Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Sunday, September 30, 2007 Bad Snooze There's something kind of adorable about a toddler coming down the hall to his parents' room at five o'clock on a Saturday morning, climbing up into bed between them, snuggling for a minute, and then saying, "I'm going back to my bed," and then leaving, not to return for nearly four hours. It's still pretty cute if he asks one of his parents to escort him on the return trip. And then, when he's tucked back in his own bed, it's even cute if he says something like, "Read me a story," although it's the kind of cute that may make your blood run cold. I declined to read him a story, because it was five a.m. and I really wanted both of us to get back to sleep as soon as possible. Especially me. This turned out to be a vain hope. Trash claims that we all slept for a while between five and six, but to me, the three-hour period from five to eight -- precious REM time, in my personal sleep cycle at least -- was an unbroken hellscape alternating between malarially brief fever dreams and M. Small repeatedly presenting himself at the side of our bed announcing, "It's wake-up time!" At least I assume it was M. Small that whole time. It was still too dark to know for sure for a lot of it. We begged -- begged him to go back to bed or at least entertain himself for a while so we could get a bit of shut-eye. His idea of complying was to go into his playroom, retrieve the largest, noisiest, heaviest toy in there, drop it on the floor directly outside our hallway, and drag it around as loudly as possible for a couple of minutes. And then he came back into our room, peered out our window, and noticed a patch of sky low in the east that was slate-grey instead of coal-black. "It's daylight!" he proclaimed. "Get up! Wake up, daddy! Wake up, mommy!" You know, when I was that age and I woke up that early, I kept myself occupied with the test patterns on TV. He said he was hungry at one point, so I went and got him a bowl of cereal and a cup of milk. Then I parked him in front of his portable DVD player. Even that wasn't ideal, because not only did he insist on watching only the shortest movies he owns, he also insists on putting the disk in the machine himself, with the goal of getting as many fingerprints as he can on the data side so as to make sure the movie freezes as quickly as possible so one of us had to get up and press some buttons, wait for it to work, get tired of waiting, take the disk out, wipe it with some spit and a t-shirt tail, stick it back in (getting fresh fingerprints on it in the process) and wait the two to three minutes while it loaded and started playing again. Repeat until dead. That's not an exaggeration. I literally thought at one point, I bet I could get some sleep if I killed myself. I don't mean to say that I was the only one up with him during this period, while Trash slept blissfully. Far from it. She got up to tend to his predawn needs as many if not more times than I did, but I had no idea what happened on those occasions because I was trying to get some power-snoozing in by stuffing my head between the mattress and the box spring. Trash might have suspected me of having put him to bed early the previous night, since she had been out with her sister. But she'd called me, and heard him babbling alertly over the phone. This was after nine p.m. Which means he slept less than eight hours. I don't like sleeping for less than ten. I think that's why we kept hoping he would admit defeat, or at least accept a draw. But he won. He won well before eight o'clock. He always wins sooner or later. Next week I'm reading him the damn story. It couldn't be worse than this was. posted by M. Giant 7:51 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
Oh, how we feel your pain in our house!! The only major difference is that our darling daughter will loudly and repeatedly insist "Mommy, Daddy, you are not KINKAJOUS - you do NOT sleep in the DAY!" Damn that Diego and his edutainmental show for teaching our kid that kinkajous are nocturnal! I shouldn't know what a kinkajou looks like, much less that the critter sleeps during the day, when, alas, I cannot...
By
I too am a slave to the happy morning child. at least you tag team the am routine, for some reason my son REFUSES to wake his daddy up. I will bribe him when he gets older.
By Here's the cure for early-rising kids in one word: kindergarten. Just wait until it's you trying to drag him out of bed at 6:45 AM! All of a sudden Mr. "Get up, Mom!" is Mr. "Just five more minutes, Mom!" And there was no transition to this whatsoever. Day before kindergarten: up at 5:30. Day after kindergarten: dead to the world at 7AM.
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Oh god. We were thinking of having kids soon.
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"Do you get the “look” from people when your son is up after 8:00? Lord knows I do..."
By Thursday, September 27, 2007 M. Small's Law M. Small's sense of object permanence – the understanding that things continue to exist even when he can't see them – developed years ago. Recently, it became better than mine. My superhuman ability to lose track of inanimate objects is of course well-documented. Less well-documented is my amazement at Trash's ability to always remember where she put anything down. It borders on her superpower. Alas, her Kryptonite is me; if I move something from where she put it, her ability is rendered useless. Apparently it's just too hard for her to remember that I moved a W-4 form or what have you from the center island in the kitchen to a secure place underneath the seat of my car. And you'd think that with a toddler in the house, it would be like moving her into a Kryptonite cage. Fortunately, the toddler seems in his own right. Until recently, it's been fairly narrow, and confined to whichever of his toys currently occupy his ever-shifting "top five." Like, he'll know that his front-end loader is in his playhouse in the backyard, whereas is road grater is in the car, and Chick Hicks is in the spare bedroom. But lately his scope has been expanding. This weekend, he and I had been playing with his blocks on the living room floor for a while when Trash called us in to the kitchen for lunch. M. Small wanted to bring his Matchbox-sized steamroller, which was nowhere in sight. "It's up there," he said confidently, pointing up to the windowsill behind and below the sofa. Sure enough, he was right. And then the other night, as I was putting him to bed, I was looking for his sippy-cup of water that I had just filled. "I just filled it a minute ago," I said. "It's in the bathroom," M. Small informed me. Silly kid. Why would his sippy-cup be in the bathroom? I went and looked, just to humor him. Sure enough, there it was. We'd gotten sidetracked with brushing his teeth, and I'd totally forgotten to bring it into his room. I brought it back now and put it on his bed, frankly and humbly telling him, "You're amazing." It's a cliché, even for me, to say that there are all sorts of great and unexpected things that happen when you become a parent. But I would have to say that finding myself in a house where it's twice as hard for me to lose things is just about the last thing I anticipated. posted by M. Giant 7:33 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
It's funny. My eight year old does this for us. (Note: My BLIND eight year old. No, really.) My husband could not keep track of his keys unless they were surgically implanted under his skin, and our son helps us find those keys all of the time. I don't know if he hears them jingle before they get tossed in whatever direction Husband flings them when he gets home, but 9 times out of 10, our son finds the keys before we do.
By
I'm so pleased to know there are other people who have this dynamic at home! I have a terrible sense of direction and a poor memory for faces, but I am good at remembering where I last saw something, and I frequently tell my husband where his phone, watch, wallet, or keys are. Which is not to say I don't lose things, but it tends to be a matter of something getting shuffled to the bottom of a bag or a pile. If it's in a visible location, I will usually remember where I saw it. My husband, on the other hand, is better than I am at finding things that have fallen into crevices or gotten hidden in unexpected places.
By Saturday, September 22, 2007 Potted Warning: Harry Potter spoilers!* *I feel like a complete idiot even saying that at this point. I just finished the seventh Harry Potter book last week, which I think officially makes me the last person in the English-speaking world to have done so. I was able to avoid spoilers, but even so, here's the stuff that didn't surprise me: 1. A bunch of people died. I felt especially bad for Mad-Eye Moody, who spent the majority of his onstage time in the series being impersonated by somebody else. Tonks and Lupin also stung, especially since they had a baby and all. But I don't see how, as Teddy's godfather, Harry didn't end up being raising the kid himself. He can engage in a sprawling, epic battle with an all-powerful snake-wizard but can't handle a baby? Okay, well, actually I can see that. Fred's (or was it George's?) death wasn't the blow it could have been, because it's not like we were going to get to enjoy a lot more of his and George's (or was it Fred's?) jokes that late in the book anyway. Colin Creevey, though, that was just gratuitous. "This is what happens to rabid fans," Rowling seemed to be saying. Nice message. 2. Harry was a Horcrux all along. It was the only explanation for his longstanding telepathic connection with Voldemort. This of course led to the dilemma of how Harry could defeat Voldemort and still survive without some kind of absurd deus ex machina. In other words, how was Rowling going to spare Harry's life without having him get -- to use Jacob's expression – "shot in the cancer?" Answer: she didn't, and she did. 3. The final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort was going to be a huge letdown. To be fair, this was pretty much inevitable. What I did not predict was that it would all center around arcane rules of wand ownership. It's like if The Fast and the Furious had ended with, instead of a climactic race, a scene where everyone whips out the titles to their vehicles. 4. Snape isn't actually evil. Rowling fished me in on that in the first book. Never again! Even when he killed Dumbledore at the end of Book Six I knew there had to be a good reason. My theory was that Voldemort needed Draco to be the one to kill Dumbledore for some reason, and Snape was foiling that part of his plan. That kind of fell apart the further I got into book seven, but then the real reason -- that Dumbledore asked him to, to protect Draco, and also he was dying anyway -- was even more than I expected. And naturally the de-earing of George (or was it Fred?) was a favor to everyone, so they could tell them apart for the last year of Fred's (or was it George's?) life. And then when Harry learned the truth, he was too self-absorbed with his own petty little problems like his imminent death to feel bad about misjudging Snape. Again. Naming a kid after him years later strikes me as too little, too late. 4. Dumbledore sucks at being dead. Don't misunderstand me; I loved the series, and found all of the books riveting. I wasn't disappointed that Rowling pulled out all the stops -- as well as a few still-beating hearts -- for the finale. She just needed more stops, is all. I was hoping the last book would be my favorite, but that honor still belongs to The Prisoner of Azkaban, probably because it's also my favorite of the movies to date. Everyone I know prefers The Goblet of Fire, which is an opinion I can't share because the whole Triwizard Tournament strikes me as completely retarded in both conception and execution. Hey, let's all go sit and watch the opaque , undisturbed surface of a dark lake for an hour! I would have finished the series sooner, but I put The Order of the Phoenix aside for a couple of weeks when I got to the third act, because I wanted to see how the movie ended first. My logic was that I'd rather read a book whose ending I know than see a movie whose ending I know. Because you can always put down a book. I don't know, it made sense to me at the time. It was weird finishing, because here it was mid-September and I'd been reading nothing but Harry Potter since May. What was I going to read next? With what should I cleanse my palate? What would be my anti-Potter? Well, Trash had recommended a book she read last year called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, so I picked that up without knowing the first thing about it. Imagine my surprise upon discovering that it's about people in England who do magic. Maybe that's better than going cold turkey anyway. posted by M. Giant 6:10 AM 16 comments 16 Comments:
Azkaban is still my favorite one, too! After I finished Book 7, I took a little break and started re-reading it. I'm planning to re-read the whole series in reverse--I've heard that leads to interesting insights.
By
I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. It is funny and touching and full of footnotes which should not be skipped. As much as I loved Harry Potter, I think JSAMN is a much better book.
By I also feel that PoA is my favorite. For that matter, I enjoy HBP more than DH. It goes 3, 6, 7, 1, 5, 4, 2 for me, with the placement of 1, 5, and 4 pretty close but 2 definitely being my least favorite. I've been meaning to read JSaMN for awhile but am now afraid it won't live up to the hype.
By Ooh, I've just finished Jonathan Strange and I absolutely LOVED it, it is so charming and witty. Stick with it! Oh, and Azkaban is my favourite Potter too. It's the scariest.
By Jonathan Strange is absolutely one of the most exquisite books I've ever had the pleasure to read. Be warned: it's addictive!!
By Jonathan Strange is FANTASTIC. In many senses of the word. And, as a previous commenter said, don't skip the footnotes - they're amazing! The only thing is that it took me awhile to get into the rhythm of the book, and now that I have a toddler, I can only read in 30-second stretches. Hrmph.
By Azkaban also my favorite! I'm just sad you didn't mention Dobby the house elf in the deaths of book 7, that one made me weep - even though I found his character so annnoying.
By i am a hp nerd - dobby's death made my CRY. i was upset that tonks and lupins deaths didn't get more wordage. Same too with george (or fred). just to make you feel better - my husband has just STARTED book 6.
By
Noes, noes, noes!
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oakling beat me to the punch - though I will point out that Harry was seventeen, not even eighteen. Way too young for an incredibly messed-up teen to start raising a child. I figure either Teddy's grandmother (as next of kin) or possibly Molly Weasley (Order member, mother extraordinaire) took the baby.
By
Why would Harry (as a godfather, and also a high school dropout) have raised Teddy, when Teddy's grandmother (next of kin) was still alive and functional? Did Harry have a job -- or an education -- or a decent home -- or experience -- or anything else required for the proper raising of a child?
By I loved Jonathan Strange too. Another great read is Cornelia Funke's Inkheart series. Aside from being a riveting story, it has a lot of interesting things to say about books, the experience of reading, and how storytellers relate to their audience. It also has some awesome villians in Capricorn and Basta.
By
Strange & Norrell kicks absolute, utter ass. I don't think I have *ever* had as big a thrill at a book's conclusion as I have had at that one.
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dangit.
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You say there's a dilemma because "how (could Harry) defeat Voldemort and still survivie (if he was a horcrux)"... I think it was explained that when Voldemort "killed" him in the forest, that destroyed the horcrux within Harry. So Harry was able to kill Voldemort with no repercussions on himself.
By Can I recommend Diana Wynne Jones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Wynne_Jones if you're looking for a new writer to follow? She writes fabulous books about magic and other worlds, in my opinion they are far more appealing and satisfying than HP. Some are aimed at younger children and some are for much older readers, but like HP readers of all ages will enjoy them. Libby.
By Monday, September 17, 2007 Dude, how sad is this? Anger management student arrested for assault. The best part of this story -- aside from the obvious fact that the suspect in the photo looks like he's just waiting for an excuse to give you a well-deserved curbstomping, and he doesn't even need a very good one -- is how he smacked a guy with his anger management class materials. One hopes that the people who develop the curriculum for anger management classes have already foreseen this eventuality, and equip students with a two-page handout and maybe a newsprint pamphlet (no staples!), as opposed to a hardcover textbook. Plus you have to think this can't help his grade. After running away from the bus stop, he was probably late for class. In fact, he may not have made it to class at all after that. And even if he did, he would have been there without any of his stuff, echoing the recurring nightmare I can't seem to shake nearly 20 years after graduating from high school. Factor in the possibility that he had a written assignment due which he wouldn't be able to submit, and you have all the ingredients for a rather awkward student-teacher interaction. Oh, and plus he assaulted some people on the way there. Maybe he thought that activities outside of class don't count against him, which, if they do, somebody should have made that clear. Could he have been the only anger-management pupil for whom anger-management class is only an hour or two of non-violence in an otherwise unbroken week of beatdowns? Surely not. It looks like even the mug shot photographer was afraid that aiming the camera directly at him would be taken as a sign of aggression, and so he just sort of pointed it in the general direction and snapped the photo, probably surreptitiously. I'd say more about this incident, but I'm kind of afraid that if I did he'd come and beat me up. posted by M. Giant 8:38 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
OMG, it's Andy from the American version of The Office!
By
Judging by the look on his face, I gather his anger management class is taught by Mr. T.
By Wednesday, September 12, 2007 My So-Called Second Life Part of what Trash does for the company that employs her is to research and understand online social networking resources. Because of her, I have accounts on Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and LinkedIn, among others, that I know very little about. Once or twice, she's even dropped mention of maybe having an account on Blogger that she's been using to post humorous essays under my name for the past five and a half years. I'm pretty sure she's making that last one up. Somewhat to her dismay, she's having to start looking into a different kind of site that's being used for social networking. Ever hear of this "Second Life" thing? I gather it's kind of like the Metaverse in Snowcrash, except you're still sitting in front of your computer, interacting via keyboard/mouse/microphone/webcam/whatever instead of having your brain directly jacked in. And apparently you still have to use your mouse to look around and your keyboard to walk and stuff. Trash was supposed to be logged into Second Life to do some research on the kinds of businesses that have presences there. Except she was kind of getting bogged down trying to figure out how to do things like "run." It didn't help that the moment she logged in for the first time, a creepy-ass avatar popped up behind her wiggling its fingers and saying, "Want to have teh sex?" Nor did it help that, under the impression that businesses probably had their stakes in the virtual landscape represented by structures, she walked into her very first one and discovered two furries having teh sex. Yesterday I called her at work to see how her research was going. "It keeps freezing my computer," she said. "Maybe you need to talk to your IT department and tell them you really need to play this game for work." "Shut up. I just fell off a bridge." "Are you all right?" "I’m in the water. I don't know where I am. How do I get out? Hey, here's a pawn shop." "You should buy a towel." "I seem to be in kind of a bad neighborhood." "You're basing that on the fact that there's a pawn shop there? I thought the rules and assumptions of real life didn't apply." "Yeah, well, there's all these buildings with boarded-up windows and graffiti. Also, I can't figure out how to climb steps." "Seriously? Okay, the graffiti I can understand, but going to the trouble to virtually nail up virtual boards to protect virtual property from virtual looters...?" "My computer just froze again. I have to let you go." "Maybe you should see if there's a Second Life for Dummies." "Don't laugh. That's exactly what I'm going to do." She spent the rest of that afternoon and most of a very frustrating evening trying to figure stuff out. After M. Small went to bed, I tried to help by downloading it and logging in at my computer. I spent about an hour wandering around "Orientation Island," being mocked by signs that said things like "Press F1 For Help" (it didn't) and "Click to retry station" (even though I hadn't yet tried them and didn’t understand what doing so would entail). Needless to say, I didn't do any better than she did. I couldn't even manage to figure out how to instant-message her (as opposed to simply yelling up the stairs), let alone meet up with her someplace so we could crash into things together. "I figured out how to run," I told her afterwards. "Besides hitting CTRL-R, which makes you run all the time?" "Uh, no." "Uh-huh." "But I did figure out that when you're flying, you can use the 'page up' and 'page down' keys to change your altitude." "That's good to know. I was starting to worry that just clicking the 'stop flying' button all the time was going to cause some lasting damage." So now we're only pixels away from figuring our how to explore the Second Life presences of her employer's competitors, once we also find out whether they exist, where they are, and how to get there. But she's still worried about showing up there and making a fool out of herself .Or, more accurately, out of her avatar, which in addition to having ugly hair, also has this unfortunate and mystifying habit of pressing the point of its elbow against the back of its head for no reason. Maybe it's trying to fix its hair. "The first avatar I saw," I reassured her, "was a fat guy in tighty-whities sitting on the ground and going 'sssssssssssdddddddddddssssss.' So I think the standards of competent behavior are a little lower there." Are any of you into this? If so, tips are welcome. Neither of us will be having teh sex with you, however. posted by M. Giant 7:15 PM 12 comments 12 Comments:It isn't that my fake hair is ugly, exactly. It's that I have this enormous lump on the back of my fake head, as though I have a very large tumor that I am trying to hide. The elbow part is true, though, as is the booting me out EVERY DAMN MINUTE and the terrible furry sex.
By Do I remember from earlier posts that Trash is a librarian? A lot of libraries are trying to offer reference services in Second Life. They're pretty big on studying Second Life here at UIUC's library school (although I personally wouldn't want to hitch my academic reputation to that particular star, because of all the user access difficulties you've outlined in this post.) Anyway, we offer a continuing ed course about Second Life, if that would be helpful at all. I've tried it out a few times and loved dressing my character up and playing with her hair and makeup, but found the actual world itself pretty boring.
By
I've used it a couple of times, and yes, navigating and locomotion is somewhat tricky to figure out. Usually, there are people around who can help you out, or at least mock you nicely :) And yes, I've been booted out frequently on my computer at home; however, I have better luck on my computer at work, which has a faster processor and more memory.
By All I know about Second Life is that a lot of Furries use it. That's all I need to know to make me stay far far away from it.
By
Oh god, a while ago my best friend's aunt started having one of those trendy virtual affairs on Second Life and after we laughed hysterically for 45 minutes we thought it would be fun to see this "world" for ourselves. We both signed up, spent an hour or so bumbling uselessly about, and gave up. I don't understand how people are able to DO anything.
By And considering how much Trash enjoys furries, she must really love this.
By
it's a horrible game - it's about 98% sex. The other 2% is people who figured out how to make money off people having virtual sex. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT FLY EXTRA-HIGH. That's where the extra-crazy sex is. Furry sex is NOTHING compared to the rest of it.
By Ha! I am also in a library school which is VERY interested in all this Second Life stuff. But the first time I heard about it, I also thought it was from Snow Crash!! Oddly, in a department full of tech geeks, no one else claims to have read this book. Geek Posers.
By Interesting that you mention Snowcrash. I heard a rumour that the creators of Second Life were actually inspired to create it after having read Snowcrash.
By
I read some newsletters from back when I was in the world of BizNiss; cutting-edge commerce and all that. I was reading about 2ndLife when it was still pretty new.
By And just today, I finished reading Snowcrash, so two days ago, I wouldn't have gotten the reference to the Metaverse. Wow, man.
By I had to used Second Life for a school paper once. I could never understand it and bs-ed my paper completely. So I understand your pain but can offer no help.
By Sunday, September 09, 2007 Head to Toe My sister, DeBitch the Elder, works at the Minnesota State Fair. Her job is to book the acts at the Grandstand, so she's largely responsible for a lot of people's enjoyment of the fair. And in a sense, she was also responsible for ours, even though we didn't go to the Grandstand this year. She and DeBitch the Younger as well, who was in town for the weekend. Lemme 'splain. They told us about a game you can play at the Fair called "Head to Toe." It's very easy and it's very simple. Or at least you would think so. All you do is, as you walk around the Fair, you look for people who are wearing an entire outfit that you would wear. We were there last Saturday, which, given that it was not only a weekend but one of the first really nice-weather days of this year's Fair, was insanely busy. I think I might have heard that two hundred thousand people were there that day, but I may be pulling that out of my ass. So you'd figure that with two hundred thousand people all together, and with the limited amount of wardrobe options available in this day and age, there must be dozens of people there who are dressed entirely in things you would wear, right? Even if this includes accessories? You'd figure wrong. Let's just say that that 200,000 figure isn't the only thing that got pulled out of someone's ass that day. Trash became obsessed with this game almost immediately after DeBitch the Younger told her about it. She started scanning every outfit in the huge crowd. Some could be eliminated instantly, but there were any number of women wearing a top that Trash might wear. Or pants or a skirt she might wear (if not necessarily to the Fair specifically, which isn't a requirement). But then those people wearing a perfectly nice outfit would have screwed it up with some horrible pair of shoes, or a goofy side-ponytail, or an impractical bag, or earrings that were all wrong, or a baby that was totally hideous. I started messing with her a little bit. "There's one," I said, directing her attention to a pair of bright-pink short-shorts that, if not for the camel-toe, would not have existed at all. She didn't appreciate that very much. So I decided to take it up. How hard could it be? It would have to be even easier for a guy. After all, I was wearing a t-shirt, cargo shorts, sneakers, and white socks. Practically the State Fair uniform for guys, I thought. And I was half right. A lot of guys were wearing t-shirts and cargo shorts. But then they'd also be wearing sandals, sometimes with black socks. And, more frequently than you'd think, it would all be topped off with some idiotic hat. I thought I had a winner near the Modern Living building, but then when I read the front of his t-shirt and saw that it read "I Speak GEEK" I had to admit that I wasn't doing any better than Trash was. "There's mine," I said in frustration at one point, pointing to a bald, goateed, shirtless man covered in jewelry, most of which was in him instead of on him. She said that she'd seen a guy in a three-piece suit, which she figured I would wear to the proper occasion. But I still wasn't satisfied. I wasn't about to sign off on something with so many opportunities for screw-ups, particularly not without seeing the tie. Also, I think the last time I wore a three-piece suit, it was to a sixth-grade graduation -- mine. We were almost off the grounds by the time I spotted my winner. The only minor difference was that he was wearing Converse instead of Reeboks, and that's something I would wear if I were less cheap. I bet. But now that I think of it, I don't think I bothered to check what was on the front of his t-shirt, either. This doesn't count at all, does it? Dammit. Fine. Just wait until next year. posted by M. Giant 9:21 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:This game sounds way harder than the "Yes or no game" that my friends and I play.
By What's horrifying is the thought that someone might be playing this game when they see me, and lose as a result.
By Wow, my friend and I played "Spot the Goth" and the renn fest, but that was about quantity rather than quality.
By
We play the inverse version, known as TYB [for That's Your Boyfriend]. Also can be played as TYG. Orientation is not a factor. You win by zinging someone with the most horrifying individual.
By My favourite train-ride game is pretty self-explanatory - it's called "Man or Woman".
By Wednesday, September 05, 2007 No TV For You! One advantage of having had so much writing to do so far this year is that I haven't had time to work on any major home projects. Sure, we sheared the top of the house off and put on a new one on starting about a year ago last week, but we paid people to do that. And besides, even if we hadn't, the tear-out/start-over aspect of it would have kept us away from having to deal with the terrifying work of Dr. Jellyfinger. So you'd think that his crap handiwork would have been leaving us alone. You'd think wrong. The other night, I figured it was time to finally sit down and watch the finale of The Office that's been gathering dust in my TiFaux for the past three months. So I went downstairs, hit the universal remote button that turns on the whole schmear, and waited. And waited. The little display window on my TiFaux that usually tells me either the time or the channel was instead cycling between darkness and the messages "boot" and "nu." I don't know what "nu" was supposed to mean, but it seems to me that if a cable company is going to provide customers with a piece of electronic equipment that customers don't have to pay for, and that is sometimes prone to frustrating glitches, they probably wouldn't want it telling people to "boot" it any more than is absolutely necessary. In any case, I quickly figured out that the TiFaux/cable box wasn't the problem, because the TV wasn't coming on either. They're both plugged into the same power strip, so it seemed more likely that they just weren't getting the juice they needed. Making this theory seem even more likely was the fact that there seemed to be a soft crackling noise coming from inside the wall behind the TV, like one of our gigapedes had moved into an outlet box and taken up spot-welding. This was one of the rare occasions where D. Jellyfinger's shoddy workmanship was actually to my advantage. He was the one who built the wall separating the TV room from the laundry room, and it is, as is the case with most of his work, a wall in only the most basic sense of the word. The lower half consists of heavy wood paneling attached to nothing, and the upper half consists of a single layer of Masonite. That meant that the electrical boxes that are usually "inside" a wall are, in this case, "behind" the wall. And one of those boxes, I noticed, was emitting a thin line of acrid white smoke along with the crackling noise. The weird thing is that it wasn't the outlet box that was doing this, like you might expect. It was the box that houses the light switch on the wall above and a couple of feet to the left of the power box. Surely Dr. Jellyfinger hadn't run the power from the breaker box to the power outlet through the light switch box, had he? Well, of course he had. This was something new. Usually it's his laziness that messes me up. This time he'd gone out of his way for the sake of my inconvenience. Knowing I was going to have to get in there, I shut off the power to the basement lights, which I assumed would kill the juice to everything in that box. To my amazement, I threw the correct circuit breaker on the first try, which never happens. Imagine my surprise when, in the illumination from my Maglite, I pulled out the switch mechanism on its wires and then heard that tiny little insect spot-welder still at work in there. And when I turned off the flashlight, I could see the sparks as well. I'm going to spare you any suspense you might be feeling as to whether I electrocuted myself, or fried our home computers, or accidentally plunged the whole neighborhood into a blackout. None of that happened. Instead I called my dad and asked, "What the hey?" Dad said it sounded like the power to the outlet, despite going through the light switch, was on a different circuit. So then there was a whole other process of trial and error, during which I had to wiggle the switch around in between every circuit breaker I threw, to see if I could get it to make more sparks each time. This time, it was almost the very last switch in the box. And I say "almost" only because I refrained from just shutting off all the power to the whole house. So then it transpired that between the two circuits I'd shut down, the entire basement and main floor were dark save a few random outlets. Ah, well. Nothing for it. I pulled out the now-completely-dead switch and looked inside the box. Where one of those little plastic screw-on wire connecters that look like tiny traffic cones was supposed to be, there was a yellow ring, a layer of goo, and a lot of exposed wire. After more than fourteen years in this house, you learn to recognize these signs that are the equivalent of a neon flasher reading "DR. JELLYFINGER WAS HERE." "Wouldn't you rather do this in the daytime?" Trash suggested at this point. And since I didn't have a new one of those connectors in the house at the time, I kind of had to agree. So I went to turn the power back on, and of course it wouldn't go back on, because the crappy connection that only refused to power the TV had now become an all-out short circuit thanks to my own Jellyfingrian manipulations. I would have left it that way, but since that meant more than half of our house would be dark (including no Internet), Trash suggested an alternate solution. So my temporary "fix" – in the sense that it isn't "fixed" at all – is to have the wires sticking out of the box, with the previously bare metal wrapped in electrical tape, and M. Small completely banished from the basement until it's all fixed. In the meantime, I ran a big orange extension cord from the utility room out into the front room, and plugged the TV/TiFaux/VCR power strip into that. "It's kind of ghetto, but it should work," I told Trash. At least until I get around to fixing it properly. I'll be damned if I'll let something like code safety interfere with my enjoyment of my long-awaited writing break here. By the way, The Office finale was awesome. I highly recommend it. posted by M. Giant 8:31 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:Your ability to deal with and understand and know how to fix these situations astounds me. Hubby and I would be so screwed if this were to happen at our house! I think I know where the circut breaker box is, hubby can change the HVAC filter in the attic, and....that's about it.
By Lat winter our power went out and my husband hooked up a car battery to the tv and Dvd player so we could watch Stargate sg-1. Our house is also one of those 'surprse" houses where we find interesting shoddy work every time we open another wall. Good luck!
By Oh, this sounds so familiar. Our first house belonged to an "electrician." I use the term loosely. He apparently did this for a job, but practiced at home. We found many instances of "creative" wiring and there were at least two superfluous light fixtures in each room - some of which were on their OWN circuit (not being on the same circuit as the rest of the room) and could only be turned on/off with the fuse box. Yeesh. Hubs got zapped a time or two.
By I need to learn more about this Dr. Jellyfinger character, because if he's still working and I wind up at a rotation site where he is, I'm worried I'm gonna kill somebody.
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I'm pretty sure that Dr. Jellyfingers wired our old place, which was a converted garage unit. EVERY SINGLE outlet in the house was wired to one circuit, except for the fridge, which was wired to its own circuit. If you turned on the TV at the same time as you nuked your popcorn, the whole thing would blow.
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My house is like that. Whenever we find one of those glitches we say it's been Gunned-Gunn being the name of the old owners who apparently took drugs before attempting to remodel. I had an electrical fire in the laundry room b/c they left a hot wires exposed, but covered by cheap paneling.
By We gone through at least 3 electricians, trying to re-wire the mistakes at our house. They all eventually end up crying in their trucks and refuse to ever come back.
By Sunday, September 02, 2007 30 I've never understood people who run because they like it (not counting my son, of course, who burns off excess energy by doing laps between the kitchen and the living room). I can see doing it to get in shape, or to challenge yourself to do something hard for the sake of the challenge, but running for fun pretty much ended for me in eight-grade track. I will say that it feels good when you stop. In related news, this weekend is the official due date to submit the manuscript for my book. Technically, the contract says September 1. But that was drafted and signed months ago, before anybody bothered to check that September 1 was a Saturday. So a couple of weeks ago, I e-mailed my editor to ask if she actually needed it before September 1, or if I could be a weasel and take the Labor Day weekend to finish up. She said that was fine, and in fact, she would be out of the office on Tuesday, so I could even have until Wednesday if I wanted. So then on Friday I finished. This has been the biggest, hardest writing project I've ever done, and I'm including in that a five-act play in period iambic pentameter. It's about the equivalent of a thousand blog entries, or a hundred recaps, or one really long-ass book that I really wasn't as prepared to write as I thought I was. There've been times when I wasn't sure I was going to make it, when I was glad we have enough in the bank to give back the advance if I needed to, when I wondered what it would take for me to get another few months to work on it. Now that's all over. Okay, not all over. There are going to be plenty of revisions, I'm sure, and then galley proofing, and then, God willing, maybe some marketing stuff to do. Oh, and I suppose I still need to send it to my editor, technically. But right now none of that compares to the fact that whenever I'm doing something else -- playing with M. Small, or hanging out with Trash, or blogging, or recapping, or eating, or sleeping, or working -- I don't have to deal any more with that guilty feeling telling me that I should really be working on the book. That same feeling that has been bugging me since I got the deal last November. The same feeling that can shut up now. Even better, the end of Big Love coincided eerily with the manuscript due date, so aside from a couple of other small projects, I get to spend my evenings and weekends paying more attention to the family and home I've been neglecting so grievously. Well, that and see if I can still remember how to play Half-Life 2. Don't worry, I know exactly how much of an asshole this makes me sound like. I know I'm lucky to have a book deal. I know I'm lucky to have a family that loves me and supports me. I know how lucky I am that Sars and Wing hired me to make fun of TV shows and that I still get to do it and now get checks for it with 30 Rock for a return address. I know how lucky I am that marvelous people like you regularly take a few minutes out of your busy weeks to see what I'm yammering about. I know I'm lucky that I get to be a writer at my day job, a goal that seemed almost unattainable (or at the very least, a great deal less lucrative) just a few years ago. I am one lucky asshole. Writing is fun, and I wouldn't want to do anything else with my life (lacking the skills to be a rock star, of course). But it also feels good when you stop. * * * Will the good fortune never cease? Check this out:  It's an honor just to be nominated. Getting more votes would be an even greater honor. I'm just saying. posted by M. Giant 8:33 PM 13 comments 13 Comments:I even registered so I could vote. You ARE one lucky asshole.
By I also registered so I could vote. You are double the lucky asshole!
By Did you know that you are nominated for more than one award? I also registered just to vote for you, so consider yourself a three-time asshole.
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I did the same thing.
By I also registered just so I could vote, but I don't feel comfortable calling you a quadrupal-lucky arsehole (I'm British) so I'll just say good luck :)
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I so totally hear the guilt thing. I am an old hand at shaming myself about things that there is no need to shame myself for (which for that matter includes pretty much anything that I could possibly decide to feel bad about). And an old hand at working to let go of that, mostly through various twelve-step thingies.
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Also:
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I also registered just to vote. Um, that is, I registered to vote for you...
By So happy for you for everything, including finishing the book. I also registered just to vote for you!! When your book comes out, I might even buy it instead of bugging my local library too so I can read it for free! Well,I might.
By
When I saw the entry title, I thought for sure you were going to give us a recap of the new TV series called "30" which takes place in the mere 30 hours it took you to complete this book project. Just 6 hours more than Jack Bauer's show, you still managed to shoot 13 more people during the writing of your book than Jack did saving the country.
By Did you know that you're up for "Hottest Daddy Blogger" as well?
By You just got one more vote. Congratulations on finishing the book! That must be an awesome feeling.
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