(This was written in late July, 2003. I know one or two people have seen it, or at least read excerpts, but somehow this never escaped to the "musings" page. )
Well, it’s almost official. I have to make an appointment with a notary, but by the end of the day on Friday, I’ll be back to having just the one car. And this time, it’ll be just a car.
I’ve been driving my pickup since September 1989; just 16 months after moving to Nevada. It was one of the last 89s on the lot and because price was an issue, it didn’t have a whole lot of features — no radio, no extended cab, no four-wheel drive and no air conditioning. The no A/C wasn’t really a problem until I moved to Virginia in 1994, and even then, it wasn’t a big problem. Going to work, I’d just use the 2-60 air-conditioner instead, meaning that I opened both windows and drove 60mph.
This truck and I have been through a lot together. I’ve slept in the back the night before the Great Reno Balloon Race so I could see the Dawn Patrol at 5am, and again on a camping trip when rain started flooding my tent. During the big snow storm six or seven years ago, I filled the back of the truck with snow and was able to go places where the four-wheel drive SUVs couldn’t, and if all the parking spaces were full of snow, I’d park on a snowdrift with the front end two feet higher than the back.
Over time, I discovered that at times having a friend with a pickup truck seems like all the excuse people need in order to decide it’s time to move to a new house or apartment. And it’s not just furniture that got hauled either. Along with the ordinary items such as firewood and wood chips, I’ve also been called upon to transport a huge pile of toys that were being donated to Toys for Tots, and parts of a spaceship bridge mockup.
There are lots of other memories in that truck — 203,700 miles worth. All with just one owner. Still, nothing lasts forever.
My truck is nearly fourteen years old and the mileage on it is more than eight times the circumference of the Earth. It’s still running like a champ, needing little more than an oil change and the occasional tune up. But the signs of its age are starting to appear. Not quite two years ago, the water pump died, stranding me in the middle of nowhere, 90 miles from home. Last winter, the head gasket had to be replaced. Four months ago, it became apparent that the clutch was approaching its replacement point for a third time. The body’s beginning to show more and more rust and even with the new muffler, the exhaust is getting louder and louder.
At the end of May, after much research and deliberation, I took advantage of the prevailing low interest rates and bought a new car. Not another pickup, but an actual car. It’s a Honda Civic with a hybrid gasoline-electric engine. It’s exactly what I need for commuting to work every day, gets excellent mileage, seats four adults (five if they’re friends), and even has air-conditioning and cup holders. It’s not a pickup, but it’ll do quite nicely.
There is a happy ending to this though. My original plan was to donate the truck to charity. I probably wouldn’t see it again, but at least it could live out the rest of its days helping someone else get to work, haul gravel, and help their friends move. It turns out that life has other plans. My next door neighbors have a son who needs a car, so they’ve decided to buy my truck. The truck will continue helping someone get to work and everything else in life, but I’ll still get to see it; maybe I’ll even borrow it sometime when I need to haul gravel and let my neighbor drive the shiny new car.
I can live with that.
Category Archives: Stories
Martians invade Grovers Mill
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles aired a radio play adapted from the H. G. Wells book, “War of the Worlds.” Circumstances collided with presentation style and a nationwide panic ensued as people became convinced that a full-scale Martian invasion was in progress. On Sunday I got a small taste of how Orson Welles must have felt afterward.
This past Saturday was April Fools day and for the second year running, I felt that the Shore Leave site should be a part of the annual antics. The original plan fell through due to technical difficulties just one hour into the day, so I decided to come up with a “Plan B” and save the original for next year.
Last year’s prank went pretty well, except that at least one person didn’t get the joke. As near as I can figure, she overlooked the text explaining the origins of “MeteorCon,” so I decided that this year I’d use something more closely resembling a press release.
After mulling it over for an hour or so, I finally hit on the idea of tapping into the popularity of the new Battlestar Galactica series. Going completely over the top (How else would you play an April Fools joke?), I thought it would be a grand idea to actually hold the convention on the Galactica. Not on the sets, but on the actual spacecraft. And so I started writing…
As much I wanted to make it sound nearly believable, I also wanted to make it clear that this a joke. I added an “April 1” dateline. I explained how the Sci-Fi channel had decided it was cheaper to build an actual space ship rather than do all the computer generated imagery. And throughout the text, I referred to the Galactica as an actual spaceship and even talked about how the convention would be set up onboard.
The emails I saw on Saturday afternoon were all favorable. People not only got the joke, they thought it was funny! When I walked into the STAT meeting on Sunday, the first several people I saw congratulated me on a great prank. This was a great success! Then I ran into the convention co-chairs…
Kett and Marilyn hadn’t known about the change of plans. While I was celebrating a successful prank on Saturday, they were fielding emails and phone calls from people who were congratulating them on their coup, or worrying over where to find enough space in the Hunt Valley Inn for “several city blocks worth” of sets. Evidently a half-dozen (or more!) people were convinced that the convention had either acquired the sets, or would be taking place aboard an actual space ship! (As Kett put it, “These are Science Fiction fans, they like to believe that anything’s possible.”)
If I had it to do over, I’d have sent Kett and Marilyn an email to let them know about the change of plans. (Seeing as how I was working on this from 1 to 3 AM, phone calls were definitely out of the question.) Other than that, I probably wouldn’t change anything.
To those who were taken in, all I can say is, “Gotcha!”
That and, “Run for your life! The Martians are marching on Grovers Mill!”
chirp
I’d been sick for a few days, so when I first heard the noise on Tuesday night, I puzzled over it for about five seconds and then fell asleep. But on Wednesday morning as I came out of the bedroom on my way to take Wylie out for his morning walk, I heard it again.
chirp
Strange, I wonder what that was? It definitely wasn’t Terry. For starters, she’s downstairs and more to the point, this sound had an “electronic” quality to it. Needing to get my day started, I decided to solve the mystery later and took Wylie out for his walk.
A bit more than a mile later, I started getting ready for work. And as I was coming out of the bedroom, there it was again.
chirp
Aha! It must be the smoke detector letting me know the battery’s running low! So I took the smoke detector down so I wouldn’t forget about it, removed the dead battery, and threw it out with the plan of stopping sometime during the day to buy a new one. I never did get away from the office at lunch and ended up working late as well (this, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the norm these days). So I didn’t get a chance to buy a new battery.
As I was getting ready to go to bed that evening, I was in the upstairs hallway and heard it again.
chirp
I thought that was pretty cool. Apparently the smoke detector holds a charge so it can still warn you, even if you have to take the battery out for a few days while you try to find time to replace it. How many other products have that much thought put into them? Not many I can think of!
Thursday morning, it was still going and I was quite impressed at how much the manufacturer cared about its customers.
chirp
That afternoon I got away from the office long enough to buy a package of batteries. Just the generic store brand, but they’ll last a long time. I got home that evening and once I’d taken Wylie out for his “Home from Work” walk, I went upstairs and put the new battery in.
chirp
I thought that was strange. Maybe it needed a little more time before whatever internal system came up to the proper voltage and then the chirper would turn itself off. So I had dinner, watched a movie, read some emails and took Wylie out for his evening walk.
I was headed up the stairs, giving some thought to calling it a night when it happened again.
chirp
Well now, this was starting to get annoying. A few years ago, the downstairs smoke detector started chirping for no apparent reason. Even with fresh batteries, it wouldn’t stop chirping. You do have to replace them every so often, so I’d taken it down and put up a new one. Perhaps the upstairs one was starting to go bad as well. Standing at the top of the stairs, I began weighing my options.
chirp
Hey, that wasn’t coming from the right direction to be the upstairs smoke detector! Son of a gun! Maybe it was the downstairs smoke detector that needed new batteries! That one uses AA cells and I have a good-sized stash of those that I use with the camera.
So I took the downstairs smoke detector off the ceiling, and replaced the batteries in that one too. Hah! Now I wouldn’t have to worry about changing the batteries in either detector for a while. Satisfied, I started to go upstairs.
chirp
At this point, I was starting to really wonder what was going on. Perhaps there was some thing beginning to smolder somewhere? More confusing, the sound didn’t seem to be coming from the right place to be the downstairs smoke detector either.
So I spent about five minutes downstairs, listening for the telltale chirp.
Silence.
I was still confused, but at this point I’d pretty much ruled out the downstairs smoke detector as the culprit. Perhaps there was a robotic cricket that been programmed to add some confusion to my life? With thoughts like that going through my head, I went upstairs and as I passed beneath the upstairs smoke detector…
chirp
I stood there for a few minutes trying to decide where the sound was coming from. Maddeningly, the chirp was only a fraction of a second long and only happened once every 60 to 90 seconds.
chirp
chirp
I finally went back downstairs to the kitchen, got the step stool, and stood in the upstairs hallway with my head a foot from the smoke detector.
chirp
chirp
It definitely wasn’t the smoke detector. That was something of a relief, but that did leave me with the mystery: If it wasn’t the smoke detector, what was chirping? My home office is on the upstairs, and there’s plenty of stuff in there that could chirp (although none of it should be chirping). Maybe the computer’s battery backup needed to be replaced? That would be annoying since it hasn’t been terribly long since the last replacement, but still, better to find out now, before it failed. So I went into the office to listen.
chirp
It was still audible, but it didn’t seem to be coming from anything in the office. The source of the chirping was still a mystery, but at least I wouldn’t have to replace the battery back up right away. So I stood in the hallway again.
chirp
Maybe it was coming from the bedroom? Again, there were a few things in there that could chirp, but nothing that should. Maybe my cell phone was going nuts? Maybe there really was a robotic cricket? So I stood just inside the bedroom door and waited.
chirp
It wasn’t coming from the bedroom. That didn’t leave much. I kind of doubted it was my razor (for starters, since the only outlet is on top of the mirror, I don’t leave it plugged in when it’s not in use). Maybe there was something radically weird happening with the compact fluorescent bulbs in the bathroom? Yes, I actually stood in the bathroom to listen.
chirp
That eliminated both the light bulbs and the razor as sources of the chirp. All that was left was the guest bedroom.
A few of my friends have occasionally made comments in which they referred to me as being some sort of practical joker. I can’t really speak to the accuracy of those claims, but if they are true, then it’s also true that I come by it honestly. My parents are both known to play jokes on their children and it’s well known throughout the family that the best way to tell whether Dad’s pulling your leg is to look to see whether his lips are moving.
Mom and Dad came down to visit in late January. They’re good people and I love them dearly; but I think it’s safe to say that anyone who’s known them for more than three minutes (which is to say, long enough for Dad to start telling one of his tall tales) will certainly understand that at this point, I was beginning to seriously consider the possibility that they were playing a practical joke on me. On a previous visit, Mom left a foot-long plastic lizard buried halfway down through my sock drawer. It therefore wasn’t hard to imagine the possibility that she was an accomplice to Dad leaving some sort of diabolical electronic chirping device hidden in the guest bedroom.
So I stood in the middle of the guest bedroom and I waited. It wasn’t long before my patience was rewarded.
chirp
It was definitely louder. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the chirping before, I keep the guest room door closed when it’s not in use. Trying to narrow down the location of the noisemaker, I went and stood by the closet.
chirp
It was still loud, but it wasn’t coming from the closet. Perhaps it was over by the window?
chirp
Not quite as loud as the closet, it must be closer to the foot of the bed.
chirp
The desk! It was coming from my old desk! I moved a few things off the top of the desk and I listened.
chirp
Definitely the desk, but it wasn’t anything on the top. Maybe one of the side shelves?
chirp
No. Nothing on the shelves was making that sound. Could it be something under the desk?
chirp
Yes! It was definitely something under the desk! I moved an old shirt and listened again.
chirp
A few years ago, the downstairs smoke detector started chirping for no apparent reason. Even with fresh batteries, it wouldn’t stop chirping. You do have to replace them every so often, so I’d taken it down and put up a new one. The problem is, some smoke detectors contain a small amount of radioactive material. Not enough to pose a health risk, even in your house, but they still don’t want you to chuck it into the landfill where it’ll end up in the groundwater.
I’d put the old smoke detector aside until I could figure out the correct way to dispose of it. Amazingly, several years later, the batteries still had enough juice in them that it was still making the periodic chirping sound that had convinced me to replace it in the first place.
This leaves one final mystery: Why the heck didn’t I take the batteries out in the first place?
Addendum: The new smoke detector in the downstairs portion of the house also has a carbon monoxide detector. On top of that, instead of just making a shrieking sound that’ll scare you to death, the new detector features a recording of a woman’s voice which in the event of a fire or carbon monoxide build up will calmly tell you to evacuate the premises immediately.
Dad predicts that I’m going to end up like a friend of his who awoke in the middle of the night to hear a strange woman talking to him about replacing batteries.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz
Some of the people who think they know me the best may be surprised by this next bit: I was once a suspect in a bombing. Nope, I’m not kidding. At the time I was quite surprised and if I’d had any sense, probably should have been horrified at the implication.
Back in my sophomore of year of college, the campus Security Chief tracked me down and asked me to come to his office about an incident that had occurred over the weekend. That Saturday, someone had flushed an M-80 firecracker down one of the toilets on my floor in the dorm. I’d seen the pieces of porcelain all over the hall the following morning and by late-morning there was a rent-a-cop standing guard over whatever evidence may have remained. At some point the campus authorities decided to treat the incident as a full-fledged bombing.
So what made them suspect me? Right after the explosion, most of the people living on that floor rushed out into the hallway and during the investigation, somebody realized that I wasn’t one of them. So where was I? Off at a party? Laughing maniacally at the destruction? Planning more mayhem? None of the above! I was sound asleep!
My ability to sleep through things is pretty much the stuff of legend. According to Mom, somewhere around the start of my freshman year of High School, it was like someone flipped a switch and suddenly I just wouldn’t wake up*. And one roommate reported the time I jumped down from my loft bed, turned off the alarm clock, and jumped back up, all in one motion, and all without waking up. Alarm clocks, fire trucks, etc. I slept through it all.
I don’t know whether they believed me about sleeping through the explosion, but I never heard any more of it. Seven years later, while living in Nevada, it wasn’t until I asked a pair of coworkers what they were talking about one afternoon that I found out I’d slept through an earthquake.
*For the record, although Mom did have trouble waking me for school, I wasn’t the absolute most difficult. That honor goes to Steve who once had a glass of cold water poured over his head.
Pane in the Glass
I bought my house back in early 1999. Two years later, in August of 2001, someone broke in. This has, of course, already been chronicled elsewhere. The intruder or intruders (I never found out which) broke the window on my basement door, undid the deadbolt, and let themselves in.
That very same day, I had a locksmith replace the lock with one that couldn’t be opened without a key. That way, even if someone breaks the window again, they still won’t be able to get in without making a lot more noise as they break out the metal framework that holds the window in place. As for the glass itself, I decided to be somewhat “creative” with the replacement.
The original window consisted of two sheets of tempered safety glass with a one-eighth inch spacer and vacuum in between. When the glass was broken, it made a mess of tiny cubes on the floor, but there were no large shards (a happy situation for me since I wasn’t wearing shoes when I discovered it). Rather than replace it with more glass and possibly have the same experience, I instead went out and bought two sheets of Lexan.
If you’ve never heard of it, Lexan is a special type of plastic (a polycarbonate actually) that is exceptionally durable. The display at Home Depot has a square of it in a window frame with a baseball hanging in front of it that people can throw as hard as they want to try and break the “window.” Nobody ever succeeds. I’ve also seen it used to make plates and cutlery for camping and any variety of other things you want to be durable but lightweight. The only way I’ve ever succeeded in breaking a piece of Lexan was to cut it with a saw or else fold it in half, lean on it with my full weight, and bounce several times. (This stuff is tough!) Installed in a window frame, I figured it would be nearly unbreakable. And that was the general idea. 🙂
One of the neighborhood kids broke into our house when I was growing up. He didn’t take anything, just made a mess, strewing toys all over the place. My reaction to that break in was the same as my reaction to this one – I was extremely annoyed that I had to clean up the mess. As I said, Lexan is extremely tough, so if someone was going to try breaking into my house again then by golly, I wanted the pleasure of finding the guilty party laying unconscious on the deck after the rock bounced off the window and hit them in the head!
That was probably the cleverest mistake I’ve ever made. Replacing breakable glass with something that’s hard to break makes a lot of sense. I’m proud of that part of the decision. But perhaps you’re wondering by now, if Lexan is so tough, why don’t they use it instead of glass? The price is about the same, but it turns out that Lexan isn’t a very good insulator (particularly the way I’d installed it without a vacuum seal between the two sheets). Over the past winter or two, I’ve noticed a pretty strong draft by that door. At first I thought it was the weatherstripping, but over time, I realized that the cold air was coming in around the window. (No doubt there was a similar loss of cool air during the summer months.)
Coming into December of 2005, I had nearly three weeks of unused vacation time. Since we have a “use it or lose it” vacation policy at work, I decided to spend the time working on various projects around the house. Item one was to measure the glass in the door and order a replacement window. A couple quick measurements and like a flash, I was off to the glass company. Turns out that glass for doors is a special order and it’ll take about three weeks to arrive. No problem. Installing the glass will be the last thing I do before going back to work.
Remember I mentioned that there were two sheets of glass in the window? It turns out that not only is there no standard height and width for the window in a door, there’s no standard thickness either. So much for ordering the glass that day! And by the time I did manage to disassemble the window and measure the spacer, it was already the end of December.
All of this practice taking the window apart and putting it back together again paid off though. When I called to order the window, I learned that it was going to cost nearly $200 for the glass company to come out and install it. By picking it up in person and installing it myself, I was able to bring the price down to less than$100. (Note to self: If this programming gig turns out to just be a fad, there’s big money to be made installing windows in basement doors!)
I picked up the new piece of glass during my lunch break on Monday. There were a few other things going on that evening, so I left the glass sitting in the living room and said a silent prayer that Wylie would refrain from knocking it over.
After dinner this evening I went down to the basement and disassembled the window for what I sincerely hope will be the last time. The new glass is installed in the door, the Lexan is leaning up against the wall, waiting to be used in some other project, and I’m hopefully doing a bit less to heat the outdoors.
The project’s done, and you know what? It wasn’t too “paneful” after all!
Family repellant?
About a week before Christmas I was wandering through Target in search of a last few presents when I spotted this rather unusual product.
At first glance, that bottle looks like it says, “Repel Family.” Interesting product for Christmas time, don’t you think? Evidently someone figured out how to bottle Eau du Fruitcake! 🙂
Somewhere in the Western Desert
NASA’s Stardust probe is due to return on January 15 of next year, carrying samples of interstellar dust particles. Riding on a set of two parachutes, the probe is due to land somewhere in Utah a little after 3:00am.
Details of the probe’s sample return mission are available on NASA’s Stardust web site, but this got me thinking about what might happen on that day, somewhere in the Western Desert….
——————————————-
January 15, 2006
Dear Diary,
A most peculiar thing happened last night. I was having trouble sleeping so around 2:30 I decided to go out for a quick run in hopes of tiring myself out. It was working and a little after 3:00 I was definitely starting to feel groggy so I headed back to the nest.
Wouldn’t you know it?! Turns out that mean old coyote was out for a jaunt too and, as always, he was hungry. Well I took off at top speed, but like I said, I was definitely feeling tired and I just couldn’t keep up the pace. I could almost feel the coyote’s breath on my back and that’s when it happened.
First there was a popping boom sound – sort of like my usual sonic booms – but like I said, I was pretty tired at that point and starting to slow down. And then, just when I thought I was a goner and the coyote was finally gonna get me for sure, he got conked on the head by this strange metal box that just fell out of nowhere.
I wonder where it came from?
Meep! Meep!
R.R.
Wylie's experimental theater
One of the useful bits I remember from High School is that when you come up with an idea in science and it seems to make sense, you call it a hypothesis. The next step is to perform experiments and see if the results of the experiment match what the hypothesis says they should be. If they match, then then the hypothesis becomes a theory. This process can be repeated as needed in order to refine the new theory and clear up any inconsistencies between it and the results of the experiments.
I’ve felt badly over the past two years about having to keep Wylie caged when I’m out of the house. The problem is, I’ve sometimes stepped out of the house for less than five minutes only to come back inside and find a couch cushion on the floor.
Over time, I noticed that the cushion Wylie most frequently pulls off the couch is the one by the window. So I formed the hypothesis that perhaps what was happening was that Wylie was jumping on the couch so he could watch out the window and in the process of jumping off and on, he was knocking the cushion onto the floor.
So, next I set out to test this hypothesis. Twice in the past week I’ve left Wylie out of the cage while I went out to run errands. Both times I came back after several hours to find Wylie sacked out on my bed and all the couch cushions exactly where they belonged.
I left Wylie out of the cage again this afternoon while I went out to finish my Christmas shopping. When I came back, I found Wylie curled up on my bed looking up, happy to see me, the very picture of innocent puppyhood.
There are, of course, pieces of couch cushion scattered all over the living room floor.
The Ice Maker Cometh
I can now say without fear of contradiction that it’s officially fall here at Dactyl Manor.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking something along the lines of, “Well, duh! It’s getting cold out, the leaves are falling off the trees, the nights are longer than the days, the calendar says it’s November….” You’re probably also wondering which of these signs was my first clue. And my answer is: None of them.
The way I can tell that it’s fall has nothing to do with the calendar, the weather, or anything like that. The way I can tell that it’s fall is that the ice maker is working again.
It never fails. When the weather’s getting warm and it’s getting to be that time of year when a nice cold glass of lemonade with ice cubes floating in it would really hit the spot, that’s when the ice maker is going to break. It doesn’t happen every year, but in the seven years I’ve been living in this house, I’ve had to fix the icemaker three times. And every time, it’s the same thing, the tube carrying water to the freezer compartment dries out, splits, and leaves a puddle on the floor.
Fortunately for Wylie, this had already happened once before he moved in, so at least I knew not to blame it on him. (As a complete aside, if anyone can offer a reasonable explanation for how a tube full of water can dry out, I’d love to hear it.)
It also never fails that when the icemaker breaks down, it’s one of those years when I’m frantically busy and can’t spare the hour it takes to gather up the tools and replace five feet of plastic tubing. As a result, every time the icemaker’s broken, it’s generally taken me around six months to get around to fixing it. Generally, right around the time it starts getting cold out.
The ice maker broke sometime in May and all summer long I drank my beverages without ice. And following the seasons of the year, I finally found a chance to repair it this evening.
It must be fall.