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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Sorry to pop in — and back out — after a long, postless weekend, folks, but uncontrollable events are conspiring to steal my precious time with you. It’s only temporary, I promise. Please don’t pout.
Plus, one of the beasts clamoring for my time and attention — moving all of this drivel to a new, faster, and more stable server, fingers crossed — should help us spend more quality time together soon. Ditto for the long hours I’ve been spending researching a notebook computer purchase. When I can connect with you from the comfort of my couch, or car, or warm fuzzy toilet seat, how cool will that be?
(Don’t answer that. Nobody wants you thinking about my ‘warm, fuzzy seat’. Least of all you. Trust me on this one.)
“When I can connect with you from the comfort of my couch, or car, or warm fuzzy toilet seat, how cool will that be?”
Of course, to enter this magical lollipop world of speedy servers, roaming writing, and blogging bliss, I’ve got some work still to do. But I can’t leave you with nothing, so I’ll direct your attention to the newly updated, finally marginally useful ‘Best‘ page.
What’s the ‘Best‘ page, you ask?
Well, it was intended to be a place where I could highlight a few posts and features that I hope are particularly fun. The idea was that it could be a starting point for new folks, or a resource for anyone trying to track down an old favorite. Where ‘old favorite’ could mean a ‘hilarious post’, or a ‘mildly chuckleworthy bit’, or ‘anything even remotely amusing; where the hell has he been all weekend?’
(At the moment, mostly that last one.)
Of course, I created said ‘Best‘ page a few months ago, without any content… and promptly forgot about it. Three months’ worth of visitors (read: two people) have flooded through this site since then, no doubt drawn to the blank and desolate ‘Best‘ page, where they would stop and ask themselves:
‘Is there nothing on this site worth noting?‘
Maybe not. But I’ve noted it anyway, on the updated and hopefully useful ‘Best‘ page, so please go and have a look. There’s still not a lot there, but I’m working on it. Three years of shoveling this crap isn’t much time to develop ‘gems’, you know. Not the way I roll.
Anyway, there’s new stuff on tap for tomorrow. Until then, I’ll be sleeping, whisking files around, and — if there’s time — putting in a few Monday hours at the office. This weekend’s a wrap, people!
Permalink | 1 CommentA few weeks ago, we were slammed here in New England with a huge rainstorm. And when I say ‘huge’, I mean ‘ginormous’. The rains were relentless, for more than a week. Rivers flooded, sewers overflowed, there was even talk of collecting two of every animal.
(Whether to save them, ark-style, or to eat them, BBQ-style, I was never quite clear. But I voted for the latter. I do loves me some spit-roasted zebra.)
After the raindrops had finally stopped plopping, the missus and I took a trip downstairs in our house to find that our basement had flooded. Which was no surprise, really. It’s a one hundred year-old house; you’ll have the occasional leak. My grandfather is only eighty, and he springs leaks all the time. That’s just how life works.
“It’s a one hundred year-old house; you’ll have the occasional leak. My grandfather is only eighty, and he springs leaks all the time.”
Sadly, there are no jumbo-sized Victorian-style diapers we can buy to solve our cellar seeping, so we had to explore other solutions. We could get the leak fixed, I suppose — but it’s an old house. It’d just leak somewhere else eventually, and we’d have to fix that, and then there’d be another one, and another… who has time for that sort of nonsense? Clearly, ‘fixing’ the problem is no fix at all.
(This should tell you right away why lazy smartasses like me should never own houses. I can just see my future self in the aftermath of a home-related disaster, shrugging and saying:
‘Aw, hell — if we put a roof back up, it’ll probably just collapse again, anyway. You always wanted to sleep under the stars anyway, right, honey?‘
This is why I can’t have nice things. Not for very long, anyway.)
Given the soggy situation, my inertial inclination, and the forecast of additional impending precipitation, I took the only reasonable course of action. I bought a shop vac, with which to suck up the current water as well as any future water that might darken our cellar floor.
Of course, I couldn’t be bothered to actually leave the house, so I bought it online. Two-to-four week delivery is very reasonable for an online retailer, I think. No problem.
Three weeks passed. The shop vac arrived.
By that time, the basement was dry — or dry-ish, at the very least — so the shop vac wasn’t particularly needed. But now we owned one, for the next torrential crisis. We stowed our new toy away for a rainy day.
In the basement.
(You can see this coming now, can’t you?)
Fast-forward to this week, with ‘occasional heavy thunderstorms’ in the area. Zoom in on me, trundling down our stairs to check on things.
The basement? Flooded.
The shop vac? Still in the box, sitting in a shallow pool of water. The very water it would be cleaning up, if it weren’t sitting, still in the box, in a shallow pool of water.
There’s a certain poetry in all of this, I’m sure. A smarter man than I could no doubt use the situation as an ironic metaphor for the futility of trying to tame nature, or the absurdity of our reliance on modern technological gadgets. Of course, he’d have time to make these astute observations, and to get so wicked smart in the first place, because he probably lives in a condo, and doesn’t waste time on watery-basement bullshit.
So what to do now? The answer is obvious — clearly, I should pull up the online store again and buy another shop vac, with which to dry out the first one. No problem. It should be here in two-to-four weeks.
Of course, by then the water in the basement might have dried up on its own, and I won’t need the new machine. Probably, it won’t even be worth unpacking it, so I’ll just store it in the basement, and when it rains again, it’ll be… heeeeeyyy. This isn’t working out any better than fixing the damned leak. The basement will still be wet, and I’ll be stuck with a dozen soggy shop vacs floating around the place. Dammit.
Well, that leaves only two options. We’ve either got to sell the place and move, or find a way to control the weather so it never rains again. I’ll start scouring the real estate ads, and have my wife work on the weather machine. She’s the smart one, you know — and besides, do you know how much work building a weather control device would be? I don’t have that kind of energy. It’s nap time.
Permalink | 1 CommentI’ve finally gone and done it. After years of sitting on the sidelines — and recent months of stubbornly denying my needs — I’ve decided to buy a notebook computer. All those thoughts of fancy PDA phones or ultra-mobile gizmos or overgrown, one-dimensional digital typewriters is out the window. I give up. The laptop craze has finally reached out and noogied me, only twenty years or so later. I’m not what you’d call an ‘early adopter’, exactly. Slow ‘n’ steady wins the race.
On the other hand, I haven’t actually bought a laptop yet, so my ‘slow ‘n’ steady’ is more like ‘comatose ‘n’ lazy’ at this point. But I’ve taken Step One™ — I acknowledged that I have a problem. A no-notebook-having, slow-computer-using, always-typing-away-in-this-hell-hot-office problem. Now the healing process can begin. I’ve joined the program.
The question remains of which computer to buy — but honestly, does it really matter? I’m currently tippy-tapping on a keyboard hooked to an ancient old desktop machine I bought four years ago. It’s the only working computer in the house right now, but it’s a piece of work. Three feet tall, barely working, noisy, and wicked slow.
(I’ll refrain from the ‘like the Keebler elves, during the Atkins fad’ or ‘like Verne Troyer’s career, after Goldmember‘ jokes. But it won’t be easy.)
“Soon, I’ll have to find a configuration that costs less than the annual GNP of the EU nations, but for now I’m having a ball.”
Basically, any mobile technology developed this millennium should blow this hunk of wires out of the water. I feel like I’m graduating to driving a car, after years of getting around on a tricycle. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a Porsche or a Toyota — it’s light years ahead of what I’m used to. And a touch more stylish in the parking lot, too.
Still, I don’t want to be calling the new machine ‘crap’ in six months, either. A laptop isn’t something you can fiddle with for a few weeks and then chuck in the trash for a new one, you know. We’re not talking about a magazine, or a spouse, or a child here; this is serious shit.
Unfortunately, being out of the techno-loop for so long has left me old and frightened and uninformed about the latest technology. I spent half an hour in Best Buy last week, arguing with one of the saleslackeys about whether personal computers have automatic fingerprint recognition doohickeys already.
(It turns out, they do. So I lost that bet.
But I still don’t buy the ‘USB X-Ray Specs’ add-on, or the ‘Apple iThighmaster’. I think the bastard was iPulling my leg.)
Of course, now I want it all. The blazing processors, the teeny webcams, the retinal scanners and hot-swappable espresso makers — everything. Even if I can’t have the things — I don’t even drink espresso, for crissakes, and who wants to see me on a webcam? — it’s fun to play around with the specs. Soon, I’ll have to find a configuration that costs less than the annual GNP of the EU nations, but for now I’m having a ball.
A trackball, that is. Attached to a wireless mouse. Also, a speech recognition module, a digital input tablet, two leather carrying cases, a fourteen-hour backup battery, and a warranty plan that guarantees a technician will be onsite to answer my questions within fifteen minutes of initial contact. Fifteen minutes!
So presumably, he’ll be living under my bed for the next two years. I hope he likes dust bunnies and dog drool, because there’s not much else under there. Maybe I’ll loan him my ‘iBuns of iSteel‘ DVD to keep him company. Even a tech weenie deserves firm glutes.
Permalink | 3 CommentsI’m locked in a battle of wills. With a real birdbrain. And I’m losing. I’ll explain.
Close by our house, the neighbors have a tree. It’s a nice tree — full of branches and shade and life-giving oxygen. I have no beef with this tree, in the matter that follows. Don’t go thinking I’m some sort of tree-bashing psycho nutjob. The tree and I are tight, yo.
(Except in the fall, when the jackass tree drops all its leaves on my damned grass, and I’ve got to rake them up. That’s uncalled for. Do I dump my coffee grinds on this tree’s roots? No. Do I fling my garbage onto its trunk? Certainly not. Do I drop trou and whiz all up in it’s boughs?
Well, okay, but just the once. And that was on a bet. I still say I would have hit that squirrel, too, if the cops hadn’t shown up. I demand a re-pee.)
“I don’t know whether they’re nesting, or courting, or maybe they’re running a bird sex line out of the tree, offering chats with ‘plumper pigeons’ and ’round robins’ for $3.99 per minute.”
Rather, it’s what’s in the tree that’s causing the problem. We’ve got birds. Chatty, chirping, chubby little birds, chittering away from dawn till dusk. They’re constantly there. I don’t know whether they’re nesting, or courting, or maybe they’re running a bird sex line out of the tree, offering chats with ‘plumper pigeons’ and ’round robins’ for $3.99 per minute. I can’t say. But if I ever manage to get that husky-voiced whippoorwill on the line, you can hold my other calls. Rrrrrawr!
All I know is, other than on positively frigid mornings, these songbirds commence their cawing at some fairly unholy early hours. Eight, seven thirty, even seven in the morning. Gosh!
(Probably earlier, I bet. But I’m a pretty heavy sleeper before seven o’clock or so. You could probably throw one of those birds down my pants at six AM, and I wouldn’t stop snoozing.
I’m not suggesting you actually test my theory, of course. I don’t want a bullfinch in my BVDs any more than the next guy. And quite probably, less.)
This was the schedule, for most of the past few weeks. I doze blissfully until around seven thirty, then *chirp chirp chirp* go the birds, up I wake, shake a fist at the window, and the day begins. They were like a fully-organic alarm clock, powered by earthworms and sunflower seeds, letting me sleep late-ish but not too late. Not bad.
That was, until last week.
Last week, we installed a set of wind chimes on the porch.
(When I say ‘installed’, I mean ‘hung precariously on a rusty nail’.)
(And when I say ‘we’, I mean ‘my wife’.)
(The other words in the sentence mean more or less what you’d expect them to mean. Just letting you know. I’ll shut up now.)
In a way, the wind chimes were our little measure of revenge on the birds. The chimes are clearly within earshot of the tree, and this is New England — it’s always breezy around here. So the chimes are constantly jangling and tinkling about. And, presumably, waking up the birds in the middle of the night.
(So we’re lousy neighbors, even to the avians in the area. What the hell did you expect?)
The birds’ counterpunch to this affront has been to sing at just about any time of the morning, afternoon, or — especially — the darkest dead of night. In other words, the time when we’re trying to get to sleep. Frantically trying, because we know those birds; even with their circadian clocks out of whack, they’ll cluck loudest, longest, and seemingly closest to the bedroom window just around seven in the morning. The fact that some of them are taking a graveyard shift to play ‘cuckoo karaoke’ at three AM isn’t important. That wakeup chirp’s a-coming.
So now we sleep by trying to drown the birds out — window fans work okay for this, but sometimes distort the bird calls into a haunting, eerily oscillating sort of noise. It sounds like the love child of Big Bird and Bjork yodeling underwater. Try sleeping with that nightmare in your ears, why don’t you?
My inclination is to fight back. I’m more highly evolved than these feather-flaunting fusspots; surely I can ‘persuade’ them to take their cranky crowing elsewhere. I’m thinking of strapping speakers to the tree, and blasting ‘Cat Scratch Fever‘ at them all night for a couple of weeks. That’d learn them to screw around with a guy with opposable thumbs and a stereo cassette deck.
I’m worried that wouldn’t be the end of it, though. These birds have already shown a stubborn resilience by staying close by the wind chimes. What if matters only escalated further? I’m a busy guy, folks — the very last thing I need is a cheesed-off sparrow with a bullhorn outside my window at four o’clock every morning, screaming:
‘TWEET, MOTHER FUCKER! TWEET! TWEET!!!‘
So I guess it’s back to wearing earplugs to bed, and adopting stray cats to patrol the tree at night. The birds have won, at least until I can think of a way to strap their beaks shut. I never thought it would come to this. These battles of wits are for the birds!
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