Posts

I haven't been doing the updates on here very frequently. Too bad. I have a couple of thoughts from the last few weeks.

One of the great unanswered questions: What does the inside of your nose smell like?

I appear to have plumbing gnomes. My kitchen sink trap recently began to leak. Multiple trips to the hardware store later, I have all PVC parts under there and a complete replacement of the brass spaghetti mess that the original plumbers left me. Not that I did much better, since they parts don't line up without a bit of a diversion from a direct run.

Anyway, after conceeding that I'd have to do the funky run, I got things bought and connected together. But having a 45 bend in there makes it hard to tighten the joints, as turning one end tends to loosen the other. I gave up for the day and left a bucket under there for the drips, planning on waiting for the weekend to take it apart again and tighten one side out where I could get more hands on it.

This weekend, the bucket was dry. So I washed my dishes. Still dry. So I dumped a gallon container down the sink. Still dry. My leak healed.

My dad suggested that if I've got plumbing gnomes, I'd better put out an offering of steak and beer.

Once in the past (about 5 years ago) I had a roof leak which led to some dripping in my kitchen. It was basically a problem with drainage under snow cover and some minor flashing errors. But it wasn't fun while it lasted.

So, in the middle of last week I was pretty distressed to find a large puddle of water on the floor in my kitchen. Particularly since it was not in the same place as the prior leak.

In fact, this new puddle was strangely out in the middle of the floor. It was about 8 inches wide and 2 to 3 feet long. One end of it did run up next to the stove. That's a lot of water on a night when there wasn't any rain nor much snow cover on my roof anyway.

Here are some more peculiarities. It was a well defined puddle with no splashes. Though one end of it reached the stove, there was no water on the stove and none under the stove. There was no water on the ceiling.

The water was very clean, like ice melt. But the quantity was at least a whole tray of ice cubes. Since I don't use ice much, there was plenty available in the fridge, but almost no chance that any got out on the floor. I'd made pasta, but the pasta water naturally was pretty starchy.

Tony suggested that maybe it was Casper pee. Ok, he said ectoplasm, but I hear what I want to hear, OK? Anyway, I cleaned it up and started waiting to see if more would show up.

By the way, at the beginning of the week last week is was dang cold out here. Daytime temperatures in the singles and as soon as the sun went down sub-zeros. (Fahrenheit— I'm in the U.S..) On my way home from work I had to stop twice to bundle up some more — and it's only a 5 minute walk to my car from the office. Then while I was waiting for the car to warm up, I found out that the BiteMe valve on my water pack had frozen in those 5 minutes. I naturally had to quote from ‘Doctor Evil’ — “It's frickin' freezin' out here, Mr. Biggleworth.”

I know that I sometimes ramble in these little stories, but in this case I'm actually still on point. Get it?

I rememebered a dream last night. That doesn't happen very often with me, so it can sometimes be an important event. In this case it wasn't the dream itself, but rather it's ending.

(Skip to ending.)

I'm a passenger in a car, back seat. We are driving on a winding mountain road in a sudden snow storm. Naturally, the driver loses control and we go over the side and plunge down toward the trees far below.

"Now would be a good time to put my seatbelt back on," I think in the dream. But I can't move because the acceleration has me pinned in my seat.

Ooops. My physics training kicks in. "I should be in free fall."

So I look down at myself to see why I'm pinned. I actually seem to be on my side...

On my side in bed...

On my side in bed and my eyes are closed...

At this point, the dream imagery, which is still mountainside and trees rushing at me, sort of moves back a bit and fades to black. But I still have that scared, anticipatory feeling of the impending impact with the trees, even though I'm pretty sure now what is really going on.

I feel confident that if I let myself go back to sleep, I'll finish that plunge into the trees, still un-belted. But I also still can't move.

I understand that I'm probably just going through sleep paralysis, so I don't struggle to move. I lay there a moment and think about the situation. Then I roll over onto my back without even thinking about trying to.

The anticipatory feeling fades away now, but it's 5 in the morning, I have a full bladder and a raging pain in my neck from having watched TV in bed last night. A trip to the bathroom relieves the first, provides Advil for the second and unfortunately, completes the waking up process. It took me more than an hour to get back to sleep.

But at least I didn't finish crashing into the trees. Or if I did— I slept right through it.

Hey, it's been a while. I've been up to no apparent good and not really been thinking about adding stuff to this page.

But today I was encouraged to take a digicam picture of something that I had video taped off the local news here in Denver, Colorado. That is an important point— the broadcaster of the following image is in Denver, Colorado.

You may need to load the larger image (by clicking) to be able to see the state lines on the map. Go on, take a look. And remember that Fox 31 News is based in Denver, Colorado.

I find something vaguely disturbing about the fact that while I was squeezing the water out of my can of tuna, I mis-read the brand name. Why would the name "Starkist" turn into "Friskies" when read upside down?

And if I opened the bottom of the tuna can, would I get cat food?