5048-b So far so good, I guess

Saturday, January 23, 2016, 8:30 pm

From an email just received:

Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) has restored service to more than 71,000 customers who lost power as a result of the massive snow storm and high winds moving through the state. Currently, 16,000 customers are without power, the majority of which are in Monmouth and Ocean counties.

I'm in Monmouth county, but haven't lost power.  Yet.  Ocean county is the next county south.

I am a tiny bit worried, though, because back after Hurricane Sandy we were without power for like 10 days, even though all areas around us had power, because it turns out our substation is just off the beach, in just about the lowest spot in the neighborhood, and it flooded.  According to the email, low lying areas are flooding now (in a snowstorm?  Yeah, wind on the bay).  

The beach is a particularly unprotected area.

Mother is not happy.

But at least the snow seems to have tapered off.  Now it's just blowing around.

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I watched a truck on our street a few hours ago.  It was an unmarked white large pickup, with a flashing yellow light on top, and a plow on the front.  He was coming down the street and slid, and spun around until the truck was at a right angle to the street.  Now, this street is a narrow, dead end street.  It's so narrow that if there's a car parked at the curb (given that most houses don't have driveways or garages, the street is usually lined with cars -- during snowstorms cars aren't allowed to park on the street, so most people park on their lawns), anyway, it's so narrow that two cars can't pass a parked car, one has to pull over and let the other by.  No way you can make a K turn on this street.  This truck was so big, it was sitting there stretching from curb to curb across the street -- and the street hadn't been plowed yet.  

So he started going back and forth, in the foot or so he had available between curbs, turning a tiny bit each time, trying to turn the truck back straight, which was working for a little while (wheels spinning like mad each time), until, funniest thing, his right front wheel and left rear wheel were both up against the curb and he couldn't move at all (the diagonal being longer than the front-to-back length of the truck).  

That was weird.

It was beginning to look like it would take a crane to get it out of there.

Then, as he was spinning wheels trying to climb a curb a little or something, the rear happened slip to to the side, spinning a wheel onto the grate of the storm drain, which was especially slippery, and that spun him around so fast he almost ended up across the road again, facing the other direction.

He pulled out of there fast, and headed back up the street, and never looked back.

Wherever he was headed with that plow (maybe to the township access road down to the storm wall, and the substation) never did get plowed.  

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It's 9:30 Sunday morning.  We didn't lose power, and Tim has cleared my driveway.  Total was about 15 inches (for me, anyway.  Due to drifting, some people got more or less). 

My back is still biting me.
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3578 Progress

Saturday, July 21, 2012

If we really believed in recycling, we'd sign our Christmas cards in pencil.

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The heat wave finally broke with a terrific thunderstorm mid-week.  Today it's in the 70s, so I'm taking advantage of the coolth (yeah, I made that up, like warmth, but cool) to rig up the pulley system  through the upstairs attic hatch so I can get stuff to the attic without having to carry heavy awkward boxes and containers up the little drop-down ladder.  I don't like ladders.

First I had to sweep the attic.  The floor up there is covered with the builder's debris.  Even though it's in the mid-70s outside, the attic is in full sun, and it has to be in the 90s up there.  I was a little worried that the heat would get to me and I'd collapse and wouldn't be found until I was desiccated (dessicated?  I looked it up and still don't know which to use), but amazingly I was fine.  I sweated a lot, but that was all. No dizziness or anything.  In fact, I sorta liked it.

Soon as I get some more money built up, I want to get an attic fan installed.  They really do help.  Until then I guess I have to be careful what I put in the attic.  If it's that hot up there today, what was it like when it was really hot?

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The day of the thunderstorm (Wednesday?  Thursday?  I forget) we lost power for a few hours.  Losing power at the country house is a big deal, because without power there's no cooking (electric stove), and no water (electric well pump).  That means not only no water at the tap, but no toilets!  So it was a pleasure to still have water here, and to be able to still use the stove by lighting the burner with a match.

With no computer, radio, sewing machine, or TV I decided to read, but because of the dark clouds, pouring rain, and wind, it was dark in the house.  There are at least seven pairs of candlesticks, four oil lamps, and two Coleman lanterns and a camp stove at the country house (when the power goes out there, it's out for days, so that stuff is important), but I haven't brought any of them down here yet.  I do have some tall candles, so I stuck one to a saucer in a pool of melted wax and put it on the breakfast bar in the kitchen.  When I decided to go to the bathroom I was worried about it maybe falling on the counter, so I set the saucer on the ceramic tile floor where if the candle fell it would do no damage.

Oops.

Jasper knows that a dish on the floor means a special snack for him.  He was somewhere else in the house, but I guess the sound of a plate touching the floor is like a can opener to other cats.  As I was rounding the corner leaving the kitchen, I saw him run over and sniff the saucer.  I yelled and dove for him just as he raised his head and sniffed the flame.

He seems to be ok.  Lost some whiskers, but I don't think he got burned.

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The hair.  It was a 6-12 shampoo tint, in "pale ash blond".  After the sixth shampoo, it has gone from brass doorknob to brilliant yellow goldenrod.   Daughter says if I wear a caftan with gold embroidery and chunky gold jewelry "It doesn't look so bad".  Especially if I walk with a flamboyant swish.

Oh dear.

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There's a Civil War cemetery in Hudson, NY.  A group had put flags on the graves.  The flags disappeared, a few one night, more the next night.  By the end of the week, 75 flags were missing.  Big mystery.  The police set up three cameras to catch the culprit.

It was a woodchuck (or groundhog, or marmot, depending on where you're from).

The police put a camera-on-a-snake down a woodchuck hole and found remnants of the flags.

Love it!

[Story, but not much more than I already said, at http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2012/07/09/news/doc4ffa1213d9e33828160370.txt]

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3250 Power Play

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Some people are like a Slinky, not really good for anything,
but you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

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Becs mentioned yesterday that someone in a meeting raised her arms several times. I was reminded of meetings with the lawyers at corporate headquarters, back when I did that sort of stuff. The attorneys, even when they're working for the same company, seem to always be in competition with each other. Scoring points.

I had noticed that when meetings were tense, and when one seemed to feel that he had just made an important point, or when someone else had made a contentious point, he would "assume the position". He'd lean back, link his fingers behind his head and swing his head and elbows back, and gaze thoughtfully at the top of the opposite wall, or tilt his head sideways to look at others at the table as they speak.

Try it. It's actually very relaxing. Loosens any tension in the upper back and neck.

There's actually several things going on: 1) It's relaxing when the tension has built up and can help you to think. 2) It's a power position. It demonstrates, "I'm not worried. I am relaxed and in control and I'm carefully considering what the rest of you peons have to say, but you can't affect me. My position is secure." 3) It reveals that you were tense, which sort of negates the second effect.

But I doubt that others at the table analyze it that deeply. Mostly it just comes across as an unconscious power position. You look at him, you are tense, he is obviously relaxed, therefore he's one up on you.

One day I was in a meeting at The Company headquarters in White Plains. There were five attorneys at the table - and little peon non-attorney me. At one point, I brought up something worrisome that none of them had considered before, and that no one had an answer for. No one spoke in response, but all five of them assumed the position. I looked around the table, five men in identical position, leaning back with elbows in the air, staring off into space, then I slowly leaned back, linked my fingers behind my head, flexed my elbows back, and stared at the wall --- and the whole table cracked up.

They treated me more like an equal after that. At least, for the duration of that meeting.
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1723 Freak

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I have fibromyalgia. It's not formally diagnosed because it's not something that can be cured or treated, so there's no point in having it on my record, but I do have eight of the sensitive points, and I have pain somewhere all the time. I also have a very high pain threshold - that "knuckle the sternum" thing to check for consciousness doesn't work on me, for example, and when my gall bladder went west, I didn't know there was anything wrong until I started throwing up coffee grounds. (Translation: blood.)

Anyway, I have something a little weird, and I don't know if it's common or not. If it's not common, I wonder if it's related to the fibro.

I found an ingrown hair on the outside of my left thigh this morning, and I was poking and pinching at it, and I didn't feel the pinch in my thigh. I felt it on the outside of my left bicep. I often sense a surface pain on my lower body as on the upper body, and vice versa. Like the nerves are messed up. The brain interprets a surface pain on the thigh as coming from the arm, and then I semi-consciously remap it to the proper place on the thigh. This is normal for me, and I've never really questioned it.

IS this common, normal? Do you ever, often?, feel a pinch far distant from where the pinch really is?

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Gov. Spitzer has been caught in a prostitution scandal. His legal problem is not with the misdemeanor visits, but with the felony act of moving money around to hide the payments.

I'm having some trouble understanding that. It's a felony to move money around? He moved money from his personal accounts to a holding company for the prostitution company, which may have had some "tax implications". That's the part I don't understand. Don't the taxes still get paid, one way or another? I'm going to have to follow this.

The visits to prostitutes is a public relations problem. My opinion on that? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

A lot of the blather is about how so many men in positions of influence and power seem to have sex scandals that take them down. People with

--- break ---

I had to run off mid-sentence. I looked at the clock and it was 5:15 pm. I had to leave the house by 5:30 to meet some friends for dinner, grand opening of a Thai restaurant, and I was sitting here in my PJs, unwashed and uncombed (yeah, at 5 pm, wanna make something of it? Benefits of retirement! I earned it! Shuddup!) Darn daylight savings time. My internal clock is all messed up.

--- end of break, 10 pm ---

So where was I? People with a lot to lose seem to do stupid things they know will hurt them if they're found out, and yet they do it. And the blatherers seem surprised by that.

I'm not, for several reasons.

The neighbor next door might be cheating on his wife with the secretary (or intern), but the big difference is that he doesn't have reporters and everybody else in the world following him around and poking into everything looking for dirt. Nobody cares. Spitzer turned up on a list of clients of the prostitutes. If neighbor John turned up on the list, no one would care, and we'd likely never hear about it. And there are a lot of Johns out there. A lot of men do exactly the same things that have taken down politicians and preachers lately. They escape scrutiny and vilification because, frankly, no one cares.

So that's one reason why. Scrutiny.

A second reason is that you don't acquire power by playing it safe. Powerful people take risks. Risk takers go for it. They did. Some of them took the risk and lost. You can bet your patooty that there are a lot more powerful people out there taking the same risk, and they will often be the loudest in condemning the guy who got caught. (Monicagate springs to mind.) They're not condemning him for what naughty thing he did --- they are condemning him for getting caught.

That's another reason why. Risk taking.

Third, the more powerful men get more women. At least they're supposed to. That's deep in the brain from cave days. More women, more breeding opportunities, more progeny. Otherwise, why work so hard and risk so much? It's animal nature. So a powerful man, deep in the dark recesses of his brain, thinks he deserves the reward. A powerful man also has more temptation thrown at him. That's why so many of them have serial wives, and/or get caught in embarrassing sexual escapades.

That's a third reason. A desire to collect the rewards.

--- Flash! On TV news this very minute, an analyst has said that Ms. Clinton's "as far as I know" (that something was not so) was a slip, and an admission of guilt! Oh, come on! "As far as I know" means that "I don't know that what you said is true, it may be true, but I know nothing about it". She's a lawyer! If she doesn't know that something is not true, then she CAN'T say "It's not true", because she doesn't know that. All she can truthfully say is "As far as I know, it is not true." Good Grief, people! There are very few things any of us know with certainty.

Am I going to have to stop watching the news again? End of flash ---
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1637 Relaxed

Sunday, January 13, 2008

I had a very nice weekend. DVD movies in front of a fire in a fireplace.

It didn't start out looking good at all. Thursday night, overnight, we had freezing rain, and I woke Friday to no electricity. Out here in the boonies, that means no phone, no heat, no water (comes from a well, you know). So no shower, no toilet. Yeah, you can get one flush from each john, and a little bit of water from the well holding tank, but if you actually try it, you get air in the pipes when the water runs out, and that's no good at all.

I wanted to leave here by 2:30 pm. I fiddled around for an hour hoping the power would come back on, but when it didn't, I started with stuff I could do. I selected clothing from the very dark closet, and packed, hoping that I remembered what color that top is, and those slacks.

Now what? I hated to open the refrigerator, but that was about all I could do next. So I put together meal ingredients and packed them.

Still no power. If it wasn't back on by 1 pm, I figured I'd just have to travel dirty, get to the hotel earlier than my friend, and shower and pretty up there. Considering that my hair was filthy and messy, a day past time-to-wash-it (I had let it go specifically so I could wash it that morning) I wasn't excited about that idea.

The electricity came back on exactly at 1. I cleaned and prettied me up, verified that the clothes I'd packed were the right ones, and then I gave the cats 2.5 days worth of dry food.

Jasper was going to have to be shut in the laundry room so he wouldn't terrorize Miss Thunderfoot for fun, and eat all her food.

How did he know that was my intent? He was lured into the laundry room with canned food, but when I moved the dangly toy out of the way so I could close the door - note that I hadn't even touched the door yet - he bolted past me, tore through the house, and hid under the bed. This time, with ALL his body under there. How did he know?

I was forced to leave with him still loose.

Gack.

Well, the rest of the weekend went much better. I'm in love again.

When I got home this afternoon, Miss Thunderfoot had some food left (although Jasper's was all gone), and Jasper is still suspicious. He won't come close enough to me that I can catch him (I don't want to catch him now, but he won't believe me), and although his food dishes in the laundry room have been refreshed, he won't go in there if I'm in that end of the house. I may have to tame him all over again. He's a smart little monster.
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