Category: Life

So, elsewhere than Dustbury, Charles said:

"So this is 'over capacity'. How wonderful!" ~ nobody, ever

— Charles G Hill (@dustbury) January 18, 2016

Immediately, I thought of this exception:

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Although, to be honest, it’s not directly “”So this is ‘over capacity’. How wonderful!” But it’s close.

Not cited: All those business people and MBAs who think that too much traffic is a good thing because that’s a lot of customers and brand loyalty who won’t immediately abandon you for TheOtherGuyzWidgetz.com which is still operational. Also, their solution to the problem is to tell someone else to solve the problem, and that seems rather easy. Especially when they say that and try to convince the underlings that that moisture they feel is not rain, but anointing oil.

So I noticed one night that one of the tail lights on our Toyota Highlander was out, and it’s due for licensing this month, so I figured I’d better replace it pronto. One of the license plate lights was out, too, and the auto service center offered to fix it for me for elebenty billion dollars.

I stopped at the local Pep Boys and picked up replacement bulbs, no problem, although they’re sold in two packs. So I quipped to the clerk that I wouldn’t own the vehicle long enough to need the second bulb. Hah. Events would prove otherwise.

You see, aside from the recent experience I had wherein I managed to shear off a bolt while changing a tire, turning a simple procedure into a tow-and-repair situation, I figured it would be no problem in replacing the bulbs. Why, the vehicle has a little hatch in the cargo area that gives the user easy access to the lights. Listen, son, I’ve replaced a bunch of parts on cars with few problems, including batteries, head lights, tail lights, a radiator, a starter, brake pads…. Although I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing, sometimes I’ve fumbled the pieces into place right and only a few times have made ghastly but fortunately not deadly errors.

So, in the comfort of my garage, I popped open the little hatch, and:

That’s almost what it looks like except the hatch that gives you access to the light bulbs is far smaller, so you have to work with fingertips at awkward angles and no strength. The individual lights are in little sockets that screw into the assembly. To replace it, you unscrew the socket, pop the old bulb out, pop the new bulb in, and screw the socket back into the assembly. Done!

Well, it’s a lot easier to explain it after you’ve done it successfully or even watched a YouTube video on it. I’m sure I looked like a thoughtful monkey as I stroked my chin and tried to suss it out without breaking anything.

Eventually, after the monolith appeared and Strauss echoed in the garage, I got the new bulb in, put the socket in, gave it a little turn, and put the head lights on, and…. Nothing. Well, not nothing, but no tail light.

So I gave it a little turn and started to pull it out, when….

The light bulb, which I hadn’t completely popped into the socket, dropped into the tail light assembly, between the lens and the thing you see above with only a small hole a little bigger than the light bulb at its narrowest. I thought about I could try to get it out: I used to have a computer part tweezer that had long pinchers; I could put some tape or adhesive on a stick; I could try to vacuum it out with a shop vac. Or, heaven forbid, I could take the whole tail light assembly off and take the lens off to get it out.

Or I could do the Brian J. thing.

So I put the second, what I thought was superfluous, light bulb in the socket very tightly (hey, it snaps when it’s all the way in! how clever!) and then recognize that the socket is keyed with two smaller notches to ensure you can only fit it in the right way to make the electrical connection when you screw it in, screwed the socket in correctly, and tried the head lights. The new tail light worked.

I figure the small bulb is not large enough to damage the inserted bulb, the assembly, or the lens itself. The real question is whether the rattle will drive me nuts, proclaiming my vehicular maintenance ability deficiency for everyone to hear (or at least for me alone to hear like the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart").

My beautiful wife was the first to drive it, and she said she didn’t hear anything.

But the next morning, I heard it. The rattling of the Tell-Tale bulb!

So far, though, it’s not enough to make me want to tear apart the tail light assembly completely.

Instead, I’ll just turn the music up.

I noticed too late that this bag of charcoal was a limited edition.

I might as well have just set the contents on fire.

Not only did I not notice it was a limited edition, but I did not use it for its designed purpose of tailgating which might put me in violation of Federal law.

The new bags of Morton System Saver II water softener pellets come in new, easier handling packaging!

Of course, that’s 25 pound bag of pellets for the same price as the old, awkward 40 pound bag.

You know, designers and copywriters can sleep at night. They’re not really lying. They’re just putting the best face forward on a corporate decision.

Me, on the other hand, I’m just a consumer. I have to deal with this nonexistent inflation. If only I were the type of person influenced by exclamation points, perhaps I’d be a happier person.

When this song comes on the radio:

And a cherubic voice from the back seat says, “Why does he want to drive 55?”

Now, if we still lived in St. Louis, I might be able to parry this off by referring to Interstate 55, but not here in southwest Missouri.

Instead, I have to tell him about the 1970s, the Arab Oil Embargo, and arbitrary limits enacted by the Federal government through chicanery and the threat of withholding money from the states and their dependence upon that system of wealth redistribution for basic government services.

The past was a strange place. No stranger than the present, actually, but exotic because it was a different strange.

Spotted at Walmart yesterday (but before the fusillade):

Christmas stakes.

For when you have to kill a vampire but want to remain festive.

Is this evidence of a great Christmas party amongst the stuffed animals or did a cat come along?

False dilemma. It could have been a great Christmas party with a cat.

I don’t know when I’m scheduled for my next nightmare, but I’d like to pencil crayon in something based on this box containing crayons distributed with the kids menu at a local restaurant:

Active volcanoes, monster trucks, tigers on choppers, and T-rexes on pogo sticks. Not depicted: Me, without any clothes on, late for a final.

On the other hand, if instead of naked I’m wearing a loincloth and carrying a bastard sword, that would be an awesome dream.

Fillyjonk says:

And I realized: this is one way in which I am kind of useless in the brave new world* in which we live: I know poetry, and I can make jokes off of it. But I’m fairly useless at business or economics beyond balancing my own checkbook. And while I like that I know these things – I value that I had a prep school education**, still, it’s further evidence of how I don’t fit in in a lot of ways.

I know the feeling.

I make a lot of quips and allusions that require a bit of classical knowledge intersected with popular culture. They’re awfully funny to me. And once in a while, someone else gets the joke, and that is the best feeling in the world.

(Link via Dustbury.)

Growing up, I didn’t pay much attention to others’ birthdays. Perhaps I should put that in the present tense as I still don’t know my aunts’ birthdays.

But I always got a little helper as to my father’s birthday, as the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on his birthday, so on or right before his birthday, a radio station would play the song or a news source would recount the story.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reminds me that my father would be seventy years old tomorrow.

The Thrillest picks correctly for Missouri in its listing of the best doughnut shops in each state.

For Missouri, it picks the Donut Stop on Lemay Ferry Road (at the intersection of Telegraph and Lemay Ferry Road).

I’ve eaten many doughnuts from that place, as it was right down the road from my sainted mother’s house, and she’d often pick up a couple for us on Sunday mornings when I’d come to visit.

Sorry, Ray.

(Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. If you’re an old-timey blogger like me, this is very confusing.)

Spell check, why you so crazy?

Why would I be talking about a tee shirt featuring heptane instead of a poetical line of seven feet.

This is definitely a case of bias: thinking that an iPhone user would more likely be a chemical engineer than a poet.

So a decade or so back when we lived in Casinoport, our closets had those inexpensive wire shelving organization system in them. As so often happens, one of the brackets in my office shelving broke, probably under the weight of the boxes of books I stored on those lightweight shelves. So I went to the hardware store to buy a couple of the brackets to replace the broken ones.

Except they don’t sell them individually. They sell them in bags of 20, and I needed 1.

So I’ve had nineteen of these for over ten years tucked away.

A couple years ago, while playing in the back yard, one or both of my boys grabbed the cable running from the DirecTV dish to an unused outlet and pulled it free from the staples that originally held them to the bottom of the edge of my deck. So I thought about buying some metal brackets to screw into the deck to hold the cable more securely. I mean, hey, some day we might want to put a television in the dining room. Someday.

Instead of buying brackets, I remembered the white plastic brackets and so I knew I could use them for this job. When I got around to it. Someday.

Once in a while, I got to thinking about doing that particular repair, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put the clasps out in my workshop area in the garage. They weren’t amongst the other fasteners or in the cabinet that makes up the bulk of my storage. So I often got distracted by other incomplete projects or clutter in my workshop before I find them.

But earlier this week, I opened the other drawer, and there they were. Now, a word about my “workshop”: It consists of a high table with a tool box (and a lot of clutter) on it; a couple of topless cabinets I acquired from somewhere covered with clutter, some tools, and an organizer for loose fasteners; a desk that was the tool area in the small space between the furnace and the wall of the utility room in Casinoport which, of course we took with us when we left because I accumulate things; and various shelving units of tools, paints, raw materials, and, quite frankly, junk that I’ll probably clear out very gradually over the next twenty years. I store most of my stuff in the cabinets because they’re closest to the workshop and, frankly, because the floor space in front of the desk is generally stacked with junk.

But on inspiration or when looking for something else or perhaps just because I felt like I was Indiana Jones in an ancient temple, I opened the seldom opened drawer and there they were, right on top.

So I affected the repair years later without having to spend a buck on brackets.

The hero of the story: My packrat habit!

Which is why it is definitely too early to throw that thing out!

And if anyone needs a white c-clamp, I have sixteen left.

I recently said elsewhere on the Internet:

When I’m talking about the film Romeo Must Die, I always have to say it slowly to make sure I don’t say Romeo Is Bleeding.

Face it, the 1990s were bad all around for Romeo. But I guess this has been true for centuries.

Now I learn there is a new film called Romeo Is Bleeding. It’s not a gritty reboot of a particularly gritty movie; instead it’s a documentary about a group of urban students staging Romeo and Juliet.

Which will only heighten the confusion in my internal monologues.

Where there are businesses whose model involves taking pictures of cattle.

So while I was working today, I had to work through a CAPTCHA over and over again. And this appeared:

The center image is the intersection of Swon and Lockwood. In Webster Groves. It’s not the street on which I lived, but I passed through that intersection fairly often while walking a baby some eight years ago.

So, do you think this is a coincidence, or does the CAPTCHA know things about me?

I’m paranoid, so you know which one I think it is.