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Gary Digs https://www.garydigs.com Tales of the holes I dig, the dirt piles I make, and the holes I fill at the B-Bar-Lazy-B Mon, 18 Sep 2023 05:49:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.9 Day 1b – Gary Goes: Coast to Coast https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-1b-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/ https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-1b-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/#respond Mon, 18 Sep 2023 05:49:09 +0000
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https://www.garydigs.com/?p=419

File under better late than never… work view for Monday and Tuesday.

Gary Goes: Coast to Coast – End of Day 1

Pool view from 5th floor window

130am arrival, just 2.5 hours behind

More tomorrow about today when time allows.

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Day 1a – Gary Goes: Coast to Coast https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-1a-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/ https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-1a-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/#respond Sun, 17 Sep 2023 14:25:02 +0000
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https://www.garydigs.com/?p=416 I don’t have a prince albert, but TSA thinks I do. An exceptionally intimate and tactile start to the trip.

My entire groin was bright red on the detector which I guess means I have lead in my pencil so to speak? I’m sure I’ve only grazed the tip of the available groin frisking jokes available, but I’ll stop and linger there for a bit.

SEA – CHS, boarding in about 10 minutes freshly groped and secure to travel.

TSA line before my groin exam

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Day 0 – Gary Goes: Coast to Coast https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-0-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/ https://www.garydigs.com/2023/09/17/day-0-gary-goes-coast-to-coast/#respond Sun, 17 Sep 2023 07:14:34 +0000
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https://www.garydigs.com/?p=412 It’s 1145am and I just finished packing. My alarm is going to go off in 5 hours, so I don’t really have time to make this intro as elegant or compelling as a kick-off blurb should be, but such is life.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Charleston, SC specifically to force the drive I’m making from Georgia to Seattle into a full Coast to Coast run. Run is an overstatement as I’ll be taking many breaks and spreading it across a 2 week period.

The course looks something like this:

Sunday: SEA to CHS by air, drive a rental car to ATL

Monday: Work, drop off rental, pick-up my 2022 First Edition Ford Maverick Lariat with 4k tow package, enjoy an evening with my sister and her husband and my impossibly adorable nephew.

Tuesday: Work, drive to Nashville, spend the evening with my very dear friends Chad and Leilani and their  daughter Ruby.

Wednesday: Work, drive to St. Louis, get psyched for the very last StrangeLoop conference.

Thursday: StrangeLoop!

Friday: StrangeLoop! And then pickup Maya, my love and partner and only true cohort in this oft times baffling world from the airport to spend time with her in STL since I won’t be making the trip every year anymore.

Saturday & Sunday: Missouri botanical gardens and sundry other activities in STL with Maya my love.

Monday: last day in STL, take Maya to the airport, drive to Emporia, KS

Tuesday: Visit the salt mines Hollywood archives over 600 ft underground in Hutchinson, KS continue to Limon, CO

Wednesday:  Work, drive to Moab, UT, marvel at nature.

Thursday: Work, drive to Tremonton ID.

Friday: Drive as close to Seattle as possible, but likely to Yakima. Get tamales in Union Gap and try to get a quick visit with my Aunt Wendy if I arrive at a reasonable hour.

Saturday: Drive to SEA and pick-up my love and dearest buddy Maya to join me on the drive to Westport, WA to complete the coast to coast journey.

Sunday: Lazy breakfast and drive back to SEA to collapse at home.

Monday: Day off to enjoy being home and recharge.

Wish me luck and…

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/garylearnsmore

 

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It won’t always be bad news… https://www.garydigs.com/2011/03/15/it-wont-always-be-bad-news/ https://www.garydigs.com/2011/03/15/it-wont-always-be-bad-news/#respond Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:38:57 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=397 but today it is…

 …as of 3/12/2011, the house is too quiet, the couch is too big, no one in the backyard cares that I’m “goin’ in”, there’s no dancing when we put on our jackets or visit the hall closet, and the worst of the worst is the conspicuous absence of that magnificent head in the living room window when we come home…thank-you dear sweet Huxley the Dog for 5 wonderful years, you are so deeply missed…

 http://www.garydigs.com/cast-of-characters/#huxley

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Disappointment around the corner… https://www.garydigs.com/2010/10/29/disappointment-around-the-corner/ https://www.garydigs.com/2010/10/29/disappointment-around-the-corner/#respond Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:53:16 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=385 So, I didn’t get back to my rant about our Senate Election here in Washington, and all the steam I had built up in the sleepless night that preceded the last entry has pretty much disappated. The general malaise I found myself in regarding the Senate Election centered around the fact that despite all of the concrete positive aspects of Patty Murray in her role as our Senator and despite the fact that her war chest dwarfed that of Rossi the race is still neck and neck.

At present, I am cautiously optimistic. A couple of debates and Murray’s numbers on http://www.fivethrityeight.com were greatly improved as Rossi reminded the voters that he is both creepy and has nothing substantive to offer except the same old “small government” line of BS he always runs (I can’t take your small government claims seriously when you want to impede on a woman’s right to choose and tell people who they can and can not marry). The big money is coming out of the woodwork now in the final push, but I’m really hoping a lot of ballots are already in the mail.

My ballot is not in the mail yet, I’m still mulling over a couple of the initiatives, but should mail it today (one of our initiatives would get the state out of the liquor store business, which in principle I would support, but during the biggest budget crisis in ages might have been a no brainer if it was better timed). The rest are the usual bevy of assanine anti-tax appeals and other such lunacy. I find most citizen initiatives irritating at best, but the real blame for them needs to be laid on legislators who choose to provide a stream of airy political rhetoric to their constituents once an election cycle and avoid concrete explanations of principles and policies on an ongoing basis.

I might not have mentioned this, and it is a bit random to pop it in here, but I ♥ Jim McDermott. Just saying…I tried to find his “Meet the Candidates” video from Kiro TV, but they don’t make it easy (one would think, go to the site, type in “election” and special coverage would be available, but not so much…but then, that introduces a whole other topic which is WA State’s shit bird top 2 primary system. The result being that in our district we have Jim (whom I adore) and another guy who ended his “Meet the Candidates” presentation stating that Jim would probably win and deserves to, noting that he primarily wanted to advance the visibility of the climate change issue by running for congress. The “Top 2” system unnescessarily limits debate, stifles ideas, and is particularly a racket when so much jerimandering has already rendered the political climate in most house districts flat and uninteresting. A former co-worker of mine is on the other side of the Cascades and has to choose between 2 Republican candidates, neither of which represent her views.

People shudder when I say this, until they really think it through…The Party should choose its candidate and all candidates with sufficient public support (demonstrated via signatures) should be on THE  BALLOT. Another problem with WA’s particular flavor of Top 2 is that if any 1 candidate gets over 50% of the vote, the election is a done deal (this year a supreme court judge was selected with less than 20 percent of vote since turnout for the primary was right around 40% and he got better than 50% of that vote). The problem started when the Primary went public and started sapping public funds to select party candidates. This development was a great way for the parties to shift the expense of collecting public opinion on their candidates away from the party and on to the shoulders of the tax payers. The fact of the matter is that the public should not pick which candidate a Party presents. The political party should choose the candidate that will wear that moniker on the final ballot anyone else then has the option to garner support as an independent or thrid party candidate and advance to the ballot with some reasonable number of signatures indicating public interest in their candidacy. If the parties would like help facilitating their primaries, they should pay the state to hold them, but they should not be a nescessary condition for inclusion on the final ballot. They should return to a mechanism by which the party chooses a candidate (at the party’s expense) to represent that party. The only thing the top 2 primary does do (given the jerimandered districts) is potentially open a narrow opportunity for a thrid party candidate to advance to the ballot in a federal House election or state legislature election where the district (like our WA 7th district) has a very narrow spectrum of political opinion.

Wow, that wasn’t really what I came here to talk about, but there it it. Written hastily, so forgive the typos. I expect Tuesday to break my heart all over again as a misinformed citizenry wanders aimlessly to the polls to express how disappointed they are that their unrealistic expectations for sudden unequivocal financial recovery from the economic disaster ushered in by 8 years of de- and under-regulation by Bush and his meathead cronies. Back to business as usual I suppose, America selects from a menu of bland options with emotion not reason and then reports shock and dismay that the veal has no flavor…

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Been a long time… https://www.garydigs.com/2010/10/02/been-a-long-timenot-sure-if-you-are-ready-for-this/ https://www.garydigs.com/2010/10/02/been-a-long-timenot-sure-if-you-are-ready-for-this/#respond Sat, 02 Oct 2010 17:55:28 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=380 Well over a year has passed since I’ve written anything here, but according to google analytics somebody still arrives here on occassion. Whether they be lost or found when they arrive is unclear from search terms like “saturn wagon”, “1995 f250”, “shitsu” or “pie transportation”. Maybe on the last item a conclusion can be drawn since there are very few websites that have a “comprehensive pie transportaion solution” featured prominently in their content. A lot has been going on here at the B-Bar-Lazy-B over the past year, and the combination of daily activities and somewhat gainful but draining self-employment have pretty much kept me out of the blogging mood. Suffice it to say that aside from a really rough September which included Huxley the dog’s diagnosis of lymphoma (a topic unto itself into which I am not ready to delve at the present time), things have been going pretty well around here. I wish I would have blogged about all of the bee hive action we had this summer, but at this moment that epic tale is a bit too distant from my thoughts to recount in detail. The short form ends in three hives in the backyard, ~6 gallons of honey harvested, and a bit of a trying time with a swarm, a hive split and one hive of relatively mean honeybees.

Moving forward, after about 3 hours of tossing and turning last night, I decided to give up on sleep and get out of bed at 5am (this is nothing short of absurd, particularly on a saturday, for one who usually stays firmly secured under the covers until about 9 or 10 when possible). As peculiar and impersonal as it may sound, the Washinton State Senatorial Election Race held fast to the foremost thoughts on my mind while NOT sleeping last night. I spun and spun, and then spun some more on the topic, and even now, an hour after I left the warm and comfortable, but angst ridden bed, I can feel a vien bulging near my temple with frustration over how tight this race is polling. One of the pleasures of the past 15 years living in Washington state just outside of Seattle, is that despite a little freakishness on the east side of the Cascades, our politics stay pretty firmly centered just slightly to the left. As such, some pretty fundemental rights are protected from conservative assault and on occassion something progressive might even happen (like the recent domestic partnership laws and the successful defeat of Referendum 71 which sought to undo that progress). Despite my bumper stickers and a flurry of posts leading up to the historic election of 2008, I have kept this blog mostly focused on the activity here on the sprawling eighth of an acre that I like to call the B-Bar-Lazy-B and stayed pretty light on the politics. That may very well be why I haven’t written here for over a year, because I am pretty damn content with what we have going on here, and as such I don’t usually lay awake at night worrying about it (or if I do, it is because something is worthy of that kind of attention). This election on the other hand gets me fired up, angry and, dare I say, passionate about a few things. So, there is a good chance that if this blog is going to be updated, then it will skew a bit more political in the coming weeks and likely into perpetuity. So, let’s get started with the rant, shall we?

In the interests of full disclosure…

let me admit that in the mid-80’s, when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I was momentarily taken in by “Supply-Side Economics” or “Trickle-Down Theory” as it was called then. To a politically naíve teen, the whole thing made perfect sense. Give incentives to big business so that big business can create jobs and the economy will flourish. Let me share a few things I’ve learned in the quarter of century that has passed since then…

First, the only two things a business needs to create jobs are a good, useful, and persistently relevant product (see GMC for an epic failure in this area recently) and people with enough disposable income to buy that product. Even Henry Ford’s warped anti-semetic mind grasped this concept and not only did his high wages (for the period) draw the best possible employees to build the best possible product, but his employees were able to buy the product that he manufactured. What a novel recipe for success, hmmm….how many GM employees could afford the retail price on a Hummer or a Caddillac without going to debtor’s prison shortly after they were laid off because GM totally lacked a forward thinking product development strategy. Yet another topic of great importance directly related to the current recession is the insane idea of being able to afford the thing you are buying, but we’ll save that for another discussion. The haze in which most business owners seem lost, is the idea that Unions are bad for business when in fact Unions are only bad for bad businesses because in the aggregate higher overall wages distributed to employees who actually buy things with their paychecks results in greater consumer demand. Since greater consumer demand is now the pre-eminent backbone of sales and small businesses are the backbone of our economy when companies that can afford it pay higher overall wages the entire economy benefits from those expenditures (usually including the company paying out the higher wages). This is true even for big businesses. If incomes are not sufficient to support air travel, then Boeing doesn’t have much business making planes. While profit margins are higher on business class (which doesn’t imply business travel), they wouldn’t be cramming us into airplanes cheek to cheek if they could profit without us (and BTW, first class travel generally operates at a loss, don’t believe me, check it out: http://www.airport-int.com/article/changes-in-demand-for-air-travel.html). This is a bit of a reprise, but humor me as I am running on about 2.5 hours sleep, WE the people who work for a living ARE the engine of the economy.

Second, the last thing a big business will do with additional profits gained from government incentives is add employees (excepton the rare occassion where they only receive the incentive by hiring, at which point they will hire just long enough to benefit from the incentive and then lay people off and celebrate at length the shrewd cost cutting maneuver they just performed). Particularly not in a recession when the old standby techniques of squeezing blood out of a turnip are so effectively plied against your captive workforce in a tight labor market. Also, there are a bevy of other things big businesses like to spend money on and most of them don’t create jobs either. Executive bonuses and raises and dividends to investors to recognize and celebrate these great windfall profits without regard for the fact that they originated in government incentives rate high on the list. These bonuses, raises, and dividends are then reinvested either in gigantic slot machines labeled NYSE where billions of dollars can vanish into thin air in a few hours or to exotic eccentricities and luxurious delights like fried baby seal testicles flown directly from Palin-land that create approximately 0 opportunities for long term employment. For the large investors, the dividends are similarly frittered away into the ether and for the small investors that actually hold a long-term interest in their investment through retirement accounts, education accounts and the like, these dividends are usually reinvested in the same portfolio from whence they came only to be wiped out entirely by the next Lehman-Goldman-AIG-Housing Bubble debacle that inevitably lays just around the corner (for more information on how this keeps happening see “Citibank – countries don’t go bankrupt viz a viz the 1970s”, “Neil Bush (son of George Sr) -Savings and Loan deregulation and disaster viz a viz the 1980’s”, “Orange County Municipal Bonds – Municipalities don’t go bankrupt viz a viz the 1990’s”, and of course “Dot Com Bubble + Enron fraud viz a viz the turn of this century” in addition to our current dilema.

Third, and this is really important, but very difficult to unpack. At some point between the 111th session of Congress in 2010 and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constiution with their lofty goals of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” we managed to conflate Freedom and Property into a single conceptual quagmire of confusion. I say this largely in response to the Republican’s claims that they desire “small government” while simultaneously attempting to control every womb in the country, tell us who we can or can not marry, where mosques should be built, which religions should be preferentially honored by government institutions, take away our right to collectively bargain wages and benefits, consider torture ok now and again, exponentially increase defense spending by engaging in foreign misadventures like Iraq, and continue to grasp desperately to the notion that state sanctioned murder is honorable (afterall look at the other great freedom loving countries that still do it, like Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and Iran). The contradictions boggle the mind. You can’t make Social Security and Medicare big enough to overshadow the size of a government interested in doing all that to our personal freedom and well-being. And yet you have this band of crazies trying to align themselves with the original revolution carrying signs that say “Don’t steal from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine” … WTF?

 

Dont Be So Efn Crazy

Don't Be So Ef'n Crazy

…and while we’re on the topic of crazy, how about guys against Patty Murray because she proposes legislation that makes it more difficult to purchase a Mail Order Bride: http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/08/18/patty-murray-facing-serious-challenge/

…and those are the kinds of things that get me spinning in such a way that I just can’t pull out of the no sleep nose dive I was in last night.

Which brings us to…

this year’s senatorial election here in Washington state.

Context Note: at this moment Maya woke up and we started listening to the radio together and discussing my spinning and not sleeping last night, so more angst and anguish over the senate race will have to come later…

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Pile O’ $h!t, Pie Transportation, and Hair Weave on the Loose… https://www.garydigs.com/2009/06/16/pile-o-ht-pie-transportation-and-hair-weave-on-the-loose/ https://www.garydigs.com/2009/06/16/pile-o-ht-pie-transportation-and-hair-weave-on-the-loose/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:56:50 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=360 Pile O’ $h!t:

Apparently it has been 2 months since I wrote the Homeresque blog post about the truck designed to rival Tolstoi in verbosity. You can imagine I needed a long hard rest after that blogging odyssey, and honestly, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten that long hard rest, but alas, I will blog again regardless. The whole thing would probably be a lot easier if I just blogged a little every couple of days instead of bundling a couple months worth of news into a single post. The bundling puts too much distance between me and some of the more significant events of the past 2 months, enough distance that any rendering of those events would seem too contrived and contemplated to have any real value. As such, we’re going to skip the most important stuff and stick to the most entertaining stuff, so put your finger on the scroll wheel and let us begin…

Maya recently encountered a post on Craig’s List by a tree service company offering to deliver wood chips free of charge with a 4 cubic yard minimum. Perfect, we happened to be in the market for a boat load of mulch to finish our comprehensive lawn removal project, so after some foot dragging on my part we gave them a ring. They said they would have about 8 cubic yards and asked how much of it we would like. “Sure, bring us what ya’ got. We’ll take it…” I said figuring we could easily spread 8 cubic yards of mulch. No problem at all.  ‘8 yards will be a perfect start’, I thought to myself when I hung up the phone. Keep in mind, I do have some idea of what a cubic yard looks like having hauled in several of them for filling the holes that I dig. A couple of years ago we had 15 cubic yards of soil delivered for the largest raised bed in the back yard, so I felt like half of that quantity was easily managable. Then they arrived…

In my estimation we ended up with about 20 cubic yards (Maya says 24, so perhaps it is somewhere in between), nevertheless, it was not 8. Nowhere near 8. A whole $h!tload more than 8. It filled the entire driveway (almost, kind of, ok, not the entire driveway, but the entire part of the driveway in which Maya parks, not the part that is ordinarily occupied by my truck canopy and other non-essential goods for which no other suitable location can be found). The funniest thing about the pile was the fact that several visitors shortly after the arrival of the pile expressed an acknowledgment of the pile’s presence in exactly the same phrase: “You have a big pile of $h!t in your driveway.” they would announce in an informative manner as they arrived. We kindly let them know we were aware of the pile and had a certain fondness and actual intention to utilize the pile and that no impending catastrophe should be assumed by the presence of the pile. Maya’s mother was really disturbed by the pile from an aesthetic perspective and inspired me once again to appreciate the fact that in Skyway no one is going to sweat the big pile of mulch in your driveway regardless of how many weeks it sits there. It is simply the case that around here there are matters of much greater importance than whether or not someone is fast or slow about their mulching procedings.

I had a picture of the original pile, but my fancy fricken’ phone decided it needed to mysterious reset back to factory defaults and I lost the pictures, so all I have is this one of the portion of the pile that remains in our driveway oh so many weeks later:

The remains of the giant pile in our driveway

The remains of the giant pile in our driveway

The original pile extended to the right hand edge of the above picture and just past the left hand edge as well as spanning the entire width of the driveway. The other somewhat irritating thing about the pile is that it consisted more of pine needles than anything else. No problem we thought, we spread it in the areas where plants are already accustomed to acidic soils (or where we don’t want plants anyway) and the rains of late May and June should help break them down as to prevent creating a giant fire hazard out of our entire yard. We have now gone 28 days without any measurable rainfall. Should this continue for another full day we will have beat the record (for this time of year, whatever that means, but weathermen need to report something, so I guess that is how records like that get created) set back in 1982. I will spread part of the remaining stuff in a final layer around the back yard where the previous three layers have been sufficiently trompled (along our main walking paths), and the balance I will take to A.’s house (A. doesn’t live terribly far from here and is in Maya’s permaculture class and we met her at a SURF Co-op meeting before that class began). So, soon enough the pile will be resolved. The biggest hurdle being clearing the back of the truck and actually pulling the canopy off again (I’m pretty sure it won’t sit in the driveway for 2 years again, but we’ll see).

Pie Transportation:

As fate would have it, Maya had permaculture class on the same day that she was slated to provide food for her cousin K.’s college graduation party way out in North Bend, Washington which is about a thousand miles from here (or it might be 35, somewhere in there). Maya’s class got out at 5:30pm and the festivities were slated to begin at 6pm (which those of us who had previously graduated from UW and had to sit through and escape from the ceremony at Maya’s mother’s behest, knew was a farce since it easily takes an hour just to get out of the stadium and off campus with the droves of humans and automobiles overwhelming the area following the event), but nonetheless, the food had to be delivered, prepared and presentable prior to the previously determined start time. As such, the task had to be assigned to the person least capable of completing it successfully…me. Why am I the person least capable of completing the task successfully? Well, for starters I have a very fuzzy conception of time and an even fuzzier conception of arbitrary deadlines (note, I recognize a real deadline, but most deadlines I consider arbitrary at best). It is also the fact that I generally lack the motor skills appropriate to carrying, mixing and handling large quantities of food (and really you should have seen the mess I made attempting to mix the 42 lbs of tabouli Maya prepped for the event). But, safe and secure transportation of 7 rhubarb and blackberry pies (which ended up being 9)  was the only part of the task that truly frightened me.

I have failed in the past at transporting exactly this type of pie, and the sadness that befell Maya when I arrived with a broken crust and spilled filling haunts me to the day. Having a deep desire to not repeat the crust breaking filling spilling heart break I had previously deliver upon the woman I love, I set my mind to conquering through technology the pie delivery obstacle which layed before me. I needed to develop a comprehensive pie transportation solution, and I only had a week to do it. So, I spent 5 days thinking about it, and then started working on the solution the day before I needed to have it done. Whilst working on it the number of pies increased and Maya detected a near fatal design flaw which resulted in some last minute adjustments (for the design flaw, not the number of pies, I had already accomodated 8 pies in the design and figure putting one floating pie at risk was far better than starting over and working toward a 10 pie solution). The challenging aspects were to utilize existing materials (specifically existing materials not likely to be useful to any other project in the near future) and to make sure that my design could accommodate both the small aluminum pie tins being utilized for this event and the larger ones that might be required for some future event. I got the inital frame work assembled, glued, nailed and cured and had a solid design to work with after the first day. So during the day of the event I finished off the pie transportation devices and managed to still get out to the event in time to set up the food (with the help of Maya’s Dad and K.’s boyfriend). Also, J.’s arrival just before I completed the second device played heavily into my success as he offered to wrap the pies while I showered and changed to get ready to leave the house (about an hour and forty-five minutes later than I had originally intended to leave, but this ended up being fortuitous for reasons I am not willing to discuss at this time). And so, I present to you, the CPTS (Comprehensive Pie Transportation Solution) as it appeared filled and loaded into the Super-Cab of the previously discussed Bio-Beast of an F250 that I drive:

Comprehensive Pie Transportation Solution

Comprehensive Pie Transportation Solution

Primarily constructed of fir trim removed from our house 4.5 years ago during our massive remodel (and since that time floating around the shed in a huge unweildy mass to be moved to and fro whenever we need to get to something), the CPTS fit the bill with relatively little sliding, no breakage, and most importantly no spillin’ o’ the fillin’. But, I’m really hoping the day we have to transport 12 pies is in the very far future because I am not at all looking forward to the hassle of making another one of these (a lot of awkward corners to wedge the little electric tack nailer into and oh so many little cuts and clamps and frustrations along the way).

Hair Weave on the Loose:

On the day after Maya’s cousin K.’s graduation festivities J. (formerly of JnX) and I took Huxley on a micro walk over to the mini-mart (so I could buy smokes) and to Nevzat’s esspresso drive through (so I could get a dose of my other ‘eine). The mini market is right next to an action packed little bar in our neighborhood that has experienced more than it’s share of massive law enforcement interventions and county sherriff helicopter hooverings. At 2am each weekend we can hear relationships coming to an end as the bar let’s out and final determinations of the relationship status are loudly resolved in the parking lot. So, it was highly entertaining, but not terribly surprising when we found this:

The remains of the night as it were, a portion of a hair weave left trompled and abandoned in the parking lot...

The remains of the night as it were, a portion of a hair weave left trompled and abandoned in the parking lot...

The picture is blurry, but suffice it to say that is a portion of someone’s “Weave“. The picture of the intense “chick fight” that resulted in this aftermath, as well as the words that must have been exchanged at the time, were immediately apparent to J. and I. Fortunately J. had his phone with him and was able to capture this priceless photo. But, wait for it…after I got my smokes and we crossed the parking lot to visit Nevzat’s espresso stand, I thought it would be funny to point the unwoven “Weave” out to him. His response:

“Oh yeah, I saw it this morning when I arrived. EVERY WEEKEND there is one,” and his eyes got really big, “sometimes a whole head of hair out in that parking lot…”

J. and I both almost fell to the ground laughing. This wasn’t a special occassion, I just usually fail to get over to the mini-mart and the espresso stand early enough in the day to see the aftermath of the Skyway weekend nights. So, if you’re looking for your next viral video to post on You Tube, drop me a note and I’ll direct you to a suitable location to set up your night vision camera on a Skyway Saturday night to capture what is apparently the regular sacrafice of the “Weave” that happens here on the hill. This fact makes me realize that each weekend we are probably hearing both the end and the beginning of some relationship out there in the parking lot as to the victor go the spoils and who ever inspired such conflict is not likely going home with the girl who just lost her “Weave” in the parking lot. Just a guess though, now I’m talking out my a$$, so I’ll bring it to a close and wish you well ’til next I bang this keyboard into temporary submission.

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Dangerous Chemicals and Oodles of Icky Oil…(continued from last post) https://www.garydigs.com/2009/04/09/dangerous-chemicals-and-oodles-of-icky-oil%e2%80%a6continued-from-last-post/ https://www.garydigs.com/2009/04/09/dangerous-chemicals-and-oodles-of-icky-oil%e2%80%a6continued-from-last-post/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:22:10 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=327 Right around the time we started the new bed and hauled the cottonwood rounds, I ran across a post I could not refuse during one of my frequent “diesel < 3000” Craig’s List searches (don’t ask me why, I’m not really shopping for anything particular, but I like to see what’s out there and am still kind of kicking myself for not jumping on the $600 1984 Diesel Ford Escort Wagon I ran across a month ago, but tax time was near and dropping $600 on something I don’t really need at the time didn’t seem wise).  Probably far too many of my conversations with Maya start with the phrase “Some in xxxxx has…”, and she is then warned that I am about to share some wacky thing I encountered on Craig’s List. In all fairness to myself, many of Maya’s IMs to me are links to pets, farm animals, and woodland creatures available on Craig’s List for which we do not have the space to raise, but I’ll admit I likely produce more “Someone has” conversations than Maya produces “Cute and fuzzy” instant messages.

Sorry, I wandered a bit there, but what I encounterd a month ago was someone in Tacoma with nearly 200 gallons of used vegetable oil, 5 gallons of methanol, and 55 lbs of lye. Oooo….hmmm…yikes…rrr…what to do, what to do…

Some background is probably in order here.

BEGIN: Saga of the Truck (if you don’t care about the truck and just want to know about the oil you can skip over the next several paragraphs of rambling automotive history)

A couple of years ago I was driving a Saturn Wagon:

Zippy and sweet, I really liked my wagon

And a couple of years before that, shortly after we bought the house, we bought “Billie”, a ’76 F100 that we bought for $300:

She treated us well (named by the previous owner), take note of the snazzy $45 lumber rack I also got off Craig's List...sweet deals all the way around...

She treated us well, take note of the snazzy $45 lumber rack I also got off Craig's List...

“Billie”‘s owner (who named the truck) hated to part with her dear truck, but she had recently purchase a fuel efficient wagon and lived in the swanky Magnolia neighborhood and her neighbors had deemd “Billie” an eyesore and started calling the cops anytime the truck was within 30 ft of a driveway or for any other reason they could or thought they could. In the beginning, no more perfect a match betwixt us and truck could have been discovered. With a waste transfer facility just down the hill for our dump runs and Cedar Grove only about 10 or so miles away for our compost and soil needs, “Billie” fit the bill and met our needs. However, after a couple of years our needs started to get a little more esoteric and drives to get lumber for the fence and the shed ended up being up to 30 or more miles (to score the perfect bulk liquidation or overstock deals I’d find on Craig’s List.

At about 8 MPG with a front tank that we were warned should not be filled above half full due to the potential for leaking, increasingly more difficult starts and steering that seemed altogether too approximate even for my liking, I didn’t feel 100% comfortable taking “Billie” too far from home (or on the Interstate for any distance). Contemporaneously, Maya’s cousin R. had started working for a Biodiesel distributor in Bellingham called Whole Energy. I did a little research, made a decision, and then became obsessed with the mission of conflating our $300 pickup and my wagon into a single enviro-friendly reliable hauler for our basic construction and landscaping needs and the treasures made available to us by the wonders on the internet. The fact that I haven’t had to commute to work for about a decade and we have Maya’s little Civic for other errands also facilitated the decision. Further, I had discovered there were several stations in the region (and one particularly close) that served up B99 (99% Biodiesel, there is a reason it is usually 99% rather than 100% that has to do with tax incentives for carbon reducing additives, but that discussion is far beyond the scope of this already meandering post). So, feasaility studies complete, I started shopping…

Maya’s dad’s F250 was coming up toward 300k miles (which impressed me), I learned that the Ford diesel engine was made by International Harvester (stirring a certain nostalgia factor related to my Dad’s fondness of his beastly and seemingly indestructable Scount and Scout II he had when I was growing up), we had fairly recently gotten Huxley the dog (and there was no way he would be riding in the back of the truck like some second class member of the family, so I knew I needed a super/extended cab to accomodate the whole family and allow for flexibility in packing for potentially rainy Northwest camping trips).

104lbs of couch surfin' lap dog...he needed a truck all his own...

104lbs of couch surfin' lap dog...he needed a truck all his own...

I also didn’t want to go terribly deeply in debt, but had accepted a couple years worth of debt at a specific price point as an acceptable sacrifice for a truck that wouldn’t be in the shop every month (since I am not well versed in auto mechanics, not particularly inclined to become too well versed in it, and lack the tools and garage that would make it a reasonable endeavor to pursue). I liked the fact that the Dodge diesels had a smaller engine (and likely better fuel economy) since I wouldn’t be towing (and people in general seem to rave about their Cummins built diesels engines), but the rarity and seeminly outrageous prices on early to mid 90’s extended cab Dodge diesels withdrew them from the running.

As bizarre as it may sound, I ended up not finding my truck on Craig’s List, but rather ran across it in an exploratory search on Cars.com. The color was not to my liking, but not a show stopper, and since has become the crux of many a jibe from Maya since I like to call it “Copper” where most people see it as “Gold” and Maya likes to call it “Rosé” or “Pink” when the sunlight hits it just so and brings out the red undertones that inspire me to call it “Copper” (I think Ford calls it “Beige” which is right out in left field).

My Truck, the bio-beast, 1995 F250 Powerstroke Supercab (for the dog), it is a lot of thing, but it is not pink (nor is it Rosé)...

My Truck, the bio-beast, 1995 F250 Powerstroke Supercab (for the dog), it is a lot of things, but it is not pink (nor is it Rosé)...

When I ran across the 1995 F250 Powerstroke (turbo) diesel supercab at Cars.com, a bit of disappointment befell me as the vehicle wasn’t a private party sale, but rather a local Ford dealer offerred up the truck at a surprisingly low price when compared to the other mid 90’s trucks I had viewed. I had test drove an ’86 non-turbo that someone had on Craig’s List, but it was painfully clear that despite the appealing debt free price tag that it was not the “reliable” hauler I sought. I also checked out a 2000 F250 Supercab at a nearby used car dealer. That truck had about a billion rough miles on it and clearly had been acquired via the auction of some corporate fleet. Nothing special about it, a nice drive, only the very base features and no tailgate. I’m sure there were reasons that one had a price tag close to what I eventually paid for the ’95.

The fact that I had a pre-approval voucher from my credit union made the ’95 F250 at the Ford dealer considerably more appealing because I knew I could roll the salestax into the loan at the dealer (I still had my Saturn and wasn’t going to sell it until I already had a replacement for it in front of the house, and wanted to be able to take my time and get my price for the wagon). And as much as I would have liked to have completed the purchase through a private sale, I initially found the fact that the dealer had service the vehicle a serious point in favor of the ’95. As it turns out, maybe that wasn’t so much a benefit, but the ’95 had already had a documented engine replacement (a ’96 with fewer miles on it than the 202,601 on the odometer, although who knows how many fewer miles as that part hadn’t been documented), and had already had the transmission rebuilt once.

The truck did have a problem with the left front ball joint, but the dealer arranged to have that replace at cost (at their cost, which wasn’t the greatest savings known to man). When I got the truck home I discovered it still seemed to have the same knocking issue with the driver’s side ball joint, but I figured since it had been replaced it must just be my ignorance misinterpreting the occasional pop during really hard turns. Eventually I had both ball joints replaced because the dealer had replaced the wrong one in the first place and my mechinic gave me a decent deal on servicable ball joints for both sides, unfortunately this discovery came far to late to take it back to the dealer, so I was out about $400 on that deal. I also realized right before a trip to Eugene, OR, why the engine probably had to be replaced in the first place. No where on the service receipts did they mention replacing the thermometer for the coolant, and sure enough, it was dead. A saturday morning at the Midas (where they apparently didn’t realize they needed to drain down the 400 gallons of coolant prior to replacing the thermometer) further convinced me to stick with my mechanic’s shop where they service their own Cummin’s tow truck and have a guy that used to work for International Harvester, but live and learn I suppose (and I really did not want to hit the road for my first long trip in the truck without a temperature gauge).

So, we sold “Billie” (for $225 by the way, net cost excluding fuel and insurance of $75, no better deal ever existed on the planet that wasn’t free), and I sold the Saturn for $3k and have managed to pay off the truck in about 2 years. Note that I kept my $45 lumber rack, and thanks to a little welding help from X.‘s dad (of JnX) was able to continue using it with the new truck (prior to realizing it was a little too wide J. & I jammed it in there and spread my bed a bit, so occasionally I have to squeeze the bed inward to close the tailgate if the truck is full of dirt or something pushing out on the bed walls). Aside for a mistake on my part wherein I still had summer fuel in the tank during a Thanksgiving dip in temperature to the low teens that clogged my fuel filter to the extent that I needed to take it to the shop and they ended up spraying WD-40 in the intake to get it started (keep in mind I fill up about once every 2 months or so), running bio-diesel has been a success. I run B-99 most of the year, but November through February I’ll generally fill one tank with B-50 and the other with an approximately hand blended B-70 or there abouts to prevent gel and cloggage in the coldest of the winter months. The price shot up dramatically when all fuel prices were going up, and apparently the harvest cycle has left it stuck around $4 a gallon while it used to be with 10 to 20 cents of the price of regular diesel when I first got the truck (prompting the vendor nearest me to stop selling B99 in favor of the cheaper B50 blend). Despite all of the drama documented above, I really, really like my truck. And love the fact that most of the year it is running in a carbon nuetral manner and get’s nearly 20mpg on the longer freeway trips. My mileage is smashed by the short trips I take around town for this and that, but such is the trade-off for being able to run out and confidently pick up a yard of dirt, compost, concrete or drywall (and yes, I did the calculations and the drywal for J.‘s addition came out to a cubic yard).

END: Saga of the Truck

So, to get back to where we started, I saw this deal on Craig’s List for nearly 200 gallons of used vegetable oil, 5 gallons of methanol, and 55 lbs of lye. I had little interest in full blown home brewing, but was hoping I could filter most of oil, maybe make a small batch of biodiesel for fun, and then sell off the extra lye (or Maya could use the lye for soap making, or something), and then I could just blend some of the filtered WVO (waster vegetable oil) in with my regular fuel through the hotest of the summer months. Think of the savings? And the pretty French Fry smell of my exhaust (you get a little bit of this from bio-diesel, but not quite the deliscious hunger inducing smell of running SVO (straight vegetable oil) or filtered WVO.

Before I went out to get this stuff I asked the buy to send me a picture so I had some idea of what my loading and storage requirements would be. Well, most of the oil was in 5 gallon “disposable” carboys as it had been delivered to the restaurants from whence it came. Great for loading, less great for storage.

The picture I receive that probably should have been somewhat of a warning to turn back now...

The picture I received that probably should have been somewhat of a warning to turn back now...

No problem though, you see, J. (of JnX) had recently offered up some portion of his garage for storing lumber should I need it since his property consists as much of a network of storage structures and garages (each of a varying degree of age, quality and stability) as it does anything else. Witness exhibit A, the garages from the air:

The area traced in yellow is all enclosed space, the area traced in periwinkle is a carport and firewood hut...

The area traced in yellow is all enclosed space, the area traced in periwinkle is a carport and firewood hut...

So, after asking J. and finding a good corner for the oil, and unsuccessfully trying to convince J. that his network of garages would be the optimal place to start a small bio-diesel processing facility (and that all he had to do is sell his 90’s gas Toyota pickup and buy a similarly priced 80’s diesel Isuzu and he could enjoy the benifits of nearly free carbon nuetral fuel (I continue without luck to convince him of this), I went and picked this stuff up. The problem, as it turns out, is that a good deal of this oil is partially hydrogenated. Adding hydrogen to oil makes it solidify at room temperature and apparently prolongs the shelf life of the stuff. These are benefits for the deep frying industry, but that solid or nearly solid at room temperature thing really blows if you want to use it as fuel (unless you’re the kind of person who gets joy out of periodically disassembling and degunking your entire fuel system). The problem is not without a solution however, and the solution is to turn it into bonafide biodiesel through the miraculous process of transesterification (more than you could probably ever desire to know about this process, and how it compares with SVO/WVO is available at: Journey To Forever. So, looking over my email I see that it was late February when I went to pick up this oil, and to date I have done nothing with it.

My first step is going to be to fashion a heating and filtration system out of a bunch of 5 gallon pails so I can get the stuff cleaned up. Some of it is super gunky (there were even bits of blue tarp in some of it). That way I can get a good quantity of it out of J.’s garages long before the day that some kind of processing setup is ready here. A couple of 30 gallon barrels (one partially full) came with the oil, so I’ll fill those and probably try to get a couple more since I can store those outside and still keep the oil dry and out of Huxley’s mouth. My first few attempts at transfering the oil between containers as-is in its semi-solid state resulted in a great number of nasty oily rags to which Huxley took an instant and undesirable liking.

Umm...the 30 gallon barrels that came with the oil. Not nearly enough to hold it all, but a start...

Umm...the 30 gallon barrels that came with the oil. Not nearly enough to hold it all, but a start...

We don’t have the space around here for a full blown multistep/multitank processing system consiting of an 80 gallon hot water tank and a couple of huge conical tanks for washing and drying the fuel after processing. On top of that those damned conical tanks with stands cost exactly 1 arm and 1 leg each (indicating that following payment for such an aparatus I would be hard pressed to process anything in the resultant limbless state I would be in). I have been scouring Craig’s List for a SMALL water heater hoping I could perhaps make a compact processor for about 15 gallons at a time that would fit comfortably alongside the shed in the back yard. I already have plans to build an attached covered area off of that side of the shed for the chipper/shredder and the soon to be obsolete lawn mower (more on that at a later date), so that seems to be my best option if I am going to do any processing around here. Apparently water heaters under 40 gallons are few and far between. I also need to do some more research to make sure I have a safe setup for handling the methonal and creating/transfering the meth-oxide that is central to the process. The methonal is a lot nastier and more hazardous than seemed to be indicated in my original research and readings. In the ideal, after I go through the small bit I have on hand, I’ll switch to a process using ethonal which is just as flamable, but apparently less toxic than methonal.

The little can of nastiness (methonal) that now lives in the backyard safely tucked away from the weather in a garden storage container...

The little can of nastiness (methonal) that now lives in the backyard safely tucked away from the weather in a garden storage container...

Since I only use about 16 gallons a month it makes no sense for me to setup some crazy large processor that is going to sit idle most of the time and force me to procure storage for more fuel than will fit in the truck. So, the challenge I face over the summer is finding a middle ground between the “Soda Bottle” sized batches with which one introduces themselves to the process and the 60-80 gallon batches that most full blown processors produce. I’ll keep you posted as I slowly but surely make headway in this fueling ourselves project (or at least my truck, Maya is vociferously dedicated to driving her Civic into the ground and she is hoping to make it her 30 or 40 year vehicle despite my periodically proding here to sell it now while she can get enough to mostly pay for TDI Jetta or something we can run on the byproducts of some of my favorite foods, being just about anything deep fried).

And thus, in closing I must mention that if you happen to be in the area and have an extra 20 gallon water heater sitting in your garage, drop me a note and I’ll come get it right away…

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Big Wood, Broken Back, Dangerous Chemicals and Oodles of Icky Oil… https://www.garydigs.com/2009/03/03/projects-projects-projects/ https://www.garydigs.com/2009/03/03/projects-projects-projects/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:24:21 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=309 We’re working on a new raised bed (as previously mentioned), honey bees are coming soon, and I just acquired almost 200 gallons of used vegetable oil that I’d like to brew into biodiesel (most of the oil is in JnX’s garage at present)…More on this soon, and I mean soon, not a month and a half from now as happened with January’s post…

Update: 4/7/2009 – Well, hmmm…I guess I let an entire month slip by and now there is more to tell then there is time to tell it, but let me at least get started…We’re heading out to dinner with JnX here shortly, but perhaps I cover the past month or so in brief.

Way back at the end of February we had a weird sun break and got a couple of days of work in out in the yard, so I took advantage of the opportunity to start working on the new raised bed. It became very clear very quickly that the broken concrete I had on hand from the removal of the sidewalk in the back yard a couple of years ago would not be sufficient to complete the job so I started scouring Craig’s List for additional concrete or alternatives to fill in the gaps. As it turns out someone had felled a gigantic cottonwood, and I mean gigantic, and had a pile of logs, rounds, and slag they wanted removed so we drove by to take a look. Maya did a little research on the burnability of cottonwood, so I contacted the guy and figured at a minimum I could get the bigger rounds that were already cut (and use those as part of the raised bed) and then snag some additional fire wood for J. of JnX since their fireplace is their only source of heat and J. didn’t have much luck finding a boat for winter fishing to augment a mediocre summer salmon season, so I figured anything for free would be good. I so terribly underestimated the weight of these rounds. Each one weighed at least as much as I do, and as previously mentioned many days/weeks have been spent recovering from the lifting, rolling and placing process. There is a picture of these monsters in their final position in the previous post, and here’s another picture of them in the back of the truck when only half of the damage to my body had been done…

I'll admit, getting them in the truck was much more difficult since I just let them roll right out onto the driveway when we got home...

To get them out of the truck? Just roll 'em out and let 'em bounce down the driveway (I did set up a cinder block to keep them from crushing my truck canopy)

So, even though the lifting was done at this point, the process of rolling them out of the truck into the driveway and then rolling them back to their final resting place was a long slow wrestling match betwixt the logs and I. I won in the end, I think, but although they are called rounds, that is a disasterous overstatement and generalization of their actual shape. The path from the back of the truck to the new bad had as many zigs and sags as a saw blade, but in a much less uniform distribution. The rains that followed this activity were not altogether welcomed despite the fact that in the end they probably granted a much needed reprieve for healing of the muscles and joints to prepare me for the final concrete wrestling match which was required to complete the wall around the new bed.

Craig’s List is wonderous, and dangerous, and tonight after I get back from dinner I’ll discuss some of the hazards inherent to a giant list of stuff from the entire region that you might not realize you want until you encounter it somewhat by accident…

Update 4/8/2009: After dinner we enjoyed the spate of nice weather by having a fire out back in which we burned the remnants of the gigantic dead rosemary we had pulled out over the weekend. We’re not sure if it died from old age, the really nasty winter, or my incursions into its bed chasing morning glory root the past couple of years, but we needed the space for the new location of the yet to be moved chicken coop and the rosemary was clearly not rebounding this year as it had in years past. Apparently many, many years past as we were able to burn the dead branches for a couple hours. Hence, I did not return to this post the other night, and probably shouldn’t have today in favor of starting a new post, but alas, here we are…

Actually, this went on too long, so I changed my mind and will continue it in the next post.

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Rats, eggs, and escapees… https://www.garydigs.com/2009/01/17/rats-eggs-and-escapees/ https://www.garydigs.com/2009/01/17/rats-eggs-and-escapees/#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:41:27 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=295 More to come on this soon… (written 1/17/2009)

Ok, well, soon is a relative term…it is now March 3rd and Maya has seen fit to comment on how terribly out of date this post is (in addition to threatening to blog about the new raised bed, not that I’d mind, but she gave me a deadline, which I may have missed). Let’s wander back to mid-January for a moment and discuss the situtations that were at hand at that point in time (some of which have been resolved, some not so much).

Slowly but surely the rat will certainly cause our shed to collapse...

Slowly but surely the rat will certainly cause our shed to collapse...

Rats, or perhaps just one, nonetheless the evidence provided above (in addition to other evidence not available at the time of this writing in the form of a catacomb of tunnels around and about the chicken coop and compost bins) indicates the presence of a rodent. Back in January I was starting to get worried that he would undermine the foundation of the shed (there are 4 or 5 of these egresses from under the slab). Further, it seems the rat was somehow extracting stuff from the compost cones. An inspection of the exterior base of the cone below ground level revealed no entrance, and yet, there were onion skins and other such tidbits pretty regularlly strewn about the chicken yard (and not by the chickens) in addition to the catacombs. I erected a barrier between the chicken yard and the compost cones and set a load of rat traps to no avail. Keep in mind we have three cats and a dog (kind of, Hemmingway is blind and doesn’t leave the house any more and Bukowski now visits every week and a half or so, perhaps more on that later).  In my opinion we shouldn’t have rodent problems, particularly since the neighbors at our southeastish corner (near the chicken yard) have the biggest most ferocious most terrible cat known to mankind. But alas, a rat we have, and as yet I have not caught and killed him, but his activity seems to have been limited by this fancy new device:

Not exclusively installed to expose the rat to dog urine and cat accessibility, but also to thwart our little escapee...

Not exclusively installed to expose the rat to dog urine and cat accessibility, but also to thwart our little escapee...

The approximately 3.5 foot tall chicken wire enclosure for the chicken yard became useless once the Skyway winds blew away the bird netting that originally covered the area. Blume (the littlest one) can basically fly whether her wing is clipped or not, and with planting season on the horizon we had to restore some modicum of order to the back yard. Coupled with the aforementioned rat issue, the gate was concieved and built (previously we accessed the chicken yard by passing through the two connected sheds at the left hand edge of the above photo, fine for us, but the situation prevented Huxley from patroling, growling, urinating and what not in that corner of the yard even when the chickens are in for the night). Prior to the gate Huxley would get really squierelly each night running around the chicken yard sniffing and barking (we assume he smelled a rat, the very same rat that continues to outwit me to this day).

Another component of the “keep Blume in the chicken yard except when we want her ranging” program was the purchase of a couple of 16ft x 54in cattle panels.  The plan is to use these panels to create dual chicken yards and rotate the chickens seasonally from one yard to the next enabling us to plan stuff for ourselves and the chickens in the area from which the chickens will be excluded while they decimate the area in which they are confined. This will happen in concert with the moving and rebuilding of the chicken coop and the creation of a funky new raised bed from broken concrete and large logs. The cattle panels and the raised bed in progress are shown below:

Still recovering from moving the logs, but they sure made the broken concrete seem light...

Still recovering from moving the logs, but they sure made the broken concrete seem light...

Now really, I mean it, really, ok, so, well, hmmm…the “chicken wire” at 3.5 feet couldn’t contain Blume. So it goes, dust ourselves off and come up with an alternate plan to accomodate the adorable little flier. She’s often picked on by the bigger chickens, so a little extra effort on her behalf isn’t a problem. She is also the most human focused of the three chickens and likes to run out to greet us when we come back to the shed or follow us around the yard when she is ranging. So we spend about $100 on these cool cattle panels. Certainly 54 inches will work, the holes are large enough for her to get through, but the plan was to just cover the bottom 2/3’s with chicken wire and we should be set. No such luck. That little turd…freshly clipped wing and all she floats like a butterfly up to the top of the cattle panel shortly after we get it set up (well, ok, not so much floats and not at all like a butterfly).  So, I tried adding some raspberry can arches to the top of the cattle panel to keep her in thinking the visual deterent might just be enough.

Again, my inadequecies were highlighted when Blume figured out she could pretty much knock them out of the way on her way up. So, after a bit of head scratching and various alternate plans for handling the Blume the flyer situation, I grabbed some of that cheezy green garden border wire arches stuff while walking by it at the hardware store. This sits a little bit precariously atop the chicken wire and addes another foot to the height. The test section I bought doesn’t quite cover the entire from facing length of their existing yard, but on the rare occassion that I remember to close the coop door closest to the cattle panel, the extra height seems to dissuade the littlest one from escaping. I’ll eventually pick up a couple 20ft rolls of that garbage and we’ll put it atop all the cattle panels when we get the new raise bed done and enclosed. I’m hoping to do some sort of funky pvc pipe strapped to cattle panel set ontop of a piece of rebar rammed into the ground fencing strategy for these cattle panels so we can take them down and get them out of the way when we are gardening that area and the girls aren’t ranging in that bed.

More news from way back in January…EGGS! Very shortly after solstace the girls started delivering their gifts again. Dahl was back to a steady egg a day and Blume and Cleary would usually round out the day with a second or third egg. Most of which have been dutifully recorded in our new “egg log” (which actually, has already been usurped by a “permaculture diary” that Maya bought, but way back in January it was just a plain old “egg log”. Unfortunately, the egg train slowed down a bit when Dahl (the red Arucana) decided to get broody on us a few weeks ago. We don’t have a rooster and have no intention of adding a chicken this year, so the poor girl spends most of her time sitting on a bunch of nothing. I miss seeing her in her chicken yard, even if she is an asshole bully to the other two girls on a pretty regular basis. Hopefully she’ll break brood soon and get our egg production back up to an average of around 2 a day.

And, because I just never get sick of this photo (taken by Maya), here is a mug shot of the escapee for ya:

I'm Breakin' Out Of This Joint! You with me or against me?

I'm Breakin' Out Of This Joint!You with me, or against me?

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Raindrops keep falling on my head… https://www.garydigs.com/2009/01/17/raindrops-keep-falling-on-my-head/ https://www.garydigs.com/2009/01/17/raindrops-keep-falling-on-my-head/#respond Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:40:40 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=293 but only in the left half of our front yard. Minor freak out this afternoon when I stepped out front to check the mail (after having been in the backyard for a bit) and found the left half of the front yard damp and rain drops falling solely in that half of the yard. It continues at this moment, and has been going for about an hour or so. A little bit freaky, but there seems to be a logical explanation.

We have 2 trees out front, a Crimson Maple (which of course is bare this time of year) and a very tall Douglas Fir. The maple is about 50 years old (I met the guy that planted it a couple of years ago when they stopped by to see their first house (the lived here from ’55-’59). The fir was planted sometime after that, but probably not long after that given the height on it. Well, it seems the conditions were just right today for a small rain storm just around the fir. Low clouds and fog, just low enough not to condense about the neighbor’s shorter conifer, but low enough to condense (heavily) on the needles of our fir.

And, voila, rain of sorts in that half of the yard. I tried to take some pictures, but I really wasn’t able to capture what was going on. So, since Maya is visiting her grandparents this weekend and I am here alone (not really alone per sé, after all, I’m here with Huxley, Hemmingway, Nin and the chickens, unfortunately Bukowski seems to have found another home and only comes by every several days or so), anyway I wanted a human witness to the event, so my friend J. of the JnX crew a few blocks away swung by to see our little storm and shot the breeze for a spell.

That’s what I’ve got for now, our private rain storm, there is plenty more and I apologize for the sheer laziness that has produced so little content as of late (but, as it stands, I am the Lazy B I guess). I should take this time to share all the news about rats, eggs, and escapees, but I think I’m just going to make a placeholder for it for now and write at length on that topic in the future.

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She finds the coolest things… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/12/17/she-finds-the-coolest-things/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/12/17/she-finds-the-coolest-things/#respond Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:33:30 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=290 Well, it wasn’t her own doing this time, but rather our friend Y. with all the many nicknames (mentioned here: Extravagance…with a little help from my friends…) sent Maya a YouTube video that you have to watch. This is, as Maya put it, A Beautiful Thing.

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On the whole… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/12/14/on-the-whole/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/12/14/on-the-whole/#respond Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:59:10 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=284 I suck…

because I haven’t writen a well thought out post in quite a while. My Dad was in town over Thanksgiving weekend, and that was a blast. It’s the first time he has made it out here from Dead Rock, MT since we bought the house, so it was a long anticipated visit. He spent some much needed quality time on the couch with his grand-puppy (Huxley) and met his grand-chickens (the girls) for the first time. We went to the Boeing Museum of Flight and to the EMP together which were both pretty cool. We thoroughly enjoyed an outstanding Philipino dinner at Kawali Grill (just south of Columbia City proper) the night before he left (oh dear oh my, can you say lumpia and crispy pork belly?), and then I spent Sunday afternoon and evening playing catch-up on the work for the week, but it was well worth it.

I also ran across this recently: www.lincvolt.com which is just super cool. If they can currently get of 60 mph out of this beautiful heavy old son of a … well, there’s hope for a much more efficient F250 somewhere in the future (which I’ll be able to afford a decade and a half after it comes out, or when I win the lottery).

In other news…well, I’m kind of ashamed to say it, but I have a MySpace page. Let me explain…

I originally set it up just to poke around at their API, since I occassionally see Craigslist gigs for developing MySpace and FaceBook apps. I figured it was worth at least checking out to get an idea as to whether or not this is something I might pursue in a time of need (which fortunately hasn’t arrived yet). Well, Maya has a MySpace page and keeps in touch with a friend of hers in Louisiana via that to some degree and I added this friend of Maya’s to my friends on MySpace. Little did I know I would soon be invited to join here Mob as part of a game called, well of course, Mobsters, and now I have found an inappropriate venue for idle time that feeds my very minor case of OCD quite well. So, some of my time has fallen into this black hole of mild entertainment value (there is a touch of strategy to the game, but it is basically just a series of apparently unending levels of acquisition and whacking other mobsters). Anyway, I figured I better out myself over this whole MySpace thing before someone else does. I’m on FaceBook too, which has actually been pretty nice as I have gotten some updates on very old friends and acquaintences from many various chapters in my life…I look down the list and realize it truly has been a long strange trip…

Also in the past few weeks I developed a crush on Annie of at Edifice Rex when she posted this splendid rant about consumer culture on the heels of yet another Black Friday trampling at a stinking WalMart. If you are so eager to get into a WalMart that you are willing to sacrifice someone else’s life to celebrate the birth of you’re stinking christ, well you probably deserve a ong painful crucifixion of your own, and if your god does exist I hope he punishes you forthrightly for your trespasses. I suspect I’ll have to make a bumper sticker for this one…”Jesus cries everytime you trample a WalMart employee to celebrate his birthday…“, you heard it here first, but I’ll probably have to take the WalMart part out to avoid a lawsuit (even though I should be covered under Fair Use for both parody and political speech, but hey, given the current supreme court line up, why risk it).

That’s not everything there is to say right now, but at least it is something, and I’ll jump back when my thoughts are a bit more orderly…

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Credit where credit is due… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/16/credit-where-credit-is-due/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/16/credit-where-credit-is-due/#respond Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:45:32 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=279  I’ve gotta give props (no pun intended) to Keith Olbermann (who generally just irritates me as much as any of the rest of his ilk on the 24 hour news cycle) for the following:

 

Generally, I tend to think the more effective (and more accurate) tact is that in a supposedly “free” secular country “marriage” in and of itself has no place in government. All government recognized unions should be by definition “civil unions” and “marriage” can stay in the churches. The short of it in my view is that the government doesn’t really have any business mucking around in our bedrooms, but if it is going to, then in order to preserve the supposed separation of church and state, then the government needs to recognize consentual unions amongst any given pair or group of adult citizens.

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“Lookin’ for a Leader” election day freak out… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/04/lookin-for-a-leader-election-day-freak-out/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/04/lookin-for-a-leader-election-day-freak-out/#respond Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:09:04 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=269 first, you have to know that there are 2,532 songs on my iPod (which generally stays in my truck unless I buy or import some songs and need to sync up). You should also know I am a little bit obsessive about keeping it on “Shuffle All”. I enjoy my music, all of it, and I like the random surprises the “Shuffle All” provides.

Another important tidbit to keep this story in perspective is that my polling place is only about 10 blocks away from my house, so it is about a 2 minute drive over there (yeah, I drove, the truck over there…it is cold and wet, I wanted to swing by the espresso stand on my way home, and I’m a carbon nuetral driver with 99.9% bio-diesel in the F250).

So, there is only really time for a single song between here and my polling location, so my eyes started getting really moist when my iPod fortuitously and at random decided to play Neil Young – Lookin’ for a Leader as I drove away from the house. I should also mention I don’t “Rate” my songs, I don’t want to skew the randomness of my musical experience. I bought the song back in November of 2006, and I only recall it coming up on shuffle a couple of times since then, so I suppose it was about due.

I guess there still is some magic in the day-to-day, I sometimes forget that these days since it doesn’t seem to present itself with the same frequency it did when I was younger. Rationally speaking, that song is going to play about once every 2,532 times I go to vote…odds like that aren’t incredibly comforting to the consumate atheist…but, I’ve never said there aren’t unknowns, just that the notion of omnipotent hate mongering phantoms and a “one true religion” that sentences people to eternal damnation for various trivial infractions and moral disagreements seems pretty silly…

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Today I’m so…. https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/03/today-im-so/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/11/03/today-im-so/#respond Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:16:39 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=264 pre-occuppied with tomorrow that I can hardly stand today…

That’s all I’ve got for now, and tomorrow I will be stationed in front of the TV and the ol’ interweb until the cows come home…

Ok, can’t resist, saw this on FiveThrityEight.com

“And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”

Jack Kerouac — On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/chicago-tomorrow.html

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The cat came back… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/25/the-cat-came-back/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/25/the-cat-came-back/#respond Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:58:12 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=258 6 days later???

Strange that right after we finally posted signs that Bukowski waltzed in the house looking for dinner. Perhaps he can read…

Or, he got himself trapped in someone’s shed or garage…

Or, he has been in someone’s house and instead of calling they just let him go…which is disappointing, but we were sure excited to see him stroll in through the cat door and head up stairs to eat. He spent some time napping on the bed, and then he was off again. He came home in pretty good shape with the exception of a fairly gnarly, but in the process of healing, scab on the top of his back that looks like he has repeated sqeezed under something very tight and rough.

He wasn’t out front this morning waiting for some lap time, but that was a fairly recent phenomena anyway. We have grown accustomed to him carousing for a day or two and rolling back in to dine, but 6 days means he must have some other place, or something…I’m kind of baffled actually, so forgive the rambling, I hope we see him sometime today as well.

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It’s the not knowing… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/23/its-the-not-knowing/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/23/its-the-not-knowing/#respond Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:32:04 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=250 a cliché, but “clichés, good ways, to say what you mean, mean what you say…” (Jimmy Buffet, Clichés, Havana Daydreamin’).

It seems we can’t get through a month without a little drama and disaster around here. Bukowski the cat has now gone missing. We last saw him on Sunday night. Historically this has not been unusual for him. I have often suspected he has an alternate home he visits, but as of today (Thursday) this is the longest he has been gone since he first showed up filthy injured stinking intact and feisty in our driveway. And throughout the summer he has been reliably present in the morning and evening for some quality lap time and hard-core cuddling just about every day.

So, today I make signs (we conveniently have lots of plastic slip covers for lost/found pets since we have the good fortune of encountering every stray wondering in the road for which we have to seek an owner), and hopefully our Bukowski cat is curled up in front of someone’s fireplace living it up on tuna and sardines somewhere… of course, as previously mentioned, it’s the not knowing that sets me spinning…

a lover, but a fighter (and a bit of a lap cat)

a lover, but a fighter (and a bit of a lap cat)

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Ummm…I almost wet myself… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/19/ummmi-almost-wet-myself/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/19/ummmi-almost-wet-myself/#respond Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:11:59 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=248 First, you must follow this link.

and a very special thanks to M&M Incremental Updates for making my Sunday morning with that link.

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This just in… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/16/this-just-in/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/16/this-just-in/#respond Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:42:45 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=245 Maya has written about and posted pictures of the spoiled girls of the house…

You must visit here.

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A word or two about Joe the Plumber… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/16/a-word-or-two-about-joe-the-plumber/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/16/a-word-or-two-about-joe-the-plumber/#respond Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:02:45 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=241 2008-10-18 Update on Joe (not really Joe and not a licensed plumber).

I was reluctant to write this post. I’m not 100% sure why, but I think it might be because I hate to memorialize what I think was one of Barack Obama’s greatest gaffes through the debates. I just don’t think he addressed this Joe the Plumber nonsense directly enough…

McCain tried to make Joe the Plumber sound like Joe Sixpack, but the fatal flaw that Obama failed to call out was that Joe Sixpack isn’t generally contemplating BUYING HIS EMPLOYER! Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Joe the Plumber. I know that since I started working for myself I feel a lot fewer stresses in some areas of my life (a considerable number of additional stresses in others given the current economic climate), but really…

Cut me a break… Barack should have addressed this head on. I just wish he would have said, “Joe, I’m very happy you have worked hard and put yourself into a position to consider BUYING YOUR EMPLOYER, but this is not the position that the majority of American’s are in, and we need to shore up the vast majority of small business that make less that a quarter of million dollars a year and we need to come together to help the vast majority of Americans who have not had the same good fortune.”

We’re all supposed to empathize with the guy because he has to reconsider BUYING HIS EMPLOYER because there may be negative tax consequences should he do that???? WTF? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all in the position to consider buying out our employer. Wouldn’t it be nice if those guys on the picket lines at Boeing could have an influential ownership interest in the company? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had the capital to take a DIRECT ownership interest in the engines of the economy? Call me an anarcho-syndicalist if you’d like, but I think that would solve several serious problems with the labor/industry relationship in this country. If the CEO could be fired by the employees when he chose to line his pockets with nice warm $100 bills rather than seriously propelling the company he leads into sustainable innovative endeavors, well, perhaps he would have an interest in actually helping the company succeed rather than driving it into the ground and walking away with an $8 million severence package.

Does the government need to oil the wheels of the economy? Yes. Can the government do this effectively by generically decreasing the taxes of the wealthiest citizens? Hell No! That doesn’t work. That’s Bush’s mode of operation and it brought us to this tragic point of overwhelming deficits and near financial ruin. Only very narrowly and carefully targeted incetives to business can truly develop jobs and the economy. As I recall this is part of why we were prosperous (beyond the bubble) during the Clinton years. Targeted incentives to the high tech industry, not across the board tax cuts for corporations, will rebuild this country’s economic infrastructure.

Anyway, the short of it is that at present Joe the Plumber will NOT see his taxes increase under Obama’s tax plan. And quite frankly, if Joe’s taxes will increase if he BUYS HIS EMPLOYER and has NET profits over a quarter of a million dollars ($250,000.00, write that down to get a feel for it), then he certainly has enough dough to sustain a tax increase. How many times does Barack Obama have to explain that his tax plan won’t impact the majority of us making a reasonable living wage (though $250,000.00 a year is clearly well above a living wage)?

I should mention it is a little bit difficult to type with the old man on my lap, but he’s happier there, so again, forgive the typos…

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The cat is officially out of the bag… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/13/the-cat-is-officially-out-of-the-bag/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/13/the-cat-is-officially-out-of-the-bag/#respond Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:41:31 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=233 The Republican Party has succeeded in energizing its base, and now we know who that base is…

McCain struggles against his base

Of course, he could have done a better job of addressing the blantant racism and fear mongering, but then he would lose the election for certain.

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Concrete buffet and I keep gettin’ a little teary eyed… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/11/concrete-buffet-and-i-keep-gettin-a-little-teary-eyed/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/11/concrete-buffet-and-i-keep-gettin-a-little-teary-eyed/#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:01:15 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=224 Blume layed what could have possibly been the cutest egg in the history of chickenkind…however, it fell out of my pocket as I was creating the concrete buffet and fractured beyond salvage before anyone but I could see it in all its overwhelming adorableness. The egg was even smaller than usual, quite squat and exceptionally pointy. I wish you could have seen it.

What is the concrete buffet? Well, in one of those rare moments of pure genius that come along every so often, I put several chunks of broken sidewalk and a couple of small logs into the chicken pen. Every couple of weeks (give or a take a week) I expose a bounty of insect and worm deliciousness for the girls to enjoy by moving the objects around in the pen.  The girls now completely comprehend this ritual and follow me around from buffet to buffet to peck up the protrien treats each slab and log keeps hidden until I’m ready to release the next concrete buffet. Now, I just need to remember not to engage in this activity when there is an egg in my shirt pocket…next time I’ll do better, I swear.

Last night and tonight This American Life has been playing their 2 hour pledge drive special, and they keep playing a segment from Fresh Air where Terry Gross interviewed Max Kennedy (the son of Bobby Kennedy who was 3 years old when the last best presidential candidate was shot). I am too young to have any direct experience with the short lives and times of JFK and RFK. I’m realistic enought to know that a decent portion of their lives and the JFK administration have romaticized. I also know that this does not matter much, since in time the romanticization has become the reality when any of us (even generations later) reflect on the very critical moments in our history into which these two brothers were injected. The Terry Gross interview glances up against one such critical moment in our history when Max reads the words his father delivered to a significantly African-American audience in the poor section of Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. The audience had not yet received the news (this was before text messaging mind you), and so it was thrust upon the young white Bobby Kennedy to notify the crowd of the comission of this awful act that could have easily threatened the very fabric of the nation. Of course, there probably wasn’t any other young white guy in the country better situated tha Bobby given the loss of his brother under similar circumstance and the contributions both of them eventually made to the civil rights movement. In addition to these circumstantial advantages, Bobby Kennedy was just plain smart enough and genuinely concerned enough about the well being of the country (and all of its citizens) to deliver exactly the correct message to a justifiably shocked, hurt, and angry crowd…

and, everytime I hear this speech, my eyes get watery and I tremble a bit, and long for a politics of intelligence and care rather than a politics of fear, deciet, pettiness, and ignorance. I long for leaders that lead and educate as they lead, rather than fear mongering zealots that simply attempt to capitalize on the ignorance and narrow mindedness of their constituents.

This year’s election will be important in so many ways for me. This country has the opportunity to decide in a very clear way what our priorities are for leadership. Suffice it to say American already broke my heart in November of 2004, and if this country continues to choose ignorance over intelligence, and hate over unity, and theocracy over democracy, and war over peace, bombs over diplomacy, and childishness over maturity (which I know sounds odd given the relative ages of the tops of the tickets, but I think we have all seen some genuinely middle schoolish behavior out of the campaign with the eldest statesmen on the ticket), etc…I may be forced to look more closely at land in Costa Rica…because a country without a standing army that clears out its entire government (all branches) every eight years sounds better and better every day.

If you’re reading this and you don’t feel like you know which ticket stands for what, then you really have to look more closely at the underlying principles driving each ticket’s decisions. If you are reading this and you haven’t every really thought about whether you want a secular government or a theocracy, please think about it for a bit, and try to understand that just because your religion feels a certain way about a topic doesn’t nescessarily mean that view should be enforced by the federal government. There are very important decisions to be made this year, and I’m just begging you America, please, please, please don’t force me to view you with simple pity and disdain, because if you choose the path of fear and hate rather than the path of hope and unity, I’ll have no choice but to write you all off as a bunch of petty ignorant beasts. I’m trying desperately one more time to believe in you, but I’m going to have to say three strikes will do it. Faith is for the intellectually lazy in my opinion, so I really need some strong evidence against the assertion that this country has fallen entirely into the hands of idiots…please, please, please give me some shred of evidence this year that there is in fact hope for us a country to work our way back to the secular ideals of freedom our founding fathers originally and idealistically proposed long before they could ever actually be realized in the policy of the day…these ideals have never been closer at hand, and they are under seige today in the rhetoric of divisiveness eminating from particular candidates and their followers…we have far too often strayed very far away from those ideals with internment camps, the house committee on unamerican activities, the anti-sedition acts, the USA Patriot act and oh so many other moments where simple fear took hold over reason and we gave ourselves over to hate…

America, when will you be angelic…

 

*my personal favorite recording of America by Allen Ginsberg is from The Beat Generation. Allen reads a much longer (and notably sillier) version in this discontinued disc set Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs.

**At this exact moment I can’t re-read this, forgive the typos and potentially overly vitriolic tone until I get back to take another look and exact a more precise level of vitriol appropriate to my actual position.

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C is for Cookie…. https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/09/c-isssss-for-cookie/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/09/c-isssss-for-cookie/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:51:11 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=217 and yes, that is good enough for me.

So, generally, I have to admit…I don’t cook. I suck at it, I don’t enjoy it, I don’t have the motor skills nor memory to keep several things going all at once in the kitchen and quickly get overwhelmed by the simple tasks in front of me. I’m sure there is prescription medication that could help me with this issue, but for now I muddle along and stay generally in charge of “dinners out”.

However, once in a very blue moon, I bake something really simple…cookies (well, once I baked something out of a box and now I can’t recall what it was, some kind of snack bar from a packaged foods company that starts with a K and has a name sounding similar to the clown on the Simpson’s). Last night the moon was as blue as it can get, and I made some cookies (with some help from Maya’s expert eye along the way).

I started with the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Easy Cookies. My hope was that this site would be geared toward children. If it were, then there was some hope I could get through the cookies without showering Maya with too many stupid questions. The very second instruction in the “easy cookies” recipe baffled me and sent me to google to do some research.

“Cream the butter and both sugars”

A concept totally lost on me, but I found some overly helpful and frightening advice at baking911.com. Maya told me most cooking sites seem to be designed to keep you out of the kitchen, and she may be correct. You have no idea how I fretted about the this process prior to Maya telling me to mostly ignore it. I even almost backed out of making the cookies entirely, but since I had mentioned them earlier in the day and Maya said she was already looking forward to them, retreat was not an option. Really, the tone of this stuff had me thinking we would need to rent a laboratory up at the University just to get the correct conditions for this highly technical creaming process. I suspected we might need to invest in some additional tools, or perhaps we should hire the work out to an expert. Fortunately, Maya put my fears at ease, and for the most part, the Kitchenaid Mixer did all the work.

Now, I can’t just make chocolate chip cookies, what fun would that be. Again, Maya helped me out here by telling me that the quatity of chocolate chips recommended by the recipe would leave us with a mess (it seems like all of the recipe was halved, except the chocolate chips). I figured I’d grab whatever leftover nuts, or what not, we had in the cabinet…but the almonds were raw and apparently someone (it was me) ate all of the hazzlenuts that were in an already open bag I had seen in there previously. BUT, I found an open bag of sweetened coconut and some mesolithic Almond extract to add with half as many chocolate chips as were recommended by the recipe.

I am generally in favor of a hint of almond in my snacks. I like Almond in my lattes and many years ago (last time I made cookies) I made peanut butter cookies, BUT not peanut butter cookies, because I used Almond Butter. The result…Hard, Flat, Greasy and FANTASTIC almond snacks. I highly recommend that you try it with your favorite peanut butter cookie recipe, but be forwarned, your cross-hatches on the top will be vaporized in the cooking process. I don’t know the science here, but you have been warned, they will be hard, crispy, flat and delicious.

Which reminds me of a funny story not at all related to the cookies I made last night, so let’s digress from the topic at hand for just a moment…

Way back in the mid-90’s (when the biggest crime our president commited was perjury regarding a blow-job, ahh the good old days) I provided telephone techinical support for Adobe PageMaker 4,5, and 6. If at that time you typed in “hard and greasy” into the knowledgebase you would get an article that contained corrections for the cookie recipe that came as part of the recipe card templates for PageMaker 4. I think the title of the article was “PageMaker 4 cookies are hard and greasy”. I couldn’t find any quick references to this little bit of publishing software history out there on the net, so I thought I’d mention it and hope I’m not violating any NDA I signed last century. Speaking of funny publishing software history stories, as I recall one of the senior techs told me that the first PageMaker 4 release would anounce that “The Space Needle Could Not Be Found” when you first launched it because the default printer at the old Aldus building used to be called “Space Needle” and that setting slipped into the final build. I have no direct experience with that one, but as I recall it was in the database at the time as well.

So, back to the topic at hand, the cookies from last night. It all went very smoothly with Maya’s assistance, and in the end the cookies were really delicious. The recipe made just under a dozen of them (wouild have been a dozen, but some of my cookie wads were bigger than others). So, take the recipe from the website above, add a healthy dash of Almond Extract and about 3/8th of a cup of sweetened shredded coconut and about half the chocolate chips they recommend, and enjoy…

In completely unrelated news…I burned some idle cycles today adding the Amazon link feature to the “Stray Random Quotes” plugin for WordPress. I don’t do PHP, so this was good little project to start dipping my toes into it. I imagine with the economy going the way it is the big MS based projects might run a little thin, so I getter get on the open source stuff to some extent. This was a quick and dirty modification of the existing script to add a spot for my associate id and the ASIN of the product associated with the source of the quote. No where near polished enough to distribute or even recommend as an add on to the current plugin, but it is serving my purposes, so I’m happy with it.

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Mess ‘o beans, happy chickens, and an update on the old man… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/05/mess-o-beans-happy-chickens-and-an-update-on-the-old-man/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/05/mess-o-beans-happy-chickens-and-an-update-on-the-old-man/#respond Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:26:41 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=182 No, really, a mess of beans. Yesterday’s gusts up to 40 mph took out our half-ass bean trellis yesterday (not surprising, I suspected the stinking Skyway winds would take their toll on it eventually). As an aside, one of the things I initially loved about Seattle was how infrequently we experienced hellish winds (unlike my home town where children learn ealy how to walk with a lean into the semi-permanent wind). Low and behold, however, once I left downtown, I think I managed to move to one of the absolutely windiest outposts of the city (and we aren’t really in Seattle, though we have a Seattle address, we live in a lawless nether-world known as “unincorporated King County”).

The aftermath of the aftermath of the trellis collapse

The aftermath of the aftermath of the trellis collapse

Since the bean trellis toppled dramatically yesterday (sorry I don’t have pictures, I really suck at running for the camera to document the minutae of daily disasters, I’ll get better…I swear…), we cleared out the vines and made a final harvest of green beans and green bean seeds, and then fenced off the back end of the garden so that the girls could have at that patch of ground. Blume, the littlest of them all, immediately snagged a worm almost as long as she is tall, and the pecking, scratching, and cooing continues at this moment. The girls will do their land clearing dirt turning weed eating magic on this patch of earth and it should be ready for some sort of fall cover crop in no time at all.

The girls at work...clearing land and turning refuse into delicious eggs...

The girls at work...clearing land and turning refuse into delicious eggs...

Also, we took Hemmy to the vet for a followup (see previous entries for details on his trevails), and aside from the blindness he is doing really well and can eat whatever he likes. The vet recommended we have a kitty opthamologist take a gander at his eyes, so we’re looking into that this week. Despite the blindness, he is getting a little bit too bold for his own good. He jumped up ONTO the child/doggy gate we use to keep him in my office. My office has no door and is one wall shy of being a “room”, but sits at the top of the stairs across from our bedroom appropriately isolated from public view. Someday, perhaps, when you and I have developed a close enough relationship, I might let you see the hell hole of boxes, inoperable equipment, and construction supplies in which I spend most my days.

Additionally, we went over to J&X’s place last night for a fantastic dinner of seafood linguini prepared by J from Crab and Halibut he brought back from fishing in Alaska this summer (commercial fishing in Alaska that is, not to be confused with a 3 month vacation to drink beer with buddies while hanging a line over the side, although sometimes J’s stories make it sound strikingly similar to such an endeavor). Unbeknownst to us, our first exposure to “Guitar Hero III” layed in wait for us after dinner, which was entertaining enough, but made my hands hurt after a while. Anyway, the point of this degression is that we came home to find Hemmy had jumped the fence/gate thingy at some point and was relaxing on the bed when Maya came up to give him his half-pill. As blind as he is, he did manage to find his old food dish on top of my dresser (there to keep Huxley out of it) and managed to knock it off the edge and all over the bedroom floor. Ahh, nothing like making a late night a bit later with messes to rectify upon arrival.

So, there you have a fairly pedestrian and likely boring overview of Sunday morning here at the B-Bar-Lazy-B. I have some work to do for the Danes today since they get into the office about midnight our time and I didn’t quite get it done on Friday since we were finally finishing the duct work that afternoon (the odyssey this became will eventually be documented here).

I should probably also go see what Maya is up to, she keeps coming in and out of the house…she’s in land clearing mode today and I had to beg and plead that she let the tomatillos run their course. We had several “volunteer” tomatillos this year (which was a lucky break with the cold spring we couldn’t find starts), and I maintain that the only reason they are there is because of our sluggish and delayed garden clearing of last year (which I’m pretty sure didn’t happen until well into November, and initiated my new “wear long underwear from November through March” policy (for those that know I’m originally from Montana, 3 short years in Honolulu drained me entirely of all tolerance for weather below 50F and now I get grouchy when my toes get cold, and the nasty wet cold we have out here in the soggy lands drills right down to my bones in a much more insidious and painful way than the dry frigid temps of the island of Montana).

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The old man and the see… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/the-old-man-and-the-see/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/the-old-man-and-the-see/#respond Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:53:33 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=136 This post is long overdue…

As you might recall, August started off with a bang, and not the bang for which we were hoping. I mentioned the middle of the night trip to the emergency vet with Hemingway in this earlier post. Well, he improved somewhat through August, but never regained vision in his left eye. The diagnosis was that he either suffered a head trauma or had a tumor. We could find out if he had a tumor by seeing a kitty nuerologist and having a kitty MRI which could conclude that he needed kitty brain surgery. We contemplated this deeply, and concluded that all of that misery to marginally extend Hemingway’s time with us would probably be motivated more by selfishness than by a genuine interest in his quality of life…debatable I admit, but this is our conclusion.

Then came September, which openned up with Hemingway disappearing. I had contemplated this possibility as well. Would he run off to die and leave a big gaping hole at the end of his story and many days of fretting in between? Hemingway at one time was an apartment cat, but once he got a taste of the inside/outside life he genuinely loved it. However, he almost never leaves the immediate vicinity of the house, so his disappearance did not bode well. Nin will often disappear for a couple of days if, for example, children are present. But, she doesn’t totally disappear, she sneaks in at night and then makes herself scarce during the day. Hemingway has never been more than a call of his name away, so we worried, and worried early. We took Huxley for a walk and didn’t see any signs of our poor old man. Two days passed…and we were pretty convinced he was curled up dead in shrub somewhere…I tried to hold out hope that someone took him in, or something, the open ended disappearance ached a dull and deep and frustrating ache…

On the second day of his disappearance, we got a call from the animal shelter, but the news wasn’t very good. They had been called to pick up Hemingway, but he was profoundly weak and seriously dehydrated. They were able to contact us because yes, we had microchips implanted in our animals. I have become a strong advocate of this, particularly for cats since keeping a collar on them is nearly impossible (and a bit dangerous). Admittedly, if Huxley had been chipped we wouldn’t have him now, but given his abandonment and the way he acts around the broom, his previous owners probably didn’t care much about (or possibly were even the architects of) his disappearance. Anyway, what I’m saying is, if you give a shit about your animal, get them chipped.

So, another of the many advantages of working for myself from home is that I was able to immediately take off for the animal shelter to transport him to our vet. The King County Animal Shelter is desperately under-funded and over-extended, which just amplifies my great appreciation for the fact that they administered sub-q fluids and drew blood for tests at no charge prior to my arrival to pick up Hemingway. We don’t know what caused him to disappear since aside from the blindness in one eye he had seemed to have recovered from his earlier issue, but it took a week at the vet to get him healthy enough to bring home. Profoundly weak, potassium poor, dehydrated and potentially suffering from both urinary and brain stem infections.

Hemingway is stronger now, but completely blind, after about 2 weeks at home. For the first time ever he is eating wet food (only took a couple of weeks of hand feeding with a syringe to get him accustomed to it). Because Nin decided she was queen of the roost, the stairs are still too dangerous for weakened cat, and don’t exactly know how the other two animals will behave with the blind old man…Hemingway is living primarily in my office. He is a little bit prone to getting trapped in tight spaces if left entirely to his own devices, so for the time being I put him in the very large dog crate at night. He’s not thrilled about the situation, but I wouldn’t be either if I suddenly went blind at about age 70. It would be very, very difficult to euthenize him at this point since aside from the blindness he does of some quality of life. We are still giving him antibiotics for about another week. One half a pill every twelve hours, and each day he gets a little bit better at fighting us and hiding it in his mouth only to spit it out after we are done. His claws are starting to get sharp again. In fact just today he started sharpening them on a cardboard box in my office again. Another sign he is returning to some level of normal. Still, I worry that he seems to be urinating more than he is drinking, but then, so do I…

An old picture of Camus the cat taking a nap on our dear old man...

An old picture of Camus the cat taking a nap on our dear old man...

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I think I’m in love… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/i-think-im-in-love/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/i-think-im-in-love/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:54:11 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=163 with flexible insulating ducting…

The splendor of the flexible insulated ducting...so beautiful...so charming

The splendor of the flexible insulated ducting...so beautiful...so charming

This project finally got started, as most do, fairly unintentionally and following lengthy internal debates about the relative merits of the project in contrast to the associated risks and hassles (which, as usual, were underestimated). I paid a routine visit to the crawlspace in the spring following the historic downpours experienced throughout western Washingtion over the winter (the brunt of the rain hit a couple hours south of here in the Centralia area, but the big sog didn’t spare us entirely). Although we suffered no where near the catastrophic rains that hit south of here, our neighbor 2 doors down has a basement and was forced to occupy a hotel for a while after the December storms caused flooding in her home.

During our neighbor’s hotel hiatus we had the pleasure of watching after Tex, her ancient Shitsu (I think he is about 2 or 3 hundred years old). I’ll avoid a lengthy digression into the entertainment value of Tex, but I happened to buy some brand new Car Harts around this time and evidently they were tasty since in the middle of a dinner party Tex decided the best thing in the world was feverishly licking my pant leg (and he would not stop, which our guests found hugely entertaining, where I did not so much after about an half an hour of continuously being licked and changed my trousers which strangely brought the licking to a halt).

Tex, the ancient manic pant licking shitsu

Tex, the ancient manic pant licking shitsu

Anyway, when I got down into the dingy hell hole that is our crawlspace during the aforementioned spring spelunking, I discovered (much to my dismay) a small pondish lake had formed just under the living room coalescing on top of the few solid portions of the mostly shredded vapor barrier.

PANIC!

We have fairly serious water fears around here, and someday I’ll relate the entire story about the household flood that occurred 4 days after we closed on the house (as a result of an overzealous water department ignoring a specific request to NOT turn on the water while we were out of town). Ok, so the question becomes, is this water here because our house sits in a hole and the earth around us is simply saturated OR is this somehow related to the replumbing that we had done back in October??? After calling upon Maya to run around the house and turn on every water fixture one at a time so I could listen and watch intently for any plumbing leaks (thinking the whole time, if this is a plumbing leak why is it under the living room, there is no plumbing here…grrr…hmmm….arggg).

Ok, as best as we could tell there is no plumbing issue, so this is most likely saturated earth acting in concert with the wholly inadequate vapor barrier and poor air circualtion resulting from the wholly inadequate crawlspace venting covered by stinking vinyl siding with silly little air louvres molded into the siding (and perhaps augmented by increased water volumes resulting from the curtailing of the roots of the 50 year old crimson maple that was required for the replacement of the water service from the street to the house). Well, that was my story, and I decided to hope for the best and stick to that assumption about the source of the water. I also decided to remove a significant portion of the remaining vapor barrier to allow the water to soak into the earth since I did not want to belly crawl across the pondish lake to check and clear the crawlspace vent at that exact moment. I also made the decision to return to the crawlspace later in the summer and assess the pondish lake again at that time (and to be fully prepared with some sort of water removal apparatus to clear the pond as needed so as to allow somewhat dry access over to the crawlspace vent if needed). Just another item to add to the list of about 18 things that need to be done in the crawlspace. And so I pulled myself out of that nasty underworld, covered the access with the beautiful hatch cover I had made the previous year to match the flooring (and to replace the piece of 3/4″ ply that didn’t really cover the access entirely anyway), and returned the entire contents of the closet under the stairs to its usual location immediately over and completely obstructing the access to the crawlspace.

Oooo pretty...with handles too...

Oooo pretty...with handles too...

This action (the clearing of the closet), in and of itself, is probably the greatest hinderance to activity in the crawlspace. Not to diminish the generally nastiness of the place, but the fact that in order to get down there we have to move this bevy of bizarre objects and shelving out of the closet under the stairs into the blue room just to get down there presents enough of an initial hassle to make my visits less frequent than perhaps they should be. And thus, summer became fall (or so Maya claims, I’ve been trying to hold out for summer until November, but the past couple of days have dashed my hopes), and I did not find a cheap enough sump pump close enough to home on Craig’s List throughout my summer searches.

The blue room full of crap from the closet...our primary obstacle to crawlspace visits

The blue room full of crap from the closet...our primary obstacle to crawlspace visits

However, a few weeks ago, J (of J&X, a friend of mine since High School that now lives only a few blocks away and fishes for salmon in Alaska during the summer) had come back from Alaska fishing and happened to be heading back up to Bellingham to work on the boat for the week prior to starting their fall fishing here in the Puget Sound. In a minor stroke of genius I remembered to ask if they happened to have a 110v sump I could borrow over the following weekend (which would at long last provide the required force to inspire me back into the crawlspace for the long overdue checkup on the pondish lake). Sweet victory! They did in fact have a 110v sump pump I could borrow (thereby avoiding some freakish car battery jumper cable Rube Goldberg style setup for a 12v marine pump). I spent the following week sizing up tough for the journey under the house…choosing a sacrificial shirt…contemplating the exact pumping strategy…hoping for the best…expecting the worst…and last, but of course not least, on Friday I cleared the closet in preparation for the descent…

Into the abyss...

Into the abyss...

 J. came through with the pump and all the pieces were in place to begin the crawlspace drainage and assessment initiative…I dutifully got the pump ready to go and Maya helped me get the hose strung from the pump at the crawlspace access out to one of the rain barrels by the back door. The pump didn’t have an on/off switch so I tied the cords together to keep the plugs in close proximity to each other to start it up once I got it into position in the center of the pondish lake and then I descended…

The heart of darkness...

The heart of darkness...

Low and behold the summer sunshine had done the job. No standing water at all, although the ground itself under the livingroom was still pretty damp. A plethora of factors converge to explain the semi-permanent dampness in this area. Several of these factors have already been mentioned above. Some other issues include the fact that this is the side of the house where the downspouts from the gutters are located. This side also borders the concrete driveway which sits about a foot above the ground (like I said, our house sits in a hole, I have no idea what they were thinking back in 1944 when they set us and our neighbor to the northeast below the street level). Well, hmmm…the anti-climax drove me into a momentary stupor (of a couple of hours) . What do I do now? We’ve moved all that crap into the blue room, the access is open, I’ve sullied my clothes…I decided to chain smoke for a while and mull over the potential items on the list of 18 or so that needed to be done down there.

More of the same...in the other direction...

More of the same...in the other direction...

First, I decided to inspect and clear (to the best of my ability) the crawlspace vents for improved airflow. I was able to immediately create a breeze by jamming a long screwdriver through the incredibly gappy loose wire mesh on the vent cover and then through the narrow louvre on the vinyl siding. Cleared all the cobwebs, but a lot of the obstruction was actually on the outside between the siding and the vent, so that became a project for another day to be approached from the exterior of the house now that I confirmed each of the louvred areas did in fact have a vent associated with it (I had my doubts since I hadn’t really previously tucked my head through the cobwebs into the space between the joists and above the concrete to see each of the vents). After that, I decided to chain smoke a little bit more and contemplate my next move (still a bit dumbfounded by the anti-climax, I set about putting away all the pumping supplies and coiled up the hose, acknowledging the end of any person powered watering requirements for the season). I started to contemplate the unthinkable, and tried some internet research to support my fretting, worrying, and strategizing…could we, should we…hmmm…better smoke another cigarette in the sun…

As I was soaking up the rays (well, not really, I was in full crawlspace battle regalia and only my face and hands could receive the goodness of the sun), another painful example of the stunning synergy of mind that occassionally happens around here was realized when Maya pre-emptively struck with the question: “Do you think we should try and replace the ducting?” NOTE: I had not mentioned this aspect of my contemplations out loud.

“Damn It!” I exclaimed, “I suppose so…” and so it began, since that is exactly what I was turning over like so much mental compost through all that chain smoking in the sun…I did a little more internet research to find some pricing on the flexible insulated ducting we wanted to use in our replacement efforts since the final 2 square feet of fiberglass that had once graced our metal ducting (and was mostly gone even before the big move in flood of ’04’) was quickly slipping into the earth beneath the house (which makes for an itchy belly crawl). It is pretty much impossible to find anything really useful on most hardware store sites, particularly those smaller locally owned independent or locally owned mini-chain stores, but even the big guys (like the ones that used to be Eagle and the ones with the big orange signs) don’t share much of the nitty gritty of construction supplies on their site. Sure, if you want a ten foot garden hose, or a Weber Gas Grille, or rat poison (stuff we don’t usually shop for), you can find it pretty easily and even pick it up in the store. If you want something like 6″ flexible insulated ducting you have to research the pricing in far off lands at sites that specialize in, well, flexible instulated ducting, and then visit the hardware store to see if they actually have that which you seek…and so we did…

 If at all possible, we try to meet our hardware needs at McLendon’s. They are a chain, but a local one, and good luck finding a small independent hardware store in the south of Seattle (the posh North of the city still has some of the old storefront independents, but then the ultra-hip and wealthy can afford such luxuries). McLendon’s had the ducting, so we loaded up the cart (overloaded I should say), and I grabbed a couple pieces of pipe insulation since I knew the PEX on the far wall near the new on-demand water heater had not been covered by the plumbers (I’m not 100% certain they ran out of insulation so much as they ran out of patience for the crawlspace, the job took longer than they expected as a result of some of the minor peculiarities of our install). Then we grabbed the connectors…all of them…they only had three, but I thought that would do since we only had two runs that needed connectors for certain, and one potential spot where we might need to go beyond the 25ft length of a single piece of ducting. These connectors are a pretty crucial piece of gear for installing flexible insultated ducting, 6 inch diameter aluminum connectors about 6 inches long and crimped on each side for joining two pieces of ducting (since unlike the metal ducting, the flexible insulated isn’t “gendered” such that you can insert one end of the piece you’re installing into the end of the piece that preceded it, etc).

The magic piece of the puzzle...so simple, yet so rare

The magic piece of the puzzle...so simple, yet so rare

Gross error on my part…I failed to realize that at each of the registers we would also need a connector to insert into the existing boot. We discovered this tidbit as I was removing the very first piece of metal ducting from the register boot below the blue room. Ok, that’s alright I thought, we bought McLendon’s out of the stuff, but certainly we could run out the next day and get the 4 additional connectors we needed. Progress, let’s make progress, we decided. So we continued the removal effort to completion (no small task, all told I think it took as long to remove all those sheet metal screws as it did to actually install and hang the new ducting). The plan was to get this part done, perhaps get a start on installing the new ducting with the parts we had on hand. I could get the pipe insulation in place. Maya started the run from the blue room, which we knew would require more than a single length. I could eventually do the very short run from the Kitchen to the plenum. Everything would be ok…the weather was still nice…no worries.

The Horror...The Horror...

The Horror...The Horror...

We spent the better part of Sunday visiting every hardware store and home improvement mega store in our immediate area to no avail. Every single one of these bastards were bursting at the seams with box after box of the flexible insulated ducting, and yet, no connectors. You see, my theory on this goes something like this… somewhere at headquarters the corporate comptroller who doesn’t know ducting from a hole in the ground from their own ass decides what gets stocked on the shelves. Add to that the fact that most mega-stores choose to pay their employees too little to really develop any concern about what is stocked on the shelves, and there certainly isn’t any incentive for knowledgable staff to apply for a job at the big orange sign when they could be making a much better living actually plying their trade. I would also lay odds that there are institutional and systemic structures in place that discourage employees from taking an active role in improving the stocking strategy (this is just a guess, in many ways I’m probably talking out my ass right now, but you get the picture).

 (IMPORTANT NOTE: I do not blame the employees for not giving a shit, neither would I at $9 an hour for the second or third job most people need just to pay the crazy mortgage payment that arises from the tiniest one bedroom on a 16th of an acre being priced right around a quarter of a million dollars).

When at long last we get home from the Odyssey of the 6″ connectors, empty handed and discouraged, there isn’t a lot of vibrance or vim available to us for tackling the task at hand (and not a whole lot we can do at this point since without the parts the labor that can be completed can’t very effectively be carried out as a team due to the cramped spaces involved). In a moment of desperation I decided to check Amazon.com for the Connector. The thought that drove this search ran something like…in the worst case scenario we could just order some and complete the project when they arrived. I almost fell right out of my chair…who supplied Amazon with this mission critical part for our project…you guessed it, McLendon’s. At the McLendon’s in Renton we were told “this item comes from Ace, so we can’t get it from the warehouse” and no other help was offered. I decided to give the McLendon’s in White Center a ring and see if they had any on hand. We could drive over there the next day and get them (they could be had in Maya’s Civic, where getting the ducting itself was a job for my F250), and then we would be well on our way to completing our project. McLendon’s in White Center only had one, uno, ein, single lonely connector…BUT, they offered to see if the other stores had any and could do a store transfer (which would take a couple days, ended up being three), and they were most helpful in securing the promise of connectors to be had in the future. We would get the connectors on Wednesday and finish up the project on Thursday afternoon (Wednesday was Maya’s Mom’s birthday and we were having her parents over for dinner, so crawlspace activity was banned for Wednesday).

We didn’t get the connectors until Thursday. Apparently they had a metric butt load of stuff come in on Wednesday and didn’t find the connectors in the huge stack until late in the afternoon (at which point I was in Auburn, WA loading a cord of wood to help J (of J&X, the aforementioned fisherman with the sump pump) keep his house warm this winter in lieu of getting central heating other than the old wood stove on which they relied last year. ‘Tis the season for heating preparations I suppose.

I had some work to do, and so did Maya, so we didn’t get to McLendon’s in White Center until about 3pm (we wrapped it with a trip to a post office box in the University District that Maya has to visit now and again and which constitutes a lengthy story unto itself that Maya probably won’t tell for some time to come). We didn’t leave McLendon’s in White Center until after 4pm and got home around 4:30pm, or roughly one thousand hours later as I recollect it. This brings us to the one narrow area where the big home improvement outlets kind of have it over the small guy, policies and procedures. Sometimes these little nuggets (policies and procedures) can have an advantage, such as knowing where to put items that came in as a store transfer for a customer so that anyone can find them when said customer (us in this case) arrives to retrieve the items. Now, on the other hand, more often than not, policies and procedures are actually designed to hinder the employee from being too helpful to the customer (and thus increasing the total cost of serving said customer which just might impinge upon the multi-bazillion dollar bonus of the executives of some home improvement chains that just might have a big orange sign). Fortunately, despite having no idea where the items were located, the folks at McLendon’s in White Center were not impeded in their dilligent efforts to find the items, and so, three of the four connectors we needed were found.

DOH! I needed 4, but only needed 3 tranferred from other stores since McLendon’s in White Center had one on hand, BUT the one on hand could not be found (and was not in the box on the shelf where it belonged, so initially everyone presumed it had been purchased). The very helpful man with the unusually pointy hair piece did check the computer to see how many they were supposed to have in stock. ELEVEN! Somewhere in the store we had been scouring at length there hid a box or boxes of ELEVEN FX0225 6″ Flex ducting adapters. So, the search continued. You’ll note that by this time I knew the Manufacturer’s part number by heart and started closely examining the writing on the unpacked boxes at the tops of the shelves and in the aisles (the previous day’s delivery actually did consist of a metric butt load of stuff and much of it remained unpacked). Eventually, I did find a box marked FX0225, and we considered at length whether or not to buy extras. We chose not to with the rationale that there were supposed to be 10 others there somewhere in the store and that perhaps they would be easier to find if we did indeed need to return for an unexpected extra.

By the time we got home, the aggressive vigor to pursue the project deep into the night to completion had completely vanished. The project would have to be completed the following day. I had some work to do on Friday, and so did Maya, but we did get the project started and completed that afternoon with relative ease. This is why, despite all of the above, I have developed a deep emotional bond with flexible insulated ducting. For a few hundred dollars, with duct tape, wire cutters, a hammer and some nails, we were able to replace all the ducting under the house (and hopefully we’ll save a buck or two this winter by not heating the crawlspace as we did with the old broken down crushed in places pouring hot air all over the place galvanized ducting that was down there before). 

Aside from the fiberglass left over from the old ducting that now resides in our lungs and nose and deep beneath the surface of our skin (along with big dirt clods in our nose and lungs), the project left very little permanent damage on our souls. There was the embarassing event at the very end while I attempted to move some of the older abandoned flexible copper piping out of the way of the final join of the flexible insulated ducting and proceded to dump any and all of the remaining water in the pipe directly into my lap, but that also could have been worse (for example, had I chosen to dump said stale old water on my face, up my nose, or in my mouth along with all the dirt that fell out of the joists into these orifices). The closet stuff is still in the blue room, and I really need to go back down there with a big can of Great Stuff to plug up the plumbing and wiring holes (particularly since the crawlspace vents are not keeping rodents out of there, and last year one decided to periodically visit our trash can by coming up through said plumbing and wiring holes…I killed him, and I’m glad I did, we can discuss all the philosophical details of this at some later date). I know I’ll be returning to the heart of darkness again in the future, but ideally not until next spring when I hope to run speaker wire out to the patio (a project for which I’ve had the speakers for about two years). I’ll probably lay new vapor barrier at that time as well, although I’m loathe to do it until I better understand the hydrodynanmics of the crawlspace, and get the vents replaced, since once water is on top of the plastic it seems to go nowhere.

If you’ve actually read this entire entry, then I suppose you deserve a reward of some sort. All I’ve got is this super cute picture of Hemingway and Huxley on the couch together…I hope you feel it is a fitting reward for your diligence in the face of overwhelming domesticity…

Your reward...a single dose of ultra-cute...

Your reward...a single dose of ultra-cute...

 

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Battle Dishwasher…won at last??? https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/battle-dishwasherwon-at-last/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/10/01/battle-dishwasherwon-at-last/#respond Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:27:48 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=133 In short, I consider it the most important appliance in the house (well, maybe the furnace is more important, but bear with me for a moment). The dishwasher actually fulfills the promise of modernity. Technology that saves us labor without the technology itself creating much of a hassle. We should have 20 hour work weeks at this point if it weren’t for capitalism’s thirst for blood and wealth, but alas, every technological advance just results in more work to be done and lower pay for the work that we do. In the 21st century, the dear sweet dishwasher (and maybe the microwave) saves us hours and hours of menial labor, and liberates us to do things like write this seemingly pointless blog post. This tried and true piece of machinery can now be had for low enough initial outlay that the ROI (return on investment) can be realized within a year (particularly, if you refuse to buy a new one and find one on Craig’s List that was thoughtlessly discarded as part of the feverish desire of our country men and women to drive themselves ever deeper in home equity debt to “update” their kitchen). We bought the first dishwasher from Craig’s List for a song (either $75 or $100, can’t recall exactly) when we first bought the house. It remained faithful and steadfast for 4 years, so at $25 a year I think we did alright.

Well, this post wouldn’t be here if the poor old bastard hadn’t died on us. Pretty common failure…no longer draining completely at the end of the wash.

So I cleared the drain (again)…no luck

Pulled the dishwasher out, removed obstructions from the hoses…reinstalled it…no luck

Diagnosis…drain pump failure…I’m not really set up here to physically apply 110v to the motor to test it, so I arrived at this conclusion purely by deduction (tried listening, but couldn’t recall how the thing sounded when it worked, which would have been crucial to determining a failure). A new drain pump motor would have cost about what we paid for it initially, so back to Craig’s List I went.

Faced with the necessity (and I mean necessity) to replace the dishwasher, why not get stainless to match the stove (and who knows, maybe someday the fridge could be stainless as well, instead of black, but only if it fails or an unbeatable deal on Craig’s List is encountered by accident). And thus the search began. I added a feed to my blertsfor it (using only “dishwasher” as the search term to make sure I didn’t miss any misspellings of stainless which happen frequently for some reason). Having gone a couple of days without a fully operable dishwasher, I was willing to spend up to about $150 for a decent used one. Fortunately, a decent stainless GE came up within 24 hours for $100…. woo hoo….

The catch, it was in Mountlake Terrace which is about a thousand miles north of here (well, 20 miles, but I-5 south bound into Seattle from the north is a trip with a permanent time multiplier of at least 3, and in my special driving in traffic mathematics 3×20 = 1000 because nothing drives me quite as nuts as going 35 mph on the interstates). Ok, the additional $10-15 in bio-diesel is worth it for a dishwasher. The F250 is only getting about 12-14 mpg in city right now, down from a solid 15 plus last year, and I’m not sure why (working from home, the truck is used sparingly, and hey it is basically carbon neutral when running on B99.9). We made the trip up to Mountlake Terrace (and discovered that the person selling it seems to be in the business of refurbing dishwashers, or he owns multiple properties he’s upgrading, or something neferious was going on based on the garage full of dishwashers we found there). I should note that even though we “took the map” we got lost because I heard the wrong house number and ended up about a mile away from where we needed to be. We loaded up the shiny new used dishwasher and we headed home. Upon arrival I immediately set about installing the new dishwasher and running it through a test run…

4 hours later it had not completed the entire wash cycle. Conducted some diagnostics, the dishwasher ran through the self test fine, but the self test can’t really test the thermistor since it doesn’t bring the water to full temp. So I did a little experiment with the meat thermometer and decided the heating element was not getting hot enough. The benefit of whatever strange dishwasher dealings were afoot in Mountlake Terrace was the fact the guy said to just give a call if we encountered any problems, so I did. The guy was great, said he would “find another stainless one” (at this point I’m not asking any questions) and to give him a call the next day to make sure he had one ready and we could switch out the bad one (having already run my tests and describing them to him when he asked about the behavior helped smooth the way I think). Quick thinking and I asked if he would be interested in taking the one with the bad drain pump off our hands (saves me the hassle of finding and paying a recycler to take it, and he seems to be a recycler, so might as well give it a shot). SCORE, he asks the model and says sure he’ll take it (it was a black GE Profile Performance and was pretty quiet and a good machine while it was working). So, the next day we go up to claim our mysterious replacement dishwasher…

On the way up I-5 south bound is looking horrible. It was a Saturday I think, so we didn’t concern ourselves that much with the fact we were headed up there around 4pm (you do not want to get into the mess around here at drive time, particularly if you have worked at home for over 8 years, drive an F250, and detest going under 35 mph on the great american interstates). When we arrive at the blessed garage of dishwashers, our patron saint of dishwashers is not present. Not realizing that the house we are at is actually a duplex, I knock on the door, the wrong door, and a weary young man seemingly accustomed to this “wrong door” error points out the correct door (sneakily tucked around the corner from the garage) and tells me it doesn’t look like our patron saint of dishwashers is home because his big white truck is not present in the cul-de-sac.  At about the moment I leave the door, the wrong door, a car drives up and stops in front of the driveway. It becomes immediately evident that my truck is blocking the side of the driveway that belongs to the wrong door, so I scramble to move it over to the side of the driveway that belongs to the correct door of the duplex. As the driver parks in their now accessible parking space, they see fit to mention it doesn’t look like our saint of dishwashers is home since his big white truck is not in the cul-de-sac. I thank the person that heads to the wrong door with an arm full of fodder from the golden arches. Oh how the blood boils at this moment, I curse the freeway, the traffic, the decision to go to Mountlake Terrace for a dishwasher, the ground I stand on..etc…but optimistically attempt to give the saint a ring before abandoning all hope and returning to the fiery hell of I-5 southbound at 4:30pm on a Saturday.

Our saint, saint Maurice as happens to be the case, answers the phone and says he’s just around the corner and will be there momentarily. REJOICE! Our saint of dishwashers has not abandoned us, he is only running late (a condition I generally suffer from in perpetuity, so I understand being off the mark by a few minutes here and there, and I have come back into the fold and eagerly await my personal blessing from the dishwasher shrine that lays behind the garage door). Maya and I have already unloaded the two faulty dishwashers in anticipation of our blessing, and when the garage door goes up we catch a vision of glory on the workbench with the makeshift water feed dangling from the ceiling of the garage and attached with wire nuts to the open 110v wire that accompanies the dishwasher rehabilitation center Maurice has fashioned here in the garage. Our blessing as it turns out is a sweet ass Kitchen Aid (even the same brand as our stove) with (and this is just like 2 toy surprises in a cracker jack box) stainless steel interior tub. We do have to make a sacrifice to the dishwasher deities as this model doesn’t have quite as many buttons on the front, BUT it does have buttons (which I love, I have an inherent distrust for rotary knobs on appliances with the distinct exception of those for stove tops…any knob upon which the appliance timing is dependent is a nearly guaranteed first failure in my assessment). I try to hold my emotions in check though, we still need to install it and confirm it is working…I take major ground streets for the north of Seattle half of the trip, if I’m going to go 35 mph, I might as well see some new parts of the city as I go (and we did see some new parts, including Frank’s Door Store which Maya’s Dad has mentioned is a great place to get…well, doors).

We don’t stop at the door store though, important mission ahead and no time for lolly gagging about looking at doors we don’t need…

The install goes relatively smoothly (I have to do it twice, but I always have to do it twice and I can’t quite recall the exact reason I had to do it twice this time). In the first run I encountered a slight drip from the drainage hoses, but I believe that was related to a moment during the first install when the dishwasher kind of slipped off it’s special platform (Maya is 6’2″, and 36″ counters just don’t cut it, so in complete violation of all universal design principles we have 42″ counters and I love them because not only do they save my love’s backfrom stooping while she does her magic, but I find it a more convenient height as well) and took a hit on the under-side. I little wiggling here and there of the rubber connectors in the drain system seemed to fix up the minor drip. At some point I need to pull off the kick plate again and triple check that this situation has been completely remedied.

Parenthetically, as I’m prone to do, I should mention that we have serious water fears, it is a long story, but the short of it is that we had MAJOR flooding 4 days after we closed on the house as a result of the water company ignoring my request to ONLY turn on the water on or after a certain date since we were both out of town for the weekend. The request was in writing, so we were meagerly compensated (at the depreciated rate) for the damage and recovery, but a lot of stuff we had intended to do much slower and much later ended up having to happen right away.

It’s been about a month, no evidence of leakage (though I haven’t removed the kickplate yet), and excepting the fact that we realized too late that the dishwasher lacked a silverware basket (and I accidentally purchased two of them due to an internet connection freak out and slow order confirmation emails from the online store from which I bought them), the new dishwasher is working out alright and it sure is pretty (even on the inside).

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The house of representatives… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/09/29/the-house-of-representatives/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/09/29/the-house-of-representatives/#respond Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:34:06 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=139 is a gaggle of ignorant pidgeon heads…

That’s all I have right now, what a missed opportunity to both salvage the economy and make some progress in the regulation and oversight of the country’s major banking institutions all at once…

Well, we had a second world war…I guess it is time for the second great depression…

Someone on another blog responded to a post of mine asking what I liked about the bill…of course, the whole situation sucks, but compared to what the administration was asking for, here are my pleasures:

1) Equity Stake
2) Restrictions on executive pay
3) Oversight (double if not triple, congress and an independent body)
4) not a single lump sum with congressional option to cancel the second half if the initial injection doesn’t work.
5) part of 1, but worth mentioning and not all would agree, but I like the idea of taxpayers getting a direct return from the profits of the banks that form the fundemental structure of our economy. Their wealth is built on the backs of all of us, and since we can’t seem to tax them effectively (and the republican’s continue to try and kill capital gains) at least we could own part of them (more of a door opener than a significant stake, but I’m left leaning enough to take what I can get in the line of broad public ownership of financial infrastructure.

Plus I should probably admit I kind of like the idea of being on the slippery slope to socialism… 🙂

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Always take the map… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/09/01/always-take-the-map/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/09/01/always-take-the-map/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:45:23 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=119 So, it would be inaccurate to say we were lost…

At any given moment, we knew the way home, we just didn’t know how to get where we wanted to go. As I mentioned previously some horrible crap happened to Maya’s car during a middle of the night hit-and-run (it was parked curbside, more on that at Eighth Acre Bounty). One of the results of the  glancing impact which terminated at Maya’s driver’s side rim (based on the available evidence), was of course, the bending of the rim (and an arm and a knuckle, on the car, we were in bed, so don’t get confused with all those anatomical terms referring to car parts). Maya called a wrecking yard not terribly far away and found out they have more rims than they knew what to do with and would be happy to sell her one that would fit her car perfectly for a relatively reasonable amount of money. All we had to do was get there…in the truck, which was well into the last quarter of the second tank…shouldn’t be a problem, the yard isn’t far, we’re going right there and coming right back (maybe stop by the big box wholesale to the public membership joint that happens to have their headquarters here in Washinton and is not at all affiliated with Sam Walton and his crew to get a tire put on the shiny new used rim we were picking up).

Here is the path from the 167 that we should have taken to get to the wrecking yard (here forward we will refer to this as the “Ideal” path):

what an elegant path it would have been

what an elegant path it would have been

As we were gathering ourselves together to walk out the door I asked “Do you have a map?” Maya responded with strength and confidence, “No, we shouldn’t need it, it is just off the 167 and I have some directions.” We were running a bit behind schedule (most likely my fault), so I bit hard and deep into my tongue to keep it quiet and sized myself up tough for the inevitable mild confusion that usually occurs when we try and give eachother directions while driving.

Brief digression…I’ve been driving off and on now for about 2 decades, but I still don’t like not knowing where I’m going if I have to actually get somewhere. I like maps, I like to look at them and at least get the false sense of security they can grant you with their magical bird’s eye view of the intrepid landscape of the region into which you are about to journey. If I don’t have to be anywhere, then I don’t care so much. If the only requirement is that I make it home sometime and I don’t have to worry about anyone in the passenger seat getting impatient about the destination, then I can wander aimlessly without end and actually be mildly entertained by the journey. This was not one of those trips, particular with some concerns about the fuel level lingering in the background.

Nonetheless, having been assured of our success by Maya’s strong and confident utternce indicating that a map would be a frivolous and worthless additional effort and delay of departure for which she would have no tolerance, we pointed the truck south and began our “quick errand” to the wrecking yard and perhaps the big box wholesale to the public place that happens to be headquartered here in Washington and has no affiliation with Sam Walton where Maya had fairly recently bought an entire set of new tires, where we could find a perfect replacement for the now seriously damaged front driver’s side tire and they would enthusiastically put the single tire on our brand new used rim.

We accomplished all these goals that day…I believe we left the house about 2pm and no reason to expect to be gone more than say, oh an hour and a half, perhaps 2 if we ran up against a long line to get the new tire. It was almost 6pm when we did get home…

The path less traveled, less elegant, and rather frustrating as well...

The path less traveled, less elegant, and rather frustrating as well...

Parenthetically I should mention that I have made almost this exact same trip several times in several different neighborhoods around and about the Seattle area, so Maya’s culpability here is minimal at best. Even with the map, there are times when one wrong turn in the earliest moments of the process of retrieving some item listed on Craig’s List will result in a doubling or tripling of the length and time of the estimated duration and mileage of that particular retrieval…that being said…

To this point I have failed to mention another variable in this equation of doom that I only fully began to appreciate toward the end of our trip after seeing the needle of my fuel gauge dipping very close to the bottom of the red area (keep in mind, of course, that despite the extraordinary use of fuel and energy involved in driving the F-250 all over the greater Kent, WA region, the trip was carbon nuetral since I’m running the ol’ summertime B99.9 or 99.9% biodiesel for the uninitiated). That night we also needed to pick up a friend from the airport that night. Maya had taken this friend, who we will call W., to the airport a few days earlier in W’s little Ford Ranger which is infinitely more agile and fuel efficient than my F-250.

So, taking the Ranger to the airport would have been the best thing to do (and taking the Ranger on this trip might have been wise as well), if it weren’t for the fact that Maya was suffering some sort of pervasive automotive curse that week and noticed as she left the airport that W’s “check engine” light was lit. Since they made the first trip to the airport at some unholy hour prior to 8pm (or Gary’s dawn as I sometimes call it, afterall, does the sun really rise if I’m not there to see it?), Maya didn’t know whether the light had been on the entire time or if it had just come on that morning. Since the automotive curse seemed to be looming large, my truck appeared to be the best option despite the imminent close shave indicated by the fuel gauge (I pretty much always push my luck in a continuing effort to discover just how far I can go on a couple tanks of fuel, even though I really, really shouldn’t given that running a diesel dry is a lot more difficult to recover from than running a gas engine dry, from what I’ve read). What I have discovered about the truck, is that it has a very, very deep empty (which I was kind of able to ascertain fairly early on by comparing the amount of fuel I could stuff into it against the advertised tank sizes).

As harrowing as all that sounds, it worked out. We did get Maya’s rim, and her tire, and found out that her warranty would cover the damage to the tire and that we would get to come back with the damaged tire for a partial refund from the big box wholesale to the public store with their headquarters here in Washington that is not affiliated with Sam Walton and has become somewhat famous for the delicious polish dogs you can eat after you’ve wiped yourself out buying 32 gallons of mayonaise and a metric butt-load of triscuits. We also learned from W that the check engine light itself had been diagnosed as problematicly stuck on despite no actual condition to check (I didn’t mention the check engine light on the way back from the airport, I figured Maya saw it, she could report it, and I’m still a bit suspicious of the bad check engine light diagnosis that W was given, but it’s not my truck and not exactly my place to say so…not that that usually stops me, but it did that night, probably because I was tired).

Maya’s car is all fixed and aside from a little bit of a catch in her steering and us losing positive control over Maya’s tire and allowing it to sneak away from us rolling about a block down the street toward a busy intersection where an electrical crew working for the county to change out the traffic signals has been parking their vehicles and where by good fortune they happened to have finished parking the vehicles at the time of the tire incident which left them available to intercept the rolling menace prior to any gory traffic disaster it may have exacted at the end of our street (I had leaned it into the wheel well while we were rotating the old one in the back to the front to replace the donut spare and then put the brand new one on the back, this worked alright until we jacked the car up and it evidently jumped out of the wheel well of its own volition), this story has come to an end and depite how confident, strong, or irritated Maya may be when she says “we shouldn’t need the map”, I will insist that we print the map prior to departure unless I absolutely know exactly where we are going (or she is driving, in which case she can skip the map if she wishes and I’ll enjoy the ride)…

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We’re Up! We’re Down! We’re In! We’re Out! https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/17/were-up-were-down-were-in-were-out/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/17/were-up-were-down-were-in-were-out/#comments Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:04:51 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=101 We were so looking forward to August. The hope being that some assemblance of the normal order would be returned, and that a blanket of calm would settle over the B-Bar-Lazy-B. Since I am the crappiest blogger known to the entire cyber-universe, I’ll have to give you some background before we get into the details of how August hasn’t yet delivered on the promise we thought it held back in Mid-July…

From late June through July we were dog-sitting Maya’s parent’s dog while they were on an extended vacation. Before we embarked on this little adventure, my greatest concern was how Jake would climatize to the cats, since he didn’t really have any direct experience with them. Hold on…

Let me introduce Jake…Jake is a yellow lab, I think he is about 8 years old, and has the longest nose in the world…

Miles and Miles of Nose

Miles and Miles of Nose

Well, ok, so maybe it isn’t the longest nose in the world, but if you live with Huxley for a while, most dogs begin to look like their noses are inappropriately long, Witness exhibit B, Huxley’s comparatively truncated snout…

A comfortably proportioned snout

A comfortably proportioned snout

Anyway…Huxley and Jake have played together pretty regularly (although always quite rambunctiously) both at Maya’s folk’s place and here at the house on occassion, so the least of our concerns was how Huxley and Jake would interact (particularly given our good luck at dog sitting other dogs in the past, etc.).

As one should come to expect, my expectations were wholly inaccurate. Jake on the whole couldn’t care less about the cats. He even seemed a bit shy and confused by them. He almost failed to notice the chickens for the entire month and a half. Jake’s sole concerns in the world are food, people, tennis balls, sticks, and of course, water. There is absolutely nothing else going on behind his stare besides a continuous inventory of the presence or absence of these five objects of his desire. His entire being is tied to these five concerns, and he can’t help but excitedly acknowledge the introduction of any one of them with fierce tail waging and some disconcerting bouncing. (Maybe there is one other thing on his mind…his bed…which he humps…which is also disconcerting and not the topic of this post, but worth mentioning nonetheless).

Our problem, surprisingly, throughout the month of July was our own sweet boy, Huxley. And the problem, he was not very sweet. After a few days, the novelty of the visitor wore thin, and the “bad Huxley” traits started to come out. These “bad Huxley” traits are few and far between, but at 104lbs, 98 of which are muscle, and 80 of those are located squarely on the top of his head to operate his jaws, any bad traits are a cause for concern. Huxley is intense. He is intensely protective and on occassion intensely possesive (we know this and prior to Jake’s arrival we removed all of the toys, bones and sticks that usually lay around the yard awaiting Huxley’s whim).

The first incident occurred while Maya was scruffing Huxley’s belly in the yard, and Jake bounded over to get a piece of the action. Maya is central to Huxley’s possessiveness tendencies, and there was an erruption that culminated in trip to the Vet to get a single staple put in a gash in Jake’s long pointy head. Maya suffered some scrapes and torn trousers in her effort to remove Huxley from Jake. Ok, historically, there was one other incident between Jake and Huxley involving a toy, so this second incident gave pause, but not panic. We proceeded by being very mindful of how and when attentions were lavished and just put a lot of effort into keeping everything very mellow around the B-Bar-Lazy-B.

I think we made it about another week, until the evening I decided I should bring the second dog bed out to the living room right before dinner so that we could all settle in for the evening. I thought I could accomplish this fairly smoothly despite both boys being in the living room at the time since Huxley was already settled on the bed that is permanently present in the living room and Jake was pretty well settled on the floor at the outset. I was wrong. Both boys took an immediate co-interest in the newly introduced bed, and our efforts to distract them in opposite directions seemed to incite conflict. Once Huxley has a grip, the only hope is for Maya to shove her hand in his mouth and break his grip whilst I’m pulling and then holding Huxley away from the site of conflict. The unfortunate consequence of Maya being so quick to shove her hand in Huxley’s mouth, is she sustains the injuries, while I generally walk away shaken but unscathed (I can’t even begin to go into how much I hate a dog conflict, but suffice to say this concern was central to my reluctance to get a dog in the first place). Maya suffered several puncture wounds to here index finger and serious bruising under her thumbnail (which now matches the other thumbnail which was bruised some time ago during the aforementioned initial conflict over a toy which occurred before Jake was actually staying with us).

Maya really needs her hands to do her job. Since the definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over again expecting different results, and with part of our livelihood now at stake, we had to take action. For the remainder of July we had to implement emergency dog separation measures. Thankfully the weather favored our efforts throughout the ordeal, and the lay out of our house accommodated keeping one dog upstairs with me while the other roamed free or stayed downstairs in Maya’s office with frequent trade offs throughout the day. If we didn’t both work from home now, this would have been a lot worse, but the continuity of our presence, and a little help from instant messaging technology, enabled us to rapidly develop policies, systems, and procedures appropriate to the task of regular dog rotation. Our strategy hinged heavily on utilization of the Blue Room as a sort of doggie air lock for performing rotations upstairs and down, inside and outside. Communication also plays as an essential component of any effective set of policies, systems and procedures for a management task as daunting as total dog separation. So, for the remainder of July the B-Bar-Lazy-B sounded not unlike a naval vessel from days of old. Aside from IM, we leveraged call and response to coordinate dog movement for locale to locale. Hence the title of this entry. At the completion of each dog movement, the party responsible for the dog in motion would call out to the party responsible for the dog at rest (usually waiting in or near the Blue Room with the dog at rest momentarily sequestered therein) to finalize the pooch transfer activity.

Let me walk you through the process of a relatively simple move, though more complicated moves were enacted in a similar fashion, just to clarify exactly how eagerly we were awaiting August. If Jake needed to move from my office upstairs to outside while Huxley was in a “free roam” period wherein the back door was open and the child gate at the foot of the stairs was closed, initiation of the movement would be either called out (if Maya was in the kitchen for example) or IM’d from upstairs to down (if Maya was in her office for example).

So, maybe I would yell “Should we do a switch?!”

Maya would respond “Sure it has been a while since Jake has been out!”

Then I would yell “Ok! Let’s do it!”

Maya would yell back “Ok! I’m taking Hux into the Blue Room!”

I would respond “Ok!”

As Maya took Hux into the Blue Room, she would call out “Ok, We’re In!”

At that point I would know I could safely open the gate and guide Jake to the out of doors, as I closed the door behind me I would call out “Ok, We’re Out!”

That final call indicated that Maya and Hux could emerge without incident from the Blue Room, and ordinary activities could resume until the next sequence of calls and moves was initiated.

This process dominated the month of July. Jake is an absolutely sweetheart, but when the sun rose on August 5th with the termination of this procedural sequence (Jake had gone home on the night of August 4th after Maya’s folk’s got back in town), a definite sense of relief gracefully settled across the entire eighth of an acre we call home. It did take a while to shake the habit of calling out to each other during each of our movements through the house. On several occassions I had to stop myself from closing the gate at the foot of the stairs and yelling out “We’re up!”

Unfortunately, the obliteration of the promise of a peaceful August came upon us that night with a midnight run to the 24 hour emergency Vet. But, I guess I’ll save that story for the next entry…suffice it to say we are all still here, so that is the good news. Our dear old man Hemingway isn’t seeing out of one eye and might be facing numbered days however, and that lays a thick viel of sorrow over the entire month. And then, just to keep us on our toes, someone decided to run into Maya’s car in the middle of the night sometime and drive off leaving it sans 1 side view mirror with a flat tire, a bent rim, and untold damage to the front end suspension, drive train, and who know what else. The precision with which they had to have scraped by her car to catch the mirror and the front tire without really denting the body is difficult to conceptualize, but alas, somehow they accomplished just such a feat and we still need to figure out how serious the damage is.

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Extravagance…with a little help from my friends… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/05/extravagancewith-a-little-help-from-my-friends/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/05/extravagancewith-a-little-help-from-my-friends/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:16:56 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=95 So…our friend Y. who goes by many nicknames…none of which he would want posted online…gave me a pair of gloves for my birthday this year with a pack of M&M’s stuffed in them. In the flurry of activity (mostly me showing our guests the chickens) I failed to try them on while he was here for the birthday pork butt smoking event that Maya kindly orchestrated to celebrate my ever increasing age.

Low and behold…a week later I cut my finger chasing Morning Glory (bindweed) bare handed (like an idiot) through the raised bed with the Rhubard, Rosemary, Sage, Oregano, and horrificly tenacious Yarrow in it (don’t ask me why I capitalized the plant names). Well, after I stopped the bleeding and cleared the dirt from the wound, I said “Hey! This would be a great time to try on those snazzy gloves that Y. (with all those nicknames) gave me for my birthday.” Such a sneaky, sneaky man is Y. that deep inside the glove was a gift card for a very large home improvement store with orange signs and a kind of comical “green” campaign that is probably worthy of a post unto itself.

I almost never buy new stuff, so a gift card is one of those moments that give me a good excuse to troll the aisles and find something I either wouldn’t ordinarily buy (thinking it an extravagance) or for which I would spend 3 months searching craigslist and researching pricing throughout the northwest until I found the exactly correct one at exactly the correct price somewhere in the region. At which point I would drive 15 miles in traffic, get lost 3 times, and arrive only to find it is not really quite the correct one, or that it is defective in some manner, and still buy anyway feeling compelled to justify the drive (and the getting lost).

So, with this particular gift card that Y. (with all the nicknames) gave me, we went trundling to the large home improvement store with the orange signs so I could troll the aisles of the tool area at a pace that inevitably irritates Maya a little bit (I’m kind of a slow, and deliberate person when trolling aisles at any store since I don’t get out of the house much and see it all as a research opportunity).

I had a little something in mind when we arrived. Something I had been toying with buying for a couple of years, and in fact, almost bought last year at a liquidation store (but realized that it was there because of obvious inconsistencies in the specifications listed on the box and couldn’t be certain it would meet my wants, needs, and desires). It is the kind of tool you can do without for a long while (and I have), but every now and again when I’m doing something I think to myself, “Gee, that tool sure would be handy right now.” And, with a little help from Maya to cover the taxes and accessories, I am now the proud owner of:

 

Electric Brad Nailer (capable of brads up to 1.25")
Electric Brad Nailer (capable of brads up to 1.25″)

 I have yet to use it, but there are already projects in the pipeline aching for the application of some super modern electrically driven brads. Sometimes (and this probably isn’t advisable) the tool drives the project, and in this case the tool has forced a complete re-imagining of the bird block for the shed (which has been waiting a year for bird block while I figure out just how I want to do it). Anyway, the primary purpose of this post is to extend a GIGANTIC THANK YOU to Y. (with all his many nicknames) and show him what the gift card added to our little arsenal of hand tools that get us through the day…

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If you are here for some mysterious reason… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/02/if-you-are-here-for-some-mysterious-reason/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/08/02/if-you-are-here-for-some-mysterious-reason/#respond Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:11:26 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=91 You have to leave right now and go look at this dirty bee butt…

http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2008/07/30/bees/

and the fantastic bee head picture that Maya took out in the yard.

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Yippee! https://www.garydigs.com/2008/07/23/yippee/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/07/23/yippee/#respond Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:00:00 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=6 I added a dynamic sidebar to the classic theme. Pretty pedestrian, but hey…ya gotta start somewhere.

If this is boring you to tears, there is more interesting stuff over at Eighth Acre Bounty, you should visit. At present this is where you will find a couple pictures of my holes and piles…

Also for today, Cleary the chicken laid an egg whilst wandering around looking for a place to lay an egg. I’m trying to figure out why she is so weird about where she lays. The trend seems to be that she wants to lay the egg in the same place that another chicken has already laid an egg (assuming the previously laid egg is still in its place). As of yesterday, Dahl’s eggs have been the target of a dining enterprise on the part of all chickens, so I’ve really been scooping them out of there fast which seems to aggravate Cleary. Blume (the little banty), lays reliably and generally without incident (although she will crowd into the nesting box with Cleary when she is trying to lay, I’ll see if I can drum up a picture of that excitement).

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For the benefit of my best friend in the whole world… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/06/25/for-the-benefit-of-my-best-friend-in-the-whole-world/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/06/25/for-the-benefit-of-my-best-friend-in-the-whole-world/#respond Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:50:07 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=4 I’m trying to figure out why the image upload over at mayacooks.com is not working right.

So, here is a picture in a post…

Growing puppies...

(PS: Figured it out, kind of, IE6 weirdness with WP 2.51. Upload was working in IE7 and FF. Advised Maya to just use FF for now, she understandably hates IE7.)

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Coming Soon… https://www.garydigs.com/2008/06/07/coming-soon/ https://www.garydigs.com/2008/06/07/coming-soon/#respond Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:41:19 +0000
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http://www.garydigs.com/?p=3 It was bound to happen, and now it has…

Well, almost…we’ll see when something actually gets written here.

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