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one toe in the grave
Thursday, November 1 2018
The day was warm, at least for this time of year. At noon I slipped out of my office and made my customary weekly visit to the burrito place, where I am now something of a regular. In addition to the usual green jalapeño salsa and red chipotle salsa, today there was also a dish of firey green peppers on the salsa condiment table. I could eat burritos every day, and this week it's looking like I might come close to doing that.
Late in the day, the guy I report to brought his two Boston Terriers into the office. One of these (the male) took a real shine to me and kept leaping into my lap, making it kind of hard to get work done. At the time, I was trying (and succeeding at) getting an Electron app to work on Hyrax, my own personal Windows 7 laptop (one of my three working Elitebook 2740Ps). At 4:45, I headed home, and, once there, immediately set off down the Stick Trail with my big battery-powered chainsaw (and Neville the Dog, who decided to tag along). I found that the big dead oak that had been hung up on another tree (the one I'd nearly cut down but then left with just a thin hinge of wood holding it up) had fallen most of the way to the ground. It was now hung up in a new way, one that was more threatening horizontally than vertically. But the trees it was now caught between ensured that once cut through, when the forces would make it swing like a massive baseball bat, it could only go in one direction. I stood upswing of that direction, making sure Neville (who was in an unusually frisky mood) was not cavorting anywhere nearby, and cut through the tree. As predicted, once released the tree swung violently away from me, and I was very glad not to be within that arc. I managed to cut two stove-length chunks from the trunk which, when combined with smaller pieces sawed from higher branches, made for an entire (and pretty heavy) load. I split it all and put it into the woodshed. The plan is that, going forward, all wood added to the woodshed this season will be dry. There is no reason to cut wood that isn't ready to be burned immediately (or at least "soon") until springtime.
On Jeopardy tonight, there was some sort of cross-promotional thing with Gene Simmons. As I remarked to Gretchen, you know your music and old and no longer with it when it's being promoted on Jeopardy. After watching that and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, I was sitting at my computer about to listen to a Dave Ramsey segment where a woman would ask what she should do given that her household earns $29,000 a year and she owes $14,000 on a car that has bullet holes in it. At that point there was a post on the diaspora Slack, which has been extremely quiet for the past couple weeks. Dan was asking if anyone wanted to do diaspora happy hour. I sure did! So eventually it was me, Dan, Cameron, and Allison all chatting away like in the good old days. There wasn't much news, but Allison told us that, after threatening her boyfriend Pickle Matt with moving to New Orleans, he'd suggested they move in together. So now they are shopping for a place. And then Cameron brought up the existence of a strange French-made buttplug called the "Gazpart" designed to control or perhaps mitigate flatulence. Later, while making myself a burrito down in the kitchen, I listened to the continued happy hour banter on my FM radio headphones. Dan was talking about his unpleasant older relatives, how they bicker annoyingly, eat disgusting food, and suffer from numerous avoidable medical complaints. One of his uncles had diabetes and periodically has to go to the doctor and have gangrenous extremities lopped off. And, since it's a rule in Judaism that the body must be buried intact, these pieces are then kept in the freezer awaiting eventual burial with the body. Or, perhaps, some of them have already been interred. As Dan put it, "One toe in the gave." In another part of the conversation, Dan mentioned the likelihood that he and his wife would have a child. Reiterating something Cameron had brought up earlier, I pointed out that, as a non-climate-change-ravaged society, "we only have ten years left, so..." Later, though, I allowed that "someone has to be the mole people."
In other news, the middle basement bathroom, the one with the bathtub where I like to take my baths (sometimes we call it "the Roman Bathroom") has had toilet problems for at least a week now. When one flushed the toilet, the water built up in the bowl and only very slowly leaked out through the bottom, the place where a whirlpool is supposed to carry away the things you don't want others to see. Normally what one does when one has this problem is to plunge the toilet. But even after vigorous plunging, the problem remained. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we needed to bring in a Roto-Rooter. But this evening I took the plunger and plunged the toilet as vigorously as I could with plunges having as a big an amplitude as the plunger itself would allow. This somehow broke up whatever was blocking the pipe (wherever that was) and the toilet became flushable again. The lesson here was that if your plunging isn't working, perhaps you're just not doing it vigorously enough.
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