Pumping the night away

The last four of my 2004 vacation days are not turning out the way I expected.

By now I figured that the weather would be much nicer than it was in early February, when we first got Haley's diagnosis of a rapidly-growing tumor on her lung. I also assumed that Haley would be in much worse shape - that perhaps it would be during these four days that we would need to have her put to sleep.

It hasn't worked out that way. To all appearances, Haley is in better physical shape today than she was at the time of her diagnosis. The X-ray picture tells a different story, one involving a steadily-growing tumor, but it has not had the debilitating effect we expected - possibly due to our hastily resumed exercise program, which may have allowed her to build up extra lung capacity in her good lung, buying her some additional time to live an active life.

The weather, on the other hand, is rock solid crap. It rained yesterday. All day. It varied in intensity, but it never stopped.

I monitored the situation anxiously all day yesterday - there wasn't much else I could do, 'cause it was raining too hard to take Haley for a walk and I didn't want to stray too far from home by car just in case the situation went bad in a hurry. But by 9:00 at night there was just the slightest sign of water starting to trickle in at the lowest parts of the cellar. I got the pumps set up - the one good one and the one that I thought I had broken back in January - but decided there wasn't enough water to start running them yet. (They need a certain amount of standing water to run or they will just shut down or burn out.) At 9:30, same story - but now South Park was coming on, the "Moop / Faith Plus One" episode, which is devastatingly brilliant. After the episode was over (signaled by Butters meekly saying "F**k you, Eric" to the Token-beaten Cartman) I checked again.

Somewhere in the middle of the episode, the floodgates had opened.

I fired up the pumps. The broken one was broken, so I only had one pump to work with. Fine, I kept the hoses in place and just began swapping around the single pump every 15 minutes or so, for nearly the next five hours as a region of particularly intense precipitation parked itself almost directly over my house.

It was around 2:00 in the morning that the weather radar indicated that the rain had moved out of our area and we would be in the clear. Unfortunately, it would be some time before the saturated ground around my house would give up its load of extra water, so I had to keep pumping, and keep pumping, and keep pumping. Finally at about 3:00 in the morning I decided in my sleep-deprived state that the rate at which water was coming in had slowed, the water was possibly beginning to recede, and the pump could damned well sit in a single location for an hour or two while I grabbed some sleep.

An hour or two later I woke up to find that the water had begun to recede and the pump had not burned itself out yet. I switched it around again and pumped down the less-critical side of the basement.

Today I spent washing bathroom rugs and Haley's bed - all of which had gotten wet - and the towels that I had used to sop up the puddles in the basement bathroom (including some beach towels which, I decided, were not expected to do much else throughout the year other than deal with the horrors of the New Jersey shore for a week at a time, so they really didn't have anything to complain about). I also swabbed everything down with a bleach-based cleanser - don't want to give mold and mildew a chance to form.

Haley and I went for a noontime walk today and I could hear the sound of pumps emptying out our neighbors' basements, so I wasn't alone in this. No more heavy rain is expected until the end of the week. That should be plenty of time to go out and get a new pump - assuming they aren't all sold out already.

Gary Gygax is dead

I forgot to get gas on the way home today.

I was in a hurry to get to my house to see if the heavy rains we're experiencing today had managed to flood my kitchen by way of the water leak which has almost-inexplicably appeared in my stove. (Melting snow dripping down the chimney and snaking through the stovepipe into the inside of the oven and gathering in the bottom of the body of the stove, which eventually sprung a leak...what, do you have a better idea?) There was no flood when I got there, so I took a leisurely inspection tour of the house, stopping in the bedroom to take my Garmin GPS thingamajig out of the suitcase I keep up there. (Garmin GPS thingamajigs are easy to lose or misplace; suitcases are not.) I was planning to use the data stored in there as the basis for today's post, after I stopped downtown to fill up.

As I rolled down the hill to the older of Nanticoke's two traffic lights a story came on NPR's All Things Considered about Margaret Jones' Love and Consequences, the latest fake memoir scandal to hit the publishing world. This one sounded semi-interesting; as opposed to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - which, when presented as fiction, attracted very little interest from publishers, but which became a bestseller when recast as a memoir - this new book was apparently an elaborate hoax from the word go.

I left the radio on while I was pumping gas. (Don't worry; that won't blow up your car any more than using a cell phone while pumping gas will. Leaving your car running or getting in and out of it while pumping gas will put you and anyone around you in some danger, though.) I only heard bits and pieces of the report, but as I was finishing up I heard these ominous words on the radio:

"E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons..."

Oh, crap. They're probably not introducing him for an interview. Did he die?

Yes. Yes he did.

I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons from a Parade Magazine article back in 1980 or so. It gave some descriptions of a game in progress, some background, the requisite "college student found wandering in the sewers last year" warning. I thought it was interesting. I decided I wanted to see what it was about.

That Christmas (well, a day or two after) , I took a bus into Wilkes-Barre with my brother and sister. We were 16, 13, and 12 at the time - back then such things were not inconceivable - and our pockets were stuffed full of Christmas loot to buy the things that Santa forgot to get us. I forget what my brother and sister got, but I picked up the boxed edition of what was called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" (a.k.a. the "Blue Book" version - according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article, this would have made this 1981.)*

The contents of the box were...interesting. A blue book of rules and information something like a thick magazine, an introductory adventure ("The Keep on the Borderlands"), and an array of numbered squares (or "chits") printed on glossy cardboard. These "chits" were designed to serve as random number generators, and came with a little treatise on normal distributions and whatnot. I believe there was also a coupon included which allowed you to order "polyhedral dice" for the princely sum of $2. (I think the game had cost me $9. I had originally paid $12 for it in one store, but returned that one when I realized I could save 25% by buying at another nearby store.)

I was a little excited by this, as the "polyhedral dice" came in the shapes of the Platonic Solids that Carl Sagan discussed in one of the appendices to Cosmos. The tetrahedon, or four-sided pyramid; the cube; the eight-sided octahedron; the twenty-sided icosahedron; and, most precious of all, the dodecahedron, the twelve-sided die whose faces were pentagons. (All of the other dice, except for the cube, had triangular sides.) In D&D terms, this set was made up of a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. No d10 for us, baby! Back in my day, sonny, the d20 was numbered 0 to 9 twice, and you had to color one set of the faces to designate it as "plus ten". But this die could also serve as a ten-sider, and if you rolled it twice, or if you were rich and had two of them, you could use it as "percentile dice" to randomly generate numbers from 0 - 99 (or 1 -100, if you counted "00" as 100.) But a d20 was the essential die for "saving throws", those little chances that maybe you got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit by the point-blank shot, or happened to be immune to the poison, or didn't get fooled by someone's persuasive words.

And that was it.

Basic rules. Some funny-looking dice. Pencil and paper. Some friends. And lots of imagination.

Remember, this was a long time ago. The Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20 (with its super-fast cassette tape drive) were state-of-the-art back in the early 1980's. Video games were primitive things.

Fantasy role-playing games like D&D presented kids with the opportunity to flex their imaginations and their creative skills. At its most basic sense, the game was a form of collective storytelling. One person - the "Dungeon Master", in D&D terminology - would set the stage and provide the backdrop and plot twists; the other players would decide how the story would play out through their characters' actions. Some people played without dice. Some people played without rules. Some people played without pencil and paper. The game was flexible like that.

People who played D&D were looked down upon as freaks and weirdos, geeks and social outcasts. And maybe this was true, to an extent. Maybe the level of imagination and creativity required by the game set players apart from most kids their age. But at its heart, D&D was a social event, even if the people you were socializing with were not generally accepted by a lot of society.

The game spun off. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out a little while later, with more complicated rules and more expensive books. The game was revised several times, and the "rules" evolved from flexible "guidelines" to hard and fast "rules" that ensured portability of play. It waxed and waned in popularity. Ownership passed from Gary Gygax's TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the people who made the Magic: The Gathering card game. In 2000 it was revised again as part of the d20 System, a codification of rules that aimed for uniformity of rule structure across role-playing game formats and platforms.

This past weekend a friend mentioned Mazes & Monsters to me. This is an ancient Tom Hanks TV-movie, a cautionary tale which, I think, involves college kids going nuts playing role-playing games and winding up wandering in the sewers. It's laughably bad, I have heard, and is watched mainly for entertainment value. My friend said that coming across this movie on the TV listings made him think of Dungeons & Dragons. He hadn't thought of it in years, since a bunch of us would get together and play it at my mom's house. I was the Dungeon Master...

Maybe I'll dust off the old books and bring out the dice sometime. I'll draw up an adventure, and a few of us will get together and pull an all-nighter, just like in the old days. Maybe even introduce a few members of the younger generation to a "game" that doesn't require an X-Box or PS3. Just some rules, some dice, some friends, and some pencil and paper. And lots of imagination and creativity.

Thanks, Gary Gygax.


*My own introductory experiences parallel those of "Unseelie" on this discussion board. I wonder where in Pennsylvania Unseelie lived?

Flood day

For the first time in a long time, I am taking a day off from work on account of weather. Not snow, not ice, but...rain. Or rather, the aftermath of that rain.

Leaving work yesterday was weird. Temperatures were in the low 60's (Fahrenheit - that's around 16-17 degrees Celsius) and the air smelled of fish. This was the warm, moist breath of the Pineapple Express, the storm system that blew in from the Pacific and caused so much devastation in California earlier in the week. Overnight the rain came down fast and hard. And this morning water started to bubble up in my basement.

The water in my basement always follows a specific pattern. First the southeast corner, then the southwest corner. Then along the southern and southeastern walls, which are several feet underground...by the time it gets to the northern wall, you'd better be heading for higher ground.

This morning started off with a little water in the southeastern corner, and none in the southwestern. OK, I thought, I would eat breakfast, take a shower, and if the water hadn't receded yet, I would pump out whatever was there before I headed to work.

After breakfast there was more than half an inch of water in the southeast corner, and almost as much in the southwest. I set up my two pumps and began pumping...and pumping...and pumping. By then the rain had turned to wet snow, but the ground is still supersaturated, so the water keeps pouring into my basement. Still, having seen the death and destruction that this system has caused, and having seen the death and destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami three weeks ago, I've got nothing to complain about.

I'm now cycling the pumps on and off, to see if the water level has stopped rising. If I get to a point that the water recedes on its own, I'll grab a shower and head into work. Odds are that's not gonna happen in the next few hours, but we'll see.

UPDATE: The water started to recede at about 7:00 at night. By this point I had burned out one of my pumps, so I had to finish things off with a shop-vac. (I think it's burned out. It makes a high-pitched whining sound instead of the more cacaphonous sound it used to make. And it doesn't have any suction, even with both the inlet and outlet hoses removed.) When the water recedes all the way, I'll have to wash everything down with bleach. Yay.

Pumping and mopping

I hate taking days off from work. I value my vacation days and hoard them for things like vacations, when I take them.

My mom had cataract surgery on her second eye today. My brother had the day off, so he agreed to take her to and from surgery. I scheduled tomorrow off to take her for her follow-up surgery.

It turned out I had to take today off, too.

A huge locomotive of precipitation rolled diagonally through much of the Northeast yesterday. Upstate New York got some of the ugliest of it in the form of snow and ice, but Northeastern Pennsylvania was treated to heavy and nearly continuous rain. It lightened up a bit yesterday afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed our basement was still dry. I hoped for the best and failed to prepare for the worst.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and put my sleep-sensitized hearing to work. No tell-tale bubbling of water seeping through concrete anywhere. I switched on the TV and watched the weather for a bit. I got up and out of bed at 5:00 and headed for the bathroom. As usual, my cat Nicky raced ahead of me, wanting to get into the bathroom before me.

He made it two feet into the bathroom and stopped. I didn't need to switch on the light to know why.

The "unfinished" part of the basement was full of water. Just a thin film in most spots, about three-quarters of an inch at its deepest in the corners. The bathroom had water that had seeped in from the bordering section of the basement - again, just a thin film.

Dammit.

I could have set up some towels on the floor in preparation - wet towels serve as fairly effective barriers to water flow, for a little while anyway. I could have gotten up at 2:00 or 3:00 and checked to see if I needed to set up the pumps. I could have done a few things. But I hadn't.

I got out my pumps and extended the hoses out through the garage door. I fired them up and started pumping. I grabbed some junk towels, and some beach towels that have only seen the beach once in the past four years, and started sopping up the standing water. I noticed that the water levels were rising, and that the water in the bathroom had now flowed out the bathroom door.

Fine. I would have to call off.

Six hours later I'm still pumping. We had one final burst of rain around 7:00 this morning, but now it's done, and it was downright sunny not too long ago. The first towels have already been in and out of the washer and dryer and are about to be pressed into service again; towels in the dryer wait to replace them, and towels in the washer are waiting for their turn in the dryer.

This isn't as bad as past floods, and it's the first flood we've had since we - and a helpful Nanticoke city official - convinced our neighbor to stop directing all of his downspouts onto our property. (Now he is merely directing most of his downspouts onto our property.) I had hoped we would get away without basement flooding this time, but I guess that was just unrealistic.

Soon the pumps will go dry, and the towels will have absorbed as much remaining water as they can, and it will be time to break out the mops and buckets and disinfectant again. I wonder if I'll have to just use bleach again? Hooboy...


UPDATE, 7:20 PM: All done. That only took me...all day.

Well, most of the time I wasn't actually doing anything. Set up pumps, let run. Throw down towels, sop up water, wash towels, dry towels, repeat. Mop floor, let dry, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Damage was minimal. Well, nothing actually got damaged, though there's always the chance of mold and mildew down the road, despite my use of bleach as a disinfectant. (I finally got to use those stupid white sweatpants that look ridiculous whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't involve mops and bleach!) You learn a few things after going through this drill a dozen or so times. If you haven't learned from hard experience, Ashley from Ink On Paper wrote an excellent article for Associated Content called "What to Do about Basement Flooding." It's a must-read for anyone who has ever had to deal with this problem, or anyone who may be dealing with it in the future.

How to dry out wet books

I woke Saturday morning to a sound thundering through the house: the sound of water flowing through the pipes at full blast. I stepped out of bed and directly into half an inch of water.

We've had basement flooding over the years, but the water has never accumulated to the point that it was Saturday morning, not since I had begun reacting to incoming flooding with active pumping. I ran into the downstairs bathroom and realized that the water was coming from there - but where? There was water dripping from the ceiling, but the leak didn't seem to be from above. I quickly discovered that the water inlet hose to the toilet was detached and blasting water full-force all over the place.  It took just a few seconds to shut off the valve, but immediately the problem of what to do with the water needed to be dealt with. Fortunately I always know where the pumps are, and set them up immediately to begin pumping the standing water down the nearest drains. I threw towels on the floor to begin absorbing the water that wasn't getting pumped. Then I stepped back to assess the damage.

I have always said that you could get a pretty decent education from the books in my bathroom. Dozens of books, magazines, comic books, plus numerous catalogs, mailings, and other assorted things that probably should have been thrown away long ago.

Many of them were now soaking wet.

When the hose detached - disassembled, really; the threaded fitting that holds the hose captive and directs it into the tank broke apart - the water sprayed everywhere, including onto the ceiling, and onto the rack that held my books and magazines. As soon as the immediate issues had been dealt with I began to sort through the books. Those that were completely dry - and there were many of these - were put into a Rubbermaid tote to be dealt with later. Those that were wet and worth salvaging - all the books and comic books and some of the magazines - were piled up to be dealt with quickly. Those that could be discarded, old magazines with no historical value, were bagged for recycling.

I got some drying racks and spread as many of the magazines and comic books as could fit over them, taking them down as they dried and replacing them with others. I grabbed the soaked books - a paperback of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (one of my least favorite recent reads) and an Irish-bought hardcover compendium of the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, among others, and...did something that probably damaged them worse than they already were. Something I would not have done if I had followed these links first:

University of Delaware Library - How to Dry a Wet Book


How to Salvage Wet Books - University of Michigan

How to Dry a Wet Book | eHow.com

How To - How to Dry Wet Books in 7 Steps

How to Repair a Wet Book: 9 steps - wikiHow

There are other useful links out there, but they all have the same basic instructions, mostly. Essentially, what I should have done is stand the books upright on an absorbent base with absorbent papers tucked in the front and back covers and let gravity do the work. I'm hoping it's not too late to do that.

A side note: A lot of the water was absorbed by crap that I should have thrown away long ago. If I had, if it hadn't been there, then a lot more good books and magazines would have been damaged. As it is, I can just take my waterlogged seed catalogs from three years ago and Quality Paperback Book Club mailings from last year and toss them out.

Greetings from the Isle of Nanticoke

Well, I tried.

After pumping water until 2:30 in the morning, and waking up at 5:30 in the morning to resume pumping, and continuing flood recovery and cleanup until about 12:30, I decided to take a shower and head into work...if the roads were open.

They're not.

There are several ways of getting from Nanticoke to work. You can take Main Street east out of town and pick up Route 29 South and take that to Interstate 81 North. If the exit for Route 29 is closed due to being covered in water, you can continue along to Dundee Road and follow it south to Middle Road and pick up Route 29 there - unless the intersection with Dundee Road is under water.

It is.

There are still a few other options. Several of them take you to the other side of the Susquehanna River, so we may rule all of them out. Some would involve driving west and getting creative with back roads through places even smaller than Nanticoke. The only real alternative would be to go south through Nanticoke and pick up Middle Road. This has also been known to flood, but only in extreme conditions, like we're likely to be subject to tonight when the river crests at levels never before seen, or at least not since the flooding brought on by Tropical Storm Agnes in June of 1972. (But this time it's not from a hurricane, not from a tropical storm. Just from rain. Welcome to your new climate. Don't like it? Sorry, it's not returnable.)

Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1972. The Luzerne County Commissioners have ordered evacuations of all areas affected by the Agnes floods, the worst flooding in the history of this area. Not that anyone expects this to be like that. No siree. But better safe than sorry.

And I shall be here, dealing with groundwater seepage but otherwise safe and sound, high in the hills of the Isle of Nanticoke.

More damned water

It's raining, again.

The basement of my late grandmother's house is flooded, again.

I was over there from 3:00 to 8:00 running pumps with little effect, all the while having someone check the condition of my basement periodically.

I guess they weren't checking often enough. The entire basement flooded suddenly, much worse than we had the other night. I hurried home and began strategic pumping. Now I'm just doing maintenance pumping. Good thing I bought a second pump.

This used to be an extremely rare event. We had a flood in 1972 as part of Tropical Storm Agnes, and another in 1975 as part of Tropical Storm Eloise. Then again sometime in the early 1980's, possibly again in the late 80's, then in 1996. That was when I bought the first pump, the one which burned out back in January.

I bought a second pump in 2002 when I was sure that a late Winter storm would quickly melt and result in a flood. It didn't. But we did have a flood in June of 2003, the day after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released. Then again in September 2004, after Hurricane Ivan. Then in January. Then Monday night. Then today.

I wonder if this is what climate change feels like?

Disasters

Our weather for the last three months has followed an annoying pattern:  ice on top of snow on top of snow, then a rapid thaw, then immediately more snow, then another rapid thaw, then heavy rain followed by more snow and then more rain.  And more rain and more rain.

All this left the ground saturated, and the water table high, and conditions right for some basement flooding.  I've been preparing for this since the rains began last weekend, sweeping the basement floor and picking up any loose items and making sure I knew where my pumps were.  We dodged the flooding bullet last weekend, and every day up until yesterday.  Yesterday it was clear that we would be getting an all-day soaking rain.  My water detector started to sound sometime around ten o'clock last night, and I realized I wouldn't be getting much sleep.

At first the water was just a trickle, and it looked like I might be able to contain it with some dams made from towels.  I checked on these dams several times and it looked like they were holding.  But then the rain picked up in intensity and the saturated soil began to void its excess water into our basement.  It quickly spilled beyond the dams, until they were nothing but waterlogged towels in the middle of a partially-flooded section of our basement.  I set up the pumps and broke out the lengths of garden hose for directing the water across our cellar and through the garage and down the driveway.  These are submersible pumps that need a minimal amount of water (about one-eighth of an inch) to get the pumping action started.  Below that they will shut down, or just burn out. So it's actually necessary to allow some depth of water to accumulate before you activate them.  (Most installed sump pumps are built into holes in the cellar floor where the water will accumulate first.)  Some water had gotten into the downstairs bathroom, too, so that called for more floor towels.

After that it became a cycle of laying down towels to try to contain the spread of the water, checking the pumps to make sure they were in deep enough water, changing out dry towels for soaked ones, putting the wet towels in the washer, shutting down the pumps if they had pumped themselves dry, putting the washed towels in the dryer, and reactivating the pumps when water had accumulated again.  Over and over and over.

Eleven o'clock rolled to midnight, and I switched to the Weather Channel to get radar updates on the storm.  It looked like the  worst was past, but it would take a while for all the excess water to percolate through the soil.

I rummaged through the downstairs bedroom where I sleep when I stay over.  This is only partly below ground, so flooding must be severe for water to push into this area.  Nevertheless I looked for things that were on the floor that could be ruined by any water that might get in.  I spotted the power strip/surge protector for the VCR, DVD player, and digital cable box dangling off the edge of the entertainment center - not on the floor, but suspended by the various wires and cables leading into it.  I reeled it up and tucked it into the entertainment center, next to the TV.

The cycle continued.  At its worst I had maybe a quarter of an inch of water in some parts of the basement, maybe a little more.  The pumps pumped away, and I kept relocating them to be in the deepest part of the water.  Dry towels replaced wet, which went in the washer and then the dryer and then back on the floor.

It was getting late.  After one o'clock in the morning, maybe two.  There was a presentation I wanted to see in Scranton on Green Energy Jobs at ten o'clock, and I would have to be out of the house by nine to be sure I made it with time to spare.  Even allowing just an hour to get up and get ready, I would need to be out of bed in just six hours.  During my working days that would seem like a luxuriously excessive amount of sleep, but now it seemed barely adequate.  I got myself ready for bed, to maybe grab sleep in two hour chunks, checking the pumps and changing the towels in between. I decided to watch a little TV first.  See if the storm had truly moved on.  I hit the ON button and automatically punched up the Weather Channel.

All I got was static.

OK, it was just working a few hours ago.  What happened?  What changed? I immediately suspected the power strip / surge protector.  Had I manhandled it, maybe disconnected something?  I picked it up and examined it.  Everything seemed to be plugged in.  I unplugged everything, one at a time, and plugged it back in, just to be sure.  I noticed that the digital cable thingie didn't have an indicator light showing.  Could that be switched off?  No, the switch was in the "on" position.  Then I realized I must have switched off the power strip when I was handling it.  (The TV is plugged in separately, which is why I got static instead of nothing.)

I flipped the switch and the screen went to black as the digital cable box reinitialized.  Then it remembered that I had punched up the Weather Channel.  Or maybe that was just the last channel selected.  Either way, I was suddenly treated to images of utter devastation in Japan.

Magnitude 8.9?  That can't be right.

I flicked back and forth between the Weather Channel and CNN.  The news was unbelievable.  An earthquake of that magnitude, just off the coast?  Surely there will be - and yes, there it was, footage of the tsunami, washing across farmlands in the Japanese coastal countryside.  The buildings looked undamaged, and the fields looked empty.  Was there time to evacuate everyone?  The answer became clear as the helicopter-borne camera followed the advancing wave and, in the near distance, a moving line of cars and trucks became visible.  Did the people in those vehicles know that death was coming?  Were they racing away from it, or just going from one place to another, assuming the worst of the earthquake had  passed?  While I watched the camera never followed the wave front right up to those cars.  Each car, each truck, had at least one living person it it.  If the tsunami reached those vehicles, each person in them would almost certainly be dead in the near future as a consequence.

The image changed to a factory of some sort, maybe a refinery.  Great spherical tanks close to each other, some burning spectacularly.  Occasionally the orange glow of the fire would flare up as, I suppose, another tank exploded.

I watched.  I dozed.  I woke at one point to the sound of the video shot within an office building as the quake hit.  At another point I awoke to something else: I didn't know what it was, but I knew I had programmed myself to get up when I heard it.  It wasn't an alarm.  It was...nothing?  Ah, yes.  Nothing.  The sound of the dryer stopping.  Another load of towels ready to change out.

I went into the flooded part of the basement.  I had had the pumps switched off, and the water had re-accumulated.  The towels I had on the floor were completely saturated.  I had maybe a quarter of an inch of water at the deepest parts.

It was nothing.  A little pumping, some towels, some quick mopping with bleachy water, and everything would be fine.  I had just watched a wall of water destroying houses and snuffing out lives as it rolled across Japan.  I had no worries.

Headless Rabbits: Germany

I saw this on CNN's website today:

German police probe animal beheadings

BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- Police are investigating who might have decapitated scores of animals and drained them of their blood* in a west German city, a spokesman said Thursday.

Over the past year the corpses of 21 rabbits, three chickens and four wild birds have been found headless in and around the city of Bochum, police spokesman Volker Schuette said.

Police have formed a special commission to investigate the grisly discoveries, but so far have no clues about who may have killed the animals.

Hmmm...too bad they haven't Googled the words "headless rabbit". They would have been led to the world's leading authority on headless rabbits, at least as far as Google is concerned. Based on reports from around the world, I believe we may be able to suggest a description of the culprit: about 18 inches long, tail, pointy ears, whiskers, sharp bitey teeth, fondness for catnip, cheezburgers, and inexplicably biting the heads off rabbits...


*"Drained them of their blood"? An interesting detail. I wonder what this is based on? If a cat kills an animal by breaking its neck, and then bites the head off, will blood come pouring out? Or will it stay in in the veins and arteries, not pushed around by the pumping action of the animal's dead heart? Could this be mistaken for being "drained of blood"?

Lucky break

The storms that have been coming like a freight train from south to north along the Eastern Seaboard have mostly broken around Nanticoke. We've had some moderately heavy rain, but none of the pounding downpours that in the past have caused basement flooding, overwhelmed storm drains, and blown manhole covers off of storm sewers. Other communities just a few miles to either side of us have not been so lucky.

This is a good thing for me. Twice in recent years (in 2006 and again in 2009) I have had to go out in the middle of a storm with a six-foot iron rod in my hand to unclog the storm drain across the street from my house. The last time I did this the standing water in the street was already close to the level of the curbs and was threatening to inundate lawns and driveways. This last time I also had to wade out into the middle of a busy intersection to replace the manhole cover that had been blown off. Fortunately, most drivers are wise enough to steer clear of a very large man dressed all in black holding a six-foot iron rod in one hand in the middle of an intersection in the middle of an electrical storm.

But tonight, for the first time this scheduled rotation, I am going in to work. That means that if any emergencies should arise, if basements need pumping or storm drains need clearing or manhole covers need replacing, I won't be around to do it. So I'm hoping that our luck holds through the night, and the storms continue to break around Nanticoke.

Helping the economy recover

It's been a good two days off. Yesterday I pulled an all-dayer: after coming home in the morning I ate breakfast, I lingered a bit, then popped up and mowed the lawn at my mom's house. After a shower I took my mom to an appointment, and then went on an odyssey of pumping my hard-earned cash back into the local economy: the Kung Fu Panda DVD for $7.99 from Kmart, a stack of comic books from a local comic book shop for which I plan to design a blog in a few months, cat food, cat litter, a scratching post, a CD of the greatest hits from local DJ's Daniels & Webster's first 5000 shows called "Sgt. Lumpy's Auto Parts Club Band", a non-stick tin for making oversized muffins, and several other items - including a large pizza with onions, black olives, and anchovies, and a six-pack of Dream Weaver Wheat beer on the side. Upon arriving home, realized that I hadn't eaten anything all day aside from some apple pie and coffee first thing in the morning, and promptly ate six slices of pizza and two beers. Read comic books until I fell asleep at 10:00 at night, some thirty-two hours after I first woke up the previous afternoon.

Got up this morning around 9:00. Made Shoo-Fly Cake, half the batch in the oversized muffin tin, the other half in a loaf pan. Read some blogs and began working on the day's blog post while eating one of the muffins. Ran across town to mow the lawn there. Set out some Fall decorations. Came back here for lunch, consisting of the last two slices of pizza and another Shoo-Fly muffin. Showered. Gave blood, which is why I made the iron-rich Shoo-Fly Cake. Bought some remaindered books at Barnes & Noble - Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, Pontoon by Garrison Keillor, and The Onion's Our Dumb World. Bought the new Pearl Jam CD and a copy of Heavy Metal magazine at the Kingston branch of Joe Nardone's Gallery of Sound. Also bought some Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations at a nearby dollar store.

So. I've done my part to hep the economy recover. Have you done yours?

What not to play for customers on hold

A few years ago I had to call the IRS to get a little error straightened out. Turned out the reason my tax refund had not arrived yet, a month after I had filed, was because they had mistakenly applied my entire refund for that year as a pre-payment for the next year's taxes.

I didn't have much trouble getting that resolved, though I did get put on hold at one point. While I was on hold I heard one of the worst possible bits of hold music: "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg, from Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt .



Not that this is a bad song. It's a good song. A great song. A stirring, frenetic, fist-pumping bit of music that was once anthologized on a disc called "Classical Thunder." It's just not the sort of thing to put people in a relaxed, patient, happy-to-be-on-hold state of mind. Especially when they're on hold with the IRS.

Rain, rain

Wow. Am I glad I don't have to head into work tomorrow. It is currently pouring outside, and this rain may very well be ice in the morning. Or I may need to spend the morning pumping out my basement.

The Best Things in Life, Part 1

So I'm finally sitting down to make up my version of Francesco Marciuliano's How to Truly, Deeply Enjoy Life on a Severely Restrictive Budget list. I've decided that there's no way in hell I'm going to get this all out in one shot, so I'll do as much as I can now and add more later.

Here's the premise, as set forth by Ces:

...I am firmly of the opinion that we were given life for a reason, and that reason is not to see what's behind Door Number Two. That reason is to experience the thrill of life while we still have not just the chance but the cashews to follow our dreams. So with that in mind I created a succinct list of activities everyone should engage in, not only for the amusing anecdotes but also to know what it truly means to be human. And because of a crippling economy, paralyzing oil prices and myelopathic job market I made certain that each of the following life-affirming pursuits would cost no more than five dollars, tops...

I don't know if my list truly meets these criteria. But what the hell. Here goes.

1. Become a backyard naturalist. I've been doing this for quite a while. (That's naturalist, dammit, not naturist, which is something different, and something I have never done in my back yard.) Assuming you have a back yard, or have access to any area of land, you can rest assured that it is jammed full of living things of every size and shape: microorganisms, lichen, fungi, mosses, algae, ferns, worms, insects, spiders, snakes, frogs, birds, bats, rabbits, cats, and even the occasional coyote, not to mention grass, flowers, plants of all sorts, and trees. Push aside a big rock and see what's lurking under it! The world around us is teeming with living things, and most of the time we don't even notice them. Paying attention costs nothing.

Now, this may not be an option for people in urban environments like Todd in Hell's Kitchen, who has to travel to see the sort of backyard wildlife most of us take for granted. Even if your indigenous wildlife is restricted to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches, you can still spend quite a bit of time observing them . . . but you might not want to. In that case, why not try this?

2. Become an urban anthropologist. Also known as "people watching." Humans are animals who behave according to their nature, their will, and the dictates and restrictions of society. Observe how people behave as individuals. Observe how they behave as groups. Observe how they behave according to the rules of probability and statistics - crowds observed over the course of time frequently form three-dimensional representations of the Normal Curve.

3. Be still and silent, and listen. This isn't too hard. I'm not suggesting trying to achieve a level of Zen meditation (envision a blank wall; clear your mind of all distractions; now, take away the wall). Just set yourself up somewhere where you can sit and listen. Shut off all distractions. Make your environment as quiet as possible. Now...listen. Deeper, closer. What do you hear? The hum of distant traffic? The thrum of your air conditioning? Birds outside, or cats inside?

I once did this exercise involuntarily when there was a power failure at my grandmother's nursing home. I walked in and heard . . . nothing. No ventilation system pumping air through the building. No hum of vending machines or fluorescent lights. Nothing but myself, walking down a corridor.Very weird.

This is also very interesting to do outside. Especially at night.

4. Extract the instruments in a song. While some music is a carefully blended combination of musical voices added together with an almost mathematical structure, modern music tends to have a more complex, intertwined form. But even when listening to this music through a single mono speaker, it is possible to mentally disentangle the various elements that make up the song and focus on each one individually. You can focus on, say, just the bass, or just the drums, or just the keyboard, or just the guitar. You can also shift your focus from instrument to instrument. (NOTE: This might not work with mp3s or other highly compressed formats. I have actually heard instruments that should have slipped into the background vanish entirely from the musical picture after being compressed onto an mp3. )

5. Become a naked-eye astronomer. Your eyes are really fantastic tools when it comes to observing, and they're great for looking at the stars, too. Find yourself a dark enough location, or dark-adapt your eyes long enough to open up your pupils wide, and you'll be amazed at the amount of stuff you can see. If you're very, very lucky, you might see an Aurora!

Observing the sky during the daytime is very cool too - and it's free.

6. Watch the Moon through an entire lunar cycle. This may not be possible due to weather conditions, but it's a great way to make you aware of the rhythms of nature. From the youngest Moon, a thin sliver bathed in reflected Earthshine visible just after sunset, through the Cylon Moon of the afternoon, through the Full Moon rising as the Sun sets, to the "Astronomer's Moons" of the late night and early morning, you'll develop an awareness of the Moon's changing appearance that most people have forgotten.

OK. None of these are as much fun as swimming with ducks or enjoying the hell out of an apple. But they are definitely under five bucks!

We survived the night

I didn't fall asleep until after 2:30 this morning, after I assured myself that I had done everything I could do to protect the house from the groundwater that was seeping in from every direction. I woke up three hours later to find that the situation was not much worse than when I went to bed. My pumps had held the water steady in the unfinished part of the basement, and my towel dams had helped to contain the water that had intruded in other parts. Fortunately I just went through a major cleanup this weekend whose primary focus was to get non-waterproof stuff out of contact with the floor.

Don't know when I'll get to work today, which is unfortunate because we've got a major project going through right now. But all of the roads between here and there may not even be open. I'll have to keep pumping and play it by ear.

Crappy Saturday (so far)

I don't like bitch blogs, where all people do is complain about everything from politics to the "liberal media" to how much they hate the ex-girlfriend they broke up with (or who broke up with them) years ago but she's a skanky slut and they hate her and they don't care about her and she's a slut and a skank and they really don't care oh but did they mention she's a skank? There seem to be no end of these, and it seems that it may actually be a good reader-attracting strategy to simply bitch on your blog. People seem to like it.

I don't like it. And I try not to bitch whenever possible. But...hey, it's 1:00 in the afternoon, and I have to tell you how this day is going:

1. I woke up this morning dreaming I was dying of cancer - stomach cancer, I think. In the dream, I had a scheduled "death date", much like a scheduled "due date" for a pregnant woman. The date was a Saturday (today, maybe?) but I wasn't showing any signs of dying, or even many signs of being sick. So my doctor was going to induce me (basically euthanize me.) I pointed out that I was actually feeling pretty well, although I had accepted that I was sick and dying of something that would be increasingly painful. So I asked for medication to ease the pain in the coming weeks. The doctor misunderstood me and thought that I was looking for some treatment despite the fact that my case was beyond hope. He warned me that any treatment would cause internal bleeding. I was trying to explain that no, all I was looking for was something for the anticipated pain, when...

2. ...I awoke to find that the furnace in our house had died overnight, and the whole house was now below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. (I awoke in the middle of the dream, which is why I remember so much of it.) We called in a service guy, but while tidying up the area around the furnace (which is also where the cats' litter boxes are located), the furnace came back on by itself. By the time he got here the furnace was running fine, and he concluded that we were idiots who had turned our thermostat down to under 60 degrees. I blamed the cats.

3. I had plans for today: a blood donation, a haircut, a trip to the Post Office for a hundred or so two-cent stamps (since the new postal rates go into effect tomorrow, and I have tons of old stamps), a trip to the bank to deposit two weeks of paychecks. As it was, I wasted until after 10:30 in the morning dealing with a phantom furnace issue. I decided to go in for a shower and try to salvage what I could. (The blood center, the barber, and the Post Office all close at noon on Saturdays, and a blood donation takes about an hour all by itself.)

4. While I was in the shower, my mom informed me that the furnace had stopped pumping heat again.

5. After getting dressed and gearing up, the cell phone bulging out of my right hip pocket (and yes, I am happy to see you) snagged the book and magazine rack in my downstairs bathroom as I maneuvered around it, causing it to collapse.

6. I picked up as many of the books as I could (those that were in immediate danger of being in water on the floor from my shower) and sized up my situation: I would not be able to give blood today if I wanted to be there when the next service guy showed up. Ditto on a haircut, which would take anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, door to door, depending on if there were any people in front of me. I could deposit my checks anytime in an ATM. Which left the Post Office as the only available activity option for the day.

7. Most of the population of Nanticoke had apparently had the same idea today, and were currently standing in line at the Post Office. (Vending machines loaded with the two-cent stamps placed in the lobby would have been a great idea. Too bad the Post Office is not noted for great ideas.) I saw the line, turned around, walked away, turned around, walked back, thought better of it, and left. No blood donation, no haircut, no two-cent stamps, just a broken furnace and a billion books and magazines and catalogs scattered across my bathroom floor.

8. I decided to sit down at the computer and look up the MySpace sites for a local musician, and her girlfriend (or possibly ex-girlfriend, it's hard to be sure), and their dead dog. (Yes. Their dead dog has a MySpace site.) Unfortunately, MySpace is one of the worst resource hogs in the known universe, so it was almost impossible to spend much time at their sites, let alone work them into this blog entry. Maybe some other time.

9. By now a different service guy had shown up. This time the furnace had not spontaneously started yet, and the temperature had again fallen below 60 degrees. He spent an hour here and replaced some contacts. The heat seems to be working again.

So now I need to roll up my sleeves and sift through the reading material all over my bathroom floor, deciding what to toss, what to store, and what to keep current. And in two hours I have to go to a Mass for my father. So this day is pretty much done.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Hyperblogia

Anyone familiar with blogs has probably witnessed the condition known as blogorrhea, the tendency of some (and, at times, possibly most) bloggers to go on and on and on and on about a subject. I've done it. Half the bloggers I link to have done it. The good ones only do it some of the time; for some bloggers, almost every entry is a marathon of words nearly devoid of content.

Surprisingly, the word blogorrhea is not derived from the word diarrhea, but is in fact a variation of the mental condition known as logorrhea. The application of the term to blogging is usually not a suggestion that an actual underlying mental illness exists but is more often a stylistic criticism equivalent to "Dude, if you don't have anything to say then shut up already!"

There is another condition known as hypergraphia, a compulsion to write excessively. It is possible that some of the better and more respected authors throughout history have had this, but the writing generated in a state of hypergraphia is not necessarily good or even coherent. Hypergraphia can also alternate with periods of severe writer's block, and may be a sort of bipolar disorder, similar the more familiar "manic-depression".

I am wondering if maybe there's a blogger's version of this, hyperblogia. (I just discovered I'm not the first to suggest this - but maybe I'm the second!) For a while I've been keeping up a two-posts-a-day schedule...not because (or, not just because) I'm a stats whore who wants to see my "visits" and "page views" stats go higher each month than the previous month, but also because (I think) I had something to say, or pictures to share.

But now I feel like I've sailed off a cliff. I don't feel a pressing need to post, and I don't have many pictures that I'm inspired to post. Is this just the "depressive" side of a hypergraphia cycle?

I'm wondering if it's something else entirely. Something has changed in this room, at this computer. Something in the air - literally. I think that some component of my computer has begun to churn out quantities of ozone. I can smell something that I don't think was here before. After sitting here for a while, I begin to feel headachey and dizzy, with a ringing in my ears, a metallic taste in my mouth, and sometimes even an increased heart rate. I have a window open with a fan pumping in fresh air, but that doesn't do enough to keep the headaches away. (I bought a Carbon Monoxide monitor just in case, but that's reading a steady zero ppm CO level.)

As I mentioned yesterday, this whole computer setup is more than five years old. Maybe my 19" CRT monitor is beginning to give up the ghost. Maybe something else is starting to overheat. I'm keeping everything powered off and unplugged while it's not in use. Maybe that will help.

I DID pay a lot for this muffler

Car is fixed. For now. It cost me twice what I expected to be paying. Actually, the muffler was relatively inexpensive, but still probably massively overpriced. It was the head pipe that was the most expensive part.

Well, if it cuts down on the amount of toxic gas I'm pumping into the inside of the car it will have been worth it. Still, I didn't expect to be putting this much money into the car in its final months. (The car just hit 247,000 miles yesterday. At 1000 miles every 17 days or so, that means only about 50 more days to 250,000. Which puts that milestone right around Christmas. Maybe Santa will bring me a new car?)

How to make Katrina and Rita work for the U.S. of A.

1. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will damage our oil-refining capacity - a serious blow, but a temporary one, and one from which we will be able to recover with the help of our dear friends at Halliburton and Bechtel.

2. Fuel prices will spike in the near-term as domestic supplies suddenly contract and increased pressure is placed on an essentially fixed import market.

3. Americans will get fed up with pumping more and more money into their bloated SUV status symbols, and will begin to abandon them in favor of smart and sexy hybrids and alternative-fuel vehicles. Demand for refined petroleum will continue, but at a sharply declining rate.

4. The rest of the world will continue to expand its use of gasoline-powered vehicles, placing a growing demand on oil supplies and putting more and more pressure on foreign suppliers, who will have to increase their output.

5. As prices continue to rise, Americans will gradually wean themselves almost entirely from gasoline and other petroleum products. Alternative raw material sources for products made from petroleum (like, say, plastics) will be developed.

6. Overseas oil fields will begin to pass the point where it is no longer economically viable to extract crude oil. Oil shortages and increasing demand will cause prices to spiral higher. In the meantime, the effect of the rising costs will be blunted in the U.S. by declining demand and increasing use of alternatives.

7. Gulf oil refineries finally come back online, and the money comes pouring in to U.S. refiners from oil-hungry consumers in the rest of the world - until they wise up.

Yeah, right. It'll probably happen in China first.

UPDATE (9/25/2005, 11:21 PM): Where Katrina was nearly a worst-case-scenario storm, Rita was far closer to a best-case-scenario: major population centers were spared (except for New Orleans, which wound up getting flooded again), loss of life was minimal (I have not heard reports of any storm-caused fatalities; most of the deaths I have heard of were actually evacuation-related), and damage to refining capacity was less devastating than expected. So we have been spared - for now - the horror of being forced to switch to alternative fuel sources and reduced consumption of oil.

The thing that sucks so much about oil is that it is such a good fuel source. Oil, like all fossil fuels, represents a concentrated distillation of hundreds of millions of years of solar energy which was processed by photosynthesizing plants which then either directly entered the fossil fuel cycle or were in turn consumed by other plants (as decomposing matter absorbed through roots) or by animals (by being eaten), which in turn either entered the fossil fuel cycle directly or after being consumed by other living things.

I recently read that someone has done a calculation of how much energy we could extract from solar energy incident on our planet's surface. I don't know the particulars; I don't know if the calculation assumed that we would use photosynthesizing plants (which would then have to have the sunbeams extracted from them, in the manner of the character in Gulliver's Travels who had developed a way of doing this for cucumbers) or photovoltaic cells (which are expensive to manufacture and have other technical limitations), or if it simply assumed that we could use x% of the total energy. But the point is, the energy available isn't enough. Not enough now, not enough for the future. If that doesn't scare you, you need to study science and mathematics a bit more. And possibly sociolology, to understand the very limited long-term options available.

But that's a topic for another post.

On death and dying, part 1

Five years ago, my uncle was diagnosed with rectal cancer. Today he lies in a hospital bed, having his breathing done for him by a respirator pumping 100% oxygen.

Seven months ago, my dog - my friend - Haley developed a cough which was later determined to be a symptom of lung cancer. Yesterday she stopped eating.

Other than the respirator and the cancer and the congestive heart failure and the other consequences of an adulthood of smoking that are almost certain to kill him at the age of 62, my uncle is awake and aware of his surroundings. He is being given morphine for the pain and a sedative to help him sleep. We have no idea how long he might last.

We had an appointment scheduled with the vet for Haley this morning. Actually this was an appointment from two weeks ago, which we rescheduled in part because Haley seemed fine - and any news we were likely to get would not be good. Even a week ago, a fellow dogwalker commented on how young Haley looked.

(This same comment was made to my grandmother about her appearance during a marathon shopping trip I took her on the day before she had her stroke. It is entirely possible that the stress of this trip, coming so soon after an extended convalescence due to sciatica, contributed in some way to her stroke.)

My uncle has spent much of the past two months in and out of the hospital. He came home on the Thursday before Mother's Day. Our entire extended family just happened to stop by to visit him that Sunday. The Thursday afterward he was rushed to the hospital again, possibly for the last time.

The X-rays of Haley's chest taken today reveal that the tumor has completely invaded both of her lungs and much of the surrounding tissue, and there is much fluid built up in these tissues. The vet prescribed a diuretic to try to remove some of this fluid, which will possibly relieve - temporarily - whatever condition is causing Haley to not want to eat. Or, for that matter, sit or lie down, neither of which she has been very willing to do since yesterday morning.

Soon, my uncle will die.

Soon, Haley will die.

I gave my 69th pint of blood this afternoon.