More Racket on the LIRR

Same seat, this time it's a Hispanic woman yodeling into her cellphone.

Why do people sit under the air conditioner then try and scream over the noise it makes? If they moved to the middle of the car they would be able to hear each other.

And I could ride with my headphone volume set at something less than "Deafen". Which isn't working because this foghorn-voiced idiot has my poor laptop outmatched.

Indeed I suspect she could give an RB211 a run for it's money.

Racket on the LIRR

Three French people sitting in the four-seater today, shouting conversationally at each other.

I put in earbuds and crank up some music as loud as I can stand but I can still hear them. But they move when we get to Hicksville.

And are replaced by two thirty-something guys with fistsful of e-gear.

Who are attempting to show the French a thing or two in the line of conversational volume.

USA. USA. USA.

Un ****ing Believable

Turns out it was a bomb scare.

And they held us for an hour, made unintelligible announcements that no-one could decipher but at no point did anyone suggest evacuating the fbleeping train.

What a completely fbleeping useless crew of fbleeptards.

Still Waiting At Bethpage

Just thought I'd mention that we are now blocking the train I would catch if I had decided to work until 6:30 tonight and thereby lengthen my commute home to about two hours, which I had decided I wouldn't do as I have things I want to get done tonight.

It probably isn't the LIRR's fault we are stuck here (but that isn't a given by any means) but why is it so hard for them to tell us what the fbleep is going on?

A New Era in Commuting Must Dawn Eventually, Mustn't It?

So, we're sitting at Bethpage, doors open, not going anywhere work-wards courtesy of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road.

They undoubtedly have a good reason for holding us prisoner instead of carrying us to work in a timely manner (their sole reason for existing). They've said as much over the P.A. system, a miracle of intra-train communications.

Unfortunately, since the person making the announcements is doing an impersonation of Rod McKuen with laryngitis, and moreover appears to be indulging in seeing how far he can get from the microphone before the little red "I can hear you" light goes off, that reason remains opaque to the paying passengers of the Bloody Long Island Railroad.

Who will all be late for work despite getting up on time.

So that's alright then.

Ennui Ain't What It Used To Be

I've been too utterly depressed of late to put fingers to keyboard, driven into a state of despair by the preponderance of late of what I'm coming to call Fbleeptard Design in my life.

Poor design is of course a fact of life, but there's a reasonable expectation that poor design will be spotted for what it is, lessons will be learned and the next time that particular thing is foisted onto the public the poor design elements will have been replaced by new ones in light of experience.

Which is why I'm finding the propagation of shoddy, stupid, unfit-for-purpose design in the second decade of the 21st century a mite depressing.

A while back the abysmal service I was getting from the Long Island Rail Road, that boil on the backside of public transportation, moved me to do something to reclaim at least some peace of mind and move me further away from the Texas Tower Solution. You are looking atthe result.

Yes, The Occasional Stevie was intended as therapy for me as much as a Schadenfreude-enabling portal for the reader.

So it is with much the same desperate need for a safety valve that I announce an occasional sub-department in The Occasional Stevie, one I am calling Fbleeptard Design. It will be nothing but moaning about the intolerable incompetence in design aesthetic displayed in whatever subject comes to hand, possibly with video footage, possibly not.

If this doesn't float your boat, I'm sorry. Tales of incompetence will be running a distant second for a while, until I've exorcised the feelings of rage and the need to thrash people with a stick until they get a fbleeping clue.

I return you to your Yootoobing.

W.T.F?

So, Bowie's new album finally arrived.

I've been staring at the "altered" Heroes cover art, so obviously a placekeeper for some awesome secret art not leaked to the public ahead of the album release, wondering what the real album art would look like when I finally got to see it. Would it be an Impressionistic affair, a-la Hunky Dory? A photo of the Artiste in clown drag? Bizarro Gonzoid Bat Crap a-la Outside? This evening I peeled The Next Day out of it's mailer and saw the real thing for the first time in all its glory.

They went with the Heroes cover c/w white post-it obliterating the visage of the Great Man (circa 1977). Cunning. A double fake-out.

The CD itself has a blank white square in place of a track list, an artistic trick pioneered in a slightly different form by Faust (circa 1971), first on Faust, then on So Far. Retro recapitulation with minimal info-utility is obviously the motif here. I give this three Peter Gabriels out of Five for form over function.

The sleeve is what I believe the British now call "digipaks" or something equally horrid. What it is is a cardboard double-fold sleeve with a plastic insert on the right panel to hold the disc, a pocket on the left panel to hold the insert c/w lyric sheet and a picture of Mr Bowie glowering like an annoyed granddad out of the middle panel. That pocket has - wait for it - a black square obliterating a black background. It's the opposite of the CD on the opposite panel. Well, it would be if the CD had been white. Or the black background had been white.

And so onto the insert, which isn't a booklet but a folded bedsheet of reddish cartridge paper, one side with lyrics printed on it, t'other with a recapitulation of the front cover done in shades of red (with a blue post-it stuck in front of His face), a really annoying moire thing that has no thematic link with anything I can find in the packaging and a set of credits printed in a typeface so small I need a magnifying glass as thick as an antique fishing net float just to make it out.

I'd review the music but I'm so overcome with ennui and Goth/Emo depression from the art that I couldn't summon the energy to play it.

I did suck the whole thing into iTunes, which couldn't find the artwork to associate with the recording.

That's right; iTunes' artwork database is so flippin' lame it couldn't find the re-used artwork for the most anticipated album from one of the most famous music artists in the world on the day it was delivered to me via the Post Office.

Ziggy on a bike.

Spotted in Penn Station

I saw a young guitarist by the name of Jason Green playing a variety of styles, solo, in Penn Station tonight.

By Jove, he's good. Like really really good. Like good enough to part me from the cost of two CDs from his guitar case without a second thought by the third number I heard him play. Like good enough for me to throw yet more dollars into his guitar case and feel like I was cheating him.

But don't believe me, check him out for yourself. You can find his website here.

I just wish there was a recording of what I was hearing this night in Penn Station - Jason Green, on his own, having fun and blowing off my socks.

Things Get Worse

Last Friday the Great Spinner of Fate, which of late has had me convinced it needs rebalancing, once again landed on "screw Stevie" and in the early evening the atmospheric thermostat got jammed on "snow"

Over the course of the next 12 hours about two feet of white, fluffy inconvenience distributed itself all over the scenery, then blew about in a wanton fashion, piling up against the front and back doors to about mid-thigh height.

Avid reader of this blog will remember this nonsense and the rigmarole required to liberate the occupants of Chateau Stevie from the horror that is Domestic Bliss avec Mrs Stevie (who does not approve of forced incarceration with others and does not tolerate it well), but on the off-chance a second pair of eyes are at this moment drifting across this text, struggling to remain open, I'll elaborate.

When the snow piles up against the storm doors like this they cannot be opened as they open outwards. This means that if we are to change the state of affairs, the glass of the storm door must be removed and the snow dug away from the door enough to allow it to once again function as a portal to dominate the weather at the will of the inhabitants rather than the reverse.

So I suited up, grabbed a snow-shovel and tried to unscrew the thumb-screws that secure the little brass tabs that hold the 6 foot by 3 foot sheet of glass into the door frame.

The storm door is a high-quality affair I fitted some 17 years ago of thereabouts, and the thumb-screws are in fact a very clever way of achieving the glass-removal needed when one switches it out for a screen in the summer (which we never do). The back storm door, a rather less expensive model, uses strips of plastic beading which snap into the frame of the door, which makes changing out the glass for the screen (which we do every year) a very much more involved affair requiring the use of a screwdriver as a lever to pry out the plastic strips.

It was this that drove the decision to dig out the front door rather than the back, which would have possibly been more sensible as it would result in being able to open the back gate eventually at the possible risk of my heart bursting with the effort of shifting twelve metric tons of snow with a shovel.

Unfortunately there was a mitigating factor in the ease of glass removal theory, one that has actually been with us from about six months after the door was installed.

We had been to a wake after a very long work day, and returned with the two-year-old Stevieling late in the night, around 10 pm. The Stevieling was on her way to bed and at the very top of the stairs missed her footing, falling like a rag doll down the entire flight of oak stairs, banging each one with her head in an impressive show of attention to detail. I raced to her limp little body just in time to see her eyes roll up in her head. I honestly though she had died. Mrs Stevie had managed to precipitate a phone out of thin air and called the Emergency Services before the child had finished spinning and falling and so it was that the firemen arrived with lots of cars with flashing lights and a humongous truck with searchlights almost before I'd finished screaming.

Now the firemen were the usual crowd of large, dedicated muscular men who are used to charging into places and situations that normal people typically charge away from at high speed, and one of them came charging into the house. Unfortunately, he was unaware that the storm door glass was between him and the injured little girl and he impacted the glass very hard, giving himself a very nasty shock and in all likelihood a minor concussion.

That the glass did not shatter is a testament to the strength and quality of the material. That it did not spring free of the retaining mechanism is a testament to the design of those thumb-screws and little brass tabs. Unfortunately, something had to give, and the mountings for the screws were severely bent out of true. Visually, not by much, but the result is that the mechanism has never really been as easy to release as it was designed to be.

Fortunately I have a belt with many wondr'ous tools hung upon it, and a large reservoir of various classes of Words or Power, from those useful in loosening pickle jar lids to those more suited to scorching paint off various surfaces, so this was a matter of assembling the Mighty Leatherman Crunch vise-grip wrench and "clearing the guns" with some class two's.

In no time at all I had the glass¹ out and had shoveled enough snow away from the house to allow me to step through the door and close the front door behind me which prevented the cold wind blowing in and Mrs Stevie's vile invective from blasting out.

I shoveled off the steps and then retrieved the glass and attempted to fit it outside. Naturally, this was when the wind went from being a mild breeze to a force ten gale gusting in all directions. This turned the sheet of glass from a cosmetic house feature into a 18 square foot spinnaker-come-hang-glider, and I was blown hither and yon across the porch, crashing into things, mostly the stoop rail which badly needs replacing and cannot seriously be relied upon as a human pinball buffer without a certain amount of bowel-loosening trepidation. I escalated matters with some Class Threes and eventually managed to get the glass back in the door frame.

And had to remove it again because ice and snow had built up in the seals and the glass wouldn't seat and then the wind came up again and there was the bloody door handle making it more difficult that necessary, but eventually, by using both hands to steer, one foot as a jack to control vertical alignment and my head to control the vertical tilt I got the glass back in the frame and the little brass tabs snugged up.

I went back inside and ordered The Stevieling to dig out one (1) path to the garage with enough clearance to open the door and liberate Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness while I had some tea.

Once the kid was back inside I opened up the garage and my collection of Class Fours, for in the general chaos of the storm and the other storm and Christmas and the storm I had forgotten to lay out a flying lead between the power tap at the rear of the house (that stays dry because it is under the kitchen floor overhang) after my old extension cord was stolen and all my cords were buried in snow. Furthermore, the Ground Fault had triggered with all the damp.

This meant that there was no electricity with which to turn over the engine of Troll.

Troll has a pull-start, but only a madman would expect the engine to start this side of Pancake Tuesday by pulling on it. But all was not lost because I have a generator. Not only that, it has proved repeatedly to be the most ridiculously easy machine to pull-start that I have ever personally started. Not only that, the genny was right next to Troll. For once, Fate was not peeing in my boots.

So I switched on the ignition, turned on the gas, and pulled on the string, which is where I discovered that because of the extreme cold the oil in the sump had turned to taffy and I almost ruptured myself as the generator lifted off the floor and dangled by the pull start.

By sitting on the genny and pulling the string upwards as though it were some sort of aerobic equipment I finally persuaded the bloody thing to start. Then I connected it to Troll and pushed the start button - instant roar of internal combustion.

Also instant fug of incompletely combusted fuel exhaust. I reeled from the smoke-filled garage, ears bleeding from the combined roar of the genny and Troll, both of which are fitted with only a rudimentary muffler, or "pipe" as engineers call it.

Once I could hear again I shut down the genny and wheeled out Troll to begin the process of moving the two feet of snow from my driveway into Mr Singh's front lawn² and my back yard.

I opened the gas tank of Troll to confirm the gas level and discovered that the tank was only about one third full. I realized that I had forgotten two things: To fill Troll's gas tank, and to remove the five gallons of gas I have in a can from the back yard shed and put it in the garage ready for use. Not only that, the gas can I had in the garage was bone dry. So I treated the neighbors, alerted by the mighty sounds of internal combustion to the possibility, to an impromptu display of The Bonehead Dance and some Class Fours with Class Threes for adjectival emphasis.

Then I realized that the thing I could see lying on the garage floor in plain sight was an ancient siphon I bought when the house was new and hadn't been able to find since. It must have been thrown up by the Crapier, the pile of Christmas lights, boots, sleeping bags and half-used paint cans that slowly oozes from the garage at all times under the force of its own weight, carving out the concrete as it goes. I had a siphon. I had an empty gas can. I had a generator with a three-quarter full gas tank. Something had gone right! Yazoo!

I picked up the siphon, a long tube, a rubber bulb and a short tube. The short tube snapped off.

No problem, I'd just point the bulb into the gas can. The can has a wide neck. Then the valve in the bulb broke, so I tossed the bulb and resolved to use the traditional suck method. Poke the tube in the gas tank, suck until the gas flows, stick the tube in the can and vomit copiously from the taste of the gas.

This went almost exactly the opposite as planned.

The tube was very stiff from the cold and refused to adopt any other shape than the demented stretched and bent bedspring shape it had on the floor of the garage. The gas vaporized so quickly it took forever to get the siphon flowing and then when I poked the tube in the gas can it slipped out of my grasp and span round in circles spritzing the genny, the garage and me with gasoline.

I finally filled the can and then Troll and started blowing the snow, which was deeper than the 24 inch scoop on Troll by as much as three inches in places.

It took almost three hours to clear the drive, including the part where I needed to move the fabulous Steviemobile and couldn't no matter how much I dug with a shovel behind the wheels. Turned out there was so much snow wind-packed under the car it was causing the vehicle to toboggan on its underframe³ but by some miracle I didn't damage the car moving it.

I moved so much snow that The Stevieling was able to walk over the fence on a ramp of relocated snow to dig out the back while I was drinking more tea.

1. Which weighs a ton↑
2. Well, he's not using it and I dig out his cars too↑
3. A Bad Thynge as all will know who've driven a mud road and plunged into ruts left by logging trucks, since the brake pipes and exhaust lie beneath the frame and can be squished and torn away by such tobogganing. Nothing beats the excitement of a sudden tobogganing at high speed on a mud road slicker than wet soap than regaining the wonderfully tractive surface of tar only to discover you have no brakes↑

Bad Stuff Happens

Well 2013 started well.

Actually, it started well before it started, on the last day of term 2012, when the Stevieling brought her mother's station wagon back from its first trip to school complaining that the brakes were not working properly. I didn't do anything about it before Christmas because when I went out to try it turned out the (new) battery was flat as a pancake.

After Christmas was over and done with and the new year started (without a bang: we were all sick and no-one was running a party this year) I went out with an extension cord and my trusty battery charger and charged the battery, discovering that the reason it was flat was the dome light had been left on since Azathoth-knows when. It seems to me that when I had a Mini with a poxy generator that barely got the job done at the best of times and a battery you had to fill with distilled water every few weeks I could leave a dome light on all night and still start the car the next day, but today's alternator-fired "long-life" sealed-at-the-factory batteries are clapped-out after a few hours of such abuse. I digress

After 36 hours of charging the car fired up, engine revving itself to death thanks to some sort of automated cold-start technology that replaced the old pull-to-start choke on my old Mini, and I put it in reverse. The car shot backward at alarming speed.

I tromped on the brakes and was rewarded with the reassuring thump of my foot meeting the firewall in the characteristic way it does when there is not so much as a drip of brake fluid in the pipes.

Defusing the tension this brought on by screaming, fearing to put on the foot-operated parking brake lest I uncovered some new malfunction, I slammed the car into "Park" and stopped just short of the road, the car rocking madly on its overly-soft suspension.

Pausing only to shout some class four Words of Power, whimpering with manly adrenaline, I engaged "Drive" and shot towards the fence again, madly stamping on the useless brake pedal in the vain hope it would magically precipitate braking from the aether. Slamming the shift once more into "Park" I brought the vehicle to a more or less controlled stop and my bowels to a more-or-less uncontrolled start.

The next day I obtained two quart bottles of brake fluid, topped off the reservoir and pumped the brake pedal in the hope that it would produce some sort of hydraulic magic. Each press of the pedal produced a "whushk-whushk" sound from under the car and when I looked, yes indeed, brake fluid was pouring from just ahead of the driver's side rear wheel.

Monday was Martin Luther King day, a holiday in New York, and I discovered a local mechanic was actually open for business. I stopped by and talked over the problem and told him I would bring the car over late that night so as to avoid all traffic.

My plan was that I would fill up the reservoir and drive slowly the mile or so to the mechanic with the hazard flashers on and the car in low gear. I would be moving slowly and could probably coast in neutral before stopping without brakes at all.

Of course, at around 4 pm it began snowing.

At 9 pm Mrs Stevie took my car and parked around the corner next to Mad Joe's house. I poured the remaining 1/3 of the brake fluid in the bottle into the reservoir, backed the Family Truckster out into the street and found the braking...wanting. It handled stopping rather in the same way a supertanker does, by not doing much of it on the whole.

I eased the monster round the corner, stopped and grabbed the second quart of fluid from the trunk of the Steviemobile, which I then poured into the reservoir, using about 2/3 of the bottle. That, and some class three Words of Power was enough to get me to the mechanic's shop.

I left the bottle of fluid on the driver's seat and taped a big sheet of paper across the steering wheel on which I had written "NO BRAKES", and we left the place in the Steviemobile.

Over the course of the next few days the reports came in. There was a brake pipe broken - $200. The caliper had to be changed because the bleed nipple was frozen - $200. The master cylinder needed changing because the seals had gone - $200. Some sort of valve had "carboned up" and was causing the engine to race. It needed changing - $150.

We eventually got it back but the brakes still felt "soft" to me and the Stevieling, but it didn't matter because she was going to use her Grandfather's station wagon. She took it out that Monday night to pick up pizza.

And called us to say that she'd gotten one block before the steering failed.

The mechanic towed the vehicle and found that the serpentine belt had failed - $100. The reason the serpentine belt had broken was that the bearing on the a/c compressor had broken up - $350.

So, bearing in mind that the Family Truckster is a heavy car with spongy brakes, the Stevieling is now using the Steviemobile to go to and from college.

This would have meant that I would have been driving the deathmobile, but I threw out my back the day before the Steering Incident took place¹ and so I've been lying around in agony for four days, apart from a side-trip to Doc Rubberglove's new House of Pain.

This began well when I used my Tom Tom GPS system to find the place. He moved to new digs about a month before Christmas and I punched in the address, some few miles East of Chateau Stevie in East Islip, then and stored it under "Doc Rubberglove". I then stored a bunch of other places, including Pete's House O' Games, my local seller of nifty game stuff, located in Plainview to the West of Chateau Stevie.

I punched up "Doc Rubberglove" on the old GPS screen and was directed up Pineacres Boulevard, an instruction the damned thing always starts with and which I always ignore as the veriest gibberish. For some reason the bloody GPS is in love with Pineacres Boulevard and will direct me to drive it and thence a network of narrow, stop-sign infested side streets, typically to get me to the same road I can get to by turning left out of my driveway and driving three blocks. So I ignore the increasingly strident cries of the GPS until it gets its act together and recalculates the route using sensible parameters.

This day the bloody thing seemed to be on a roll, for it was trying to get me to drive North. Doc Rubberglove's practice is to the South and East. Still, after about five minuets of ignoring the GPS I decided to follow the latest recalculated route, which had me on the LIE in no time - heading West. I found a trucker's parking area and pulled over.

The Tom Tom does not have a feature allowing a visual inspection of the actual address stored under a "favorite" destination, but I eventually found a feature that enumerated the route as text and found that it was taking me to Plainview. I don't know why unless the memory glitched and Pete's House O' Games was now the destination of (any) choice.

Naturally I did not have Doc Rubberglove's new address because I HAVE A GPS!!!!

So I was forced to call them and get their address so I could re-enter it into the GPS. A new problem immediately presented itself when the list of towns that the GPS knew about didn't include the town of East Islip. A light dawned. I didn't have the external power supply connected.

I usually do, but I hadn't bothered this time since I wasn't worried about traffic and the only extra functionality I'm supposed to get with the power connected is a cellular-connected real-time traffic update. I plugged it in and Hey Pasta! East Islip was now an available choice. Not only that, the other info I needed to input sprang into being as though the GPS now knew the way to Doc Rubberglove's after all.

So we set off again, and the GPS took me off the Long Island Expressway on a voyage of discovery through the outskirts of Pilgrim Psychiatric Facility in order to get me on the Sagitos Parkway, something we could have done easily by staying on the Long Island Expressway another 1000 yards or so.

If you are reading this and you are a Tom Tom route algorithm programmer, I hate your guts and wish you a plague of boils and a tax audit.

Eventually we reached Doc Rubberglove's Palace of Pain and Misery, and in no time he was showing me around the bombsite that is his new practice. When I didn't make enough encouraging and approving noises he diagnosed a bad back and told me to drop my pants so he could give me some shots.

"I'm going to apply some cold" he said, donning protective ear gear and spritzing me with liquid nitrogen. Having distracted me with agony, he rammed a hypo into my left hip, skillfully avoiding my attempts to claw his eyeballs out.

"This next one will hurt a bit" he said, faked left and rammed another hypo into my right buttock containing something like a cortisone shot, but in this case the agony cut in as soon as the shot was given instead of five minutes later. I stood up with the aim of maybe punching him in the spuds or head-butting him, but instead was hit with the greatest feeling of sixties camaraderie I've experienced since the Demerol Shots of 1992.

"Whoa! Thanks, Doc!" I said, flashing him the peace sign.

He scowled. "There should be no side effects. How do you feel?"

"Outasight, man!" I burbled, reeling slightly.

"Any Pain?" he asked.

"Nope. Well, yeah, I suppose so, but who cares?" I responded.

"Well that's not right! Are you alright to drive?" he asked, or maybe it was the purple marmoset he had on his shoulder.

"Sure, man" I said. "My eyeballs feel a bit too big for their sockets and there's the whole oil-wheel eyesight thing, but I think I'm good to go".

So after signing various release forms with an inked locust I limped out of the office, weaving around the animated vines that seemed to be sprouting from the ceiling and climbed back into the car, which now resembled a large stuffed crocodile, and drove home via the pharmacy for some muscle relaxants and it was home to the giant toadstool where I slept for six hours.

Today, I woke to the feeling that my eyeballs were too small for their sockets, and the world was a less colorful and cartoony place, worse luck.

1. walking slowly across a room↑

Musing on the Mayan Apocalypse

Hey, Mayans! What if they had an Apocalypse and no-one showed up?

Not even the idiots that were banging on about the Mayan Apocalypse as though it were a) real and 2) properly identified as to time given the difference in calendars and changes ours has gone through over the last few hundred years.

Does this mean that as your people, long extinct as an actual culture, can now officially be declared as irrelevant in the years to come since in theory if there were any of you left you would have ceased to be in the aforementioned Apocalypse?

If so, it was all worth it.

Can't stand bloody Mayans.

Now That's A Pretty Song

Back in the High Life Again, by the late Warren Zevon, from his wonderfully titled antepenultimate album Life'll Kill Ya.

Steve Winwodd's original was a big hit here in New York in the 80's (I think), but Zevon nails that "threw it all away, wiser now" tone in this low-key, pared-down, laid back version that was released just two years before he was diagnosed with Mesothelioma, a cancer widely associated with asbestos exposure.

There's lots of good stuff on this album, which is themed around morbidity, though High Life isn't about physical death as much as social and psychic morbidity (at least, that's what it sounds like to me).

I'm not a big Zevon fan. I've only got two of his recordings and one I bought for the track used on The Color of Money. Not only that, his (to many people) anthemic Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner reduces me to helpless laughter at the point where the mercenary transitions into the vengeful revenant sans tête. There are two schools of thought on that: I reckon it's the most egregious use of bathos I've ever come across, everyone else says I'm nuts and use clever words uncleverly. Whatever.

Buy Life'll Kill Ya" and listen to "Back in the High Life Again".

Musings On The Atmosphere

Azathoth on a bike, I'm so fed up to the back teeth with this never-ending bleep-forsaken bleeping bleep-sucking ass-bleeping rain.

Christmas "Cheer"

So, two things I was looking forward to on Christmas Day; Playing a board game with the family and going to see The Hobbit.

Both cancelled so we can get to the in-laws in time for dinner.

So that's alright then.

My Christmas Miracle

After years of seeing them on TV, I finally had me a Christmas Miracle of my very own.

About two weeks ago I misplaced my iPod, an old-style red Nano that I was given as a Father's Day gift and which I've come to find indispensable. I knew it was in the car, and when I looked and it wasn't I thought it might be on my desk at work, and when it wasn't I thought it could be in a bag I only use occasionally for carrying supplies to my Role-Playing games and when it wasn't I began to despair. I looked everywhere but could not find it, and I was very broken up about it, to the point of losing sleep fretting about it. It's only a piece of electronics, easily replaceable with a bigger "classic" unit that will hold all my music, but in another sense it is completely irreplaceable, and not because Apple doesn't make that model any more. It was a gift from the people I care most about in all the world, and I, fool that I am, invest such things with emotional ballast that can't be duplicated.

Tonight, Christmas Eve, I was clearing off our always-cluttered coffee table, which had been searched early on in the process, and there it was - my iPod, good as new.

It's charging now.

Skull-Fist-Lightningbolt-Mushroomcloud

Yesterday I left the house for some fun with pals and while I was out, some stupid woman driving down Nicolls Road managed to crash into my property despite it being lit so brightly you can see it from the Space Station.

She did a good job too, smashing into the power pole (yes, the same one that was smashed a couple of years ago and which now is bent so far out of true the wires to my house are bowstring-taut and a second pole once again stands next to the one with the wires on it), gouging a lump out of my grass verge and scattering parts of her car and a few pints of old, well-burned oil all over the sidewalk as she used my chain-link fence as an arrestor-net, bending and dislocating the top rail and stretching the chainlink into unusability.

They said she was swerving to avoid someone who pulled out in front of her from Pineacres Boulevard, which forms a T-junction with Nicolls Road in front of my house. They said no-one was hurt. Well and good. What no one was speaking about at all was the Warp Factor at which Madame Destructo was traveling when she implemented Evasion Pattern Picard Delta One.

Because it was obvious from the debris field and infrastructure damage that she sure as damn wasn't driving at or below the legally posted speed limit of 30mph.

Fun On A Ladder

So it was time to enable Xmas Merriment Illumination Chez Stevie once again.

My regular reader will remember that I long ago developed the very sensible policy of not removing last year's icicle lights from the gutters in order to get a jump on the job, which in past years has involved me perching on a ladder in full darkness trying to hang lights in sub zero¹ weather, while attempting to avoid freezing to the metal gutters.

I decided that as I had used this policy for the last two Christmases and some of the lights were blown and they all were a bit on the yellow side (this happens too for reasons I can't fathom; after a few years of intermittent use, icicle lamps go from a bright yellow to a more sickly shade, making it impossible to mix new strings with old. This may be a manufacturing process at work that forces the replacement of nine boxes of lamps when only one is needed. I dunno) that I had better change them for new ones before The Rage of Mrs Stevie was let out for a run. Also, I had cleaned out the gutters in preparation for Really A Lot Of Wind And Water Sandy² and for reasons I will explain in a moment this had entailed smashing half a dozen of the bulbs in the string nearest to the downspout.

In front of my house there is a row of Alberta Spruce trees. They began life as two-foot high bushes and stayed that way for a long time. They spent a few years going from two to three, then four feet. Then they shot up to six and seven feet in about six months. This has introduced a new facet of excitement to the business of getting up to the gutters.

The ladder won't lean against the gutters because the trees are in the way. They poke into the ladder at the halfway point and stop it coming into good, safe contact with the gutters. The end of the ladder floats above the gutter edge at a distance of a few inches. It doesn't sit properly until I am three or four rungs up the ladder. Until then each step produces an alarming bounce. When the ladder finally does land and stay in place, it typically does so on a bunch of light bulbs and crushes them giving me yet another job to do. It is all very trying.

Well, this day I had three boxes³ of lights to hang in place of the strings that had hung for lo these many years. So I unraveled two lengths of new icicle lights and hooked them over the rungs of the ladder as high as I could reach as it sat resting against the seven foot tool bushtree. I plugged in the lights and mounted the bouncing ladder to the sound of crunching glass, emitting little manly squeaks of terror at each fresh bounce until I was safely up the ladder, it had an inch and a half of length poking over the gutters and was resting firmly upon the roof edge.

Partly because it warms the wires and makes them easier to work with, partly because I never want to hang a string of lights, turn them on and see darkness again I have for a decade or more always hung the lights with them plugged in. It also cheers me up as the cold freezes my nose hairs and the feeling slowly departs my fingers. Today, it was drizzling to add misery to the overwhelming atmosphere of utter dejection. So I climbed the ladder, pulled up the strings of lit lights and unsnapped one string of the old, broken lights from the end hook.

At least that was the plan.

What actually happened was that the hook, weakened by three years of extreme temperatures and rotted by exposure to ultraviolet light snapped like a rotten twig and the wires of both old strings fell away putting more weight on the second hook which snapped putting even more weight on the third which snapped and so on in a chain reaction of amateur lighting collapse. With a loud zipping sound the lights along the entire frontage festooned themselves on the ground just as I looked on in resignation and Mrs Stevie stepped out of the front door holding the phone.

"It's your mother" she said, casting her eyes about a scene that did not, to her untrained eye, suggest much in the way of hanging-up lights, but rather the reverse.

"Of course it's my mother!" I snarled. "Why wouldn't it be my mother at this, the least convenient time with the light only two hours from gone and rain drizzling down and me not wanting to get off this ladder unnecessarily!"

So of course I had the phone call while trying to replace the gutter hooks and string lights in the drizzling rain which left me no hands or teeth left for holding onto the ladder. Not only that, the new lights proved to be unbelievably cheaply made and despite my having arranged a working ground-fault interruption device in the circuit I would get the occasional unpleasant shock to the fingers. I pride myself in such cases that I can maintain a conversational tone, refrain from swearing and so forth, though my mother did inquire as to why I kept going "agleaggleaggle" down the phone every two minutes.

She finally hung up just as the sun was touching the edge of the roof, which gave me two hours before total darkness, allowing me to quicken the pace a bit, achieving as much as four "aggleaggleaggle"s a minute.

Until I ran out of lights halfway down the house, which was when I remembered the real number of boxes of lights needed for the job.

I did the bonehead dance, not advisable on a ladder made bouncy by mutant Alberta Spruce bushes I might add, and yelled that I was going to Home Despot for more lightsaggleaggleaggle.

Naturally, this being the first week in December, they only had three beaten-up boxes of lights that looked suspiciously used and returned, so I asked a "helper" to test the strings for me.

"Test the strings?" this stalwart asked, looking askance at me with all the indications of someone who has just heard an outpouring of an unknown foreign language.

"Yes! These boxes have been opened and the lights unwrapped! I'd like to know that they are functional before I get them home please, so is there anywhere I can plug them in and see that they are working?" I snarled. I'm not at my best when people are being deliberately thick at me.

"Calm down! he snapped. "I can test them. Keep your cool!"

"I am calm and cool, but if I'm going to pay full price for obviously shop-soiled merchandise I expect that at a minimum it does what it would say on the box if any of the boxes still had sides!" I howled.

The "helper" grapped the bundles of lights and plugged them in, one by one.

"Aggleaggleaggle".

"Aggleaggleaggle".

"Aggleaggleaggle. There! Satisfied?"

"Very. Good Day!" I did battle with the self checkout, then having checked myself out returned home where I discovered that these were not in fact replacements for the lights I had bought three weeks before, but similar ones featuring longer icicles and a shorter run. I dealt with this by using some class three Words of Power and doubling the icicles back on themselves and knotting them. As a byproduct of this, I received approximately three times the number of painful shocks I had before. I also ran out of lights before the end of the house.

So I ended up re-using some of the old strings to finish the job and wonder of wonders the color of the bulbs matched perfectly with the newer strings. A first.

After this triumph I decided to ready Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness for action by firing up the engine.

I do this every year to ensure that if I need the machine there will be fuel in all the lines and the carburetor will be primed. Usually I have an extension cord rigged from the rear of the house with which to power the starter motor, but my ratty old 100 foot extension cord was stolen (possibly by mistake by a builder but the results are the same). It was repaired and ratty and mucky but it was damned useful and it was mine.

Anyway, this left me with a quandary. Troll has a pull starter but experience has shown that using it is a path to a wrenched shoulder, madness and a potentially dangerous depletion of my reservoir of Words of Power of all classes above three. Troll must be fired to life electrically. It is dead symbolic too. The connection of the power, the flipping of the switch, the setting of the choke, the pressing of the button, the percussive detonation of the starter dog engaging, the cough of the engine, the cloud of black smoke, the chugchugchug of the engine lumbering to life, life LIFE I tell you! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So pulling the string on Troll's engine would clearly not do at all. However, there, in the garage, was the solution. And if anything, it was even deader symbolic and completely in the idiom. There, by the side of Troll, hastily moved there as I had nowhere else to stick it, resplendent in its bright orange livery, was my generator - without doubt the easiest engine to pull start I've ever owned or used.

I located the short extension cord that came with Troll and which I've never used after a brief, vocally intensive search, moved the genny out into the rain, cleared off the stuff that had accumulated on top of Troll's engine, and began the ritual of The Starting of the Generator.

Fuel tap on. Engine switch on. Pull the cord gently.

No attempt to start.

Hmm.

Headslap.

Pull out extremely stiff choke toggle and try again, and be greeted on the third pull with the chugchugchug of the generator struggling to...LIFE! AHAHAHAbloody hell push that choke in quick before she stalls!

Then, hands trembling, I connected the cord between the generator front panel and Troll's starter motor, pumped the carb primer until I felt gas under it, then another five times, flipped the engine switch to 'on' and twisted the choke toggle to 'cold' and pressed the start button.

Vast clouds of invigorating black smoke belched from the exhaust and the engine struggled into life life LIFE!

Choking and coughing, eyes watering from the acrid fumes and ears bleeding from the almost-negligently silenced engine, I flipped the switches on all engines to 'off' and packed everything away, satisfied that this day I had Done Good Work.

As I was about to enter the house, the ground fault device tripped, plunging my light fantastic into darkness.

1. English-style. Sub 32-degree weather measuring things the way they do in the US↑
2. One mustn't call it a hurricane for insurance reasons, apparently↑
3. I always forget when I'm buying lights that I double up on the otherwise weedy-looking icicle lights and need at least nine boxes of lights to cover the length of the gutters on this house, so I inevitably end up trying to find lights three weeks before Christmas, which is when the stores have stopped selling Christmas stuff in preparation for the Valentine's Day rush↑

Feeling Old

Every now and then life does something to make me feel old without physical pain.

Case in point. Some years ago, while I was back in the UK for Christmas and debating the wisdom of proposing marriage to this American bird I had met, I paid a visit to the Mitsukiku store in Brimingham New Street Station and purchased two nice Kimonos which I got at sale prices. I'd never been able to afford either under other circumstances.

True, the second was at the prompting of my friend Frank who had the girl's best interests at heart - I was going to cheap out and get her a short, shirt-sized "Happi-Coat" as I was still dithering on the "mate for life" thing. I had other reasons for wanting to see her in the shorter garment which he was emotionally unequipped to appreciate and which I won't go into now, but he was right and I took his advice and purchased two full-sized kimonos.

Mine is black, and has a dragon running down the full length of the back embroidered in gold thread with details in various other colors. Hers is lilac with what to my uneducated eye looks like a Willow Pattern scene on it.

I bought a pink obi for hers and a red one for mine which made the Japanese saleslady giggle, this being a female accessory that serves the same focal purpose as a nice wide belt or lace-up bodice does. My kimono was supposed to tie with this length of black material but would still occlude part of the design. Some kimonos have little slots and other accommodation for the tie so it would run inside the kimono around the back and not break the design, but this one doesn't. So I usually wear the kimono with the red obi tied as a sash/belt, allowing the ends to dangle rakishly at the side. Sue me.

I've worn mine rarely, usually as a dressing gown at Christmas or while on vacation, but it still reached the point of needing cleaning. I took it to a cleaner I trust, but the red lining still bled color and looks rather sad now. Oh well.

I can't remember the last time Mrs Stevie wore hers. I doubt she could find the damned thing amongst all the other clothing she has amassed in the intervening years. Imelda Marcos could have taken lessons from this woman.

Anyway.

I just did a ninternet search and it turns out that Mitsukiku kimonos are now vintage collectibles, which means two things:

First, my dream of getting another or of getting mine a new lining is now pie-in-the-sky.

Second, I'm demonstrably vintage (I outrank the Kimono by a good quarter century) which I kindasorta knew but didn't need telling in such an abrupt way.

Another Fine Mess

No sooner did the hurricane finished the nor'easter blew in, dumping 4 inches of damp snow all over the place. Yes, we are talking about inconvenience snow here. The Bloody Long Island Railroad lost no time in making the most of the situation and canceled its post-hurricane minimalistic service ¹ replacing it with a super-minimalistic service. All trains were canceled in favor of waiting around on freezing open-air platforms for hours at a time.

It was all very trying.

So I still had all the wreckage from the hurricane line around including some pieces of siding from the house, but now everything was covered in slushy snow. The only bright side was that I couldn't actually do any work on the house to fix any of the things that had broken off in the hurricane. Result!

Of course Mrs. Stevie is getting a little tired of not having a garden gate and having to lob the trash cans over the fence to get them from the back garden into the driveway, so I shall have to begin amateur carpentry on a grand scale in order to put it all again the way it was before hurricane Sandy blew through. Actually, with a little effort I might be able to make it better than it was.

Later

I actually did get started on Veterans Day, although I didn't get very much done on account of the job suffering from the usual handyman annoyances: hiding tools, improvised skills, incompetence etc.

I decided to start work on the driveway part of the fence, the part that used to be a small gate, a freestanding post attached to the driveway by an inch thick pin set into the post and the driveway containing the shackles into which the gate bolts slid, and the larger eight-foot wide gate (used when we need to move really large things onto the patio, like a car).

The small gate had been ripped off the side of the house pulling the lag bolts fastening the gate post and hinges of the brick work, lead anchors and all. The freestanding post had split at the base, shattering the post and leaving only the pin firmly embedded in the concrete.

This pin was poking up at an angle owing to the fact that when I had originally placed it I had actually put the pin into the post first and then set the whole thing down onto wet concrete filling the socket into which an older post had been fitted, and in which it had rotted away because the water table was so high the old post was actually permanently immersed. The pin would either have to be straightened or removed. To this end I gave it a few blows with the sledgehammer, and the pin obliged me by adopting a very-near vertical stance without the concrete shattering.

Color me amazed.

My new plan would be to eschew the nice-looking structurally short-lived Cedar posts I had installed on all the other parts of the fence for the rather more sturdy (if more unattractive) pressure-treated pine posts are used on the stockade fencing at the rear of the house. Should these prove as ugly as I suspect they will I have a few ideas for disguising them as Cedar (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

I would strengthen the freestanding post by augmenting the pin-in-concrete construction of the previous post with an archway connecting it to the post on which the hinges to the small gate would be fastened, that post being screwed firmly into the brick wall of the house (hopefully more sturdily than the original was).

It took all morning to locate three fenceposts of suitable quality (two to become gate posts, one to be chopped up to form the arch which would be actually a half-octagon rather than a circular or elliptical arch proper), along with sundry fastening devices, metal sockets in which to seat fenceposts when they can't be buried, metal threaded rod to form the long bolts that would hold the gate post wall, and since I have the vague idea that I might be using my .22 caliber nail gun to fasten various pieces of metal to the concrete of the patio and/or the driveway, a container of 2 1/2 inch "ram" masonry nail loads along with a box of yellow (high power) cartridges with which to fire the nails into the concrete.

I decided to tackle the gate post on which the small gate would swing first, and drilled three holes into the brick work to take the threaded rod which would hold the post to the wall. Into these holes I placed a special kind of anchor (the lead ones no longer being legally available in New York) which consisted of a steel tube one end of which was threaded to accept the rod, the other having vertical slots cut in it which would be spread by driving a special tool into the anchor, depressing a pin held captive inside the anchor.

This process naturally cracked the bricks.

I then cut the poster size, and put a 22 1/2 degree bevel on the top to begin forming the arch. I had also decided to set the base of this post in a special socket made for the purpose, a metal construction which would hold the base of the post an inch off the ground which would require fastening to the concrete with a bolt if possible, or nails if not.

I had bought a bolt for the purpose pre-fitted with an expansion anchor similar to the ones used in the brick wall but which expanded as a result of tightening the nut at the end of the bolt. This required me to drill a half inch hole in the concrete to a depth of 2 1/2 inches. Naturally, I hit rebar at a depth of 2 inches, forcing me into the position of dismantling the special anchor and cutting down both the sleeve and the bolt to match the hole using my Dremmel tool, a carbide cutoff wheel-point and some class three words of power.

By some miracle, once the bolt was driven into the hole and the nut tightened down over the socket, it all lined up as I wanted it to and not - as is the usual case - in some completely unhelpful orientation requiring a lengthy and involved bodge, a dozen otherwise unnecessary tools and some class four words of power. To compensate for this, I screwed up the cutting of the metal rod forcing an unwanted trip to Home Despot in what was rapidly becoming the fading light of the closing day.

after this I finally got a clue and instead of trying to drill the holes in the post to match the slightly off-horizontal orientation of the anchors (the realities of drilling holes in a brick wall by hand being what they are) I simply screwed in oversize lengths of threaded rod, applied some professional strength construction adhesive in the probably vain hope that it would help prevent the anchors letting go and stop the brick splitting completely, and bent them until they were horizontal ones that were properly seated.

This made the job much simpler, and I was able to bolt the post to the wall just as the sun began to set and the unusually warm day began to freeze down. I trimmed off the rods using the Dremmel tool and ground the sharp edges down with another wheel-point before mounting the old gate to the post and finishing for the day.

It's quite underwhelming what can be achieved in only a day of exhausting work.

1. one train each hour serving all stations between Penn Station New York and Ronkonkoma ² if we were lucky↑
2. Those poor bastards needing to go to Flatbush Avenue having to change at Jamaica (not the good one) and in the case of the eastbound trains having to fight for a place on an already overcrowded train↑

Real Happiness is a Full Tank of Gas

Convoys of ships, sailing bravely toward New York heedless of the danger posed by U-Boats, each laden with gallons of wonderful, refreshing, thirst-quenching gasoline!

I just saw this on the morning news. It was just like those old WWII newsreels they used to fill Sunday afternoons with when I was a kid so we'd remember why it was great to be British, except the boats were going the wrong way.

Soon the lines of idiots sleeping in their cars for days on end so they'll be first at the pumps will be gone.

And I'll have gas for my car again in time for Christmas!

Cue: "When They Sound The Last All Clear"

Cut to sunset over the ocean

Fade to Black

Happiness Is A Warm Light Bulb

Power.

POWER.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!

LIPA reconnected us late yesterday and we have a warm house and a cold fridge and lights and TV and Internet and no ice-cream truck parked outside the kitchen or extension cords through the window.

It's indescribably beautiful.

It's like the fourth of July.