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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Wednesday, September 30, 2009 Bet Red I want to show you a picture I took earlier that has nothing to do with home repair. It's more like world repair.  That's M. Edium and Trash earlier this evening, picking out which projects he wanted us to fund from Sarah's Donors Choose contest, which started less than an hour ago. Now if that doesn't just warm your cockles, one might accuse you of being cockle-impaired. Sarah does this annually, and I contribute what support I can from my own meager efforts. But now that M. Edium is old enough to pick out his own projects, it's like our funding power has increased by fifty percent! Even if one of us does have to get by on a pitifully small allowance from his parents. The thing is, with $210,000 as this year's goal, people will need to kick in more, or more people will need to kick in, or both. But with over 600 projects to choose one, if you can't find one to get behind you're just not trying. So go, and give! And in addition to the straight-up donations Trash and I are making, we're also contributing all of October's ad revenue from the site. I mean, it's not Dooce money, but every little bit helps. And the more you visit the site this month, that bit gets less little as my ad view numbers go up. But don't overclick on the ads -- they don't like that. Just read them out loud to someone so they know you're paying attention. Oh, and if you try to donate and find the servers crashed, don't worry. That happens sometimes. It always comes back. posted by M. Giant 9:38 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:At breakfast this morning, as soon as M. Edium was actually awake, he asked "When are we going to help out the students on the computer?" When he discovered that we had started without him, he was NOT. PLEASED. Needless to say we had to donate again this morning, so he could pick a project about books.
By I might sound like a stalker, but I would llke to see what projects M. Edium picks. Maybe it would inspire your readers to donate to a specific project.
By I saw a "why I donate" note or two from M. Giant and M. Edium whilst scrolling through the Tomato Nation options. So I say read through 'em all!
By Thanks for the heads up on the contest - Sometimes I need that reminder that it's time to browse the Donors Choose site again.
By I keep seeing M. Giant and M. Edium too, but where is the Trash love? Or is she giving through a separate account? I too would love a list of M. Edium's favorite picks. I would throw some money at one in his name.
By Hung Part II So on Thursday, I had a big old chunk of new drywall hanging from my bathroom ceiling. On Friday, it rained. That night, just for fun, I pressed my finger against the spot at the top of the upstairs bathroom wall where it used to get soft every time it rained, just to see that my roof repair job was holding up. Like it had the last time it had rained. My finger went right through. And I'd thought this was going to be fun? Tracing the path of the stream along the slope of the ceiling that the guy with the infrared camera had shown me, it didn't feel wet, but there were a couple of nail holes under the surface that had gotten pretty mushy. I told myself it wasn't that bad. That this was just a minor leak, compared to what had been happening before. That maybe this was something we could live with. Then I went downstairs to look at the ceiling in progress. That giant piece of drywall that Trash and I had wrestled into place just the day before? Was wet. You know that bit in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke wails, "No! That's not true! That's impossible!" That's pretty much what I did. Seriously, I was beyond discouraged. Here I'd been congratulating myself on keeping this project on schedule, and now, with three weeks to the target date, I was back where I'd been a month ago. I told Trash, and she wasn't nearly as upset as I was. "We could move," she suggested. As mad as I was at myself for blowing this, she just wouldn't help me gang up on me. She's so disloyal sometimes. But as much as I wanted to continue the Episode V parallel by throwing myself from a great height (preferably my leaky-ass roof), what I did instead was reach out to my father (who has never once cut off my hand). Again, he came to the rescue, driving in the next day after everything had dried off, climbing up on that roof, and actually getting under the shingles to plug up spots I'd missed on my first trip up there the previous month. And then, if that weren't enough, he helped me put up the second piece of sheetrock in the bathroom. Which unfortunately didn't fit as well as the first, so the lightness of it was easily outweighed by all the trimming we had to do to make it fit. Now, I know what you're thinking. Why finish putting up the ceiling when we still weren't sure if it would still be dry after the next rain? Well, as Dad said, the wet ceiling downstairs wasn't the cause, but a symptom. The wetness I'd spotted the night before, as much as it rent my heart in two when I'd first seen it, had really only affected the very edge of the new ceiling, well within the area the new crown molding would hide, so it didn't need to be replaced. And since it's in a bathroom, it's moisture and mold-resistant anyway, so bonus! Just don't, you know, make it permanent yet. So I decided to hold off on the taping and mudding and priming and painting and crown molding installation and crown molding priming and crown molding painting. I could do all that the morning of the party anyway. Sunday it rained again, first in the afternoon and then all night. Monday morning, every place inside that had been wet two days before was bone-dry. I called my dad to let him know his patch job had held up, and to thank him for his help. I may have also considered offering to join him and rule the galaxy together, or that might have just been in my head.  
posted by M. Giant
6:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Three cheers for Dad!
By My parents have often rescued me in parallel situations. They kind of like to, I think, so I'm sure your dad was glad to help. Good for you!
By Monday, September 28, 2009 Hung Beware: this entry features a lot of tool-wielding, screwing, wood-handling, and me showing off my manhood. One of the best parts about being on vacation is that while I was hundreds of miles away, I didn't have to work on the bathroom ceiling. But since Trash has given me until the day of M. Edium's birthday party in mid-October to finish up this project, I decided I couldn't put it off any more. So I got to work -- asking my dad and my father-in-law how to fix it. I had a couple of options, but the idea I liked best of all was the suggestion to install some crown molding. Not just to class the room up a bit, but to hide what would no doubt be my very sloppy edgework. I also decided to start by hanging up some of what are called furring strips, which are not as dirty as they sound. They're simply boards hung perpendicularly from the ceiling joists to give me something to screw the sheetrock to. It was also an excuse for me to get some more precise measurements for when I started cutting the crown molding. I'm not all that handy with a tape measure when it comes to inside angles, but if I could cut a bunch of boards that will fit exactly where I want it to go, I could use that as a guide. Here's what it looked like as of Wednesday, after I'd put up the furring strips:   Yes, it's a little uneven. That's because I ran out of the right size of boards, having miscounted the number I would need. The old carpenter's adage is measure twice, cut once, but the old carpenter forgot to say anything about how many times I should count the number of strips I'd need. I did my best to place them 16 inches on center, as per code. You may ask how I got so lucky as to not have one of the strips hit that light-fan box. Answer: I didn't. I had to move the thing over a couple of inches. That was fun. As for that shorter furring strip, that was another result of that "measure twice, cut once rule." I did indeed measure twice. I even marked it twice. And then I cut on the wrong mark. But at least I only cut it once. With the frame ready to hang it from, it was time to prep the drywall. After following my new policy of "measure thirty or forty times, cut once," I had a big piece of sheetrock that I was reasonably confident would fit snugly into three of the walls, with an opening for the fan box. Unfortunately, it also weighed about fifty pounds. I dragged it in and got everything ready, staging the bathroom like an operating theater, or the scene of an ambush. I took down the shower curtain rod, unscrewed the light bulbs protruding from the strips flanking the medicine cabinet, plugged in my screw gun, and arranged small, easily accessible caches of drywall screws at strategic spots around the room, including my shirt pocket and my mouth. Then I took Trash up on her offer to help. I was gratified to see that the piece I'd cut slid neatly into place, "like it had eyes," as my dad likes to say. But we were also holding a fifty-pound hunk of drywall over our heads, standing awkwardly on the toilet and the edge of the tub, respectively, except for that moment when we switched places without letting the ceiling down. Actually, Trash was doing most of the holding, because I was dealing with the screw gun. All my preparation paid off as I found myself doing things like missing the furring strips and trying to drive screws in backwards. By the time I had the four corners secured and we could let go, both of us were exhausted. I looked as if I'd been dipped in sweat, and Trash underwent a severe yawning fit. But I was pleased with the result. We had more than half of a bathroom ceiling where previously we had had none. The second piece of sheetrock, though it would require a lot more cutting and measuring to fit, would be much lighter. And then it would be a simple matter of taping, mudding, priming, and painting it before I installed the new crown molding. The end of a project I'd begun on New Year's Day was in sight! And then the next day it rained, and I decided to kill myself. Tell you why later, although you can probably guess. posted by M. Giant 6:44 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Oh no! There's something particularly exhausting in working over your head.
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Hi! You need a dead man to hold the weight of the drywall. It is basically a T made out of 2x4s that supports one end of the drywall. DIY has a nice video on building one. Can you tell I watch too much home improvement TV?
By Thursday, September 24, 2009 Let it Slide Yeah, I know I promised no vacation slides, but Flickr links are different. For instance, you can get up and leave and I won't be offended. Seriously. Hey, where you going? The first place we whipped out the old thousand-kilopixel HP was in the Badlands:  Every time I come here, I'm struck by the need to try to capture a significant part of this vast, beautiful wasteland on film. And every time, I'm struck by the futility of attempting to do so. Fortunately, this time I also captured someone's Uncle Phil. Bonus!  Now this is really what the Badlands is all about. To look at this picture is to gaze into the abyss of my mortality. All is barren and dead. There is no future here. Of course I'm referring to the gray in my hair. As weird as the rock shapes in the Badlands are, check out some of the crazy shit a hundred miles or so to the west:   Okay, the one on top didn't occur naturally. The one on the bottom might be, though, going by how long it's taking. This is just a big honkingloud:  You don't get those here in Minneapolis. Or if you do, you can't see the whole thing at once anyway. Trash has never been able to sit through Dr. Strangelove. If she had, I doubt she would have let me take this picture at Ellsworth Air Force Base:  At some point, M. Edium got it in his head that he wanted a blue or green cave crystal. Eventually we found the aptly named "The Rock Shop," which had seemingly acres of geological specimens. He got his crystals, although now not a one of us could tell you where they are. But he did get to spend a little time with some new friends he made in front of the building:  Even if the rocks are gone, they were way cheaper than admission to the Reptile Gardens, Petrified Gardens, and Flintstones Park, all three of which this covers. This year, Mitchell's Corn Palace is decorated with an "America's Destinations" theme.  Other panels feature NASA, The Statue of Liberty, and the St. Louis Arch. Between the rendering of Mount Rushmore on the front and Crazy Horse on the side, I wish I'd thought to walk all the way around it to see if it showed any other landmarks we'd visited on the trip. I'm now imagining that the back shows the Corn Palace itself, complete with a decoration of the Corn Palace on it, on and on into an infinite regression. Or at least as infinite as you can get when your resolution is limited to the size of a corncob. Trash and I hate Sioux Falls, but we liked this:  Sioux Falls Park turned out to be a lovely place to take in some scenery and enjoy a surprisingly nice breakfast. Of course, Sioux Falls being Sioux Falls, they stuck it in a hard to find spot in an industrial area. I suppose I should just be glad this is upstream from the sausage factory, if only just barely. There's roughly a metric shit-ton more photos from the trip in our Flickr photostream. It tells me how many times people have looked at them, you know. And if some of those numbers don't go up, I'm going to be really offended. posted by M. Giant 10:53 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I looked through your Flickr pictures, and your campsite looks beautiful. I'm impressed that M. Edium is such a good camper at so young an age. Good job mom and dad!
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Was this your cabin?
By Wow, I was at Crazy Horse about five or six years ago and what do you know? It looked exactly the same! They will never, ever finish it.
By
So I shouldn't show Trash this picture?
By Tuesday, September 22, 2009 A Pig in a Poke Oh, I forgot to tell you what we did after we got home from South Dakota. We took Trash to the doctor, hung out with my parents and Debitch the Younger (in from the East Coast), did some work, went to bed, and then left the next morning to camp in Wisconsin with Trash's brother, his wife, and their daughter, my niece Deniece (now seven[!]). It wasn't so much a homecoming as a twenty-hour layover at our house. So anyway, in addition to being mind-bendingly beautiful, the spot where we camped had the additional benefit of being five minutes from a perfectly functional town, complete with a supermarket. It also has what appears to be an annual community festival, and we just happened to be there on the weekend it was occurring. We arrived early Friday afternoon on the eleventh. I could hardly believe our luck when I saw the signs saying that the festival was happening on the twelfth. But even that wasn't the good part. The good part was the name of the festival: Pork N' the Park. Note the "N'." I think it's short for "and," although at first I thought it was short for "in." It was hard to be sure what it was about. Was this a gathering at the park for people to eat pork? Or was this little town inviting its citizens to literally come and pork in the park? Either way, I saw no downside. Over the next 24 hours, Pork N' the Park was built up in my mind until the reality could never live up to the hype. Hype which I myself had generated, but still. I began to convince myself that "Pork N' the Park" was actually an imperative. Kind of like the sign we'd seen in Custer State Park for a place called "Camp Bob Marshall." Every time we passed it, we felt bad for anyone named Bob Marshall who happened to be driving by. "Really? Do I have to?" Bob Marshall might protest. "But I have hotel reservations in Rapid City and I don't have my tent…I suppose I could sleep under my car. Stupid sign." And God help Bob Marshall if his daily commute took him past that sign. I bet he'd find an alternate route in a hurry. "Yeah, boss, I know I'm late, but trust me, I would have been even later if I'd driven through the Park." So anyway, the whole next day I was all over Trash to get on her fancy new Web-enabled phone and find out when Pork N' the Park officially started, because I didn't want to miss a single minute of it. What eventually ended up happening is that BIL, the two kids and I drove in to check it out. And of course it was a bit of a letdown. I was expecting a pork feast like a Famous Dave's menu, but the only two meal options were 1) pork sandwich and 2) pork sandwich with a drink. 2) being more expensive than if you bought the pork sandwich and the drink separately. It was a decent sandwich. The local band up onstage seemed to have equal facility with the Stones, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles," and reading off winning raffle numbers. But the best part was the lawn mower race. We were just lucky enough to catch the feature, which was scheduled for 2:15 but got pushed back to 2:25 due to a broken chain. At ten laps, the race wasn't too long to be boring, but M. Edium wanted to leave seven laps in (which is a clear sign he's not ready for the real speedway yet). The kids played at the park for a little while, and then we all went back to the campsite and I figured that was the end of it. Except much later that evening, when the kids were conked out in their sleeping bags and the adults were gathered around the campfire, we could hear music drifting to us across the water, loud but distant. At first we thought it was some rude campers, disregarding campground etiquette now that it was after Labor Day and the park rangers had apparently made a Fred Flintstone exit from the premises for the season. It wasn't until we went to bed that I was able to really focus on the music. That's when I realized I was hearing the worst version of "Love Shack" ever. Pork N' the Park was still going strong, apparently, even if the competent band we'd heard in the afternoon had been replaced by a weak 80s band. Or maybe it was the same band, after hours of nonstop rocking, beer, and pork sandwiches had rendered them shitty. I heard them struggle through a few more songs that it took me longer than usual to recognize before I dropped off, very glad I was tired. Now this was a letdown that lasted all day. Although it did meet expectations in one sense: I felt totally porked. posted by M. Giant 9:53 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, September 20, 2009 Swept Away Trash and I don't really divide household chores based on gender roles. It's based more on what each of us is good at. For instance, she's much better, not to mention faster, at cleaning and organizing, so that kind of thing typically falls to her. While I, on the other hand, am way better at most video games, so those generally become my responsibility by default. Another area where my abilities exceed hers is in sweeping. Some time ago, I realized that she lacks the finesse for it. She tends to push down on the broom too hard, causing the bristles to bend back. At the end of her stroke, the bristles spring forward, catapulting the dust and crumbs across the linoleum. This is counterproductive at best, as much as the cats enjoy chasing after them, so I'm happy to be in charge of this task. Now, the thing about having a four-year-old and cooking at home a lot is that the kitchen floor gets messy in a hurry. It needs sweeping almost every day, sometimes twice. But you know what, I'm not going to schlep the kitchen table and chairs out into the living room every day so I can sweep under them. I'm just not. So I sweep more around them, generally. I assumed Trash would approve. Does she really want me devoting a half hour of every day to the kitchen floor? She does not. Then one day during dinner she happened to look down at the floor by her feet. She said to me, "I thought you said you swept in here today?" "I did," I confirmed. "What's this down here?" she asked. Without looking, I assumed she was referring to a few stray crumbs or maybe one of those little drifts of Exie-fur that sometimes spontaneously self-generate and start wandering the house, as though this is his way of trying to have kittens. "Well, I didn't do a full sweep," I admitted. "More of a partial sweep. I just don't want to do a full sweep every day, you know?" "That's a sausage," Trash said. Even that might not have been so bad, only we hadn't had sausage for two days. You never stop working on a marriage, you know. Even having been married eighteen years and one week like we have, there are still things that come up that need to get worked out. The full sweep/partial sweep issue was one of those. After picking up the sausage (which had clearly exceeded the five-second rule by a factor of several tens of thousands), I explained to Trash my philosophy of the partial sweep versus the full sweep. Partial sweeps were for every day -- literally. Full sweeps are, im theory, for certain circumstances: it's been more than a week since the last full sweep, a catastrophic mess has just occurred, or someone is coming over. Admittedly, in practice, it was more like the "or" in that last sentence was replaced by an "and," and the "someone" was "a celebrity or a social worker." Trash made a reasonable point, which is that the partial sweep is fine for everyday -- provided it doesn't leave entire servings of food on the floor. In those cases, I should feel free to deploy fingers. It's worked out well ever since then. My partial sweeps have become fuller, and the full sweeps have become closer together. Just don't tell her how seldom I move the center island to sweep under there. Even I don't want to know. posted by M. Giant 9:17 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:How did a full sausage survive on the floor with multiple carnivorous animals in the house?!
By Thursday, September 17, 2009 Windshield Driver My mom and dad were nice enough to not only lend us their pickup truck for our trip, but also their GPS unit. Or, as Trash and I might have called it a couple of times, "The Madwoman." I mean, I don't mean to seem ungrateful, because she was awesome on almost every level. A little electronic device not much bigger than a deck of cards with an interactive map of the entire continent inside it can be an invaluable thing to have along when you're exploring unfamiliar territory. I can't even tell you how many places she helped us find (some of which we even went to). Honestly, that thing could do stuff I never would have expected. I always thought you had to punch in an address to get it to give you directions, but it will totally find places for you with minimal effort on your part. I mean, ask her to tell you how to get to the nearest Mexican restaurant, or an ATM that won't ream you with fees, or just "cool stuff," and she's all over it. And she does it with this calm but decisive female voice that seems to know everything. Which is why I keep referring to her with gendered pronouns. Still, we didn't even turn her on for the first few hours of the trip, because how hard would it be for us to find Interstate 90, after all? The thing runs from Boston to Seattle, so it's not like we were going to accidentally blunder around the end of it somehow. She sat dormant in the center console while I missed a turn to stay on a road we wanted to stay on, and then ended up on an hour-long detour on the wrong state highway, the whole time expecting to come back to a route we'd left hours before. Despite what you may think, a state of being irretrievably lost is not the best circumstance under which to teach yourself how to operate a GPS unit, let alone try fiddling with the suction-cup mount that sticks to the inside of the windshield. Fortunately Trash knew how to operate another navigational device that my parents had left in the truck, a technological wonder we called the "road atlas." Even when we found the freeway and she started telling us things we already knew, the GPS voice synthesizer injected a note of calm with her tranquil imperatives like "Turn. Right." when we stopped for gas. I think she thought we were lost again. Clearly we hadn't made a good first impression on her. By the time we reached Mitchell, it was dusk and we were in the honeymoon period with the GPS. I even carried her across the threshold of our hotel room. This was so I could program some western South Dakota destinations into her memory and make them easier to find later in our trip. The only downside was that M. Edium was sleeping in the room with us, so I had to figure out how to mute the beeps I was causing it to make. I felt kind of guilty about that. I hated to stifle her genius. But as is commonly recognized, with genius often comes eccentricity. The next day, as we were finishing up the Badlands Loop, I told her to take us to Wall Drug. This is not because I thought I might get lost, because not only does the Badlands Loop dump you directly into downtown Wall, but also given the ubiquity of Wall Drug signs in this part of the world, the only way you're not going to find Wall Drug from anywhere in the Midwest is if you're in no condition to drive in the first place. No, I was just curious as to how long it would take us to get there. ETAs become much more important when you're traveling with a four-year-old, you know. Well, if we'd listened to her, it would have taken us a lot longer, because every time we passed a turn, she told us to take it. Even if that turn didn't, strictly speaking, exist. I mean, she didn't try to steer us into a pond like that one on The Office, but the first "road" she told us to turn on was a pair of tire ruts that disappeared over the northern horizon. Then she tried to tell me to take a "road" that to the naked eye looked more like a gravel patch shorter than our driveway at home. I began to wonder if she thought the truck was in 4WD mode and she wanted to see what it could do. And yet later that same day, when we were headed on to Custer State Park and Trash had us take a truck bypass route around Rapid City, the GPS was at a loss. That's because as far as she knew, the smooth, four-lane road we were on wasn't real. The little car icon on the screen floated in the middle of a trackless nothing while the deceptively calm voice kept repeating "recalculating…recalculating…recalculating…" as though we were chauffeuring a stubborn Vulcan with autism. After a while, it wasn't hard to imagine what she was really thinking: "There's no road here, genius!" And, "You are going to mess up your suspension so bad." And, "Fine, I wash my hands of this." And, "Just let me out right here." And, "Is that a mountain lion?" (It was actually a Corvette.) But I have to give her credit: she really had her shit together once we reached the park, where the roads haven't changed in over half a century. She had it all, down to those pigtail bridges. It was when we left the park that she had problems, like the day we were looking for a place to buy a new air mattress and she tried to send us to a Pamida four miles away. "Maybe we should just go to that Pamida," Trash wisely suggested, pointing out the windshield to the one right in front of us. Maybe it's something about the area we were in, which features a mother lode of fossils where scores of mammoths died in a sinkhole over several centuries. Perhaps thousands of years from now, paleontologists will uncover a giant fossil trove of GPS unit casings. By the time we headed home, the Madwoman and I had come to an understanding. She could continue to suggest I take every turn off of I-90 except the one I actually wanted to take, and I could keep her in mute mode for the whole day. I'm sure a lot of relationships would last a lot longer if everyone had a mute mode. And it works both ways. I didn't talk to her either, which I'm sure she found highly preferable to some of the things I might have said in response to her incessant suggestions. I would have regretted those things anyway. This way we were able to part as friends. P.S. When my mom was showing me some of the features, I noticed a "maximum speed" display that showed its top traveling speed during a trip. Before returning it, I wasn't able to find that indicator again. But just in case my parents did, I would just like to take a moment to remind them that the posted freeway speed limit in South Dakota is 130 miles per hour. posted by M. Giant 9:50 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
"as though we were chauffeuring a stubborn Vulcan with autism"
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Glad you managed to navigate the bypass to Highway 16 and get the correct directions from here. I *Live* in Rapid City and have a less than year old GPS and it doesn't know about that road, which I drive at least once a week.
By My friend in England has Becca (Becker) the GPS. She kept telling us to go down what looked like cart tracks in the Cotswolds. And he trusts her completely, so we did. Imagine my surprise when we ended up exactly where we wished to go without getting stuck in traffic with other tourists.
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Yeah, the voice option is only to be activated in the most dire of circumstances, when only the alternative to hearing her is so much worse, you want to be talked to by that slow, plodding, infinitely patient wench. A pack of wolves, some madmen with axes, that sort of thing.
By Land of Shrimp - Call up the car dealership that sells your make of car. Mine stopped working after 5 years and it turned out that the CD that stored the maps was out of date.
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Apparently, there are ways to get different voices to be one's GPS audio. For example, Homer Simpson is an option. My husband found samples of the Homer Simpson GPS audio online and has now sworn that if we ever get a GPS unit, we will ONLY get the Homer version.
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Homer is good, but I want the Knight Rider-branded one, with William Daniels' voice.
By Tuesday, September 15, 2009 Camping Near Death 1. Trash and I have been using the same camp stove for over ten years. It's a three-burner Coleman that runs on propane. The knobs that run the burner have been missing for years. We used to turn the little metal stalks behind them with a pair of pliers, but we don't even bother with that any more. In fact, as of this last week, we don't even bother with the stove any more. Not now that we have a new three-burner model that runs on either camp fuel or gasoline. We switched over in the Black Hills, in fact. We'd brought both stoves along, mainly because my dad had lent us his pickup for the trip and we had plenty of cargo space. Our first day in our favorite site, Trash was having a little trouble getting the old one lit. All it would do is hiss, and until she got her coffee, that's all Trash would do as well. I decided to help. I turned it off, let the gas in the supply hose burn off, and started over. Before applying the flame, I went through the usual procedure, and after a few seconds was rewarded with two things. One was a strange hiss of gas that sounded different from the usual hiss of gas. The other was a visible cloud that coalesced immediately over the burner. Huh, that's weird, I thought, and lit it. The ensuing fireball didn't hurt anyone, and wasn't even that loud, but oddly, Trash's need for coffee wasn't as urgent as it had been a few seconds ago. 2. The first sign you see after entering Custer State Park is in white letters on a brown background. It reads, "Buffalo are dangerous. Do not approach." And of course it says this in really big letters so that nobody has to approach the sign to read it. "Dangerous" is a little deceptive, but there's not really room on the sign to show a little graph with "aggressiveness" on the X axis and "size and strength" on the Y axis, indicating that while a bison is probably not going to go out of its way to come after you unless you provoke it, if it does you'll be in a world of hurt. Oh, and also, it may well construe your being within fifty feet of it as provocation. Like, as the avuncular, white-mustached park ranger told us within minutes of when Trash snapped this with her cell phone near our campsite, you don't want to get much closer than this:  And that's only when he comes up to you, not the other way around. Which is why we were a little uneasy that evening when we returned from a walk and discovered that he was back. And closer. Two campsites away from ours, in fact. So we quickly got in the truck (which was not rammed, my dad will be glad to hear) and drove to the adjacent campground to alert the ranger. He suggested we be somewhere else for a while. Either the buffalo would leave on his own, or he, the ranger, would run him off with his bullwhip. Yes, I said bullwhip. We made a stop at the general store, and when we got back, it was dark and the bison was gone. The only other camper said the ranger had come and taken care of it. I'm still kind of disappointed at missing the bullwhip. One other thing the ranger told us: you can chase a buffalo off, but they tend to come back. We retired to our tent early that night. 3. We have this screen gazebo that's great for keeping rain off the picnic table when we camp. But since there wasn't rain when we camped, all it really did was trap bees inside it. As I may have mentioned, Trash is deathly allergic to bees. If a bee stings her, it's a life-threatening situation. Which makes sharing a campsite with a small swarm of them rather inconvenient. We were looking forward to saying goodbye to them on our last morning in the campground. Our plan was to move to one of the cute little cabins that are nearby, just to see what they were like for a night, and also to expedite our departure for home the following morning. We were packing up the truck, and I was congratulating myself on all the bees I'd saved Trash from during the past few days when suddenly, from next to the truck, she let out a howl of dismay. "I just got stung!" she cried. We never camp without her Epi-Pen. At this moment, it was in the Ziploc storage bag we use for toiletries when we travel. The Ziploc bag was in the end pocket of the black duffel bag, one of the three pieces of luggage we'd packed our clothes in. That black duffel was in the bed of the pickup, along with roughly half of our other stuff. The pickup was some twenty yards away from me. I don't think I'll ever know how I dropped what I was doing and got that Epi-Pen out so quickly, ready to jab it in her thigh before we all leapt into the truck and hauled ass to where I'd seen a big blue "H" sign in nearby Custer. But Trash pushed it away. She had seen that she'd been stung by a wasp, which doesn't actually kill her. It only debilitates her severely. So yay, she didn't die! After prescribing herself ice and rest, she only developed a red blotch on her knee the size of Louisiana; suffered excruciating pain, itching, and limping for the remainder of our trip; and had to go on prednisone for a week when we got home and saw the doctor. Win-win-win! 4. The park guide magazine is pretty clear that if you go on a hike, you should carry a sturdy walking stick. But considering what they want you to use it for, they should just come right out and call it a cougar-fighting stick. Yes, apparently mountain lions live in the Black Hills as well, and although they aren't nearly as numerous as the bison, there's a whole section about them in the guide that reads like a chapter out of The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook. Problem was, I had trouble finding a decent walking stick the evening we went for our walk. Trash and M. Edium both had sturdy poles that were just the right height for them, but even after scouring somewhat afield of our path, all I could come up with was this thick, awkward, Y-shaped branch that came up to the top of my belly. Trash mocked me, but I made the best of it. "No, see, what I'll do is when the mountain lion comes at me, I catch his head in the Y, like this, right? And then I twist it! You guys just stay behind me while I handle it, okay?" Later, Trash told me that when she went to put my cougar-fighting stick in the fire, it came apart in her hands. So it's probably just as well that we never saw a mountain lion at all. posted by M. Giant 10:29 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I'm going to print out this entry and show it to people when they ask why I don't go camping. Glad you survived it all!
By Between this and the leaning tree of Pisa, I don't think its advisable to go camping.
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We were in South Dakota the week before you guys and this post illustrates perfectly why we slept at Comfort Inns and spent our days at places like the Flinstones Campground and Gift Shop o' Overpriced Crap. Sure, we might have missed out on the "real" South Dakota but we also never had had to find cougar fighting sticks either.
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I'm with Sasha in the "no camping for me, thanks" camp.
By Sunday, September 13, 2009 Phase One, Plan D Much like military battle plans, our vacation plans rarely survive contact with reality. For instance, until very recently, we were intending to drive around (and at one point, over) Lake Michigan and visit friends in Kalamazoo. The day we had originally planned to be there, we ended up finding ourselves a thousand miles west of there. Shit happens, you know? Of course, we've always improvised our vacations, to whatever extent possible (which is why we never went on a cruise again). Sometimes that means we end up in a hotel bed shaped like an inverted U that we're afraid to get undressed in, but other times it results in unexpected awesomeness. Like how on Day 2, Trash and M. Edium and I were having a late (and, in all cases but mine, pretty much inedible) lunch at Wall Drug. We'd spent the first night in Mitchell (although saving the Corn Palace for the return trip), been through the Badlands Loop, and were just about to make the final push to Rapid City, where we planned to spend the night in a hotel before moving into Custer State Park and setting up our camping gear. But Trash said hey, why not just go on and camp tonight? Let's see if we can secure a site. After all, how hard could that be, in the Black Hills, on the Saturday before Labor Day? So let me tell you about where we like to camp when we go to Custer State Park. Along the main east-west stretch of road through the park is a small, eight-site campground, tucked in between the road and a dramatic sheer cliff, at the base of which is a babbling stream. I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't been there several times, and even then I start to think I've imagined it if it's been more than several years. So after completing our Wall Drug experience (and remind me to tell you about that some other time), we get back on I-90, head on west, and arrive at the east entrance to Custer State Park a bit before 4:00 p.m. The ranger who takes our admission fee and sticks the required documentation on our dashboard all but laughs at us when we ask about our chances of getting a spot at all, let alone one of the ones we have in mind. "The park is full," he says flatly, and recommends us to a commercial campground outside the park (which we will later drive past and deem horrible). But, keeping hope alive, we proceed on to that idyllic little campground. None of the signs or the little notes stuck to the number posts are encouraging, but Trash gets out, parks her ass on the picnic table at a seemingly unclaimed spot, and sends M. Edium and me back to the Park Office, a few miles back up the road. I do this with trepidation, because wrangling the park rangers is generally Trash's job. I don't even know how this crap works half the time. But when the boy and I walk into the office, the boss ranger apparently takes pity on us, and says we can have one site that apparently the rightful renter never showed up to claim. I snap it up. And then I ask if we can stay there through Tuesday night, since we're planning to start heading back Wednesday morning. The bad news? No. But the good news is that after the first night, we can spend the rest our stay at the park at, you guessed it:  So that worked out okay. Even if we did spend that first night in a hastily-assembled temporary camp on the edge of a tent city the size of District 9, dining on Chef Boyardee before going to bed on what would turn out to be the coldest (and, as it later turned out, longest) night of the season, only to discover our air mattress had sprung a slow, invisible, but comprehensive leak since its last use. After all that, we did end up in our favorite single campsite in all of South Dakota, if not the entire Midwest or indeed the world. Later this week I'll tell you about all the different ways we almost died there. posted by M. Giant 9:09 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, September 09, 2009 Three-Fer I'm coming to you from Sioux Falls, which is not my favorite city in the Midwest (or my favorite city in eastern South Dakota, for that matter), but we're on our way back from a family vacay in the Black Hills and the hotel has Internet and an indoor water park, so here we are. It's been ten years since we've been to this part of the country (and a first for M. Edium, who loved most of it), so there's a lot to tell you about. But for now, I just want to share with you a little tale from our last trip there. This was ten years ago, when Trash, my then-bandmate Kraftmatik, his wife The Krank, and I all took a long, looping road trip whose apex was way the hell down in Las Vegas. We hit a lot of stops along the way, including a couple of days in the Black Hills. You'd think four people crammed into a rented minivan with too much camping equipment and a couple of guitars would have gotten on each other's nerves more, but it didn't really happen that way. I will say that we all got to know each other really well. For instance, I developed this habit of claiming anything visible out my window as "mine." As you can imagine, I built up quite a collection. Bet you didn't know that I'm the proud owner of, among other things, a herd of bison, several mountains, and the Grand Canyon. Trash, on the other hand, hates to pay for firewood when she's camping. She much prefers to scavenge what has fallen to the ground, where it's free and all you have to do is cut it up and/or drag it back to your campsite. Now, there's not a whole lot of deadfall near the camping areas because most of it gets picked up by people who are just as cheap as Trash, but on the hills surrounding the long, winding roadways between Mount Rushmore and our campsite, there's always a mother lode of fallen trees that Trash just can't stop herself from audibly wishing that she could scoop up, drag back to the tent, and set fire to. And Kraftmatik, like others at the time, had a tendency to repeat words that made him happy in a happy Homer Simpson moan. Like, he would utter a sentence that ended in the word "beer" and then repeat, "beeer." Or it wouldn't even have to be a whole sentence; it could be just "Beer. Beeeeer." I can't even tell you what the Krank's thing was, because one day she just got all of us. We were driving around Custer State Park in the Black Hills and she looked up a hill and suddenly said, "My wood. Woood. In other words, she mocked all three of us, on three separate levels, using only three words. I have never heard anybody take down that many separate people that efficiently, and I don't see how I ever will again. Unless of course I can somehow find myself in the position of being able to mock three people with one three-letter word -- one letter each. It could happen, right? More on our trip over the next week. No slides, though, I promise. posted by M. Giant 9:08 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:That's impressive. She totally should have gotten some sort of award or commemorative plaque for that.
By Monday, September 07, 2009 Track Down There are so many tiny little things in this world you take for granted until they stop working properly. The little lens in your DVD player. Fuses in your car. Tear ducts. Neurons. Even tinier, more delicate things that I haven’t even had to think about yet but someday will when they inevitably break. And another new one: track sticks. I’ve had this laptop for a little over two years now, and with a few hiccups it's worked brilliantly (now pardon me for a minute while I go back up everything on it). But it is subject to physical wear and tear. All of the letters are still visible, but the surfaces of the keys are getting shiny as the texture wears away. The scroll-lock key keeps trying to break free and escape, which is ironic for something that says "lock" right on it. And there's this hourly error message that I keep meaning to call the help desk about. These are essentially non-issues. But I don't know what to do about my track stick. What I love about my laptop is that along with our home wi-fi, it allows me to hang out in any room in the house (or even outside) while doing work. Many pleasant hours have I spent sprawled on our bed tapping away while Trash works on her own computer, kiss-blowing distance away. But it doesn't make sense to use a mouse in this position, so I don't. That's what track sticks are for, right? But then the other night I made the mistake of doing some editing work that required a lot of cut-and-pasting. After a while, I noticed that the cursor wasn't traveling as quickly or as fluidly as it used to. I think what gave it away was that as I was waiting for the little arrow to travel from one side of the screen to the other, I got up, went to the bathroom, made a sandwich, ate it, and went to the bathroom again. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the little rubber cap, which has been losing its tiny little bumps for some time now, was actually beginning to crack. So what do I do now? I've fixed letter keys before without difficulty (whatever that scroll-lock key I may or may not have partially cannibalized might like you to believe), but I have no idea how to even get at this, let alone fix it. Do I need to go to back to Hacker-Mart and find a big bin of track-sticks to root around in? Or do they just have a track-pole that I can whittle the end off and take home with me? I seriously have no idea. The laptop is equipped with a track pad as well, but I'm not so great at using that. Or maybe it's that it doesn't work. I suppose I could spend some time practicing clicking and dragging with it, but something tells me that hours of doing that would only result in the discovery that it's not really designed for that. Or I'd finally get the hang of it seconds before wearing it down to the point where my thumb goes through it. In fact, I even had another joke here until I accidentally stuck it into an e-mail to my boss (don't worry, I don't think it was a joke about him). In the meantime, I suppose I could always get into the habit of carrying my mouse around with me when I compute at large. I can easily imagine reaching down next to my hip to click and scroll. Or, alternately, I could just keep a spare mouse and pad in my bedside table and plug it in when I work on the bed. I think I'm going to hold off, though, until I've determined whether it's geekier to fix my own track stick or keep a mouse in every room. posted by M. Giant 12:00 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Or you could spend $8.73 on new TrackPoint caps.
By And a finepoint silver Sharpie works great when you need to re-etter a key!
By Friday, September 04, 2009 Around My Ears This may shock you, but there doesn't appear to be a neat way to demolish a ceiling. As much as I hated to mess up the bathroom, I hated to mess up myself even more. This was a matter of self-preservation, not just vanity. I've told you about what happens to my lungs when I get sheetrock dust in them so that had to be avoided. I also discovered a bunch of old damp fiberglass insulation up in the ceiling from when it used to border on the attic instead of the upstairs, and that stuff didn't seem to respect the boundary represented by my glasses when it was falling down into my face. And I was overdue for a haircut, and I didn't want to have to spend 45 minutes in the shower getting shrapnel out. So how to protect my mouth, nose, eyes, and hair? Allow me to model my protective equipment for you:  The added benefit was that it hid my identity while I was committing crimes of violence against the bathroom. I did have good intentions when I went in there to keep the mess under control. I took out all the stuff that lives on the bathroom counter and the toilet tank, as though I was going to clean the room instead of do the opposite to it. I brought in a whole roll of black Hefty bags so everything that came down could go right in. Funny thing, though, it didn't seem to want to do that. You know how when you're bagging leaves in the fall, the hardest part is getting them in the sack? There just aren't enough hands to hold the bag open and shovel it full at the same time. Now imagine trying to bag up all the leaves before they hit the ground. It's tricky, especially when you're dealing with a stiff autumn breeze. Now imagine tripling that stiff autumn breeze because you're trying to do it in the damage path of a giant blower fan. Oh, and I forgot to mention that some of the leaves are heavy and hard and have nails sticking out of them. Obviously I turned the blower fan off shortly into my first demolition session. Which lasted about a half hour, followed by about thirty-five minutes of cleaning up the mess I'd made so far. After not only bagging up the debris but also giving all the surfaces the kind of cleaning they only get when Trash has just threatened to kick me out for my slovenliness, I looked around in satisfaction and turned the blower fan back on. You'd be amazed at how much ceiling crap can fall into the output chute on one of those things. Although it probably wouldn't have looked like as much if it hadn't suddenly been flying around the room in a constant fifty mph wind. I got another section of the ceiling down the next night, in about twenty minutes. Then I spent thirty minutes cleaning. Clearly I was doing it wrong. It's just a messy thing to do. You think you can pull the ceiling down one neat chunk at a time, with a little trickle of dust here and there, until you actually start doing it and debris goes everywhere. Then you realize you might as well just swing the hammer as hard as you can. Same mess, but you're done faster. So the next time, I resolved to not clean up until the entire thing was down. It took me two hours to get the rest of the ceiling down, and the cleaning after that session only ran 45 minutes. Admittedly, Trash wasn't pleased when she got home (an hour ahead of schedule, I hasten to add) and couldn't push the bathroom door open because the whole room was ankle-deep in debris, but I assured her I knew what I was doing. "You shouldn't have let it get this bad," she admonished. "I find your lack of faith disturbing," I replied. It all turned out fine. I got the mess cleaned up. The drying equipment was rendered more effective, thanks to the fact that the subfloor was exposed. And the next day when we had to have the plumber come out to clear the bathtub drain, the blockage turned out to be one of M. Edium's toys rather than a hunk of plaster. Now all I have to do is nail up a new ceiling, tape it, mud it, prime it, and paint it. That'll be the easy part. Right? posted by M. Giant 12:00 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Yeah, demo'ing a bathroom is punishment that should be reserved from someone who mugs old ladies.
By Tuesday, September 01, 2009 High and Dry So let me tell you about our "drying equipment." It was delivered on Tuesday afternoon, after the contractor guy had been and gone. Its stated purpose was to remove all the moisture from the infrastructure of our home, allowing us to effect repairs without worrying about rot so we could look forward to living happily here for the next hundred years. Its actual purpose was to ruin our lives. Here's what "drying equipment" means. In this context, we're talking about one of those big blower fans shaped like a giant blue snail, paired with a giant dehumidifier about half the size of a phone booth. You would actually have to stack two of these dehumidifiers on top of each other to get the proper height. Which we could have done, had we wanted. As it happens, there were two of these dehumidifiers in our house, as there were two giant fans. And in addition to getting all of the moisture out of the bathrooms, they keep all the people out of the bathrooms, because no one wants to go in there. First of all, there's a big heavy dehumidifier blocking most of the doorway. And then, once you squeeze past that, the fan is crowding the toilet. And turning the whole bathroom into a wind tunnel. Have you ever tried to pee standing up in a wind tunnel? One word: inadvisable. Furthermore, having these machines on all the time is causing the little wheel on our electric meter to spin like the blade on a Skilsaw. Our insurance company might cover the entire cost of the repairs, if as I suspect the power bill matches our deductible. Added bonus: they're noisy, so nobody in the house could hear anyone else, even when in the same room. They freaked Phantom out, causing her to yowl like she had her foot trapped in one of them. And the humidifiers were fitted with these long rubber output hoses that in theory are supposed to dump the collected humidity in the bathtub, but in fact dumped it on the floor. But at least they were due to be picked up on Friday. So the guys came to check it out to make sure everything was dry that day. It wasn't. So we got to spend the whole weekend with our noisy, bulky, expensive friends. Did I miss them when they left on Monday? I did not. But at least I had a head start on the demolition part of it. More on that next time. posted by M. Giant 8:21 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
You have my sincere sympathy. In the past 5 years I have had to endure the horrible loud noise twice. Once at my cabin where the toilet kept running till the freshly pumped (thank God) holding tank filled up and backed up into the cabin and covered almost the entire first floor.
By Oh gosh, we had those in our house this spring when our water heater gave up the ghost. Six of them, and all but one in the living area of our house. There was simply no getting away from the incessant, loud noise. By the time they got carted away SIX DAYS LATER I was on my last nerve. I think if they had been in my house one more hour I would have committed homicide.
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