Category: Life

There are two kinds of men in this world: Men who own drain augers, and men who do not have drain augers but sometimes really wish they did. Males who do not know what drain augers are are not men. Men who call them drain snakes or cables are men, too. People who think drain augurs tell the future from the way plumbing parts fall to the ground after being cast into the air are interesting, but they are not men. Masculinity has a very complex set of rules, as you can see.

So this morning, while I was preparing to shave, my basin’s drain fell closed and became unresponsive to the manipulations of the opening and closing mechanism. I had to use my wife’s basin, and it drained very slowly indeed, as she wears her hair long these days. I knew I could call a plumber to come clean it, but no. I am of the first type of man (being one who owns two augers: a small drill-mounted one and a smaller one designed exclusively to scratch up your toilet bowl while you clear a clog).

So I disassembled two drains, cleaned the p-traps, and used the auger to push any blockage deeper into the pipes where my auger cannot reach it. I have found that my drain stop became stuck in the closed position because its horizontal rod (where the stop rests) had actually rusted through and broke off so that the spot that should have held the drain plug open was actually in the p-trap. Do you know what I mean? Score yourself two Man Points.

So I will pick that up this afternoon and replace it (a five minute repair), and after I reassembled the p-traps, water is again flowing from the sink basins (and not into the cabinets under the sink, bonus). I’ve done nothing else this afternoon, but when one does a home repair this complex, one can coast on it for a while.

Of course, I do know what this ultimately means: people will know I have an auger of some sort and will want to borrow it.

After someone dies, you know if someone close to you has died or you attend estate sales, the families are left with a pile of the effluvia of daily living in addition to the fine china, the antique buffet, and the savings bond worth $25 that is not worth putting through probate. In my family’s case, I have inherited a number of office supplies. Yesterday, I used a number of those heirlooms.

My mother saved every notepad ever given to her as a fundraising come-on or as a piece of swag from someone who performed a service for her. Because I could see the utility of such notepads, I carried out a file box full of them with her name at the top and, sometimes, handwritten notes to herself on them. I have a drawer full of them:

I hate to get rid of the little scribbles in her handwriting, because her handwriting is now a fixed, limited resource, and every sample lost will go unreplaced. Although I’m melancholic and maudlin, I do let those go.

My mother’s only been gone for two and a half years now; my Aunt Dale has been gone for five or six, and I still have a pile of her office supplies. Report covers? Got ’em! A metal stand for a reference-style book or catalog? I don’t know what I’ll use it for, ever, but I still have it. Come to think of it, I don’t know what she would have thought she would use it for.

But the box of 500 number 10 envelopes? I’m still working on it, mostly because one uses so few envelopes of one’s own these days:

And as I prepared to send out a number of review copies of my novel, I needed a mid-sized sheet of paper to handwrite notes to the recipients on. Preferably one without my mother’s name at the top and the name of a questionable charity at the bottom. Fortunately, I have some sheets left in the steno pad I also got from Dale:

Just simple little things, little office supplies, but reminders of my ancestors. Well, my mother and my aunt, anyway. Both of them would be pleased that I was frugal and thrifty enough to save these things and to use them. And, probably, to remember the sources.

James Rummel is afraid that some people might confuse him with the Scottish monster Big Gray Man:

But there’s far more than that to Ben Macdhui. The mountain is the reputed home of a vile and terrifying man-beast: the Big Gray Man, as it has become infamously known. Indeed, while on Ben Macdhui, witnesses to the phenomenon known as the Big Gray Man describe how they have variously encountered footsteps, a sensation of a “presence,” occasional sightings of a large humanoid creature, and an overpowering sense of panic.

I should add that Big Gray Man should not be confused, either, with the "Little Grey Man".

So, some months ago, apparently I put a Power Paw vacuum cleaner attachment on my desk because it needed to be cleaned out so that the little spinner gizmo in it would spin.

Apparently, some months ago, same Power Paw fell between a disorganized organizer and the side of the hutch attachment on my desk, which means it lie hidden there between desk cleanings until such time as my wife really, really wanted to use it and actually ordered another one, waited for it to arrive, and then used the replacement for whatever she wanted pawed powerfully.

At which time I found it. And moved the organizer so it’s touching the hutch so nothing can fall in between the two.

Weeks pass, but this morning, I had a couple of moments to kill, so I picked it up, unscrewed the two Philips screws holding it together using a small screwdriver that also happened to be lying on my desk, and knocked out a bit of dust to unlock the little gearwheel.

The complete fix time: about 5 minutes. The turnaround time: Probably 4 months.

As my sainted mother liked to say, “I don’t like to rush into anything.”

I feed my children McDonald’s Happy Meals on occasion. I hesitate to confess on the Internet because in England, this might be grounds for forcible removal of the children from the family. But there it is.

I also pride myself on being a knowledgeable sort of father, one who can answer most any question in a greater detail than a kindergartner or preschooler can actually retain. It’s important to do so to keep up the illusion of omniscience as long as possible.

Happy Meal toys, the little trinkets that come in with the chicken nuggets and apple dippers with white milk to drink (thereby mitigating, somewhat, the dietary destruction of McDonald’s), have been pretty good to me in this regard. Most of them recently have been rehashings of things from my own youth, so I can give great detail.

Transformers? I can explain some elements of the originals (except for why Megatron transformed into a gun and Soundwave transformed into a boombox with full-sized other transformers somehow shrunken to cassette size). I can even speak to the film series a bit, engaging in the modern controversies. (Bumblebee was a Volkswagen, dammit. What, do you think Greedo shot first, too?)

Marvel superheroes? I can speak at length about Captain America, Spiderman, Iron Man, and Avengers story lines. D.C. Superheroes? Go ask your mother.

Smurfs? Yeah, I can talk about the origins of the mythos from records to cartoons to the creation of Smurfette. I’ve known this stuff longer than I’ve had a college degree.

Some of the toys were pleasantly non-specific and non-mythos-centric. (Yes, when discussing varied story lines and toy universes, I do use the term mythos with my children. These are traditional stories passed down between generations now, ainna?)

Some of the toys are archetypal. If it’s a little animal, I know it’s from the latest environmental propopanda piece du juor, and the plucky animals are the heroes and the men or the animals in favor of civilization are the villains. They never make the toys out of villains for these sorts of films, as they want children to identify with the cute animals.

Oh, and Star Wars. Every couple of months, something new from Star Wars, trying to get the children hyped up on the new going concern, the Clone Wars, a series so ethically muddled that the storm troopers are the good guys, Anakin Skywalker is a hero, and at the end of the series, Anakin Skywalker is going to kill all his allies. Seriously, how can you not root for the freakin’ Hutts to rub him out at some point? Regardless, I know a lot about the overarching stories if not the specific Clone Wars adventures. I’m less clear why they built ships with the cockpit on the top, set way on the back. Because in space, too much visibility of the enemy might drive you mad or something. Or George Lucas is a tool.

But now, out of nowhere, we have a toy from some mythos of which I have no knowledge: Ben 10 Ultimate Alien.

I can’t suss it out. The name doesn’t tip anything of its story. The toy is some child embedded in a larger translucent monster or alien. Did the boy turn into that? Did the monster eat the child? Is this particular translucent alien/monster a good guy? I just don’t know.

Way to make me feel forty, McDonald’s. Now that you’ve reminded me I have to watch my diet, I’ll have to cut out the fast food for my children and me. How does that suit you?

And now, to distract my children, I will once again how them the introduction to Scooby Doo from 1970:

• This Lysol 4-in-1 Foaming Bathroom Cleaner should be tagged with With Real Police Shooting Action! Jeez, every time I pulled the trigger on the pump, it shot out a stream of foam that ricocheted and splattered so that for every spot of foam I got on target on the surface to clean, I got a half dozen spots of foam on the surrounding surfaces, including the ceiling and floor. No matter how I tried to angle the bottle or the distance from the surface, and I was a couple sound effects out of a Western where the mildew is the hero and I’m the outlaw. I searched the Lysol Web site so I could show you the exact product I’m talking about, but it’s gone. Apparently, I’m not the only one concerned about scattering caustic chemicals willy-nilly to save the world from some evil modern equivalents of chlorofluorocarbons (just as evil as CFCs! Ban them next!).
• Wait a minute, you mean that shower door isn’t frosted glass? I have thought since we lived here that the door was frosted glass. An incomplete splatter-pattern of cleaning chemicals later, and I’m looking out of my shower. Did the previous owner sell us a house with a dirty shower door? Well, in all honesty, I’d do it to someone else. Especially as dirty as this proved to be.
• Dammit, woman, I’m a man! How am I supposed to know the difference between a bath loofah and a toilet brush?

When we first moved into Nogglestead, I placed a child lock on the fireplace in our family room:

That’s kind of funny, now that I think about it. I’ve only opened the fireplace once myself. The home inspector opened it when the chimney guy was evaluating it, and I peeked in at that time. Then I popped the child lock on it when we moved in.

The only time I opened it was last winter when we were under the threat of the Great Blizzard of 2010, which threatened the Ozarks with any combination of ice, snow, winds, and calamity that would turn off our heater and would make us rely on the fireplace.

To open it, you don’t pull it; you have to actually turn one of the handles ninety degrees, something that’s a little easier when the metal hasn’t mostly frozen in years of little use. That is, it wasn’t easy.

That being said, it took me almost a year from the time I opened the fireplace and put in the Duraflame log that I expected to keep my family warm for 10 days of subzero temperatures to actually remove the pointless child lock.

As my mother used to say, “I don’t like to rush into anything.”

The latest mailer from Ducks Unlimited, of which I’m an off and on member, tested me. And I failed.

There’s a dotted line and a perforation, but the instruction is Do not detach. Apparently, in addition to a renewal form, there’s a letter to my Congressman telling him not to cut federal funding for wetlands.

Come to think of it, that’s a test Ducks Unlimited failed. I’m all about sending my money of my own volition to them to pool money with like-minded people to conserve wetlands. Meanwhile, I guess its professionals have decided that the proper way to spend my membership dues is to lobby Congress to extract money from non-like-minded citizens to do the work Ducks Unlimited should do.

Come to think of it, this membership form is going in the trash.

See, I post about my messy desktop, and I set to work cleaning it. You’re an inspiration to me, gentle reader.

The Blip, mounted:

The Blip and the Parker Brothers Merlin join the previous wallhangings. All, of course, are mounted on Velcro so I can pull them down and play a quick game any time I want to, natch.

The cat thing, though, that’s still on my desk until I figure out what to do with it.

Dustbury and Jennifer muse on the Gun question that appears on pediatrician forms. You know the one: Are there guns in the home?

Remember, if you refuse to answer that, you actually answer “Yes, and furthermore, I’m a politically sensitive gun owner, which means TERRORIST!”

However, there are some better answers:

• No, they’re not in the home; we all have CCLs, and Junior has his .22 in his diaper.
• No, they’re all buried in the backyard with the canned goods.
• Of course not. When we need a gun, we steal one, and then we leave it at the scene.
• Not today; Lil Rico needed it for something.
• No, it’s locked in Robb’s car at the YMCA.

See, in all of those scenarios, Junior is safer.

A friend on Facebook posted a retro comment about wanting to go shopping so her mom could buy her a Trapper Keeper for school, and after I was all about reminding everyone that I was a child of the housing projects who got his first Trapper Keeper secondhand, if you call “from the common metal garbage cans in the alley” secondhand (all right, they weren’t exactly common, as each apartment got two trash cans with the apartment address painted on them–you got me, I’m making this all up!). I never did take that Trapper Keeper to school, as it had last year’s (1981’s) scrawlings from someone else in it.

But I did get a second one in 1985, which I still have. Of course.

Continue reading “I’m Not Retro, I’m A Pack Rat” →

Since school starts in a week, the school has sent its non-normalized list of equipment the urchins will need for school. One child’s list is very specialized in certain areas, the other’s is specialized and recommends specific brand names and sizes. So your shopping list has to be a half again as long as it should be.

Then I remembered something I’d read recently about Van Halen and brown M&Ms:

In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed”. Once the “M&Ms” story leaked to the press, social commentators jumped all over it as an egregious example of the pampered and spoiled behavior that rock artists demanded.

…

Van Halen was one of the first rock bands to bring truly massive concerts to mid-size cities like Macon, Georgia. The staff that worked at concert arenas in these smallish cities were used to bands coming to town with, at most, three tractor-trailers full of equipment. Van Halen’s equipment took up 9 tractor-trailers. It was a lot of stuff, and the staff at these venues were frequently overwhelmed. And when people are overwhelmed, they make mistakes. At a rock concert, “making a mistake” during setup has a large number of possible outcomes. Some mistakes don’t have any effect at all. Other mistakes can make the band sound awful, which hurts nothing but the band’s image. Other mistakes can cause stage lights to fall from the ceiling and kill people… which is exactly what the band was afraid of.

At the heart of any major concert is the contract. Much of the text of these contracts is standard legal boilerplate, but each band may attach specific demands via something called a “rider”. Most of the contracts involving concerts at large venues are jam-packed with riders, most of which involve technical details specific to the band’s stage design. For instance, a rider might say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, spaced evenly, providing nineteen amperes total, on beams suspended from the ceiling of the venue, which shall be able to support a total gross weight of 5,600 pounds each, and be suspended no less than 30 feet, but no more than 37.5 feet, above the stage surface”. Van Halen’s concert contracts would have several hundred such demands, and their contracts ended up (in lead singer David Lee Roth’s words) looking “like a Chinese Yellow Pages”.

The staff at venues in large cities were used to technically-complex shows like Van Halen’s. The band played in venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden or Atlanta’s The Omni without incident. But the band kept noticing errors (sometimes significant errors) in the stage setup in smaller cities. The band needed a way to know that their contract had been read fully. And this is where the “no brown M&Ms” came in. The band put a clause smack dab in the middle of the technical jargon of other riders: “Article 126: There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”. That way, the band could simply enter the arena and look for a bowl of M&Ms in the backstage area. No brown M&Ms? Someone read the contract fully, so there were probably no major mistakes with the equipment. A bowl of M&Ms with the brown candies? No bowl of M&Ms at all? Stop everyone and check every single thing, because someone didn’t bother to read the contract.

And I thought, Holy cannoli! The teachers are testing me!

If the urchin’s backpack contains a 6oz bottle of Elmer’s Glue, a gel gluestick, or a 48-pack of crayons, this failure will automatically indicate to the teacher that I am that kind of parent. The kind who lets the child select camo-and-stripes ensembles with the trousers on backwards and two different shoes on the wrong feet.

So I was particularly meticulous in this annual scavenger hunt, finding the right size of disposable cups that are only sold in a dusty Halltown shop with a single shelf slot and two boxes stocked every two weeks.

Because I am that kind of parent, but I am considerate enough to not want to spoil the remainder of the teacher’s summer.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. Sensing.

So I have this tech writing gig where I’m writing documentation for software that generates import/export documentation for exporters. The software now features the ability to produce documents for ITAR, which is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. So on my technology Twitter Feed, I said:

Today’s user scenario: I am an international arms dealer. No, really.

A user scenario, as you know, is describes the mindset and goals of a user interacting with software.

Someone responded:

That’s good. Most of the software I work on is useless to you if you can’t get yourself some arms.

So I said:

Can I interest you in something on our menu? http://bit.ly/q6PkGl

The link goes to a list of codes used in shipping munitions overseas. Comparing this list provided by the United States Customs to the United States Munitions List, I discovered that the list was missing one of the munitions categories (even though the Customs data element spec says it should be available, but that’s government data integration for you). So I tweeted:

The Man is holding me down. I can’t sell Directed Energy Weapons abroad.

and:

I mean, the Pentagon’s selling its lightning gun on Ebay (http://t.co/xZTAwK7), and I can’t sell particle beams to the Mongolians.

I thought it was mighty funny. I just hope the Federal agents monitoring the social networks have a sense of humor, too.

A part of the new publicly funded Busch Stadium in St. Louis fell off of the six-year-old stadium:

A day after a 100-pound piece of metal trim toppled from Busch Stadium, inspectors were busy looking at similar panels on the stadium to determine if they could fall, too — and what to do about them.

Ron Watermon, the Cardinals’ director of public relations and civic affairs, said the city sent an inspector to the stadium late Monday afternoon after a 2-foot-by-4-foot piece fell from the building, and a team of inspectors was back at the stadium this morning.

Is it just me, or does it seem like more civic engineering projects are falling apart lately?

• June 2010, O’Donnell Park parking garage:
  

  Structural engineers from the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin will return to the collapsed parking garage Friday morning at O’Donnell Park.

  They will be there to determine why a portion of the garage on Lincoln Memorial Drive near the Summerfest grounds collapsed, killing a 15-year-old boy and injuring two others.

• August 1, 2007, I-35W:
  

  The I-35W Mississippi River bridge (officially known as Bridge 9340) was an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. During the evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, it suddenly collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145.

• July 2006, Big Dig tunnel:
  

  The Big Dig ceiling collapse occurred on July 10, 2006, when a concrete ceiling panel weighing 3 tons (2722 kg) and measuring 20 by 40 ft (6.1 by 12.2 m) fell in Boston’s Fort Point Channel Tunnel. The panel fell on a car traveling on the two-lane ramp connecting northbound I-93 to eastbound I-90 in South Boston, killing a passenger and injuring the driver.

The Romans built roads that were in use for millennia. 21st Century American Civilization can hardly seem to build something that lasts until the checks clear.

Yes, I know, Galloping Gertie, 1940. Have things always fallen down like this and I’m only being especially gloomy now?

I didn’t always used to be a talentless Internet blogging hack. Once, I was somebody. Once, I was a middle school student with a Kodak winner camera laden with 110 film. And I won prestigious awards. Or I won an award.

I won second place in the North Jefferson Middle School Art Show for that picture. It depicts my brother sleeping with his arm around our dog at the time, Cricket. Cricket lasted from those middle school years until the year after I graduated college. In other words, she was always there in the latter half of my childhood.

The picture was taken a year or so before the show; that bedroom is in the basement of my aunt’s house in St. Charles, where we lived for a year and a half after our mother moved us from Milwaukee to Misery, as we called it then.

Note the innovative wainscoting. My aunt bought a bunch of fence pickets and let them sun bleach for a while before putting them over the plastered basement walls.

Note the blonde-veneered bureau behind my brother. That had been part of my parents’ bedroom set in Wisconsin, pre-divorce. Aside from the dining room table and chairs, that bureau and its smaller dresser might have been the only matched furniture they owned. My mother let me have it when I moved out of her basement at age 25, so I still have that bureau in my bedroom today, with the scars from a puppy we would own a year after this photo was taken. My wife hates it, of course, and looks forward to a day when we own matched bedroom furniture. Last I saw, the matching dresser remained in the basement of my mother’s last house, laden with blankets and other clothes she bought at garage sales and probably never wore.

The yellow thing with a felt paw on my brother’s arm is a monkey puppet that my mother took to a bar once or twice when she got a chance to go out, post-divorce, in Milwaukee. When I turned nine or ten, I got one like it except brown, and I named it Mark. I think I disposed of Mark only a year or so back. In his 25 years, he lost an eye, his tongue, his nose, and had a tear in his abdomen.

The inverted smiley face is an orange pillow someone gave my brother. We never really liked it, but we carried it along and it was on the bed we shared in that basement.

At any rate, I had no real artistic talent, but I did have pictures from that Kodak camera to enter into the art show. And I won second place.

But as I’ve said before, when you look at old pictures from familiar environments, most memories are not stoked by the foreground but by the background.