Monday, July 21, 2008
Update
My life is going along just fine. My dad is visiting here for the summer, up from the Caribbean and Central America where he usually resides on his sailboat, visiting his family and sitting out hurricane season during our warm and pleasant months of the year. I haven't found much to blog about re: current events or my personal life, but I've enjoyed watching movies and writing short essays about them. So in case you haven't checked it out yet, my current blogging action is happening over at criterionreflections.blogspot.com - I would like to dialog on the films I review there even if you haven't seen them recently or ever.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
"McCain=Bush" = Thoughtcrime
I don't get this. What can be the rational basis that explains what you see happen on the video below? A 61-year old librarian wants to hold up a very simple, non-provocative, handmade sign but is threatened with arrest, ticketed and escorted off the premises of a public event held on city property in Denver CO.
Can anyone give me a sensible legal argument that supports this, other than "the cops and Secret Service say so"?
Can anyone give me a sensible legal argument that supports this, other than "the cops and Secret Service say so"?
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Power Outage
On Tuesday I wrote about how we were working around the house, getting the basement and yard and household in general together this week, partly in preparation for my dad's arrival and partly just because it needed to be done. As often turns out to be the case in this world, these plans were rudely shoved aside and crumpled up by forces of nature beyond our control.
Wednesday afternoon, just shortly after I had helped Julie install some trellises in our new planter beds in the backyard, I came indoors to return to the "fine detail" level of organizing and sorting through stuff in our basement. I have stacks of books, CDs, videos and DVDs that need to be sifted in order to determine what's worth keeping, what I can sell, what I should donate and so on. I'm in one of those rare (for me) moods to minimize my accumulation of clutter and I want to take advantage of that impulse. I know I will be a better person and experience a higher quality of life if I take a more disciplined approach to my collector's mentality.
After getting into it a bit, Julie and Lys came scurrying into the house, informing me that the sky was darkening, the wind was picking up and a big ol' storm was about to blow. I was fine with that - a good old fashioned cloudburst is always kind of fun and since I was pretty much consigned to indoor work at this point, I figured it would be no problem at all to give our lawn and plants a big dose of free water.
We turned on our downstairs TV to see what the forecast had to say and saw the local newsroom in a bit of an uproar. The storm was big enough, apparently, that the channel found it necessary to not just have the storm warning ticker running underneath the regularly scheduled program, but instead, they put the cameras on in their weather center and treated us all to that "you are there" experience as their sophisticated equipment brought us into vivid, personal contact with the advancing winds and tumultuous downpour of rain as the storm swept across Lake Michigan, then Ottawa County, then Kent County (where I live.) Things developed so abruptly that WOOD-TV 8 assigned their chief political reporter, Rick Albin, to provide the on-camera narrative - their weather people being busy and their regular anchors perhaps unavailable at the time. I recall Albin leading a hand-held cameraman through a corridor, to the back door of the studio where they showed just a fierce cascade of rain coming down - and at that very moment, our electricity went out, our basement plunging into near darkness.
Now we live pretty much "in town" though it's not the city of Grand Rapids, so when we have power outages, they are usually pretty short-lived. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised to see the power come back on within the next five minutes or so, except that the storm was unusually intense and showed little sign of diminishing anytime soon. So upstairs we went, given that the small windows in our basement did not allow enough light to continue our project (especially since it was so dark outside, even though it was 2 o'clock in the afternoon.)
As the blackout stretched out over the next hour or two, I decided to take advantage of the quiet and read a book I've been looking at lately, titled Deep Blues (a history of blues music, focusing mostly on the personalities and sounds that emerged from the Mississippi Delta region.) I was feeling a little nappy, laying there on my sofa in the warm, humid afternoon, reading about the Great Flood of 1927 (which inspired some notable blues classics) when I heard Julie exclaim "Oh no!" from the back entry of our house. The one that leads to our basement.
What she saw was a shallow pool of water at the bottom of our steps. Running down, we recognized instantly what had happened - the sump pump had shut down and all that groundwater was seeping back up the drain and onto the floor of the basement!
That set us into pretty furious action - Julie started bailing water while I scrambled to pick up as many items sitting on the floor as we could. Fortunately, most of our important items had been stacked up on tables or were sitting in bookcases, the bottom shelves still high enough to remain untouched by water. Still, we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. The rain was continuing to fall and by this time, we recognized that restoration of power was not likely to happen for quite some time. We called Derek back (via cell) from a friend's house and when he and Ben got here, we set up a bucket brigade. Lys filled pails with water from the dormant sump pump's hole in the floor and the four of us (Julie, Derek, Ben and me) hauled them out to the drain in front of our house. It was still raining - so just imagine a big ol' soakin' sloppy mess as one five-gallon pail after another sloshed up the stairs and out the back door as we repeated that cycle countless times over the next hour or so.
Once we had brought the overall water level down below floor level, we took the opportunity to drive down to Julie's brother's farm. He had a robust generator he could lend us - that hog puts out enough current to power up his house, his barn, his wells, the works... More than we really needed but it was the best deal in town so we took it. It took four guys to hoist it into the back of our minivan (we have a nice big greasemark on the carpeting to remember it by now) but we got her in and got her out and by 10 p.m. or so, we had restored our connection to electrified life - sump pump, refrigerators, a couple of floor lamps, fans and dehumidifier in the basement...
But what a loud old beast that generator proved to be. Our neighborhood was fairly humming with the sound of gas-powered engines keeping their respective homes at least partially lit - but I'm sure we had them all beat when it came to decibels. And a gas guzzler too! I was dropping two gallon cans into that thing after three-four hours, and as the outage stretched over the next two days, you can figure for yourself that I was not only spending a lot of money (about $9.30 every time I filled the two jugs, with gas at $4.199 p/g) but also not getting much good sleep, since I didn't want to let the noisy brute run out of gas and had to top off the tank through the overnight shifts on Thursday and Friday a.m.'s.
Thursday morning was spent tearing out our old carpet (it had been flooded several years ago and it just didn't seem to be worth trying to save it now - we still remember what a hard time we had getting the mildew smell out and had no desire to repeat that experience.) All our furniture, bookcases, tables, computers, etc. had to be reshuffled as we sliced out the carpeting strip by strip and dragged the dripping bundles up the stairs. We now have added incentive to clean out the clutter as the prospect of putting it all back together just as it was seems not merely futile, but actually repugnant. This is a great opportunity to get a fresh clean new arrangement for our downstairs living space so I'm looking at this situation as more of an opportunity than a calamity. But for now, the downstairs is a heap. No getting around that!
Anyway, when I called Consumers Energy on Friday morning to see when power was expected to be restored, the recorded message said "Saturday, July 5 at 11 p.m." That seemed unacceptably slow to me, but what could I do? I figured that they were just buying themselves time and avoiding making any promises they couldn't keep. So with the house now safely dried, the sun out, and everything looking pretty stable, we decided to shut off the generator for a couple hours and go see a movie. We chose a matinee showing of Wall-E as our Independence Day family movie outing (it was fine, well-produced and clever mass consumer entertainment up to Pixar's reliably high standards) and when we came back, we were delighted to see lights on in our house again. Civilization had imposed itself back on our household and we were happy to return to our bondage on The Grid.
Wednesday afternoon, just shortly after I had helped Julie install some trellises in our new planter beds in the backyard, I came indoors to return to the "fine detail" level of organizing and sorting through stuff in our basement. I have stacks of books, CDs, videos and DVDs that need to be sifted in order to determine what's worth keeping, what I can sell, what I should donate and so on. I'm in one of those rare (for me) moods to minimize my accumulation of clutter and I want to take advantage of that impulse. I know I will be a better person and experience a higher quality of life if I take a more disciplined approach to my collector's mentality.
After getting into it a bit, Julie and Lys came scurrying into the house, informing me that the sky was darkening, the wind was picking up and a big ol' storm was about to blow. I was fine with that - a good old fashioned cloudburst is always kind of fun and since I was pretty much consigned to indoor work at this point, I figured it would be no problem at all to give our lawn and plants a big dose of free water.
We turned on our downstairs TV to see what the forecast had to say and saw the local newsroom in a bit of an uproar. The storm was big enough, apparently, that the channel found it necessary to not just have the storm warning ticker running underneath the regularly scheduled program, but instead, they put the cameras on in their weather center and treated us all to that "you are there" experience as their sophisticated equipment brought us into vivid, personal contact with the advancing winds and tumultuous downpour of rain as the storm swept across Lake Michigan, then Ottawa County, then Kent County (where I live.) Things developed so abruptly that WOOD-TV 8 assigned their chief political reporter, Rick Albin, to provide the on-camera narrative - their weather people being busy and their regular anchors perhaps unavailable at the time. I recall Albin leading a hand-held cameraman through a corridor, to the back door of the studio where they showed just a fierce cascade of rain coming down - and at that very moment, our electricity went out, our basement plunging into near darkness.
Now we live pretty much "in town" though it's not the city of Grand Rapids, so when we have power outages, they are usually pretty short-lived. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised to see the power come back on within the next five minutes or so, except that the storm was unusually intense and showed little sign of diminishing anytime soon. So upstairs we went, given that the small windows in our basement did not allow enough light to continue our project (especially since it was so dark outside, even though it was 2 o'clock in the afternoon.)
As the blackout stretched out over the next hour or two, I decided to take advantage of the quiet and read a book I've been looking at lately, titled Deep Blues (a history of blues music, focusing mostly on the personalities and sounds that emerged from the Mississippi Delta region.) I was feeling a little nappy, laying there on my sofa in the warm, humid afternoon, reading about the Great Flood of 1927 (which inspired some notable blues classics) when I heard Julie exclaim "Oh no!" from the back entry of our house. The one that leads to our basement.
What she saw was a shallow pool of water at the bottom of our steps. Running down, we recognized instantly what had happened - the sump pump had shut down and all that groundwater was seeping back up the drain and onto the floor of the basement!
That set us into pretty furious action - Julie started bailing water while I scrambled to pick up as many items sitting on the floor as we could. Fortunately, most of our important items had been stacked up on tables or were sitting in bookcases, the bottom shelves still high enough to remain untouched by water. Still, we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. The rain was continuing to fall and by this time, we recognized that restoration of power was not likely to happen for quite some time. We called Derek back (via cell) from a friend's house and when he and Ben got here, we set up a bucket brigade. Lys filled pails with water from the dormant sump pump's hole in the floor and the four of us (Julie, Derek, Ben and me) hauled them out to the drain in front of our house. It was still raining - so just imagine a big ol' soakin' sloppy mess as one five-gallon pail after another sloshed up the stairs and out the back door as we repeated that cycle countless times over the next hour or so.
Once we had brought the overall water level down below floor level, we took the opportunity to drive down to Julie's brother's farm. He had a robust generator he could lend us - that hog puts out enough current to power up his house, his barn, his wells, the works... More than we really needed but it was the best deal in town so we took it. It took four guys to hoist it into the back of our minivan (we have a nice big greasemark on the carpeting to remember it by now) but we got her in and got her out and by 10 p.m. or so, we had restored our connection to electrified life - sump pump, refrigerators, a couple of floor lamps, fans and dehumidifier in the basement...
But what a loud old beast that generator proved to be. Our neighborhood was fairly humming with the sound of gas-powered engines keeping their respective homes at least partially lit - but I'm sure we had them all beat when it came to decibels. And a gas guzzler too! I was dropping two gallon cans into that thing after three-four hours, and as the outage stretched over the next two days, you can figure for yourself that I was not only spending a lot of money (about $9.30 every time I filled the two jugs, with gas at $4.199 p/g) but also not getting much good sleep, since I didn't want to let the noisy brute run out of gas and had to top off the tank through the overnight shifts on Thursday and Friday a.m.'s.
Thursday morning was spent tearing out our old carpet (it had been flooded several years ago and it just didn't seem to be worth trying to save it now - we still remember what a hard time we had getting the mildew smell out and had no desire to repeat that experience.) All our furniture, bookcases, tables, computers, etc. had to be reshuffled as we sliced out the carpeting strip by strip and dragged the dripping bundles up the stairs. We now have added incentive to clean out the clutter as the prospect of putting it all back together just as it was seems not merely futile, but actually repugnant. This is a great opportunity to get a fresh clean new arrangement for our downstairs living space so I'm looking at this situation as more of an opportunity than a calamity. But for now, the downstairs is a heap. No getting around that!
Anyway, when I called Consumers Energy on Friday morning to see when power was expected to be restored, the recorded message said "Saturday, July 5 at 11 p.m." That seemed unacceptably slow to me, but what could I do? I figured that they were just buying themselves time and avoiding making any promises they couldn't keep. So with the house now safely dried, the sun out, and everything looking pretty stable, we decided to shut off the generator for a couple hours and go see a movie. We chose a matinee showing of Wall-E as our Independence Day family movie outing (it was fine, well-produced and clever mass consumer entertainment up to Pixar's reliably high standards) and when we came back, we were delighted to see lights on in our house again. Civilization had imposed itself back on our household and we were happy to return to our bondage on The Grid.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Organization, Home Work, New Beds
My priority list for this week has been heavily home-focused. I'm taking time off work in order to get my house ready for a long visit from my dad, who's chosen West Michigan as his destination of choice for riding out the Caribbean hurricane season. His boat is (presumably) fully prepped and safely locked down somewhere in the vicinity of Honduras (or maybe Guatemala) and he'll be flying in over the upcoming fireworks displays being launched across our land, as his plane is scheduled to land in Detroit around 10:30 p.m. on July 4. Could be an interesting display if he happens to get a window seat!
A friend of his will be picking him up and my plan (details yet t.b.d.) is to meet them somewhere around Lansing (mid-state) on Saturday. And we'll improvise the rest from there. But at least Dad will have a prepared bedroom awaiting him, with a nice new cozy twin bed that we just set up tonight. That's a big part of what I've been doing the past few days, since finishing up work on Friday - getting my basement organized, cleaning out Alyssa's old room (she now lives upstairs where our twin sons used to stay) and reducing our accumulated clutter at least enough to increase the living space and keep the storage down to single layers of boxes and plastic tubs, rather than piles that accumulate in unsightly heaps in our utility room.
We still have some ways to go and probably won't be done sorting it all before Dad gets here but at least his room is prepped and our storage room is orderly. The problem zone is our downstairs "family room" (where we really don't hang out all that much, due to clutter and lack of furniture.) But give us time.
The other big project of the week is whipping the last big chunk of our yard into shape. We used to have a garden behind our garage but too much shade and invasive rodents (a woodchuck and a bunny have been spotted as recently as this past week) and subsequent general neglect reduced it to a wasteland. But Julie had an idea and she sold me on it so we've built three raised beds, one for tomatoes, one for herbs and strawberries and one for flowers, after doing some clearing and leveling. Now the beds are filled with dirt, consisting of a mix, equally divided between the three, of 32 bags of top soil, 20 bags of horticultural grade compost, 19 bags of cow manure and 1 bag of Canadian peat. Pretty rich stuff compared to the stony, dusty soil that our poor struggling tomatoes, herbs and strawberries have had to struggle through the past few growing seasons. So I look forward to seeing some nice verdant growth springing forth from these beds this year and for years to come.
A friend of his will be picking him up and my plan (details yet t.b.d.) is to meet them somewhere around Lansing (mid-state) on Saturday. And we'll improvise the rest from there. But at least Dad will have a prepared bedroom awaiting him, with a nice new cozy twin bed that we just set up tonight. That's a big part of what I've been doing the past few days, since finishing up work on Friday - getting my basement organized, cleaning out Alyssa's old room (she now lives upstairs where our twin sons used to stay) and reducing our accumulated clutter at least enough to increase the living space and keep the storage down to single layers of boxes and plastic tubs, rather than piles that accumulate in unsightly heaps in our utility room.
We still have some ways to go and probably won't be done sorting it all before Dad gets here but at least his room is prepped and our storage room is orderly. The problem zone is our downstairs "family room" (where we really don't hang out all that much, due to clutter and lack of furniture.) But give us time.
The other big project of the week is whipping the last big chunk of our yard into shape. We used to have a garden behind our garage but too much shade and invasive rodents (a woodchuck and a bunny have been spotted as recently as this past week) and subsequent general neglect reduced it to a wasteland. But Julie had an idea and she sold me on it so we've built three raised beds, one for tomatoes, one for herbs and strawberries and one for flowers, after doing some clearing and leveling. Now the beds are filled with dirt, consisting of a mix, equally divided between the three, of 32 bags of top soil, 20 bags of horticultural grade compost, 19 bags of cow manure and 1 bag of Canadian peat. Pretty rich stuff compared to the stony, dusty soil that our poor struggling tomatoes, herbs and strawberries have had to struggle through the past few growing seasons. So I look forward to seeing some nice verdant growth springing forth from these beds this year and for years to come.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
