I’m a science fiction reader because of Robert Heinlein. He started it all with “Have Space Suit, Will Travel” – the first book without pictures I remember buying.  The rest of his ‘Juvenile’ novels ended up in my nascent collection rather shortly after, and I was off and running. After consuming those, I did Mr. Heinlein a disservice. I can’t quite explain why, but I studiously ignored his more ‘adult’ offerings, except for “Stranger in a Strange Land” sometime in my twenties. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I simply wandered away and was reluctant to return. Perhaps I feared sullying his reputation with me? Formative experiences are sometimes not up to the standards by which we recall them. After all, I’ve noticed I haven’t made the time to re-visit the Juvenile novels either, despite having such great memories of enjoying them.

So this year I’ve decided to correct the omission.  Starting with “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, I’ve read “Glory Road”, “Friday”, “Time Enough for Love”, “Farnham’s Freehold”, “Revolt in 2100/Methuselah’s Children”, “The Green Hills of Earth/Menace from Earth”, and most recently “I Will Fear No Evil”. I’ll likely comment on them all in later posts, but for now I want to focus on “I Will Fear No Evil”.

First, I hate the cover. Look at it! I’m not a prude, but I wanted to tape a cover over it. Not because I was embarrassed by the image, but because I was embarrassed by the image of the image. Growing up on Science Fiction, I got pretty tired of the condescending looks of teachers and other grown ups while reading my little ‘fantasy’ stories. No one seemed to accept any literary merit in the genre (which is still an issue today). It didn’t help when publishers would slap on the most ridiculous covers full of half-dressed women and silver bullet shaped rockets. Sure, they were targeting a market of young adolescent males, but such pandering offended me. So now as a 43 year old man, I really didn’t want to carry this thing around at work during lunch. It fed a stereotype that we could do without.

But beyond the cover, let’s talk about the content.

Because it was awful.

That’s hard for me to admit. This is the first Heinlein book I’ve encountered where I’ve frequently sighed audibly and skimmed large segments, not really caring what happened. The plot is flimsy, the writing poor, and the characters are cut-outs of people. I understand that Heinlein was gravely ill during the writing (peritonitis if Wikipedia has it right), so I can grok why it might not be up to par. But someone in the publishing cycle really should have pushed back on letting this thing out of the box before it was given a good washing down.

A lot of the objections to the book from the public are sourced from the content. I really didn’t have an issue with the subject matter, as it was interest to consider. To whit – a ‘richer than Crassus’ elderly man, nearing death, manages to convince a cutting edge surgeon to transplant his brain into a new body. As he has a rare blood type, his potential donor pool is shallow, and time is not on his side. When a suitable corpse turns up, he’s essentially out of time and has to take what is offered. He wakes up in the body of a twenty-something woman, who happened to be his secretary (no evil conspiracy to this coincidence – the rich old miser isn’t evil).  From there, we have the fish-out-of-water story and the subsequent exploration of identity, sexuality, gender roles and so on. Published in 1970, I can see why this stirred up quite a reaction at the time.

The exploration of the terrain still holds up today, as they are very interesting questions. Could a lifelong heterosexual male re-orient under the onslaught of female hormones? Is orientation driven by body chemistry or is it all in the brain? Legally, what status does such a person have? Alive or dead? What of the estate? There’s enough there for an interesting story.

But what we get is five hundred pages of trite banter between the characters with little plot movement. The old man and the dead woman have a running conversation in his head throughout much of the book. It isn’t clear if Heinlein is proposing that some of the self resides outside of the brain (explaining her presence in her body), or if this is just a sign of psychosis developing. This conversation makes up a large part of the book, and after awhile I was completely sick of it. One criticism of mine that does persist across all of his work is dialogue. No one speaks as Heinlein writes. It is tightly scripted, artificial, and wittier beyond what normal people can achieve. That’s okay as it should be entertaining, but I do find it grating from time to time. In this work, it was absolutely maddening.

By the end, I really didn’t care what happened. I just wanted to be done with it and move on. My love of Heinlein hasn’t changed. I’ll keep reading him (and I’ve enjoyed everything else I’ve read so far).  But someone seriously let him down by waving this one into print without pushing back pretty hard. Even legendary writers need to be swatted down occasionally.

Sometimes one can still find awesomeness

I’ve been ‘off’ of blogging for a couple of years now – too many distractions, too many things going on with work, you likely know the feeling. Sometime within that hiatus, either in a fit of realism or despair (frequently indistinguishable), I archived the blog and nuked all the content. If you do any writing, you may be familiar with the feeling one gets when reading really old work – it can be painful.

Recently, I’ve had occasion to return here and try to whip this thing back in shape. Part of the re-launch centers around something I’ll be posting about a little later (see the Hallowed Waste link in the sidebar for a hint). To get my footing again, I picked through some of the old material and identified a few posts that I enjoyed writing, and didn’t cringe quite as much when reading – so up they went. They aren’t particularly noteworthy or monumental, but why not? Plus it broke the ice.

Again, breaking ice is important in the writing process. Your mileage may vary.

From here, you should be seeing newer and hopefully more interesting stuff, particularly if things unfold the way I hope in the coming few months.  Stay tuned.

After suffering two cats, two kids, and an anemic vacuum that produced more noise than cleanliness, the wife and I broke down and spent a small fortune on the Lord of All Vacuums, the Dyson DC14 Animal.

You’ve seen the commercials. The snooty Brit harrumphing about ‘things working properly’. I don’t know about you, but when I think of British engineering, I think of Neal Stephenson’s observations in Cryptonomicon.

You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable—there are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mr. Ford, such as the hand-brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid blocks of cahoutchouc.

Now, if a dour Germanic engineer had fashioned the King Tiger of vacuums, promising to clean the Fatherland of dust, I’d be inclined to take him seriously.

But a mild-mannered Brit?

The Dyson Vacuum will do for Britain what BMW and Mercedes has done for Germany. You are not a serious lover of clean floors unless you have a Dyson.

The clear containment cylinder displays the accumulated dirt, simultaneously proclaiming the immense power of the vacuum while shaming you for the squalor of your living conditions. I swear the vacuum must contain a compressed brick of carpet dirt, flaking it into the cylinder so as to enhance it’s already impressive appearance.

We ran our anemic sweeper, then the Dyson. After one pass in our smallish living room, I could have knitted a new cat out of the collection of hair in the sweeper. That is, if I could knit. I’m sure someone with sufficient skill could have made a nice cat shaped knick-knack out of the available material. After witnessing the Dyson in operation, simple phrases like ‘vacuum the carpet’ or ‘sweep the living room’ seem insufficient. We now say ‘operate the Dyson’.

I took the time, with appropriate reverence, to disassemble the beast and try to figure out how it works. You can find all of those technical details here. Suffice it to say the Dyson is a marvel of simple engineering coupled with a strong desire for operator accessibility. Just about everything pops off with little effort, leaving you with a collection of parts that can be dunked in the sink, ran through the dishwasher, or totted down to the local church for baptism.

Should Dyson ever decide to design a shop-vac, I expect it to suck oil stains out of concrete.

Seem like a high price for a vacuum cleaner? It is: for a vacuum cleaner. Fortunately, you are buying a Dyson. Mere vacuum cleaners aren’t in the same league.

My last entry on home improvement left off with the kitchen sink project.

Time to finish this sorry tale.

A few months back, my wife bought a kitchen sink and a new faucet to replace the battered, ugly sink that came with our house.  Knowing my limitations, I asked my dad for help on it and let the sink sit, unopened, in the garage until he had time to come up and instruct me on the dark arts of plumbing.  He’s been busy, so when I finished my manly hose reel project, I decided I probably could handle this one on my own as well.

Pride goeth, and all of that…

Saturday night, I opened the box and examined the instructions for both the sink and faucet, while taking inventory of what I might need.  A quick run to Home Depot supplied plumber’s putty, Teflon tape, and a new gasket for the garbage disposal.  My wife picked these up.  After all, the hardware guys kind if expect a woman to look a little lost (all hate mail can be sent to the address in the upper right…I’m not endorsing it, just observing the glass ceiling of the hardware world).

Later Saturday night, after wargaming the operation, I realized the flexible water hoses weren’t long enough to span the distance from the copper pipe to the new faucet connectors.  I would have to replace the compression fittings.  I knew about compression fittings because my dad mentioned them once, when I was still living at home fifteen years ago.  I knew they had something to do with water…

I ran to Home Depot at 9:40 PM, twenty minutes before close.  The first interaction should have been a sign as to how things were going to go with this project.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for plumbing.”

“Aisle 11.”

I look up to see I am standing in front of Aisle 11, under a sign that read PLUMBING.  The employee glanced at my hands but I ignored him.

I scanned that aisle and found the compression fittings, confirming my idea that these are important to plumbers.  The Depot has a nice layout, with an example of each of a gahzillion different fittings mounted to a board, behind which hangs bagged, saleable product.  I had the forethought to bring along the connecting nut to the faucet, so I started scanning the area.

“May I help you?”

“Yeah, I’m installing a sink and I need a compression fitting.”  I had just exhausted my knowledge base with that statement.

“What size?”

“Uh.”  Then I remembered the nut and held it out.

“Half inch.  What about the other end?”

I froze.  He glanced at my hands (stop that!).   I think he took pity on me right then.  “Usually they run to a three eighths hose. “  He yanked one from the massive grid of product without looking.  “Did it look like this?”

I examined the fitting.  “I think it was smaller.”

“Smaller??  How old is the house?”

His question implied that a smaller hose was a possibility.  I had already regretted speculating the hose was smaller, but I didn’t want to look like an even bigger fool.  I was stuck with the small hose paradigm, and I’d go down in flames with it rather than backtrack.

I’ve always had a knack for sensing ‘outs’ when it comes to awkward moments.  It isn’t a skill I’m proud of, since I think it has helped me more than once get a job I may not have been right for.  It reminds me of some political skill that is less than honorable.  But God help me, I used it here.

“It is a pretty old house (actually seven years).  I expected three eighths too, so this surprised me.  That’s why I’m here ten minutes before you closed.  Who’d have guessed a quarter inch hose?”

I held my breath.

He stepped past me and pulled out a quarter inch compression fitting.  “We don’t sell many of these.”

I accepted the fittings and shrugged.  “It’ll work.  Thanks.”  I turned away to examine the PVC piping (premonition of my future) until he wandered off.  I grabbed the three eighths fixtures and took off for the register.

No, I’m not proud.
Sunday morning dawned with the task ahead of me.  I had a sense of what I had to do, and it seemed doable.

It didn’t take long to unhook the water hoses (three eighths…), unscrew the PVC fittings, unplug and unhook the garbage disposal, and figure out the sink was secured to the counter by clamps that needed unscrewing.  Within twenty minutes of starting, I had a big hole in the counter where the sink used to be.

Surely this was a sign that this task was within my competency.

I brought up the new sink and demonstrated my smarts (S-M-R-T!  I am so smart!).  Installing the faucet BEFORE placing the sink in the counter was the obvious way to go.  After all, who wants to crawl under the counter and wrestle with all of these bolts later?  The faucet went on easily, and forty minutes after starting the project, I was ready to drop the new sink into place.

The old sink had clips.  This sink didn’t.  That didn’t seem right to me, but repeated readings of the instructions assured me to apply the provided silicone to the sink and drop it in place.  That is, after cutting the hole in the counter to precisely fit the sink profile.

No mention about what to do if you already have a hole in place.  I recall from physics class that holes generally aren’t movable, nor do they change shape easily unless one wants it to be larger.

I slid the sink in dry, as a test.  It wasn’t a snug fit.  As a matter of fact, the hole was almost too large.  With some careful positioning, the sink would cover the cut, leaving me with a properly appearing sink/counter interface.

But I worried about the lack of lateral stability.  Would the sink slide around even with the silicone in place?

I didn’t have much of a choice (see hole physics above).  Diane slathered on the silicone (to the sink) while I held it in the proper orientation by the drain holes.  A few minutes later, we had the sink on the counter, positioned, and were witnessing the proper level of silicone ooze.  Things seemed to be going along ok.

After giving it some time to cure, I started in with the compression fittings on the new hose.  The thing about compression fittings is the irreversibility.  Once it is in place, the ability to remove it sort of defeats the purpose.  I installed one end, eyeballed the needed length to span the distance between pipe and faucet, and cut the hose.

Too short.

It was an inch too short.  Hoses are the inverse of holes when it comes to modification.  You can’t make them longer.

And, of course, I only purchased enough compression fittings to accomplish the task without error.
This is where the Hardware Store Law of Increasing Returns comes into play.  It states, to be concise, that one must run to the hardware store one time for every two hours a task takes to complete.
I knew exactly where the fittings were in Home Depot.  It is closer to my home than Lowes.  I would simply have to risk being seen by yesterday’s employee.

I went to Lowes instead.

Yeah, yeah.  I know.  But that extra thirty minutes was worth the potential embarrassment.  If you are a man, you understand.

Back home with the proper fittings, I took care to actually measure the distance and add a couple of inches.  I attached both lines to the copper pipe and then confronted another learning opportunity (or as I prefer to think of it “my idiocy”).  Sure, I attached the faucet ahead of time.  It might have been even better if I had attached the water lines and let them dangle down to the copper pipe.  But no, gravity never occurred to me.

So there I was, laying on my back, inside the cabinet, reaching up into a very cramped area with two large wrenches, trying to apply Teflon tape with one hand.  An hour of this reminded me of some particularly demented form of Yoga (I call this pose ‘the stupid plumber’).

The wrenches were particularly exquisite in how they mocked me.  I would engage the nut that needed tightening, turn it about six degrees, encounter the sink body limiting my motion, and then have to remove and re-engage the wrench for another six degree turn.  I wasn’t even turning the nut enough for the wrench to latch on to the next nut face.  I ended up with some odd variation of turn, release, engage in the vertical plane, turn it like a doorknob, release, engage properly, turn, repeat.
For about a week.  Or until my arms grew so weak, I risked clubbing myself in the head with these ill-suited tools.

Then there was the marvelous game of ‘turn the water on, watch it drip, turn the water off, and repeat tightening action only this time on wet hardware’.  I can’t imagine a better Sunday.

Later, I learned that sinks do not have standard drain hole positions.  The immutability of hole position came into play again when none of the existing PVC drain pipes were where they needed to be.  Fortunately, they were assembled with this nice screw fittings, and come apart in a matter of seconds.  Using the existing pipe sections, I managed to construct a means to mate the non-disposal drain with the terminal drain running to wherever dishwater ends up.  Fortunately, PVC pipe can be made to bend slightly with enough determination.  Stay tuned to see if there are any long term issues with that.

The disposal side was another ‘opportunity’.  The new gasket was too thick to seat properly in the mount.  It was the right size, but years of compression had made the old gasket a breeze to mount when I tested the disposal attachment mechanism.  I really thought, in the planning phase, that this would be a snap.

If you’ve never tried this, it can be deceptive.  You must press the disposal unit up into the mount, compressing the gasket to get a good seal, while then engaging three tabs on a circular collar, rotating it in a threaded fitting until it seats.  Let’s do a quick count –

Hold disposal – Two hands

Line up three tabs at once – three hands.

I’ll leave it to you as an exercise to imagine how long this took me to accomplish.

Later, the disposal was in place and I was ready to make the final connection into the ‘T’ junction from the disposal to the terminal drain.

It wasn’t even close.  Remember what I said about PVC pipe being able to bend a little bit?  We were well beyond that option.

So, back to the hardware store.  This time I went to Menards.  Hopefully these hardware guys don’t talk to one another.  In two days, I visited five stores.

It seems that my problem was a common one.  They sold a flexible pipe for disposal attachment.  Provided I ran it downhill (and I was) it would work fine.  I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The flex pipe did not mount properly into the disposal.  Nor did it mate with the PVC pipe already in place.  And by the time I noted this, the stores were closed for Sunday.

Sitting at my desk on Monday, I figure out a new solution.  The drain came with a five inch metal pipe that mated with the PVC ‘T’.  My problem was that the ‘T’ was not high enough to mate with the disposal.  So, why can’t I cut the metal pipe, move the ‘T’ up, and make the connection?

But I didn’t have a saw.  Nor do I have a pipe cutter.

Back to the hardware store after work.  The pipe cutter was about $40, while a small hacksaw hanging on the next peg was $7.  Easy choice.

Until I started sawing.  Fifteen minutes later, I have made a fine notch on the pipe…I think.  If I run my finger over it, I can feel a little dent.  At this rate….

I go back to the flex pipe idea and take a closer look at the mounting system.  The pipe came with this huge gasket.  I rejected it initially because there was no way it would replace the old gasket and still let me hook up the mounting bracket.  Why would they provide such an obviously oversized gasket?

Then I noticed the groove cut inside.  The gasket slipped on the pipe and sealed, providing enough of a flange to mount properly.  Instead of re-using the old gasket (which is what I did), this new gasket both sealed the connection and gave extra material to connect to the bracket.  In my defense, this kit did not come with directions.  I guess they figured they didn’t need to explain how to mount a single pipe…go figure.

By late Monday evening, we turned on the water and watched it leak from the disposal.  My five handed solution did not adequately seal the gasket, so I had to remove the whole thing and start over.

I learned that raw, blazing frustration CAN solve problems.  I still can’t explain how it happened, but sometime during a blinding haze of rage, the disposal mounted itself properly.

The job was completed.  The sink was in place.  It works.  (Never mind that little leak my wife discovered this morning…)

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

It started when he looked at my hands and smirked.

I make no claims to being a handyman.  I’m certain my father’s biggest disappointment in me is my concept of the word ‘router’: I think of a packet router with a bunch of Ethernet plugs, while he thinks of a tool that does….something.  So I spend a lot of time agonizing over home projects, making a bunch of phone calls to my disappointed father, reading up on the internet, and wandering the aisle of whatever Home Depot-equivalent searching for the surely just invented tool that will do precisely what I need despite my raging ignorance at how to actually do what I need on my own.  It usually takes me awhile to figure out that this magical invention is called ‘money’ – as in giving some to someone who does know how to do the job.

Works every time.

But it is unmanly.  I think all men have this underlying need to master certain basic skills.  A century ago, a man was expected to start off with a forest and turn it into a house.  Today, the tools are better, and the expected competencies are smaller, yet I still feel  overwhelmed.

We have a good house, but shortly after moving in it turned on us a bit.  An upstairs bath tub leaked, leaving a wet spot in the kitchen that eventually turned into falling plaster and unsightly damage.  That’s a twofer – fix the bath tub, then figure out how to repair a textured ceiling.  Then we had shingles blow off and water began to intrude on the master bedroom ceiling.  See kitchen reference above.  Then the basement leaked.  A finished basement, with nice pad and carpet.  I had to rip out two year old carpet and figure out how to stop water intrusion.  I went for that magical money tool, but recoiled when the quote came in at $11,000.  Alas, the basement is still unfinished.

Then there is the yard.  My neighbor is a lawn fanatic.  He mows two or three times a week, shaving off millimeter layers and walking in complex geometrical patterns that have something to do with the Nazca Lines in Peru.  I can watch him pushing the mower toward the boundary between my ratty desert-like scrub and his lush Amazonian bio-preserve.  He pauses on the border and I can see the scorn in his face.
I try.  I have tried.  Last year I decided to use a large bag of fertilizer left in the garage after the previous owners moved out.  I filled up the donated spreader and walked precise lines in my front yard.  I felt outdoorsy.

Until the grass grew in dark, thick strips, separated by the aforementioned desert shrub where I had failed to walk a proper overlap.  Add a field of stars in the corner and I would have an American flag replicated in shades of green.

My neighbor stopped looking at my lawn completely.  Winter was a welcome relief.

So with all of this as background, why would I buy a table saw last week?

Good question.  I’ll let you know when a coherent answer forms.

The simple reply revolves around garden hoses and my father.  He has done a wonderful job of facilitating my mother’s landscaping at their house.  One simple thing that caught my eye was his emplacement of one of those hose reels in a box.  He wasn’t content to simply wind the hose and set it next to the home.  He took 4”x4” lumber sections and built a support frame, buried the frame partially in the flowerbed, built a border around it and secured the hose box to the lumber so it won’t move when my mother pulls the house around.

I could do this!

So, since I had other crazy expectations of building some bookshelves, I picked up a $100 light duty saw from Lowes, along with the requisite lumber and screws.  As I’m stacking this on the cart (those 6’ sections of lumber are unwieldy), a Lowes worker comes over and offers to help.  He looks at the saw and the wood and asks “You sure you want that saw?”

I nod and say “Budget.”

That’s when he looked at my hands and smirked.  I didn’t pick up on it until later, when I had assembled the saw and realized the guy had asked a good question.

But why the hands?

I am a desk worker.  I don’t like landscaping or other forms of hard labor.  Most people prowling the hardware store have these immense calloused hands, suitable for pushing nails directly into the wood should they ever suffer that rare (and often tragic) hammer failure.  These guys don’t much bother with saws if the wood is less than an eighth of an inch thick – they just rip it like a piece of cardboard.

I have keyboard hands.  I need gloves to swing a golf club, let alone manipulate a thick, splintery piece of wood without drawing blood.

I have the hands of an amateur, and this guy knew it immediately.  So he let me buy the saw.

Later, after putting it all together, I learned the saw only cuts three inches deep, and I bought four inch thick boards.  You’d think that this information would have been displayed.  Sure, it says right on the box “3 inch cut”.  Why couldn’t it say “This saw can’t cut 4 inch lumber used to make a silly hose reel support frame”?

Then there is the even more obvious issue of table area.  I mentioned those heavy, six foot boards?  Now try cutting twenty inches off of one with four feet hanging off the small table.  Then you have to turn the board over and cut it again to get through the full thickness.

Multiply that by my sheer hubris at demonstrating my abilities to my dad.  Not only would I build a simple square frame, I would miter cut the ends to 45 degrees (while wrestling heavy, oversized boards on an undersized table with a miter gauge more suitable to guiding a piece of floor trim the size of a pencil…and then have to flip it over, reverse the gauge and make a matching cut to finish it up.)

So there I am.  Massive board on a table saw already groaning under the weight while the overhanging section is partially balanced on a ladder made wobbly by the need to have it partially closed to raise a step to the height I need.

I look across the street to see a couple of neighbors staring at me.  After a moment, their families joined them.  Certainly what was about to happen would provide a lifetime of power tool safety indoctrination to their children.

I closed the garage door and decided to work in the dark.  That way I wouldn’t have to see the results.

It took me about thirty minutes to make the first board section.  It looked better than I expected, provided I didn’t try to match the miter edge up with anything else.  Later, when I had a second board, I could see some problems with the miter gauge’s idea of 45 degrees.

The entire process took two days of work.  I managed to avoid losing any fingers, and the boxes generally went together as intended.  Just don’t look to closely at some of those edges.  The first box, hose reel and hose is now installed in the front of the house, and it looks pretty snappy from greater than fifty feet.

So, what did this experience do for me?  A couple of months ago, my wife bought a new kitchen sink and faucet, and I’ve been waiting on my dad to find some time to come up and show me how to install it.  Saturday night, after the first box had been installed, I opened up the sink and read the directions.

This can’t be that bad, right?  I just built lumber boxes!  I can do anything!

Sunday morning, the old sink was in the garage and I began a long day of humility.

But those details are for another post.

Sick toddlers are never convenient, but there are elements of the experience that just might align in a way to reduce the suffering – not for them, no, they are going to be lying around in a swirling stupor of fever and bodily fluids no matter what, but at least the parents can find a little relief in the fortuitous alignment of fate.

Samantha started first.  My wife calls to explain that our littlest one has expelled her own body weight in vomit, and is presently hugging the floor, chanting gibberish and moaning.  Knowing that drunkenness is unlikely regardless of the similarity in symptoms, we prepare for the Flu Siege at the household.  For the next two days, we took particular care in standing clear of Samantha’s blast zone, while staring warily at our oldest daughter, dreading the first rumblings from her stomach.

There’s just no good way to handle something like this.  Times like this forces one to question the most basic and trivial of interior decorating decisions.  Things never considered suddenly seem patently obvious.  Questions such as “Why do we even HAVE carpet?”, “Isn’t that a dumb place to put a couch?”, and “Did I really used to mock people with plastic furniture covers?” reverberate around the house.  One’s sense of disgust vanishes, overturned by the necessity of functioning in such an environment.  The ancient reptilian parts of our brain shove aside our developed hominid traits of order and cleanliness, elevating simple directives such as clearing airways, checking temperatures and hydrating the kids to primacy.

Survival first.  Redecorating second.

By Friday, Samantha’s fever came down to where she could be held without scorching the holder, and she started to perk up.  It’s ashame she’s too young to understand the concept of a hangover, because this might have been a powerful teaching experience on the ravages of alcohol.  That lesson will have to come later.

The virus wasn’t done with us, of course.

Friday afternoon I’m paged home with a ’911′ in my beeper.  Reagan had looked at my wife with an odd expression, triggering one of those frozen instants where everyone knows what’s coming but no one can move fast enough to react.  Unfortunately, she happened to be standing over the toy box at the time, bathing a hundred pounds of plastic, wood, and cheap electronics in a stream of partially coagulated soy milk.  A small herd of soy-cows would be stunned at the volume of milk.  Had circumstances been different, the soy-cows might have elevated Reagan as some sort of soy-bovine-deity of Excessive Production.

So, the weekend evolved pretty much as one would expect.  At least Samantha was practically over it when Reagan went under.  Our house still has that faint ‘school hallway after the accident triggered by the bad meatloaf in the weak-stomached kid’ smell.  I expect to find a mound of sawdust in the kitchen, but that’ll get better.  The kids are nearly recovered, and us adults are feeling okay so far.

I finally did my taxes on Easter (or as it is known in my household – ‘Sunday’).  I’ve been putting it off out of anger.  Despite all of my planning, I found myself owing a non-trivial amount of money.  So I’ve spent time letting that fester, determined to make the government wait as long as possible.  I use TurboTax on the web.  As documents became available to me, I go in and plug in the numbers, make some guesses, and watch my net tax amount float with each decision or point of data.  I lacked a few trivial pieces of information, but it wasn’t enough to make a difference in the total.

Or so I thought.

I punched in Samantha’s Social Security number, to finish off the return, and watched the Tax Owed column shift to green with a refund.  It turns out the software doesn’t consider her a live person without that number!  All of this time, I was $1000 off – money I had let the government sit on for four months as an interest free loan.

I went home and gave my adorable little girl a big hug.

Maybe this little windfall will cover a good carpet cleaning…

We’re rolling over the mountains of Tennessee and we’re on top of the world.  I’m sure residents of the Rockies will smirk, but these are the highest mountains I’ve ever personally experienced.  My childhood doesn’t provide much context to this part of the country, since our trips to West Virginia never took us this far south (obviously).

But my childhood will be an issue today.

I75 narrows to a chute up here; two lanes each way, balanced on a running ridge with nothing but sky above us and vertical drops to each side.  Troopers really can’t pull you over up here safely, so we all race along above 80 MPH, flying in a tight formation, risking disaster with one blown tire, or someone talking too much on the phone.  Death by distraction.

The view is amazing.  I’d love to be able to get out and rubberneck a bit.  I seem to recall a spot to pull off and do just that, but I must have missed it somewhere.  Probably while typing.

We used to come through here every winter.  Christmas in Toledo was mandatory, and we would always seem to find bad weather in the chute.  Usually clouds, manifested as a thick fog, heavy with moisture and snow crystals slamming into the windshield.  One year, the entire route had been shut down due to weather, and we scrambled to find a hotel room.  People were abandoning their cars on the road and hiking to shelter.  Back then, we were always short of money.  We had this bright idea – we gave my mother all of our cash from Christmas in exchange for a check, so we wouldn’t be blowing it on the way home.  So there we were, stranded in a motel (we got the last room!), and very little cash with no access to any money.  The hotel room took almost all that we had for one night.  That might have been the scariest time of our lives – hungry, cold, uncertain and ashamed for even being in that situation in the first place.

We got home, of course.

Old, familiar exits pass by.  It is all downhill to Atlanta, both physically and mentally.  The route feels natural, like running in a groove.  The car steers itself.

Finally, we depart our memories and turn East on Route 40, leaving I75 at Knoxville.  I’ve taken this route one time in my life, in 1987.  I don’t remember much, and Diane has never been this way.

Old memories give way to new experience.

Route 40 is an amazing piece of engineering.  The mountains of Tennessee are cleaved and graded for I75, but the route is generally straight, with long grades.  Route 40 is a tortured, tangled snake with frequent signs suggesting death is a real possibility.

In 1997, a rockslide gave way and blocked the interstate for two months.  Frequently, boulders come down and take our semi-trucks.  We pass a section of road and I see deep gouges running across the road.  The center concrete barrier has been obliterated, and the gouges continue across the opposite lane.  That had to be quite a sight for someone.

The geology is interesting here.  In Tennessee, the rock face has definition.  The strata are stacked nicely, and you can still see the drill holes spaced evenly, where the engineers packed the explosives to shear off the rock in a nice plane.

Here, the strata are confused.  The layers are contorted and intermingled, and the rock is not smooth.  The sharp corners of shattered rock stick out, reminding me of sandpaper under a microscope.  There are no drill holes evident.  The rock crumbles like coffee cake.
They do what they can with it.  You see the massive bolts, drilled into the mountain and affixed to giant metal plates like washers, keeping the rock face under tension.  You see acres of chicken wire affixed to the rock face, loose enough to let small stuff fall, contained to the wall and collecting by the side of the road, but not too tight to let the fractures build up until a megaton slide tears it all down.

We pass through a few tunnels, and I feel safer under the mountain.  At least nothing will  fall on me here.

Don’t trifle with gravity.  It might be the weakest force in the universe, but it is strong enough for you.

Route 40 is a white-knuckle drive.  Semi-trucks labor uphill for miles, making 20 MPH in the slow lane.  Downhill, we ride our brakes for miles on end, and I wonder about thermal effects in brake pads.  Frequently, you see a shiny new piece of guardrail at the end of a downhill section.

I wouldn’t do this at night, or in the rain, or if I were tired, or if I didn’t have to.

And I’ll be driving back over it in an unfamiliar car with unknown characteristics.

Asheville/Hendersonville isn’t West Virginia.  But there are similarities that evoke memories.  The rugged terrain might as well be the same.  The look of the town, the housing layout (mostly perched on the slope of a hill or mountain), and the determination of builders to utilize the most unexpected patches of land are all the same.  Above us, a large hill I remember had been chopped off, leaving a mesa supporting a Super Wal-Mart, fifty feet above the road.

The people are similar; small town friendly, wonderful accents and a practicality that I miss from time to time.  I find myself thinking of that possible past.

My parents ‘fled’ Logan, West Virginia when they were young.  In WV, you pretty much had a future in the coal mine, or government relief.  My maternal Grandfather spent a lifetime in the mine, crawling through passages where the earth touched your stomach and back at the same time.  He breathed coal dust for decades, leaving him with partial lung function.  After serving in the Pacific in World War Two (winning the Silver Star for valor), a life in the coal mine seemed a poor reward.  But he never complained.

My parents didn’t want that.  As soon as they could, they ended up in Toledo, where my Uncle had already settled.  It was a tremendous leap in the late 60s – leaving everything behind.

Had they not made that move, what would have happened to their kids?  What would my brother and I be today?  When I look at Asheville and think of WV, I return to those questions.

I should insert the caveat here.  I don’t look down on these people.  They are wonderful, warm and friendly.  While Logan is economically depressed and poor, the people would do anything for their neighbors.  They focus on the today and now, leaving the larger issues unexplored.

There is something to be said for that.

But I was raised differently.  I have learned to value knowledge and inquiry.  I am inquisitive, and ill suited to manual labor (that is a painless way to admit I’m lazy).  Growing up around the mines, those traits would not have emerged.

What would I have been?  Diane thinks an auto-mechanic.  Considering my incompetence with vehicle repairs, I’m not so sure.

These possible pasts used to scare me.  As a teenager, I thought I was ten feet tall and destined to change the world.  A life ‘wasted’ in the hills, running hollows and shooting rifles (while fun as hell) wasn’t a suitable lifelong activity.  I was a bit of a snob.  I wanted to big income, the important job, and a sophistication that seemed better suited to a large city.

I have most of those now, except the income doesn’t seem to go as far as I thought, the job doesn’t set me on fire, and I’ve been all over the country, living in Georgia, California and now Michigan, while visiting two thirds of the nation on business.

Those hollows and firearms seem awfully appealing right now.

Age changes people.  When I left college, I imagined a certain level of income that I would consider as successful in my career.  Call it X.  Today, at 36, I am at 1.33 X, and I have plenty of room to advance.  And I’d drop it all to do something I love, even for half the pay.  Looking back, I made good decisions, but I could have always made better decisions.

Life turns on small things.

In 1991, my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I were going to a movie in Toledo.  She was hungry, so we stopped at the first place we found on the way – Rax (think Arby’s if you aren’t familiar).  It was a random stop.  We went in, and I picked a booth.  Nearby, an abandoned newspaper covered a table.  I grabbed it and started flipping.  At the time, I had a job.  It was a placeholder job while I attended college – I was a QC tech for an electroplating facility.  I Did lab work.  Nothing sophisticated, but it was working for me.

I saw an ad for a job in that newspaper.  It was in Quality Assurance for a medical testing lab in town.  It didn’t say much, but it seemed to seize me.  It was a bit electric reading it.  I made no mention of pay of anything, so I don’t know why it had that effect.  I knew I had to pursue it.

We blew off the movie and drove to the address.  Nine PM and we were scoping out this facility.  As soon as I saw it I told Diane I was going to work there.  It was an unremarkable building, long and narrow, without windows.  It had zero charisma, but I knew this was it.

Monday I dropped off a resume, Tuesday I had an interview.  By the end of the week I had the job for $7.60 an hour.

And I’m still in Medical Quality Assurance.  I worked for this company for seven years, and after four, I became the Quality Assurance manager for the Atlanta division.

Everything in my professional life, and the subsequent major impact on my personal life, stemmed from that random stop at a Rax on a quiet Sunday night.

Life turns on small things.

The mountains of Asheville echo a possible past, deflected by events outside of my influence.

How much do we really control?

It is late.

Friday night, just south of Toledo and the storm is hovering over the interstate.  Bright bursts of lightning flare in the clouds, painting the sky with a fluorescent white, shaded to various intensities of gray by the cloud layers.  The rain hasn’t started yet, but it is promised.

My wife are I are traveling well into the night, heading for Cincinnati.  Our ultimate destination is Asheville, North Carolina.  An hour ago, we dropped our daughters off with my parents for the weekend, and for a couple of days, we are free of the responsibility of parenting.

The van is empty.  The child seats have been removed, the middle seats folded into the floor (I love the Stow-N-Go concept), and I relax on the back bench seat with first class legroom.  Warm, comfortable, and mobile while typing on a laptop – life is pretty good.  (What is the bandwidth of a 60 gigabyte hard drive at 70 MPH?).

Interstate 75 has played a major role in my life.  Our families are in Toledo, while we lived in Atlanta for nearly eight years.  I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve traveled this route, but this will be the first time in over three years, since we returned to the north and settled in Kalamazoo.  It is hard not to think of Atlanta as we start out.  With the van empty of our daughters’ belongings, it doesn’t take much to imagine that it is just the two of us again, heading back home after a visit with friends and family.

Atlanta.

In many ways, my heart is still there.  We’ve lived a lot of places, but Atlanta is different.  I’ve never been anywhere that has seemed so alive, vibrant and energetic.  When we moved there in 1995, I read that Atlanta was the fastest growing human settlement in recorded history.  I don’t know if that was true, or still true, but it seemed like it.  You had to step lively, wary of a new retail establishment erupting from the soil beneath you.  They would spring forth, fully stocked and manned, ready to make a sale.  It wasn’t uncommon to pass a bare patch of land, and then a week later, a full scale operation hawking some sort of wares needed by the recently arrived settlers.  I’m certain the opponents of urban sprawl couldn’t withstand the Atlanta experience, and that is a bit of a bonus in my book.

But we left.  Children were on the way, and it didn’t seem fair to raise them so far from their grandparents.  The extended family was vital to my own childhood, and we were determined to have that for our kids.

Kalamazoo isn’t bad.  We have winter, which we didn’t have down south.  I like snow, so I appreciate that.  It is a decent size, like my home town.  I’ve met some great people.  But it isn’t the same.  Michigan suffers one of the worst economies in the nation.  It has that Blue State funk.  My empoyer, Pfizer, is the undeniable lynchpin of the economy in Kalamazoo (and you Stryker people are a strong second…keep building those new structures and you’ll have us surrounded soon).  Should Pfizer ever pull out, much of the Kalamazoo region would dry up and blow away.  It doesn’t inspire long-term confidence for the region, particularly as the political climate continues to grind on against the pharmaceutical industry.

But that is another post.

Rolling through Findly and now the rain starts.  The sky has ripped open, and the lightning is strobing like God’s Rave Party.  And here I sit, protected from the fury, traveling faster than my ancestors could imagine in weather that would have drove them to shelter.  To us, this is an inconvenience.  Teeming billions of people lived and died, accumulating the knowledge and expertise to, among other things, create a world where I can do this.

Sometimes I lose sight of that.  It is an age of miracles.  A hundred years ago, even a forecast of this weather could have meant life and death to some.  Now, we barely dip below 65 MPH to get through it.

Lima, Ohio.  Northern Ohio/Southern Michigan is full of cities named after other famous cities, but always pronounced differently.  Lima is ‘lie-ma’, Milan is ‘My-lan’, Toledo is ‘Toh-lee-do’.  Troy is ‘troy’, not much you can do with that.  Blowing through it at 70 MPH, I don’t think Achilles and his Myrmidons would have spent 10 days, let alone 10 years, giving it a proper sacking.  All of these towns seem to want to be somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I grew up here.  I like Ohio.  It is nice and flat.  It is hard for someone to sneak up on you when you’re the tallest thing within sight.  There are good people in Ohio.  (As a Buckeye, I can’t vouch for Michigan…our states have a long running feud).  Ohio is a great baseline to evaluate other portions of the country, and I like to return here for recalibration.

Wapakoneta.  The home of Neal Armstrong, whom I shouldn’t have to identify further.  Growing up, my family would make the trek to West Virginia a few times a year, to visit the grandparents.  The buried white dome of the <a href=”http://www.ohiohistory.org/places/armstron/”>Armstrong Museum</a>, looming within touching distance of the Interstate was an important landmark for me.  Who didn’t dream of being an astronaut?  Each year, the massive white dome would seem smaller to me.  I look at it now and it seems too small to really contain anything.  I’ve visited the place a couple of times at various points in my life.  Lately, when I see it, I feel a bit sad that we abandoned the things enshrined here.  Forty years later, and NASA has ‘brand new’ plans on the board that look a lot like this past.  We wasted an entire generation going in a big circle, and now we have to recreate what our fathers had already accomplished.

Each significant landmark evokes various memories of both my childhood and my adult years.  Each exit, gas station, or fast food outlet seems to have a vague memory attached, and I can’t be sure I’m not recycling the same memory and applying it to various locations.  There is a sameness to the land as our culture homogenizes each region of the country.  Every exit seems to sport one of a defined number of standard configurations of food, gas and lodging.  While some sophisticated types are horrified by this, I take comfort in it.  Maybe I’m a bit simple, but I like knowing what I am going to find when it comes to necessities.  Sure, I want to find local color when I’m looking for it, but I like having the option of a known thing when I’m far from home.

It is late and we are hungry.  Wendy’s gets the call this time, and we hit the drive through.  I’m not hungry enough for a full meal, so I get the deep fried chicken tenders (3 pieces).  Chicken tenders are a neutral food.  While there isn’t much you can do to make them great, there are many, many ways to screw them up.  With chicken tenders, the best you can hope for is a competent preparation that inspires indifference.  You eat them, and ten minutes later you are thinking about something else.  Few people look back fondly on a cardboard container of tenders, sighing with contentment.  It is protein, presented inoffensively.

Two state troopers are on the side of the highway, parked one behind another with flashers strobing, lighting up the night.  I imagine one pulling over the other in some tragic friendly fire incident with a radar gun.  I hope they get that sorted out.

Earlier in our trip, we saw a broken-down Schwans truck by the side of the road.  Momentary thoughts of raiding the carcass for various and sundry frozen delicacies crossed my mind.  There was an opportunity for frozen piracy, and we let it go.  Now, hours later, I see yet another Schwan truck being hooked up to a tow truck.  I imagine the tow driver pulling up to his house with his ‘kill’.  Good eating for him.

We are staying overnight just north of Cincinnati.  Tomorrow, we rise early and make a side-trip to Fort Knox.  In all my years up and down I-75, I never knew about the George S. Patton Armor Museum in Lexington, Kentucky.  Since I rarely come this way anymore, we are going to take a quick trip and I’m going to take as many pictures of vintage World War II armor as I can manage.  Then we travel on to Asheville to get my new, used car.

It is going to be a long weekend.  1,200 miles in 3 days.

More later.