Matt Rogers bubbles back up

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Matt Rogers bubbles back up
Friday, March 4 2016

I awoke in the middle of the night with a sore throat. The sorenesss, though, wasn't located in my throat. It seemed to be in a cavity up above the roof of the back of my mouth. It was possible to suck a thick mucous out of that cavity and make the soreness go away. By this morning, I was fairly good, if not entirely well-rested.

Though it was a cold morning, there was enough sun to keep me from immediately starting a fire in the woodstove. So I took the opportunity to remove the stove's ashes, weigh the remaining supply of burnables in the living room, and tally up how much fuel I'd consumed since my last ash dump on January 28th, 36 days ago. It came to 2393.05 pounds of wood, which produced 13.25 pounds of ashes. I didn't bother calculating "estimated" burn rates with the flawed formulæ I'd used in the past, since I had the numbers to produce actual burn rates. I appended this additional record to my growing database of firewood burn rates and ash production:

Time period	Number of days	Ash weight	Est. firewood burnt	Est. firewood/day
Nov 14-Dec 19 2013	36	13.5 lbs	0.27 cords	29 lbs
Dec 20 2013-Jan 22 2014	33	20.5 lbs	0.41 cords	48 lbs
Jan 23-Feb 19 2014	28	24 lbs	0.48 cords	66.23 lbs
Feb 20-Mar 20 2014	29	16 lbs	0.32 cords	42.63 lbs
Apr 21 2014-Aug 16 2014	118	10.6 lbs	0.21 cords	6.94 lbs
Aug 17-Dec 12 2014	118	20.8 lbs	0.41 cords	13.62 lbs
Dec 13-Dec 26 2014	14	5.8 lbs	0.116 cords	32.02 lbs
Dec 27 2014-Feb 2 2015	38 (31)	13.75 lbs	0.275 cords	27.96 lbs (34.27 lbs)
Feb 3-Mar 5 2015	31	12.25 lbs	0.245 cords (actual firewood burned closer to 0.75 cords)	31.12 (inaccurate)
Mar 6-Mar 31 2015	26	8.4 lbs	0.168 cords (actual firewood burned closer to 0.25 cords)	24.97 (inaccurate)
Apr 1-Jul 25 2015	116	11.8 lbs	0.236 cords (much of which was paper ash)	7.86
July 26-Oct 1 2015	68	10.35 lbs	0.207 cords (nearly all of which was paper/cardboard ash)	11.7
Oct 2-Nov 19 2015	49	10.45 lbs	0.209 cords (est) 1229.4 lbs (measured) 0.293 cords (calculated)	16.4 (est) 25.09 (calculated)
Nov 20-Dec 23 2015	34	10.85 lbs	0.217 cords (est) 1771.67 lbs (measured) 0.422 cords (calculated)	24.66 (est) 52.1 (calculated)
Dec 24 2015-Jan 27 2016	35	10.50 lbs	0.210 cords (est) 2133.21 lbs (measured) 0.508 cords (calculated)	23.19 (est) 60.95 (calculated)
Jan 28 2016-Mar 3 2016	36	13.25 lbs	2393.05 lbs (measured) 0.570 cords (calculated)	66.47 (calculated)

[REDACTED]
Figures in red limit the calculations to days of actual firewood heating. It looks like those estimated firewood burned per day figures (which are calculated from ash weights) are completely useless.

Today I salvaged wood from the same place I've been gathering it for the past two days, though for some reason today's haul came to a relatively-light 79.05 pounds.

This evening I realized that a pseudonymous Facebook user "named" Herbert Hoover who had recently friended me was actually my old college buddy Matt Rogers. Last I'd heard, Matt had ragequit Facebook over arcane issues of privacy and some foggy notion of thwarting corporatist hegemony. He'd unfriended me a little before that, accusing me of being a dcadent yuppie. It had been years since I'd heard from him, so I was amused (though not entirely surprised) to find that he no longer considered himself a part of "the left" (that is, a liberal), and now his big concern appeared to be Donald Trump's favorite whipping boy: political correctness. He'd also begun sharing posts by infamous anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller. Despite the changes, there was still something fundamentally the same about Matt Rogers: a burning idealism that rendered all potential coalitions suspect. To sum it up: Matt Rogers' revolution is only going to include him and a handful of others, as very few people are pure enough to join his movement. It's all just another way of being content with doing nothing and raging uselessly into the void. These days he likes to say things such as "Muh lesser evil! I'll literally take Trump proto-fascist demagoguery and all over this crap [Hillary Clinton]! IMO Trump cares too much about money to be this kind of ideological war monger." I could see from Matt's trollish profile that he still lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, probably with his mother. As Donald Trump would conclude, "Sad!" The guy is at least fifty years old. Still, despite Matt's infuriating personality and his repeated "break ups" with me, it was kind of good to have him back. I picked through the posts on his Facebook page and even played along with some stupid Facebook game where you're supposed to list your ten favorite music albums. I didn't post my response on my wall as requested, but simply added it to the thread on his wall. Here is what I wrote:

ok mr -- i'll play along but not on my wall.
1. Alien Lanes - Guided by Voices
2. Copper Blue - Sugar
3. Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow - Dirty on Purpose
4. Animals - Pink Floyd
5. Into the Labyrinth - Dead Can Dance
6. Harmacy - Sebadoh
7. Murmur - REM
8. Engineers - Engineers
9. Sad Wings of Destiny - Judas Priest
10. Off the Wall - Michael Jackson
*Forgiveness by Engineers [a song I'd been humming recently]

(This is mostly correct, though I added that last one just so not everybody in my list would be white. I also wanted Matt Rogers to look at it and think, "Wha??")

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160304

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