Cutest little girl EVER
I don't even have anything to add. She's such a cutie. The soft focus is thanks to Zane's peanut butter smeared fingers finding their way onto my camera's lens.
Other examples of cuteness: she calls free standing chemical toilets "porcupotties". And Tinkerbell is "Twinkerbell". Today she told my cousin's girlfriend, who she'd never met before, "Houston has a bonk bed!" and, "My daddy has dreadlocks!"
Scooter Working! :)
Other than that, i'd like to thank the weather for not thunderstorming all day like it was supposed to. And instead of writing something brilliant about all that, i'm simply going to go to bed!
Another Jumping Picture
Today in church, our famous and controversial pastor talked about the Trinity, and went way more in depth about the concept than i've ever heard in church before. The Unitarian idea of God can be very attractive, since it simplifies our thinking about the Divine. Polytheistic ideas can be likewise simpler for our minds -- one god to make thunder, one god to bring crops from the ground. But a three in one God baffles the mind. Groups from Jehovah's Witnesses to Muslims reject the trinity concept as heretical, since God is One... plus, it doesn't make any sense.
But the eye (or "the I") cannot see itself, so without some kind of other-ish thing, how could it be that anything more than simply "I" have come to exist? That was kind of the point of today's sermon, that God's being is one, yet the three persons are involved in a selfless, Holy relationship of love. My buddy Keith talks eloquently about his approach to Christianity, which he refers to as Relational Theism. The whole theme of our lives, as a continuation of the story moving through creation, is to relate to God and others. Jesus' two most important commandments are all about relationships, after all.
Having spent a lot of time thinking about the Trinity and what it means for relationships, during church i thought about shapes. Three spheres on a table can rotate around and stay touching. With more spheres than that, at least two must not be in contact with each other. However, four spheres can make a pyramid and all of the four can touch. So if God had been Quatrune (um.... four in one...), would we live in a four dimensional universe?
It seems obvious that the reason we live in three dimensions is because God is three in one.
On the lighter side
A couple jokes: yesterday Katrina and Houston and i were talking about when they'll be able to learn to drive. Houston was counting... "When I'm seven? When I'm eight? When I'm nine?" I was saying no, no, no, no. Houston giggled, "When I'm ninety nine???" I said "Sure, when you're ninety nine you can drive." Katrina who had been chewing her potatoes, in an exact imitation of Napoleon Dynamite, "Yes!"Also, yesterday one of the kids at work was eating a banana. It was fully peeled, so of course he was pretending it was a phone. As the banana was getting shorter, he kept talking on the phone, until there was only an inch left. So then the kid said "Okay, I should go, because I almost ate all my phone. And," the kid said, looking to me (the funny staff) with a humorous gleam in his eye, "if we get disconnected, the only way I'll be able to call you back is if your number is 121-2211." Hrr hrr hrr hrr hrr.
And today we played the game where you think of something and explain it and everybody else guesses. Both of our verbal kids are really good at it, which is more impressive for our four year old. She started the game out by explaining: "It's somewhere that has a play area for us to play on." It wasn't the playground, Houston's school, the mall, the other mall....... Karen and i thought she totally didn't understand. So Karen said "Can you give us another hint?" So Katrina said "It's where we go to get checkups!" And of course, "THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE!!!" She nodded enthusiastically.
This was just a comment until ten seconds ago.
The abortion issue is obviously a very tough one to discuss, since it's such a wedge issue. I'm not even sure how to approach it coherently, since i'm unreasonably tired right now. I'll spew thoughts which Travis honored me by saying he'd appreciate.First off, the straw man "Pro-Abortion" is an almost exact fallacy to the liberal straw man "Pro-War". Unfortunately, i think we can agree that there's more actual, no kidding "Pro-War" people than there are "Pro-Abortion" people. Maybe if abortion came with powerful airplanes and amazing pyrotechnics, there would be more of a Pro-Abortion demographic.
But the fallacy is still a fallacy. Nobody (reasonable) is PRO abortion. That's like saying you're Pro-Amputation. Abortion sucks. People are Pro Choice, and that's not a euphamism. It's possible -- common -- to be anti abortion AND Pro Choice. I support people's rights to disobey Biblical moral code in many areas. I would never support legislation to outlaw extramarital sex, for instance. Or being gay.
But murder steps beyond the realm of any religious guidelines. It's impossible for civilization to function if it's okay to kill each other for no reason with nobody stepping in to, you know, stop it. On the other hand, a civilization could roll along just fine if everyone was homosexual. Except the whole reproducing thing.
So then i have to fearfully pose the question: when is abortion murder? The only answer i've ever heard from American Christians is "always". "Life Begins at Conception". The white hot moral outrage when a zygote is dismissed as a "bundle of cells" or a fetus is called "a blob of tissue" makes me loathe to even bring this up, but i'm being brave. My question remains, HOW DO WE KNOW? As far as i know, the most cited passages relevant to this are Mary's visit to Martha and in-utero John "leapt within his mother's womb" because of Mary's earlier-on pregnancy. Studying this passage, however, to extract Western style scientific theories about the exact nature of LIFE is a misuse of Holy scripture. We've made this mistake before, flat-earthers.
The Torah calls for punishment when a baby within a womb is killed, so once a baby is kicking and squirming, it's got a right to live. And obviously, the horrific situations where "partial birth abortions" are carried out deserve the same kinds of scrutiny as every situation where a medical team must weigh lives and make decisions which involve someone possibly or certainly dying.
But at this point, scientists have learned how to fiddle with an adult skin cell and get it to start behaving exactly as a fertilized human egg behaves. Obviously, my skin cells I slough off in the shower aren't all living humans. But they're alive, in the same way any tissue can live after being separated from the body. And if one of those skin cells was fiddled with enough to make a little clone Juanito, he would have a soul, just like i do.
I think if we're honest, we have to admit that we simply do not know when the sacred image-of-God bearing bit, the eternal soul, is infused into the physical body that it's going to hang about with until the body dies. This is mystery, people. We can't see them, you know. We have no choice but to entrust that God, in God's infinite wisdom knows what's going on, and is making sure that stuff works out. However, in my own life, i will choose to err on the side of never knowingly causing any zygote or fetus to stop being. In exactly the same way, i pray with Zane and teach him about God and Christ, even though he doesn't have a clue what i'm saying. I trust that God will welcome Zane to eternal life if Zane dies tonight, but i most certainly am not going to wait until the Age Of Accountability to start teaching Zane about the grace of God through Jesus' sacrifice. Because when is that? WE DON'T KNOW!!!
The questions we have about God and our souls and eternity, the origins and nature of Life, indeed, of reality, are areas that we simply cannot know anything about, scientifically speaking. We're inside this universe. Our vantage point is insufficient to understand what's really going on. The individual numbers in an equation don't understand the math they're participating in, but the numbers continue to have meaning, and the truth they're part of is real as well.
Paul used Platonic imagery: now we see as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. I imagine that we'll all be surprised by how totally wrong we were! I know i will be.
La Loomi Air!
You know, i've always been mystified by how unpopular science fiction is among the literati. And it's lumped together in libraries and bookstores with fantasy. Fantasy/Sci-Fi. I have never understood that. Fantasy is swords and magic and dragons. Sci-Fi is lasers and aliens and robots. And of course there's mixtures, like Star Wars, with swords and lasers and the Force and droids. But Tolkien and Asimov are quite definitely writers from separate genres.But anyway, in my searching for the Iain M Banks essay from yesterday, i found an interview by him in which he's asked why Science Fiction is not takes seriously. His response:
It’s technofear, in my opinion. The people who control our media and culture are generally—actually almost exclusively—from a Humanities background ... and they have a degree of contempt for and fear of the nuts and bolts of the way stuff works even in our own society, never mind in how it might all work in the future.
That's it! I totally understand machines! And electronics and devices with knobs and levers and engines. Exotic technology is very diverting for me to imagine. And i love reading books! Books are great! So there you go. Yesterday you learned why i'm a bleeding heart liberal whack job, and today you understand why i love one of the more reviled of the literary genres. Tomorrow, we'll learn why i eat canned papaya.
Today Houston had his first T-ball practice. I didn't get to watch because i worked -- unusual. But according to Karen's pictures, he had to wear a batting helmet. Um... they have a ball on a pole that they have to hit. Why the helmet, which protects the noggins from pitches??? Karen has some boring reason about kids "throwing the ball" all around "the field" and how it's "practice" and stuff, but it's still fun to imagine a six year old whacking his behelmeted head into the bepoled ball, and getting up saying how lucky he was to have been wearing a helmet. Hehehehe.
Sorry -- i've been thinking about this for days.
Last week at the substance abuse training i was so impressed by, i sat at the same table as a guy who works on another unit. He talked about hunting and building a deck, and he's white and sort of regular looking... so i figured he was going to be a Republican. Well, he asked who i was going to vote for, and i said that Obama is my fave. So he said that Obama is "less evil", and went on to say that if Obama won the nomination and the general election, and then had Clinton join her on the ticket as the Vice Prez, he wouldn't put it past her to have Obama killed so she could take his place.Um...? So i reciprocated and asked him who was his (safe to assume) man. And then he went on to emphatically state that he could never vote for anyone who's Pro-Abortion. I ignored the inflammatory straw man smoldering there, and wondered if we should make sure babies get born, and then figure it's okay to screw them over. Turns out, that was the end of my input into the conversation, since he went into the rhetoric about personal responsibility and stuff... and our other coworker was agreeing with him heartily, having never thought of it that way before.
Pretty much all of the political conservatives i know don't work at Wedgwood. I feel like it's almost impossible to work with such a disadvantaged population and not think that somehow, the government has some part to play in seeing society's outcast helped in some way. So, thinking about my coworker, i checked out some conservative websites and radio stations... Yeah, i'm a flaming liberal. Bleeding heart. I'm not even a moral conservative, at least not politically. What irks me so much about my sampling of conservativism was the smug sense that they were completely, absolutely correct. Obviously i think i'm correct -- why would i believe something i think is wrong. However, i can usually understand why someone would think what they thing without resorting to words like "leftard". I remember listening to someone say that you'd have to be a complete idiot to vote for Kerry (the Democratic challenger to Bush's second presidential bid). I believe this self-assuredness comes from experience. It's completely natural to live as a successful white person in the United States. The whole fish not noticing the water thing. But any time people talk with total certainty, it bothers me, especially when things are proclaimed so obvious, you'd have to be blind or stupid not to see them.
Then, tonight i managed to catch part of Obama's speech after he lost the Philadelphia primary. He talked about the one hundred people whose jobs had disappeared because the factory operation had been moved to Taiwan. The commentator on the AM talk radio station said "Of course they moved the manufacturing jobs to Taiwan! They wanted to make money! Is it wrong to want to make money???" and then later when Obama said the word "community", the cartoonish presenter mocked: "Community! Community... that's... that's almost like communist!!!" Yes, this is an embarrassingly bad example of conservative behavior.
My current favorite author, Iain M Banks, writes about free markets...
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
The idea that using humans as a raw material should be abhorrent to we who believe that people are made in God's image. And Banks is -- at least, he "writes as" -- an atheist. So there you go. Don't get all mad at me.
Handprints
Two newses
So after waiting a year, they decided to grant me Senior Youth Treatment Specialist status. I didn't even have to interview for it. All i did was send an email to seven different people in Wedgwood's main office asking if there had been any progress in the decision making progress, and i listed a few things that i'd done well, which i thought might qualify me to be a Senior YTS. And i told the seven people that i would be sending out a new email after every shift, detailing whatever decent things i'd done.
I don't know if that worked, or if one of the people in HR talking to the president of Wedgwood on my behalf worked... but i am no longer a YTS. I'm an SYTS. I can't remember my other morsel of news. Sorry.
Oh yeah! I found out my blood type! As one might expect from, ah, the rest of my life, i'm AB-, which is the least common blood type. It turns out that the plasma they take from AB- blood is the best kind for premature babies and stuff. So i'm totally going to give blood someday.
Medusa
"Oh yeah?" quoth i, squinting, "Tell me everything you know about Medusa."
"Okay, Poseidon slept with this lady Medusa, and one of his other ladies, I think his wife," the kid responded, "she got super mad about it. So she cursed Medusa and turned her totally ugly so that if anyone looked at her eyes they'd turn to stone! And she had snakes for hair and her blood was poisonous!" He said this with many energetic expressions and hand waving. I was impressed.
Really Good Videos
Check out these short animated films. I watched three of them and they're great. I especially liked this one. But i have to go to bed now.No more Java
My whole family, i'm ecstatic to report, is very interested in insects and other creepy crawlies. In fact, i should have a whole blog about arthropods. Arthropods and my family. No Moores Get The Willies? The Arthrofamily? As For Me and My House, We Like Insects, Arachnids, and to a Lesser Extent, Myriapoda? Too wordy? We went on a family walk today (which caused Corbyn great distress, as he came over and knocked, and even though "both cars were out there", we didn't answer. "What happened with y'all?????" Aww, he cares!) to the park, and on the way we saw an ant hill, occupied doing whatever arcane work ants who scurry around on the surface of a lawn do. And a spider. It's a small stretch for me to hold spiders in the same way i'll hold earwigs or crickets or mantises, because those can't reach down and bite with venomous fangs. But spiders can. Not that they would... my hand skin doesn't resemble any kind of food that would interest a spider, and they only bite in defense when they're seriously being hassled. I'm especially proud of Karen, for whom a fascination with creepy crawlies is entirely affected. At least i think it is. She does an incredible job faking it. She really seems to be interested... Karen?
Besides that, i went to a Wedgwood training today about adolescent friendly substance abuse treatment strategies. I signed up for the class mostly to argue about how useless treating addiction in teens is. However, i'm very proud of my agency and the presenter, because my preconceptions were utterly shattered. I actually learned that it is, indeed, worthwhile to treat teen substance abusers. The fact that less than a third of kids actually "succeed" is actually kind of an human-services industry standard. 30% of heart attack victims change their lifestyles; same with those who suffer from diabetes. I guess working in a sexual offender's program has led me to expect that most kids in treatment actually want to get better.
Apologies...
Did that really happen? Anyone?
So up there is a picture guaranteed not to freak any computer out. And i'll quit with the panoramas for a while. Next it'll be wiggle pictures. Remember those?
Last panorama
Today we went to Meijer Gardens. That's what the huge horse is. Inspired by some sculpture work by Leonardo Da Something or other.
Whoops...
First of all, i'm sorry if my fancy panorama pictures are crashing your computers. Java!Then, check out the trampoline picture! It's like you're really there, man. The kids and i love trampolining.
Beth told me that she actually read and enjoyed the entire essay i wrote for the guy Karen met at a party who liked her camera. She was all "I want a better camera!!!" and i was like "Um duh, you have a good one just like Karen's" and she was totally "What Ever Mega Loser", with the accompanying hand motions.
We haven't spoken since.
So just to push my luck, i'll post what i wrote for some anonymous user on Yahoo Answers about the alignment on his Ford Explorer. Answering the question like i did is probably an utter waste of time, since car alignments are fiddly and complicated, not to mention dirty and you need decent tools. But inquisitive people should learn how their car manages to steer around stalled cars and slow children and scary clowns. So check it out, after the break.
___more___
New kid in town
Make sure you click on that picture and drag the view around.
The post title says "new kid in town", but really what i mean to say is "same kids as usual, but new place in town for them to play in", which wouldn't sound nearly as poignant in Glenn Frey's caramel voice. Anyway, there's two major malls in Grand Rapids, and two or three minor malls, depending on your definition of "mall". Both major ones have play areas, one being dominated by a vast, opaque tree play house. This play tree is strategically situated exactly between wherever i am sitting and wherever my kids are playing. The other one is big food, which makes up for being easy to see over by being big food. And not healthy big food, either, besides the banana.
But one of the minor malls has a play area! We visited it today, and i sat close to the pedophile. At least i thought he was a pedophile, out for a little sightseeing, but then twenty minutes after i sat down, a couple kids ran up to him and hugged him, and he suddenly became Friendly, Well Adjusted Dad Guy. I felt weird for having been so totally wrong. Although he was wearing clean, tan cotton socks, which would be incongruous on an adult sex offender, somehow. Well, maybe not Humbert Humbert.
Anyway, the new place is a hit. Plus, there's a proper indoor skate park in one of the stores, featuring a real half pipe and swimming pool. Awesome. And i also have to share with enthusiasm the leaps of progress my kids have made drawing. Houston's drawn several car scenes today, most of them featuring catastrophic crashes. One of them has a car flying apart with the parts labeled: "WEL", "ENJIN", "DOR", "BOTY". Of course, Houston is learning to draw from me. I encouraged Katrina to draw copies of paintings in one of her books, which she did with such awesome innocence and beauty. And she managed to do well enough for the pictures to be recognizable. I like being a dad.
More Indian food
Okay, i don't mean to brag, especially about something as unpopular as legumes, but i cooked good today. The experience in Chicago with the naan and soup inspired me to cook some naan of my own, and it turned out very good. But then, thought i, we have over there most of a bag of lentils left, so why not make up some lentil soup? Naan dough has got to proof, after all. So here's what i made, and it was Really Good. If you have experience with Indian or Pakistani food, i'd be interested to know if this sounds authentic in the least:Boil until soft and stewy: most of a pound of lentils, water, a small can of tomatoes, three potatoes chopped up, three cloves of minced garlic, and spices, in order of amount added, paprika (LOTS), black pepper, turmeric, cumin, coriander, cardamom, cloves, marjoram, cayenne. Oh yeah, and salt. So what is that? Lentil stew, sure, and vegetarian -- vegan, even. Zane loved it, but he's not reached the age where brown lumpy foods are Unacceptable. Houston and Katrina said they liked it, and they ate enthusiastically for three bites, but then they kind of stopped. They didn't even eat very much naan. Lunatics.
Just a joke...
Karen: Hey Houston, what does a pirate say?Houston: ARRRR!
Karen: How far can a pirate run?
Houston: I don't know.
Karen: FARRRRRR! What instrument does a pirate play?
Katrina, very excited: A piano!!!
Houston: I don't know.
Karen: A GuitARRRRRRR! Okay, what does a pirate drive?
Houston, finally getting it: A CARRRRRR!!!
Karen: No, a boat!
Katrina to Houston, matter of factly: You were wrong.
Fully paid trip to Chicago
It was awesome. We parked for the day right by this Pakistani restaurant, which serves nearly exclusively the taxi driver population of Chicago. One of the charming parts of the restaurant is the fact that you open the front door and are confronted by a tile wall right there. You squeeze by the other of the double door (the one that is locked) and can then walk down a hall filled with handwritten "DRIVER WANTED" and "cab available from 2am to 7am" signs. And in a surprise twist, none of the restaurant staff speak English, but all of their patrons do, and yet nobody speaks English while inside. Unless they're helping to explain what the white guy wants. It was great. Highly recommended.The rest of the trip involved me making fun of the kid who wore house slippers on a day trip to Chicago. This is the same kid who was putting dandruff shampoo on his legs, and complaining: "this lotion stings". I try not to mention that and laugh more than twice per shift. It's therapeutic. I got a horrible headache and nausea, which is weird because that never happens to me. But the pizza at Giordano's was totally awesome. One piece filled my head pounding, queasy self. Yum.
So now, my discontent baby Zane is playing with his odoriferous blanket. I wish he'd sleep. But it's nice to see him and Karen.
Random advice about cameras
She told me that she related how lens quality relates directly to the quality of the resulting pictures. It's utterly true. Consumer digital cameras, especially point-and-shoot pocket cameras woo customers with fancy features and high megapixel image sensors, but fundamentally, without a high quality lens, pictures won't be sharp, filled with real color depth, with a tightly controlled depth of field, and the ability to control shutter speed, and therefore capturing decent pictures even in low light.
What attracted me to the camera I bought for Karen was the quality of the lens. Reviews on Steve's Digicams praise the Olympus Camedia E10 and E20 for their excellent quality lens. That's an excellent digital camera review site, by the way. The best, in my opinion. Additionally, that camera has a non-interchangeable lens, unlike other digital SLRs. This sounds like a bad thing, and for professionals, it is, but with an interchangeable lens system, you've got added complexity and weak areas, specifically, if you get a speck of dust on your image sensor, every picture you take will have a huge flaw until you have the sensor professionally cleaned. Newer DSLRs have ultrasonic sensor cleaners which shake the sensor to dislodge anything... but still.
The drawbacks of Karen's camera are its electronics. The thing is old -- 2001 vintage -- so it lacks the sophisticated autofocus and speed of newer cameras. Even cheap DSLRs nowadays can capture two frames per second until the memory card fills up. Karen's camera can do five fairly quickly, but then needs a good fifteen second rest. And Karen's camera isn't very high resolution. This is fine -- a good 4 megapixel image will print up a beautiful, fine grained 11x14 picture. If you one wants to enlarge bigger, one must deal with grain, blurring, or visible pixels.
So my recommendations for a very good quality DSLR: buy any good brand SLR body which tickles your fancy. Then spend almost that much on a lens. Or two. Pay particular attention to the "speed" of the lens -- the f number. Most cheap DSLR lenses are f:3.5 or slower (lower f numbers mean slower lenses, slower lenses mean less light picked up for pictures indoors). Karen's camera does f:2.2. Slower lenses can be compensated for somewhat by fancy electronics in the camera itself, but there really isn't a substitute for a big, sharp, quick lens.
If you're interested in sports photography, especially indoors, you might be interested in a long zoom lens, which can be stratospherically expensive.
As far as flashes go, I only know enough to recommend a tilting, swiveling flash head. You can make flash lit pictures look like they're naturally lit with proper bouncing of the flash. Getting one perfectly matched to your camera will allow Through The Lens metering (TTL), ensuring perfect exposure every time.
Finally, if all you want is a nice point and shoot, get a Canon Powershot A570 IS or related. They're excellent, and have very good video capability.
Generous Boy
Today Houston was invited to his first extra-familial birthday party. There's a detailed write up over on Karen's blog, and i didn't get to go. But there's something which i'll totally repeat, because i'm so proud of Houston.He rejected the idea of going shopping for his little friend, so he could give the kid some of his own cars. Houston LOVES his cars (although at breakfast he told me "I'm not such a fan of cars", talking about real cars -- he acknowledges my superiority at knowing the names of hundreds of cars by sight) and he wanted to give them to his friend. He asked me how many cars i think he should give his buddy. I recommended four, so Houston spent about ten minutes poring over his car collection, and emerged with four cars in hand. Good cars, Hot Wheels cars, not cheap thin metal dollar store landfill fodder. One of them was a "Code Car" which will allow a persistent browser to find a game on Hot Wheels dot com, where you might be able to punch a code in and get a fancy different weapon or something... But Houston loved that one in particular.
I'm so proud. What a kid.
A shorter post than yesterday's...
We watched The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything tonight. It's the latest Veggie Tales movie, with Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato and the whole gang.I'm a huge fan of the first Veggie Tales movie, which is the one which hastened Big Idea's demise. Massive fan. I've watched it dozens of times with my kids, back when i used to do that to keep them quiet. Videos don't work for that anymore. But the movie is great, with dozens of the kind of tossed off moments of humor which delight me so. "You are a skilled metal worker." ROFL. And the story of Jonah is one of my favorite ones in the Bible, with the central figure (um... spoiler alert...) turns out to be an unredeemed, sniveling, self-centered jerk. And God puts the smack quite firmly and decisively down on Jonah.
This movie wasn't so much a favorite. It's not a retelling of a Bible story, and there's not a particularly religious message. Sure, there's themes of self sacrifice and courage, patience and love... and resisting evil. These are Christ like qualities, but can be found in most stories told, on the screen or anywhere else. Okay, maybe not rap music. But that's okay. Halfhearted references to other films seemed to take the keeping-the-grown-ups-entertained role, versus the spirit of clever randomness that's made the whole Veggie Tales series so enjoyable to the "I can button my own jeans" demographic. I think maybe Phil and Mike were too self-consciously mainstream with this film. I'll watch it again on video to see how it bears repeated viewings. Maybe crazy cleverness was masked by novelty.
The Accord is GONE!!!
When Aaron was going to move back to South Carolina (or wherever), he needed to sell the car. Well, i'd already replaced the fuel pump in it with some generic $20 pump from the cheap car parts store, so maybe he figured i'd know how to handle the car. Aaron sold it to me for $250. I rejoiced.
The radio was an AM/FM cassette player with one desperately bad speaker, so i contented myself to listening to nothing or headphones. The car was a five speed, but the fifth gear had gone out on Aaron while he was driving on the freeway one time. It turns out that Accords of that year never have fifth gear, since Honda engineers tacked the fifth gear cog pair onto the end of the shafts, outside the normal, well lubricated transmission housing. So the fifth gear starves of oil and simply shreds itself. I wish cheese did that.
One day, during the epoch knows as "Highway 131 S-Curve Reconstruction", i was sitting calmly at a stop sigh, on my way to work. There was a bang, and my car shot out across the vacant intersection. Some dude in a full sized Chevy pickup had rear ended me. I had the cheapest insurance on the car, and his fault was plain, and the car was technically totaled. Which means it was damaged. Any amount of body work at all would have been more expensive than the car was worth. So, the at-fault-party's insurance company coughed up the $500 "mini-tort" that Michigan allows as a monetary apology for having the stupidest auto insurance laws in the entire universe. I got a check for $500. I remind you at this point that the car cost me $250. I rule.
I spent the money on drugs and fast women, or something else, and kept driving. After a couple winters, the exhaust system merged with the infinite, becoming tiny flecks of rust scattered between all the places i go, and one nice length of mangled pipe on the side of the main street near my house. So the car went from having an exhaust leak or two to having no exhaust at all. I got two warnings from pleasant law enforcement officers for having such a loud car, but i was young and irresponsible, and i seem to remember having more important things to spend our money on, so i never got it fixed. It wasn't so bad that Tim Wetzel couldn't drive it for a few weeks while his van was being fixed. Aww, Tim!
I had to replace the alternator once, which was easier than falling out of a tree. One of the front wheel bearings self destructed, so the disc would wobble all over the place, burning up the brake pads on that side, and requiring a few breathtaking moments of the brake pedal sinking all the way to the floor without slowing the car every time i needed to stop. I fixed that at a shop, but we pressed the bearings in with the wrong tool, so they went bad again fairly quickly. There's a junk yard near us with another car like that (except a different spline pattern on the outside CV joint) which no longer has a strut or hub. And the left outer CV joint on my Honda has 18 splines, while the right had 16. Awesome.
Finally, after the car started burning oil, the clutch started slipping on even shallow hills, and the front brakes would grind severely, Karen and i decided to park the car behind our house, and buy a new car. That's when we bought our KIA -- the only new car we'll ever own, probably. The Accord languished back there until some yahoo (we suspect Daniel, our neighborhood hooligan teenager who once tried to steal model glue from me to sniff) decided to steal the battery. They cut the battery leads, and stepped in the engine, breaking all the spark plugs off. Jerks.
Then one of those mysterious stickers appeared on the window of the car, and an ad in the GR paper advising "only brave drivers" to buy the car didn't get any bites. So we pushed the Honda into our garage. Stray cats found it a welcoming home. Random detritus of our domestic life found the hood and top of the car serving as an adequate shelf. The tires slowly lost air. The gasoline slowly gummed up.
I spent a few afternoons trying to get the car running again, but was unsuccessful. We pushed the car back into the street, and sold the thing for $150. It was towed away yesterday. It is always sad to sell a car. Especially if it's a car for which you had some kind of hope or plan. We had hoped to race that car in an Off-road Demolition Derby. Either that or Houston and i could have fixed it up for him to drive. With a whole lot of work, it could have been extremely cute and very reliable.
If i had been here when it disappeared around the corner, i might have gotten... misty.
So... um... what's up? Yeah, me neither. I don't know what to do.
I've goofed about on my computer. I've listened to Pandora. I even did some dishes. But Karen and the kids aren't here! It's quiet (except for electronic music) and calm and peaceful, and i LOVE IT. But it's weirdly quiet, calm and peaceful. So i made some Rice-a-Roni and read my book. Mmmmmmm, reading a book. I haven't read for more than ten minutes at a stretch in ages -- if i'm in bed, i fall asleep. If i'm not in bed, there's other more pressing needs to attend to, like "Daddy, Zane's filling the toilet with bath toys!" or "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA". Those two things, mostly.
Of course, as soon as Karen called to say she was on her way, i remembered the things i wanted to do: get a Linux computer working as our internet gateway, make a song, do some hand-drawn animation, start making my capacitive dance pads... Oh well.
___more___
Argus camera
Today we went for bagels. Did you know that bagels at the Bagel Beanery are up to $1.19 each now? Um... that's EXPENSIVE? I just bought a half dozen, and paid with some of my computer-fixing-money, but then the kids were starving, because Katrina decided that she likes "prickery bagels" now. So i handed Houston a whole one dollar bill and told him he could go get another bagel. Well, my two post-pre-verbal kids flitted over to the counter where Houston said "Excuse me! Can i have an everything bagel?" and threw the dollar on the counter. He and Katrina bounced back in my direction with half a bagel each, overbrimming with joy. But i had to ask "Did you get the change? The coins?" and Houston said "No!" so i went to see, and it turns out that the bagel selling girl had just given them the bagel anyway. Even though they'd shorted her twenty cents. I guess 19 cents is, like, worth a Canadian penny nowadays... so no biggie.
Hey, did you know that stagflation wasn't even considered a possibility until the '70's? It seems so obvious to me that when some fundamental resource (like energy) is suddenly more scarce, that the price of everything goes up, so money gets more worthless. It makes me annoyed when i hear analysts talk about the price of all commodities going up, and that means that inflation is "a danger". That's like saying that having a head on collision means that you're in danger of crashing.
She really is the most adorable thing in the world.
-- karen - 30 April '08 - 19:48