Fapo

Two Plows in Late Autumn

2007-11-18T21:50:17Z

The homestead in late autumn:

Dodging Bullets

2007-11-13T16:55:07Z

Sorry about the unannounced sabbatical. Severe writer’s block and an ongoing series of personal crises ruled my life over the past eight weeks. Let’s enumerate: On the day she left for her third semester at college, Adie’s boyfriend called out of the blue and broke up with her. Distraught, Adie drove to school, hit a rumble strip in the passing lane of an interstate, and over-reacted. She spun out and went into a guardrail. Only after twenty-four hours later, I found out about it. The car was totaled but she came out of it unscathed. A week later, because she had no car, she couldn’t get to the pharmacy and being a typical twenty-year-old kid, blithely withdrew from some high powered meds that had been prescribed to deal with a general anxiety problem she has. The meds were prescribed about six months ago and help her concentrate on academics. The withdrawal symptoms were horrendous. Adie had hallucinations and became self-destructive. Again I only found out about this later, after getting a cryptic phone call in the night, and emailing her and her friends in school. Her friend sent back a one-liner saying that she had a “pretty rough night”, which I later learned included an attempt to jump out of a window. Meanwhile B1 was calling me every day. It seems that the equity loans she took out on what used to be our house was against some sub-prime shyster and the payments were about to double. She was already behind in her mortgage payments, has a broken refrigerator, a nearly dead furnace, and is about one mortgage payment away from defaulting. She can’t sell her house, since the loan and appraisal was made back in the salad days of 2004. She is now in a negative equity situation, and can’t sell the house for the amount she borrowed. Meanwhile B2 never calls me. She is still looking for a job and is at risk of losing her house. B2 has lots of assets (she owns three homes) but has borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. Paul is now showing up the door, with his thumb-breaking friend named Vinnie. The next shoe to drop was a physical assault by Adie’s ex-boyfriend on a Friday night. The assault was not sexual, but Adie was bruised pretty badly. After much prodding and a few phone calls to school administrators, Adie came forward and told officials of the incident. So most of my time has been spent doing remote crisis management for Adie. Needless to say it hasn’t been easy, but it was made worse by cell-phones, which have spotty connectivity in the mountains of northern Vermont. Invariably I’d get a phone call, with Adie sobbing on the other end, and then get garbled information that would be truncated by a dropped call. I was going nuts just trying to get in touch with her and clarify what was going on. Many places in the third world would be logistically easier. After several trips by B1 and myself to her school during the weekends, we got Adie back on her medication. She went to counseling and support at the school to deal with any trauma regarding the physical attack, and is busy finishing her semester while sending applications for transfer to some large universities in Boston. Given that Boston is less than an hour away and has pretty decent and reliable communication infrastructure, a transfer sounds like a blessing. Oh, I have met and started dating a wonderful woman, named L. She has endured two months of this nonsense and has been more than supportive. To add some comic relief to my personal life, L and I got carried away on a weekend and put us in the precarious position of worrying about becoming fifty-year-old parents. Thankfully, L’s pregnancy test turned out negative. I immediately marched down to the doctor’s office and arranged for an appointment with an urologist to get myself gilded. Since then L and I have been dutifully restricting ourselves to holding hands and watching old movies. Presumably in five weeks I will be officially sterile. As Forest Gump said, “One less thing.” I find myself quoting Gump a lot recently.

"How dare they!"

2007-09-17T17:58:26Z

When I was thinking about buying “Two Plows” I was a little apprehensive about the maintenance issues. I had been spoiled living in civilization where there were neighborhoods, very good services, and where I was co-habitating with women. My broker looked at me oddly and reminded me that I would be purchasing this from an eighty two year old lady who hobbled on a cane. With some luck I might be able to manage. Still, the owner had only lived in the house during the summer months for at least a decade. Presumably her son spent a year living here a couple of years ago, so I suspect everything is in order for dealing with a long New Hampshire winter, but I am still a little nervous. Because “Two Plows” is high on a hill-top we already had an infrastructure failure. The downstairs toilet had a “jiggle the handle” problem which was unattended for an afternoon, and the excess discharge of water dried up the well. It recovered in about a couple of hours, but it drove home the fact that living so high off the valley creates special challenges. Often when wells go dry, the pump at the bottom of the well can burn out. When the well is very deep, as this one obviously has to be, fixing a pump can cost thousands of dollars. So a new rule for “Two Plows” is that showers are limited to five minutes. The other issue will be the high winds and cold that it is exposed to during the winter. When I lived with B1 in our small starter home, we had an ugly but very practical wood stove in the living room. B1 hated it because of aesthetics. I loved it because it kept us warm on brutally cold nights when the central heating either gave out or couldn't produce enough BTUs to warm the upstairs. The art of loading up a wood stove on a cold winter night required learning how to properly adjust the intake of air. With air vents open, there would be a period of a few hours of slow burn as the wood would heat up and dry. Then there would be a burst of heat for one or two hours where the dried wood would incinerate all at once. I used to have visions of spontaneous combustion and would often go downstairs and sleep on the couch. When I bought the house, the liner in the existing fireplace needed to be replaced. It would set me back at least two or three thousand dollars. I've always harbored survivalist instincts, so I started making phone calls to inquire about putting a wood stove in the existing fireplace, hoping that this alternative would give me a much better secondary supply of heat for about the same price that would have been spent fixing the fireplace. I discovered a great local store that offered alternative heating energy solutions for the home. It included state of the art wood stoves, but lots of other choices: propane, wood pellets, and anthracite coal. I talked to the owner of the store for what I expected would be a five minute conversation. Instead the discussion went on for the better part of an hour as he enthusiastically talked about the variety of options and the pros and cons of each in terms of ease of use, price of stoves, and price and availability of fuel. According to him pellet technology has a long way to go. Wood pellets are manufactured from sawdust collected at wood mills. The dust is compressed with some sort of binder into pellet form. The advantage of this system is price and convenience. It is cheaper than firewood and because the pellets are manufactured in small standardized pellets, the stoves can behave more like a conventional burner, with automated feeding of fuel that is controlled by a thermostat. According to the store owner, the problem with pellets is that the technology is new and the burn characteristics of the pellets problematic. He claimed that pellet stoves were forever having problems and were constantly in need of service. Propane is becoming popular because of its simplicity and instant gratification. You just flick a switch and you have the aesthetics of a wood fire without the hassle of hauling in wood from a wood pile buried in snow and trying to get a fire started. Propane is good for easy local heat, but still not the solution for augmenting or replacing the oil system for the entire house. When the heat store owner started talking about coal, the pace and enthusiasm in his voice quickened. Then he launched off for the better part of the hour explaining the nuances of modern automated coal burning stoves. He had one installed against the protests of his wife, who had nineteenth century visions of coal and steam technology churning in their living room, but after the installation, she was beyond pleased. While his fervor was infectious, I was more entranced by the mix of both retro and contemporary technologies: intelligent sensors and motors to feed small uniform pellet size anthracite into a stove controlled by a state of the art thermostat. The stove itself looks like a throwback to the Victorian era, with a classic black finish with a window that looked like the coal hatch one would see in the engine room of an old locomotive. The brass fittings only enhanced this imagery. What clinched it for me was the vision of having my Massachusetts Al Gore loving friends over on a cold winter night for beer and conversation, and excusing myself for a moment only to bring in a bag of anthracite to fill the coal hopper. I trembled at the thought of watching their horrified faces. “Two Plows” is going to be a lot of fun.

Triggers

2007-09-13T03:47:13Z

On reflection over the past few months, perhaps the hardest part about dealing with B2 was witnessing her emotionally checked out demeanor and her complete unwillingness to share responsibility for the situation. It triggered painful memories of a eight years ago when B1 had an emotional melt down that quickly led to our divorce. It happened suddenly in winter of 1999, just after having a typical and happy Christmas holidays. One night in January we were sitting in bed and B1 announced that she was feeling distant from me, but did not articulate why. I tried to draw her out but she couldn’t really put her finger on what was wrong. After a few days of seeing that this was not just a bad night, I suggested that she re-establish sessions with a counselor. For seven years she had seen a brilliant doctor at McLean Hospital who had done wonders with her. For reasons I did not understand then, but do now, B1 instead went to a local councelor, one that she had never seen before. Then B1 started disappearing at night, coming home late, and never calling. I started worrying about her. One night she went out across the street to get a few items at a store and didn’t come back. By two o’clock at night I had called the police, called all her friends, and my brother in California. I was sure something had happened to her. She showed up at 3:30 in the morning and claimed she was with a friend and that she didn’t call because she had left the phone near JayWon’s bed and didn’t want to wake her. Nothing seemed to be adding up. About a week later, again in bed, she said that she didn’t want to be married. I was dumbstruck. Up until Christmas she had been kind, warm, and attentive. Our relationship had many flaws but I had always perceived her as being a dedicated wife and mother. I spent many nights almost hysterical with grief, trying to hide the sobs from the girls who had no clue what was going on. I tried to convince B1 to go to couples counseling and found a very good woman who had a good track record of dealing with these sorts of things. B1 reluctantly went. The counselor was name Dawn who saw the emotional detachment immediately. After two sessions she told us that she didn’t want us to come back unless we were really interested in saving the marriage. Afterwards I called Dawn privately, and she told me that the message was really being directed towards B1, who then declined to go to future meetings. I was beside myself trying to salvage my world. I needed help so asked Dawn if I could get individual counseling from her. She said yes. When I went in for the first meeting she told me she had some bad news. She told me that she didn’t give up on seventeen-year-old marriages easily but my marriage was over. She said B1 didn’t have the emotional ability to be a wife. She also validated my suspicions about B1 being sexually abused as a young girl. Dawn thought the age of Adie triggered this meltdown. In so many ways that harsh message was a relief to hear. That I was not the cause of this, that the seeds were planted long before I ever entered B1’s life. It also explained why B1 chose not to go back to someone who knew her so well. If she had gone back to her old counselor, she would have been told that the problems had less to do with me than it did with unresolved issues in her childhood. By going to a complete stranger, B1 could, on the first meeting, paint any picture she wanted of our marriage. That’s what she did, and within the first session the counselor was recommending that she get divorced. The big problem I was facing were the girls, ages 12 and 14. They had not seen any arguments between B1 and myself and had no clue of what was going on. I had to force B1 to talk to the children as a family and tell them that we were going to live apart. She kept minimizing the impact on the kids. B1 chose Easter Sunday, and the girls bounced into our bedroom expecting us to tell them something about a summer vacation or some other long term plans as a family. I did the talking and explained that B1 was having issues that went back to when she was a child and that she did not feel comfortable any longer living with a man. So I said I was moving out to give B1 the space she needed. Adie instantly became hysterical. She wanted to know where I was going and what did this mean as far as where she would live. She wanted to know if it meant that she would no longer see her grandparents and Sis. Both of us reassured Adie that everything would stay the same, except I would be living somewhere else. JayWon’s reaction almost made me physically ill. She froze and sat motionless staring and not even blinking. Slowly a tear ran down her cheek. It was at this point B1 excused herself and said that she had to go downstairs to do some work in the kitchen. I sat with JayWon who was still rigid and held her close to my chest. I carried her over to the bed and rocked her for about an hour. She then quietly told me that she wanted some time alone and went off to her bedroom. About four weeks later I pulled up to the house on a Sunday with a small van to get a few things to take with me. B1 puttered around the house totally ignoring me. I carried things into the van with a buddy of mine. The kids were playing around the house on what was a beautiful sunny late May day. When I drove off, B1 never said goodbye. The day after I drove back to what had been the home of everyone I loved. I saw that residual clothes I had left in the closet were tossed in a thoughtless heap outside, where the girls would see them on their way out the door when going to school. It was my relationship with the girls that turned things around, but it took me a long time to recover from those awful days.

Two Plows

2007-09-08T02:56:19Z

I’m calling it “Two Plows”. It’s my unanticipated new home, just a little more than a mile from where B2 and I used to live, but light years away from the orderly life of an upscale residential neighborhood. The name is derived from two horse plows that were left on the property, at my request, by the previous owner. One of the first things I did after moving in was to carry them towards the mailbox. In my “free” time, I plan to clean them up, adorn them with paint and shellac and put in some landscaping light to silhouette their forms at night for people coming to visit. A lot of folks have come up to look at the place with its funky cottage, outhouse, old stonewalls, dilapidated greenhouse, overgrown grape arbor, and the forested and abandoned country road. They all leave saying the same thing: “This place is you.” I assume it’s not intended as a left-handed complement. The dust bunnies in the upper hall could be mistaken for tumbleweeds. I spent a couple of days camping out in the sunroom in my old sleeping bag and cheap aluminum cot. The first thing I did was clean out the fridge and stocked it with a case of Labatt Blue. The little old lady also left a slew of mason jars, which I ran through the dishwasher and placed in the freezer as beer mugs. The day after the closing the movers arrived and I directed traffic, mostly to the abandoned cottage where my woodshop will be resurrected. Then it was time to make lists. Lots of them, and to start living day to day to figure out what was missing. There were endless trips to Walmarts, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s and Best Buy. This was followed by lots of phone calls to various subcontractors for doing electrical work, putting up fencing, stripping wallpaper putting down new flooring, winterizing the sunroom, and adding a deck. I’m still trying to sort out how much of this I want to do myself: trying to balance the practicalities of saving money versus losing patience for all the things not done. Surprisingly I had more furniture than I originally thought, and only needed to go out and purchase a bed, a segmented couch, and dining room table. I got a great deal from a consignment shop for the last item. It had wicker chairs and a rich pine finish, which complemented the pine in the living room. Within three days I was ready to have some folks over for a first meal. I called up Adie and JayWon. A half-hour before arriving JayWon told me that she was bringing some company: Hannah, her fiancé Jim, and Amy (a softball colleague of JayWon’s). I was short of food by about three people so I jumped in the Jeep and headed off for some power shopping. When I got back Hannah had found my Nikon and was busy snapping pictures of the new place. She is a very talented professional photographer and I was delighted with what she left for me. Pictures of flora and fauna, and of Jaywon and Adie. My girls were home with just me and a few of their friends for a simple dinner. It's been eight years since this has happened.

The New Homestead

2007-07-25T17:58:34Z

The reason for no posting is simple: I’ve been very busy transitioning to a new life. The buyers from hell finally signed the purchase and sale agreement and deposited a big fat check. B2 and I are now officially moving on to our separate lives. They took their good sweet time coughing up the money for the agreement. We were hearing a lot of excuses about them being in Belgium and the additional delays it impose but frankly the Mayflower could have gotten the money here sooner. The total time from offer, to inspection, to getting a signed purchase and sale was about five weeks. B2 was ready to commit herself. I was preparing a rope for myself in the basement, but stuck on what dieing message I would leave. I finally figure out what it would be: “Welcome to your new home! While I was leaving I noticed a peculiar smell in the basement. When you have time could you have one of your kids go downstairs and check out what is wrong? I think I might have left half of a ham sandwich down there. And let me offer my congratulations. I’m sure this house will provide you with many lasting memories!” While the time-line to get these cretins to sign kept slipping, the closing date stayed the same, which meant I had to scamper to find a new place to live. When I divorced B1 I left all my furniture with B1 and the kids. B2 brought all her furniture with her when she moved up to New Hampshire and filled our house. So this is what I have: a few antique chests, photo albums of Jaywon and Adie, some crappy clothes, a ridiculously elaborate set of heavy duty tools (lathes, band saws, table saws etc) and cabinet making equipment, and Lucy my eighteen month old Aussie. I initially wanted a cheap low maintenance condo. But it would look weird with no furniture and a nuclear powered table joiner sitting in the living room. Compromise one was to bag the garden style condo and upgrade to a townhouse. Probably this would be more expensive and give me more room than I could use, but at least I could find a full basement. My realtor took me around and found lots of great places, but nothing fit for Lucy. She needed a small patch of yard to at least go outside and sniff on her own. She and I both go nuts on a leash. I could have easily bought something nice, but my instincts were telling me that I was heading for a disaster. Lucy is a fabulous animal. She is a beautiful tri-colored miniature Australian Shepard who has a sweet temperament. But she is still an Aussie, which means that she has herding instincts that can’t be broken. She goes berserk wherever she sees legs moving at a fast clip. Joggers, bicyclists, and baby carriages send her over the edge. So things were starting to get difficult. I wanted a condo with a patch of yard, out of view of other people doing athletic activities. My realtor was starting to think I was nuts. Compromise two: Look for a condex. More expensive than a townhouse, but for the additional money you get the worst of both worlds: all the headaches of homeownership coupled by hassles with condex associations. With a condex, you own half a house, and have to maintain it but you are captive to having a working relationship with the owner of the other half of the property. This means they need to agree with you on when to repair the roof, paint the house, and mow the lawn. It also means that they have to love my dog, Lucy, a lot. This seemed like it could be a stretch. The final compromise: I bit the bullet and suggested that I start looking for a house. Much higher cost and taxes, lots more maintenance, but we are talking about Lucy, my soul mate. The next day I got one of those Thoreau moments of complete madness and did an MLS real estate search for something way out in the sticks. Escape has been an undercurrent of my existence for a while. Amazingly something showed up: a cute looking open concept house on a lake in Greenfield, New Hampshire. I called up my real estate broker and we drove off that evening to look at the place. Greenfield is “Deliverance” country, but I was up for an adventure, conjuring the sociological implications of conversations with folks about the benefits of sleeping with sisters. We get to a dirt road leading to the lake, take a few turns and see the house. A crappy looking mud colored ranch sitting in an unkempt lawn that looked like former wetlands. But there was a bigger problem: there was no lake to be seen. For grins we decided to go inside and look around. Apparently, “open concept” means that the washer and dryer greet you as you enter the front door. To get into the full basement you needed to crawl under the dining room table and lift up a hatch. What a great idea for an icebreaker. “Let me get you another bottle of wine in the cellar, excuse me for a moment. My that’s a lovely pair of panties you are wearing tonight!” My realtor now knew I was certifiable. She had a suggestion. There was a small bungalow across from where she lived in my town not more than a mile from our current house. We drove up a high hill into countryside I had not seen before. The house is on a high hill overlooking a valley. It had an odd shaped piece of property with a guest cottage and an outhouse (for the cottage). The property had been for sale for a year and was at a great price. I offered 10 percent less than the list, which was accepted in a day. So in a matter of a week I morph from a metro-sexual bachelor to Green Acres redux. Inspection reveals carpenter ants, radon in the water, a fireplace that needs relining, and a septic system that is locked up like Fort Knox. And I need a huge fence put in to prevent Lucy from becoming road-kill. I don’t care. I brought three of the five kids up to see it and they all love the place. . .

The Hen House

2007-07-08T16:40:35Z

I call it the “hen house”. It is the product of estrogen “gone wild”: my former home which I left eight years ago when B1, my ex-wife, out of the blue told me that our marriage was over. Since then it has been the exclusive domain of females: my mother-in-law, B1, my two daughters, and our dog Daisy. The only two creatures remotely male are the pug, Titan, who was gilded (and as B2 has observed, is a little “light in the loafers”) and Sonny, a beautiful golden tabby. I guess that elevates Sonny to being "the man of the house". He has a perpetual scowl on his face and annihilates birds and rodents, often filleting chipmunks alive to die a horrible death baking under the summer sun. Let’s just say Sonny and I relate. Today I spent some time helping B1 with her computer. I often go over to the hen house to drop off a check, visit with the girls, or catch up with B1’s latest grand scheme. She is always coming up with contorted ways of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Today was a little different in that she wanted me to help her with email. Now when I say “help her with email”, this does not mean fixing some arcane software settings that have somehow become corrupted. Nor does this mean fixing network proxies, or rebooting the router. This means teaching her the basic concepts of how to use a personal computer: complicated things such as using a mouse, setting focus, and browsing on the Internet. You read that correctly, learning how to browse the Internet. When you visit the hen house, it’s advisable to set back your watch a little bit, say about twenty years. It’s not that B1 is not bright. She is extremely intelligent, witty, and fun. It’s just she has her priorities and they have trouble aligning themselves with some minor things in life: such as reality. B1 loves to play dumb, and is the closest living being to the persona that Marilyn Monroe characterized on the silver screen back in many movies during the 1950s. I first met her around 1979 through a mutual friend of ours in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was a tall, drop-dead gorgeous Lithuanian blond, six years older than me. She was over-the-top glamorous. She had spent many years hobnobbing in Boston amongst the elite, going to parties with Russ Frances and various other high profile professional athletes. Red Sox ace Luis Tiant was particular fond of her and for a while they were friends who partied together. According to Arthur Fiedler, B1 had the best legs he’d ever seen. One time after we were married I took her to the Boston Symphony where a world famous flautist was performing. B1 was a big fan of his and we got front row seats right below his feet. During the performance, I started to get uneasy when I noticed that while twiddling on his instrument he was making flirting glances towards my wife. About half way through the concert, B1 piped up. “Am I imagining this, or is he mentally undressing me?” I didn’t want to know. The concert ended and the flautist took several bows, finishing with a dramatic one unambiguously directed to my wife. A thousand heads turned towards us trying to figure out who we were and why B1 was the focus of his attention. B1 turned pure crimson. “Get me the hell out of here.” Horny little French bastard. It still pisses me off. Back to the hen house: About two or three years ago after listening to my advice since we divorced B1 bought her first computer. For a day or two it stayed in a box, and then disappeared into a closet. This is not surprising. Her beauty aides never are out of reach twenty-four hours a day. Take away her right eyebrow anti-wrinkle cream and she will have a meltdown. Take away her computer, and it can wait a while, say half a decade. Today, when I went over to the house I saw that it had been dragged from the closet. B1: “Would you mind setting that thing up for me?” Me: “You mean the computer?” B1: “Yes. I need it to type up my resume.” Me: “Sure, where do you want it to go?” B1: “Probably on the desk. Do we really need both of these things?” She points to the computer tower and the monitor. When it comes to technological jargon, the word "thing" seems to serve her like a Swiss army knife. Me: “It would help. Where’s the mouse?” B1: “I’m not sure. I think it is in another closet somewhere. Let me go look.” I was sorely tempted to ask how the mouse and keyboard got separated from the monitor and keyboard, especially since the stuff had never really been used. But I bit my tongue. Too often these kinds of exchanges start sounding like first drafts of a Burns and Allen comedy sketch. Frankly I was simply glad she didn’t ask me what a mouse was. I sat her down in front of the computer after hooking everything up. Me: “Okay. Now push that big button.” B1: “This one?” Me: “Yup”. The machine powered up and she was almost rigid, intensely focused as if the machine were about to lift off to a trajectory towards Mars. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around someone who is computer illiterate. The whole experience was somewhat anthropological, like being the first white person young kids see in some remote tribe in Zambia. Unfortunately Adie had played with the computer the day B1 first got it, and loaded it up with AOL Instant Messenger and lots of other interactive stuff. So as the machine was booting B1 was constantly be confronted with pop-ups. Every time some new window would appear out of nowhere she would squeal, like Betty Boop getting goosed on a late Saturday night. Then she would laugh and say, “What do I do now?” Me: “Just close it.” B1: “What does that mean?” Me: “See that little red box with an X in the corner. Move the mouse over it and click.” The box disappeared. B1 almost jumped out of her seat. B1: “Oooh! Where did it go?” She stumped me there. She does have this uncanny knack for asking obvious questions that are impossible to answer. Me: ”It’s dead. You just killed it.” B1 was having trouble disambiguating the context of all of the pop-ups. For her each window was simply another annoying thing from The Computer. B1: “The computer is asking me for a password”. Me: “That’s just Adie’s AOL Instant Messenger.” B1: “What’s that?” Me: “Another thing you want to kill.” B1: She laughed. “Oh okay.” She positioned the mouse with the concentration of a Army sniper and clicked the button. “Oooh!” There was another slight jump, but not so high as the last. We were making progress. After about an hour of this, she got to the point where she could turn on the machine, find the Internet Explorer icon, get to Hotmail, and send an email to her daughters. I made her do it twice, saving me another trip in one day. Then I got the hell out of there. The place was becoming toxic. I can only imagine JayWon’s and Adie’s reactions. “Dad, you won’t believe this. Mom actually sent me an email.”

Belated Happy Birthday

2007-07-06T00:36:35Z

So much for my personal pity party. Happy birthday to my country. More than anything else in my life, it has exceeded my very high expectations

Not a Normal Fourth

2007-07-05T16:53:08Z

The Fourth is my favorite holiday of the year. I love the hot weather, the local parades, visiting with friends and family. Sometimes I stay up in New Hampshire with my girls for the Fourth, other times I go down to the Cape and spend time with B2 and her extended family. B2’s family is larger than mine and not spread out geographically, so I fell into their traditions and family outings. They have their quirks, but they are a great family. But yesterday was different. B2 avoided asking me to come down to the Cape, and I would have declined if she had made an offer. Her depression is taking its toll in her ability to be civil. I try to stay out of her line of fire. So yesterday was brutal. It was the first holiday where things where decidedly not normal because of the state of my relationship with B2, and I was walking around the house alone like zombie. Tenacious was off partying with his friends; Adie was off with her cronies. JayWon is in Pennsylvania. JayToo is down at the Cape. Perfecto is doing research in school. The physical absence of my kids and B2 was palpable. Because the house is for sale, it is in pristine condition and is simply a joy to walk through. The deep tall woods that encompass the house make this one of the most serene and majestic times of the year. The absence of the noise that permeated the house for eight years was driving me crazy. It simply punctuated the loss of what was once a rich relationship.

Stretched

2007-07-04T12:36:21Z

I wonder if Melanie Phillips wraps fish with such dreck. This is from the London Times.

Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital where a well-fed patient, preparing to have her varicose veins removed, complains to an Iraqi doctor whose medic brother was killed for treating bomb victims back home; or a Malawian nurse whose young child died of an easily preventable disease; or a Zambian whose life expectancy at home would be lower then the age of the woman in the hospital bed – where she complains to these people treating her that the food sucks or she hasn’t got enough pillows or painkillers. No, murder is never excusable, and often impossible to understand. But resentment; even hatred; some burning anger for a fanatic to build on? Oh yes. Surely we can stretch ourselves to understand that.

Get that? Alice Miles thinks its easy to understand why a doctor can morph into a terrorist. Does this idiot have a clue? Let's get this straight. Because some sick, potentially dieing patient is crying out for relief from pain, we need to relate to the resentment of someone who is perfectly healthy, living in the first world, and is being well paid to take care of patients? When was the last time you heard of a Zambian or Malawian terrorist? I didn't think so. Perchance could it be because these places are in the southern area of Africa which are dominated by Christianity? The only thing that is being stretched are the litany of excuses of why radical Islam is not the driving force of incessant terrorism.

Jaws 2007

2007-07-01T18:03:35Z

I didn't name this blog FAPO for nothing. Inspired by Snapped Shot.

Blog Toy of the Day

2007-06-29T19:39:23Z

My language rating, based on a search engine that counts dirty words. Guess I'm going to have to temper my language around here and start talking like Ma and Pa Kettle. The engine reports that my blog mentioned "breast" one time. Whoops, now I guess now it's twice. Well like the old Woody Allen punchline, "I hear they travel in pairs." I went over to the site that generates this critical service and entered the URL for the Democratic Underground. I expected the lights to go dim in my office. Instead I got this: Well bless my suds, the kiddies have cleaned up their act. Right. Courtesy of Ace, the reigning king of right wing potty mouths.

Hyperlinked Photography

2007-06-28T02:47:43Z

Seldom do I see a technological advance that is virtually jaw-dropping. This one fits the bill. It shows a new technology being nursed by Microsoft that spatially relates photographs of the same subject to provide an amazing interactive visual experience. God knows what the porn industry will do with this.

Work and Politics

2007-06-28T01:49:10Z

My workplace is supposed to be apolitical but it isn’t. It is a high-tech stomping ground for presidential candidates traipsing through New Hampshire. The gleaming glass and brick building, and the marquee name of the company provide a great photo-op which allows candidates to babble about “cutting edge” technologies of the twenty-first century. It makes an interesting contrast to the other standard New Hampshire venues: the small town with the Congregationalist church in the middle of an early 19th century common, or the a crowded breakfast diner where people are more interested in finishing their pancakes than investing time in some presidential wannabe. On 9/11, I arrived at my office about a half-hour after the first tower had been struck. I noticed a crowd gathering in an auditorium at the facility. It was full of people watching the events of lower Manhattan unfold on a large wide-screen television. People were sitting in chairs, stunned, watching the atrocity unfold in hushed tones, except for one lunatic who was thinking out-loud about the next shoe to drop. I walked out after seeing the first tower fall. I was physically ill and was seething with rage. Most of the people in the auditorium were Americans. Non-Americans, if they stopped by at all, quickly disappeared to their cubicles or to quiet groups congregating around the various coffee stations. I think they didn’t know how to react to this situation. They were clearly not emotionally invested in the events of the day and seemed to want to distance themselves from their American co-workers. I also sense that they felt they were intruding on a family crisis, and weren’t quite sure how we were going to react. At least sixty or seventy percent of my co-workers are Asian, about evenly split between Chinese and Indians. In general I find that the Chinese are much more reticent to talk about politics. I remember one time I was having a loud discussion with a friend of mine who is of Italian American descent. In other words smart, verbal, and very opinionated. A young Chinese colleague stopped by to ask some technical question and we tried to engage him on some political hot-button topic of the day regarding international relations with China. The poor guy almost went catatonic with fright and sounded like an oriental version of Sergeant “I know nothing!” Shultz. He went bug-eyed and started rapidly spouting platitudes of how all he wanted was peace and how he had no opinion on such matters. This seems to be a common reaction. A legacy of the stories they heard from their parents about the days of the "Cultural Revolution". Indians are much more diverse and outspoken. They happily engage in political discourse and seem to thrive on it. Their comfort level is grounded on obvious reasons: the commonality of the English language and the shared experience of achieving independence from the British Commonwealth. There is a deep respect that exists between our two cultures that is one of the few positive developments of this first decade of the new millennium. While there are obvious political tension points that fall along cultural lines, it is the generational differences between Americans that are more aggravating. The fact that this is an engineering environment doesn’t help the situation. One would think that engineers, being hyper-rational by nature, would engage in constructive conversation. The opposite is true. Engineers are inherently detail oriented, cautious, and afraid of jumping the gun on a decision. These are wonderful traits when you are tasked with building the next jumbo-jet airplane or some new medical device that performs laser surgery on your retina. It is a lousy trait to bring to the table when debating the future of Western civilization. Virtually very conversation about foreign policy with an engineer becomes mired in warnings about all the things that could go wrong. Indecision rules the day. Being very bright people you might also wonder how come a knowledge of history wouldn't mitigate these occupational instincts. That they would see that it is unrealistic to approach geo-politics with the same expectations of certainty as you would when designing a system of software. But that’s precisely the rub. These very well educated people barely know any history at all. I get the feeling that Generation X’ers I work with get most of their facts from “The John Stewart Show”. They pepper their political opinions with ad-hominids or specious wisecracks laced with cheap irony. Even living through "interesting" history hasn't made an impact. The lessons of 9/11 only lasted a few months, and then it was business as usual.

Epcot Center for Sex Voyeurs

2007-06-26T01:31:32Z

A while ago I discovered that Google now has a search engine for patents. On a whim I searched on "sex" and came up with this. The following is an abstract of the invention:

Abstract A method of sharing erotic experiences includes providing a building with a number of compartments, entertainment viewable from inside the compartments and surround sound music audible throughout the building, participants entering the building and go to the compartments, starting the entertainment at a proscribed time, and turning on the power from a central control booth at a proscribed time to a stimulation device for sexual pleasure found in each of the compartments. The facilities are such that sounds from the participants are transferred between the compartments, such that couples or individuals in one compartment can hear others in the building also experiencing intense sexual pleasure. The individual compartments may further contain a whirlpool tub with jets starting at a proscribed time. Importantly, security is provided to maintain order in the building, and regular cleaning and sanitizing of the compartments and stimulation device is provided.

The diagrams are embedded in PDF documents and can't be displayed here. But the facility looks like a geodesic dome populated with little gas chambers. Only here the chambers service the Pee Wee Hermans of the world who pay to walk in, get artificially stimulated, and listen to others in various stages of ecstasy. I have a few patents, and one of the things you have to do is differentiate your proposed patent from "prior art" (i.e. stuff that has already been invented.) The citations for this include:

THEATER WITH SEPARATE VIEWING BOOTHS Jun 1972 4843788 Modular seclusion room Jul 4, 1989 5024398 Office module for passenger aircraft Jun 18, 1991 5163447 Force-sensitive, sound-playing condom Nov 17, 1992 5651219 Dynamic workspace module Jul 29, 1997 5928170 Audio-enhanced sexual vibrator Jul 27, 1999 6199552 Bed with suspended platform Mar 13, 2001 6368268 Device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks Apr 9, 2002

Notice the timeline and how things evolve from the mundane to the degenerate. "Progress is our most important product."