of steel to the mostly illusory firm footing of the mutinous deck.

I realized that I was going to have to reconstruct the upper ring with the clips or the same sort of embarrassing nonsense would likely happen again and again until the steel wasn't worth salvaging, so that's what I did. Once the top ring was re-installed I went around with the pillars, thinking to reattach maybe half of them to add more rigidity. That's when I discovered some of the holes no longer lined up properly. It was as if the pillars were too short or the wall too high. How could that be? The steel had bends in it where the worst offenders were - I could understand there being a problem with the walls being too short on account of that, but too tall?

Then I troubled to look down and realized that everywhere the steel had folded flat it had jumped out of the slot of the base ring, because it was no longer held in place by the pillars and top ring. I took a few minutes from my busy schedule of screws-up to do The Bonehead Dance, then, using a two-by-four to apply force from inside the pool and my foot I gently but firmly kicked the bleeping bleepery bleeptard back into place.

However, at the point by the skimmer, the place I'd fallen in, the problem was much worse. Not only had the steel popped inside rather than outside the restraining ring, when I removed the tarp and earth berm and the vinyl landscaper's cloth I found that the place where the steel seam was had been damaged so that the ends had spread in different directions. It would not seat in the groove until they were hammered back into profile. Not only that but I had no room for the two-by-four as an outside "foot" to apply force - the four foot high walls precluded me just reaching over with my hand and thumping it - owning to the snug fit of the deck to the pool wall. Fortunately I found a thinner piece of wood That would fit and that I could also use as an anvil to hammer against and in far too much time at all I had the blasted thing the right shape and properly seated with a few class fours to spare.

And so to bed after a shower to get all the flakes of rubber off my body.

1. ie Mrs Stevie↑
2. In which the top four inches of water are very warm indeed and right under that layer the water is just above freezing, with no transitional temperature gradient. It is a real wonder, science-wise but, hell on the eardrums↑
3. Around $100, which doesn't sound at all reasonable for what amounts to some heavy duty vinyl sheet with some trimming and welding work done to it until you start looking around and pricing that sort of stuff↑
4. And some of those batteries are reasonably new dammit↑
5. Ha!↑
6. Which I've vowed never to use ever again owing to the stench which I remember as having all the worst olfactory nuances of fermenting raw sewage and crude oil↑
7. But which had collapsed when we left the house in the charge of the Stevieling and she neglected to notice the four foot of snow accumulating on the tarp↑
8. My claw hammer↑

Rainy Day Lawnmowers Numbers 12 and 35

There's only one thing that I know:
No matter how often I mow
The front garden's scenery
Will be obscured by greenery
If the grass just continues to grow.

More Fun and Games On The Bloody LIRR

It has been a very bad week commute-wise so far.

Monday I was excused the need to deal with the Bloody Long Island Railroad on account of being asked to be a pall-bearer at the funeral mass for the father of a very close friend.

Tuesday I arrived in reasonable time with a good connection at Jamaica (not the good one) but had to leave at 1:30 to dash to Doc Rubberglove's House Of Pain so I could get an injection of whatever it is he gives me to stop these blasted allergies¹ in their tracks². I also spent ten minutes sucking on Doc Rubberglove's Patent Electric Fog Bong which did for the wheezing and coughing and increased the billability of my visit.

The Bloody Long Island Railroad missed the opportunity to deliver me late to this jab'n'bong fest, something in which they have been assiduous since I've been riding the wretched thing. Such was my discomfort that I didn't take note of this at the time.

But on Wednesday they more than made up for the inadvertent delivery of acceptable service.

I was forced to miss the earlier rush-hour trains on account of needing to send the taxes on Chateau Stevie to the Receiver of Blood Squeezed From Stones by registered mail, which in turn required the Post Office to be open for business. This was an almost painless operation and so it was with the usual trepidation I found myself standing on the platform a few minutes before the 9:33 am train, my so-called "safety train", was due to arrive.

At 9:38 am, with no announcement of incompetence underway, I began to suspect a major problem was at hand.

The alacrity with which the Bloody Long Island Railroad offers information varies inversely with the scale of the disaster. Delays because the on-board staff cannot get a grip and anticipate scheduled stops at long-existent stations require that they open the bleeping doors will be five-minute diatribes on the PA system. Announcement of "equipment problems" - trains not starting when the Go Button was pressed because the veeblefetzer fell off (again) - will be delivered when the train is in sight by someone emulating Rod McKuen's vocal technique while crumpling cellophane next to the microphone. Derailed trains will be announced four or five days after the train has been re-railed as a parenthetical addendum to an advertisement for train "service" to some baseball game. No announcement means Big Trouble.

So I fired up the Stevie Portable Interwebs and the iSlab of Usefulness³ and pulled up the Bloody Long Island Railroad schedule for Wyandanch (Pearl of the East). Yep. Okay. There was my problem.

the bleeping Long Island Railroad had removed my "Safety Train" from the schedule. No doubt this was another attempt to improve the rider experience by reducing the opportunities to be stuck riding a Bloody Long Island Railroad train. It sort of jibes with the usual levels of smart deployed by the Bloody Long Island Railroad. So I boarded the 10:02 in high dudgeon, now facing arrival at work sometime around 11am. Magic.

But the Bloody Long Island Railroad were not done enhancing my rider experience yet.

By the breathtaking strategy of taking almost a full hour to do the 40 minute journey to Jamaica (still not the good one) the Bloody Long Island Railroad managed to strand me there for half an hour waiting for a connection to replace the one I'd missed on account of an excess of rider experience enhancementations.

There are worse places to pointlessly kill half an hour of your life I suppose, but when you need to get where you are going I'd be hard pressed to name one that has to do with mass transit. I usually ride into Penn and take the subway back to Metrotech in Brooklyn when this happens. The magnitude of the resulting lateness is the same but at least I can use my laptop or my iSlab or read a copy of Analog or a book while sitting down as the lateness is being larded upon me.

But this time I stupidly assumed that the Bloody Long Island Railroad would hold the connecting train. I mean, they canceled half the trains going to Atlantic Terminal the day they reopened it after the refurbishment so as to avoid wearing out all the new granite and marble by having taxpaying commuters walk on them, so it's not like the traffic patterns are overloaded in and out of that monument to overspent taxpayer monies. No doubt there are reasons to do with not wanting to un-enhance the rider experience of the people on the connecting train.

That doesn't explain why when I am sitting on the bloody thing it often gets held for five minutes waiting for another connecting Penn-bound train to catch up, but no doubt there is a good reason for that which cannot be spoken of for reasons of National Security.

I eventually managed to catch a train to Atlantic Terminal which delivered me to the subway station, where I was greeted by a seven minute delay in catching a train to take me the two stops to Hoyt Street. From there 'twas but a five minute lope through the building site that was once the network of streets between the subway station and Metrotech and I was at work.

At noon.

1. Which left untreated leave me wheezing and coughing, blind from the ooze from my eyelids and trying to claw out my own sinuses in a desperate quest for relief from the itching↑
2. I tell people I'm off for my "allergy shot" and am told there is no such thing. Doc Rubberglove confessed last year that it is a "slow release steroid". Is there such a thing? I have no idea and I don't care. As I tell the would-be medical experts leaning in to advise me, it could be sugar water for all I care. All I know is that whatever it is it works like a charm. I tell a lie: I know that it usually hurts just like a steroid shot does - i.e. it is a completely painless affair until I am safely out of the doctor's office and walking back to my car, whereupon I get kicked in the wherever-I-was-injected by an invisible horse↑
3. Still trying to work out how to do actual productive work - like writing for this blog - on it, but I'm sure it's just a matter of my finding the right "app" rather than the fundamental inability of the iSlab to provide the levels of productivity support all those famous people⁴ claim it can↑
4. Such as early adopter and famous author Charles Stross↑

Figures

Yesterday was nice, in weather terms, no vertical wetness, howling gales etc as per since Xmas, so I thought I'd get some stuff done around the yard.

First order of business would be to pump out the meltwater in the swimming pool, which would entail me unplugging the remaining Xmas lights still deployed, a job normally done by now but delayed pending the snow piled up between me and the plugs melting. The pump would need the same outdoor circuit as the lights, which I had disabled by tripping the ground fault interrupt so we wouldn't look like trailer trash at night¹, so before I could re-activate the electrickery I'd need to remove the three dozen extension cords and adaptors plugged into the wall, necessitating a trip behind the Alberta Spruce Wall o' Green that screens off the wall and window of the front bedroom in a spiky hedge of noise abatement.

Which was when I found that the brick wall that runs from the corner of the house to the front door was leaning out precariously from the alleged sheathing of the house and had begun turning into individual bricks stacked on top of each other rather than a wall, a happenstance that elicited a barrage of improvised Class Four Words of Power and one Class Five when I figured out that the sheathing underneath was probably wringing wet and rotted out².

Did I mention I just paid the last mortgage installment on this house?

Let the regretting commence.

1. I can't do anything about that during the day, but I am not there most days so I don't have to look at the house. Up yours, neighbors↑
2. The bricks are essentially siding built over a chipboard inner wall, or possibly a sheetrock inner wall. This house is partially what is called by builders a "shiplap house" which means the original builder cheaped-out and used gypsum sheetock instead of plywood or chipboard as is more usual↑

Goings On (And On And On And On)

So, I haven't posted much of late.

It isn't that the LIRR has not been supplying the raw material for Tales of Suck, rather that there has been such a plenty I've been overwhelmed to the point I know not where to start. Their incapability to run trains when a light frosting of snow is on the land means nothing good when three feet of freezing water dumps on the ground. Add to that that the fleet seems to be falling apart around - I nearly said "them" but of course it's "us", the poor bloody riders. They have augmented the usual practice of last-minute cancellation of the 6:04 from Atlantic Terminal (the last and one of only two straight-through trains from Brooklyn via the Ronkonkoma branch) and the to-anyone-but-the-Bloody-Long-Island-Railroad obviously naff "information" that Passengers will be accommodated by the Babylon train¹, change at Jamaica for the Ronkonkoma branch² with last-minute cancellation of the 6:04 without any sort of acknowledgment of the fact other than the stealthy removal of the train from the platform assignment board. It is monumentally fbleeptarded to cancel the only real option for the Brooklyn/Ronkonkoma commuter when they have a 5:01 out of Penn that leaves almost empty every single day. I get that the system is congested, but why do the cancellations start with the 6:04 out of Atlantic Terminal? The levels of suck are toxically high here.

And get this: the fbleeptards in charge are constructing a multi-million dollar tunnel to run trains directly from Penn to Grand Central which adds only load, without adding capacity. Not only that, it adds load through the same East River Tunnels that cannot reliably handle the existing traffic because the bloody signals are not up to snuff. This project has been gobbling down dollars for years and a child could see that it is a complete waste of every fbleeping cent.

Time for the Happy Place Song³.

By Jove I needed that.

It is tax time again, which has fomented the usual anxiety and anger in Chateau Stevie, but with a new twist: The Stevieling announced she wanted to have her taxes made up by a professional. Last year I did them for her, but a screw-up that I maintain was the fault of the obstreperous bbleep at the post office who scrambled the stickers and labels needed to get the mail recorded so you can prove it arrived and who I believe put the stickers and address labels on the wrong bloody envelopes⁴ so the Feds got the State check and the State got the Feds', leading to an unexpected demand for cash with menaces from NYS and smug silence on the matter of an extra $200 from the Feds.

It turns out that the banks don't question the fact the names of the payees don't match in such circumstances but blithely hand over the cash. So much for the US banking system then. Had they said: “Hang on mate” I'd have simply had to pay late fees.

The tax code in the USA, New York and NYC (for me anyway) is so tortuously involved that filling in a tax return by hand is no-longer an option. It took hours even when we were newlyweds and our tax situation was very simple indeed. Mrs Stevie used to do it on account of my whining excuses and claims of an inability to see the number five due to an accident suffered at the age of, well, I can't say because I can't see it, but the rages induced by the worksheet for Schedule A dwarfed anything Starbux could produce even on a good day. On one memorable occasion I had to restrain her when George Bush senior made some sort of comment on the TV the day after she had mailed out the returns, lest she destroy the television set⁵ and my eardrums were badly damaged. Action was Called For.

So I staged a miraculous recovery after a particularly fortuitous skillet-beaning, and once the tweety-bird noises had worn off and the little moons and stars had stopped whooshing around my head and crashing into one another, I announced I would do the next return.

It would take all of one Sunday and all of my patience with fbleeptarded Bureaucracy Gone Mad to fill in Form 1040, Schedule A and form IT201⁶

Then, in '96, we got our first computer and I started using tax preparation software and it became less of a chore, though no less time consuming overall. Last year our tax situation became complex due to The Stevieling earning wads of cash so she had to file her own return, which I did for her. Ours I filed electronically, something I distrusted at first but now wish NYC would pick up⁷. NYC insist on a paper return being mailed, and insist on a copy of the NYS return being included, which in these days of e-filing adds complication. The copy is supposed to be exactly as filed with NYC and must be signed. E-filed tax returns are digitally signed, but that is not reproduced on the saved image of the paper tax returns. It is therefore technically impossible to follow the instruction on the tax document.

You'd think someone would have spotted this by now and moved to make it sensible, what with the levels of anality built into the tax calculations themselves, but no. The language is short, clear, precise and completely unworkable in the real world. Welcome to NYC, firmly mired in the QPHS⁸ world of your grandfather.

What else?

My neighbor has a new tenant, who is a thirty-something Italian American with a mouth on it a sailor would be ashamed to own to. It holds shouted conversations into its cell phone that can be heard from the front of our house. In one such I counted every third word as some variation of "fuck". Last weekend I was privileged to witness it greeting a friend. Never have I seen two so painfully white young men trying to be black movie gangstas so loudly.

It's as though they don't realize that Words of Power must be carefully hoarded and used only under the most unbearable provocation - such as when pulling the starter cord on the Lawn Mower for the third time or catching one's sandalled foot with the weed whacker at maximum revs, or picking up some pipe after heating it to 500° C with a blowlamp. Meeting someone you know rather well at a previously agreed-upon time hardly qualifies.

I wouldn't normally give a rat's bottom but it is done at Volume #11, so I welcome ideas on how to mitigate this unwelcome development, not least because as of March I finally own Chateau Stevie in all it's disintegrating glory.

Yes, I managed to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous property devaluation by the outmoded idea that I should own it as a priority rather than a house full of new bathrooms and flat screen TVs.

Naturally the mortgage being paid off happened a month early (the bank decided my refusal to "pay down" the loan - on account of having no extra funds to do so at that moment in time - was a signal to raid the escrow account for the difference and terminated the deal a month early anyway) which has landed me with the necessity of paying a humongous property tax bill with no real means to do so without the remaining funds from the escrow account, the next two weeks wages, crossed fingers and some Class Four Words of Power.

I was going to speak of the various medical tests I've been subjected to in the search for a return to health, but my keyboard has become soaked with tears and I've cracked a tooth gnashing my teeth so I'll leave the account of Doctors in a World Gone Mad for another time.

1. A train that is already filled to bursting with Babylon-bound passengers↑
2. i.e. Try and board the already overcrowded 6:23 out of Penn, possibly the most subscribed NY-Ronkonkoma evening train in the schedule↑
3. Myy-yyy happy-place has a hammer in it BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG↑
4. I double-checked those addresses hand-written on the envelopes matched the forms inside them but they still went to the wrong place and we ended up $200 out of pocket as a result↑
5. An essential component of my newly acquired Nintendo Entertainment System↑
6. A book-like affair that had the singular property of not fitting into any envelope one could lay one's hands on, including the one supplied by the NYS DoT&F and that was as easy to fold as the Manhattan Yellow Pages↑
7. I file three returns: One with the Feds, one with NY State and one with NYC↑
8. quill pens and high stools↑

Oh Good

The snow is just about all gone from Chateau Stevie, just a few small glaciers left in the shady areas.

I just heard we're in for another 3 inches tomorrow.

So that's alright then.

Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent

So, we are back from Florida and enjoying New York in the Winter.

Not.

We got back on a Sunday in the early evening and it started snowing at about noon on the following Monday. This was bad because it meant more snow. It was good because it covered up all the filthy snow left over from the storm that hit New York as we were settling in in Florida with a blanket of white.

The Stevieling had been left at home with instructions not to burn the place down or allow the snow to set solid in the driveway. She had cleared what she could, she had told us when we called to ask, but the snow embankments were now bigger than she was so she was having difficulties shoveling.

"But why didn't you use the snowblower? " I asked. She replied that she had looked at it and seen that it had "three different ways to start it" and become intimidated.

Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness in fact has two ways to start it; the electric starter which involves an extension cord a switch flip and a button press, and the recoil starter which involves the same switch flip and twenty or thirty minutes pulling on the starter cord while chanting the Magic Start Words.

All this I had shown the Stevieling. Many times. But as usual when she is taking instruction from me she zones out in the same way Calvin used to become Spaceman Spiff when being lectured by adults. This is something she figured out how to do when she was a toddler and has used to good effect in many occasions, notably the Great Simultaneous Equation Homework Question Debate And Lack Of Graphpaper In A House Full Of Paper Fiasco.

And, it turns out, the How To Work The Snowblower lessons.

I rather hope the shoveling hell she went through after the threats on what might happen should we return to find the driveway access not wide enough for Mrs Stevie's bus on our return has had a Pavlovian reinforcement on paying attention, but I wouldn't put money on it¹.

Of course, The Stevieling was so busy emptying the snow from the front of the house she had no time to so much as look out the back to see if there was a problem, so the tarp tent I had placed over the swimming pool to keep the leaves and rain out didn't get brushed off and, well, it turns out that thirty inches of snow is very heavy. Heavy enough to tear the securing ropes out of the little grommets and pull up one of the auger anchors (aka dog-stakes) I had used to tie it all down with. I went out on Sunday to see if I could pull the tarp out of the pool and rebuild the tent but the icebergs on each side were much too heavy to shift so it will have to wait until March when the water will thaw.

Time passes.

The Stevieling departed for Florida leaving us to ourselves about a week after the events hinted at above. It promptly snowed on us several more times, then the temperature dropped to -17 Degrees Fahrenheit in case anyone was feeling happy. Then it thawed so all the snow would turn into slush. Then it did it all again so everyone's driveway would become a skating rink.

Naturally, in such weather one is thrown back on one's resources and one's company. Mrs Stevie and I did some preliminary bickering and decided it was a great opportunity to rediscover why we got married in the first place since the kid was not underfoot. After some thinking and a few false starts we decided neither of us could remember exactly why we had got married, although it must've seemed like a good idea at the time.

I thought it might have been a case of Mrs Stevie needing to be able to access the coffee of England occasionally, while she felt that it had involved her feeling sorry for me. It was obvious we had both blocked the memories. We decided to watch some 80s TV using Netflix and see if those deeply buried memories could be forced to surface.

One show that had been popular with everyone except us had been Twin Peaks. Opinion was divided as to the value of this David Lynch "murder mystery". Everyone else said it was a brilliant surrealist's vision, I said it was "unwatchable drivel".

My friend Ralph was a particular fan and was constantly perplexed by my obstinate refusal to see the brilliance. Obviously, watching this show would create the proper ambiance and prove to be a great start to our Personal Rediscovery.

We were, I think, five episodes in when I announced my verdict: "Ralph's an idiot!"

So we switched to The X Files. Ralph like these too. I can't remember why we didn't watch them, but we would do so now. The X Files proved to be, in season 1, about 30% drivel. It seems I had seriously misjudged Ralph. Ignoring the Twin Peaks outlier his Idiot:Knows-His-TV ratio had zoomed to 70%.

I tried to do a complicated statistical analysis of this to definitively pin down the Ralph Factor so that it could be used to, for example, assess episodes of season 1 of Babylon 5 without having to actually watch them, but I took my usual wrong turn in the sums and ended up after an hour and a half proving that X=X+/- 0.0009, something of a triumph for Mr Brain and the death of Euclidean Physics.

I turned to Mrs Stevie and told her sadly that I couldn't figure out why we'd gotten married but she was busy talking to her friends in Australia via iPad and simply waved her "shut up" sign at me, so I played Bejeweled on my iPad until bedtime.

The pool is now half full of solid ice.

1. Largely on account of not having any money after paying off the speeding ticket I picked up in South Carolina on the way back↑

More On The Microwave Oven Debacle

So I did a bit of experimenting with the microwave oven last night.

I'l spare you the technical details as they would involve barrowsful of dense jargon that you would never need again. In layman's terms I plugged the microwave's power cord into a heavy-duty extension cord¹ then plugged the other end of that extension cord into various different power outlets in the kitchen, attempting to coax the microwave into showing signs of life at each one by hitting it smartly in the time-honored Slap of Electrical Implement Repair and then muttering some class one Words of Power to ward off anti-handyman demons in the vain hope they would go away so the microwave would start working again.

What I gained over the course of the twenty minutes or so this took was the following insights:

a) There are too many empty soda bottles littered about the floor of the kitchen. Someone could turn an ankle.

2) There is never an Ace Elastic Bandage around when you need one to strap up a turned ankle.

♣) The malfunction of the sockets might have been the result of a treacherous mutiny on the part of the microwave inducing a short that threw the breaker, said breaker perhaps being in need of replacement as the latch is dodgy and doesn't reset properly when recycled. I found one such breaker when the coffee machine refused to start the other day and it is quite possible the outlets involved are on the same circuit as those the fridge and microwave used to be plugged into.

So a bit more poking around with a voltmeter is needed, in conjunction with a bit of work inside Mr Breakerbox. Lovely.

All of which will have to wait ten days because tomorrow Mrs Stevie and I head out for our second annual trip to Florida. We are fed up to the back teeth with shouting and arguing with each other in Chateau Stevie, which leaves us with only two choices: Major dental surgery or relocation to somewhere not inside Chateau Stevie for a bit.

And it's so hard to find a dentist on Long Island these days.

1. Originally intended to couple car block heaters to power outlets in Canada² ↑
2. To stop the engine freezing solid and rupturing or the oil going so hard the engine won't turn over for luvner money↑

The Operative Word is "Late"

I just received an email and a text (formatted as a slide show for reasons I can't begin to fathom). They are identical in content, which reads:

The 4:51PM train from Penn due Ronkonkoma at 6:04PM is operating 11 minutes late due to a late late ahead experiencing equipment trouble.

I wish I could invent stuff half this good.

I wish I didn't have to ride the Bloody Long Island Railroad even more. Fortunately, the said mass-transit joke is working tirelessly to reduce the incidence of trains to help me reach that goal.

My day has been so full that I shall now be forced into traveling into Penn Station, there to catch the late late late or possibly the late late late late, depending on how late the subway system is running.

Stop The New Year, I Wanna Get Off

Gad this year is sucking and it's only two weeks old.

I already mentioned the busted camera fiasco and the dinged Steviemobile debacle. Those happened last year, but turned out to be harbingers of the levels of complete and utter suck that would prevail in 2015.

Example: On the 7th I left my car at the body shop to be fixed. Freezing weather immediately moved in so that any delay in being met by whoever was picking me up became an exercise in not dying, there being no windbreaks or shelter in the area after dark. When I picked up the car on Saturday, it turned out they had removed my car antenna, probably to put it through a car wash. When I found it on the back seat and went to screw it back into its mount, I found that the rubber mount seal had become brittle over the 12 years I've owned the car, and it had cracked in several places. So I have that to replace.

Example: That night we got a call from the Mrs Steviemom saying she had crashed her car into her house. We drove over with visions of the car sitting in the living room. It turned out the car was not in the house, but in the driveway. The house had only a small dent in it. The car however was looking much sadder. It had hooked up on the jamb of the garage door, and at that point probably only about a couple of hundred dollars of cosmetic dings and broken plastic clips had been done. But then, in a move last seen in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World it had been backed away from the garage, ripping off the entire front of the car. About two grand's worth of damage.

Example: Yesterday, at around 10 pm, the circuit into which the fridge and the microwave are plugged failed. An hour screwing around with a voltmeter in the breaker box showed no problems there. Somewhere a wire has broken, or burned through, or been gnawed through by varmints. I have no idea which of the fossil breakers in the box control those two outlets (and apparently only those two outlets). I put in a new circuit a few years back to accommodate the dishwasher and toaster oven so that the breaker would stop tripping when the fridge compressor kicked in, but I never labelled the breakers. I know where the new ones are but Azathoth alone knows which of the damn things operates those dead sockets. Fun lies in the near future for me in a rewiring job from Hell.

Example: Six o'clock this morning I woke up sneezing. My nose hasn't stopped itching like crazy inside all day and I've produced about 20 gallons of snot from it. Just in time for the three day weekend.

Example: Seven o' clock this morning Mrs Stevie announces that the burner in the furnace has shut down and the house is noticeably cold so I agree with her. A quick check with Mr Thermostat: 65°f. I do all the quick and easy things and then say we need the furnace repair guy to come and put in a new thermocouple. Mr Stevie arranges this¹ and the furnace repair guy arrives just as I leave for work.

So, as far as 2015 is concerned: I want my money back.

1. She called him and he said "Oh yeah, I remember you. You're the people who have a problem every year. So much for Slant Fin furnaces↑

Xmas Report 2014, Pt II

In The Aftermath Of Santa

Christmas Day dawned and the sleepers of Chateau Stevie were not brought out of hibernation by an excited child as in previous years, so we slept in.

We got up late, whereupon Mrs Stevie announced we were going to church to see The Stevieling do a turn as Assistant Pastor. I did some pro forma whining but the truth is that I'm always in the mood to watch The Stevieling in action, being about as proud of her as it is possible to be¹, and even though I have no belief that anything in me will survive death I like to sing the carols so a Christmas Service isn't such a terrible thing to endure.

The service was short too, which was good because we'd come out with no breakfast inside us. The Stevieling did very well except for the bit where during her reading she read something twice, then interrupted herself by saying "Oh, I read that already", after which I was plagued by the image of the angel going over to the shepherds and saying "I bring you tidings of great joy! To you a savior is born this night in Bethlehem! I bring you tidings of groh I did that bit already."

It certainly made keeping my mind on the sermon hard.

There was also the question of the tunes. Lutherans sing all the same carols normal people do, the same ones I'd been forced to learn and sing in my youth in those glory days of Mandatory State Religion Worship. But they sometimes use the wrong tunes to sing them to. This makes singing the blasted things hard.

I used to just sing the tunes I knew louder than everyone else, a task made easier than might be thought by the fact that most of the congregation sing carols and hymns softly in case they wake up God and annoy him, whereas I don't think there's anyone to wake and so belt out Oh Little Town of Bethlehem and Silent Night in a voice Ozzy Osborne would be proud of². Naturally, this could cause problems if, as has happened, I dropped the hymnal and simultaneously forgot the words, but in that event I simply sang "Lobster Thermidor" over and over³ until I remembered where I was in the song.

However, Mrs Stevie had put her foot down after the humiliation of The Away In A Manger Fiasco some years before and I had to read the music and work out how it worked or shut up. So that's what I did, and it was a great triumph as I was in fine voice. A little flat, perhaps, but what I lacked in accuracy I made up for in decibels. Mrs Stevie complained, but then again she always does.

Back home and it was present opening time.

We had agreed that we wouldn't go crazy with presents this year, so naturally the pile of boxes under the tree had grown to huge proportions as each person tried to smuggle their present ambush munitions in unseen.

I had presented Mrs Stevie with a large flat screeen TV, a surround sound soundbar, the furniture to put it all on and a Blu-Ray player. She was a bit put out that this meant deep sixing the old surround sound, which was actually better for the sound panorama, but the old system a) was part of a malfunctioning DVD player that annoyed the living heck out of me, 2) would not connect easily or well with the new TV and þ) was too big to fit in the new TV stand anyway. She became more enamored of the system when she found out she could watch Netflix on it, as the TV integrated with our WiFi network out of the box.

But I knew she'd like a stocking stuffer or two so I bought her an Elton John concert on Blu-Ray and a copy of Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, a favorite movie of hers. I also bought her a book called Diabalries, which was a collection of digitally restored stereoscopic pictures of dioramas of scenes from Hell, first created at the end of the 1800s. The book contained lots of text about the pictures and included a sturdy steroscope with which to view the panels. It was the sort of quirky and neat present we used to find for each other when the world was new, we were newlyweds and Mrs Stevie knew nothing about Starbux and their mood-altering products.

I gave The Stevieling a book on the art used in the movie Frozen, a thumb drive disguised as one of the characters from that movie and the cash she needed to go and see her boyfriend⁵.

They bought me the Hess Trucks I'd asked for and an iPad air - something I'd looked at but dismissed as unattainable. Given our "no presents this year" pledge I thought my TV ambush had won the bragging rights, but I had been undercut and overtaken by this breathtaking iPad Ploy.

I also got scads of chocolate goodies, which I ate and made myself quite ill because I'd run out of my statin drug of necessity and the avalanche of fat caused the onset of the unmistakable signs of an attack of pancreatitis a few days later. But as I always say: what's the point of being given life if you can't throw it away stupidly?

We put ourselves in a good mood by watching Much Ado About Nothing on the new telly, then went over to the Mrs Steviedad's place so Mrs Stevie could make Xmas Dinner for everyone. We do this because the in-laws are too old to come over to ours as they did in former years. I took my laptop and new iPad so I could start moving some of my pdf textbooks over to it.

Upon arriving we carried in all the food and made our hellos, then, while Mrs Stevie and her Mom chatted I figured out how me and the Mrs Steviedad could watch an episode from the Band of Brothers Blu-Ray set we'd given him. We got about three minutes in to the running up Currahee bit before the women arrived in-theater, unloaded Band of Brothers and replaced it with some insipid movie about Christopher Reeves going back and forth in time so he can conduct an unbeliveably tedious affair with a woman.

I decamped for the front room and my iPad. Mrs Stevie did attempt a Don't you like this movie?⁶ gambit, but I cut her off at the knees with a heartfelt You must be bleeping kidding!⁷ and she retreated to leave me the bleep alone.

It took me about an hour to get the books moved, some of which was finding out that iTunes was the conduit for all PC-iPad communication (at least, hardwired communication) and then finding out how to work iTunes all over again, since I had foolishly allowed it to upgrade itself after months of nagging in full knowledge of what had been done to me the last time I was so idiotic as to say "OK". Once again the interface had been completely changed and it had taken me a long time just to find out how to display my music collection the way I want to in the bloody thing.

Why the bleep do software providers foist this never-ending unwanted set of changes on the user? Microsoft do it every time they upgrade Office to the point I won't use it any more if I have the option because I can't find anything in the revamped and completely bleeped-up menu. I can understand Apple wanting to fiddle about under the hood, but why would they assume that they know better than me what I need from my music player software?

It's not as though the changes fix any of the borked and unuseful user interface stuff anyway. All they've done is make everything different for difference's sake and force me to learn a new set of operations, typically making them harder-to-use, to get the same effect.

Building a playlist used to be a simple drag-and-drop thing. Then they changed the main window display and everything became tedious, as the window was never scrolled to where I needed it, or if it was the sidebar was scrolled to hide the playlist.

The cure? Not fix the display because, well, that was new and by definition "better". No, what had to change was the drap-and-drop mechanism. Now you build playlists using a drag and drop from the other side of the screen. Nothing is improved by this. Just annoyingly different. All the problems gthat the old method had are present in mirror image in the new one.

And yesterday I had to work doubletime to clean up a mess originally precipitated by the Amazon Music App, which sports an interface so mind bogglingly unfit for purpose I wonder how the Bright Young Things responsible haven't been found face-down in the mud of some tidal estuary.

My problem with it is this: There is no clear way to find the music I just bought from Amazon in mpeg format and differentiate it from music I bought weeks or years ago in CD form but sold with the "Autorip" value-added feature. Briefly, when Amazon sells one a CD they sometimes offer a downloadable version of the recording for free.

This is an excellent service, one I approve of, and certainly is not cause for approbation. Unfortunately, when one is forced to buy a downloadable version rather than a CD, one is then forced into installing the Amazon Music App in order to get the music from Amazon's cloudy goodness into one's personal electronic device.

"But Stevie", I hear you say. "Why not just stream it in from the cloud?"

"Because I do not have - nor do I accept the need for - a permanent persistent connection to the internet just to play an album Chris Squire recorded before you were born!" I rudely reply, cueing you that perhaps my tolerance for new technology has hit some Old Person arbitrary limit and I am not going to be susceptible to "reason" concerning persistent internet issues.

Anyway, when I pull up this bally app it shows me a button to download my purchases - say the Squeeze album I had a passing yen to hear again. When I click on that it downloads my Squeeze album, and every other album I've bought that has Autorip enabled.

The app is a nightmare of one-way navigation paths too, so if I move away from the download panel - perhaps to look for some help feature - I cannot find a way back to it again. This is annoying because I've already sucked those albums into iTunes the old-fashioned way, and have folders of mp4a files under the iTunes "music" folder.

No problem. Amazon's app uses its own folder to stash this content as mp3 files. It's all organized so you can sort it out.

Unfortunately, iTunes finds them and copies them into folders in its library folder. But wait! There's already a folder there containing mp4as of that content! No problem, iTunes will simply interleave the mp3s from Amazon with the mp4as it made itself. Then, in a move so stupendously unhelpful it beggars the imagination all over again, it imports the tracks into the iTunes user interface so whatever album it is has each track listed twice. And if I play the album, it will play each track twice⁸.

Convinced that this was in fact behavior caused by some switch I'd set, or perhaps that had been set for me when so much else of the bloody thing was changed, I rooted through iTunes to see what was what. After 20 minutes I was convinced that all the switches were set properly and that this was some dimwit functionality Apple was doing behind the scenes with one of the umptytump "helper services" it installs silently when you install iTunes⁹.

Lest you think I'm being harsh, consider: The music library My Music contains both the Amazon folder and, nested a few levels deep, the iTunes one. Windows media player can find both without any problem. The Amazon Music App can find both without any problem. And the secret Apple file buggerer-upperer can find both, which poses the question; why can't bloody iTunes find both and simply link without copying content around?

You see, in order to sort out this bleeping mess, if the content hadn't moved I would just need to delete the folders in the Amazon library folder that were duplicates. But because iTunes makes copies, wasting space for no good reason, screwing up the album experience for no good reason, I had to drill into the iTunes library too and delete only the mp3 files that were duplicates - a lengthy and manually intensive process - then pull up iTunes and delete the albums from the user interface, then re-import them.

People have stopped gibbering the Apple Mantra¹⁰ at me because I interrupt them by snarling the word "iTunes".

Anyway, all that messing around with iTunes tired me out almost as much as recapitulating it all here has, so, overcome with ennui and fed up with typing I'll just say we had a nice dinner¹¹ and then went home.

1. Even if she is breaking my heart by quitting school in NY and moving to another state and maybe emigrating to Canada but she's not sure and I'm not allowed to be negative about it all because she's a grown woman now so that's that↑
2. Assuming Mr Osbourne had a tin ear, no sense of timing and a problem staying in the same key as everyone else↑
3. A trick suggested by someone who had been in congregations featured in Songs of Praise⁴↑
4. A televised service from a different church each Sunday evening for those unable or unwilling to actually go to church but still of a mind to partake of a weekly dose of Mandatory Religion↑
5. This so she would stop trying to hijack our us-only vacation and repurpose it to her needs↑
6. This an attempt to throw me on the defensive and make me explain my reasons why I didn't think Christopher Reeve is a compelling use of my time↑
7. Which, of course, is as much of an explanation as any reasonable person would need↑
8. Remember the Apple Mantra: It just works↑
9. A practice Microsoft and Symantec (Norton) and McAffee get screamed at in public for doing for much better reasons than Apple have↑
10. ibid ↑
11. Mrs Stevie makes great dinners if she can keep her urge to experiment with the ingredients tightly under control, but Mrs Beaton help you if she gets creative↑

Xmas Report, 2014

Ho! Ho!
Haaaarrrrgggghhhh!

It's Christmas Again!

Or was, about three weeks ago. I'd have posted my usual effusively gushing report of merrymaking and excessive consumerism in a World Gone Mad but stuff got in the way.

Christmas Eve was the usual family affair, with Mrs Stevie at work, The Stevieling making herself scarce and me, having taken the day off, trying to make a dent in the crap strewn about our house in an attempt to achieve scenic congruence with Bikini Atoll shortly after the Castle Bravo event.

I shoveled and vacuumed and swore until about 4pm, when The Stevieling swanned into theater, announced she was going to her grandmother's and demanded to know my own ETA at that venue of in-law reunion, once yearly catching-up and loot exchange. I may have been a little short in my response, as I was feeling a bit out of sorts having been waiting in vain for her to join me in removing her crap from my Xmas Eyeline.

In any event she hotly denied any of the stuff on the kitchen table was hers¹ and stomped off leaving me searching my lexicon for the exactly apposite Word of Power to express my lack of confidence in her denials of ownership.

Some time later Mrs Stevie hove into view, her attitude somewhere south of "Blitzkreig" owing to a day long surfeit of idiots and Starbux Xmas Cinnamon Triple Clawhammer Latté Grandes, which it appeared she'd been hitting continuously since around 11 am in defiance of good sense and medical advice.

We exchanged a few desultory insults and got changed, she into a Christmas-themed sweater and me into a golf shirt and the same jeans I'd been cleaning house in, and I drove us over to the Mrs Steviedad's house, parking behind The Stevieling's car.

From the fleet of cars parked in the driveway I could see that BiL the Younger was there with the crew

They had driven down from somewhere barely not in Canada that day, so his kids (all grown up into late teens and early twenties) were all tired and shagged-out after having gotten up in the middle of the bloody night in order to get here.

Now it had been asked of us that we get together at four, but no-one who had a job could manage that, not Mrs Stevie, not BiL the Elder, and not me either given that my day off had been spent working twice as intensely as I would have if I'd gone into the office - and if I had they'd have been lucky to see me before 8pm. So we'd apologized and said we'd get there as soon as we could.

I could understand that the Northeastern Maritimes crew would want to get started on dinner and present exchange etc as soon as possible as they would be dead on their seats by 9pm, but the scheduling is all their own doing and is predicated on their not wanting to spend more time than absolutely necessary with Mrs Stevie's side of the family.

I can sort of understand why, my Mother-in-Law having been a little more critical of my Sister-in-Law than Pope Paul III was of Henry the Eighth, but the time squeeze and long day was, as in previous years, not of my doing and I have little patience with being given a hard time by whoever is out of sorts this time, which turned out to be the middle daughter, who gave us the bounty of about two whole sentences the entire evening and avoided returning my greeting to her by playing Minecraft at me.

Oh well, maybe she'll have come around by next Christmas, though the reasons for meeting are becoming less compelling as the years go by and it may be this was the last we'll see of each other. Her loss.

BiL the Elder and spouse rolled up eventually and the adults enjoyed themselves having fun while the various younger "adults" interacted or not with each other and sometimes everyone else. I felt sorry for The Stevieling, who was at one time inseparable from The Minecrafter and who was probably feeling the snub harder than anyone else.

Eventually it was time to eat, then time to exchange gifts. Now the kids are grown this has become a much shorter ceremony. It used to take about an hour as each person took it in turns to open up something and show it off. This time we were done in about twenty minutes - gift cards are not as time-intensive as Easybake Ovens or Barbie Doll RV Campers or whatever else the kids got over the years. At some point in the proceedings Mrs Stevie passed the camera, which she'd schlepped over there after ascertaining that my interest in playing Lord Snowden this year was nil, to BiL the Elder and asked him to take a picture of me, The Stevieling and her as we sat in an obviously contrived pose of family unity.

A sad mistake.

BiL the Elder is no stranger to digital SLR photography for he has a top-of-the-line SLR gifted to him by his wife some years ago. He was, however, completely thrown by the fact that my SLR is a bottom-of-the-barrel model that does not offer the facility to swing the viewfinder mirror up in order to allow the rear screen to act as a viewfinder itself. My camera requires you look through the viewfinder, which contains more dials, indicators and flashing warning lights than The Predator's Space Goggles do, and press the shutter release like you used to do on a film camera.

The conversation went like this:

Mrs Stevie: Would you please take our picture?

BiL the Elder: Sure. How do I get the screen to work?

Mrs Stevie: You don't. You use the viewfinder.

BiL the Elder: But how do I get the screen image?

Mrs Stevie: You don't. You need to use the viewfinder.

BiL the Elder: What? You mean you can't use the screen as a viewfinder?

Mrs Stevie: No. You have to use the viewfinder.

BiL the Elder: So you can't use the screen as a viewfinder on this camera?

Mrs Stevie: You can't use the screen as a viewfinder. Use the regular bleeping viewfinder!

BiL the Elder: But on my camera ...

Mrs Stevie: JUST TAKE THE PICTURE!

Which he did, grumbling about screens and viewfinders the entire time. Apparently, BiL the Elder doesn't know that the mirror swing-and-lock feature (which also enables the taking of movies as a free extra benefit) is only available on very expensive SLR cameras like his, and is not available on cameras like mine that cost about a third of what his did.

I considered telling him but then realized that he would press me for the reason why this feature is such an expensive option, and given that I have no idea why swinging the mirror for viewfinding is so much harder than swinging it for taking the shot (which has to happen anyway, just like in a film SLR) that it should cost one arm and most of one leg, and that I would be trapped in a second never-ending exchange, so I let it slide.

Later that evening I discovered my camera under a side-table where someone had placed it. Why it wasn't on the side table was a bit of a puzzler, so I picked it up and was rewarded by seeing the front element of the lens wobble from side to side.

"When did this happen?" I asked Mrs Stevie, as an experiment in prediction.

"It's always been like that" came back the entirely expected (and entirely ridiculous) response.

I was disappointed. Mrs Stevie has been known to ignore wobbly steering wheels, strange noises from the engine and flames shooting out of the air vents of her car, and to respond to my queries as to the length of time the car has been exhibiting signs of immanent catastrophic failure with vagueness or outright denial of the visual evidence of same six inches from her nose, but she has a background that includes photography and I expected more acumen concerning cameras.

I expressed extreme doubt as to the normality of the main light-gathering and focusing mechanism of the camera having always waggled a quarter of an inch from side to side, then switched on the camera and pointed it at something, pressed the shutter and watched all the lights, dials and flashing indicators in the viewfinder die.

"what's the matter with it?" she sweetly asked.

"I can't say for sure" I replied. "It's either been dropped or kicked. It may even have been drop-kicked. Either way, the lens is now a casualty of The Family Christmas. Let's hope the body comes back to life when we get home and I plug the other lens into it. As for now, we have no camera. You are going to have to use your phone for recording any more happy memories. Why didn't you put it back in its case when you were done using it?

She then deployed Spouse Ploy #1 : I gave it back to you which I countered with a hearty and firm No you bloody well didn't. The camera was your responsibility. You brought it. You were supposed to take care of it. I told you that in so many words before we left home and I hold you responsible for the damage and refused to discuss it any more. I knew that I had just been handed a $200 bill for expenses and was not a happy camper.

It infuriates me the way the women in my family treat expensive technology. They casually deal out all sorts of biffs, bangs and clangs to stuff, then have the brass nerve to look surprised when it breaks.

We scored this camera as a "freebie", inasmuch as I got it using the frequent spender points from a credit card to obtain gift cards that I used to buy the camera, but I at least am always aware that it cost about $500 in real terms. It isn't a toy, even though it is the low-end-of-the-range model. It is a very good quality camera as suitable for the budding shutterbug or photojournalist as for a point-and-shoot clod like me. It is stuffed with features that make life unbelievably easy compared to what I had with my Minolta SLR film camera. The lens alone is a technological miracle, with autofocus and an outstanding vibration reduction feature that lets me take hand-held non-flash pictures at speeds four times slower than I could with a film SLR², and it has an 18-55mm zoom range that makes picture composition a doddle.

Not that night, of course. It had been turned into a bunch of scrap metal and glass by a passing foot.

We grabbed some more food and chatted a bit more and then it was time for people to start leaving. BiL the Younger's crew was assembled and they departed into the night, yawning. We did some tidying and then BiL the Elder and Wife left.

The Stevieling took the tablecloth out to the front garden to shake off the crumbs, came back in and said "Dad, come outside please". I figured she needed help with the spinnaker-sized tablecloth, grabbed my shoes and walked out into the cold. "Uncle BiL the Elder has hit your car".

I was unprepared for this and so without thinking shouted an incredulous "How?" to the neighborhood reflexively. You see, BiL the Elder had moved his car so that BiL the Younger's convoy could leave earlier. As far as I could see he must've then been parked alongside The Stevieling's car. To hit mine, he'd have had to swing directly into it as the first thing he did. To miss it all he had to do was drive back one car length to the clearly visible road. I couldn't see how it was possible to have a direct collision between his car and mine.

But when I got there, indeed he had done the impossible and put a deep dent in the fender I had replaced only some months before when some other clod in an SUV had backed over me in a spectacular demonstration of driving with all power to the brain switched off³.

BiL the Elder was making noises about paying for it, so I waved him off and told him we'd sort it all out later, no, it wasn't important so long as no-one was hurt and so forth. Then I went back inside before my natural tendencies became too much and I deployed some totally deserved class four Words of Power in his direction. The car was, after all, driveable, so other than a spectacular inconvenience to come and some steep out-of-someone-else's-pocket expenses, there was no real need for a family feud.

So: one Minecraft-themed snubbing, one destroyed camera and a thousand-dollar-or-I'm-a-scotchman⁴ ding in The Steviemobile; not a bad haul for Xmas Eve.

1. A blatant falsehood↑
2. Where the rule of thumb is 1/30th of a second is the slowest you should try without a tripod↑
3. "I could hear your horn blowing but couldn't see anyone so I just kept reversing"↑
4. And I *never* drink scotch↑