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, February 27, 2011 Hamstumor Bucky's been with us since the beginning of July, but it's not clear how much longer he'll be with us. A dwarf hamster's life expectancy is only a year or two to begin with, but his might be shorter. Last week, he was climbing the bars of his cage like he usually does when Trash noticed a bald, pink lump on his tummy. It was smaller than her fingertip, but on a dwarf hamster, that's the equivalent of a human walking around with a Butterball turkey sticking out of his solar plexus. This was last Friday night, and I was able to make an appointment at the vet the next morning. I wasn't even sure they see hamsters. Especially a hamster the size of Bucky, who you can't see from more than a few yards away. Anyway, I brought Bucky in that morning while Trash brought M. Edium to his karate class. One of the two vets who takes care of hamsters was the same one who took care of Turtle during her long illness a few years ago. He used to begin his examinations of her by saying, "Hey, squirt." He said the same thing to Bucky. "Squirt" seems like a more fitting nickname for him than a full-grown cat, but I could have done without the association. Anyway, it turns out that dwarf hamsters tend to be prone to mammary tumors, which are often malignant. we have a couple of options: do nothing, get him a fine-needle biopsy, or just have it removed. All of which could add literally weeks to his life. Now, nobody can accuse us of being callous toward our four-footed family members when it comes to vet bills, given how much we've invested in the past on trying to save our cats' lives. But is it cold-blooded not to want to drop four hundred bucks on a lumpectomy, especially when Dr. P. says that he often ends up just chasing them all over the hamster anyway? Yes, he's cute, and yes, we all love him, but let's face it: he weighs about an ounce. His heart beats a hundred times a minute. The only noises he makes come from his wheel or whatever he's digging around in at any given moment. He has two moods, sedentary and active. Basically he's a cute, fat, furry bug. And yet… The other day, when I was cleaning his cage, I decided to take a look at his tummy to see if the lump had grown (after all, it had appeared almost over night), and figured I'd try holding him by the scruff of the neck like the vet had. The funny thing about hamsters is that their cheek pouches reach all the way back to their shoulders, to allow them to store food (like all the food he stashes in his bedding isn't enough to feed an entire family of…well, dwarf hamsters). With all that loose skin, the "scruff" can effectively be the entire front half of his body. Also, a hamster's brain doesn't shut off like a cat's does when you scruff him. A cat's scruff is like a pause button, but it turns out a hamster's is more like a fast forward. While I examined his belly, all four of his feet flailed madly at high speed. After a few seconds, I released him back into my palm, where he immediately gave me a punitive little nip on the finger and then went right to grooming himself as though the incident had already been forgotten. That's the most personality I've seen him display. Here I thought his only emotions were fear, curiosity, hunger, and sleep, but it was almost like I offended his honor, whereupon he took satisfaction by means of a proportional response, and then moved on all, "Okay, we're square now. I know this won't affect our relationship our my supply of sunflower seeds." Still, that episode gave me a lot more respect for the little critter. I think there's only one option open to us for the future: there's going to have to be a Bucky II. posted by M. Giant 9:56 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:This is so sad! I know he's just a tiny little critter, but he's a pet just the same. My sympathies.
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We had a guinea pig when I was a kid who developed a small tumor and we decided to just ride it out. A year later the tumor was as big as he was and still he kept going. We finally had him euthanized when the skin couldn't grow fast enough to keep the tumor covered.
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I had a rat when I was younger that I loved, loved, loved. He was extremely well behaved and affectionate (especially for a rat), and his favorite place in the world to be was the front pocket of my hoodie. He loved it enough that he never pooped in it. I ended up having to put him down because of a brain tumor that made him extremely agressive. I cried for days, even though he bit the crap out of me near the end.
By Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Ka-FWUMP I remember last week well. We were having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. On Sunday I'd gone out on a fast-food run without my coat. That was only the beginning of a series of days with the temperature over freezing. Snowbanks receded and long-buried pavement reappeared, exposed to bright blue sky for the first time in months. Almost overnight, the experience of driving through our neighborhood -- which until then had been like negotiating the narrow back alleys of an old-world European city in big, dumb, American and Japanese cars -- became a liberating experience, with as many as two cars able to traverse the same block at the same time. I wore my spring coat. Trash wore no coat -- and this was on a walk around the neighborhood. It was glorious. Perhaps we'd broken the back of this long, punishing winter at last. Punxsutawney Phil had seen his shadow, March was on the horizon, and the narrow green fringes starting to peek out from the sunward edges of people's lawns would soon sprawl into meadows stretching to the horizon. I decided that my recent decision to buy a roof-rake to keep snow off the house could be put off until the spring clearance sales, and I made a mental note to make sure I started up my snowblower and run it out of gas, because it's not good for it to sit there with fuel in the tank until the next big snowfall in December. Trash opened a window. This winter had been rough, but at least it hadn't been long. Or, it had, but it could have been longer. Which it proved by becoming longer. As you may know by now, this weekend it started snowing again in our region, and kept snowing. It began right on schedule at 10:00 on Sunday morning, slowing down my errands. That afternoon, we all went to clear what had fallen thus far, on the theory that after we'd done that, it would take less time to clean up the inch or so still expected to fall. What ended up happening was that we went out later to clean that inch off the sidewalk, but we left it on the driveway because there were more inches to come. So then the next morning, which luckily was Presidents Day so nobody had to leave the house, I went out to snowblow that additional inch, as well as the other inches that had fallen over the course of the night. AND THEN, at about M. Edium's bedtime, the snow was just starting to slow down. Trash wanted me to go out a fourth time. I protested that it was a waste of time. "It's going to stop soon," she said. "You've been saying that for 24 hours," I said. But I went out anyway, and did another clearing of the driveway and the sidewalk and the steps and the deck and the patio and the cars. And it was still drifting down, sparkling fakely under the streetlights. Seriously, if I saw snow like that in a movie I'd laugh at it. Oddly, in real life, it wasn't as funny. The good news is that it must have actually stopped soon after that, but it still ended up being one of the few February snowstorms in history that gave us a foot of snow without stopping. But it's okay. We're over the hump, I'm sure. Before we know it, those fringes of green will peek out again, however briefly. Trash and I will take another walk, we'll open a window again, and April will be on the horizon.  Or May. Either way. posted by M. Giant 4:56 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Yeah, we had the Spring's a-comin'! fake-out thaw here last week too. Followed by enough snow to push this winter further into the record books (we're now 29 inches above our average snowfall to date for the season). Then, today, we had sun. We had temperatures that started with a "3" and had another digit following it with no decimal! (Granted, that second number was lower than 5, but still... I took my hat off while walking through the zoo today. Whoa nelly.) Tomorrow, the weatherpeople have been promising we'll see 40. FORTY!
By Monday, February 21, 2011 Diamonds in the Rough (or at least bumpy) At M. Edium's Montessori school, the activity of choice during “choice time” for him and a lot of his friends is playing with Legos. When I used to pick him up there in the evening, before he started going to afternoon kindergarten, he was always among the boys (and one or two girls) who were building spaceships or cars or whatever. And just like in any manufacturing industry, certain building supplies become valued commodities. As always, it's about supply and demand. There aren't really specially-shaped Legos in those tubs at school, so it's not like everyone's always arguing over a certain cockpit canopy or engine or whatever. There are, however, specially colored ones. At Montessori, the transparent kind of Legos, whatever their color are so in demand that the kids literally call them "diamonds." This is something we became aware of during our play sessions at home, when M. Edium would dig for red, blue, yellow, and orange diamonds. We didn't think much of it at first -- after all, most kids call Legos different names, most of which are fairly fanciful, if not outright free-associated. But once we learned about the situation at the Montessori school, it made even more sense. It's pure and simple nanoeconomics. At the end of every year, Trash and I make a donation to the school over and above his regular tuition. This year, we seriously considered making the donation anonymous. And, since you can order any kind of specific Legos online in any color and shape, we considered making the donation in the form of clear Legos. There's a book by Gregory McDonald called The Buck Passes Flynn in which the titular police detective looks into why huge amounts of cash have begun appearing anonymously on people's doorsteps. McDonald is of course better known as the creator of Fletch (and with good reason), but The Buck Passes Flynn is an interesting look at the unexpected (by some) havoc that can be caused when a market is suddenly flooded with a formerly scarce resource. We kind of lost interest in the idea when M. Edium started kindergarten, largely because the Lego supply at his kindergarten is flooded with clear ones. As a result, they've become less of a prize to him when he plays at home, and he no longer joins in the battles over them at Montessori -- even for the coveted green one. But that's not to say that he wasn't still amazed when we went to the Lego exhibit at the Children's Museum and he got to clap his peepers on a backlit "stained glass window" of clear Legos that was a good five feet on a side. And I have to admit that when I saw it, the first thing I wanted to do was box it up and ship it to his Montessori school. Seriously, though, the urge to disrupt the zeptoeconomy at the Montessori School has mostly passed. Although we're not ruling it out for after he graduates. posted by M. Giant 12:46 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:We had this same issue with Liam's class. But it wasn't clear diamond pieces. It was the mini people. It got to the point that they separated the legs from the bodies to make 2 people so that they had more to play with. It's kinda sad to see a kid playing with just legs! We ended up buying them 20 more people to play with.
By Sounds like you need to hit the Lego Discovery Center if you're in the Chicago area! We have a membership and my Lego-obsessed children adore it.
By Friday, February 18, 2011 Branson Misery I've been thinking about this Serene Branson thing even before I saw the clip. One thing that comes to mind is that we all know how to come up with our own porn name or soap opera name, but now we have a way to generate our own entertainment reporter name. Just think of the first place you remember your parents taking you on vacation, and that's the last name. Then your first name is your mood when you recall that trip. For example, my entertainment reporter name is Bucolic Galveston. Trash's is Cranky Des Moines. What's yours? But that isn't the main thing that interests me about the story. I didn't get a chance to watch it for a couple of days, because my work computer blocks video and my home computer has no sound, but when I did get around to playing it, I saw and heard pretty much what I expected and hoped to see and hear. Which was, more or less, what I sounded and looked like late on the of October 17, 2004. I've written about this before -- in this blog, in my book (now on Kindle!), in a Six Feet Under recap where I made fun of Peter Krause getting away with a simple "narm narm [thump]," and I've thought about it every time I hear Sarah Palin speak, but now I have an excuse to write about that night again. Hot damn. So here's what happened. I was tired, I was the father of a five-day-old preemie in the hospital, and the very next morning I was starting a new job I wasn't sure I'd be able to do. And I opened my mouth to tell Trash I had a headache, and what came out was pretty much this: I even remember that exact expression of fear and confusion that what I was trying to say was somehow, somewhere, becoming totally divorced from what was actually coming out of my mouth. But even after all these years, it's a little eerie to see that expression from the other side of someone's face. We've all seen the early speculation that she was drunk, or high, or catastrophically ditzy, followed by today's reports that it was actually an incredibly ill-timed complex migraine, like the one I had back in October 2004 (although the later reports don't mention me specifically). Maybe she felt something coming on too, even if she didn't know what it was, and thought she's be okay. But then those camera lights would have hit her migraine-sensitized eyes, creating a neurological power-surge that sent her speech centers into vaporlock, and from there it was Katie bar the drone fill arc nibble swish. Yes, I'm laughing about it now too, because I've been there. Of course, I wasn't there while also on a live camera feed to millions of people, but then I rarely am. The point is, don't feel too bad if you laughed. If she's anything like me (and I think we've established that she is), she's laughing about it herself by now. And she knows what she needs to do to avoid it: don't get too sleep-deprived, don't jolt an overtired system with too much caffeine, pop an Imitrex the minute that telltale blind spot appears in the center of your vision, and lie down. Relax. Think of Branson. posted by M. Giant 12:50 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:OK, my entertainment reporter name would seem to be Happy Cowes, which isn't exactly filling me with confidence regarding my career. Perhaps I'll tweak the timeline and opt for Freedom Mitta instead.
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I finally watched this, and hello, Paul Magers!
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@Anonymous1: shouldn't that be "Freedom Mitta Mitta"? Or is it "Freedom Mittagong"?
By My name would be Antsy Orlando.
By Sunny Myers (I've elided the "Ft.")
By Wednesday, February 16, 2011 Reading, Writing, and Wrong Back when M .Edium used to watch the recordings of Curious George we made him off of PBS Kids (first-season narrator Bill Macy: accept no substitutes), there was a little interstitial promo advising parents to "read to your child fifteen minutes a day." Trash and I chuckled indulgently at how unrealistic that advice was. Like M. Edium would ever let us cut it down to that. But one nice thing about those days, which we can't say about now, is that with us having to do all his reading for him, we at least knew every printed word that went into his head. Then he started reading on his own, independently, in the last half-year, so we have no idea what's going on in his life any more. Admittedly, we were a bit worried that he was taking longer to learn how to read than we did as kids, and also because it seemed less like he wouldn't read than that he couldn't. We suspected that his resistance came from a fear that once he could read to himself we wouldn't read to him any more. Being the clever, mind-reading parents we are, we confirmed this theory by asking him and hearing him say "yes." But then came the advent of Captain Underpants in our house, which he enjoyed so much they put him over whatever hump was there. Do you know from Captain Underpants? There's some difference of opinion on our house over them. M. Edium loves them, but they're juvenile, inappropriate, and frequently gross. Which means I love them too, even if Trash doesn't. Anyway, if M. Edium was faking illiteracy, the day he got his hands on his first Captain Underpants and couldn't put it down? That blew his cover pretty thoroughly. Captain Underpants also marked a sort of soft (and preshrunk and cottony) transition from us reading to him to him reading to himself, so I've read most of all of them by now. I can't say the same of all of his books. Books for kids that age are all about series, as you probably know. He's into another series about this first-grader with an obnoxious bowl haircut and a shark fetish who spends 60% of every book bickering with his sister and classmates. There are words in there he's not allowed to say. Sure, George Carlin's Seven Words in his world are Stupid, Dumb, Butt, Shut Up, and Gimme (yes, there are only five), but we're not thrilled about him seeing that language modeled by his literary heroes. Seriously, some of these children's writers are fucking assholes. There's another series authored by someone more famous for his portrayal of an iconic sitcom character (Barry Zuckercorn, if you're curious) than for his writing. It's about a hapless fourth-grader who struggles with various learning challenges. I think it's great and relatable for kids who share those challenges, but should I be worried that a kid who doesn't have them might get it in his head to try to imitate them? I think the issue is that we assumed that for a long time, anything he could read must be age-appropriate. Which was fine when he was slogging through board books by Sandra Boynton and the Very Formulaic Children's Author, but then a few months ago I read him a few chapters from Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing at bedtime, carefully editing out anything borderline, and then the next morning I went into his bedroom to be greeted with the top-of-the-morning-to-you announcement of "FUDGE [SPOILER] PETER'S [SPOILER]!" He'd finished it after I left the room the night before. So, yeah, in case you were reading this whole entry thinking that he's just faking and doesn't actually have any comprehension, so much for that. And now Trash and I find ourselves in the unexpected, unwelcome position of being our child's literary censor. I knew we'd have to do it eventually, to a certain extent, but the fact that it's started this early means that it's going to be a longer-term job than we hoped. The good news is that we suck at it. posted by M. Giant 3:51 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:Note to self: teach M.Edium to come downstairs and matter-of-factly declare, "Humbert Humbert isn't nearly as sympathetic as Nabokov intended him to be."
By I look forward to your childrens writer's series, 'All These Fecking Arseholes' soon.
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I was one of those early reading-type children. In first grade I had to get a note from my mother to let me check out the (very old-school) Nancy Drew books from the school library (Which I had been reading since Kindergarten). I was utterly enraged that I had to read the "little kid books". Also at a Montessori school, un-interestingly.
By Full disclosure: don't have any progeny myself. But might I encourage you to continue really poor literary censorship? I recieved rather lackadaisical 70s parenting, but I give my mom major, major credit for letting me read absolutely whatever I wanted, and then talking about it with me. If it was too gross/scary/completely over my head...I usually gave up on my own. Given M. Edium's eagerness to blurt plot points, it sounds like you've got lots of conversations to look forward to, and no "censorship" necessary. :)
By Speaking of series books, might I recommend Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath series? I'm fairly certain that there's not much you'll need to censor there. Books 1-3 are currently out, with books 4 and 5 on their way this year. Great artwork and fun stories. They're classified as ages 9-12, but I'm a fan of getting kids reading more "advanced" books earlier.
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I took to reading at a young age and was raiding my mother's bookshelf at age seven. When she realized I was always finding a way to get my hands on adult novels we finally struck a deal that I could read whatever I wanted on the condition that if there was anything I didn't understand I would ask her and she would explain honestly what it was.
By I read at a high school level by third grade and my mom assumed if I got it at the library, it must be appropriate (this is not in fact true). I turned out fine (imho) and I love to read, to the point that I'm currently on my 37th book of the year, mostly good qualiy choices. Also, I'm a teacher, I promise you he hears those words at school.
By Monday, February 14, 2011 Lights Out Trash and I both have fond, ancient memories of lying awake in our beds reading much later at night than we were supposed to. We always agreed that when we had our own kid, we'd never limit his or her reading like our parents limited ours. What idiots we were. In less than a year, we've gone from where he couldn't or wouldn't read at all to where if we let him, he'll stay up past midnight reading. Who knew? Besides our parents, of course, and every other parent ever. His relatively new ability -- not to mention willingness -- to read has drastically altered bedtime. Used to be we'd read him three to five short books, or a couple of chapters from a long book, and then leave him for the night to stare at his walls and interact with his stuffed animals. Which would be exciting enough to keep him alert and entertained for a while, but he'd eventually crash once he got tired of begging us for more books and ran out of other stalling techniques (i.e. another bedtime snack, a request for a hug and kiss, a truly epic visit to the bathroom). Once he could read to himself, we'd read the same number of books, then give him a small stack of books to read to himself. That worked well, until he would get through that stack and then holler, "Can I have more books?" as though instead of being stored in a shelf two feet from his bed, his books are kept under lock and key in a vault under the garage of someone else's house. Eventually, reluctantly, he got the message that he can grab his own damn books, and Trash and I enjoyed knowing that he would soon get into the habit of "reading himself to sleep," and those precious few minutes between his 7:30 bedtime and 10:00 would be ours again. There were only two problems with this scenario. One was that he never completely got over the habit of asking for more books. And the night he asked for them at 11:30 PM on a Wednesday, we realized the "read himself to sleep" thing was not working. Fortunately, we had mad a recent and serendipitous discovery. The weekend after New Year's we were heading back from Iowa in the evening. It was only six, but it was full dark, and the battery on his portable DVD player wouldn't charge. And we had a four-hour drive ahead of us. He figured out some good ways to entertain himself, though: eat some drive-through fast food in the back seat, beg us to let him watch a movie as though there were anything we could do about it, and then promptly fall asleep a half hour into the drive and stay that way until we pulled up in front of our house. There was only one possible conclusion: darkness and forced idleness help him get to sleep! This should probably go into a medical journal somewhere. As a result, we instituted a new phase of bedtime cleverly called "lights out." We read to him for a while, he reads to himself for a while, we turn off the lamp that used to stay on all night, he engages in a brief but intensive period of bitching, and then he falls asleep faster than he has in years. Sometimes he protests that he gets nightmares when we turn the lamp off, but in those cases he's welcome to call us when he wakes up. And besides, I have a nightmare of my own I'm trying to avoid, and that nightmare is living with a kindergartner who's subsisting on seven hours of sleep per night. So that takes care of the issue of when he's reading. Soon I'll talk about how we're dealing with what he's reading. posted by M. Giant 2:44 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Man, I always hated that my parents wouldn't let me stay up reading all night. Even though I always regretted it in the morning, I couldn't never make myself stop at a reasonable hour--not until I literally couldn't keep my eyes open, often at two or three a.m. When my parents starting stringently enforcing lights out, I would either sit next to the night light to read, therefore straining my already defective eyes, or I would go into the bathroom to read, since my parents couldn't see the light under the bathroom door from their room.
By Wednesday, February 09, 2011 Gassed Up See, I knew that the only way I could have broken the snowblower was if I'd forgotten to run it out of gas the previous spring. And I was pretty sure I'd done that, and even if I hadn't been, the empty gas tank when I first got it out of the garage confirmed that I had. But then its failure to start even after I'd filled the tank told me something else had gone wrong. Full tank and all, I schlepped it to the repair shop in the back of my station wagon. And that was the genesis of my second problem. As I've already mentioned, the carburetor was leaking. What is was leaking was fuel. And where that fuel was leaking was onto the carpet of my station wagon. For a long, bumpy drive. The back hatch wouldn't close with the snowblower in there, which meant lots of frigid air was blowing around inside of my car. Otherwise I'm sure I would have more quickly been alerted to the fact that the carpet of my cargo area was being soaked with enough gas to burn down a submarine. The issue was considerably more noticeable after the door was closed and I was sealed in there, with the air outside freezing cold and the "air" inside consisting of yellowish fumes that made the road in front of me go all wavy. By the time I got home that evening (coincidentally, the day of the worm dissection, because I remember that after I helped unload the moving van at Chao's new house I stopped at Office Max to pick up the stuff you need to vivisect an invertebrate in your kitchen), my wool overcoat smelled like a refinery. Oh well, it was in need of a dry-cleaning anyway. For a couple of days I left my car windows open in the driveway. I also pulled the carpet out of the back of my car and hand-washed it in the laundry tub using dish soap and a hand-scrubber. It didn't get all of the gasoline smell out, but it did enough that I could leave it in the back yard to freeze-dry. It was still there when the blizzard hit the following weekend. It's currently under three feet of snow, and in the spring I fully expect it to continue stinking of Blue Planet™. Trash started encouraging me to take her car any time I went anywhere, because she didn't want me and M. Edium to show up at places reeking like we'd been slamming Molotov cocktails, battling twin headaches and having hallucinations of Vietnamese monks. My parents lent us their pickup truck to visit Trash's mom in Iowa the weekend after New Year's. I met my dad at a McDonald's halfway between our houses and he drove my Saturn home. Between one thing and another, I didn't get it back for two weeks. When I went to pick it up again, it was still a non-smoking car, not only because nobody's allowed to smoke in it but because if anybody had tried they would have been instantly blown up. When I got home, I left all four doors and the rear hatch wide open, hoping the frigid wind would carry some of the fumes out of the car and to some unfortunate family in need of something to burn for warmth. I was even clever enough to turn off the dome lights so they didn't drain the batteries. I felt less clever the following morning, when I realized that not only had I failed to ever go out and close the doors, it had also snowed six inches overnight. It wasn't fun to scoop six inches of snow out of the back, front, and middle of my car with one of M. Edium's beach shovels, but after the heater had melted most of the residue, I had to admit that it had taken the majority of the smell with it. Now the inside of my car only smells like the street in front of a gas station rather than the giant tank underneath it. I'm hoping that the smell will continue to dissipate over the remainder of the winter. I always enjoy driving with my windows open in the summer, but this time I'll be looking forward to it even more than usual. It's either that or spontaneous combustion. posted by M. Giant 3:47 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
THIS: I felt less clever the following morning, when I realized that not only had I failed to ever go out and close the doors, it had also snowed six inches overnight.
By Febreze, my friend.
By Monday, February 07, 2011 Snowblown You think I've written enough entries about my snowblower problems? Yeah, me too. I agree. Let's have another one. As I've probably mentioned, it wasn't my idea to get a snowblower in the first place, because I knew I was going to have to be the one to keep it running, and also because I knew I wouldn't be able to. But she prevailed, and we're now on our fourth snowblower. This is my favorite one, because it doesn't require me to mix the fuel and the oil before I put it in the tank, which means at least I'm not going to break this one the same way I broke two of the previous ones. And when I say the same way, I mean literally the same way. But then the first snow came, and I went out to start the snowblower -- the new, reliable two-stager I wasn't going to be able to break -- and it was broken. Simply would not start. Trash and I had made a deal the previous winter that if I bought this new snowblower, I would have to bring it in to have it fixed the very day it broke. Fine, I said, and heaved it up into the back of my station wagon so I could drive it across town -- with the back hatch open, of course -- to the one place in town I know of that fixes small engines. When I dropped it off, they said it would be about two weeks, give or take. Well, the very next weekend, it snowed for three days straight, a frozen deluge the like of which even we Minneapolitans hadn't seen for over a decade. And when I called the engine repair place for an update, they said, "Oh, about two weeks." It took several hours just to dig a path down the front steps. If my brother-in-law hadn't come over the next morning with his snowblower, we'd still be snowed in. I gave it another week, and then, at Trash's insistence, she had me call another place, one her brother had used, one that was a lot closer because it's right by M. Edium's Montessori School. You know, the one that's three miles away? Anyway, not only were they much closer, they were much faster. I picked up my snowblower from the other place (where the ETA was still, oddly enough, two weeks), drove it back to our side of town, and dropped it off at what is basically a neighborhood hardware store. A mere three days later, they called me to say it was ready to pick up. The repairs, while not cheap, were at least cheaper than a new snowblower or even a used one. And best of all, the problem wasn't because of anything I'd done wrong, but with a leaky carburetor, something I wouldn't have known how to cause even if I wanted to. So now that I've had a functioning snowblower for the past several snowfalls (I'm not going to jinx it by saying anything beyond that), I'm still dealing with a more lasting problem that came about as a result of the snowblower breakdown. I'll get back to you on that one. posted by M. Giant 7:21 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I always enjoy reading your stuff, even with all the snowblower talk!
By Friday, February 04, 2011 Dishwashed Up When we got our new dishwasher a couple of years ago, I figured our dishwasher troubles were over for a while. Turns out they're just over for a year at a time. First, there was last year's mishap with Trash slipping and falling on the open dishwasher door, and let me just say that when that happened, I was glad I hadn't yet seen Garden State. The resulting damage (to the dishwasher, that is) was an easy problem to visualize, and resolved simply by my ordering a couple of hinge brackets and replacing them. But the last week, when I went to start the dishwasher and nothing happened but an unfriendly electrical buzz, I was at a loss. Well, almost at a loss. Fortunately, after years of experience with the two sucky previous dishwashers, I know about a dozen troubleshooting techniques. But then when starting it and stopping it twelve times didn't work, I resigned myself to an indefinite period of washing dishes by hand. After breaking a glass during the first load on Saturday morning, I gave it another try. I called the customer service number inside the door, but the first thing they told me to do was shut off the circuit breaker to the dishwasher. Unfortunately, the dishwasher is on the same circuit as the cordless phone I was talking to the help line on, so in order to find out the second thing they wanted me to do, I had to turn it back on and call back. And the second thing they wanted me to do was call a local repair shop. Did you know they still have those relics of the past? They do, complete with their antiquated M-F business hours to make it even more authentic. Then I did some online research. I was able to determine that the problem was not with the float, which is supposed to slide freely up and down on its shaft and activate a mysterious little magic switch deep inside the receiving tube (you can't see it, but it's in there, and if you get it just right it does what you want). It certainly did that, even with a puddle of gooey white fluid that had spurted out and pooled around its base. I felt like I should clean up the unused dishwasher liquid before I proceeded any further and this paragraph got any dirtier. But then the other five tips all involved taking the whole thing apart and probing around in its guts with a voltage tester. Do you own a voltage tester? I don't, and am not even sure I would know how to use one. My dad has one, but he was in Florida, and given how handy he is (some things skip a generation), he probably brought it with him. I did, however, take off the kickplate and the front door panel and look at all the wires to see if anything looked broken. Nothing did. But I wiggled as many wires and connectors as I could get my hands on,. Surprisingly, after I put it back together (having only lost one screw, a new personal best), it still didn't work. And we were having friends over for dinner that night. Luckily, they not only didn't object to washing their own dishes by hand, one of our friends also suggested a solution. Since no water was flowing into the machine, could it be that the supply line was frozen? Sur enough, all I ended up needing was a hair dryer. Or, as it's called in our house, the thing you use to shrinkwrap the windows. Then it was just a matter of digging a bunch of crap out of from under the sink to get access to it. And then doing the same thing under the kitchen sink to get to the supply line after I'd gotten the TYUTSTW unearthed. Before long, the low-tech approach accomplished what the high-tech couldn't; I started the dishwasher and heard the clunk of a dislodged ice-plug hitting the inside of the tub. High-tech only does so much good when, as in my case, it's paired with low-competence. I was just glad I hadn't tried to rewire it from scratch. posted by M. Giant 9:56 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, February 02, 2011 Buckyball We're not as careful as we used to be with Bucky, I have to admit. When we brought him home the first week of July, we were all about protecting him from the cats. If nobody was upstairs, M. Edium's bedroom door had to be closed at all times, just to prevent Phantom and Exie from even thinking about trying anything, even though Bucky was safely locked into his cage. This precaution lasted almost into the third week of July. But we still maintain common-sense precautions. Even though cats are not still invariably ejected from the room during "Bucky Time," they are at least ejected from the bed. Usually. And when M. Edium bought Bucky his first exercise ball, Trash made the rule that even with the ball, Bucky and the cats could never be in the same room. Alas, getting to see that was 92% of the reason I got behind getting a hamster and a ball in the first place, but I got over it. Especially when that precaution went the way of all the others, and Bucky was even given the run of our whole top floor. The funny thing about all these rules is that they seem silly when you no longer follow them, especially when there's an exercise ball to protect him. And then you hear this "clunk…clunk clunk cluncluncclunk" noise coming from the stairs and…well, you know. Not our finest hour, that. Still, Bucky loves his ball. If you remove its lid (a circular hatch that's approximately the relative size of Antarctica) and hold the open ball up to his open cage door, he'll eagerly scramble from one to the other, ready for a roll. Not so much the week or so after that little stairs incident, but he got over that after we got better at blocking the route to the top of the stairs. Anyway, that's what we did one night last week. It was Wednesday, which for the past year has been the night of his gymnastics class, so we were a little off our rhythm. The three of us (Trash, M. Edium, and I) were busy hanging a model Solar System over his bed, one planet at a time (I regret to inform you that my suggestion to use a box of Nerds as the asteroid belt was vetoed). So what with getting the little bits of fishing line the right length and poking the tacks, into the sheetrock ceiling, we got distracted from our usual task of listening for the soft rumble of Bucky's ball on the hardwood. If it stops, it means one of two things: 1) he's stuck, wedged between one thing and another thing, or 2) the hatch has come loose and he's wandering around on the floor. Having failed to notice any of this, I stepped around the dresser to collect Saturn and saw four highly significant yet discrete items, all several inches apart but sharing the same square foot-and-a-half of floor space: 1. Bucky's ball. 2. The lid of Bucky's ball, solus. 3. Bucky. 4. Exie. "AAAAAAHH!" I said, scooping up Bucky before I'd gotten to the third "A." He went back in his cage as soon as I was able to determine that he was all still there. And boy, did Exie get a lot of praise. It might have confused him a bit. Why are they buttering me up so much? I'm the worst hunter ever! Anyway, it's obvious we're going to have to make another run to the pet store soon. We need to pick up: 1. A new Buckyball with a tighter lid 2. A dwarf hamster for Exie posted by M. Giant 7:21 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:This is all rather amusing in that my friend had a hamster named Bucky, he too had a ball (also called “the Buckyball”), and the poor creature made several trips down the basement stairs.
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My sister had a buckyball for her gerbil. One night while she was out babysitting and my parents had friends over, they decided to get out the ball as some after-dinner entertainment. The cats were also keenly interested having been heretofore removed from the area when the gerbil was out and about. Unfortunately for my sister, my parents, but especially for my parent's very, very pregnant friend, my parents did not get the door on solidly and the cat pounced and that was nearly the cause for the premature birth of a child in our living room.
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