history, politics and cat houses

I'll get back to that story idea some other time.  For today, I'll just throw a bunch of unrelated tripe into this little space and call it good.  For starters, the word of the day is fetial, which means, "Concerned with declarations of war and treaties of peace."  Can I use the word in a sentence?  Of  course I can.

George W. Bush will go down in history not only as a buffoon, but also as a virtual fetial priest.

Not bad, huh?  It should also give an idea of my political leanings to those of you who haven't spent the last 7 years hanging on my every word.   I'm not completely liberal, but I've found that I'm growing ever more so - no doubt because of the absurdity of Bush and his minions coming into power so soon after that caricature of a human, Newton Leroy Gingrich, did everything he could to take the civility out of civil service.


Moving on.


On this day in 1896, Utah became the 45th state.   That fact alone should be enough to set me off on a tangent about Mormonism, but it won't.  For the record, I don't have much of a beef with the LDS church.  My family fed and hung out with numerous "elders" on their church missions in my youth, and my favorite uncle was a member of the church for several years, which resulted in me getting to see a well-designed genealogy on my father's side.  It's true that that same uncle later cut ties with the LDS after they basically ignored him when he was in the hospital; and it's true that the LDS is incredibly homophobic and Salt Lake City has a horrendous teen suicide rate at least in part because Mormon kids get their heads screwed up young, but I'm not going to go off on that tangent.


Instead, I'll go off on the tangent of trigonometry.  For the last few weeks, I've been hanging out at a website called KahnAcademy.org.  The site has a few thousand instructional videos, including many on algebra, calculus and trig.  One of the videos that I viewed today gave me a great way to remember how to determine sines, cosines, and tangents of angles in a right triangle: SOH CAH TOA.  Simply put, the sine is the opposite side over the hypotenuse.  The cosine is the adjacent side over the hypotenuse.  The tangent (hence my being on this tangent) is the opposite side over the adjacent side.  


I'd never heard that mnemonic device before.  It was all theta to me (ha!  Trig humor).


Had I decided to go with the story idea that I mentioned in the last post, today's Post-A-Day topic is this:

Maybe its tying your shoelaces, or parallel parking cars, but we all have something very simple that we just don’t do very well. Write about yours.

One of my feral feline friends, Fleck, snacks
on a plate of cheese in his custom-built cat house

Well.  For now, we'll just leave aside the fact that a blog devoted to inspiring writers by coming up with Post-A-Day topics just screwed up the word "it's" and we'll concentrate on what was being asked.  There are numerous things at which I suck, but trying to come up with one of them that's considered "simple" is not so much difficult as it is depressing.  The first one to come to mind, however, was "ironing."  I gave up on trying to iron clothes - particularly shirts - years ago.  Sure, if I've got an Easter gig and my only black shirt bears a striking resemblance to a shar-pei puppy, I might smack it with a hot iron a few times, but I won't fool anybody.  A far more likely solution for me would be to throw the shirt into a dryer for 20 minutes and call it good.  Don't even talk to me about tux shirts.

One thing that I like to do is build things out of wood.  I'm not particularly good at that, either, but carpentry isn't something that I'd consider to be "simple."  Also, I don't have a wide assortment of tools or workspace.  I do the best I can, however, and I have a good time.  In the last couple of weeks, I built a little house for the (ironically) feral cats in my yard, and I also threw together an insulated cover for my fireplace (it was getting increasingly cold in my living room).

I think I'm drawn to "strange" carpentry because it's just so damned imaginative.  I like coming up with a mental picture of what I want and then seeing if I can put it together.  Chairs, camp kitchens, cat houses...it's just fun to build things.

And now I have a router table.  Watch out, world.

alliteration

December despair.
Dark, drizzly, dreary days.
Damned doubts.
Depression.
Doom.
Death.

That is my happy sestet for the day.  A friend suggested that I write a sonnet about the word "Frowsy" without actually using the word, but I'm just not up for it.  Bitching about December using only "D" words is much easier.  I really need to come up with a decent topic to write about in this blog.  Maybe I'll start taking the suggestions (lame as they are) from the "Post-A-Day" groups.  To keep it interesting, I guess, I could also use a "Word-A-Day" system and try to work the daily words into the daily post topics.

Something to try in January.

What might be more interesting is to do both of the above exercises while also trying to keep a coherent narrative going.

Yeah.  That was like an "Aha!" moment right there.  Beginning next week, I shall endeavor to use strange words and boring topics to create a work of fictional genius.

Need some character names, though.

a holiday poem

Man.  I'm hungry.

'Tis the night before Christmas and I am at home
sitting in bed and composing a poem.
My bathrobe is hung by its hook on a door.
Underwear's strewn on the unvacuumed floor.

One cat is curled up at the foot of the bed.
With visions, no doubt, of dead bugs in her head.
The other cat's downstairs, most likely asleep.
No worries, no job, no appointments to keep.

And I, in my nakedness, type like a fiend
writing this verse on my laptop (wide-screened).
The TV is off, but the air cleaner hums.
What's chaffing my ass?  Oh - some old cracker crumbs.

There's no tree in the house and no presents to wrap.
I'm an old single guy and I don't do that crap.
I don't leave out cookies and milk for the elf.
I don't even have any snacks for myself.

The crackers, you see, were from sometime last week.
Since then, I've had nothing but salads (all Greek).
There's canned food downstairs.  Of that I am sure,
but, for me at least, kidney beans hold no allure.

That being the case, there's not much to say.
I guess I'll just starve for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow, however, I'm having lasagna.
I'd offer to share, but you might get some on ya.

So have a nice Christmas, alone or with friends,
and think of me starved, as this poem portends,
but do not get misty-eyed.  Nay!  Do not weep!
I'll surfeit tomorrow.  Tonight, I shall sleep.


TWD

who am i?

I've been watching Breaking Bad for the last week or so (I've become completely addicted to it) and one of the scenes made me start to think hard enough that my mind wandered and I had to pause the program.  In the scene, Jesse Pinkman is in a post-rehab meeting; and the meeting leader says something along the lines of, "You don't come here to be a better person.  You come here to learn to accept the person that you are."

As I said, it sort of made me think.  As far as I know, I accept the person that I am - but I'm not overly sure that I really know myself.  I tried coming up with one-size-fits-all adjectives to describe me honestly, but none of them really fit.  This exercise, of course, depressed the hell out of me and has caused me to wonder  what the answer is to today's blog entry:  Who am I?

More specifically, what defines me?  What is it that I like doing?  What don't I like doing? If money were no object, what would I do with myself?  What talents, if any, do I possess and are any of them worth pursuing from an "I like this" point of view?

So I've been thinking about this on and off for the last few days and decided I'd try to figure it out - in bits an pieces - with this little FN blog.  Not all at once, of course; and I'm not going to turn this thing into a tell-all (that's what my original blog was becoming, which is why it is no longer open to the public).  As I think of it, though, I'll try to hash things out.

I really like photography.  I do.  I'm not that great at it (and I do wonder if getting my stupid eyes checked would help), but I honestly enjoy it.  The feeling that I get when a really good photo comes straight out of my camera is one that I can't describe.  I want to show it to the world, hang it on my wall, and - perhaps most importantly (and most maddeningly) - do it again.  When I see a great picture taken by someone else, I get jealous.  Not necessarily because I didn't take it, but because if I take the same picture - even if it's just as good or better - it still isn't mine.  Somebody else did it first, and anything I get after that is just copying.  Screwed up, huh?  I might still love the shot that I get, but on some level I'm annoyed with myself because I didn't think of it first.

In other news, I saw a suggested topic from one of those "Post-A-Day" blogs today that went something like, "How do you decide on your New Year's resolutions?"

It's an interesting question in an odd sort of way.  How do you decide which resolutions about which to be resolute?  Is that the question?  Or is it, "Why do you keep making the same promises to yourself, year after year, whether publicly or not, when you never succeed in keeping those promises?"  I mean, if I wanted to set a goal for myself and be relatively assured that I'd make that goal, it'd be something along the lines of, "I resolve that I will not wear soiled underwear during the entire 2012 calendar year."

Now, this might be a no-brainer to some of you; but try keeping that goal when you're camping for a few days in the middle of nowhere.  It's not a completely safe goal if that's the case - but I could keep it by just going commando.  So there's that.

Those other goals, though (and I do make them - or at least think about them - every frigging year), have almost become pointless.  I mean, if there's this "resolution" that you want to make (and keep), then why haven't you made it and kept it previously?  Furthermore, most of the "big" resolutions are always negative.  As in, "I will not smoke this year," or "I will not drink this year," or "I will not eat chocolate this year" (that last one, by the way, is one of those goals that I could fly through).  And, with those negative goals, what does the person who makes them always do on December 31 - the day before those negative resolutions go into effect?

You got it.  Mr. Resolve goes out of his way to binge like hell on the very thing(s) that he's determined to give up.   And he wonders why he's already failed to live up to his expectations by about January 3rd.

Why not make some positive resolutions?  "I will put $5 into a cookie jar every week."  That of course, doesn't limit you from taking $3 out of the cookie jar every week...

Anyway, I don't know what makes me think I'll be able to do/not do something next year that I've been not doing/doing for long enough that I think I have to start/stop doing it; but I still make the damned resolutions every year, and I'm sure I'll do it again in a few weeks.

This time, though, I think I'll just make my resolutions on a weekly basis.  Who knows?  Maybe I can keep one going for 52 consecutive weeks.

TWD

yeah. i'm mr. fix-it

Got home this evening and decided to tackle the knocking noise in the automatic litter box that's in my bedroom.  It's a pretty remarkable device as litter boxes go.  I can see the lot of you rolling your eyes at me, but it's true.  Basically, this is a large round bowl with a conveyor belt sticking into one side of it at an angle.  A small electric motor spins the entire bowl about once every hour, and the poop and solidified chunks of pee are carried up the ramp and dropped into a plastic bag.  No muss, no fuss.  Really.  See for yourself:

So the problem has been with the small motor that rotates the bowl.  It's a tiny little thing about the diameter of a fifty-cent piece; and, for whatever reason, it has developed a very slight knocking.  Unfortunately, that slight knocking is passed from the motor and amplified through a series of four gears (the last one being the bowl itself) and has become rather loud.

After spending 30 minutes ripping the entire setup apart, I managed to get to the motor, which was caked with litter dust (no surprise there), but otherwise seemed to be completely clean.  I'd been hoping that a good cleaning would be all it needed, but after blowing it off and putting some magic oil on the gear, I was unable to stop the knocking completely.  It's a bit better, but still annoying.

So I moved on to Plan B, which consists of putting the stupid thing on a timer so that it only comes on for 1 out of every 8 hours.

After solving that problem - at least at much as I'm going to solve it without buying a new motor - I turned my attention to my old laptop, which continues to irritate me because I'm easy to irritate and because it isn't perfect.  So far I've tried to install about 5 different flavors of Linux on it (with limited success); but, since Linux can't play Netflix, I really need for it to be running Windows.

It's a fairly old laptop.  I think I bought it in around 2004.  For some reason, its wireless hardware is not recognized by Windows 7.  Though I've managed to install Win7 on it twice, I have not yet been able to get the wireless up.  To anyone smirking and feeling all superior, YES, I've looked for drivers all over the place.  It's not the software, it's the hardware.  Eventually, I may pull the wifi stuff out of a busted HP that's sitting on my desk and see if it'll work with the Dell.

At any rate, Win7 isn't going to work.  So tonight I put Windows Vista (Ultimate) on it.  Everything seems to work fine, but it may be a bit too much for the processor.  When I tried watching Netflix at full-screen, the video was choppy.  This may have been because AVG (anti-virus) was hogging all of the cpu cycles or it may not have been.  Whatever.  Tomorrow night, I'll put WinXP on it and see if it's happy with that.

Stupid Netflix.  If they'd just come up with a player for Linux, I wouldn't have to deal with all this crap.

Took this at Chattanooga last season and have no place to use it.  Might as
well throw it in here.

TWD