Category Archives: Paul

January 18, 2016 · 22:48

Who Pissed Off 2016?

Bowie. Rickman. And now Frey. (And my van, but I’m trying to focus on the global issues here.)

It’s only the freakin’ 18th of January! We’ve got a long way to go here, 2016, so let’s figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it. I don’t want you being all bent out of shape over something and making our lives miserable for a whole year when we could get it out into the open, get it fixed, and then we can all get along without torturing each other.

Is it the whole “Two Thousand & Sixteen” versus “Twenty Sixteen” thing? I’ve always been solidly in the “Twenty Sixteen” camp and I’ve noticed more and more people switching as we get further into the century. (Hell, we’re already over 15% there, and I’m embarrassed to say that I had to calculate that percentage…think about it.) I might occasionally slip up, but I’ll do better, I promise. I can proselytize if it would help, just say something.

I know you’re a leap year and that means there will be a little bit more work for you, but consider it an opportunity to make that much more of a positive mark on history. I would like to emphasize the term “positive” there, since a positive mark on history would go over much better than, say, World War III. Everyone loves 1776 (even got its own musical!), right? 1969 got a moon landing! On the other hand, there are those other years, like the whole “Dark Ages.” They not only get a bad rap, they don’t even get remembered individually!

Oh, I see. It’s that election thing, isn’t it?

Look, 2015 already did its job in setting the stage for you. I know it seems like she did a lousy job with that whole “whackadoodles crawling out of the woodwork” approach to fielding nominees, and that does leave you a shitty mess to clean up, but think of it as an opportunity for greatness instead of a chore. For better or for worse, this US election may be one for the record books, either for good or for bad, so let’s keep your chin up and swing for the fences!

We’ll be here to help. I have faith that we’re not really stupid enough to put some incredibly unqualified, blowhard, megalomaniacal, misogynistic, racist, moron blowhard into the White House. As long as we don’t all start buying brown shirts to go along with our assault weapons, you’re good.

In the meantime, feel the Bern! It could happen! Can you even imagine your spot among your peers if we can pull that one off? You’ll be legen…

…

…

…dary! (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)

In the meantime, let’s work together and make this as easy as possible for all of us. There are plenty of other favorite musicians, artists, actors, writers, idols, and heroes out there that we would really like to see healthy and happy on New Year’s morning 2017. I know you can’t let them all make it, but jeez! Pace yourself!

There are some nice things coming up on your watch. The Olympics. The Juno mission to Jupiter. I’m sure you have some nice surprises up your sleeve, and that’s fine.

Cut us some slack and we’ll put in a good word for you with 1776!

 

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January 16, 2016 · 22:49

Small & Zippy

I got my first good test of my new car out on the open freeway today. I see why the cruise control is there. Finding myself being small and zippy, even with a little four-cylinder engine, after fifteen years driving a battleship-sized “soccer mom-mobile,” it’s easy to find yourself cruising at… Well, let’s say it was far enough above the posted speed limit to give decent odds on getting my second speeding ticket sooner rather than later.

Here she is:

File Jan 16, 19 36 50 small

I have, of course, named her “Hissy.”

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January 13, 2016 · 23:18

19 Miles

File Jan 13, 22 57 01

The last time I bought a car with this little time between the start of the process and driving it off the lot was probably 25 years ago, some time in the late 1980’s. That time it was lust – this time it was more mature, with overtones of inevitability.

That time it was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and the crisis was a car accident that suddenly left us with three kids, my job, and no transportation. I had been drooling over this particular car for months with no way to afford it or any justification to get it. Faced with a situation where I had to either rent a car for a few days or a week or two and figure out what to do, I went and paid full MSRP for my “lust-mobile.” It was a great car that met a horrible fate, of which we will not speak.

This time it’s a Honda Fit, but this time the crisis is the aging nature of my existing car and the sudden onset of potentially fatal repair bills. I saw it coming and had done my homework, but hadn’t had a good reason to give up on the old van when it was running okay. Faced with a situation where I have to either rent a car for a few days or a week or two and figure out what to do, we went and paid about 99% of MSRP. Lust had no part in the equation.

It’s not the car I would have bought if I had won even a small part of the $1.3B lottery tonight – but it will do. Most of the cars I lust after these days are $70K or more – this one lists at about $22K, then throws in some extras and ends up about $26K plus tax and so on. Most of the cars I lust after will go zero to sixty in about five seconds or less – I’m not sure the Fit will go zero to sixty in less than twenty seconds if you pushed it off a cliff.

But it’s practical, it’s roomy (for a subcompact), it’s got lots of cool electronics and things (voice activated commands, satellite radio, GPS navigation system, rear view and right side view cameras, etc), it’s gotten excellent ratings from Car & Driver and the like, and most user reviews are highly positive. The only reason we got any discount from MSRP is that the MSRP is so freakin’ low to begin with, there’s just not a lot of wiggle room.

The feelings are completely different. The original lust-mobile was an expensive car for its day and way more than I should have even dreamed of paying at the time in our financial situation. This car is cheap but practical, costing less even than the cars we got for the kids when they were teens, and we could have paid for it on credit cards. Literally.

That’s when you know you’ve become an olde farte. When the comfortable, cheap, and practical wins out over the flashy, cool, and expensive, you’ve crossed over a line that’s hard to go back across.

Here’s to the next (cheap) 180,000+ miles.

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January 12, 2016 · 21:58

188,815 Miles (Part Deux)

(I apologize if you’re seeing this in your email inbox twice. After whining and pissing and moaning and griping about my car problems, I hit “publish” and immediately got a message that said, “SERVER MAINTENANCE – Your server is going through a few minutes of routine maintenance. Please don’t touch your browser for a few minutes.” When I checked, while WordPress says that the original article published, I can’t see that anyone got an email, it’s not on FaceBook, or LinkedIn, or… So let’s try this again, this time with FEELING and four-part harmony!)

File Jan 12, 21 15 32

Nothing tops off a long day at the office more than having your dashboard light up like a Christmas tree with all of those blinkedy blinkedy red warning nights, accompanied by the blingedy blingedy sound of the really urgent, loud, “you’re in deep shit now” bells and buzzers.

It makes me think that this might not be one of the cheap repairs. Shit, and I just put a full tank of gas into it yesterday!

We had been talking about going out looking for a new car anyway. If I had gotten one of those jobs that involved a two-hour commute each way it would have been critical and would have had to happen immediately. But I got the job that’s a twelve-minute commute away, so it wasn’t critical.

Now, that might be what we do on Sunday.

The good news is that it didn’t happen miles and miles away. I could have been in one of those two-hour commutes and fifty miles away, out on the freeway. (Been there, done that, not nearly as much fun as it sounds.) I could have been going out to the hangar, thirty-five miles away. It could have happened in heavy traffic. It could have happened while I was driving at “maximum freeway speed.” It could have happened with a car full of people, or one of my kids or The Long-Suffering Wife driving. It could have happened back when I was still job hunting and didn’t have a paycheck.

Lots of bad things that “could have happened.”

But I was alone, two miles from home, at 35 mph, and I was able to risk ignoring all of the blinkedy and blingedy and get it back into the driveway.

Apparently some cooling system problem – I first noticed that I wasn’t getting any heat even though I had been driving for five minutes, and at 48° F that’s an issue. What next caught my eye was the temperature gauge, up there where I’ve never seen it before.

I fiddled with the heating controls and the temp dropped back down to normal – for about ten seconds. It then almost instantly pegged high, along with the aforementioned blinkedy and blingedy. I was by that time about a mile and a half from home with green lights ahead of me.

I thought about just parking it, but that particular stretch of road is narrower and all marked “No Stopping Any Time.” I understand that this would have been an exception. But it still would have been blocking a lane and potentially dangerous. So I put my faith in the probability of significant safety margins built into the system and kept going. By the time I got to where I could pull off into a shopping center parking lot, I was only a half-mile out. What the hell? Go for it.

In the driveway I shut it down fast, then hopped out to see if there were any other side effects going on. Like, oh, say…fire!” Nope, seems all good. Not even any odd smells. I passed on the opportunity to pop the hood and see if the engine block was actually glowing in the visible spectrum.

I’ve gone back out now after it’s cooled down and checked for a second to see if it will start. It did. I did not see any oil running down the runway underneath, nor did I get any oil pressure warning lights while driving. So at least I didn’t apparently crack the engine block or have a piston seize or throw a rod.

When I get a chance I’ll check to see if there’s fluid in the radiator. Maybe there was just a cracked hose. Or a crack in the radiator at worst. Maybe it’s just a stuck thermostat, or something that’s gotten jammed in the controls that shunt fluids back and forth to the heater.

Maybe this will be just a $500 fix. Or $800. Or $1,200.

Or maybe it’s time to take $2,000 and put it down on a new car instead of trying to resurrect an otherwise perfectly good vehicle that already has 188,815 miles on it.

On a side note, this being an adult thing really sucks sometimes.

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January 12, 2016 · 21:33

188,815 Miles

File Jan 12, 21 15 32

Nothing tops off a long day at the office more than having your dashboard light up like a Christmas tree with all of those blinkedy blinkedy red warning nights, accompanied by the blingedy blingedy sound of the really urgent, loud, “you’re in deep shit now” bells and buzzers.

It makes me think that this might not be one of the cheap repairs. Shit, and I just put a full tank of gas into it yesterday!

We had been talking about going out looking for a new car anyway. If I had gotten one of those jobs that involved a two-hour commute each way it would have been critical and would have had to happen immediately. But I got the job that’s a twelve-minute commute away, so it wasn’t critical.

Now, that might be what we do on Sunday.

The good news is that it didn’t happen miles and miles away. I could have been in one of those two-hour commutes and fifty miles away, out on the freeway. (Been there, done that, not nearly as much fun as it sounds.) I could have been going out to the hangar, thirty-five miles away. It could have happened in heavy traffic. It could have happened while I was driving at “maximum freeway speed.” It could have happened with a car full of people, or one of my kids or The Long-Suffering Wife driving. It could have happened back when I was still job hunting and didn’t have a paycheck.

Lots of bad things that “could have happened.”

But I was alone, two miles from home, at 35 mph, and I was able to risk ignoring all of the blinkedy and blingedy and get it back into the driveway.

Apparently some cooling system problem – I first noticed that I wasn’t getting any heat even though I had been driving for five minutes, and at 48° F that’s an issue. What next caught my eye was the temperature gauge, up there where I’ve never seen it before.

I fiddled with the heating controls and the temp dropped back down to normal – for about ten seconds. It then almost instantly pegged high, along with the aforementioned blinkedy and blingedy. I was by that time about a mile and a half from home with green lights ahead of me.

I thought about just parking it, but that particular stretch of road is narrower and all marked “No Stopping Any Time.” I understand that this would have been an exception. But it still would have been blocking a lane and potentially dangerous. So I put my faith in the probability of significant safety margins built into the system and kept going. By the time I got to where I could pull off into a shopping center parking lot, I was only a half-mile out. What the hell? Go for it.

In the driveway I shut it down fast, then hopped out to see if there were any other side effects going on. Like, oh, say…fire!” Nope, seems all good. Not even any odd smells. I passed on the opportunity to pop the hood and see if the engine block was actually glowing in the visible spectrum.

I’ve gone back out now after it’s cooled down and checked for a second to see if it will start. It did. I did not see any oil running down the runway underneath, nor did I get any oil pressure warning lights while driving. So at least I didn’t apparently crack the engine block or have a piston seize or throw a rod.

When I get a chance I’ll check to see if there’s fluid in the radiator. Maybe there was just a cracked hose. Or a crack in the radiator at worst. Maybe it’s just a stuck thermostat, or something that’s gotten jammed in the controls that shunt fluids back and forth to the heater.

Maybe this will be just a $500 fix. Or $800. Or $1,200.

Or maybe it’s time to take $2,000 and put it down on a new car instead of trying to resurrect an otherwise perfectly good vehicle that already has 188,815 miles on it.

On a side note, this being an adult thing really sucks sometimes.

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January 10, 2016 · 20:17

My Day On Ladders

The loud  bangedy bangedy sounds were not followed by loud and horrifying scream of agony sounds. In Paul-land, this is known as a “win.”

The Christmas lights are all down. Two of the four gutters are cleaned, more or less. The pruning shears have sung their sweet, sweet song of death to the rogue branches that keep clogging the gutters and messing up the roof. And all of the leaves and debris on the back porch has been cleaned up after that first one-two punch from El Niño this week.

I am going to be so very freakin’ sore tomorrow.

And my idiot “smart” exercise watch still isn’t satisfied. I started out (just after Christmas) with a goal of 5,000 steps, which I’ve done about half the time. Today I’ve done 11,399 steps so far, a new record. Yet when I spend a half hour on my butt for dinner, the nagging and the buzzing and the vibrating and the judgement starts again.

Oh, the loud bangedy bangedy sounds were from when I was up on a ladder with a hammer, re-attaching one of the gutters to the eaves. It was the one where all of the leaves had clogged it and the weight of the debris and water had pulled it loose. The combination of me + ladder + hammer has been known to be hazardous in the past. I am grateful that no Wilhelm scream escaped my lips tonight.

It’s the little things.

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January 6, 2016 · 23:11

It Loses Something In The Translation

Tonight I’m out of time and out of gas, just wanted to write a quick paragraph about some stupid thing I’ve noticed driving around LA in the last few days. But who wants to be normal, so in a desperate attempt to be original I took the title “Out Of Time” and stuck it in Google Translate (English to Russian), which came up with:

Несвоевременно

Of course, being a numbers dude and needing to proof and double check everything (and not actually knowing a word of Russian), before I went ahead with the post I wanted to see if a curious reader could guess that it was Russian, stick it back into Google Translate or some such, and get the original meaning.

This does not work.

While I wanted a translation for “out of time,” as in, “The day’s been really busy and I’m really short on sleep and I have run out of time,” instead it translate to “untimely.”

Which made me laugh way too hysterically. It might be time to get some sleep.

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January 1, 2016 · 22:51

2016 – Known Knowns

Yesterday I looked back at my highly dynamic, roller coaster, schizophrenic year in 2015. Today, let’s see what’s on the horizon for 2016, at least as well as we can see anything into the future.

The two big events I see are a “milestone” birthday (inevitable) and a change in residence for the first time in over twenty-five years (very high probability). As for the first, if you can’t avoid something like that, you might as well screw around with it and everything associated with it, so stand by. As for the second, with the pets all gone and the kids all grown and moved out, it’s not only unnecessary for The Long-Suffering Wife and me to occupy a five-bedroom home by ourselves, it’s downright silly. And expensive.

Along with that necessary move will be the associated task of sorting through twenty-five-plus years of stuff. I’m sure there will be much grumbling and pissing and moaning and complaining as we have to go through room after room and do the “toss/donate/keep” determination. (FYI, I’ll be the one doing the whining – I like stuff.) But that process actually started earlier in 2015, so now I just need to get it in gear big time.

I expect much of the first part of 2016 to be occupied primarily by me work schedules between my paid, full-time job at Habitat For Humanity and my unpaid, part-time job at CAF Socal. It’s obvious which one has priority, but I’ll be busy with both of them doing taxes, year-end closing, and audits through March and April, as well as simply getting settled into the job at Habitat.

It’s unlikely that we’ll be doing anywhere near as much travelling as I did last year, simply because I won’t have any accrued vacation time until at least the end of the year. We would like to get to New York City in July for our 15th anniversary, or to Kansas City for Worldcon in August, but it might at best be one or the other. Or it might just be three-day weekends where we have holidays. We’ll see.

In addition, my opportunities to go to any NASA Socials will be severely restricted do to employment commitments. As Super Chicken said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred!”

I would like to start flying again this year. I’ll need to get my medical certification current (not that big of a deal) and I’ll need to get a few hours of lessons under my belt to become comfortable in the cockpit again (it’s been three years), but after that I’ll simply need to start building up some time and getting my flying skills re-honed. Once that happens, there are opportunities at the CAF to start training and qualifying to fly aircraft there, starting with our PT-19 trainer. That will be a big highlight for the 2016.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but another personal goal this year will be to get back to running. As much as I hate thinking about going out, particularly when it’s cold or wet (or hot or dry), that’s just the “bad brain” talking. I know that I feel better after a run, and I feel better overall about myself and everything else when I’m running regularly. It’s time to start again.

Oh, and if my beloved Chiefs can win the Super Bowl, my beloved Kings can win the Stanley Cup, and my beloved Angels could win the World Series, that would be great as well. Just a suggestion for any of the gods that might be listening who think I’ve been good and need a treat or reward. (What? Oh, yeah. Well… Okay.)

If that sounds a lot less “dynamic” than 2015, bordering on outright boring and dull, well, that will be okay with me. I burned enough adrenaline in 2015, both good and bad. I suspect I’ll be busy as hell all year and stressed with time pressures from a number of sources, but I’m hoping that it’s nothing life and death. Literally.

What does your 2016 look like?

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December 28, 2015 · 23:36

Haircut

I’m a simple man.

(Pause to let the applause, laughter, and catcalls die down.)

While there are plenty of things that I get very passionate about (search this website for “rant”), my hair has never been a topic I really cared about one way or the other. I just don’t care, period. I don’t understand all of the fuss over hair replacement procedures, Rogaine, $100 haircuts at fancy salons, toupees, or the idea that any man without a full, thick, lush head of hair is somehow diminished or lesser than the more hirsute among us. Hair is hair, it needs to be kept neat, clean, as simple and maintenance free as it possibly can be.

I understand that lots of people worry about such stuff – I’m just not one of them. Never have been. Don’t think I ever will be.

In the 70’s when I was a teenager, I didn’t get upset when my parents wanted me to get a haircut – no big deal. Whatever. Plenty of other things to get angsty and rebellious over, but hair wasn’t ever on the list.

(There was a time in college, around 1979, when I did let my hair grow out quite a bit. There’s a passport picture which should probably remain buried deep, deep in a locked box guarded by venomous snakes and demonic incantations. Perhaps one day I’ll let it see the light of day, maybe as a reward for my legions of minions upon reaching a monumental funding goal for some great charity which I support. First, I need legions of minions.)

For the most part, for the last several decades – buzz cut, #2, all over. It’s quick, it’s simple, and the only reason I pay $12 or $15 at SuperCuts or Fantastic Sam’s to get it done for me is that I can’t see in the back or around the ears to trim it up. If I could, it would be a simple matter to just get a pair of clippers and buzz, buzz, buzz everywhere until there wasn’t anything left to buzz. I think for our wedding I went and spent more to get a “good” haircut, but other than that, I can only remember one time that I got anything other than the most basic, simple buzz cut.

A few years back, when I was hitting one of those “Big-Zero” birthdays (i.e., the one between forty-nine and fifty-one) we were going to celebrate by going off to Angels spring training in Tempe, Arizona for a couple of games. The Angels’ team color is red, and I wanted to do something wacky and outrageous to memorialize the birthday, so I secretly stopped on the way home from work the night before the big day and came home looking like this:

2006-03-18 Hi Corbett Field Tucson small

That’s me holding my autographed hat at one of the games we went to. The Long-Suffering Wife had arranged for me to meet Buddy Black, who was the Angels’ pitching coach at the time. More to the point of this essay, I obviously looked a bit like a short-haired version of Bozo.

My kids loved it. The Long-Suffering Wife put up with it. (“It’s your hair. It will grow out.”) My boss blew a gasket for reasons I still don’t understand. (I was in an office with a handful of people without any kind of contact with the public.) It grew out. It faded. I buzzed it back off a couple of weeks later.

I told you that story to tell you this one.

Today I was getting my latest haircut. The young lady performing the task was friendly and kept trying to convince me that I should do something other than my normal “#2 buzz cut all over.” I told her the only time I had done anything like that was when I had my last “Big-Zero” birthday and gave her the thumbnail version. She said, innocently, “So, you did this when you turned forty?” Kids, that’s how you earn the big tips!

In order to make her point, while she did give me what I wanted and asked for, she did it in stages with stops along the way to see what it would look like with different cuts. What I ended up with, of course, was the usual. But it did give me some most interesting ideas for what to do when that next “Big-Zero” birthday rolls around.

Stand by.

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December 25, 2015 · 23:26

944 Steps

When I started working again, I soon discovered that I wanted (sort of needed) to wear a watch again. Normally I haven’t, primarily because I didn’t have a good, functional watch. I have one that’s functional (an old Timex Ironman, one of the metal ones, not the plastic ones) and while it works and I like it, the display is dim and hard to read after probably fifteen-plus years. I also have a nice Torgeon pilot’s watch, but it went glitchy a couple of years ago and tends to die after only a few weeks, even with new “two-year” batteries installed every six months.

As so many do in this day and age, my phone is my watch, as well as my always at hand internet connection, GPS map, book collection, movie collection, music player, camera, computer, and so on. But if I just want to get the time, it’s awkward to have to pull out every time I want to check, especially if I’m sitting.

I also need to get more mobile and active, especially now that I’m in an office at a desk job (more or less), so I have been looking at the watches and “portable electronic assistants” that will keep tack of your activity, steps, and so on.

There are a growing number of these devices that combine a little bit of all of that. The Apple Watch is at the top of the list, and I wouldn’t mind paying $350 or whatever for one, but for what I want there were a couple of drawbacks. One is that they don’t have internal GPS, but instead take it off of the linked phone. If you don’t have your phone, you don’t have GPS, which limits it as a watch for monitoring and tracking runs, walks, bike rides, hiking, or whatever. The other drawback is that, while they’re a bit “water resistant,” they’re far from waterproof. For $350+, it needs to be more rugged.

The device that I had my eye on was the Garmin Vivoactive smart watch. Garmin has long been a leader in sports watches with built-in GPS – I still have an old Forerunner GPS running watch that I got about four years ago. The Vivoactive is waterproof and reasonably rugged, and has all of the apps I’m used to in the Forerunner for running, walking, or biking. It also has built in apps for swimming or golf, with the ability to download a database of maps for every golf course in the US. Not that I play golf, but that’s still cool.

In addition, the Vivoactive will link to your phone and buzz to let you know you have a message, or do some simple changes to the music play list, or get the weather, and so on. It’s nowhere near as versatile as the Apple Watch, but what it does it does better. Since I primarily wanted and needed what it does, and not all of the potential things that an Apple Watch might do, and because most head-to-head reviews gave the Vivoactive much, much better battery life than the Apple Watch, and because the Vivoactive runs about half the price of the Apple Watch, I wanted the Vivoactive.

I was going to get one as a personal reward when I started the new job, but I was just too busy. Then I was going to stop and get one when I finished the first week of work. Then it was when I got my first paycheck. Then…

Then it popped up when I was doing my last minute Christmas shopping on Amazon, and I figured it was time to quit screwing around with the decision. I bought it for myself for Christmas.

So far I like it. We’ll see what it does over the next few days.

It wants me to target 5,000 steps a day, which should come out to about three miles or so. Today I’m only at 944 steps, which isn’t that bad considering I didn’t power it up and start it until well after noon, and I spent most of the day watching movies with The Long-Suffering Wife.

Yet another toy to try to save me from myself. But a nice toy. A clever toy.

AND it tells me the time at a glance!

 

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