926 Nephew

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Update on my nephew in Orlando: He "popped a wheelie" on his motorcycle (whether it was on purpose or not is unknown), and went over backward, striking the back of his head on the pavement. Then apparently the front of the motorcycle hit his face. His girlfriend was following him in a car, so he got 911 assistance immediately. His skull is fractured, and his brain is swelling. He apparently wasn't moving too fast at the time, so he has no other injuries. The doctors are not encouraging, but that may just be preparing the family for the worst.

Naturally, being me, I asked my sister whether they had opened his skull to relieve pressure, what medications he was on, and so on. Naturally, being her, my sister didn't know.

On a different front, I have changed the comment processing so that I have to approve comments before they are posted, so if you leave a comment, you won't see it for a while. Don't worry - it will eventually appear. I did this because someone from my past has contacted me through a comment on an archived entry, and she's not sure I am who she thinks I am (I am!), so she didn't leave contact information. Naturally, I don't want to leave specifics as to my name or other identifying info in a comment either. So - If I have to approve comments before they are posted, she can give me her email address in a comment, I won't post the comment, and then we can get more specific outside the public eye.

925 Positive Vibes Requested

Friday, October 13, 2006

Please send positive thoughts in the direction of Orlando, Florida. My brother's son, the fireman, had a motorcycle accident last night and is in a coma. I have no other details at this time.

924 Things I've done...

Yeah, these things are silly, but I feel like I have to do them anyway just to "see what I get". Sorta like opening the prize package in the cracker jacks box - you know it's junk, but you have to see it anyway. And then compare it to what your buddy got.

Meme lifted from True. Items in bold are things that I've done. I took it a step farther by "explaining" some.

1. Bought everyone in the bar a drink.
2. Swam with wild dolphins
3. Climbed a mountain. I think climbing Red Rock before there was a trail should count.
   
4. Took a Ferrari for a test drive
5. Rode in an airplane.
6. Been inside the Great Pyramid.
7. Held a tarantula.
8. Took a candlelit bath with someone. I suspect the questions means a romantic episode. But I'm counting the time our electricity was out for almost two weeks, and we had to heat snow on a camp stove to bathe. You bet Jay and I shared a candlelit bath!
9. Said “I love you’ and meant it.
10. Hugged a tree.
11. Bungee jumped.
12. Visited Paris.
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.
14. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise.
15. Saw the Northern Lights.
16. Went to a huge sports game.
17. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa. Nope. But I've been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and I've climbed to the top of the Washington Monument.
18. Grew and ate your own vegetables.
19. Touched an iceberg. ...But I've touched a glacier. That's the mother of icebergs....
20. Slept under the stars.
21. Changed a baby’s diaper.
22. Took a trip in a hot air balloon.
23. Watched a meteor shower.
24. Got drunk on champagne.
25. Gave more than you can afford to charity.
26. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope.
27. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment.
28. Had a food fight.
29. Bet on a winning horse.
30. Asked out a stranger.
31. Had a snowball fight.
32. Screamed as loudly as you possibly could.
33. Held a lamb.
34. Saw a total eclipse.
35. Rode a roller coaster.
36. Hit a home run.
37. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking.
38. Adopted an accent for an entire day.
39. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment.
40. Had two hard drives for your computer.
41. Visited all 50 states.
42. Took care of someone who was drunk.
43. Had amazing friends.
44. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country.
45. Watched wild whales.
46. Stole a sign.
47. Backpacked in Europe.
48. Took a roadtrip.
49. Went rock climbing. Not the kind with the ropes and stuff.
50. Midnight walk on the beach. ... and the sand fleas ate us alive!
51. Went sky diving.
52. Visited Ireland. Wales, but not Ireland. Tsk. I guess Ireland just has a better tourist board.
53. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love.
54. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them.
55. Had a stranger ask you to dance.
56. Visited Japan. This is a sore point. I was promised a trip to Japan if I accepted the last internal transfer. They renegued.
57. Milked a cow.
58. Alphabetized your CDs.
59. Pretended to be a superhero.
60. Sang karaoke.
61. Lounged around in bed all day.
62. Went scuba diving.
63. Kissed in the rain.
64. Kissed on a first date. Not if I considered it a "first date".
65. Played in the mud.
66. Played in the rain. When I was teaching high school math my students used to laugh at my sailing paper boats in the gutters during summer showers.
67. Went to a drive-in theater.
68. Visited the Great Wall of China.
69. Started a business.
70. Fell in love and not had your heart broken.
71. Toured ancient sites.
72. Took a martial arts class.
73. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight.
74. Got married.
75. Been in a movie.
76. Crashed a party.
77. Got divorced.
78. Went without food for 5 days.
79. Made cookies from scratch.
80. Won first prize in a costume contest.
81. Won first prize in a limbo contest.
82. Rode a gondola in Venice.
83. Got a tattoo.
84. Rafted the Snake River.
85. Was on television news programs as an “expert”.
86. Got flowers for no reason.
87. Performed on stage. Amateur.
88. Have been to Las Vegas.
89. Recorded music.
90. Ate alligator.
91. Had a one-night stand.
92. Bought a house.
93. Have been in a combat zone.
94. Buried one/both of your parents.
95. Looked out onto the Atlantic Ocean.
96. Looked out onto the Pacific Ocean.
97. Have been on a cruise ship.
98. Spoke more than one language fluently.
99. Performed in Rocky Horror.
100. Raised children.
101. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour.
102. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over.
103. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge.
104. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking. Doesn't everyone sing along with Miss American Pie? People in the next car recognize it even if they can't hear it, and they join in!
105. Had plastic surgery. Removal of a wen on my nose, and reduction of hooded eyelids. It must have been plastic surgery, 'cause insurance wouldn't pay for it.
106. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived.
107. Thanked God that He got you home safely.
108. Lost over 100 pounds. Not all at once. Does it count if I lost the same ten pounds ten times?
109. Held someone while they were having a flashback.
110. Piloted an airplane.
111. Petted a stingray.
112. Broke someone’s heart.
113. Helped an animal give birth.
114. Won money on a T.V. game show.
115. Broke a bone. My own, and someone else's.
     
116. Went on an African photo safari.
117. Bailed a friend out of jail.
118. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced. They pierced four holes on my belly when they removed my gall bladder. Does that count?
119. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol.
120. Ate mushrooms that were gathered in the wild.
121. Rode a horse.
122. Had major surgery.
123. Had a snake as a pet.
124. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours.
125. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states.
126. Rode a mechanical bull
127. Visited all 7 continents.
128. Took a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days.
129. Had a specific prayer answered.
130. Ate kangaroo meat.
131. Ate sushi.
132. Had your picture in the newspaper.
133. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about.
134. Went back to school.
135. Parasailed.
136. Ate fried green tomatoes. I missed them this summer, because unless you grow them yourself, it's almost impossible to find green tomatoes.
137. Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey.
138. Killed and prepared an animal for eating.
139. Skipped all your school reunions.
140. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language.
141. Was elected to public office.
142. Wrote your own computer language. Not quite. I wrote a compiler.
143. Had a true spiritual experience.
144. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream.
145. Had to put someone you love into hospice care.
146. Built your own PC from parts.
147. Changed a tire.
148. Skinny dipped.
149. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you.
150. Have been friends with someone longer than 30 years.
151. Dyed your hair.
152. Have been a DJ.
153. Shaved your head.
154. Traveled to a tropical island.
155. Caused a car accident.
156. Faced a fear.
157. Saved someone’s life.

923 Ah, Youth

Thursday, October 12, 2006

I found this photo today. It's me in 1994. I was 50 years old. I'm surprised at how much I've aged in only twelve years. Now I'm starting to think "facelift" again. (No, that's thinking about again. Not having again. I've never had a facelift, although I did have excess eyelid tissue removed in about 1991 or so.)

I'm annoyed with the Blogger technical folks. There's a "search" field up there in the header. If you put "Daughter" in that field, and click on "Search This Blog", you get only the latest three posts! Even if I use advanced search and specify a wide range of dates, I get only the latest three.

Considering that I use this blog as my external memory, this is a big problem. I want to be able to look for the history of complaints about the van, for example. Or the days I put in volunteer time. Or whatever. (Luckily, I copy entries to a script file, and I can search there, but it's still annoying.)

"Help" natters about feeds. It will return results only since you've been providing feeds. I do provide an RSS feed (otherwise Bloglines wouldn't find me), and have since the beginning, so that's not the problem. Also, it used to work! It used to return a full list of hits, all the way to the beginning.

I sent an email to blogsearch-support@google.com, and got back canned responses (two, to my one email) advising me to read the "Help". Apparently they didn't even read my email, wherein I said I am doing everything Help says I should, and have since the beginning.

So - anyone reading this who also uses Blogger - does search work for you on your blog? I've tried it on several, and I consistently get only three hits (well, except once when I searched one blog for the word "not", and got four hits. You KNOW there were more than that!) Maybe the magic number is not three entries, but one month? But then if it is a time limit, why do they offer an unlimited time span in the advanced search, and then ignore it?

Any suggestions?

Anyone willing to pick up the gauntlet and fight it out with the Google/Blogger folks?

922 Where Are the Snakes?

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

I saw a road-killed snake yesterday, curled up in the center of my lane. It looked like a large blacksnake. That's when I realized that's the first wild snake I've seen in years.

Where are all the snakes?

It occurs to me that I haven't seen a snake in my front yard in three or four years. Used to be that there were always garter snakes around. I'd see them in the flower bed near the front door when I went out to the car, or in the back yard when I went to the basement door. Always slithering away from the mower when I cut the grass. Of course, I haven't done the mowing myself in five years, but I DO still walk around on the grass....

I'd often see a snake in the woods when I walked (having grown up on a mountain with rattlesnakes and copperheads galore, I tend to be very conscious of the places snakes like, movements in the leaves, the smell of them (copperheads smell like cucumbers, a large rattler has a musky tangy smell, possibly the urine, or the musk they lay for marking trails...)). I'd usually see at least one or two snakes, large or small, run over somewhere on the roads every month, spring through fall. In the spring, there'd be shed snakeskins under the bushes, and I'd drape them over tree branches. Birds collected them to weave into their nests.

Not lately.

Turtles are missing, too.

I used to often see turtles crossing the roads in the spring, when they'd be looking for mates and for places to lay eggs. It used to be so common that I carried a snowshovel in my car so I could help big snappers across before they got hit. You'd see a lot of squashed turtles on the road.

One time, a few years ago, right out here where my street meets the highway, I saw a turtle crossing in the middle of my lane. A big female box turtle. I pulled over, and was running back down the road to move her across, when a car came from the other direction, and the S.O.B. actually crossed the center line to hit her. I was furious. When I realized he was trying to hit her on purpose, I actually wished she'd have a very hard shell and flip his car. Then I wished I had a gun. Then I cried. I intensely dislike people like that. Someone should run THEM down.

Anyway, I haven't seen a turtle on the road, live or dead, in a long time. I've been to ponds where painted turtles live, and they're still there, but they seem to be fewer. And smaller.

Where have they all gone?

Secondary question - if the snakes are scarce, why aren't there more crickets and mice? Ten years ago we fought a constant battle in this house against mice and crickets, and in the yard against moles. We appreciated the assistance of the garter snakes and the blacksnakes in our war. (Jay had seriously suggested catching a blacksnake and setting it loose in the basement, but dropped the idea when I pointed out that the snake would knock down all the insulation in the basement ceiling. Otherwise I sorta liked the idea, too.)

We've got fewer mice and crickets. I had only one cricket in the house this year.

So which disappeared first - the prey or the hunter?

921 First Week

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Every year I am grateful when the first week of October passes with no personal disasters. Jay's back gave out completely in the first week of October. His head-on automobile accident was in the first week of October. Notice that he was being sued for that accident (three million!) came in the first week of the next October. His first seizure. The MRI that showed his first relapse. The first signs of loss of his left side. The start of the final infection. Every year, the first week of October, something awful happened. Yeah, awful things happened other times, too, but there was always something really bad the first week in October.

Since he's been gone, there have been five more Octobers. A few of them have had minor disasters (like last October, the beginning of the end with Roman, I just didn't know it at the time), but nothing I couldn't recover from. No total disasters.

That's good. Sigh of relief.

I don't know how long it will be before I can consider the first week of October as just another week.

920 Too Many Words

Monday, October 9, 2006

My back was giving me trouble again today, causing some intense stomach cramps, so I didn't do much of anything except read and nap. I've got to stop falling asleep on my stomach at night. If I fall asleep reading in bed, it bends my back the wrong way.

------------------------------------------

I read a lot of blogs (I use Bloglines.com, so it's easy), and one thing that impresses me is how some people can say so much in so few words. Paint entire pictures in one sentence.

I can't do that. I'm too wordy. Maybe I should cut, weed, trim, before hitting "post".

That's if I want to write well. I'm not sure that's what I want, though.

I write the way I speak, and yeah, I do tend to be a bit wordy when speaking. I don't talk much, I tend to be too quiet, but when I do talk, well, Daughter often rolls her eyes.

So I thought about that a while. Why so wordy?

Because I don't like to be misunderstood.

I want people to fully understand what I'm saying.

Many times in the past I've gotten into big trouble when someone misquoted me, or attributed untrue motives to me.

When other writers paint pictures in one sentence, I bring my own beliefs and prejudices to the interpretation. The picture is generated by my mind, not really by theirs. It may or may not look anything like what they meant to convey.

Artists don't seem to mind this - that people may bring different understandings.

I guess I'm not an artist. I'd rather be boring and understood than exciting and misunderstood.

So there.

919 Touring Houses

Sunday, October 8, 2006

Today I toured these buildings:

Photos and text are from the brochure provided to the tour participants by Hudson River Heritage.

I discovered that the Coykendall Coach House is the home of the Coach House Players, the local amateur theater group. In 1970, I joined the group, worked on scenery for a play, and then Ex#1 informed me we were moving to St. Louis. I never even got to see that play. I've been thinking about rejoining, so today I did! I mentioned that I wanted to paint scenery, hammer nails, sew costumes, and learn lighting. The guy I talked to was very happy to hear that. Most people who join want to be on stage. I don't.

The one I wanted to see most was the Cordts Mansion. It's a lot bigger than it looks in the photo - it extends quite a bit back from the front. Back in about 1994 or 1995, two young men had purchased it, planning to open a B&B. It was in very bad shape then - peeling wallpaper and paint, dangerous staircase, so on. But they were enthusiastic about its potential, and had made a good start on the ground floor. It had been included on a Victorian house tour Jay and I went on then.

So I was looking forward to see what had been done with it.

I don't know what the young men accomplished. I heard that it had in fact been a B&B for a short time. There are several parlors, and something like ten large bedrooms. The current owner had purchased it in 2001, and has done a lot of interior decorating.

The owner is apparently fabulously wealthy, owns plantations and homes all over, spends only a few weeks a year in this house. He has furnished the house with antiques, mostly Renaissance Revival, a lot of heavy baroque, some Chinese. Many huge pieces. There was even a full-sized copy of David (with fig leaf). Most of it is pretty fantastic, but the overall effect is overwhelmingly excessive. It wasn't one or two spectacular pieces in a room with more subdued supporting pieces - everything was spectacular. Just too much too much. Several of the bedrooms have a color scheme, but a bit overdone. The rose bedroom, for example, is too much pink. Everywhere, everything. The only thing in the room that wasn't some shade of rose was a beige lamp, which stuck out like a sore thumb. The blue bedroom was downright depressing.

A lesson in decorating.

The Griffiths Thompson House was the most beautiful inside. Again it was full of antiques, but more livable pieces, lighter, warmer, cosier.

In most of the houses, the owners were not there. Instead, there were Heritage docents. Two of the houses did have owners present, and I had to giggle. You know Mrs. Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances? Heh heh. Never heard so much syncophantic name-dropping and boot-licking in my life. I think some people went home dreaming of being invited to tea at the manor house.

918 I Feel Blech

Saturday, October 8, 2006

I've been feeling very contented, even happy lately. Getting out and exploring new places with the Pilot Log deliveries has been unexpectedly fun. I'm feeling very positive.

However, my body is not happy. For the past few weeks I've had a lot of joint and muscle pain. It seems to have started high in my neck, moved down my back, and is now all over. My knees complain when I stand from sitting. My shoulders ache. Sometimes my arms feel too heavy to lift. My feet ache, and every once in a while there's a sudden arch cramp. I had pain in my lower back that made it hard to sleep last night and there must have been a pinched nerve in there because I had really bad abdominal cramps all evening and through the night. Moving around today seemed to help it, but there's a residual headache. And I've got that heavy feeling in the sides of my jaw and neck that sometimes means I'm fighting off a virus.

At home alone I feel like crawling into bed, pulling the covers over my head, and giving up. So tired. But when I get out, I'm fine as long as I keep moving.

Maybe it's that the weather is changing. I hate cold. I hate being cold. I hate drafts.

Maybe it's that the house is closed up tight, and the furnace is slowly poisoning me.

Maybe I am in fact fighting off some horrible virus.

Maybe this is my old fibromyalgia, and this is how I used to feel all the time, and I just felt better the past year because of the Roman-generated hormonal surges, and I had forgotten how I used to feel, and now it's back. Unfortunately, this is perfectly possible. I know I used to complain that I had constant pain all the time, and this past year I really did feel better.

Maybe my body is trying to tell me I need more chocolate.

I don't know, but I wish whatever it is it would go away.

Or explain itself.

917 Antiques Fair

Saturday, October 8, 2006

Went to the antiques fair today. There were 181 booths, and this year there seemed to be a lot more business conducted than last year - every aisle I went up or down had someone trundling out a huge piece of furniture.

I bought a marquisite ring, sterling silver intertwining leaves, for $15, and a amethyst ring, a large pinkish cabuchon surrounded by darker purple cut stones, for $10. Neither antique, but very pretty. I also bought a 150-year-old round crochet/netting tablecloth with gathered fine linen inserts. Very unusual and very beautiful, and perfect for the big table in my living room. It had only one broken thread, in a spot where it's barely noticeable, and one spot where there are three very small brown stains. Otherwise it looked like it had never been out of the cedar chest.

There was a lot of Triffari jewelry in the cases, with pretty hefty prices. (Triffari is "good" costume jewelry from about the 50s and 60s. Not exactly antique, but apparently collectible.) I have a lot of Triffari. Wow. An accidental investment.

I bought my ticket for the historic house tours tomorrow. The newspaper blurb led me to think that I could visit whatever houses I wanted on either Saturday or Sunday. There were two houses I wanted to visit on this side of the river, and three on the other side. But it turns out that today was the six or eight houses open on this side, and tomorrow is the houses on the other side. Ouch. I guess I'll have to wait until next year to get to the houses on this side. Worse, the tickets were $50 a day! So it would have cost $100 and two days to visit all the houses. I had thought that for my $50 I could pick and choose.

Gotta remember to set the alarm tonight ...

916 Mansion Museums

Friday, October 6, 2006

I delivered the last of the Pilot Logs and a batch of rack cards to the Mills, Wilderstein, Vanderbilt, and Roosevelt Mansions, the Norrie Point Marina, and the Rhinebeck and Staatsburg libraries today. I enjoyed seeing the mansions again, and it was even easier than I expected to get them to take the brochures because I asked them if they had some of their own brochures that I could take back to the Maritime Museum, and they all leapt at the opportunity to trade.

Wilderstein has had a lot of exterior work. It's looking really good. I also noticed that they now have marked trails, too. I'll have to go back someday and check that out.

This weekend there's an antiques fair at the Rhinebeck Fairgrounds, and a tour of historic private homes in Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, and the Kingston Rondout. Tickets are limited for the house tours. I didn't reserve by phone ahead of time, so tomorrow morning I'm going to try to get house tour tickets for Sunday, when they go on sale in Rhinebeck, then go to the Antiques Fair. I prefer to hit the fair the first day, before all the best stuff disappears.

I've been searching for side tables for the living room for years. The upholstered furniture is mostly Renaissance Revival (and a 1860's carved cameo sofa). I've been haunting antiques auctions looking for Ren Rev marble-topped tables, but every one I've seen has gone for about three times what I was willing to pay, even when they were in terrible condition.

On my travels yesterday, I saw an Indonesian import store and decided to stop in. They had my tables! They're not antique, but they are exactly what I want. Dark heavy wood, carved beautifully, 4-post-pedestal with a finial in the bottom center, round white marble top. Sturdy and stable. Both tables for about 1/3 of what I'd pay for one antique marble-topped table - assuming I could even find one. I bought them.

Oh, and I forgot - remember the guy who stood me up on Monday? I got an email from him on Wednesday, and he did apologize and had a good excuse. We'll try again next Monday.

915 Obituary

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

914 Nice Drives

Thursday, October 5, 2006

Today I delivered Pilot Logs to an aerospace company in Woodstock. I was looking forward to that, as I had heard a lot about this company, but didn't know where it was. Woodstock isn't a "corporate" kind of place. Sure enough, the plant was tucked back in the woods on its own road. If you didn't have the address, you'd never know it was there.

It was another beautiful day (although a bit chilly), so I decided to find Cooper Lake, a high lake in the mountains north of Woodstock, very pretty, and then I explored a bit. I got "lost" a few times when I took roads that my map said went through the mountains and met a county road further up, but when I took the roads, they turned to gravel, then dirt, then died. But it was a beautiful scenic drive anyway.

Way back in the late 60s, when I first arrived in this area (before moving away, away, away, and finally coming back in the 80s), every guy I dated took me down a dirt mountain road that was absolutely beautiful, and at the same time absolutely terrifying. On the driver's side was sheer rock. On the passenger side was a steep dropoff into a deep valley. We were high up on the side of a mountain, and there were like three other mountains on the other side of the narrow deep valley, crowding close. No guardrails. Barely wide enough for getting by oncoming cars. The road is closed from November to April.

Yesterday, driving route 9W near Bear Mountain, I was reminded of that mountain road. I never knew exactly where it was. All I could remember about it was that it was a back road out of a small hamlet or village. I mentally flipped through all the villages I could think of that might be candidates, and came up zero.

Today, driving through the mountains, I thought of that road again, and how I'd like to find it.

I eventually found a way through to route 214, that goes to Hunter and Tannersville. I headed for Tannersville, intending to take 23A, another very scenic drive, to Catskill. I thought maybe I'd stop at Kaaterskill Falls. I hadn't been to the falls in years. I had forgotten that 23A east of Tannersville is closed for bridge work.

Checking my map again, I noticed that route 16, Platt Clove Road, out of Tannersville, meets route 33 in West Saugerties, and that'll get me home. So I took it.

That is The Road! I found it, entirely by chance! Absolutely amazing! Tannersville as the village would never have occurred to me.

What's really weird is that I have a friend who lives just off route 33, so I've been up that way several times in the past few years, but never went up past her house far enough to recognize "The" road.

This sort of thing has happened several times in the past three weeks. Finding places I'd thought I'd never find again. I'm loving it.

Now, I have a request for whoever or whatever is guiding me: About forty years ago, I was potting around in the Fleischmanns area, took a road through a wide valley, and found a church. The church was a simple box with a squarish steeple on the front, and a steeply pitched roof. Unpainted varnished golden wood. What was remarkable was that it was dripping with hand-carved gingerbread everywhere. It was beautiful. A few weeks after I first found it, I took a friend to see it, and we couldn't find it. I tried several times back then, marking roads on the map and systematically checking them off, but I was never able to find it again.

I feel encouraged to go look for it now. Like if I just head up there and wander, it will reveal itself.

913 Peeve - Pretext

Current peeve: Every time someone on a news program mentions the HP spying scandal, I get annoyed. The investigators impersonated telephone account owners to get copies of their phone records without their knowledge or permission. They are calling this "pretexting".

Pretext is not a verb! Pretext is a noun! The verb form for "pretext" would be "pretend". The miscreants "pretended" to be the account owners, or, better, "impersonated" the owners. They "employed a pretext" to acquire the information.

It is not ok by me to "verb a noun" when there is a perfectly good verb available.

"Google" is a noun, and I have used it as a verb, "to Google some topic", but the difference is that Google is a very new word, and we are creating ways to use it. The only suitable verb to use instead of "to Google" would be a modified phrase, "to search using Google".

"Pretext" is an old word. Don't mess with my old words!

And don't give me garbage about evolving language. Idiots have evolved "problematic" to the point where it is now useless.

Fowler is spinning in his grave....

912 Odd Musings

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Today I delivered a handful of Pilot's Logs to a marina about 9 miles south of the Bear Mountain bridge. Five and a half hours, a little over 150 miles. It was a beautiful day for the drive (although it would have been much nicer to be out of the car), sunny and high 70s. Route 9W along the section just above and below Bear Mountain is very scenic. I pulled into overlooks several times on the way home, including one that overlooks West Point.

I got into an odd train of thought on the Throughway on the way south, concerning infinity. (I've never heard this argument before, so there must be something wrong with it....)
No even numbers (except 2) are prime,
all prime numbers are odd,
odd numbers can therefore be grouped as prime or not prime,
and all non-prime odd numbers are the product of odd numbers.

So all numbers greater than 2 are

• Even, factors are even x even;
• Even, factors are even x odd;
• Odd, factors are odd x odd; or
• Odd and prime

When you start grouping together all unique combinations of multipliers, 1/4 of the sets are even/even, 2/4 are even/odd, and 1/4 are odd/odd.

• Therefore there are three times as many even products as there are odd non-prime products.
• Since there are as many odd numbers as even, and only 1/3 of odd numbers are non-prime products, then two thirds of all odd numbers must be prime.
• Therefore the average difference between prime numbers should be less than 4.
• But if you look at a list of the first 1,000 prime numbers, the 1000th prime number is 7919.
• That's an average difference of almost 8.
• There are 105,097,565 prime numbers between 2 and 2,147,483,647 (ref. here).
• That's an average difference of about 20.
• It's reasonable to assume that the difference increases as the numbers go up (primes get more scarce because non-prime multipliers get more common).
• Therefore, there's a huge (impossible) clump of prime numbers up there somewhere taking up the slack,
• or there's a fallacy in the argument - can you spot it?
  

Or, third possibility, there's something holding the end of the chain, and it's overwhelmingly prime, and very very odd.

911 Hotel Reservations

[Update 10/04/06 - I just tried again, and I got a non-smoking room.]

I just reserved a room for Saturday night of Rakkasah East. The Rakkasah web site says they negotiated "a very special rate of $82 per night for 1-4 people in the room". I used the AAA discount, and got a room for 1-5 people (two double beds and a couch, I guess) for $79. The only problem was that they didn't have any non-smoking rooms at that rate. I may try again tomorrow. If I can get a non-smoking room I will cancel this one.

What makes me think I might be able to get a non-smoking room tomorrow? Because of my experiences last night.

Last night I went to the hotel website, and requested a room etc. The ONLY things they had available for the AAA discount were a honeymoon package (champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries, breakfast for two), for $119, or a deluxe room for somewhere over $230. So I thought well, maybe they don't consider all rooms when you want a discount. So I backed up and tried without the AAA discount. Same result, and the difference in price was small. Ok, I guess I'll take the honeymoon package, with the AAA discount. Only this time, the search results were "no rooms available on that date". They were both taken while I futzed around?

Hmmmmm.

So I tried tonight, and suddenly there are a multitude of rooms available, but all are smoking. I wonder if they had cancellations, or what?

Yes, I smoke. No, I don't want a smoking room. Why? Because I don't care to smoke indoors. And I've stayed at this hotel before, and there is NO ventilation to the outside. The hall where the smoking rooms are smells bad, and the smokers' rooms are so bad that when I get home I have to launder all the clothes I took, even if I didn't wear them.

910 Got the Van Back

Quoting directly from the report:

"Cust. states vehicle stalls out instermittenly, check engine light comes on intermittenly.

Roadtested vehicle, confirmed vehicle stalls intermittenly, using computer diagnosis found code for no cam signal at pcm [Silk - powertrain control module - the onboard "computer" I guess] and 1/2 oxygen sensor stays at center, using wiring diagram tested wiring from cam sensor to pcm, tightened pins in pcm connector for cam sensor and oxygen sensor wiring, cleaned pcm connectors and installed diaelectric grease, removed cam sensor, installed sim card to set correct spacing between cam sensor and cam gear tone wheel, test drove six miles, no stalling, codes, or trip failures present, technician test drove vehicle home for two days and experienced stalling. [Silk- !!!!!!! Italics mine.] Tested, called star and ordered new pcm and wiring connectors (clips broken)"

So, we'll see how long the fix lasts. I think I will avoid long trips or crossing the river with it for a while yet.

909 Free AOL

Well, I decided to change my AOL account to a free account, since what I'm paying for is a dial-up number I never use (I have a separate service), and technical assistance I never call.

I hesitated at first because I didn't know what else I might lose. I use AOL for my main email accounts because it's pretty usable and has good spam controls, but I almost never surf the internet through AOL because it was so horribly slow.

Surprise. With the free AOL, the spam controls appear to be less effective - I'm getting three or four spam emails a day now, as opposed to the prior zero. That's still pretty good!

Bigger surprise - internet loading is MUCH faster now - almost as fast as Firefox and Netscape.

Biggest surprise - no new advertising. No new pop-ups. Nice and quiet. Looks the same as it always has.

Cool.

908 Comfort Zone

Thinking about books that kick you out of your comfort zone. The book that did it for me was Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979), about the life of Gary Gilmore.

Gilmore is the guy who wouldn't defend himself against a murder-during-robbery charge, insisted that he be executed immediately with no appeals, and, against the preferences of Utah, insisted that he be executed by firing squad.

The Wikipedia entry for him implies that he never attempted to reform after getting out of prison (a robbery conviction), but Mailer's book describes his attempts to "do it right". He wanted to have all the good things that right living brought others. However, things never seemed to work out for him.

I read the book in 1979 or 1980. I was 35 or 36 then, and I was not particularly naive, not sheltered. But the book was a revelation to me. I found it very disturbing. It shook me. Maybe I was more sheltered than I thought. I never knew that there were people who think like Gary Gilmore thought. To know that there were people out there who think like him, whose thinking is so foreign to me, frightened me more than any horror movie could have.

I guess my father being an Air Force officer, and being raised in a military family, I was raised among intelligent middle-class people. My high school classmates weren't for the most part middle class, but they were old-style central European stock mountain folk, with old-fashioned values. In college, and later working for The Company, again it was all intelligent middle-class people. Yeah, some of them weren't nice, and some were downright crazy, but at least they all knew the rules, and "how things work". We all had pretty much the same understanding.

Maybe today, with exposure to courtroom shows, Jerry Springer and his ilk, we see more of "the other side", and maybe if I were 35 and reading the book now, maybe I wouldn't be so shocked.

Gary Gilmore never understood why he couldn't succeed in "regular" life. He looked around at other people, friends, relatives, and saw that they had homes, TVs, cars, jobs they liked, all the things he wanted but couldn't have. His conclusion was that other people had luck that he didn't have. That other people gave each other "breaks", but that no one would give him a break. It angered him that he was (in his mind) treated differently.

It was very long ago, so I can't think of any specifics to him, so I'll give some made up "fer'zamples". He gets a job, and one day he doesn't feel like going in. He doesn't have a phone, so he doesn't call in either. He gets fired. In his mind, the boss didn't give him a break. Others had been working there for years, and obviously they must feel like not going in sometimes, but they don't get fired. And his not calling in isn't his fault because, hey!, he doesn't have a phone! What do people want from him?

He gets a good deal on a car. He runs out of money (having lost another job, maybe?), and so misses some payments. The car gets repossessed. He gets angry because how could anyone expect him to make the payments when he has no money? Again, they didn't give him a break. Got turned down for a loan because of rotten credit? Again, they won't give him a break.

When he looked at the success of other people, he didn't see commitment or responsibility - he saw luck and breaks. He didn't understand commitment and responsibility, the relationship between actions and consequences. He felt entitled to the same things everyone else had, and felt that "the man" was denying him those things for some reason he couldn't figure out. He felt that he was being singled out for unfair treatment.

Actually, I guess the book wouldn't have the same effect on me now. Roman teaches morning GED classes, older kids and young adults required by the county to attend, and those kids all seem to think like Gilmore. It frustrates Roman to no end, because there doesn't seem to be any way to get through to them. I listen to his frustrations, and sympathize with him, but I don't know how to fix it, either.

907 Feeding Cats

I've had cats all my life: Snowball, Smokey, Suzie, Peggy, Tigger, Obsidian (Siddy Kitty), Scruffy, and the current Miss Thunderfoot (Thunder). That doesn't look like 50 years worth, but most of my non-leukemia kitties lived 18 to 22 years.

Several people lately in bloggerland and real life have been having tooth problems with their cats. This seems to be the season for it.

One thing I've painfully learned is that their diet, kidneys, heart, and teeth/gums are closely related, in a delicate circle. A problem in one area will cascade to everything else. Tartar on the teeth can cause gum problems which can cause heart or kidney failure. Kidney problems can cause bleeding receding gums which will lead to more infection, which can cause heart failure or exacerbate the kidney problems. Heart problems can cause kidney problems, which cause gum problems, which ... and on and on, 'round and 'round.

Dry cat food helps to keep their teeth clean, but the less expensive dry foods are high in ash (whatever THAT is) and other things that can lead to kidney failure, which ... etc. The more expensive dry foods are better, but I haven't had a cat yet who would eat them. If you are going to feed mostly canned food, to avoid the ash, vets say you should brush the cat's teeth. Yeah, sure. Cats aren't as eager to please as dogs. They'll love you, but they won't compromise their own integrity. If you insist on brushing a cat's teeth, she'll start plotting to kill you in your sleep. And cats won't happily chew on bones or nylon chew toys to clean their teeth, like dogs will.

The healthiest way to feed a house cat, I conclude, is to throw them a live mouse or wounded bird a few times a day. Gives them a perfectly balanced diet (they get the partially digested vegetable matter they need from the prey's intestines), bones to keep their teeth clean, and some exercise.

Ick.

I have a friend who dearly loves her multiple cats, and when one dies, which they do with distressing frequency, usually of heart disease, occasionally of kidney or thyroid disease, she and her husband both are cast into months-long depressions. I was visiting one day when she fed the cats. She opened those little cans, the ones with the pull tops, Fancy Feast?, and then just set the cans on the floor. I was shocked. I dump the food out onto a flat dish, and Miss Thunderfoot additionally insists that I break it up for her, and shape it into a pointed mound (reshaping is required as she eats it down).

My friend's cats licked like mad to get the food out of those tiny cans, and licked all around the (sharp!) edges to get the last bits. I couldn't believe it. This woman is a Mensan. Has it not occurred to her that her cats probably cut their tongues regularly? I have several times cut my fingers on those cans washing them for recycling. I didn't say anything, I know that she would not have reacted well, but I felt so sorry for those cats. My only consolation is that her cats are rescues, so it's still better than what might have been.

Miss Thunderfoot gets a Mommy-recipe dry mix of weight, age, and hairball formulations, and once a day she gets a small can of moist (formed into a pointed mound) of which she eats about half . About twice a day she demands (by sitting in front of the refrigerator and calling) an ounce of skim or 2% milk (she refuses 4%). Not only is she unusual in that she tolerates milk, but it seems to help her move hair through, so that she passes it rather than throwing up hairballs. I think she's about 11 now. At her last annual checkup in July, the vet said she does have some deposits on her teeth, but not much, and no more than she's had the past several years.

Either she and I have very good luck (since I know what I should do, but don't do it), or she's secretly catching and munching mice.

Ick.