Where Are My Teeth?

Too darn hot

It's been in the high 80s all week, which means in the 90s in my office, so any kind of creative thought has been pretty much impossible. But it was so cool this morning that the heat went on. Predicted lows in the 50s for the nect 50 or six days. Hurrah!

But I did get a bunch of paper put away in file drawers.

Ground Truth

So this afternoon I spent a couple hours in the park with the new cellphone (if it turns out to have good enough coverage) checking out reception in the park. Thus far, julie's office seems to have the worst signal of just about anywhere within a half-mile radius.

I walked around the park's roads and trails, map in m fanny pack, camera on one shoulder, phone in hand, staring at the signal strength meter. No bars, one bar, two, three, one, four... It was surprising how much and how quickly the signal could change from step to step, or even wih the way you hold the phone. Got dropouts only in a few spots along the backside of the park, partway down one of the ravines.

A few people passed me as I was wandering along with m high-tech divining rod; I have no idea what they thought. Meanwhile, the light is about a dramatic as I've seen it: deep greens and sudden bursts of orange sun. The ferns grow everywhere, and the trail down to the far end of the nature center is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Oh, and one of the bridges is going out -- some of the rain appears to have washed out one of the columns that support the middle of the little span. I thought it was particularly springy underfoot when I crossed it, and by golly it was.

Even more icky stuff

Thanks to a friend who pointed me at a neat guide for identifying water creatures I now have a better idea of what that evil-looking insect thingy swimming around with the tadpoles might be.

Or it might just be an isopod or a sow bug, depending on how many legs it has. I can't really count them from the picture.

What big ears you have

All the while julie and I were firing away with the digital cameras, the deer were wondering what the clicking and beeping noises were, and even walking toward the house to investigate them. The sound of windows opening, in contrast, is apparently known to them as not a good thing.

Tadpole update

Warning: these pictures are not for the sqeamish. Heck, even I used pretty the second longest lens I own to get a close view without actually getting near the little critters.

Where's My Lunch?

Earlier this afternoon, I took down the hummingbird feeder, washed the ants out of it, and refilled it with sugar solution. As soon as I had closed the window (my hands were still on the sash) a hummingbird buzzed up and started drinking. I admired its tongue, the mottling of iridescent green feathers about the shoulders, and its air of general impatience. The nearest cover is 30 or 40 feet away, so this thing must have started making a buzzline for the feeder pretty much as soon as I opened the window to put it back out.

Hmmm...

Gee Whiz

I just love the new toy that is http://labs.google.com/sets. Sometimes it's dead on -- it fills out newton and einstein with Kepler, Galileo, Aristotle, Copernicus, Hawking, Ptolemy, Eddison, Brahe, Bunsen, Plato and Heisenberg. Sometimes it's not:
Bush
Saddam

Nirvana
Pearl Jam
Radiohead
Sauder
Gottlieb
Francis
Frankenthaler
Gorky
Martin
O'Sullivan
Clinton

Scare the frog

As it turns out, the tadpoles in our little pond are much bigger than the tadpoles in the stream down in the park. (The ones in the park's frogpond are bigger yet, but they've got the advantage of souther exposure and a good couple hundred feet lower altitude. The flowers bloom earlier down there too.) I think it might be all the mosquito larvae and billowing waterweed -- last yeat the pond was cleaner, we put in organic mosquito toxin, and the tadpoles were tiny.

But those little fellas down in the stream have something ours don't: a guardian, er, something. Get too close and there's a splish that sends everything diving for cover in the bottom mud.

Today we have naming of grill parts

BOOM! That's the sound that could have been made but wasn't.

So last week the grill started spouting a few extra flames points back in the direction of the valve assembly (Julie said pay it no mind but I am a little paranoid about things like that ever since a miniature welding torch almost blew up in my dorm room) and today we went to home depot to get a replacement burner.

Of course, the kid in the burner aisle immediately copped to knowing nothing at all and called some other guy, who allowed as if the generic model was about the same size as the dead burner we had with us that should work. (Getting the burner out involved removing more parts than you would imagine, most of them pretty well rusted through, and partly drilling out one of the screws. Hence also on the list at HD: a couple of screw extractors.)

Well, you screw the venturi tubes onto the bottom of the generic burner with some gaskets, and then screw on the adjustable feet (finding an extra screw in the basement to eke out the ones in the kit) and disassemble some more of the grill to make room to put the burner in and adjust the feet for level. Then you bend the venturi tubes (some kinda fancy metal bellows stuff) around in a nice shallow sideways question-mark curvee to point them in the direction of the valves, which you now have to detach from the grill's front panel so that the valvestems and the venturis can mate up.

Did I mention that there's supposed to be a groove in the valve body so that the venturis lock on, but there wasn't? They're pretty solid anyway (the old ones were slip fit pure and simple) Did I mention there's a heat shield to protect the rubber tube coming up from the propane tank, and if you forget to put it on you have to disassemble the whole damn panel-valve-venturi business and start over?

And then there's the matter of the new spark-lighting assembly (since the old one was built into the defunct burner) that kinda sorta clamps onto the side of the new burner assembly, right where the old heat shield that kept flames and corrosive grease off the venturis used to go. Pliers and tinsnips, do your stuff.

WHOOSH! I am under the impression from the way the remaining paint and rust started sping-ing off the metal shield above the burner that the new model produces quite a bit more heat than the old one. Could be wrong, but I'm not going to be the one leaving it cranked up full.

It's always something

So I got to the dentist's office up at the top of the hill on state street in plenty of time, about 10 minutes before my scheduled appointment, parked the car in what passed for a sliver of shade, and went on up.

They were closed. The lights were on inside, so I knocked on the locked door a few times, went back outside to kill time in case everyone was at lunch, went back and knocked again. Nothing.

Then I remembered that there had been talk of a move to new offices down by the river. The person who called with my appointment reminder on monday hadn't said anything about it, but that might just have been an oversight. So back into the car, down the hill on the other Hubbard St, right on Barre, left on Main just missing the utility truck in the middle of the road, left on Stonecutter's way, and damned if the still-under-construction new building didn't have a functioning first floor. "We're running a little behind", the receptionist said as she greeted me and pointed to some fancy new chairs.

A lot of this vist took me back to my childhood dental experiences, from the rattling buzz of the amalgam capsule to the exquisite (well, no, not really exquisite at all) pain of the novocaine needle piercing the back of my jaw. The numbing went from the tip of my left earlobe to the middle of my chin, along with half my tongue, and lasted the better part of five hours, but it wasn't nearly enough.

Of course, when the nice new dentist started talking about things like "if the front corner of your tooth comes flying off when I drill out the filling, don't be surprised" I should have known it was going to be one of those hours. Oh, and the headrest was adjusted funny, so that even breathing through my nose was kinda difficult as the drilling went on and on and on. Every couple of minutes, the dentist would stop, and her assistant (in between bouts of talking about the new apartment she'd just moved into, with at long last ceilings high enough for the posts of her four-poster bed) would suction the debris out of my mouth so I could take a few big gulping breaths.

Did I mention that the suction gizmo, along with the chair, the equipment caddy (which kept swinging off into the distance), the compressed air and wash water, and even the wall clocks were still undergoing shakedown on this, the first day of operation in the new offices? The new pump was apparently set somewhere between neutron star and black hole, so that you had to dial the suction down to avoid sucking lips, tongue and eyeglasses into the sump along with whatever you were trying to clean up. And the flatscreen monitors and keyboards everywhere came with software that dispalys the treatment plan for every tooth, but woe if a dentist changes her mind somewhere deep inside a patient's mouth...

When all was said and done I staggered over to the food co-op and bought a bunch of soft things to eat, then drove home and slept for about four hours. And just think: two whole months until I get to do it again!

The park forester has a sense of humor

Firewire follies continued

Remember my complications trying to find an extension cable for my firewire cam, which I had temporarily solved by daisy-chaining the cam to that back of a firewire disk drive on the far edge of my desk?

Today the postman arrived with an envelope from Malaysia.

"Whom the hell do I know in malaysia?" I asked myself. There are some folks in Singapore and environs on the olympus mailing list but that's about as close as I get. (The envelope felt like there was something round and vaguely camera-related in it, and I wondered if someone had shipped something to me by mistake.)

But damned if it wasn't the firewire connector, pretty much direct from the factory. For $10.00 including shipping. I am impressed. Thank you, frontx, whoever you are.