Overwhelming Cricket Noise

I've been to busy, sick and despondent to post of late.

That's not an excuse, just a reason for the sounds of silence of late. After this weekend I shall be in a position to rectify this veritable famine of fiascos, debacles, screw-ups and annoyance at the hands of those iniquitous swine, that cabal of insidious workers to the detriment and defeat of the working man, The Long Island Rail Road.

Posts in the works include the I-Con report (last years I-Con was such a disappointment I think I actually forgot to deliver the promised post on it) including how a Very Famous Writer savagely cracked the spine of one of my treasured ancient paperbacks, and why I don't care about it as much as I should, a serious plea for people to stop using the trains as a means of ending their now-pointless existence on the planet or at the very least to start using the South Shore Lines so I can get home on time for once and the acquisition of new technology and my struggle with it in a World Gone Mad.

Oh, and Mrs Stevie's Shuttlecraft will be there somewhere.

The Rain In Wyandanch Stays Mainly On The Carpark

I have spoken before about the cunning and innovative civil engineering used in constructing the drains of Long Island in general and Wyandanch (Pearl of the East) in particular

So I shall use the relatively new Blogger feature that allows me to upload pictures to this blog without an account with a third party web-host and a degree in computer science to demonstrate that I do not "make this stuff up" as certain people have recently been hinting.

The picture appearing above (hopefully) is of the place the rain should have gone over the last week, during which the Western Hemisphere's entire supply of rain for spring was erroneously delivered to my address all in one go over the course of three soggy days and nights.

Luckily, the Wyandanch civil engineers realized that a gentle flow of water sluicing over the various cracked curbstones, potholes and ill-laid tarmac that make up the North-East carpark complex would be just the thing to raise commuter spirits dampened during the previous week, and arranged for the carpark to become a massive shallow reservoir that should take another three to four days to drain dry by the stunning expedient of placing half the drains halfway up the various hills and slopes that make up the local topology.

The pool depicted wraps around a small complex of shops and restaurants, none of which can use their rear entrances owing to between 3 and six inches of water pooling round the entire mall. As you can see, their is a very nice, large, clean drain within a couple of feet of this lake, but as it lies a good foot above inland sea level it is of no use in reducing the amount of wet lying in square yards all over the place. In a stroke of genius, the elevation of the drain exceeds that of each and every doorstep by at least six inches, so maximum fun was extracted from the inclement weather and many of the establishments are still trying to dry out.

And they say there's no more greatness in the world.

The Saga Of The Jewelry Case Comes To An End

I have finally completed the repairs on the Jewelry Display Case of Extreme Time-Wasting and Expense.

I said I'd have a go at making this thing after a friend who sells pewter statues, chess sets and jewelry, broke his rotating triangular case o' jewelry displayage by bashing and smashing it for a few years. Since it was made of Perspex, it just about disintegrated. He asked me as I passed his booth at I-Con one year if I could fix it, and I said no¹, but that I might be able to make him a new one.

I dithered for about two years and came up with a hexagonal design (the issue was not the shape², that was 5 minutes worth of overheating brains, smoking hair and so on) but how to realize that shape in the footprint required to house a reasonable number of the little display cards the jewelry comes fastened to.

These cards hang from a metal hook-shaped clip fashioned into the top of each card, which engaged in a slot in the original display case. I thought that six columns of two cards, six high would work. I had one of the cards (I had though far enough into the process while I spoke with my friend to realize the need for one) and so it was a matter of simple arithmetic to figure out the dimensions of the hexagonal prism required to do the job. The problem was that no-one makes hardwood in such dimensions that the hexagonal base and top could be simply made from two planks, and if they did I could never afford to buy it given the rarity of hardwood in general - I had decided to go with maple for the construction as I could work it easier than I could oak and it would be hard enough when finished to withstand a fair degree of bashing and smashing without getting dinged-up.

I finally had the required brainwave and figured out that if I made the core prism out of MDF (a sort of hardboard) and used small lengths of aluminum channel bolted to these panels as hooks for the cards to hang on, I didn't need the base to be solid. It could be annular (ring-shaped). The top could also be made annular, and the hole could be covered up by a second, smaller hexagon of wood. So that's what I did. The whole thing was held together by a threaded truss rod joining the top to the base.

The finished object was, if I say so myself, a thing of beauty and I presented it to him at I-Con four years ago.

The next year he gave it back. He had stored it for a year in an unheated garage lockup and the top had cracked through due to thermal creep and, I suspected, an over-tightened truss rod. I told him I'd repair it and return it, but the top ended up needing to be completely re-fabricated and during that process my drill press died and my router self-destructed, so it wasn't ready. The next year Mrs Stevie was ill and I had no thought for woodworking. So this year, four years after I originally made the thing, I finally am able to re-present it with the proviso that if he stores it in a garage and it cracks I want nothing more to do with the wretched thing.

It was quite a struggle to get the damned thing built too.

The original was clearly not properly assembled, so I resolved to make the joints more accurately this time. The best accuracy I could get in tests on the Miter Saw was about 1/3 a degree per cut, which translated into an accumulated error of about three degrees over the entire ring, meaning it was a spiral with either an overlap at the final joint or a gap. Experiments with my new table sanding machine could not improve on the error in the time I had, so I went cheap 'n' cheerful and decided to make two half-hexagon rings, then machine each half-hex to match the other. This would result in a slightly irregular hexagon, but I was getting fed up with the whole thing by then and didn't care.

The crowning hexagon was machined as six triangles, and was glued down to the hexagonal ring, centering it as best I could.

I took some precautions to avoid Splitting Top Syndrome while I was at it. The lack of biscuit joints, dovetails, tenons or whatever meant that the joints could easily fail as they had before (I had used biscuits³ in the previous design, but they let go). I considered using metal plates screwed over each joint, but that would only hold one side of the joint and allow expansion stresses to build up and twist the top apart again.

Then I had what I hope was a better idea. I machined an extra slot in the ring and the crown, sank some screws in the slot, leaving the heads proud, and poured quick-setting Alumilite liquid plastic resin⁵ into the slot. Now each hexagonal piece has an integral O-ring holding the joints together.

The goodies on display are kept safe from the light-fingered by six Lucite windows that engage in a slot in the base and have a top piece made of wood that has a pin which engages in a hole in the top of the case. The original design was a bit too fiddly when it came to hooking up the windows after a sale, so I added knobs to the bottom of each window fabricated out of the flat-top screw bolts used to hold Swedish furniture together.

It all looks quite good now after a minor paint touch up to the core (which is matte black to emphasize the goods on display)

but there are two minor gotchas that have me grinding my teeth.

First, I forgot that in transit the windows need securing and managed to construct the top with no regard for the clip-on hardboard "transit disc" that held everything together on the original. Fixing that requires dismantling the whole thing, a non-trivial operation at this stage in the game, so that has to be worked around with rubber bands.

Second, sometime between me giving my friend the case and my finishing it yesterday, the windows gat marked up. I was very careful to store them in wrappings, but I can't say for sure they got scratched in a damp garage as opposed to my basement. Most of the marks could be polished out with a polishing compound and some elbow grease, but I haven't the time or the inclination. I can replace the windows for about 20 bux and a weekend's work (and about two weeks recovery from the wrist strain cutting Lucite with a special scoring knife will cause) but I'm unwilling to invest more cash in this project. It has already cost north of 100 bux and enough is enough.

I am almost as glad to be rid of this albatross as I was to get shot of Bil the Elder's G4.

1. After I'd done laughing↑
2. The original case was triangular but my friend had asked for a square one to increase capacity. The problem with a square prism that revolves is that you have to allow a footprint that accommodates the sweep of the corners but hat is otherwise empty. I knew from observation that space tended to disappear on his table as the day went on, so a hexagon seemed a good compromise. Smaller sides meant smaller storage space per side, but the difference in diameter measured from point-to-point as opposed to that measured from flat-to-flat would be small making for no illusory free table space to be swallowed by tidal crap↑
3. Biscuits are small, oval pieces of wood that sit an a slot machined⁴ each face of a joint so that the joint is bridged by the biscuit which is secured by a water-based glue. The water in the glue causes the biscuit to expand and lock the joint firmly together. Unless some gimp stores the joined pieces of wood in a cold-then-damp-then-hot-and-damp garage for a year of course, in which case all bets are off↑
4. Using a biscuit-joiner↑
5. A truly marvelous product that can be used to make all sorts of things very, very quickly↑

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I'd never been to Carnegie Hall before.

Last Thursday The Stevieling was part of her school choir, which was joining five others in an evening of music in the Isaac Stern auditorium, Carnegie Hall, and the family decamped there-wards for some culture.

Seated all around were other proud parents, some of whom I knew, some from many years of meeting at similar, if less upscale, events. Behind me, with her family, was an enchanting five-year old girl who - like most of her kind - reminded me of the days when The Stevieling was that age.

Since our choir was on next-to-last I got to see a cross section of Long Island school choirs sing. There isn't much to say. The youngest kids had material that was too repetitive and went on too long for non-parents to appreciate, while one of the older kids' choir presented a "World Premier" of a piece that could have had a subjective month lopped off it without ruining the experience in my opinion.

But everyone had practiced until they'd turned blue and was giving it their all in Carnegie Hall for crying out loud! I gave each kid in each choir a heartfelt round of applause when each choir's program ended, and I meant every handclap as a salute to their hard work and professionalism under stress.

Then I watched my all-but seventeen year-old daughter mount the rostrum with her peers, and a peculiar double image formed in which a choir of five year old children mingled with the evening dress-clad young women and dress suited young men on the stage. I couldn't figure out who these young women and young men were. It wasn't that long ago that I was building her tree house, surely

The music swelled and folded us in simply wonderful for about twenty minutes, and all too soon it was over and I was on the sidewalk wearing a stupid expression while trying to find everyone in the crowds.

I still can't figure out when my little girl grew up.

Out Of The Furnace, Into The Fridge

When we moved in to Chateau Stevie it had a boiler made as one of a batch, the rest of which were installed on RMS Titanic.

It had, I think, been converted from oil to gas in the far distant past, and had probably run flawlessly for thirty plus years before we saw it. The outside was rusty, and the coil¹ would give only about one minute of hot shower water even with a lo-flo shower head, but it worked, sorta.

Admittedly we had to heat the top floor with electric heaters on account of the bloody plumber doing the plumbing "Genaro Fashion²" and relying on some sort of goodwill to move water out of the furnace-pipes-downstairs baseboard radiator-pipes-furnace circuit via a T-fitting and into the upstairs pipework.

What actually happened was that the vertical pipe would get hot, but no water would flow because there was no reason for it to do so.

One day the furnace gas valve required a tap with a Brummy Screwdriver³ to get it to open and provide us with life-sustaining heat and I finally had to admit we were in trouble. A quick check showed that we had hit the usual watershed: four grand in the savings account. Whenever we manage to scrape that amount up (which takes years BTW: no power earner me) something will come along to wipe out some part of the domestic infrastructure worth exactly that amount. It's sort of the universe's way of telling me exactly what my worth in the scheme of things is. One time it was a driveway that broke up and a hundred feet of fencing that fell over for example. This time it was a decent hot water system to replace the hope-anna-prayer job that was then sitting in the basement.

We had the Stevieling in the house by then, so I knew that keeping a furnace that might one day malfunction catastrophically was Not On. Accordingly we had fitted a "state of the art" Slant Fin furnace and a fifty gallon separate water heater, and had the installers create two pump-driven zones with proper valving for the upstairs and downstairs heating circuits. I still remember walking upstairs into warm air for the first time since we closed on the house, and the first post-water-heater-installation shower I took, five minutes after the last plumber left the house, which featured the luxury of being able to dawdle for more than one minute in the stream of hot damp.

The next day, which happened to be Thanksgiving Day, the brand new, state of the art furnace wouldn't fire up and the house was ice-cold.

I poked and pried and discovered that I could, by tapping hard on the flue vent, persuade the thing to open and the furnace to start. I spoke to the installer and said that since I could get the thing started manually, and since we were going out for Thanksgiving Day dinner that day, I could spare him sending out a team on Thanksgiving Day if he would set us up for a fix at start of business on the day after, Friday. He was very happy and promised that would be done.

Naturally, Friday rolled on and at 10 o' clock I called the installation company to find out what the hell was going on. The woman who answered the phone began her side of the conversation by asking "Do you have a service contract?" to which I answered "No". She then told me she couldn't send anyone out unless I had a contract with them. I then explained in increasingly harsh tones that I had a warranty, that the unit was less than 48 hours old and that if someone didn't come round and fix it at once I was calling the better business bureau and my lawyer, in that order. Someone came around noon and replaced the automated flue vent required by NY state law, the servo motor of which had malfunctioned, closing off the flue and thus triggering the fail-safe on the igniter.

The bloody thing malfunctioned every single year with the same fault for the first three years (the warranty period) and the same process of arguing with Ms. Service Contract or Nothing followed by threats followed by a late night visit by a "specialist" who would replace the same motorised flue vent was gone through each time. After the third replacement, the "specialist" said that legally the unit had to be fitted, but it didn't have to be used. The flue could be left open. The reason it is closed is to prevent backdrafts filling the basement with carbon monoxide, but the furnace also has a sensor to shut it down if it detects that happening (and it has on a couple of occasions when I've had a high-velocity fan blowing out of a basement window). So I had the unit deactivated.

The next failure, a couple of months later, was a carbon monoxide sensor shut-down caused by a freak windstorm, and the "specialist" showed me the secret restart button not included in the instruction sheet the installers left for me.

Then the warranty went out and the price quoted for a service contract by the installers would have put a man on the moon so we parted company. The furnace got clever and started chewing through thermocouples every year.

The thermocouple is a little copper tube that pokes into the pilot flame and tells the electronic gas valve that the pilot is lit so it can turn on the main gas jets when it wants to. When the thermocouple breaks, it breaks in "do not start" mode and the furnace does what it's told. The first I know of it is usually when I get home and enter a freezing house. "Why is it so cold in here?" I will ask, and get blank looks from the shivering women lying in wait.

This time I got up on Sunday morning, wandered about the house crashing into things and generally trying to get the old body started properly, and was ambushed by The Stevieling who said "The thermostat is set for 70 degrees but it is only like 60 in here. Is this normal?"

Now, in all the years she has lived there, she has been through several "cold house" moments and she knows darn well it is never "normal". This was just her trying out her mother's circumlocutory powers.

I went down into the basement, covered in sawdust and bits of wood from a frenzied attempt to dominate wood with power tools in a World Gone Mad the day before. I reasoned that it was possible that all the activity, including a high-throughput shop-vac doing duty as a dust collector, could have tricked the sensor into sniffing the dreaded carbon monoxide so I pressed the secret button in full expectation of hearing the boiler fire into life.

It didn't.

I wasted a few minutes taking the cover off the furnace and poking things in the hope Magic Poke Cooties would fix things, then stood up and did the Rage Dance while improvising a rap composed of my very best third order Words of Power.

Mrs Stevie said "Call the guy who always fixes it for us", so I did. This was a self-employed heating engineer who did a bang up job of restarting the damned furnace two or three times in the past and didn't charge a limb of any kind for the privilege.

He denied ever visiting us.

Since he wouldn't actually discuss things until we had resolved that, Mrs Stevie was forced to join the conversation (she was the only person who'd ever met him). He finally allowed as how he might have worked on our furnace, but said he was in semi-retirement now and couldn't help until Monday at the earliest.

Mrs Stevie then went and found another firm who agreed to come over⁴ and left for organised religion with The Stevieling in tow. I had to go and dismantle my production line so the furnace guy could actually get into the basement (which is filled floor to ceiling with crap everywhere there are no tools, workmates supporting tools, router tables on workmates or floor-standing tools). Since I was frantically trying to build a replacement top for the Jewelry Display Case of Annoyance, it was all very tiresome and I explained how tiresome it was at length, to the air in a monologue consisting largely of my very best fourth order Words of Power, as I moved, folded and dismantled various tool set-ups.

John the Furnace Guy came in, took the furnace apart, installed a new thermocouple, reassembled the parts⁵ and lit the thing, then presented his bill, all in a trice⁶.

I apologised as I paid him, but he said his bank had no problem cashing tear-stained checks, and since he always took the precaution of putting in ear plugs before presenting his invoice his hearing hadn't been damaged by my shrieks of dismay.

1. American domestic furnaces often feature an internal coil that is used to heat a separate water circuit, typically used to provide the domestic hot water supply↑
2. There're four ways of doing things: The right way, the wrong way, the hideously dangerously and/or uselessly wrong way and The Genaro Way. This is an ordered list↑
3. A pipe wrench↑
4. Mrs Stevie has a knack for finding reliable people on the strength of the briefest conversations, though I'm not certain threats are involved in every case↑
5. And had none left over afterwards↑
6. Defined in this case as just under an hour↑

Oh, What A Lovely Bore!

So much for the blizzard that had everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I went in early, so early I won't get paid for about an hour and three-quarters unless I request overtime which will be denied, and left at mid-day to avoid the chance of being marooned by the Long Island Rail Road, who now have a policy that once the snow is 10 inches deep, they don't run any trains.

This is because in the last snow storm they left a train full of people with no power, light or heat for six hours, and to their surprise were roundly vilified in the press and by anyone with breath in their bodies as a result. Rather than fix the systemic problem (no procedures to cover evacuating trains stuck in super-inclement weather or to attempt to restore "hotel power" - as heat and light are called in railroad parlance - so people don't freeze) they used the Clawhammer o' Never Again. So when a train stalls out due to a colossal rain storm, it'll be the same story because THEY HAVEN'T FIXED THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM.

Anyway

All that rushing around and for what? About nine inches of slush.

Good one, weathermen. A credit to your skills with the cutting edge technology you have at your fingertips.

Update - 0600 Hours am o'clock, Thursday

I spoke too soon.

Approximately 12 inches of snow fell all over the place overnight, then most of it blew into 2- and 3-foot drifts in my driveway, trapping the Steviemobile and the MrsSteviemobile behind impenetrable walls of weatherfluff. After that, it was a simple matter to have the town's snowplows throw whatever snow had not blown into my driveway into my driveway.

You have won this round, Mr Weatherman!

A Royal Pain In The Rear End

Warning! The following blither is totally disgusting, involving what can only be described without negating all purpose in this alert as "The Toilet Regions", and I'm not referring to the bathroom when I say that. Those with a weak stomach and those who find the subject of certain parts of the body repugnant should surf over to something else for a while. You have been duly warned. It's trousers down from here on in.

I had cause over the Xmas period to visit with a colorectal specialist.

I will pause now while those who unwisely ignored the big red warning at the top of the post finish throwing up into their keyboards. All done?

The reason was that I had somehow done an injury to that opening in my body not capable of coherent speech. I figured it would heal itself in time, almost every minor tear in the skin eventually does¹, but Mrs Stevie was adamant I seek proper medical attention. I argued that there was no real need, but she countered this clever line of reasoning by citing towel racks ripped out of the wall, torn linoleum and bite marks in the toilet seat, so I gave in.

The doctor was clearly an expert in wringing the maximum amount of humiliation from the situation, and had a highly trained staff. No sooner was I in the office than he had me drop my pants and underwear. The nurse held up a paper napkin around the same size as those in an average fast food restaurant, claiming it was to save me embarrassment, but she blew it by sniggering as she said it.

Once my trousers and underwear were around my ankles, I was instructed to kneel on a sort of leather and stainless steel chaise-longue of the kind often seen on exclusive members-only German bondage web sites and in the main parlour of Mistress Alexa's House of Executive Correction. It was, of course, some eight feet away, and so I was obliged to hop vigorously over to the device to the delight of the nurse, who had dropped all pretense of trying to preserve my dignity. I comforted myself with the thought that under normal circumstances, this procedure would have set me back a good $500, assuming Mistress Alexa could fit me in (she has a very crowded schedule).

I first began to appreciate how much real trouble I was in when I heard the doctor say: "Nurse, pass me the Hobbs retractor. It's that thing that looks like a bicycle pump with ridges around the end. No, the big one. And be careful. Those ridges are razor sharp. Now Mr Stevie, relax. You'll feel a small pinch."

Naturally, as soon as I heard that old "small pinch" line, the very same one Doc Rubberglove uses when he jabs me with his signature blunt hypodermics and leaves me with a dinner-plate sized bruise that fades in only 10-12 days, I tensed up tighter than Mrs Stevie's best choke hold, and the doctor was obliged to use brute force to insert whatever it was that he was holding into me.

"Just be careful doc", I whined. "I'm very tender back thereYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGH!"

The doctor, wise in the ways of colorectal examinations, had his nurse pinion me while he used his sheer muscle-power to insert fourteen inches of cold steel into places I had no idea I even had, while I thrashed around, screamed, begged for mercy and/or death and so forth. Before I knew it (actually, a good deal after I knew it to be honest), it was over.

"The original tear is healing. I'll give you some ointment for the four or five new ones you just got. Oh, and you should have a colonoscopy, being as how you're over fifty."

"I was thirty eight when I bent over your ruddy couch" I told him, attempting to sit on only one buttock.

And so the colonoscopy was scheduled, and was undergone last Monday.

Others in my office claimed to have had to drink gallons² of some sort of white liquid to clean them out (the hosepipe up the jacksy is, thankfully, no longer a recommended way of cleaning out the pipes of human beings prior to sticking something the size of a drainpipe up their rear ends). I'd seen the dentist on the movie "Ghost Town" drink some sort of disgusting white glop for the same purpose, and a co-commuter told me her husband had been made to drink something akin to clotted milk in sliminess to do the job.

I, however, was told to just take four laxative tablets on Saturday, drink one 10 oz bottle of cherry-flavoured Magnesium Citrate (another laxative) around six pm Sunday, and another at six am Monday. For once I was on the winning side of things it seemed.

Not for long though

The tablet-form laxative was supposed to begin laxavating my innards in three hours, but took nine. However, after a mere 30 minutes I was as dehydrated as a vulture's crotch. Every molecule of moisture was torn from my tissues, and I couldn't drink enough water and Gatorade to offset the dehydration. Result: a vicious hangover headache, which I still have days later.

The cherry soda had much the same effect, to the point that I was moaning and clutching my head for most of Superbowl Weekend, which was a curiously apposite title from a personal perspective given that my diet for three days consisted primarily of laxatives and water. I didn't watch the game on account of I couldn't get out of the bathroom for more than about two minutes at a time. At least I had no more need to rip out and/or bite down on the fixtures, the good doctor's ointment having done its job.

On Monday I was required to drink nothing in the final four hours, and I nearly went mad from thirst and the pounding headache.

Once in the doctor’s office I was made to remove everything except my socks. For reasons I cannot elucidate, being naked is nowhere near as humiliating as being naked except for socks. Like I say, the man is a master of the art.When I folded my trousers, my cell phone fell out of the pocket and onto the floor, where it disassembled itself into it's various removable parts.

I found most of the parts quite quickly, but not the battery. I searched high and low but couldn't find the bloody thing, then spotted it lying in the space under a door marked "Staff Only", so I had to get dressed again in order that I could contravene office policy and open the door to retrieve the damn thing. It was all very tiresome and par for the course.

Once on the operating table³ I was asked when I last ate ("Three years ago" I snarled) and drank ("Four hours, twenty-seven minutes and eleven seconds" I whined) then the anesthetist stuck me with a hypo full of Valium and something with three syllables, and the headache immediately went away. I was so relieved I thanked the man and began regaling him with one of my wittiest anecdotes. After about ten seconds he let out a strangled cry and stuck another hypo in me and that was the last thing I remembered until it was all over, at which time Mrs Stevie hove into view⁴ and the headache came back again.

The doctor said he'd removed a couple of polyps but couldn't see anything esle wrong, then left shoo-ing the crowd of Russian webcam operators and total strangers invited in from the street before him, and I was allowed to get dressed and go home.

Apart from the headache, the only thing I've been able to take away from the whole miserable business is that the threat to "tear me a new one" now holds no force, since I am intimately familiar with what it feels like and can sneer "been there, done that" at the manager attempting to motivate me with those words.

1. Albeit in age-related increasing timescales that can induce worry in your scribe at times↑
2. Well, gallon. The container is hucking fuge↑
3. Face-up; presumably some ultra humiliating pose was forcéd upon me once I was unconscious, possibly involving stirrups. Or they may have simply turned me over, but the photographic humour possibilities in that are minimal↑
4. You can't have a general anesthetic without someone waiting for you so they can drive you home. State Law, I think. Same thing was true when the cracked tooth was pulled.↑

The Great (Coal) Train Robbery

Ken was not a happy camper.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were 15 years old and had only a hazy idea of the legalities involved, and anyway, if no-one caught us we had got away with it and therefore were, by definition, innocent. Anyway, it was all Ken's idea.

I don't mean to suggest I was unwilling, far from it. I pretty much leaped at the suggestion we mosey on over to the smokeless fuel processing plant marshalling yards and take a close look at the coal wagons. It was winter and I found the reflection of the moon off the pools of solidified lime that dotted the landscape thereabouts quite evocative in the way only a 15 year old does. The Gothic Gloom of the place was a Lorelei Song to a moody teen and I went there often to think about life and stuff.

I was dead philosophical at that age.

Anyway, Ken and I had been kicking around the railway yards a couple of nights before and he had opined that the very acme of desirable memorabilia in his humble opinion was the heavy, oval cast-iron makers plates fastened to the right rear and front left corner timbers of each coal wagon. I took a look and was dubious.

"There's a hundred years of black tar and two ginormous carriage-bolts holding the thing in place" I noted. "Why on earth would you want something like that on your wall?"

"Idiot!" said Ken in that playful manner he had after we had been in each other's company for a couple of hours. "I'll use the gas torch in the school metalwork shop to burn all that crap off and repaint it first! If we can get the bolts out I reckon it'll prise off with a big screwdriver"

"The bolts are square, though", I said. "We'd need a big Stillson's pipe wrench to get those buggers out. Like the one me dad has hanging in the shed. He won't miss it for a couple of hours or so, and then there's the big World War I - era screwdriver in the toolbox. I'll use my duffel-bag and we can carry the plate to your house in it when we're done."

And so we had. At dead of night the next, er, night we stole into the yards, keeping well away from the highly illuminated part, and relieved one of the ten-foot long coal wagons of one of the two makers plates it bore. Ken was ecstatic at the haul and I was pumped with adrenalin as all criminals must be after their first "big job", and we gleefully made plans to repeat the process the next night.

During the day, news of The Big Job had somehow gotten to the ears of our mutual friend, Dave, who had insisted on being "in". We both shrugged and said "okay", but we had unwittingly made a mistake.

You see, Dave was An Adventurer in the making. He later went on to climb mountains, dive reefs and all sorts of other moderately daring stuff, but he was already taking himself Very Seriously when it came to capers. Well, we all did at that age, but Dave was...epic in his approach.

We were lulled into a false sense of security when he rendezvoused with us wearing black trainers, pants, pullover and woolen hat. He looked every bit the part. Indeed, he looked like he was going out to blow up railway lines and thus put yet another spanner into the well-oiled works of the filthy Bosche war machine that had run rampant over his beloved France in 1939 and abruptly ended his innocent adolescent life as a simple grape picker plunging him into a life of deadly intrigue, guns and high-explosives. Mon Dieu!

We stealthily made our way into the railway yards once again, Ken and I with the sure tread and wary eye of the seasoned coal-wagon burglar, Dave with...wait! Where was Dave?

Sometime between our reaching the ultra secret weak point in the smokeless fuel plant's security, known to those prosaic, stiff-necked Denizens of the Daylight Hours as "the level crossing on Blackberry Way" and our insertion into the high-risk area about two hundred yards from the day-bright Klieg lights illuminating the live part of the yards, Dave had slipped fully into character.

Once we spotted him it was easy to deduce that he had elected himself "Look-Out". He was running back and forth, diving periodically between wagons and then sticking his head out to check for observers, his shoes making the canyons of steel up ahead ring with the sound of scrunching gravel.

Ken did a little dance of annoyance, as did I, but we resolved to work further back down the trains of parked wagons so that we'd have a head start should Dave's "precautions" bring disaster.

We pulled off one maker's plate after about five minutes of unscrewing and levering, and moved on to a second. I should point out that the plates in question were, once the tar was burned off, beautiful items¹, dating from well before World War II in some cases and that there were several different ones available. Ken knew the ones he wanted - no mere opportunistic thieves were we, but refined aesthetes with a discerning eye. Well, Ken was. I was just easily led².

We did, however limit ourselves to only taking one of each pair when we selected the ones we wanted, partly because we didn't want to overly inconvenience the poor buggers in the maintenance shops, but mostly because being more than a foot over the long axis these things weighed a ton. What with the Stillson's pipe-wrench and the screwdriver, which appeared to have been machined out of depleted uranium despite being over 50 years old (no screws made after 1935 had slots wide enough for the blade I might add), I was in serious danger of having the bottom fall out of my duffel bag. Two was our limit that night if we were to avoid Explanations to parents³.

We were removing the second plate when Ken became aware that Dave was now leaping from wagon to wagon, clearly outlined against the sky. I also became aware of this around the same time, because Dave was good enough to stop right next to us and comment loudly that we should bring power tools the next time. Then he bounded off again into the night. I could see his gymnastic form as he occluded the light from the smokeless fuel processing plant itself. I think probably anyone could against that light, just by looking out of their kitchen window, and the nearest house was about a mile away.

"He's gonna get us caught!" snarled Ken.

"Where will we plug in the extension cords?" I asked, dubiously

"What?"

"For the power tools. It's a great idea, but I can't think where we'd get the juice from", I said

"Idiot! yelled Ken, quite forgetting in his indignation where we were and the perilous situation Dave had put us in vis-a-vis being rumbled with a bag full of cast iron swag. "Not only is there nowhere to plug in these power tools you pair want to bring in, the sodding things will make enough noise to raise the dead!"

"I hadn't thought of that" I admitted ruefully.

"Stealth!" howled Ken. "Stealth is the key to not getting caught!"

"Will you keep it down?" hissed a voice, unexpectedly coming from just overhead.

"Argh!" Yelled Ken.

"Argh!" I agreed.

We sat and caught our breath while Dave returned to his lonely, leaping vigil, then Ken said "I want one of those!"

"One of what?" I asked. I'd been looking into the lights again and couldn't see what he was pointing at.

"That. The destination board. I wannit."

I looked for a bit, and checked I wasn't going mad. "This?"

"Yes, that."

"But all it is is a block of wood with what looks like a mousetrap mounted on it. Why would you want that?"

"They put routing information slips under that spring clip. I want the thing."

I could see we were going to get nowhere unless I did what Ken wanted, so I took a look. The block of wood was held onto the wagon frame by two nuts. The bolts were either captive stud-type things, or were inserted from behind the frame and had domed heads, 'cos I couldn't find anything to grip that side of the frame. In order to remove the device, Ken would have to hold back the "mousetrap" waybill retainer, which swung down against a very strong spring, while I used Mr Stillsons on the nuts. Ken concurred and we got to work.

Now my part of the job was tedious but involved constant work, but Ken's was really just standing and holding back this mousetrap thing and he had time to get bored and start obsessing about Dave again.

"Look at that idiot! He's gonna get us caught. I mean it! We are gonna get caught because that twit thinks this is some sort of game."

The litany went on and on for the entire duration of the job. Indeed it went on a bit further. Ken was so caught up in his monologue that he was quite oblivious to my having removed both the nuts holding the device to the wagon frame. All that was holding it now was whatever environmental gunk had stuck the wood of the base to the wood of the frame.

"Ken, the nuts are off" I hissed. "Ken! I'm done! Ken!"

Which was, of course, the point at which the wood came away from the frame and snapped closed on his fingers with a mighty THWACK! that I was sure could be heard for miles.

It is at times such as this that the true mettle of a man is shown to the world. Ken was magnificent.

Well aware of the need for silence after the night of lax stealth protocols, yet having been dealt an injury of heroic, nay, super-heroic proportions, he was faced with a difficult decision. Not since Wiley Coyote had almost the very same thing happen to his paw during a particularly trying bout with the Road-Runner had one being been dealt such a hefty whack with such a thin piece of metal to such a delicate set of bones and tendons.

Doubling over yet somehow managing to show his face to the world at the same time, Ken puffed out his cheeks (both sets), drew back his lips in a terrifyingly wide grin and went for a hop around the shunting yards, all the while making a sound like a distant steam whistle with his nose while gnashing his teeth hard enough to flake enamel off them. I stood and watched admiringly from the shadows, while Dave, sheltering from possible detection in one of the wagons, offered the shouted opinion that Ken should be more circumspect in his fooling around.

Eventually Ken was able to regain control of his voluntary muscles and we made our way home to the sound of his fingers throbbing. Dave thought the evening had gone very well. I was less sanguine, but then I had been volunteered to carry the cast-iron swag. Fortunately, about half a mile from home, the bottom tore out of my duffel bag, which lightened the load drastically at the cost of waking up the entire neighbourhood. It was, we decided later,⁶ a good night, but not good enough to do again.

Not even on a bet.

1. If you like that sort of thing↑
2. M'lud↑
3. To be avoided at all costs. We had taken great care not to worry them by telling them anything about our nocturnal quests, and there was no need to get them all excited over what was, when all was said and done, nothing really to speak of⁴↑
4. Which is why neither Ken nor I have ever spoken of it⁵↑
5. Until now↑
6. Months later↑

Ho! Ho! Ho! And Pass The Batteries!

Nice One Santa!

Good haul this year.

Mrs Stevie gave me a watch I'd been lusting after ever since my old one fell apart. The old one, which still works on account of the bit that disintegrated was the fancy case that turns out is totally ornamental and the works are all in a waterproof cylinder to which the strap is attached, showed the time as small digits in a crowded display, and had an alarm function, a stopwatch and a countdown timer. It ran for years before I had to change the battery.

The new one shows the time in letters large enough to be seen from the International Space Station, and has a stopwatch, five alarms but no countdown timer. Instead it has compass, barometer & temperature and altimiter functions and is the bestest watch since the chronometer I was given for my 15th birthday.

She also gave me Super Mario Cart for our Wii console, and I've been buried in it ever since. I've been addicted to this game for years in one or other of its many incarnations, but this one, with its wireless steering wheel gadget, is the best yet. Everyone knows now if they wander away from the TV during their favourite show, they may not get it back until the Mushroom Cup Challenge is over. Hence, the other members of the family have been hogging the TV set for days.

No matter, I can always play with my Hess truck, which this year is actually two racing cars, one hidden inside the other. Most of the Hess truck collectors I've spoken with confess to a slight disappointment with this year's model, and I'm one of them. The big car is the usual high-quality affair with lights and sound, and a lifting front section that opens to reveal a scalextric-sized second vehicle, a pull-back-and-go version of the larger car. The thing is, it's not a truck. I was still playing with studying last year's offering (a dump truck with front-end bucket loader) in late November, but I expect I'll pack this year's away soon. Hmm.

I also got a copy of the new four-player Super Mario Brothers game, which is spiffy but everything looks so small on our old-fashioned 27" TV I suppose I'll now have to buy a hucking fuge flatscreen in order to play it. Azathoth alone knows where I'll put such a thing though.

I also scored a magnetic poetry kit on the off-chance I suddenly develop an ear for the stuff, some tasty chox (scoffed), a desk calendar and the daftest multitool I've ever seen.

It features a hammer on one end and is so idiotic in concept it deserves its own post, so it'll get one. Mrs Stevie only bought it because I laughed so hard when I saw it hanging on a hardware store wall.

Mrs Stevie got a digital picture frame from me, as demanded with menaces two weeks before Xmas, a book set in Henry VIII's time that she also was most definite about and some fancy Roger & Gallet soap I scored from the only shop in NY that stocks it. I was careful to select one of their many fragrances that would most likely bring her out in an amusing rash, but either she hasn't used any yet or I need to pick another scent.

The Stevieling made out like a bandit. Mrs Stevie gave her a game for her DS handheld that she's been using every free moment to play, a speaker system for her iPod and cosmetics. I gave her some supplies for creative card and letter crafts (stamps, sealing wax and seals and so forth).

Mrs Stevie's big present to the Stevieling surprise was undermined by Bil the Elder giving the Stevieling The Beatles Rock Band game at our traditional Xmas Eve gathering. Mrs Stevie had bought the thing the day it came out, stood on line at 6 a.m. etc etc etc, and had crowed daily for the last three months about how clever she was, only to have the wind taken from her sails with less than 12 hours to go. I laughed and laughed until Mrs Stevie hit me in the head with a Christmas-themed china platter.

Good times.

Ho Ho Argh!

Ho Ho Argh!

So tonight we had the traditional meet'n'gift exchange with the in-laws.

It was all very pleasant and a good time was had by most. Everyone gave people stuff they didn't need in the established western way, we ate food and regaled each other with tales of our exciting lives. It's true that my tales tended to induce either snores or sobs, sometimes both at the same time as the fact is my real-life stories induced snores in the listeners and sobs in me. Happy times.

On the way home the festive mood was ruined and we were almost killed when I was cut off by some idiot driving an overloaded vehicle with no regard for anyone else on the road. That the driver was drunk I have no doubt whatsoever. He was laughing like an idiot the whole time for all to hear. The poorly secured load was threatening to fall to the road at every jink and swerve, and I doubt the vehicle itself was legal for highway use in New York State.

Snow or no snow, an overloaded sleigh drawn by reindeer should not be on the public highway on Christmas Eve.

Teeth: A Bad Idea

Time to tell the tedious tooth tale.

The eager reader of TOS¹ will remember that I was having trouble with an upper right-side molar³. I had been driving past Doc Tugmolar's surgery when a nugget of mercury amalgam weighing about a pound and a half fell out of my head, uncovering the delicate hurtybit inside the tooth.

"What a stroke of luck!" I remember crying out⁴ and had dashed in and made out a very good case for a temporary filling being fabricated for it immediately. I'd had the damn thing root-canalled, but the endodontist had pulled a face at the time and said the tooth was cracked and probably could not be saved.

During the next few weeks I went back and forth with one of Tugmolar's young associates as to whether it was worth even trying to cap the tooth. Leaving it as a stub like the other one was one option, but the dentist didn't think she could fill the tooth effectively without putting a crown on it, specifically a post-and-crown cap, which would involve putting a peg down the center of the tooth.

I thought that this plan would result in me spending a lot of money (for my insurance plan has an age-related exclusion clause on crowns⁵ which would make me liable for most of the 1600 bux this one would cost) and then, if things went the same way they did for the other cracked tooth I root-canalled, I would have to have it pulled anyway due to the agonising pain every time something brushed the tooth. If it was only going to have to come out anyway I'd just as soon be not 1600 dollars in the hole. There was also the matter of the endless stream of ear and sinus infections I was having, and the fact that my face felt like it was on fire much of the time. A cracked, infected tooth root snugged up against my sinus cavity was looking more and more like the route⁶ for the germs into Mr Head.

The dentist was most persuasive that the post would stabilize the tooth and called me in for the appointment to make the impression. I was in the chair about ten minutes while she X-rayed my jaw, then she came back and said that not only could the tooth not be capped owing to the severity of the crack, not only would it indeed have to come out, but that they couldn't pull it because the root was snugged up against the sinus cavity and I would therefore have to visit a oral surgeon.

They did recommend a surgeon, so I called and made an appointment. I discussed the details with the surgeon's PA, confirming that my insurance was good and so forth when the lady asked "Do you want to be awake for this procedure?".

"You offer general anaesthesia?" I asked.

"Of course" she answered.

"Will my insurance cover general anaesthetic?" I asked dubiously.

"Oh yes" she answered.

"Then I would most certainly not want to be awake" I said with feeling.

I mean, who would? There's the hundred and fifty jabs in the jaw, the horrible, bone-jarring cracking as the tooth is ripped out of your head, fragment by fragment (cracked, remember), the gallons of blood gushing from the gaping wound. Not to mention the bruising from the places the oral surgeon will have to grab your head to get the leverage required.

The only problem, such as it was, was that I would have to be ferried to and from the surgery. Mrs Stevie had plans to be in Manhattan with The Stevieling all day, but grudgingly allowed that she wouldn't be due to leave until after the surgery was done, so couldn't pass up the chance to see me in post-surgical agony and offered to drive me there and back.

On the day, I was X-rayed in surround-rad in a stand-up rig that gave me my yearly dose of Roentgens in 15 seconds, then I was conducted to the operating room and helped into the leather recliner that would be the scene of the action. Mrs Stevie announced she was leaving to get gas for her car, and I engaged the surgeon in conversation. I was in the middle of regaling him with one of my many witty stories, when he leapt onto me and stuck a needle into my arm. Long years of life with Mrs Stevie have granted me immunity from such minor assaults and so I didn't break the stream of my amusing narrative. Five seconds later, just before the hysterically funny climax of the tale, I passed out.

I was awakened some 45 minutes later by the frantic nurse who demanded to know where Mrs Stevie was. I wracked my brains, wooly from the aneasthetic and also because my head was stuffed with real cotton-wool, and realised I didn't know since I had no idea where she went for gas. The nurse started yelling about how she would have to take me home, but I couldn't pay attention to her because the room was swishing around and I was very tired, so I just said that she should leave me propped up in the waiting room until Mrs Stevie returned, at which point Mrs Stevie returned.

The rest of the day was spent attempting to shrug off the anaesthetic, which left me with the mental acuity of a drunken hedgehog for about 17 hours.

But.

The operation was painless and so was the recovery. Even after the sleepyhappy juice wore off I had absolutely no discomfort at the wound site. Mouth felt a bit odd with a hole in my toothline you could drive a bus through, and I drooled uncontrollably for three days, but no pain from that side of my mouth.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for the other side, where the stub of the other root-canalled tooth was cutting the hell out of my tongue. I think I was biting myself in my sleep, probably during nocturnal gnashing brought on by the need to do constant mental battle with the mercurial and ultra-violent Mrs Stevie. I stood it for a couple of weeks, then begged Tugmolar's team to give me an appointment so someone could file off the sharp edges. It's fine now, no biting my own body while I sleep and no more drooling and, finally, an end to the endless ear infections and burning sensations in my right cheek.

Oral Surgery is the best thing ever.

1. It is a central literary conceit of TOS that there are people who read it, and that they are eager for each installment².↑
2. In fact, a recent survey of the system logs here at TOS Ents (North America) Inc. have shown that almost 100% of the visitors to a given page promptly navigate back off it again in less than 12 micro-seconds, which outpaces even a sugared-up teenager's click-read-click rate by several orders of magnitude and strongly suggests these visitors are in fact robotic spiders dispatched by the various web search engines for book-keeping purposes. The small fraction of a percent of visitors who do not go somewhere else in a gnat's eyeblink do so after about two point eight seconds, suggesting they were directed here by the said search engines but were looking for other types of content. There's a way to figure out what they were looking for, and I would indeed offer such content if I could figure out a) how to get pictures onto TOS, 2) how to circumvent certain petty federal obscenity statutes and web host terms of service and ♥) how to persuade Mrs Stevie to pose with the various pieces of equipment and/or farm animals that seem to be in demand. Experience has taught me that Mrs Stevie has ultra-conservative views on such matters and a tendency to illustrate them by the percussive use of cookware on my skull↑
3. Number three for the dentophiles out there↑
4. Or words to that effect↑
5. I imagine this policy would most benefit young professional hockey players or kickboxers since apparently one can get all the crowns one can stand before a certain, undisclosed age, at which point you can't have any.↑
6. aHahaha↑

Good News For Once

Mrs Stevie just got the results of her last tests in.

The PET scan shows no activity in the site at which she had the beginings of a tumour last year. This is about the best Christmas present anyone could have given her.

There had been some concern about something the PET scan had shown concerning her thyriod, or what's left of it (Mrs Stevie had Hashimoto's Disease shortly after we married and underwent a hemi-thyroidectomy). The results from the "thyroid uptake test" - whatever that is - just came in and she's "clean".

So all those life-insurance policies I took out on her were a collosal waste of money and yet another retirement investment scheme has gone nails-up.

And Then Came Saturday

And Sunday too.

Saturday began with a bang when everyone in the whole world decided to get in the car with their dog and do some seriously witless driving, on account of there being two flakes of snow per cubic metre falling from the sky. This meant that the world was about to end and everyone knows you can't meet the end of the world without a cellar full of canned food (if you can get it, the early birds being up and about very early this morning). I wanted to go out to get my shirts from the dry cleaners and the part for the washing machine that stops it winding the legs of jeans and apron strings around the agitator drive shaft, so I was part of the fun whether I wanted to be or not.

Such was the chaos that it took me about four times longer to get my stuff from the cleaners as it usually does. The drive down to Sid's Appliance Parts and Ammo Shoppe was even more annoying and took so long, what with people forgetting how traffic lights work and deciding on novel interpretations of the lane markings that have only been on these roads for about thirty bleeping years, that it was snowing for real by the time I entered Sid's door.

Sid didn't have the part, either.

I returned home and, aided by Mrs Stevie, wrestled the electric Christmas bush o' merriment from it's storage niche in the garage and took it inside the house so Mrs Stevie could erect it and festoon it with crap. It was now mid-day and I already felt like I had gone eight hours with a tax inspector. But things were about to get worse. Immeasurably worse.

No sooner had Mrs Stevie deployed the first stage of the tree¹ than she found that a grand total of zero lights were working on it and demanded I fix them tootsweet, and my spirits, already low, sank south of utter depression.

The tree's lower stage has two strings, each running about halfway round the tree. I found a broken bulb, replaced it from a set of coloured lights I had bought years ago just for replacement bulbs (it's about a zillion times cheaper to do this than buy replacement bulbs in three packs) and half the bush sprang into glorious coloured illumination. The second string was to prove more of a pain in the ass challenge.

To find the blown bulb in a string, I normally remove one of the good bulbs from a similar set that is working and test each of the bulbs from the unlit string by plugging it into the working string, and this is what I did with the tree. At first I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Every bulb I tested in this fashion allowed the string to light but wouldn't light up itself. This is how Christmas lights are supposed to work these days, but who has ever seen it work properly? The mechanism is simple: the filament holds apart two spring-loaded contacts that slam together when the filament wire breaks.

Heh.

I think everyone has had experience with how well this works in real life, which is to say usually not at all. I'd put the ratio at one bulb that shorts itself when it blows for every three hundred that somehow still manage to take out the entire string. I had assumed this to be the case with the tree, but in fact I was seeing a textbook case of what happens when the mechanism does work but the bad bulb is not noticed.

Each bulb consumes some of the total electric power coming out of the wall. If one blows, each of the other bulbs gets a little more juice than it was intended to cope with, shortening their lifetimes. The next bulb blows, and the situation for the survivors gets that much worse, making for an even shorter time to failure for the survivors. Given enough time in service, it is possible for the shear amount of electricity coursing through the bulbs to cause a cascade of failures, each one quicker than the last until either the whole string is dead or one bulb fails in the more usual string-killing manner and puts a stop to the avalanche of popping bulbs.

I found myself hoping for this string-killing behaviour in one of the bulbs before I got through the entire string, but in fact I was 2/3 of the way round the tree and had replaced all but one bulb before the dead string of lights burst into glorious multi-hued splendour. I immediately unplugged them of course, because I noticed that the other 1/3 of the string was still un-illuminated and that that could only be because every single bulb from that point on was dead! Had I left the string plugged in, each bulb lit would have been overpowered by about 25 volts and I would be likely to see first hand the Wonder of the Popping Bulbs.

In all I changed over three dozen bulbs from that string. Only two bulbs from the originals were still working from the entire string of lights. And that was my Saturday shot to hellanback. By the time I was done it was after six and the snow was coming down hard.

Sunday dawned and I leapt from the marriage bed before Mrs Stevie could wake up and complicate matters and ran to the front door. Then I remembered the conversation with officer McDermot and went back for some clothes, then opened the door to survey the problem.

Snow was still falling, just, and had piled up in front of the storm door. I pushed it open and discovered I could get it to open enough for me to squeeze out with a snow shovel (unlike the year before last when I had to remove the glass from the storm door and climb out through it). We'd had about 15 inches of snow, which had drifted to several times that level in places, notably around the Steviemobile which had so much snow piled around it the hood (UK Bonnet) was below ground level.

I dug for about thirty minutes, opening up the deck, steps and front path, then waded through the knee-deep snow in the driveway to the garage. It was time to once again deploy the mighty Troll, The Snowblower Of Supreme Spiffiness.

Troll has a maw on it that is 27" wide and about 20" tall. Today, the snow was just the right sort for maximum fun - not too dry, not to wet, and so deep that Troll was tunneling for some of the time requiring second and third passes over the same terrain. How the early morning idiots attempting to drive on the roads marveled at the graceful arc of snow, twigs, small rocks and fragments of frozen turf that flew from Troll's ejection chute to a height of perhaps thirty feet before falling all over their vehicles². How they screamed their own enjoyment of the snow-clearance process to me as I in turn howled in the sheer primal joy of my manly domination over the mounds of soft, frozen inconvenience lying about the place.

I did our driveway, the sidewalk in front of my house and that of Mr Singh the next-door neighbour, Mr Singh's drive, because Mr Singh has rescued my bins from the road and cleaned out the leaves from the property boundary which was half my job and I like him. I was just mulling over whether I had enough gas to go and clear Mike's driveway when Troll mutinied and refused to move any more.

Once my brain was clear of endorphins, which it was quite soon after the manliness factor evaporated, I realized something serious had gone wrong with my beloved snowblower. The self-propulsion drive was inoperative probably due to the malign influence of the dread anti-handyman demons, which had been quiet - too quiet - of late. I dragged Troll back to the garage and located the manual for it which for once I had not put in a Safe Place and therefore rendered un-findable until the snowblower was but a dim memory. It looked like the problem could be one of two things: a) the drive belt could be broken, or 2) the drive wheel could be damaged.

The transmission on these devices is fairly straightforward. The engine spins a shaft, which drives two belts, one for the self-propulsion drive and one for the augur (the thing that munches the snow, then throws it over Mr Singh's garden wall). The self-propulsion belt drives a wheel oriented vertically across the width of the machine. A second wheel, much smaller and with a rubber rim, can be brought into contact with this spinning wheel to transfer the motion to the wheels via a chain-and-cog reduction gear. Why so convoluted? Because you derive the speeds by moving the small wheel across the diameter of the larger spinning wheel with the "gear shift" lever. In near the middle of the spinning wheel gives you a slow speed, out near the rim gives you a much faster one³ and across the center and over to the other side a bit gives you reverse. Simple and fairly robust, but a bugger to service because it means pulling the snowblower apart.

I removed the cab, which was heavy and made tipping Troll up on her scoop almost impossible. Fortunately, the manufacturer foresaw the need to occasionally be cabless and it is a matter of undoing two ripstock nylon belts and removing two cotter pins to get the cab off. Finding somewhere to leave the cab while you work is another matter, but I managed to find somewhere that wouldn't result in a damaged window. Then I upended Troll and removed the steel plate covering her underside to reveal the works. Turns out it was in fact option þ) that was broken. The final chain-driven cog that turns the roadwheels is mounted to the axle with a bolt. This bolt had broken. I thought it might be a shear-pin (something that is designed to break to prevent something much more expensive being broken) but I wasn't sure and it would be an odd place to put one. I couldn't get to any local Sears likely to stock the part (and I doubt that any Sears stocks the part anyway) so I nipped down to Arse Hardware where they very kindly sold me a suitable bolt and nylock nut. It was a very pleasant shopping experience, which if it hadn't involved driving on the same roads as the other idiots out doing Xmas shopping and trying to get ice-melt at this late stage in the game would have been idyllic. Said idiots included a number of teen and twentysomething morons on quads racing around at far above the speed limits, ignoring the everyday restrictions on overtaking, traffic light precedence and so forth and posing a threat to life and limb. One, for example, blew through a red light on a main road and came this close to going under a car that was spinning its wheels, and which made contact with tar and catapulted forward - with a green light - almost hitting the berk on the quad, who had the nerve to look surprised. It's bad enough when these quad and skidoo morons come out on the roads late at night when there's little to no traffic, but to do it on a main road in busy traffic? Idiocy of the first order. While I was ploughing out the drive I saw a couple of quads come screaming up behind a convoy of slow-moving cars (the road was still snow-covered at that point) and the quads pulled out into the oncoming traffic's lane and hit the gas. I was absolutely flabbergasted that people could be so monumentally suicidal. Bear in mind that these vehicles are not legal on the roads and therefore their drivers carry no insurance. The threat they pose to children playing in the snow - themselves not noted for common sense when the whit stuff is abounding - is terrifying.

Anyway, I bought the bolts and some snow-melt on account of mine had migrated from the place I put it at the front of the garage in July to Places Unknown⁴ and returned to Chateau Stevie to fix Troll.

I'm well aware that replacing what might be a shear pin with an ordinary bolt is a) asking for trouble, 2) an enormous and potentially costly gamble and ♥) akin to replacing a troublesome fuse with a coin, but there may be another dose of this white stuff coming our way and a buggeréd snowblower beats a buggeréd heart any day of the week.

I tested everything worked, put all the bits I took off Troll back on, pumped up the tires which I noticed during the drag back from Mr Singh's driveway were flat for some reason and, infused with sheer manly fixiness turned my attention to the matter of the Steviemobile's blown headlamp.

The drivers' side headlamp has been dead since at least the time I last loaned the car to Mrs Stevie (I only say that because that's the first time in ages I've seen the car at night from the outside, not to infer that Mrs Stevie somehow broke the lamp - though I wouldn't put it past the woman). I bought a new bulb, anticipating the same job that I had when I replaced the other one. Remove the bayonet fitting dirt cover, undo the clips unplug the bulb, put in the new one and do everything else in the reverse order you did to get the old bulb out. Easy.

The drivers' side one is a tad more involved. Following a design ethic that I haven't yet fathomed, the Elantra design crew called for the drivers' side headlamp to be entombed in front of the battery, itself fastened down with a clamp and then obscured by a plastic cover bolted to the engine with a bolt and to the front metalwork of the car with Phillips head screws. No problem then. Out comes my TR6-era Hilka socket set, lovingly brought from England and now showing signs of rust since someone left it near the garage door during a storm and water splashed all over it in such profusion it got into the closed steel case. Where was I? Oh right.

The bolt came out no problem, but two of the three screws simply turned without unscrewing, while the third locked tight and then the screwdriver slot chewed up since the screw was made of soft engineering plastic. If I was going to pick an unfeasible material to fabricate screws from I'd go with poster-putty, then ice, then this engineering plastic, though it would be a close thing between the three materials as to which was the most ridiculous choice. The spinning without coming out behavior was simple to divine. It was caused by the fact that the screws did not screw into a threaded hole in the steel, but into a rawlplug-like device similar to those things you put in plasterboard to hold shelf brackets on with. The plastic plug swells up (in this case deploying four stubby "wings") to lock it in place while providing a surface for the screw thread to bite into. My best guess is that mechanics simply cut these off and replace them in the shop when they need to get the battery out.

Exhaustive study showed no other obvious way of replacing the bulb, though I did try to remove the headlamp module and work on it while it hung off the car. I failed to find the hidden third bolt securing the damned headlamp module to the car after a half hour of looking, and so was reduced to deploying some class three words of power and resigning myself to getting the job done when the next service comes due.

I went out to a Pep Boys, a sort of American version of Halfords crossed with Clutch Brake Autospares, with a view to obtaining the Haynes Manual for the vehicle, to see how the trick was done.

Now Haynes Manuals got off to a running start when they published their first book, the one on the early minis. This book was a diamond in the rough and an indispensable piece of any mini-owner's arsenal as it gave incredibly practical advice on how to do literally everything to a mini, from changing the wiper blades to rebuilding the gearbox. It scored over the Austin/Morris (later Leyland) workshop manual on just about every job, not the least because the tools required were described and, where possible, improvised rather than the Morris standard Service Tool 18G-something⁵

It might have been expected that every Haynes manual would be so complete and well thought out, but in fact that was not the case. Indeed, judging from my own experience and that of people I've spoken to on the subject, none of the other Haynes manuals achieve the clarity and error-free procedure schedules of the Mini manual, and there's a good reason for that. The reason is that the compiler of that first manual was Paddy Hopkirk, who rallied Minis in the late 60s and early 70s and who developed a series of radical procedures for quickly servicing these cars⁶ and therefore not only knew every shortcut and trick in the book, invented the tricks and wrote the book. The man was a genius. Not so the man who oversaw the Vaxhaul Viva manual, and who miscounted - low - the number of bolts holding the water pump to the engine block, or the nitwit who advised me to undo the eight bolts holding the prop shaft on my TR6 to the rest of the drive train and simply lower it to the floor and forgot that on a real car there was an exhaust system in the way.

With this in mind, I decided to read the bit on the headlamps before I bought the Haynes Hyundai Elantra manual. Good thing too, because the instructions read: remove the dust cover, undo the clips, remove the bulb and unplug the wires. To install a new bulb, reverse the procedure. I'm paraphrasing, but my version is not that far from the Haynes one and the salient point is that there is no acknowledgement whatsoever that there might be a bit of a problem when it comes to doing the driver side bulb because some fat-head put a battery and a big plastic cover in the way. No sale there then.

So, as of today I still have only one headlamp because I could not get the battery cover off no matter how much I swore. I mean, is it really necessary in this day and age, when buying a car to have to ask the salesman "can I change the headlamp bulbs without substantially dismantling the vehicle"? So I'll just have to give the mechanic at the dealership the bulb and ask them to fit it for me.

At a standard rate of 80 bux per hour or part thereof.

1. There are three, rather like a Saturn 5 moon rocket except greener, needley instead of frosty and each stage has umpteen strings of lights pre-strung on it instead of being filled with cryogenic rocket fuel. The first stage has two, the second four or more. The third only one, I think. It's pretty right up to the time they don't work.↑
2. Troll is very loud - and therefore very manly - and I can't hear motorists approaching even when they sound their horns almost continuously and scream through their open windows so it is sometimes the case that a foolish driver, more intent of getting to their destination than pulling up until I'm done with that bit, will be forced to drive through the ejecta plume. This is very unwise, but then again, so was driving on the roads that day.↑
3. If you don't get this point, pop the lid on your CD player and look at the rate at which the outside of a spun disc zooms along compared with the middle for the same rate of spin (rpm). If you steal your final speed from the disc you should see that it matters where on the disc you steal it from↑
4. Stuff migrates in my garage, especially during bike-riding weather, without my touching it. This means something.↑
5. every tool in the official workshop manual was referred to not by common name but by an alphanumeric identifier that started with 18G-. Something that was described as Service Tool 18G-451-763B might be better known as a hammer for example, yet the workshop manual eschewed such pedestrian terms.↑
6. Which were so small and light you have to wonder why no-one else thought to just turn them on their sides instead of jacking them to change the wheels and look at the underside gubbins↑

A Bad Day

Friday started out as a much better day.

I compose may of my TOS posts on an aging Handspring Visor that I have repaired and resurrected many times, but that has recently developed a very inconvenient habit. It powers itself off if it gets a physical shock because the battery (or the battery connections) are disconnected from the unit. If I don't notice and rearrange the two AAA cell batteries it runs on and by doing so restore the power in a relatively short time, the bloody thing forgets everything and I have to restore it from a backup.

Like everyone in real life, I don't backup the Visor anywhere near enough for my usage of it, which means stuff gets lost. If I don't have a paper backup (I do for some of the things I use it for) I am up a certain creek without a paddle.

This morning, wile commuting in to work, I had composed the beginnings of a very nice TOS entry and was planning on working on it on the way home. You can guess what comes next. Sometime during the day the bloody Visor took a hit and forgot the future TOS entry. I had a backup on a so-called springboard module (a forerunner of today's memory sticks) so I could get it back up and running but it was thouroughly annoying.

This evening, the train began moving, and proved to be one of what I call the "Seaview" trains that throw the passengers violently from side-to-side if the track is not arrow-straight, such as in the Flatbush Aenue to Jamaica section of track. The train just crossed a switch and almost threw me from my seat, so this evening's commute looks like being a real doozy.

While I was waiting for the restore to finish, the train smashing me first against my co-commuters and then against the window, my water bottle contrived to upend itself on the seat. This would not have been a problem last year when water bottles typically had a pull-to-drink nipple on them, but these days the bottled water companies fit flip-top nipples and the damned thing leaked all over the seat, me, my coat and my book.

And people wonder why I'm constantly in a foul mood after my commute.

It's Getting Better All The Time

Just heard President Obama's address to the nation on the subject of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you didn't catch it, he touched briefly on what Operation Iraqi Boondoggle¹ aka The Phony War² has cost us. This has been the Fact No-One Must Ever Mention until now because doing so would cause members of the previous administration to scream "Why do you hate America?" and froth at the mouth. Listening to these swine yap on about how we must cut education and health coverage to kick-start the economy when a thousand times more money is poured into a war we should never have started in the first place and another we should have piled in weeks before we did has made me froth at the mouth for years.

Anyway.

The President has promised that we will be out of Iraq by next summer or so (schedules in these sorts of affairs being a tad slidey) and that we finally have an exit strategy for Afghanistan. About bloody time.

Afghanistan is a real problem. No-one has been able to get the place in order because the only thing that will grow there in any sort of profusion is poppies, and the illicit drug trade only makes a few select individuals rich, not a country. Shutting the drug trade down and turning the land over to conventional crops is a non-starter. But I would like to know if anyone has considered getting the pharmaceutical companies to fund bigger poppy crops for more benign purposes. The way you get rid of loony regimes is to make everyone rich as Croesus. Give everyone a chance at paradise on Earth and they won't be so eager to scatter their bodies over the landscape on a hunt for however many virgins the going rate is today. Is there no legitimate way to make the opium crop pay for Afghani education and infrastructure?

It remains to be seen whether or not this charismatic young President can energise the people of the USA and get them behind him and his many agendas. The political landscape here right now is a joke. Eight years of a regime that threw away or simply disregarded every check or balance put in place to prevent unilateral power developing in the Executive branch (and a lickspittle Congress and Senate that let them get away with it), followed by an almost unprecedented turfing out of the old guard in favour of the new, and now there's "worry and concern" about checks and balances from the right.

Politicians who can't understand the difference between a public spectacle put on by shills for the insurance industry and the State of the Union speech. Mendacious, evil, manipulative people who, against all reason, can still find an audience for their monumentally stupid "birther" blather⁴, and I don't know what other madnesses today will bring. The only way to stay sane is to contemplate one blindingly obvious and unquestionable truth:

It's good to have a man in control of the Nuclear Deterrent who can actually pronounce it properly. The last bloke to sit in the chair got it wrong on a daily basis for eight long, long years.

1. My title↑
2. AKA by me³↑
3. And probably me alone↑
4. That's the one that goes: We believe that the President is a citizen, but some people have legitimate doubts. The President should produce his birth certificate and end the debate. Until this unspeakably idiotic nonsense came about I had thought the stories that mainstream America was racists at heart were overblown, but how else can you explain how people could possibly believe that the issue of a candidate's citizenship wouldn't be a matter of intense scrutiny before his or her party would think of endorsing a run for office?↑

Playin' The Slots

Why do the designers of machines that accept credit cards for whatever service it is that will cost the user deep in t'purse make it so bleeding difficult to actually swipe¹ the card to complete or, more often, initiate the transaction?

Consider: The vast majority of the world is right-handed² and so will pull the credit card from a wallet, purse or little Kevlar™ envelope with the right hand. The natural action would then be to take the card orient it so that it is vertical with respect to its short edges and attempt to insert it in the slot provided.

The MTA machines that sell metrocards for use on the subway require the card be inserted flat, with the magnetic band pointed down, on the left side of the machine. The card must be oriented with the stripe to the right though, so even a lefty will be in trouble here. No doubt there is a sound design principle at work here. If only it were a little more obvious.

The LIRR ticket machines have the slot (again, card goes in flat with the stripe down) on the right, but at such a height that the user must employ an awkward cocked wrist arrangement. Then again, the LIRR has a long history of incompetence and being bloody awkward just for the heck of it, so we shouldn't look for more from them.

Gas pumps often employ a vertical slot. Huzzah! But the card has to go in backwards (lefty-fashion) so on any given day you can see drivers madly revolving their credit cards to get the bloody pump to recognise the bloody card. This is not funny, because these days a five second delay in swiping the card can mean another 5 cents a gallon for regular unleaded. I mean, if we had been put on the Earth to pay exorbitant gas prices we'd have been born in Europe!

Point-of-sale swipes usually require the card be upside-down and back-to-front. No doubt this arrangement won a major design award for someone.

Much more of this and I'll be forced back into using cash. Would do so now, only I haven't got any to speak of.

See, the ATM machine at my bank can only be unlocked by swiping my card and I can't figure out which of the four possible (horizontal) orientations actually unlocks the bulletproof glass door instead of flashing a little red light at me and sounding a buzzer.

1. in the US sense rather than the UK one↑
2. Un-PC but indisputably a fact. Swivel on it, lefty southpaw losers!↑

An Ode To My Ex-Tooth

There's a hole in my head
Where a tooth used to be
I'd write a bit more
But I have to go pee

Teeth - Forswear Them

Remember the root canal I had in June?

A problem involving my pig-useless dental insurance plan meant that it took until the end of last month before I could move forward with the crown and peg the dentist had been recommending. I also wanted to examine the options since the damned tooth was cracked and hurt like blazes when subjected to sideways force despite having no nerves in it any more. This was exactly the same as the last one I had done, and I wanted to make sure the dentist was sure about her descision and that she was clear the crown would have to sit below the datum line of the other teeth so it would stand a chance of 'settling down" (a technical phrase thrown about by dentists).

Anyway, I was finally convinced and had the insurance go-ahead (they were going to pay about 250 bux of a 1400 bux bill by the way). The dentist removed what was left of the temporary filling (replaced several times over the months), then whent "Hmm" and decided to take an(other) X-Ray. She now announced that not only was she sure she couldn't fit the crown on account of the crack, but the tooth would have to be pulled - something I had been trying to get her to discuss weeks before on account of I don't have 1200 bux lying around for a tooth that will probably need pulling out 6 months after it is crowned.

Not only that, she told me that because the root was nestled up against my sinus cavity (which explained all the ear and throat infections I've had in recent years), she couldn't pull it. I would have to go to an oral surgeon.

The Oral surgeon's personal assistant was very helpful and determined that my insurance would cover full anaesthesia, so I should be asleep for the duration of this miserable business. There's even a slight chance I might not wake up afetrward, which makes it all the more attractive to me after the year I've had so far, but I couldn't be that lucky.

The tooth comes out on Saturday at around 10:30 am, setting me up for a weekend of sheer misery. Mrs Stevie has been supportive, and has offered to drive me to and from the dentist's office. She rather spoiled the moment by grinning savagely and rubbing her hands together as she made the offer, but I need a ride apparently; they won't let me drive myself after the surgery. I don't know if that's because of the anaethetic or because driving while screaming in agony and trying to strangle yourself into merciful oblivion is considered unsafe.

The aftercare will be a solo affair it seems, as Mrs Stevie has elected to go into Manhattan with the Stevieling rather than minister to me in my hour(s) of need.

Rong Agen

Well, that didn't take long.

I recently detailed how two nitwits pulled into the hard shoulder behind a tractor-trailer rig under the impression they were in a turning lane, and I explained how no truck driver would have been so monumentally dimwitted as to use the hard shoulder as a turning lane because their vehicles have such a wide turning circle.

This morning I observed a tractor trailer rig do just that at the turn before the railway bridge, the one with the doughnut shop on the corner. In order not to mount the curb he had to pull so far ahead of the turn that he came this close to clipping someone trying to turn left out of the road he wanted to enter.

So once again my "I'm an unlauded genius" theory has gone down under the wheels of Mrs Stevie's "You're A Nidiot" premise.

Goodnight Pool

It is that time of year again.

More precisely, it is weeks before that time of year has taken place in years gone by, because come hell and high water I wasn't going to be attempting to shut down the swimming pool in a force ten October gale while the womenfolk stretched out in the house and watched TV.

Accordingly, I raced out of the house on Saturday, pulled off the solar cover and vacuumed up all the crap the Maple tree had dumped in it over the week. I cleaned up all the air pillows with a scrubbing brush, and got the crud off the solar cover while I was at it. Curse that aerial plague on mankind known as "birds".

Conventional wisdom says you should tether a 4-foot diameter balloon in the middle of a pool our size before covering it with a winter cover. This allows the cover to fill with rainwater that holds the cover down in gales. Over the course of the winter months the trees, birds and insects conspire to convert this "water" into a soup of such disgusting olefactoriness that it defies description. Steviewisdom says "sod that for a game of soldiers". Last year I augmented the 4 foot pillow with three 4x8 foot blimps, and apart from some teething troubles when it rained so much the cover almost burst with the pooled weight of water it went rather well.

Well enough that I decided to up the oomph, blue vinyl balloon count wise, and purchased another 4x8 foot pillow and a 4x15 foot one that I envisaged forming a sort of ridge pole for the tented cover.

Inflating these things is a bit tiresome to be honest. They do not have a standard fitting such as one might find on a vinyl dolphin, inner tube with a pillow, fancy airbed or other non-life-preserving swimming pool fun-enhancer. They have instead a one-inch plug that has a sort of inexpensive one-way valve underneath it when you pull it out. This means that standard fittings on compressors or hand-pumps will not work, a decision that was no-doubt taken for consumer convenience reasons.

The proper method for inflating an air pillow is as follows:

Go down into the basement and retrieve shop-vac.

Spend fifteen minutes locating the hose which you removed three months ago, the last time you used it, when the damned thing attempted to snag you with its tentacle as you walked by it. Twice.

Wrestle shop-vac up basement stairs, dislodging carrier bags of crap hung on walls at shoulder height by spouse and child so that the contents form a satisfactory hazard the next time you descend those same stairs.

Bang head on door at top of stairs and come this close to going arse-over-tip down them.

Emerge into light of day clutching shop-vac and hurl it onto living room floor so the power cord can unspool.

Wrestle the shop-vac out of back door and tangle power cord on screen-door handle, slamming said door on left elbow punching a hole in screen.

Disentangle power cord from screen door, pick up shop-vac and stumble over hose.

Fall down short flight of concrete steps, twisting right ankle and give siding of house a good banging with head.

Once shop-vac is successfully situated on the patio, deploy hose in "blow" configuration.

IMPORTANT - connect vacuum to power supply and switch on while pointing hose away from anything you care about, own body, windows, car etc, so as to avoid a repeat of the Low Compression Air-Powered Sawn-Off Shrapnel Gun Fiasco.

Lay out air pillow on clean lawn furniture so as to not pick up crud from the floor and thereby transfer it to the pool - once was enough for that oversight.

Unplug air hole and poke finger in to bend back flap of valve otherwise it will take all day.

Grasp air hole fitting by making a ring from your index finger and thumb underneath the plastic valve.

Switch on vacuum.

Leaping smartly aside to avoid flailing hose, switch vacuum off again.

Grasp hose under right armpit while grasping valve of air pillow as described before with left hand.

Switch on vacuum.

Flail about for ten seconds attempting to get right radius and ulna to spontaneously develop extra joint.

Turn off vacuum.

Grip hose between manly thighs, ignoring unseemly comments by family members, neighbours and other onlookers, grip air pillow valve as described before in left hand and switch on vacuum. By pressing vacuum on the ring formed by your finger and thumb you will eventually persuade the air pillow to inflate.

Wash blue vinyl blimp with hose to get all the stuff off that stuck to it anyway, and transfer pillow to pool, fighting sudden gale-force wind gusts, and lash at each diagonal with ratty clothesline.

Repeat.

The process became much more fun with the 4x15 foot pillow, which in only half an hour went from being an unwieldy, unmaneuverable, heavy blue vinyl tarpaulin to an extremely unwieldy, unmaneuverable, unaccountably even heavier blue one-inch-to-the-foot scale model of The Hindenburg. With perfect timing a small gale blew up just as I was getting a proper hold on the damned thing and I was swept around the garden from pillar to post, augmenting my manly grip with that of my manly teeth and, on one occasion, one of my legs too, all the while chanting the most powerful charms against the forces arrayed against me in a World Gone Mad. My vocabulary came into its own when I was slammed up against the razor-sharp corners of Mrs Stevie's four-burner barbecue which had decided to join the fun and become just mobile enough in the windy chaos to intercept me as I was pushed backwards and cushion what could have been a nasty collision with something not sharp at all.

Well, to cut a long story shorter, I finally had all these pillows inflated and resting in the water, ready for me to apply the pool cover. Which was when I realised that I had never gotten around to cleaning the crud of it last spring. I had no time to do it now. The topside was clean because I had managed, in typical a moment of genius, to lash the damned thing on upside-down last autumn. But I emphatically did not want the dirty side anywhere near my pristine clean pool what I had spent lo! These Many Hours that morning cleaning out. So I once again mounted the cover on the pool in inverted configuration. This wasn’t optimal because the seams are tucked under and form places where filth can be washed to form colonies of Azathoth-knows what if they point up and out but I was at the end of Mr Tether by then and speaking in tongues. It is my hope that the tented arrangement will allow the dirt to rinse off in the coming fall monsoons.

I had no more ratty clothesline for temporary cover securage, so I cut up one of my nice sheathed ropes. Normally, this would have been unthinkable, but it was getting late, the wind was getting up and I was getting fed up. With the cover on I set the pump to run for twelve hours and dropped in a “winterizing orb”, which is basically a way of adding copper sulphate to the water as an anti-fungal/algaecide. It didn’t work last year, but I noticed they’d changed the instructions and so gave it one more go. Worse comes to worse, I’ll just eat one load of diatomaceous earth next season by vacuuming up the crud at the start of the season. This new filter is so good I was tempted to not bother winterizing at all to tell the truth. The D.E. is so cheap it won’t matter if I have to completely clean out and rebuild the filter after the first cleaning next year, and the water stays clean.

Once the pool was down for the count I dismantled the tent gazebo and packed it into the garage, then called it a day. Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling are off to see Hamlet on Broadway tomorrow so I can get on with productive stuff then. I retired inside to staunch my wounds, shower and mess around with what Mrs Stevie is pleased to call "pointless crap".

I’d earned my supper this day.