rustyredrock.com

All,

This will be my last RustyRedRock post.  I will leave the site up for a little while longer before I tear it down entirely.

As I have said, my wife and I are expecting our first child soon and I have a lot of projects to take care of before, during, and after the happy event.  Maintaining a website is not really that big of a task, but maintaining one to the level of care that I would like to give is a little tougher.  It’s sort of a “How many grains of sand are needed to make a pile?” sort of thing. I am just trying to reduce the size of the pile…  For now, anyway.

I have removed the Puzzle for Charity and halted work on Puzzle 05: The Chalice.  Don’t worry… They will be back when the new site is posted in a few months.  The Prize Pool and Charity Pool will retain (at minimum) the values they had when I took them down.  I will, however, be writing a $60 check to the current charity (Blue Ridge Food Bank Area Network) after I post this… No reason not to, really, and it’s only fair.  That will make a total of $247.25 (and three huge blankets) donated to charity since the start of this site.  Thanks again to Agmorion and Siun-Kelan for making Puzzle 03 possible.
 
When the site comes back up, I hope to have a few steady contributing writers to help me out.  I have tried that with extremely limited success in the past, but maybe next time will be different .  Also, I think I might switch from Wordpress/Yahoo to Blogger.  Easier for a number of reasons, it seems.  We will see.

Even better would be to write for someone else’s site, which is ultimately what I would like to do.  If you know anyone that is looking for a contributor for puzzle creation or the style of writing you see in the Unexpected Segue or World News sections of this site, let me know.  My contact info can be found in the Contact and FAQ link in the sidebar on the right.

Some final stuff:

I have started on a video project that I may or may not post in the future… The project was designed to be more of a historical archive rather than something for mass consumption so it depends on how the individual episodes turn out.  If they turn out decent enough, you will hear more about them.   If not, you won’t.  Either way, it will be a while before I find my feet and have a few finished episodes, as any of you that have done any sort of video editing will completely understand. 

Speaking of projects, I have finished building my scrap wood holder and nearly finished my firepit.  I built both with (mostly) leftover items from previous projects. The irony of the wood holder project is that I used a lot of my scrap wood to build it, so the problem it was designed to solve sort of dispappeared…  The design was taken from the book The Complete Book of Woodworking.  It is very, very good with lot’s of step-by-step pics.  Here is my (modified) version, front and back. 

Thanks to jimmydunes who provided many, many hours of unpaid labor to help me create a firepit in my backyard.  The exterior was made from the leftover bricks from the elevated garden project and the overall design was based on one at the DIY Network site.  If jimmydunes and I were able to do this, anyone can. Important Project Scheduling Note:  Brickyards (where you will get the fire clay and the fire bricks) typically have banker’s hours for some unfathomable reason, so plan accordingly.  Below is a pic of the first “test fire”, and the other picture is the mold for the capstones that will finish up the project this week. 

I have hung the curtains and ceiling fan in my new den, so the finishing touches of that project are done, at least.

The final sticks of furniture have been added to the baby’s room.  We are looking to add a border, hang some more art, and add a clock.   And some shelves for the closet… Hmm.  It looks like we aren’t done after all… I had better get a move on…  Here are some pics, though.

What else?  Oh, yeah.  I hate my Treo with all of the hate that it is possible to generate toward an inanimate object.  It locks up constantly, stays latched in “roaming” mode whenever I go inside and then leave a certain building at work, I can’t send pictures easily, I can’t convert the video with any tools I have, the Bluetooth connectivity is random… The list goes on and on but it is really no different than any other piece of 2008 technology: something claims to do a million things, but does none of them well. 

So what am I going to do about mine?  The only action that makes really makes sense is this: It’s just a phone, man. Don’t worry about it.  Unplug.  “The only winning move is not to play“, style of thing… Sort of Zen, dontcha think? But, as God as my witness, my next phone will not be Windows-based. 
 
After a rough start, it looks like the tobacco plants are going to make it.  I have started picking the smaller leaves off the bottoms of the plants and the top leaves are starting to grow faster.  I am storing the leaves I pick in a mason jar in my very hot garage to see what happens to them there.  I will use these initial clippings to make my own insecticide, I think.  The soy is also doing well, but the peanuts were a total failure.  Everything else is doing just fine.  Here is a photo of the garden and a close-up of one of the tobacco plants.

That’s about it.  Thanks to all of the readers of this site.  I had a lot of fun doing this and look forward to re-starting it when I can. 

Cheers!

 unplugnow

Even more beyond the OFNOGs… 

The Towel Princess

On a feminine beauty scale from one to ten, this gym employee rates a 5.1 and is obviously tired of being hit on by every single guy who walks into or within one quarter mile of the place.  It has gotten so bad (in her 0.1 focused mind, anyway) that the only way to deal with the constant threat of having to turn down spontaneous marriage proposals and throne abdications is via pre-emptive strike: hyper-rudeness to everyone at all times.  After all, you can’t spell “customer service” without a “what the hell is your problem, pal, can’t you see the extra towels are over there?”  

The Clustering Chucklers

Nothing gives these old gents greater delight than a non-stop exchange of cliche-rific one-liners first thing in the morning, each more rip-roaring than the last.  Nothing, that is, except to do it in front of your locker, effectively blocking you from doing anything but enjoying their wacky routine.  Side-splitting, time-consuming topics include church cookouts, baldness, and “where Barney’s gotten to these days, haven’t seen him around much, probably got sick of his wife’s cookin’ an’ took off a-hur-hur-hur”.

We - my wife and I, that is - have begun to plant things in our food garden.  Well, I use words like “we” and “our” but I am the one doing all the work tilling, weeding, planting, etc, etc, etc.  She does nothing but dictate which crops go where and does not contribute even a little bit to the labor effort.

Why not, you may ask? Why is she so damn lazy - too many soap operas and bon-bons? Hasn’t she ever read the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper? 

The truth is she is 7+ months pregnant, and her ogre of a husband refuses to let her deal with fertilizer, come near insect poison, or dig in the hot sun.  I figure she’ll have ‘labor effort’ enough later. In the meantime she can just focus on building us a little dude and let me tend to the crops.  Personally, I couldn’t be happier to do it.

Since this is “my” garden this year I got to add a few plants that normally would not have been there.  For instance I will be planting some soy, some peanuts, and even a couple of tobacco plants.

Why those? The wife and I like tofu occasionally and, as with the peanuts, I think it’s cool to get protein without having to raise and kill farm animals.  Not that I am a vegetarian -  there is nothing I like more than a huge medium-rare steak, and, statistically speaking, at the time you are reading this I probably have a #1 combo from Wendy’s somewhere in my digestive tract.  I also know that growing only a few plants might sustain a small family for a week at the outside, but no longer than that, that’s for sure.

So call this a very tiny experiment in self-sufficiency.  I will post pics and descriptions as I go.  Sort of like Agmorion has been promising to send me for well over a year now to post on this site.  I mean, would it kill him to send a few descriptive paragraphs of the work he has done on his basement greenhouse?  But, noooo, he can barely fire off a zero-text email with “a bunch of pictures attached” and remember to actually attach them… But let’s get back to the tobacco.

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get someone in this tobacco-growing region to give me a straight answer to the question “Where can I get a small number of tobacco seeds or slips?”  50% of the people I have asked, at both large and small gardening centers have haughtily rebuffed me for even asking such a stupid question. They even seemed angry, as if this was my 50th time calling in this “prank” and they had had just about enough of my shenanigans.

49% of the respondents, while non-rude have been less than useless with their answers, trading in the perfectly acceptable reply of “I don’t know” with “I don’t know, so instead let me while away the hours telling you everything I do know about tobacco from the establishment of Jamestown Colony to modern federal regulatory actions…”  I have even gotten responses that, if true, prove the existence of time travel - “The plants are grown from seed in greenhouses in February but you can’t get seeds because the plants are grown from slips starting in May…”

It’s almost like I have stumbled onto the existence of a secret society of some kind, one whose pass phrase is “Where can I get tobacco seeds or slips around here?”.  The correct response on their end is “Tobacco plants draw worms away from tomatoes” or similar.  The correct response on my end then is probably something like “The pearl is in the river” or “John has a long mustache” at which point we would show each other our secret tattoos and they would lead me to some tastefully decorated underground lair…

But, since all I actually want are two damn tobacco plants all I get are trivia of suspicious value and strange looks.  You know, I might actually have to follow the advice of the other 1% of the people I have asked (Siun-Kelan). She said all I need are three things to get them: a shovel, the cover of night, and a moral compass that doesn’t point True North.  Check, check, and check. 

I will let you know how it turns out.   Who knows?  You might see it on the news.

One of the few benefits to living in our house is the huge amount of storage space.  I understand it is also one of the most dangerous things to have.  Much like a goldfish will grow to fit its bowl, some people have the habit of accumulating useless knick-knacks until every closet, crawlspace, basement, attic, and “spare” room are absolutely crammed until bursting with stuff they will never, ever use in a million years.

And, man, I mean freaking never. 

As a matter of fact a lot of the stuff people collect have no possible use other than to act as a great disservice to archeologists of the future.  Think about it. Wildly inaccurate claims will be made on the life and leisure of people of the 21st century based on the items that are found in your ex-house.  “It was considered a symbol of high status amongst these primitive peoples to gather and store as many irreparable gas-powered Weed Eater engines as they could, possibly for religious rituals…”

Fortunately, I have been cursed with a low tolerance for clutter and blessed with a like-minded wife. We recognize the difference between a memento worth saving and a shoebox full of broken cell phone chargers.  We don’t measure a room’s potential value by trying to imagine it packed to the rafters with cardboard boxes filled with broken exercise bicycle parts and half-used PAAS Easter Egg coloring kits that we will sort though “some day, we swear”.

I know, I know… You are thinking the geegaws that comprise your little hoard “might be collector’s items some day”.  I will let you in on a little secret: it’s 2008.  That means absolutely everything is a Limited One of a Kind Platinum Edition Director’s Cut in the Special Metal Box with the Shiny Foil Trading Cards and Cheat Codes Inside.  Everything is amazing, everything is garbage, everything is useful and necessary, and everything is just taking up space.  Everything, in short, is the Tom Waits’ song ‘Step Right Up’. 

(Steps gingerly down from soap box. Looks around. Blushes) But we have been slipping lately.  Over the past decade we have accumulated enough worthless stuff to mandate having a yard sale.  Actually, that’s not true.  We have about half of what is needed so we are sharing happy-fun-time-crap-fest with some friends of ours this Saturday.  They live in a more populated area and I don’t think even the most ardent connoisseurs of other-people’s-very-used-stuff will drive 30 miles to paw through our collection of maybe-all-there jigsaw puzzles. 

(Places one foot tentatively back on soap box) Or maybe they would.  But be ye warned: Oh, I will take your money as you successfully haggle a functional TI-85 calculator with no battery cover out from under me for $3 instead of the suggested $3.50.  But know that I would have been just as happy with $2.00, $1.00, or even 50 cents just to get the dust-collecting thing out of my dang house.  And, when you leave with your treasure, I will mock you for it relentlessly, trash-boy.

Weather permitting, of course.

Beyond the OFNOGS…

Whistler’s Great-Grandfather
Whether he emits his high-pitched atonal renditions of 1940’s pop hits for echolocation or merely to block out the voices in his head, this guy just won’t shut up with the mindless whistling.   His complete lack of awareness of the musical scale dovetails nicely with his complete lack of volume control. From the entrance to the locker room all the way to the showers, no one amongst the early morning crowd is spared his daily, relentless performance.

The Screaming Peacocks
A small tight-knit group of balding, oddly-shaped-but-muscular male humanoids dominates the free weight benches in the afternoon.  Completely lacking “indoor voices” and a sense of “no means no”, they terrify every woman they attempt to pick up.  Repeated rejection only seems to exacerbate their preening and strutting behavior, and dropping 60-pound dumbbells from chest height onto the rubber matted floor is just their subtle way of saying “Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!”

More to come (unfortunately)!

Over the past week I have managed to drag my lazy carcass out of bed and get to the gym before work. Some of you may be thinking “For the love of God, why?” or “Hey, haven’t you written several times on the awesomeness of sleep?” or even “Whoop-de-doo.  Whaddayawant, a medal?”

The third comment notwithstanding, I am doing this for two reasons.  The first is because my job mostly involves me sitting virtually motionless in front of a computer all day and I need more than the usual 30 minutes/day of cardio I had been getting.  The second is that I have a number of projects I am juggling at home so I can’t simply tack on another half hour to my workout at night.  Something had to give to make these mandatory yet seemingly incompatible targets reachable, and that something is two hours of sleep in the morning.  So I have been getting to the gym early, doing a 30 minute treadmill workout followed by a quick upper body rotation, then getting to work early.  I love the extra energy and I am trickle-charging my comp time pool.  Pretty sweet.

But all is not happy…  The OFNOGs are there in much greater numbers in the mornings than in the evenings.  That was to be expected, though.  I have updated the counter in the sidebar to include this week’s count.  I won’t go into details.

Ok, just one detail.  One OFNOG was standing at the urinal taking care of business in a pose that can only be described as “slouchy orangutan at parade rest”.  Yep, both hands clasped loosely behind his back.  Freaking weird.

Hmmm… Since this is getting a little longer than I expected it to be, I will break this down into several articles instead of writing one giant one.

Although I talk about them a lot, the OFNOGs are not the only creatures of interest at my gym, you know.  Look for future articles describing the other fascinating life forms that inhabit the building such as: Whistler’s Great-Grandfather, The Screaming Peacocks, The Clustering Chucklers, The Towel Princess, and many more!

Stay Tuned!

Dear Bird,

Aww, c’mon… What the hell is your problem, anyway, little dude?  Like this is exactly what I need when I’m trying to leave for work – I reach for my car keys and I’m halfway out the door and what do I hear? The all-too-familiar tap-tap-tapping at the window of the wood burning stove.

We go through this exercise about three times a year… You or one of your buddies decides to spelunk my 40-foot tall, 10-inch wide stove pipe.  Why?  What’s the draw?  I used to think that maybe the light from the living room could be seen from up above but the flue is shut.  Well, obviously not shut too well since there you are hopping around like the very sooty doofus you are.  But, still, I don’t think it’s the light.

The pipe is capped pretty well, and there is no nest that I can see.  It really must take an effort to squeeze in there before realizing there is no inside ledge to grab onto, and then to drop all the way to the bottom.  Absolutely brilliant.  Well thought out, my friend.

Calm down, calm down, of course I am going to rescue you.  I am only trying to take your picture for my blog.  There, was that so bad?

I assume you know the drill. I am going to shut all the inside doors of the house, open one upstairs window, open the garage door, and try to gently grab you with a towel. Easy, easy, spazmo, I’m not trying to crush you.  You should be pretty tired from your ordeal.  One of your pals was so out of it he hopped right into my hand and let my carry him outside.  I hope you are like him.

Oh, great, you little [many expletives deleted]!!  Right in the face!  Very nice.  So your plan was to blind me with soot before slamming yourself into the skylights over and over again?  No, no, go ahead.  I’ll wait.  Good luck with that.  Twentieth time’s the charm, you know.  Just watch out for the ceiling fans.

Ok, you made it to the bookcase.  If you just look a little to your right you will see an open window in the loft.  Nice and inviting.  But feel free to slam yourself fifty times into the closed one literally less than two feet from freedom, idiot! The right… THE RIGHT!! 

There you go.  Please spread the word that the chimney is not a toy… or a tree.  Well, time to wash up and change and tell the boss I’m gonna be a little late.  Thanks a lot.

Sincerely,

The Owner of That One House

My brother and I are currently involved in a very serious text message discussion, one that has taken much time away from our busy schedules.  It started with a simple question: Who would win in a fight, Grape Ape or Jabberjaw?

My brother thinks that a 40-foot gorilla would destroy that effete great white shark, no question, but I think that’s unfair.  I think my brother is only considering land based duels.  In the water, I reckon the ape gets dusted pretty quickly.  Oh, I know he is huge and can swim but he requires goggles and a snorkel underwater… Plus the shark would have way more maneuverability. So, split decision, there.

We agree that Grape Ape would be killed by Apache Chief from the Superfriends, since he can “Inyuk-chuk” himself to the size of a mountain or more.  (This assumes his mass grows with his size, and that he isn’t just some micron-thick hollow shell).

Most other “Laff-A-Lympics meets Thunderdome” battles involving Grape Ape would be lopsided as hell due to sheer size ratios.  How to even the odds?

How about Grape Ape versus his weight in Smurfs?  Assuming his mass goes as the cube of his height, a normal gorilla is 400 pounds and about 5′ 8″ tall, the Go-rill-ill-ill-a would weigh about 60 tons.  So, if a Smurf (three apples high) weighs a pound, it would take 120,000 of them to equal the weight of the ape.  My brother and I agree that, although the feral Smurfs would take heavy casualties, they would eventually eat him alive.  It would be like a human trying to fight a huge colony of fire ants bare handed. You are going down, my friend.

In conclusion, although I am swamped with projects both at home and at work, I still find time to blow off those projects and slip further behind schedule by engaging in meaningless jibber jabber with my brother.  That’s the American way.

A lot of Americans will be getting a $600 rebate check from the government sometime this summer to “stimulate the economy”.  However, you may want to put off buying that BlueRay player for a bit longer because you are going to need that money to help the government subsidize the oil companies.

The price of gas in America goes through cycles that are driven by supply and demand, global events, inflation, greed, and other not-so-tangible factors.   The prices start to ramp up starting in February, plateau in May, start to drop in August, and return to normal in November.  See the graph below (taken from GasBuddy).

I won’t bore you with the math - the derivation is left as an exercise for the student - but if gas is destined to rise x dollars a gallon at this year’s plateau, then you will pay an average of 0.69x dollars per gallon extra from now until November 1.  For example, if gas shoots up to $4.25 per gallon (like some are saying) from where it was in mid-February at $3.00, the end result is the same as paying $3.86 per gallon for the next 34 weeks.

Let’s assume you fill up your tank once a week and it takes 15 gallons to do so.  On average, at $4.25 per gallon it’s going to cost you an extra $12.90 each time you go to the pump.   By the time November has rolled around, you will have paid an extra $438 in gas. This is 73% of your Stimulus Check.

Admittedly, hitting the $4.25 average above might be too high.  Then again, the calculation relies on the prices dropping back to normal by November - they might not if they follow 2007’s trend. So here is a little table to show you how much of your Stimulus Check will be, quite literally, burned up at various national averages. 

Assumptions:
Average National Gas Price Mid-Feb: $3.00
Gallons Used Per Week: 15

Plateau   % Check Burned
$3.20                      11.7
$3.40                      23.5  
$3.60                      35.2
$3.80                      46.9
$4.00                      58.7
$4.20                      70.4
$4.40                      82.1

Of course, if you start with a lower “normal” price or burn through more than 15 gallons a week, then these numbers get worse.  A lot worse.

So, what’s the punchline, here? It’s this: The stimulus package is $152 billion.  If gas hits $4.00 a gallon (like a lot of folks are saying) this is the same as the government writing a 89 billion dollar check to the oil companies. For comparison, Exxon Mobil posted a 39.5 billion dollar profit in 2007.  

Remember, folks: Torches in the left hand, pitchforks in the right.  It’s called organizing a mob for a reason, people.  Let’s not look sloppy out there.

Do you possess near Olympic-level lack-of-awareness of your suroundings?  Do you have a physique that makes you look like the offspring of Santa and Station (from the second Bill and Ted movie)?   Do you feel the concepts of “clothing” and “other people might not want to stare at me in all my splendor” unfairly restrict you as a human being?

Take this quiz to find out if you have what it takes to be an OFNOG:

1) The proper arrangement of unclothed people in a locker room is:

A) One per aisle
B) Two per aisle
C) Packed in like giant pink Marshmallow Peeps

2) Two naked dudes occupy an aisle in the locker room.  Which is most normal?

A) They pass each other, change, and leave without incident.
B) They squeeze past each other with a sound like someone violently making balloon animals, change, and leave.
C) Same as B) except they sit and chat while one of them towels off his toes for 15 minutes and the other trims his nose hair in a pocket mirror.  It takes another 15 minutes to put on some clothes, squeeze past each other again, then leave.

3) You have just completed your workout.  How long does it take to shower, get dressed, and leave?

A) 10 minutes, tops
B) It depends if I decide to fall asleep in the steamroom or not.
C) Approximately the same length of time as the workout itself plus it depends on what’s on TV in the locker room.  Those chairs in there are mighty comfy.

4) Which is most true of your exercise routine?

A) 30 minutes on the treadmill followed by 1 hour of weight training
B) At least two hours in the gym itself, but 90% of that time is spent shouting with a friend who, like me, is wearing new headphones.
C) I usually get pretty winded removing my clothes and re-arranging my combover, so I never actually make it out of the locker room 

5) Describe the towels at the gym.

A) Plentiful, clean, large, and soft
B) Unnecessary.  I don’t wipe off equipment after I use it or utilize the shower facilities, so they are pretty much just taking up space.
C) At a paltry 48 inches long, they are not much better than washcloths. Sometimes I use a couple to sit on while I drip-dry after a shower, though.

6) If you are going to just stand there, why don’t you at least put some pants on for crying out loud?

A) I’ll be out of your way in a minute
B) What’s your problem?  We’re all guys, here, right? Relax, man.
C) Because I am the only person on Planet Earth.

Scoring:

• If you have answered mostly A, rejoice!  You are considerate to others and aware of your body and its surroundings. You are definitely not an OFNOG.
• If you chose mostly B, you are pretty self-centered and might be seriously out of shape, but not quite to the level of an OFNOG.  Beware!  It’s a slippery slope…
• If you chose mostly C, bad news.  You are an OFNOG.  The good news is that you probably don’t care whatsoever and in 10 minutes you will have completely forgotten having taken this quiz at all. 

It’s bad enough that the local weather personalities go into fits of histrionics when it drops under 40 degrees and therefore “might snow in your area - stay tuned”.  And don’t even get me started on the wind-chill/heat-index “we’re all doomed, doomed I tells ya” hyperbole. 

It’s much worse when they just start making up odd new terms for “partly cloudy” or “hazy” (see image at left).

Unless they actually mean “dimmed sunshine”, of course.    Are we talking super-massive sunspots?  Book of Revelation 8:12 type jazz?  Ming the Merciless causes an unexpected eclipse?

If this is the case, we are kinda doomed after all, and I formally withdraw my objection.

OK, I was wrong.

In the post where I talked about the Scooba dying at the virtually the same time as my monitor I was sure that the next appliance to go belly-up would be either the “bearings-bearings-who’s-got-the-bearings” washing machine or the “for-the-love-of-God-what-is-that-noise” microwave oven.  In fact, it was the coffee maker.

I wrote an article when we first got the Tassimo (by Braun) describing our new toy.  Happy visions of gourmet coffees, teas and even hot cocoa danced through our heads.

What was significantly less happy-making was the repeated and spectacular disc failures that would happen with about 80% of any coffees that were not Maxwell House (12 oz version) or Seattle’s Best.  They would explode and make a huge mess in the coffee maker and in my cup near the completion of the brewing cycle.  Watching it near the end of a brewing cycle became exactly as gut-wrenching as watching that little mountain climber guy from the Price is Right approach “25″…

Making coffee should not be ulcer-inducing.  Drinking it, maybe.  Not making it.

For those of you that are interested and have a cabinet filled with exploding coffee disks, I found a “hack” that bumped up the success rate of the faulty discs.  Since the Seattle’s Best never failed, I cut out the bar code from a used one and covered up the bar code from one of the fragile discs.  Works pretty much all the time except you need to remember the orientation of the bar code.  Maybe its not being perfectly brewed, and its kind of a hassle but at least I don’t spend my mornings going all Angry German Kid in my kitchen while cleaning up coffee grounds.

It might be worth your time to complain to Tassimo about faulty discs.  They will send you free new ones, when they get around to it.  Unfortunately, these also have the same failure mode and rate.  Luckily, I really enjoy the Seattle’s Best coffees, so that’s pretty much all I get anyway.  That and the Chai Tea, which has also never failed.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  After brewing a cup of coffee last Saturday, I disposed of my disc and sat down at the computer to check the news.  About 5 minutes later a sound like the one the bird makes when Mr. Slate calls “quitting time” at the quarry came blasting out of the kitchen.  I ran in and steam was burping out of every crevice on the machine.

I yanked the plug and let the thing cool down for a while.  I plugged it back in and the little lights on the front started to blink in a very sickly, unsteady way as if to say “the error codes in my EEPROM simply don’t cover this, man.  You are on your own.”.  I am sure all of the electronics are ruined.

I checked out their forums and found no failures like mine.  Lots of complaints about customer service and exploding discs, though.  I called customer service (open 24/7, according to their website) and told them what happened.

The lady on the other end of the phone (who apparently just finished a “I bet I can drink more Red Bulls than you” contest with her co-workers)  laughed and said “Well, that shouldn’t happen!”. I agreed with her and said I was thankful that I was not standing next to it at the time or had left the house already.  She stopped laughing after that.

She said that they are sending out a box with which to ship the coffee maker back, but “it is coming from Canada so it might take a while to get there”.  I reminded her that it is 2008, and it shouldn’t matter if it was coming from the moon she should be able to tell me better than “it’s going to be a while”.  And I don’t know many Canadians, but from what I hear they pretty much have their act together… So I don’t know what she was talking about.

It has been 5 days and still no box.  I did get an e-mail tonight, though, that said “my order has been shipped”.  I assume they mean the box.   I will post when it gets here.

In the meantime I will continue to enjoy the crystalline goodness that is Folger’s Instant Coffee.  Heated up in my awesome microwave…

(For those of you that want to “get their geek on”, read the title of this post in as crone-ish of a tone as you can.  There you go.  )

Ok.  Sorry about the excessive rantiness of the last post.  I have calmed down a bit now… So to pick up where I went veering off course…

My wife and I went out of town to get some lunch last weekend.  It really doesn’t matter what the name of the place is or what city it was in, because I am sure the little tableau I am about to describe to you is played out every day in every restaurant in America.

Our waiter - polite, smiley, professional - had other tables to deal with besides ours, of course.  We were privileged to sit near two of the fussiest self-important Baby Boomers in the world.  The show started immediately. They wanted ice water, but the standard glasses were the wrong size and needed to be swapped out.  The pause that took place after that request and before he cheerfully replied “Sure thing!” was only a tenth of a second too long, but it was there.  Crammed into that tiny extra interval of silence were huge, shoulder-slumping volumes of dread and sadness that whimpered “Oh no.  Not again.”

You see, waiters and waitresses deal with people all the time and they rapidly become experts at telling exactly where you lie, even before you are seated, on the one-to-ten scale of being a jerk.  And you are a jerk, you know.  That’s why the scale does not go to zero.  You can’t help it, and you probably don’t even know it.  Have you ever asked your server to fetch blue cheese… Then ranch… Then another Coke… Then some A-1, all separately and within a span of three minutes?  Yeah, we all have.  Now multiply that by the number of people who do that over the course of a day, and it starts to get ugly.  Now start to add the unreasonable requests and complaints from people who think of a server as a temporary slave… Yeah…  Either the guy who waited on those harridans had the Zen Master-like control that would put your typical Buckingham Palace guard to shame, or he was one dirty fork complaint away from second degree manslaughter.

I like to think the former.  Please let it be the former….

Back to the snobby jerks at the next table.  How do I know they were snobby?  Did I mention that they were loud?  Oh, yeah, they were loud.  Mostly, their conversation consisted of one-upping each other regarding meaningless historical trivia about their semi-successful distant relatives (e.g. My great uncle was one of the first line foremen when Ford made Model Ts and he had 25 men under him).  I won’t reproduce the entire conversation here but to get the same effect all you would have to do is stand up in the middle of the restaurant and bellow things like “PAY ATTENTION TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! VALIDATE ME! I’M INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT!” for about five minutes solid.  Also, you would have to do a little dance.

They complained about everything, of course, but the most awesome request one of them had was to put the cappuccino she ordered in a different kind of cup and put the foam in a separate one. In-freaking-credible.  Throughout this whole process of verbal abuse and unbelievable requests the waiter’s façade of happy subservience only cracked once.  As he was walking away from their table his shoulders stiffened ever so slightly.  I could not see his face from where I was sitting, but my wife said he did not look happy… Not happy at all.  Poor guy.

There might be those of you out there that think “Boo hoo, it’s their job.  It’s what they get paid for”.   Ok, fine.  But isn’t it everyone’s job to be civil to each other?  We teach our children to play nice with others and then immediately turn around and try to get some guy fired over a dirty napkin.

Still not convinced to be nice?  Let’s put it this way for the thickheaded: Would you ever walk into a barbershop and yell “Hey, [expletive deleted]! Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you!  Cut my hair, you fat idiot!” Why not?  Ok, now that you have agreed that doing that is probably a bad idea, think about your waiter or waitress… alone in some back room… with your now-only-mostly-tea.

Yeah…  Now maybe you’ll be a little kinder to strangers.

This past weekend my wife and I headed out of town to get some lunch.  You know, that sounds odd even as I write it.  Why would we have to go out of town to get something to eat, you may wonder.  Well, it appears our town has the highest bad restaurant to good restaurant ratio in America.

These places think their definition of “down home Southern cookin’” is somehow a good and just thing to threaten innocent people with.  With vegetables boiled yellow and shapeless and an extra heapin’ helpin’ of bland in everything else, going out to dinner around here is sort of like eating a giant plate of Gerber’s baby food.

What makes it worse is that this is such the polar opposite of what you see on TV that your expectations are unreasonably high from the get-go.  You see happy families enjoying mounds of fried chicken, ribs, and other delicious looking (and possibly actually delicious) food.  Therein lies your folly.  You have hoodwinked yourself into thinking that this is how all (or even most) Southern food must be.  Picture an alien landing on Earth on Christmas morning and happily reporting back what he saw.  Yep, your viewpoint is that distorted.  Most of the restaurant food here is like being trapped in England in about the year 1100 - before trade routes brought much needed flavor to the island from the East.

I am not necessarily saying I would prefer to be waterboarded rather than to eat a plate of our local food, but I really can’t think of a way to end this sentence truthfully.  I honestly think that even Oliver Twist would have said “Please, Sir, may I sit quietly in the corner and starve to death instead?” if the orphanage was run by one of these local restaurant owners.

Surely, there must be a few places locally to go to enjoy a nice sandwich or whatever.  Yeah, with about 50 to choose from you’d think so.  Never mind “statistical clustering”, this town has reached some sort of Blandness Event Horizon where all flavor and appetizing presentation is sucked from the menu shot into oblivion and lost forever.  I mean, even the pizza places are terrible and I am super not picky about pizza.

You may wonder If the food is actually so bad then how do the restaurants stay in business?  Well, my theory is that the town is caught in an Insipidness Feedback Loop (IFL). Here’s how it works: At some point in the town’s past someone (we will call him Zeke) opened the first restaurant and it was “okay, I guess”.  Not great, but at least you could get out of the house and have a drink and some hot food once in a while. Since it was the only game in town, it became popular.  One of the patrons may have said to him or herself with a burst of undeserved overconfidence “This food is okay, I guess, but this town needs another restaurant and people tell me I make a fair Thanksgiving turkey.  Heck, If Zeke can start his own place, then so can I”.

And so the downhill slide began.

A few more places popped up and bored self-important civic league members began Johnny Appleseed out entirely too many “Best in Town” awards.  With the bar set so low to begin with, it was easy for any of these food joints to accumulate any number of these prestigious and meaningless frameables.  Getting a prize was a crystallizing event for these places.  After all, an award says “Good Job!  Keep up the good work.  Don’t change a thing.”

So they stay the course and proudly display their “Voted Best Apple Pie or Whatever in Town” certificate.  This causes people to say “Wow, I didn’t know Emma’s won an award… I always thought the food was kinda crummy.  But what do I know? Let’s go to Emma’s”.  After a while of this (say a couple of decades) this sub-par blandness and how it is prepared actually becomes a “local style”.  While no one genuinely enjoys it, it seems to be what everyone else likes (just look at the awards, after all).  After a little while longer people have become so accustomed to “blah” food that they would probably burn you for witchcraft if you added oregano or (God help you) a bay leaf to your spaghetti sauce.  It may even be fatal to some of the older members of the community - too much of a system shock…

Wow, this got ranty quick.  Sorry about that.  I originally intended to write about the awesome Buckingham Palace Guard-like wait staff at this restaurant we went to over the weekend.  Maybe later this week.     

Our Scooba 5800 died recently.  No amount of cleaning or messing around with it would prevent the pump from failing immediately upon startup.  Those of you who have read my Roomba, Scooba, and Dirtdog post know that one of the major draws for buying this (and getting the apparently useless Sears extended warranty)  was the fact we were assured repeatedly that we could take it back for an upgraded model in case this one failed.

But when we took it back to Sears the appliance lady refused to get past her “we ain’t carry that model anymore” mantra.  I guess we should have known better… Good thing iRobot has awesome customer support.  I am sure they will help us out…

To compound that issue, my monitor died this morning.  It was a tiny old Dell and pretty old, and it was “borrowed” from my wife’s computer after my previous monitor gave up the ghost.  I’m starting to think my video card is killing them…  So now I have a 22” Gateway. Good price. HDMI inputs and everything.  Pretty sweet.  We will see how long it lasts.

Appliance deaths come in clusters around here.  It’s probably caused by buying them all pretty much simultaneously, like when you move into a new place. The next things to fail here, if I had to guess, would be the washing machine and the microwave.

The washing machine has, like, no bearings left and shimmies about 6 inches away from the wall per washing cycle.  The microwave turntable turns intermittently and randomly, occasionally jolting liquids out of their containers with the din that, according to Agmorion (a reader and friend), “sounds like I’m torturing a hamster in there”.

Look, I just like to run things to failure, OK?  I’m not trying to act like some stubborn grandpa that, despite the pleas of friends, neighbors, and the car inspection guy, tries to use a coat hanger and the top of a tuna fish can to get “a few hundert more miles out uh the ol’ Buick”.  I mean it.  I own an Xbox 360 and everything… 

As God as my witness, I will not attempt to repair the $200, seven-year-old washing machine regardless of the goading from my father-in-law.  I can hear it now: “All you gotta do is dismantle the thing completely, buy new bearings from Steve’s Hardware, Bearings, and Ripoffs on Third Street, install the new ones, and reassemble it.  Shouldn’t take you more than a couple of weeks or set you back more than $175 in parts”.  Forget it, dad.

And only those blessed with the mindset of “what I don’t know won’t give me second degree surface burns over a majority of my face and torso” would attempt to fix the microwave.  It’s a microwave, people.  I think they come in six-packs now for $25 or so at Wal-Mart.

I will get a new microwave and a new washing machine - quite possibly within hours of their eventual near-simultaneous deaths – when the time comes.  It’ll be fine.