Category Archives: Ronnie

‘Cause I haven’t done one of these since last October, that’s why.

• I used to do these about every six to eight weeks at the most. Now it’s been nine months. What the hell have I been doing for the last nine months? Hmmmm… I should know this one…
• Back at the end of June I posted a Photoshopped picture and said there was someone in the original who was mentioned in a Tom Lehrer song, and I invited anyone to guess who it might be:
• My fannish/filkish friend Harold Groot got it correct over on Facebook.
• Most days I try hard to be friendly, helpful, and cheerful. After a couple of long, miserable nights (leg cramps, again) my goal today was to be minimally offensive. I think it was a roaring success. Neither I nor anyone around me ended up in jail or the hospital!
• It’s Wernher von Braun
• With the raccoons going nuts every night on the flat roof above me in my computer room/office, I finally went and bought a better tool to take pictures of them. I got a Bushnell wildlife trail cam. It has an infrared flash and is triggered by motion, so you set it out and when something wanders into its field of view, it snaps a picture. I didn’t do anything fancy to mount it up there, just put it on a short tripod, then lashed the camera and tripod to the legs of a ladder propped up against the roof. It makes it easy for me to get up there and check it, and hard (I hope) for the curious raccoons to destroy it or tip it over. We’ll see.
• The Long-Suffering Wife is doing well on her trike. She reports that the hardest part is getting it unlocked and locked back up again. I’ll admit, we might have overdone it on the bike lock. About four feet of coiled, braided steel about 3/4 inch thick. It doesn’t much want to get uncoiled and it’s like wrestling a pissed off octopus to get it around the tree and then through the bike frame and unlatched.
• Speaking of the raccoons, when I posted pictures of them last week, the aforementioned Harold Groot did some research and told me over on Facebook that it was almost certainly a mother and three kits, not a male/female pair and two kits. He didn’t mention whether or not that made my imaginary dialogue less funny, more funny, or had no effect on the funny to begin with because you can’t improve or lessen that which did not exist to begin with.
• Best Pokemon Go line of the day was a comment on a local television station’s story about how a gym or beacon or some sort of special place was in front of the house of a registered sex offender. Think of how this endangered the children! To which someone pointed out that there were no children playing the game – it was all twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings.
• As I have been here working and writing this, I can hear the raccoons directly above me, right where the camera is. They keep coming back, and now I can hear them chirping and chittering (if you’ve never heard them, you should listen to the clip), even over the sound of the air conditioning and the music. (Toccata & Fugue in D Minor by good ol’ JS Bach, at the moment.)
• Should you happen to need a bicycle shop in the west San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, we can highly recommend Spoke ‘N Wheel at Platt and Van Owen. When we bought The Long-Suffering Wife’s trike they were having a bad morning (a break-in overnight) but took great care of us anyway. Most impressive was when they politely pointed out, after The Long-Suffering Wife had picked out a particularly rakish and stylish helmet, that it was a $250 helmet and given the expected speeds and hazards involved on the trike, maybe a $45 helmet might work just fine. That’s some good customer service right there!

Remember, “The only secret to magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.” From Penn Jillette, a freakishly brilliant human.