November 25, 2003
Frankenshower
We knew that our upstairs bathroom had a lousy shower when we moved in, but for three years we lived with it. But a month ago, when the nice water-meter guys replaced the old, nonfunctioning pressure regulator (knocking the incoming water back from a vigorous 115 psi to 51) the situation became critical. I cranked the regulator up to 70, which at least made water come out of the old shower head at all. But when you're relying on a blast of hot water in the face to wake you up in the morning, that's really not good enough.
So on Sunday, after we went to Essex for brunch with a friend visiting from New York (There's a NECI campus there -- "Coming Soon: an edible ski resort") I wandered around the plumbing aisle at Home Depot and got a length of really big reinforced vinyl hose, a union and an elbow and some other parts.
Today, of course, I went into town to the hardware store to get more parts.
But now the whole thing is done, held together by pipe clamps and sealed with teflon tape, and delivering a more powerful spray than we had in the apartment on Chambers St. The threaded fitting that formerly fed a handpiece through five feet of measly quarter-inch tubing now serves:
I can't wait till morning.
November 22, 2003
It's the little things
Tonight, for the first time in way too long, Lunch climbed up the stairs, made his way onto the sofa, sat in my lap and purred. I know he was just looking for more of the ground turkey I had been feeding him earlier (I think he ate an ounce or two) but it still brought tears to my eyes. Fingers crossed.
November 16, 2003
This is the season of bendy pines
Seventy feet of lithe, springy timber with just a bit too much snow on top.
These trees are on the edge of a stand that snapped off en masse a few years ago, so they had no neighbors to support them. I wonder whether, if the tree survived for long enough, you could cut the tree down and have permanenty bent strucutral members. Probably not.
November 14, 2003
Forecast said 1-8 inches, depending on altitude. But my knees, which the snow comes up to, are more like 18 inches off the ground. I'm sure it was just a typo.
Meanwhile, one of our neighbor's big old pines fell across the driveway (wider than our chainsaw blade) and the tree service doesn't know when they'll come. Good thing we went to the grocery store last night. Bad thing Lunch really needs to go to the vet.
November 13, 2003
Stupidest Injury Ever
So last night while were were making pizza and trying out the new peel I cut my thumb. Nope, not while dividing the dough or even chopping the broccoli. I cut myself on broken pasta. Night before last, I cooked a new pasta shape, Barilla's fiore, which kinda stick to one another and everything, and one of them had gotten itself impaled on the big wooden pasta fork and dried there. Wouldn't come of for love nor money. I took fork handle in one hand, dried pasta in the other, and pulled. Pasta crumbled, leaving some bits still welded to the tine. Bits with really sharp edges.
The bandaid and the neosporin seem to have done the trick. But on looking at the catalog page for the peel again, it seems that the danger of burning one's hand that I perceived was the result of using it upside-down and backwards.
November 11, 2003
Leafblowing as a Model for Pyroclastic Flow
Some of you may think that this is just along the same lines as my Heisenberg Raking Theory, but it's not. For one thing, it's not particularly useful (whereas Heisenberg Raking Theory provides an elegant justification for doing a really half-assed job).
The oak tree in the back yard had finally finished shedding, and the mind wanders when blowing leaves. I noticed that there's a trick to it: if you get under a pile, you can levitate whole bagsful off the ground in a mass and shift them gently downwind. The air reduces the leaves' sliding friction (which is considerable) and the matted leaves hold in the air air underneath them.
As I waved the leaf-blower back and forth, the analogy to Posted by wallich at 03:55 PM | Comments (1)
Another reason I would never make it out of high school these days
This. And meanwhile, students who actually do assault other students on a regular basis get cited as role models. Eh.
November 10, 2003
Clear and cold
While we were on the way to dinner with Hadley and Angus it suddenly became clear that there was a bite out of the moon.
So we stared at the sky from the parking lot across from the restaurant, and then we walked around to one of the back streets of New Paltz with less light and stared at the sky some more. I rested the camera on top of some local's SUV and pointed it upwards, and we stood around until our 8 o'clock reservation was coming up, which was just a bit before totality.
My fingers froze, but it was worth it.
November 07, 2003
Boycott Belkin
I would say that this is among the most disgusting corporate tricks I've ever seen, but it's not. Even if putting trojan horses in people's hardware is the kind of thing that used to land you in federal prison, it''s getting to be common business practice.
Still enough reason to never buy anything from Belkin. O Tempora! O Mores!
November 06, 2003
Things we notice
On the way back from the car rental place (we needed something while the jeep was getting its brakes rebuilt again and transmission flushed) we filled up at the Sunoco station hard by the tiny Sears outlet. $1.51 a gallon, thanks to their every-thursday five cents off sale. (When you're pumping 17-plus gallons that can add up.)
But it's a strange little place: the full and self-service pump islands are staggered, so that when you're on the northbound side of the self-service pumps, you're nose-to-nose with the car on the southbound side of full-service. You have to back up and go out the way you came in. Oh, and they don't have credit-card readers to pay at the pump, so you go inside where somebody ducks out of the service bay and runs your card through some bizarre hybrid gizmo that prints your credit-card info on an old-fashioned two-piece-carbon charge slip.
Closer to town, Julie noted that the other Sunoco station had the same nickel-off sale running, but with card readers at the pump. The Exxon-Mobil stations on opposite corners of the 12/2 intersection were at $1.54, and, cheaper as always, Cumberland Farms was at $1.47. They have card-readers to, but there's some kind of glitch that requires a clerk inside to talk to you over the PA system before you get to pump.
We weigh our options carefully up here in Vermont.
November 05, 2003
Chicken soup for the manx cat
After making couscous with pesto and finely chopped broccoli for me (talk about soft warm food) we had the butt end of a box of chicken broth left over, and Lunch was acting kinda spooked after getting his evening half-pill, so Julie poured some into a small plate for him. He lapped it up, so she poured a half inch or so from the other open box in the fridge.
Later in the evening he was friendlier and more chipper than he's been in a while, and the plate of soup was licked to a mirror shine. Now I'm beginning to wonder if this whole thyroid thing isn't just malingering.
In which I have a funny mouth
That was what my dentist said today while speculating on why the decay-detecting gup she was swabbing into the bottom of some newly-unfilled cavities was staining a new shade of turquoise or aqua rather than the navy blue it does in most mouths. Of course, I should be glad enough that I'm not one of the people for whom it goes black...
Our best guess is that the color is pH-dependent, but that's hard to check. She tried to get some litmus paper for another patient once, but the only stuff she could find was nowhere near accurate enough to measure the difference between a happy mouth at pH 6.2 and enamel dissolving before your eyes at pH 5.5 (well, at least that's what
Meanwhile, until my mouth "thaws" I'm not supposed to eat anything, or if I do eat something (and I did) to make if very soft, like yogurt (it wasn't merely like yogurt, it was yogurt). And tonight, still no hard food. I have specifically been warned off beef jerky, alas.
The whole experience was a sort of jolly dog's breakfast. The receptionist is on vacation in the caribbean, and the nice german assistant who sometimes fills in at the desk was home throwing up with a migraine, so things were running a bit late.
My dentist tried a fancy technique called a mental block -- no, she hasn't learned to become a vulcan -- in which you inject the anesthetic into the mental foramen, one of the channels through the lower jaw that carries nerves and blood vessels. When it works, it knocks out sensation to the teeth without sending your tongue and lip to sleep and making you drool uncontrollably over everything.
Didn't work.
As soon as the #4 roundhead burr started chewing into the amalgam I could feel it, and I politely raised a hand, palm forward, in the universal gesture for "Stop! You're about to kill me!" So she shot up that really painful spot in the back of the jaw where all the nerves come together (it felt, in addition to the usual discomfort, like a dozen needles were suddenly puncturing my tongue) and soon everything was properly numb. Still is, four hours later...
Meanwhile, as she and her assistant were adjusting the medieval torture instruments to be placed in my mouth, she noticed the dark scar on my lower lip and thought it might be a bit of amalgam. I explained that it was instead the result of a tragic marching-band accident, and we swapped musical-incompetence stories. (She wanted to play flute or piccolo, but there were too many of those already, so the band director handed her a french horn and sent her off to the boys' bathroom to learn to play it. She never really did, and marched with the moutpiece out for safety's sake. Her sister actually knew how to play the alto clarinet, it seems, but at 25 cents a reed in those days and marching tending to break a lot of reeds, the expense began to add up. So she took the reed out and hummed the national anthem and fight song instead.)
Oh, yeah: not only is my mouth funny, but the old filling was funny too -- during the drilling it disintegrated into shards of metallic confetti that went every which way ("Do you see that one in his hair? Suction it up."). I must have a word with Dr Foster.
Fastforward. (Uh-huh) It would be just my luck to get a dodgy batch of amalgam, so halfway through the final shaping pieces started chipping off pie wedges. So out with the burr again (up to a #6 by now) and back again with the bands...
As we were scheduling my next appointment -- tell me why I bother having teeth at all -- someone delivered a huge hanging philodendron, a gift to the assistant from her fiance.