Just Six Years

     Not even all of six -- in January 2025, I'll be able to retire with full Social Security.  And don't think I won't take the Federal check, as long as it holds out: having been forced into contributing to FDR's* New Deal "safety net," I have paid in far more what I'll get back and as long as the system is still operating, I'd like to have that small return, thank you all the same.  That and my (tiny) IRA should get me by, assuming I live very frugally.

     If I hold out longer, Uncle Sam will allow me a little more -- but there's a catch:

      Present projections have the system's reserve assets crossing zero in 2034, with a choice after that of cutting benefits about 25 percent and running it right off the incoming tax, cranking up the retirement age (again), or increasing the payroll tax that funds it (to a chorus of, "Boomers ruin everything," from the generations still working).

     It's a race against time!  So why am I not in the least excited about it?
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* Like most of the New Deal, this was a reaction to a more radical proposal; in this case, the Townsend Plan: elderly physician Francis Townsend was pushing the notion of paying every (non-criminal) retiree over sixty the remarkable sum of three hundred 1933 dollars every month, but they had to spend it all within thirty days.  That's around $3800 in 2019 dollars!  It was getting pretty popular, too; as ever, the trouble with the elderly is they have little to lose and plenty of free time.  Congress and President Roosevelt ginned up Social Security by 1935, a tearing hurry at Congressional speed, and headed off Dr. Townsend at the pass with a higher retirement age and a smaller payout.
     Alas, it's a pyramid scheme, and relies on population growth, inflation and a retirement age set late enough that a significant percentage of the prospective recipients die before receiving full benefits.  Medical advances get a lot more of us past 65 -- or even 67 -- these days, so small wonder it's running on empty.

The Annoyances Of Car Ownership

     Having to get one's car worked on is one of the most annoying things about owning them.  Even having resigned oneself to the inevitable surprise -- "They used a special veeblefletzer in this model, and they're hard to get.  So the part alone is $500 instead of the usual $50, and where it's mounted, well, we'll have to pull the engine...."

     Okay, fine.  The bill will be high.  It will be high everywhere, and about the same, since they're generally ordering from the same wholesaler and calculating labor from the same how-long-should-it-take reference (and hoping to beat the actual times listed, getting more work done in eight hours than the mythical average mechanic).  One grants these things.

     One of the best compensations for them is getting a loaner vehicle.  I take in a defective car, and drive one that works while mine gets fixed, heck of a deal.

     --Until the shop reneges.  My car's in the shop now; the air-conditioning hasn't worked this year and after six weeks of highs in the upper eighties to low nineties, I can no longer ignore it.  They called me yesterday afternoon:

     "Miz Ecks?"

     "Speaking."

     "Hey, your air-conditioning compressor is locked up bad.  It killed the engine when we tried it!*  It'll have to be replaced, and we'd better do the belt.  It dumped all your refrigerant.  It's gonna be $XXXX.XX to fix."

     The number was in the low four digits.  Painful but worth it.  "Okay."

     "You asked us to look at the water pump, and it isn't any worse than last time.  That's still $XXX.XX.  But the timing chain cover?  There's a little drip there, it's not much but you'll want to keep an eye on it.  That's $XXXX.XX if we replace it, 'cos we do have have to pull the engine...."

     The price quoted for that last was a little over half what I paid for the car.  "Look, let's just do the oil change and get the AC working, okay?"

     "Okay.  We'll have to order parts for the air conditioning, be three, four days.  How soon can you get that loaner back to us?"

     Utter confusion on my part.  "You want it back?"

     "Yeah, we're open 'til five-thirty, could you get it up here?  I have it assigned to somebody else tomorrow."

     "I'm downtown and I'm on until at least six-thirty."  It's over a dozen miles from my work to the garage, on one of the most crowded commuter routes in the metro.

     "Oh, we can leave your car out for you."
 
     "I only have the one key."

     "Oh, we leave 'em out like that all the time."

     "Not my car, you don't.  I'll get the loaner back to you in the morning."

     Deep unhappiness from the mechanic.  Yeah, well, sucks to be him.  Sucks worse to get back into my saunamobile for three or four more days -- make that six, with the weekend.

     Annoying.
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* It was enough for me to turn it on and hear the engine falter; letting it kill the engine seemed like a step too far.  Clearly, I lack the investigative finesse of a trained mechanic.  Also, I know who burned the belt they're telling me needs replaced, and it wasn't me.  Worth the extra $45 to not bust my own knuckles but blow me no smoke, pal.

Benjamin Franklin, Reformed Internet Troll?

     By his own account, wise old Benjamin Franklin was something of a troll in his youth, "disputatious" and fond of direct contradiction and of voicing very positive opinions.

     Eventually, he realized that all it did was increase argument and further disagreement; he came to realize he made better headway by Socratic questioning, and better still by modestly expressing his opinions and conclusions, in the form of, "It seems to me...," "I think that..." or even, "I feel...."  (This is a very modern approach, sometimes described as "owning your own opinion" as opposed to stating it as some universal truth.)

     His own biography shows him in adulthood as something of master manipulator, guiding group actions for what he believed to be the greater good -- and it worked, too; Franklin's efforts resulted in the first lending library in America and the earliest organization of volunteer firemen, institutions which were widely copied soon afterward.

     So pay him a little heed: he stopped arguing with strangers (and friends) and managed to accomplish great things instead.*

     And what did you do on social media today?
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* That said, and perhaps despite his own best efforts, Franklin was no plaster saint, entirely willing to use inside influence to further his own business and to reward family and friends with political patronage when he was in a position to do so.  Both were pretty much SOP in his day, for whatever excuse that provides.  On the whole, he nevertheless did far more good than  harm

More Reading

     Most recently, Relic and Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, linked monster-thrillers in the "don't pay too much attention to the science, just sit back and enjoy the ride" vein.  The cast is well-drawn, maybe a bit close to pulp at times, but only the very best pulp, and the story in each is exciting. Great fun!

     Presently, I have just made a start on Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.  So far, he's an engaging and impressively modern writer, give or take a few flourishes of style.  Franklin was a complicated man and the work reflects it.

NRA Meltdown

     The current mess the NRA is in alarms me.  I've been following it at a bit of a distance, and it appears to be a multi-level failure, based on the mistaken belief that the organization was an endless "cash cow."

     NRA is often accused by opponents of "leveraging fear" in fundraising, as if that was somehow wrong; donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation go up when online freedoms appear most under attack; the American Civil Liberties Union is quick to issue press releases on abuses of Constitutionally-protected rights and lo, this affects their take.  Surprise, people donate when causes they support are under threat.

     Get a Republican in the White House, especially if there's a GOP majority in the House and/or Senate, and NRA donations dwindle.

     After eight years of President Obama's support of antigunners, however hollow, NRA executives and their deeply-entwined ad agency were fat, happy and overly complacent.  The fight was on!  Until late 2016, when suddenly it wasn't.

     It is clear the rot had been building for awhile.  Now the pool of dollars was shrinking and however you care to characterize the tussle between Wayne LaPierre, Oliver North, ad agency Ackerman-McQueen (to which PR had been hugely and expensively outsourced) and various factions of the Board of Directors, one thing stands out: they're fighting over money.

     Gun rights ain't in it.

     Ack-Mac never gave a flip about the Second Amendment, and why should they?  They're an advertising agency; caring about anything but the bottom line is a huge drawback in that line of work and the way you keep an ad agency toeing the mark is to ensure that getting your message across is crucial to their income.  Instead, Ack-Mac was given a great deal of freedom to determine what the message should be, and the end result was more than a little inward-looking and self-serving.  And out of touch with a lot of the membership.

     NRA's executives, meanwhile, isolated from much of the hurly-burly of messaging and outreach, appear to have relied on what Ack-Mac was telling them, and on having a compliant, bloated Board of Directors that could be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever the leadership wanted.

     Nobody, save a few members of the Board, was listening to the membership. 

     When the money started to get tighter, pretty much everyone reacted to save their jobs and didn't look to survival of the organization as a whole.

     Until Chris Cox got the axe, I was mainly just watching.  Watching in no little alarm, but figuring NRA would weather the storm and emerge, leaner, meaner and with a renewed sense of mission.  I'm starting to doubt that.  Wayne LaPierre's got the survival instinct of a cockroach -- and is just as much of a team player.  Whoever he's got to push overboard to stay in power, he will.  Board members who have spoken out publicly are finding themselves kicked off of committees -- pardon me, not invited to continue serving.

     Is it going to continue to be the National Rifle Association, or is it just hanging around to keep a few people living in the style to which they'd like to remain accustomed?

     2020 is coming.  Bloomberg's pockets are deep.  There's a even chance we're going to have a Democrat President in the next go-round, and the odds aren't much worse that he or she will have a (slim) Congressional majority as well.  If the NRA isn't focused in their core mission by then, it's going to mean a lot more than an executive or three losing their phony-baloney jobs.

     NRA's going off the rails and I don't know know how to fix it.  The people who can do the most, soonest, are in Fairfax, Virginia.  It's time they got to it.

A Quick Note

     I felt pretty lousy all day today, and did pretty much nothing except a little laundry.

Dizzy All Day

     I don't know if it's some kind of a bug or just the weather, but I have barely managed to attain and maintain verticality all day, and the sound effects inside my skull have been, well...unnerving.

     Did the sinus rinse thing a couple of hours ago and I'm better, but exhausted.  You know the saying about having backups for critical items, "Two is one and one is none?"  Days off seem to work like that for me.

A Glorious Fourth

     Okay, other than a small fire, we didn't take the advice of John Adams, who wrote of Independence Day, "It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more."*

     We nevertheless celebrated.  Our neighbors provided a lot of "shews ... [sounds like unto] guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations," Indiana having pleasantly few restrictions on what kinds of fireworks can be sold to the general public and the law allowing considerable leeway over the holiday in setting them off.

     Shopping Wednesday, the neighborhood market offered a special meal package for the holiday: four lovely hamburgers (USDA Prime!), big tasty ciabatta buns, choice of cheese (Colby Jack for us), ear corn and potato salad.  When they make things that easy and offer a substantial discount to boot, why fight it.  I wasn't all that sure of the potato salad -- their deli tends to err on the side of caution in terms of seasoning, but I couldn't've been more wrong: it was as good as the best home-made, rich and complex, with exactly the right amount of sweet pickles.

     Fired up the grill, which has seen all too little use in this rainy Spring and early Summer.  Tam and I cooperated to clean the corn (partially de-silked and with a bit of husk as sold; we cleared the rest of the silk, made sure the husks were clean and damp, and wrapped them in foil with a little butter, Chipotle salt and butter).  By then the coals were going well, so I put the corn on.

     The burgers had been out a while, salted, peppered and Worcestershire sauced.  You don't want to start them still cold!  Once the corn had a fair head start (it wants fifteen minutes on a hot grill; I had it around the edges, to get a little more time), I oiled up up a perforated grill pan, loaded the hamburgers on board and set it over the coals.

     Time passed.  My little covered grill is not super hot as such things go and the grill pan slows it even more.  Getting a burger to medium rare takes upwards of twenty minutes, all that lovely hardwood lump charcoal smoke swirling around them the whole time.  I took the corn off first and stacked it on a plate in the oven, then brought in three of the burgers and we prepped them, dished out potato salad, and unwrapped corn.

     It was wonderful!  Once my plate was loaded up, I fetched the fourth burger, now cooked to medium well, and prepped it like the others -- Coleman's mustard (how's that for ex-Colonial effrontery?), Heinz Chili Sauce (it'll make you sneer at ordinary catsup) and a slice of Colby Jack.

     The meal was -- if I say so myself -- delicious.  It was also way too much food.  Tam and I watched a couple of episodes of The Orville, munching steadily, and after a custard cup of potato salad each, our second ear of corn, and a few bites into the second burger, we looked at each other.  Tam spoke first, "This is great, but I don't think I have room left to finish it."

     I agreed.  I had nice sweet cherries in the fridge for dessert and never got them out.  Those hamburgers were huge!
    
     So it was a glorious Fourth, fireworks sizzling and popping outside and plenty of food on the table.
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* Of course, he thought we'd celebrate on the Second, instead of adding in the couple of days Congress spent faffing around with the Declaration.  Alas, John, no.

It's Independance Day

     Set your arguments aside for one day.  You are free to have them thanks to the edgy, far-out thinkers who thought the common man ought to have a voice -- a determining voice -- in the government that set his taxes and boundaries.   ...Eventually, the common woman got in on the deal, too.

     No other country started in violent revolution has ever made the kind of progress the United States has made across so many fields.  That's a fact, no matter what your politics are; I don't think it was luck and do think it is entirely related to our form of government.

"And Another Thing Broad Ripple Has Ruined Me For..."

     ...Is bacon.  Tam made the remark after blind taste-testing this morning but it could have as well been me, when I cooked up some supposedly high-end bacon I'd ordered from Amazon Prime Delivery Monday after working all night and being to sleepy to shop in person.

     You know, the kind of bacon sold sealed in plastic?  We just don't buy it; the corner market's got the good stuff, applewood-smoked in big slabs and sliced on arrival.  Per-pound cost is not much more than the best prepackaged stuff and I can buy it in small amounts, avoiding the problem of using up a whole package of bacon before it begins tasting stale.

     It has made us bacon snobs; even the fancy thick-sliced applewood and cherry-smoked bacon I cooked this morning, fresh from vacuum-sealed plastic, is just "meh" compared to the butcher-shop stuff.

     Okay, that's the pretty much worst sort of 21st-Century food-hipsterism, but is it still pretentious when there's a real difference in taste and quality?

     (An omelette cures many ills -- as part of a filling with diced portobello mushroom caps and Swiss cheese, this assembly-line* bacon is okay.)
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* But isn't it all assembly-line, really?  All commercial meat comes from an assembly, or more properly, disassembly line; some meat, like bacon and ham, then gets additional processing (and some gets even more).  I suspect the real difference in bacon comes from a slightly less-aggressive use of preservatives and shorter time from smoking to selling for the stuff we buy wrapped in brown paper at the butcher counter, versus the pale-pink and curiously-regular plastic-sealed flitches I grew up eating, two slices at a time.

2 July

     No, I don't have any comments on tennis-shoe patterns, activism or the overly-shallow treatment of what passes for historical knowledge in many circles these days.

     Nope, here's what I've got for today: we celebrate it on the official date, the Fourth of July, but it was on this date that an assorted group of thinkers, politicians, polemicists and "direct action" men, all of them white, many of them well-off, many of them slave-owners, put their signatures on the document that touched light to the fuse of events that would result in the ethical, moral, political and technological advances that would, over not too many years as history is counted, put an end to slavery.

     At least some of them knew it, too.  And signed anyway.

The Lack Of A Posting This Morning

     Awake at six a.m.?  Check.  Cats fed?  Check.  Not ill?  Check.  Slept?

     ...Um.  Not so much.

     Along about dinner time last night, I had a call from work.

     "Along about dinner" being that point in the process where I had two New York strip steaks and a batch of mushrooms in a cast-iron grill pan on the stove, having decided it was too hot to grill outdoors.  My right knee was hurting and while I hadn't quite been in pajamas all day, what I was wearing wasn't suited to anything more formal than weeding a garden, and maybe not even that.

     Dinner was at that point where you either finish cooking it and eat it, or you throw it away. Dinner for two.

     So the phone rings and it's one of the Master Control techs, reporting a pressurization issue at the unstaffed North Campus.  We monitor a couple of things up there that are kept dry by keeping them full of dry air (from a sophisticated compressor-dehydrator*) or, as a backup, dry nitrogen from tall, 3500-psi tanks of the gas.  The system only runs 5 psi above ambient, but it's a critical 5 psi; what we're keeping dry runs a thousand feet, carrying high voltage, high-current VHF and UHF energy and if it gets wet, the connection points (one every twenty feet) can begin to arc and heat up, melting their support insulators.  This doesn't end well.

     Dry air is fed into the system from a single point but there are two different monitors.  I am rewiring alarm connections, and one of them failed shortly after my last work.  It had been intermittent; I thought I had found the wiring problem but I had not.  Hey, no problem, we have two alarm sensors; I asked Master Control be especially vigilant until I could return to the North Campus.

     And that was why the tech had called: the second alarm had tripped. 

     Maybe it was a false indication, maybe not.  There's a while left once the alarm goes, at 2.75 psi.  Nothing for it but to finish cooking, eat dinner in some haste, change into slightly more civilized attire (it's always 65°F at the North Campus, unless something has gone very wrong), grab a few bottles of water, and head out.

*  *  *

     Arrive to discover the compressor was dead.  D-E-A-D, no breakers tripped, motor windings reading less than half the normal DC resistance. 

     System pressure was just under 2 psi.  I started up the dry-nitrogen system and the regulator was wonky: the tank was low.  I set flow rate with the valve so it was sitting at 3.5 psi to repressurize, loaded all one-hundred and fifty pounds of the compressor-dehydrator onto a cart, and hauled it to the the workshop in the far end of the building.

     A few more checks later, it was obvious there was no fixing the compressor this side of an electric-motor shop.  I have a spare, of course.  It's tricky to change; you can't get at the mounting bolts, so you remove the support plate from the shockmounts.  The plate is held by bolts through the rubber shockmounts from underneath and, you guessed it, they won't support the 60-some pounds of the thing  upside down or sideways and the feet of the unit aren't tall enough to let you reach under.  Nope, one hangs the enclosure over the edge of the cart and removes one bolt at a time.  A bit of un-plumbing, some electrical, and it was out.  The same thing in reverse to install the replacement (after a spine-freezing moment when I read "230V/50Hz" at the top of the label on it, until I read on down to the description of how to strap it for 120V and the maker's admission that it would run on 60-cycle power, too).  Checked it was set up for wall-socket juice and proceeded to test the finished installation.  This is quick to write but it's nearly two hour's work.

     It ran fine!

     Hauled it back to the far end of the building, plugged it in, and started it up without connecting the output.  The compressor feeds a finned cooling section and then a pair of "molecular sieves" that remove the last bit of moisture from the air.  There's a clever arrangement of valves, one of them run by a solenoid controlled by a thirty-second timer: every half a minute, one of the sieves gets backflushed to clear any captured moisture, while the other is online.  Thirty seconds later, they trade places.  If the thing has been shut down, you need to run it to clear them both out, a process that can take up to an hour.

     The dry air is held in a small tank at about 70 psi, and fed out through a regulator at 2 to 10 psi, so the compressor can run at a reasonable pressure and comfortable duty cycle, and so there's sufficient pressure for the backflush.  Drying it out, all you need to do is let it spill air into the room and make sure compressor run time isn't excessive.   --For an hour or more.  There's a nice front-panel light to show when it's making dry air again.

     I passed the time checking nitrogen pressure and flow, and pondering if I was too sleepy to change out a big tank if necessary.  Cleaned up the shop, puttered around at this and that, and an hour later--

     An hour and a half later, there was still a big "Humidity Alarm" light.  It hadn't sneezed any water out the drain line, either.  And the more I listened, the more that solenoid valve cycling sounded just a little wrong.

     Replacement valves are amazingly expensive.  Rebuild kits for them aren't and I keep a couple on hand whenever the budget permits.  (Okay, I admit it: I sneaked the second one in years ago.  There are a lot of fiddly little bits to replace and "Two is one and one is none," if one of the pieces goes missing!)

     Unplugged the compressor-dehydrator and horsed it back onto the cart, all 175 pounds of it.  Back to the shop, cover off, the valve is buried deep in the guts of the thing but I have been at it before; there's a trick to it.

     Two of the air connections are "prestolock" types and there's no removing them in situ, period.  Out of situ, maybe, but it's not worth it.  The drain line is nothing, just a short section of flexible tubing that pokes through the back panel. The fourth connection is a section of flexible line I replaced a decade ago, softer line connected with a hose clamp and barb.  That, you remove with a razor blade, and lose a short section every time.†

     The valve is tucked into a tiny gap in the middle of air line, wiring, tanks, molecular sieves, the compressor and sundry ancillary items.  You can unbolt it from the back panel, then wriggle it up far enough to remove the solenoid coil (thank you, ASCO "Red Hat" design!), set that to one side. thread the drain line out, cut the input line at the barb, and move it out and rotate the assembly so you can get at the four 1/4"-20 bolts that hold the two halves of the valve together.  There's barely room to get a wrench on them and they're snugged down tight, but it is possible to take it apart.

     That gives you one half still plumbed into the machine, with one dual valve seat and four O-rings on it; and another half with the four-part solenoid plunger assembly -- no, make that five parts -- a complex double-ended commutating inner valve, a single valve seat and two more O-rings.  Except for the threaded outer solenoid tube (got your 1" box wrench handy?), it's all force-fit and stuck together with a couple of years worth of gloop.

     Take everything apart, clean it with alcohol, dry, lube the O-rings with silicone grease and the valve seats with a tiny dab of molybdenum disulfide in silicone, keeping any excess away from the rest of the valve.  The solenoid plunger has a key that engages the commuting valve, and an internal spring and brass tube that complicates the task.  The other end gets rebuilt in place; the seat is very tight and has to be prised out with tiny screwdrivers, and the far side takes a pair of tiny O-rings that you'd never find if they hit the floor and rolled away.

     (It was at this point that I noticed my right knee wasn't taking weight very well.  Oh, well, the job still has to be done.)

     The two halves get mated up and awkwardly bolted tight, it's moved close to position and the coil assembly is slid back on, and a new retaining clip is installed.

     New retaining clip-- Rats, I'd left it on the workbench.

     Left it, in fact, right next to a short coil spring that goes inside the body of the valve, around the solenoid plunger right where it engages the commutating inner valve.  You know, the thing that's not all that easy to put in even when you follow the correct procedure.

The solenoid plunger tube sticking out of the valve body and the spring that's supposed to be inside the brass part.

     Nothing for it but the valve's got to come back apart.  That takes time but eventually the big half is back on the bench.  Rather than unscrew the plunger tube and risk tearing up the O-ring, I used thin needlenose pliers to hold the plunger as I slid the commutating part out, put the spring on, and slid the inner valve back in place.  It only took three tries to get everything all lined up.

     Next, reassembly, with all the fun that entails, and by then I was getting a little punchy, having to slow down and check myself at every step.

     Got it all back together, tightening down the last hose clamp, plugged it in and hit the switch.  The compressor started up, gauges fluttered up the scale and thirty seconds later, the drain line sneezed out a couple of tablespoonfuls of dirty water as one of the molecular sieves ran its first purge cycle.

     I put the outer cover back on, hauled it back to the far end of the building, wrestled all 200 pounds of the thing off the cart, plugged it in and started it.  An hour and a half later, the "Humidity Alarm" light went out for good (after a half hour of off again/on again: one sieve was a lot wetter than the other) and I reconnected it, shut the dry-nitrogen valves at tank and manifold, then watched, adjusted, waited and adjusted again to get the system back to normal pressure.

     I limped around putting tools away while getting it all stabilized and finally left after another hour. Total time from arrival to departure, eight hours.  On no sleep.  My knee was hurting bad enough to make up for it, at least.

     Driving back home just ahead of sunrise was, well, "interesting."  I texted my boss, ate a snack and took ibuprofen, and made it to the bed right before I fell soundly asleep.

     That's why there wasn't a post this morning.
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* You can think of it as being like the thing in your garage you use to air up tires and maybe operate small tools, but it's not.  The compressor itself and its motor is a single unit the size of a sewing machine and twice the weight; the output is cooled, regulated and run through a "molecular sieve" to remove any trace of moisture.  The whole assembly is about the size of three sewing machines. They cost about what I usually pay when I buy a used car.

† There are various barb designs and some of them purport to be more removable than others.  In my experience, after a year or more of being compressed, the hose cannot be removed by anyone of normal strength.  YMMV.