So that's that.

Oliver cat passed away this morning, apparently just before I woke up. I notified the family, and then swung a pick to dig a hole in the cold winter soil the back yard. I had actually thought that he was going to pull through (as he had before), but one never knows. Hell, I knew that I was going to outlive him when we got him. (That's one reason why I didn't want to get him.)
That damned fat, grouchy cat.
He brought me some pleasure —and displeasure— at unexpected times.

November, 2017, under the lemon tree in the sunroom. One of those "unexpected pleasures."

Sometimes, it's about something else.

I wrote this last weekend, on December 31st:
_______________________________________-

“Burglar Bob,” the semi-self-healing full-sized plastic shooting dummy which I had used for Shooting Incident Reconstruction back in grad school, was in the way again. My teenaged daughter Allie and her boyfriend had set him up on the porch during Halloween, and his clothed leg was sticking out into the main lane of travel in my cluttered garage while we put up holiday decorations. My wife, aggravated, yelled at Allie to come fix this mess, and stow ol’ Bob away properly. The joints on Bob’s limbs locked at 22.5 degree increments, and his pants had to be removed to adjust the wingnuts on the stupid system, and Allie wasn’t getting it, right away.

Allie had been called away from trying to get Oliver the family cat to drink something, and was realizing that tomorrow she would be taking the 9 year-old cat with kidney problems to the vet, perhaps (probably?) for his last ride. She fumbled with the scarred plastic mannequin fruitlessly for a few seconds before tears became sobs over this task which she felt helpless to effect.

I realized that I hadn’t done any shooting at “Burglar Bob” in years. Years of leaving this... thing... in our way. Years of not doing more of the kind of training that I had planned to conduct. Years of annoying my sweet wife.

I ripped “Bob” from his 2x4 mount, pushing past my crying daughter and startled wife. Though man-sized, the dummy was much lighter than I remembered, dressed in a cheap polo shirt, an old pair of Dockers, a belt, and tennis shoes. I honestly don’t recall if I threw him to the frozen ground next to the driveway, or just fell atop him, but I found in my hand a very large screwdriver which we use as a garage door track lock. I began to use it on the plastic dummy as an implement of rage. The detached part of my mind noted that the plastic had none of its self-healing properties at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, as the half-inch flat-head bit gored hole after hole into the torso of the dummy.

I left the screwdriver in “Bob’s” chest, and beat the ugly patched plastic head with my right fist, knocking it off the torso to roll somewhat comically across the lawn. I ripped the arms off of him, surprised a bit at how easily the brittle cold plastic threaded bolts popped, with a touch of rage. I beat “Bob’s” body with his own limbs, breaking them down segment by segment. I again took up the screwdriver and began stabbing again and again, until I became aware of the scrapes on my knees and bruises and cuts on my knuckles, and my deep breathing.

I stood up, brushed myself off, and began picking up the remnants of my old training dummy, and stuffing them into the garbage can. I assured my wife that “Burglar Bob” wouldn’t be in the way anymore. I thought it would be a little funny, but my daughter was still crying.

That damned cat. I didn’t want him in the first place. Now look at me. What a mess. I’m going to find some ibuprofen.

She's leaving home (bye, bye)

The day we brought her home from the hospital. 

Renaissance festival, October, 2000. 

Airborne, 2003

All American Girl, Summer, 2009

Horseshoe Bend, Glenn Canyon, AZ, March, 2010. 

Drum Major, 2015

Senior in High School, February, 2016

High school graduate, 2016.

 About three weeks ago, my 18 year old daughter borrowed my pickup. We loaded her bed and her dresser and a bunch of clothes and other odds and ends into it, and she drove it away, with her boyfriend in the front seat. She had spent her last night in her room, and was moving into an apartment with one of her best friends and a friend from work.

She's not ready. Financially, I don't really believe that she's making enough to cover school expenses (though she has a pretty decent scholarship), car, rent, utilities, food, and sundry. She is taking on a good $5000+ in new expenses per year, just for the ability to say that she's moved out, even though her commute to college has only shrunk from 12 to 3 miles, and about the same for work.

I know-- kids want to feel grown up.  And she has a full-time job, and she pulled off a 4.0 GPA in her honors program at university this semester. She's a sophomore. She just bought her own Honda CRV. She's a great kid, and left the house with no animosity for her parents.

So why was I sobbing in my living room for five minutes after she left? Is this what I've become?

Okay, maybe I was the one who wasn't ready.


________________
For what it's worth, the recently remastered release of the Beatles' _Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ album is absolutely worth a listen. Particularly have I been listening to "She's Leaving Home." (The hotlinked version isn't the remastered one; you'll have to get the album or find it on Spotify or Google Play Music.)

November, 2015, and EMT stuff

*****STARTED IN EARLY NOVEMBER****
--I'm prepping for my EMT practical exercises, all next week. I'm not ready.


--Without getting specific, I had to officially apply my authority as a supervisor at work for the first time. I didn't much care for it.


--The weather in North Texas has been spectacular. Temps down in the mid-to-high 50s at night, up to almost 80 during the day. My wife put a drip irrigation system in for her garden in early September, and in early October, I gave her a high-end hose splitter and two-channel electric water timer. Our garden looks amazing.

--We noticed that the area around our water meter was getting swampy. I called the Public Works guys, who dug down and found a leak... on the city side! Huzzah! The very nice Public Works guy suggested that I put in a personally-owned water cut-off valve, so I bought one and a hand-hole box. He just installed that where the meter was, and moved the meter over a foot, and installed it a little higher upstream. To do this, he had to dig up the valve at the main, which was just direct-buried and not accessible by manhole or hand-hole. He took the old manhole cover and bit of steel culvert, and put it over the valve at the main, and put a new box over the meter, and put my purchased box over the valve that he had put in. He and his partner then put in sand around it, and carted away the mud, because, they said, it was dry into impermeable cement. (We have a high clay content in our soil.) 

***************LATER. MUCH LATER. WRITTEN IN DECEMBER, ACTUALLY******


--I did my skills week for my EMT studies. It was a 70+ mile drive, through downtown Fort Worth each way. Going there, I just started at about 5:45am, and made it right through the city. Coming back, I had to sit in traffic. I'm a wimp about traffic, having to only rarely deal with it. My normal daily commute is just from my front door to my car, and then on in to the office less than half a mile away.

--I took the final on a Friday. I got a 90. I'm not proud of that 90, because it means that 10% of the cases that I come across may well fall in a gap of my knowledge. I have a long way to go.


--I did my rotational internships at a regional hospital pursuing Level II Trauma Center status, and at a couple of mid-city firehouses. The fire guys were great, and were easy to chat with and get along with. They were people of the sort that I knew; they laughed and cut up, but turned on the professionalism as soon as a call for service came up.

At the ER (ED, actually), it was different. The staff was quite stiff. Tensions were up a little bit. I found myself in the way, apologizing a lot. Nurses would be professional, but often put the "curt" in "courteous." I understood. I was just an intern, and was furniture. In three days, I was gone, and there was no reason to really develop a relationship with me. Thus, I was at best a liability who could maybe be of some help in moving a patient, or cleaning up an exam room. I cleaned a LOT of exam rooms. I was surprised. My first ER preceptor, a "Tech," was a paramedic with street experience, but he was also treated a lot like an errand boy who also took vitals. And I was his assistant and intern. My preceptor was very nice, actually, and quite encouraging. He told me that he thought that I was going to be great as an EMT. I got handed off to another Tech/Paramedic, and then a nurse that I chose for her friendliness and willingness to answer questions. At the end of three days, the Charge Nurse gave me one compliment: He directed me to show the next EMT intern who was relieving me his way around the ED, and explain what was expected of him.

I did my final rotation as a 24 hour shift at the firehouse on Thanksgiving. I brought a couple of large pies with me.


--I got to see some stuff. One guy with normal vital signs had taken a trauma to the throat during sports, and during auscultation of his neck, I detected crackling sounds like rice crispies. Subcutaneous emphysema!  

An ambulance crew brought in an 84 year old man who was receiving CPR (begun within one minute of his collapse). I got put on compressions. He had been intubated. His sternum was completely broken free from his ribs. We shocked him three times. The doctors pushed a lot of drugs. As I was doing compressions, I felt something, and looked at the monitor, even as the ER doc was looking at it. He told me to stop compressions. At about this time, a paramedic and a nurse who were bagging him noticed eye movement. The patient had a viable rhythm! We backed away, and the RT put the patient onto a machine to help the patient breathe, and the doc started a central line.


We had a lot of rain on Thanksgiving night. I rolled with the fire guys to a swift water rescue that was so professionally performed that it looked actually kind of boring.  My ambulance preceptor was kind of a meat-and-potatoes guy.


An elderly woman with recent UTI and chest infection, with abnormally low BP, who had fainted in her bed and couldn't be awakened until shortly before we arrived? Well, that's just syncope (fainting). She refused to go to the hospital with us, but would with family. Walking out, I asked my preceptor about the possibility of it being septic shock. "Hey, it could well be," my preceptor said.


We had another older woman with a history of stroke, speaking in two-word sentences, with edema in her legs and respirations at about 28, who assented to go to the hospital.  While I was filling out my Patient Care Report (for my school-- this wasn't the official one), I got to the Assessment portion again. I asked my preceptor about the possibility of it being Right Ventricular Failure. He nodded and said that could be, and asked if I was sure that I wasn't going to go get my paramedic. I told him that I had too much respect for what those guys did, to assume that I could do it.

--I suppose that it's possible that someone will whine that I'm violating HIPAA by describing these cases. Of course, they'd be hard-put to figure out where the patient was, when they were seen, what the outcome was, etc, etc. I've learned a thing or two, observing my friend Kelly Grayson.

--I've sold a safe queen gun, to buy an amplified electronic stethoscope. I only asked enough to get the 3M™ Littmann® Electronic Stethoscope Model 3100, but I think that I want the 3200, with Bluetooth and recording capability. I will probably come up with the rest and buy it this weekend. I just don't feel that I can hear well enough with standard stethoscopes, over my tinnitus.


--I have to send in my EMT book to the school, and get their permission to take the National Registry test. (I'm not ready.)

More of this, more of that. Mostly home.

--Having taken allergy medications, I just slept for 16 hours. No, really.


--Reviewing my kids' report cards, it appears that I need to go to the bank, because they've earned some cash. We shamelessly pay for results.  But they need to tone it down, or I'm going to need to get a second job. Maybe if I got them into World Of Warcraft, or something?


--My elder daughter got home just now. Healthy and trim, modestly-dressed, wearing the tooled belt that her granddad had bought her in her jeans and long-sleeved T shirt, with her hair pulled back, my senior in high school looked self-assured but friendly. I think that I would have wanted to be her friend, at her age. She asked me for rubber gloves, because she's helping her mother refinish some cabinets. While I found them, she looked through the mail that she had brought in, and laughed at the hoity-toity colleges sending invitations for her applications. She gets that we don't want her saddled with education debt. She's barely 17, and she gets it. I suppose that it's possible that I could be more proud of my daughter, but I can't really imagine how, realistically, just this second.


--One of my chickens is injured, badly. In just a minute, I'm going to dig a hole and do what needs doing. Yeah, I hate to waste the meat, but the injury probably ruined some, and the danged bird has a name. It will contribute to the garden. Rest in peace, Pocky. You ate a lot of bugs, and gave us a lot of eggs.


--I just found out that my middle-schooler has been taking a thermos of coffee to school with her for lunch, because she has been getting sleepy after lunch every day. That ends now. [Matt looks guiltily in the mirror as he considers what kind of bad influence he's been on his daughters.]


--My middle schooler over-dresses for school. She prefers dark silks, which she buys second-hand, and likes long skirts and full blouses. She has dyed her brown hair black, and wears it long and straight and brushed-out. She has a very different style, all her own. I don't fully understand it, but I respect that she is not falling into others' ideals of style.


--Wednesday, my wife and I go to the Great State Fair of Texas, in Dallas. We're deliberating on whether to pull the girls out of school to go, as well.


--The weather, man. It's beautiful. Guess I'll go dig a hole, shower, and go to work.

Insanity.

We could have used a couple of items yesterday, but I was adamant that we were NOT going to make any purchases on Thanksgiving Day. I never actually left the property all day yesterday. The vast majority of people working retail are paid very little, and while I believe that it's the right of the retailers to be open on Thanksgiving Day, I think that it's pretty sorry to do it. I won't be part of the problem; I don't shop on that day.

Likewise, I won't take part in mobs. Maybe wall-sized million DPI televisors are available for $20 bills. I don't care; I'm going to miss out. I've got a 30" CRT screen that only plays Netflix and Amazon and DVDs, so I'm a bit behind the curve, anyhow.

This stuff? Oh, HELL no.

And we're back. Monday.

--My home machine caught a little virus. I fought it, thought that I won, and finally went Slash And Burn, and used the recovery discs to reset my hard drive to factory settings. Man, I wish I'd created the recovery disk when I bought it. For $30, I was able to get the discs sent pretty quickly to me from Acer. Apparently, that's cheap, these days.

--Today is the birthday Leonhard Euler, who among other things came up with the most simple equation to utilize the mathematical constants e, i, pi, 1, and zero. A trig professor I had once offered a free A for the semester to anyone who could write a proof for that identity. I checked out 3 books on the subject, and went to work. A week later, I got tired-head, and quit. I got a C in that class.
--As our greatest generation fades away, I cannot stress enough how important it is that we view such pieces as this amazing video, and realize that Granddad and Great Granddad were young, once.
Also, to help us remember what it was like to see an end to a war.

--A company called Myriad is arguing that a patent should be issued for its isolation of the BRCA1 gene. I'm a fan of patents for medical discovery and processes, because that creates the profit motive which stimulates new R&D. But you can't patent nature. Myriad did not create this gene-- they simply discovered its bounds. This is akin to patenting a star which one found in a telescope. Name it, sure. But it ain't yours to charge usage fees for me looking at it, after you point it out.

--High of 87 degrees here today. Humid.

--I heard a "Welfare Concern" call go out over the radio, of a topless woman walking down the highway before dawn. I'll bet that got some response from the cops in her area. But  what were they going to do? It's not illegal to be topless in public in Texas. Maybe they were going to call her a traffic hazard. Or use the tired threat of Disorderly Conduct. (Behavior others might find to be offensive.)

--The Eleven Year-Old In The House had a birthday sleepover this weekend, and invited 5 other 11 year-olds to the house. As a buffer, The Fourteen Year-Old In The House invited her best friend over for a sleepover, as well. We had 5 pizzas, lots of soda, a birthday pie, some spooky kid movies, and Just Dance 4. There may or may not be an MP4 extant which documents my own entry into the dance-off that occurred in my living room. The Nentendo Wii declared me to be the loser of that event. There was also a stationary bicycle sprint race, which I won (I had to redeem myself somehow.).  The girls then held (I'm not kidding, here) a spelling bee and a geo trivia quiz tournament. Then they played "Slender Man." I didn't know what this was, and one of the girls whipped out an iPad to show me the creepy first-person game derived from the apparently ancient (by Internet standards) meme. How did I miss this? The girls played a version that involved notes left around the house, as they played hide and seek.

--I fell off the wagon with regard to my little diet, this weekend. Before that, I was losing about a pound a day. I'm back, though.

--Tax day. We had some complications, but filed about a month ago. We got $1000 back, which went directly into debt abatement. My wife is irritated that the refund isn't bigger. I'm irritated that we made a no-interest loan to the federal government for so long.

--That $150 riding mower that I bought a couple of months ago is working like a house afire. The guy that I bought it from said that he felt that it cut too rough. He must be picky; it is made of win, from what I can see.

--Due to work conflicts, I may have to miss the NRA convention this year, and it's in Houston. I has a sad. I mostly want to see my friends.

--Flirting with the statewide Child Protective Services intake lady over the phone is just another little service that I perform for people with soul-crushing-yet necessary jobs. I'm afraid that I do discriminate based on gender, though. Sorry.

--I talked to a CPS investigator today who said that her job was way better than teaching, for her. I told her about my friend who told me that he found combat in Afghanistan to be less stressful than teaching urban high school kids. But then I've got friends who should always be teachers. It takes all kinds.

--I've been watching my carbs. I can't express how much I want a PBJ and a bag of Cheetos, right now.





 

Thursday random thoughts.

--When Marty McFly went thirty years into the future, he went to 21 October 2015. That's a little over two and a half years from now.

--I've got a friend turning in his gear to muster out of the US Army in Korea. I actually still can see a point in being there, unlike Afghanistan. But even then, the reason to be in Korea isn't good enough. Let's bring them home. This is less about me being a peacenik and more about me wondering how we're going to pay for this, and wondering what it is that we think we're buying with all those taxpayer's dollars?

--South Korea is mighty industrialized, now, and China has little or no truck with North Korea, now.

--I've been watching old episodes of Barney Miller, lately. As a kid, I remember that show coming on, and wondering why anyone would want to watch it. What kind of a cop show was it, where mostly people just stood around and talked, and a laugh track ran? Why didn't anyone ever fire a gun, or chase somebody?? 

Now, I'm fascinated again at the anthropology of police work. The detectives' squad room, for instance: no computers. Hell, even the typewriters are manual. The cops wear Detective Specials and 2" Model 10's, and maybe the odd Agent or something. Apparently the detectives routinely get called out to hot calls in-progress. Nobody has a portable radio. Very, very rarely is a female cop seen, and it's a big deal. Come to think of it, it's a big deal that one is black, and one is Polish, and one is Chinese, and one is Puerto Rican, too. Then there's the character Deitrich, who's just weird. I like his character the best. Sadly, Steve Landesberg and Jack Soo and Ron Carey and James Gregory are all dead. Ironically, the actor who portrayed the sick and burnt-out Phil Fish (Abe Vigoda) is still quite active as an actor at 91.

It took me a while to realize that Detective Harris is Shepard Book from Firefly.

--Watching the 30 minute cop comedy that spanned from 1974 to 1982, you become very aware of that tendency of television shows from that time period to attempt to grapple with social issues. I've seen ones on Vietnam, and the aftermath of violence, and on racial relations, and civil rights ("In a very special Barney Miller: Deitrich gets arrested, standing up for what he believes in.").  I just watched one about Agent Orange that had an investigation less plausible than that purportedly presented in J.F.K.

--The captain has a couch in his office. I've had a boss with a couch in his office. I want, someday, to have a couch in my office.

--The dicks wore their guns right in the show, though, for the most part-- behind the strong side hip. Modern cop shows are terrible about putting that pistol at 2:00 or even 1:45, just so that you can see it even when a cover garment on. The show's main character carries it too far, with Hal Linden deciding that the good captain would have his snubbie at about 4:30 or even 5:00 o'clock.

--That reminds me: I need a new couch at home. We've shredded the leather. I've stitched it back. My daughter's stitched it. It's time. We got our $1300 out of it. (What? That was 10 years ago. We'd gotten an insurance check, and needed a couch.)

--Remember when you would occasionally see benches in men's rooms? My wife tells me that there's a couch in the lady's room at her office. I seem to recall, as a little kid getting dragged into ladies' rooms, that couches were rife in womens' restrooms.

--I had someone question some point of my manhood recently. I pulled out my pink cell phone, pointed to it and my ring, and said, "I've got almost 15 years of marriage to the woman that I've had two kids with. I quit caring about having to prove my masculinity to anyone a long time ago."

--Apparently, the SCOTUS just heard arguments about whether states can do mandatory blood draws without a warrant. I've been kind of uneasy about our new "If it's a felony, you have to give blood" law, from the outset. I'm absolutely fine taking an involuntary blood draw after having a sworn warrant. I've got a sneaking suspicion that we're going to see a lot of specimens thrown out for violation of 4th Amendment. I can deal with losing the admittedly useful investigative tool.  I'd rather live in a free[r] country, even though I promise you that some intoxicated drivers will walk because of this, and will cause some deaths.

--I've had some felony DWI arrestees voluntarily provide me with a blood sample, so that their license wouldn't be immediately suspended for refusing, stating that they knew that I could take their blood against their will, anyway. Tough break for them if the mandatory blood draw gets thrown out.

--I bought a new dishwasher for Mom for Christmas. I got delivered today. The delivery guy knocked off some insulation, said, "Uh oh," and left it. I tried to stick it back on. Maybe I've got it right? I found that Whirlpool dishwashers need a special adaptor that you have to buy separately, to hook 'em to your water supply. They salesman that us the washer forgot to mention that. The salesman at the store when I went in to get the adaptor was shocked, and said that it should have been mentioned. The manager gave me a $25 gift card, so I'm basically happy. 

--But now I have to finish installing a dishwasher. Which I hate doing. Uninstalling the old one was two tons of fun, too. It's been sitting full of stagnant dirty water for about half a year. Ew. It made a mess.

--I went to a Council of Governments class on grant-writing yesterday. That was kind of a beating. I'm hoping that I win us a grant, and that it becomes worth it. As the coordinator for our city, it's going to be like herding cats.

--This looks like an interesting integrated rifle system. The misuse of the term "bullet" is frustrating, though.

--My elder daughter refused to let me pull her out of AP honors geometry to put her in the regular class. She's been struggling, and feeling some stress. (First B in years.)  I'm really proud of her for not taking the easy way out, when I was giving her that option.

Responsibility: A Hard Week At The G Household For Critters.

I got home this morning, and checked on the chickens. Hm. Their water pan was bone dry. NOT good, when the temps get up to over 100. I had told my younger daughter yesterday to feed and water the chickens. There was some feed scattered on the floor of the chicken yard, that I certainly hadn't put there. I pour their lay pellets into the heavy flexible bowl made of recycled tire, so that I can move them, when I move the portable pen. Two chickens were in the small yard. The other two were in the hen house. I pulled the water pan and the feed bowl out, and moved the portable pen. Immediately, I saw the corpses of two dead hens left behind. Lulu, the big red, and Yolky, the Araucana, had succumbed to the heat and lack of water. They were our two biggest and oldest chickens. The other two hens ran out of the pen, but jumped right back in again when I put water in the pan. I should have checked on them before I went to work, but I had told the 10 year-old to check on them.

I went to the recently re-filled unused cat grave, and scooped it back out again. I put the chickens into it, and I covered them with the dirt, and tamped it down. The shallow grave gave with the compression of the bodies. I was wistful about the wasted protein, but without knowing when the chickens died, it would be a questionable practice to harvest the meat, even without the issue of them being named critters.

I went back to the chicken coop, giving up a muttered prayer that the pan would be empty. It had some rust all over the bottom of it, and it was faintly possible that there was a rusted-out leak that had emptied the pan last night. That would excuse the lack of water. Maybe the pan had been filled. I found it quite full, with two younger chickens still greedily filling their beaks and tipping their heads back. No. The pan still held.

I thought about fibbing to the girls. It's a hard thing, discovering that your negligence caused a death. I remember crying as a boy when I'd killed a goldfish that way.

Oh yeah-- goldfish. Alice, our 7 year-old goldfish, passed away this week. But she was pretty old.
The cat is still on the mend. Not where he needs to be. I probably could have done more to keep him healthy. I need to be more often checking his litter box to see that he isn't going to up and die from kidney problems. Stupid cat.

I went in the house, woke up the girls, and told them. It turns out that my wife had told the near-14-year-old to feed and water the chickens, too. Both girls said that they had fed the chickens, but forget to check the water. The hose doesn't quite stretch, so it's a chore to fill the pan, where the chicken coop is now. They both gathered the truth: they had each neglected the poultry, causing us to lose our two best layers.

This time, the younger daughter took it better. The elder daughter cried a bit. I almost regret telling them. But responsibility isn't just a word. It's a reality that means that if you don't do the job, it doesn't get done. There are consequences for failing in your responsibilities. In this case, neither are being punished, except with the knowledge of their failure to complete their duties. I'm disappointed, but not distraught. This is the opportunity for an incredibly valuable lesson in both their lives. I had just last night congratulated the elder daughter on her commendation from the school district for her scores on the state math exam. But I should be more proud of her if she uses this experience to better herself.

Monday bits.

--Saturday we practiced drafting and water movement at the fire department. It was actually pretty fun. First, we threw up a temporary pool, made of a folding steel frame and rubberized canvas. It was about 10'X20'X3'. I pulled the lever over the chute at the rear of the tanker truck, and we had the tanker emptied in under three minutes, and 3,000 gallons in the pond. We then practiced drafting water from it through the engine, and had guys practice handline technique, refilling the pond. We also nursed the tanker, and used it like an "engine" to pump to a handline. We were taught to have the nozzle man backed up by a hose man, both leaned forward into what looks for all like a stance for shooting SMGs and shotguns. But it was just a piddlin' 1.75" attack hose, so the guy in back wasn't strictly necessary. (NOTE: The guy at the nozzle gets all the glory, but it's the guys behind him that do the real work. If they're doing their job, the nozzle guy has it very easy.)

--When I got on the nozzle, I asked for more pressure. I had my backup guy step away from the hose. I called to the engineer: "More pressure! MOAR!!"  They took me to 170psi (100 foot hose), and I finally felt it feel like it might push me over. I wasn't doing it as a stunt; I really wanted to know how much I could handle on my own. Frequently, we arrive at a fire with nobody much to help. An engine might arrive with one engineer and a hose man. I feel very confident about handling a 100 foot 1.75" hose with 150psi. 170, I could do, but I want a really firm place to stand, and I want the engineer to have eyes on me. More than that, and I'll look like this guy, but not having as much fun.

--I noticed that the round analog gauges showed some space for negative pressure, and showed us somewhat above zero when the pumps were off. I asked why. The captain explained that they showed atmospheric pressure. He snapped his fingers to recall it. I mentioned that it was 14.7 pounds, or about 30 inches of mercury.  He said, "Yeah, I knew it was somewhere around 20 psi." Later, in the firehouse during whiteboard talk, one of the young cocky guys looked up from his iPhone and announced happily that atmospheric pressure was 14.7 pounds, unlike what I had said. "You said it was about 20 psi!" He crowed. I found myself surprised at irritated this made me. "Look, you might not have been paying attention in school, but my A's in college physics were earned, you little piss-ant," I began. "I could no more forget SATP than I'd forget the speed of c or the distance of an A.U.!" He scurried off.

--My old college roommate had the cork break in his bottle of MacAllan sherry-casked 12 year-old. He called me over. After we reduced the volume, it was filtered and decanted. What a fine way to spend a Saturday evening off.

--My neighbor has offered to put up the rest of my fence for a case of Budweiser. I bought said case, and learned that he drinks longnecks only. So now I've a case (minus two) of Bud red in cans. Maybe we'll cook with it, or just keep it around the house for friends. Eh.

--My daughter was upset that her tennis coach had told the kids that if they skipped the tournament that he set up tomorrow, they were off the team. This after he had changed the date of it. Lots of kids had planned to go on a trip to see a play with the school, and had a mandatory band practice. I found myself sitting in the office with the principal today, saying, "Look, I refuse to slam the instructors in front of my kids, but can we PLEASE back the pressure off my kid a notch, here? She loves it all." She assured me that this would all be worked out to my satisfaction. This would be the first time that I've ever been in the principal's office on either of my kid's behalf. I really meant it when I said that I support them whole-heartedly. I suspect that that sentence is uttered in that office with somewhat less sincerity by some.

--This week we have a board of review for a new officer, which I am to sit on. I'm picking up my partner to have him sit on the board, too. It'll be good to see him back in the saddle in some way, again.

--Asparagus is shooting up out of the ground in our garden at such a speed that one should wear eye protection while about the garden. I'm only sorta joking.

Random Wednesday thoughts.

--I went to visit a friend in Waxahachie (by-Gawd) Texas the last couple of days. We wondered around the Ellis Courthouse on the square. That's a beautiful courthouse, and I'm picky. Every time that I go to a Texas county that I've never visited before, I try to get a size-up of their courthouse. There are 254 Texas counties (many of which are ~30 miles square, but not all), and most of them have a courthouse, many of which are over 100 years old and still in service. Some have retired their old courthouses but still keep them for other uses. Some counties share their judicial district with another local county, and thus use their that county's courthouse.

I enjoyed the detail of the stonework over the porticos at the entrances:



I also dug the turrets:

Forgive my poor photography. I was using a crappy not-Smart phone at dusk.

--I'm still liking Sallie Ford And Sound Outside. They've got a rough retro sound that I enjoy.

--I went to a pub last night to get a (wife-approved*) pint with an old friend from high school. I enjoyed our chat. She's extremely liberal. I'm a bit right of center. We disagreed about gun control. We're still really good friends. It's not all about politics, friends.

--Pubs are nice places to get a drink and chat. I've hardly ever done that. However, at 9:00PM, the place basically turned into a club, and the music went all doosh-doosh-doosh-dooshdooshdoosh, doosh-doosh-doosh, making us old people find it hard to hear each other. These kids, with their techno music, these days. . .

--This past weekend, I borrowed a flatbed trailer and picked up 3 cubic yards of enriched compost  humus dirt. They said that it was about 1900 lbs when I picked it up.

 I had mediocre tarps, and the wind kicked up, to 50 mph gusts, which meant that I probably lost almost a half a yard. But given the sheets of rain that fell on it over the next couple of days, I'll bet that we shoveled 3000 pounds of the stuff into our raised beds. My wife had gotten out the nail gun and thrown together some 8'X4' beds with doubled 2"X6"s, and lined the sides with black plastic. We put down layers of newspaper under the beds, and shoveled in the compost dirt, mixed with cow manure, vermiculite, and peat moss. While it's organic, it's also basically not much like any soil found in nature. We should be able to grow some stuff in this. It was a dirty job that even my nine-year-old got into.

--We filled Mom's raised bed frame and her front yard flower beds with the stuff, too.

--After all that rain, there seem to be some ruts in my yard from where I backed the trailer onto the soft dirt, and then back out. At least I didn't get the van stuck. This time. I need a yard roller.

--I go in tonight to see how I did on my Homeland Security test in grad school. I'm not enthusiastic. Then again, I'm not really enthusiastic about the state of our nation's homeland security, either.

--I had my daughters do without TV or computer for two days. Given the results, I think I'm going to do this some more.

--My chickens are back to laying about an egg a day. Two of them are laying eggs the size of duck eggs.

--I got to take the weekend off from fire training. It was the first weekend off this year. It was very nice to have the weekend off from training, because I worked at my paying job all weekend. This stuff makes you tired, when you don't get any sleep on top of it.

_______________________________________
*You think that "wife approved" part is silly? Not me. I'm in this thing for the long haul, friends.

It's not such a bad little tree, after all.

Little tree. Over new tile (sans grout).

Random Friday Thoughts.

--I would LOVE to have a news cameraman come along to video People Behaving Badly while I conduct traffic stops, like a highway patrolman in San Francisco had, recently.

--The other night, I had a dream in which I dreamt that I shot heroin. I've never used illegal drugs in my life, and I have a particular disgust for IV drugs. In the dream, the needle was even borrowed from SumDood. The whole time, I was panicking, until I woke up, upset, panting. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a dream. I couldn't go back to sleep for a long time.  I know that lots of y'all cross all kinds of boundaries in your dreams, and it's okay, because it's just a dream. But I don't. I may have to visit the ramifications of this Never Crossing The Line Even In A Dream" thing in another post, sometime. Days later, the shudder is real.

--It was well below freezing when I got off duty last night at 3:00. This morning, the house was cold. Really cold. I really need to hook up the vents to the furnace so that I can run the new furnace that I installed back when I put in the new air conditioner.

--Last night was the only night expected to freeze this coming week. We covered the tomatoes and zucchini with tarps and blankets, and turned on a light under them, and other stuff just got comforters and buckets put over them. About 90-95% of our stuff survived a pretty good frost.

--Okay, let's see who had the better breakfast: I had a pot of fresh coffee and half a pint of Braum's Chocolate Almond ice cream. Never mind what you had; I win.

--I took a day-long class on mobile-field reporting, on how to use our new proprietary computer system. They flew in this guy to give teach us in a class of 6. The quality of the instruction was actually really quite good, and breaks were at a minimum and lunch was short. The guy gave us full measure. I was pretty impressed. I talked to the trainer, who said that he had all kinds of technical certs that he thought that he would be using, but in fact, he uses few of them, now. He got tapped out to train one day, and it turned out that he has the gift. Knowing how doesn't necessarily mean that you can impart it efficiently to others.

--I'm about to go purchase a bunch of fencing materials to repair my mom's fence. I had put in cattle panels in the back yard during the ridiculous heat, but now's the time to do it right, and put in posts and such. I have sworn never to sink wooden fence posts again, when I can put in steel posts into concrete. I'm about to test-dig to see if the little bit of rain that we've gotten has softened things up enough to let me hand-dig the 4 post holes. Otherwise? I'm renting the gasoline-powered auger. Call me a sissy if you want. I've done my time over a post hole digger in rocky hardpan. I'm not in prison.

--I discovered this week that, with a skillet, a big wok, a pound and a half of good grass-fed beef cubed, some bok choy, lemon grass, coconut milk, home-grown basil, hot red peppers and peanut butter? --I'm an evil genius of a fusion Thai cuisine. There were other ingredients, but that was the basic foundation.

--When you're at training, and realize that the speed loader in your pocket is a 6-shot one for a K-frame, and the revolver on your hip is a 5-shot J-frame, it nags at you, and makes it harder to concentrate.

--A couple of weeks ago, I was planning on trekking over with my best friend Scott to see the Alliance Field Air Show on Sunday. The night before, it rained heavily. They cancelled the Sunday air show, because they didn't have a contengency plan for when the grass parking area got too soggy to park in.* Part of my irritation with this came from the fact that an old school chum that I've not seen in 21 years is the lead pilot of the Air Force Thunderbirds, who were to fly that day. Kind of interesting when you find out that the guy you used to make fart noises with in the lunch room is now arguably the best precision F16 pilot on the planet. Would have liked to have seen him fly, and said howdy.


___________________________
*Interestingly, Alliance Airport is just a couple of miles south of Texas Motor Speedway, which had no events going on that day. Would have been an easy thing to have parking be diverted to TMS, and just shuttle people over to Alliance, for a small fee.

Mid-morning walk.

I awoke to find my house empty. I was a bit ashamed that I hadn't helped take the girls to school, but my sleep schedule is difficult to regulate, sometimes.

I answered a message left by my boss, who needed something at work. I started the coffee, got dressed, and walked to work.

On the way in, I noticed that last week's break from the summer heat was over; when it's 88 degrees and 70% humidity at 10:15 AM, it's going to get hot, before the day is over. Still, a 10 m.p.h. breeze from the south made the walk pleasant. I arrived and tended to some business at work, discussed time off for a possible hunt this October, and walked back home.

Approaching a distant neighbor's dog, I could hear him barking furiously at me from a long ways off. How dare I intrude within the scope of his master's realm?!? He has some pit in him, and some other breed that I can't identify. I walked up and petted him through the fence, and he wagged his tail. It's all a big game.

Getting home, I wistfully looked at my next door neighbor's majestic pecan trees, and then gazed derisively at my own trash trees.

There's a reason that I'm planting pecan trees of two varieties about my yard, along with fruit trees and even an almond tree. I will soon cut down some hackberry trees in my yard, despite the dense shade that one of them provides.

I stepped inside my house, frustrated that a short walk could bring sweat to my oversized brow, shaded or not. I was greeted by the cool quiet air conditioning of a distinctively empty house, and the smell of fresh coffee.

There are things to do before autumn comes.

Empowered kids.

"Dad, can you help me with my bike tires?" asked my 11 year old daughter. This gets me moving pretty quickly. I don't much care for requests that I do it for her. But help her? You bet.

I was surprised that I'd never worked with her on her bicycle.

First, I had her get the compressor, plug it in, and try to air up the tires. The back one took pressure, but the front one was a no-go. The valve stem had partially separated. I had suspected as much, and my wife had purchased a new inner tube the week before, after I gave her the tire specs.

I showed her how to stand the bike on its seat and handlebars, because we didn't have a bike stand. I showed her how, when working on low projects, it's worth the time to seek out a stool. (I procured for us each a 5 gallon bucket to overturn for that purpose.)

I asked her first what she thought we should do. She thought that we should take the wheel off. I told her that sounded like a good idea, and said to do that. She looked at the nuts on the axles for a few seconds, and went to the garage, coming back with a crescent wrench. She adjusted the wrench until it fit to the flats of the nuts, and removed the nuts and washers from the axle, and then pulled the tire, being careful as it came through the caliper brake.

I asked her how she thought we could get the tire off the wheel. She wasn't sure. I asked her to fetch me two large screwdrivers. She did so. I showed her how to pop the tire from the rim, twice. We took the tube off. She took out the new tube, noting how much heavier it was than the old tube-- about 3 or 4 times heavier. This new one was "thorn resistant." We put the tube on, and I showed her how the tire just pooped on with finger pressure, without tools.

At about this time, a 9 year old neighbor boy came by, with a dead snake in a box. He had been retrieving eggs from the henhouse, and found the chicken snake in the hen house. I asked him how he killed it. "I brained it with a rock," he said with a grin. "Got 3 others, yesterday." I admonished him not to just kill all snakes, as they keep down the rat population. He claimed he didn't.

Both my girls poked at the recently-dead snake with interest, and then the neighbor boy and my younger daughter fed it to my chickens. The omnivorous birds pecked at it, cheerfully.

My elder daughter put the wheel back on the bike and bolted it back on, before airing up the tire to 60 PSI. She flipped the bike over, hopped on, and rode away, with a quick "Thanks, Dad."

I should have told her to come back and put the tools away. But I didn't. I put them up myself. It was my pleasure.

Apparently, there is a point.

I've always liked it cooler in a given room than most. Hell on earth for me as a kid was to go to the elderly relatives' houses, packed in too tight, with the heat turned up to about 90, over the holidays.

So when the cooler days came this autumn, it didn't bother much that the heater never seemed to kick on. Hey, it's old. It could use a rest. And isn't it nice not to have to fight through the dog days of summer? I didn't fuss. I like to sleep under blankets, and 68 degrees is perfect for that.

As the autumn wore on, the average house temperature, bolstered in the evenings by our body heat and cooking, began to drop. Today my living room was 59 degrees at half past noon.

As it was 28 degrees last night, I suspect that the living room was somewhat cooler than 59 degrees, earlier in the morning.

And that, my friends, apparently is the point at which I decide enough is enough. Well? Everyone has one. Mine just seemed to be a bit lower than others'.

I first called another furnace man, and left a message. I say "another," because a contractor that we had used here had installed the thermostat. That man was HVAC certified, and said he knew installation of digital thermostats. Rather than root through the instructions to perform a job for the first and possibly last time, I deferred to his superior abilities and experience, and let him install the device. Back in May. We never used the heater in the interim. The heater which the thermostat wouldn't turn on this morning.

I got on the Rite Temp website, and looked up the installation specs for their model 6020 digital thermostat, and found the correct wiring diagram for a four-wire installation of a gas heater/AC system. I compared it to the extant wiring on the wall. I walked back and forth. Hallway, computer screen. With some trepidation, I moved the red wire one slot to the left. Of COURSE I worked hot.

Behind me, I heard a quiet "foom."

I checked the inside of the furnace, and saw that the valve had suddenly opened, allowing the flames to correctly begin warming the inside. I closed it. 90 seconds later, the fan kicked on, and heat, glorious heat, began flowing through the house.

20 minutes later, my living room is at 62 degrees and climbing.

Stupy "HVAC" contractor man.

Gotta make a cancellation call, now.

* * *

In other news, I've decided to rethink the whole "store your wrapping paper in the utility closet" concept. With a gas water heater kicking on and off, and a gas heater kicking on and off, there's a lot of flame and spark in that little closet. Wispy crepe paper and tissue paper sticking out of a big cardboard box with two dozen rolls of paper wrapped around vertical cardboard boxes strikes me as resembling tinder a bit too well. What's next? Keeping the jug of lawnmower gas in there? That big box has now been relegated to the linen closet, which will irritate my wife, but will make me feel better.

Political Distribution.

There are shades of gray.


It would seem that people are so busy identifying the difference between black and white, that they forget that the vast majority of the world falls somewhere in between.


Most people tend to think of their political affiliations as falling along a single line, like this:

But it's not really that simple. It's at the very least two-dimensional, like this:

The above graphic is one that I sketched from memory, from a lecture by Dr. Robert Taylor in a graduate class on terrorism. This was early on in the class, and we were discussing what drives people that were allegedly on opposite ends of the political spectrum to take up very, very similar positions and tactics.

It's funny how worked up people get in their identity with regard to which side of the centerline that they fall.

I worry about the polarization that I see in our nation.

I worry about the civil Cold War that looms.

I had dinner last night with some of my favorite people.

John Shirley, for one. My mother, for another. Then I had my wife and my two girls at the table all at once, which is lately a bit too rare a circumstance. We had my Carribean grilled chicken with plaintains red bananas and rice with green salad and assorted beverages of interest. We talked long and walked a bit.

My mom especially liked John more than a little bit. I had thought that she would, and was glad to be there while they made each other's meatspace acquaintance. My home was honored by his presence, and I hope that he'll allow me to host him again.

It's not crazy....

...that I keep poultry in my little back yard in town, is it?
Or that we named them?

Clockwise from the top: Pot Pie, Yolky, Lulu, and Bock-Bock.

Lulu is the head of the pecking order, and we thought that Bock-Bock would never fit in, because we got her last, and for the first week the others pecked at her. We had originally gotten four chicks as un-sexed birds. It's hard to tell gender until they're mostly full grown. We didn't want roosters, because we would be unpopular with the neighbors. We found that one of our original four was a rooster, and took him back to the feed store to trade him for a pullet, which we brought home in an empty yellow Shiner Bock case box. My wife and I quickly dubbed the poultry conveyance device the Bok-Bok Bock Box, for the sounds emitting form it on the way home. The name stuck, and we named her Bock-Bock. :)

Worth it.

There are some who might think that I was gilding the lily, a tad, when adding slices of vintage Kerrygold white Irish cheddar to my meatloaf sandwich, last night. But I would disagree. The meatloaf sandwich is not to be scoffed at, and when made with my mother's fresh meatloaf, it's even more special. Fresh whole wheat bread, quality mayonesa, crisp iceberg lettuce, Dijon mustard, fresh-ground pepper, a dash of salt, and a little thinly-sliced mild onion finished the sandwich. It'll do, until my tomatoes come in.*

In other news, my wife is going to be mighty satisfied with her own lunch that I packed for her, in the morning.

_______________________
*From what bushes remain. Curse you, unseasonably-late frost! You may have won this battle, but you haven't seen the last of Matt G, N. Texas tomato farmer!!! (Seriously-- I covered them!! I did!)