Nazzo Fast

     This morning as I was ladling out breakfast,* Tam was bemoaning that she "...needed to turn out 500 words for Z_____† today," and I remarked, with my usual sensitivity and tact, "Aw, you can do that without even sweating blood."‡

     And now here I am, mind as blank as a fresh snowfall before dawn.  That'll learn me to crack wise! Or not.
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* French Toast. This does not normally call for a ladle, even here at Roseholme Cottage, but some mornings...!

† Z_____?  Yes.  "X_____"is clearly useless here as a synonym for "J. Random Contextually-Defined Placeholder Name Instead Of A Real One That Wouldn't Mean Anything To Most Readers Anyway" and I can hardly be expected to spell it out except for this once, so: Z_____.  There's only one problem, that readers may confuse it with "Z," the nickname of Owen Zastava Pitts, whom it ain't and who slays other sorts of monsters in another sort of world.  So that's settled.

‡ Based on the well-known principle that states, "Writing is easy.  All you have to do is stare at a blank page until your eyes bleed."

Ow

     My neck hurts.  Still.  Maybe another night's sleep...?

     ETA: Oh, and guess what?  If the replacement part arrives today (Friday), I get to do the same thing that hurt my back all over again!

Your Back, Let Me Strain It For You

     It was either wrestling with tires -- a mess largely resolved by mid-afternoon yesterday, I'm pleased to say, and I drove the Hot Needle of Inquiry home yesterday evening -- or working on an especially awkward rack of vehicularly-mounted RF equipment, but something has done my back no good at all.

     How awkward?  Lay on your belly.  Do so on a porch or landing such that your calves are hanging in the air.  Okay, now rear up so you can reach over a 7" barrier, and reach into and see into a vertical opening 5.25" high by 18" wide by just about two feet deep. On the far back wall of this space, there is a device with a couple of fine-thread F connectors at top and bottom, parallel to the wall and right up against it.  Okay, here's a 12 mm wrench;* disconnect 'em and barrel them together.  There's a 4-degree-F breeze blowing up your coat, the cables are dressed so tight they can't flex back as you loosen the connectors and the uplink vehicle has been out of service for a week and a half.  No pressure!

     By the end of the day, after that and related gymnastics only slightly less awkward, along with giving a high-precision TCXO time to actually stabilize (far longer than you might expect), the thing was, at least, working.  Lacking the widget I bypassed, it is slightly less convenient to operate (you have to set up the same frequency on two different inputs of the monitoring receiver, one for uplink-monitor out and another for the actual return from the satellite) and this is being put forward as a Major Failing, never you mind that it's $250 L-band RF switch not actually required to make the million-dollar truck do its job.

     Come to think of it, the pain in my back is about half sore or strained muscles and half sheer annoyance at being expected to excrete a specific component or make Radio Shack start carrying it in a blister pack for $1.298.  Umm, make that three-quarters real, one-quarter mental.  No, seven-eighths real.

     Aw, to heck with it.  I'm gonna go soak in the tub.  There's a mandatory staff meeting today, probably to tell us how wonderful we all are except for not being wish-granting rainbow unicorns and then announce pay cuts.  I can't hardly wait.
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* Every male F connector in the universe is 7/16" across the flats.  All of them.  Always.  ...Except for the (very high-quality) ones made by Canare.  This works fine if you were expecting it, rather than finding it out after you have got yourself into a position only a contortionist could love and have dropped your very own personal 7/16" wrench into a space you cannot see into and are fishing around for it blindly, hoping the people who built the truck were considerate enough to not put any exposed 120 VAC or high-current 12 VDC back there where you're groping.  Since I am neither dead not burned, you may assume either they were or I was lucky.

I Ignored The State Of The Union

     I often do.  Some well-off Harvard or Yale graduate, nattering on, a little about things he doesn't have a firm grasp of and a whole lot of empty, rah-rah claptrap?  Got better things to do with my time, thanks.  (Like change a flat.  Entertainment-wise, it's a step or three better than POTUS SOTU.)

     But the Chicago politician had to return to the topic of gun control like a dog wandering back to snack on a well-remembered pool of his own sick: when it comes to gun control, limiting the basic human right of self-defense, Mr. Obama averred, "I intend to keep trying, with or without Congress...."

     Probably without, especially after the next round of elections.  Philosophy aside for the momemnt, it's a losing issue outside of LA, SF, Chi and the festering oligarchies of New England but he just can't keep his tongue off that frozen flagpole.  How many more tries before his tongue freezes to it, I wonder?

     Philosophy back on: that's even before we come to "morality" of makin' a law-abiding Granny walk home from the store through a bad neighborhood unarmed, while young scofflaw hoodlums get their choice of weapons to use against her.  Mr. President, most folks with gray hair don't get their own Uzi-toting Secret Service Praetorian Guard.  Maybe you forgot that?  --Or maybe you just don't care.  Some well-off Harvard or Yale graduate, what's he know about a fixed income or a paid-for house in a neighborhood going downhill?

Gonna Hafta Deal With That Bad Tire Today

     ...Time was, I could just let the menfolk take it behind the shed with a shotgun and blammo!  Problem well, not really solved; we'd still had to go to the junkyard and find a wheel with a decent-enough tire on it.  In This Modern Age, it'll mean a trip to garage where I bought the tires.  With any luck, they'll be able to stick a new stem in the thing and the tire will still be in good condition, or good enough; I can take it to work and maybe get a garage downtown to put it back on my car, thereby avoiding further messing-about with the teensy-weensy car jack, the itsy-bitsy spare and all the other saccharine bits and bobs comprising the tiny-car spare-tire kit.

     Anyway, that's the plan.

Composed Of Suck, Fail And Triumph

     This day.

     I did finally solve a nagging problem with an accursed Ku-band uplink system, which could have been collateral damage caused by either A) a loaner encoder that suffered a power supply failure that made the case "hot" to ground by 120 VAC or so, ahead of the fuse or B) a fancy dual-source, automatic-switching power strip that decided to add series resistance in the neutral of one source -- and connect it to the neutral of the other input, while also showing signs of control-electronics-insanity.  The problem (in a well over $100,000.00) piece of equipment was, however, not that.  Nope; it was actually fine.  But the replacement-loander encoder wasn't sending out any 10 MHz reference along with the modulated L-band, and that was driving the widget (an SSPB, an' don't we love our alphabet soup?) nutso.  All I had to do was be reminded of that by a factory support engineer, and then dig through the menus to turn the reference output on, and voila, it worked.

     Here's what didn't work: in cold weather, my car tires tend to leak.  Every three days or so, left rear and right front have to be topped up.   There's free air at work, in the equally-free dark and cold, but who's complaining? I started up my car at the end of my day, let it warm for a minute* and pulled over to the overhead door nearest the air.  Left rear, from 20 (!!) to 30 psi, all okay.  Right front, put the filler on it and it started hissing.  So I reseated it.  Still hissing.  But there was  a pressure reading, low, and I brought it up to 28, disconnected, still hissing.  Oh, thinks I, the valve, she are stuck.  Put the filler back on, blip it--  Hissing.  Repeat -- and soon after taking the filler away, POP!  The end of the stem flew off!  I put my thumb over  the open end on the wheel, 'cos I am clever like that, muttering, "Oh, no, no, no..."  But it was Too Late.  The stem had broken at the lowest thread and carried the valve with it.  There was nothing to be done but let the air out and put the spare on.

     The spare in a Hyundai Accent, at least of a certain vintage, looks like a joke and not a nice one.  It's below tiny, an appetizer-sized tire on a monstrously distorted, undersized, deep-dish wheel.  I prised it free from the ancient padding where it has been since the car was new, took a good look and called Tam for a ride home.  But my car was still blocking an overhead door and I was going to have to put that wee little tire on it and move it to a real parking space.  There was no other option.  Cold, dark, and out of options.

    The jack is twee, too, and I couldn't find the handle.  Nor could I find the Company's nice floor jack, which I would've borrowed and never thought twice.  So I borrowed a honkin' big Philips instead.

     Oh, the temperature was in the vicinity of 4.  F.  And the asphalt was darned cold.  I borrowed a scrap carpet square, broke the lug nuts free (this involved me doing an impromptu Tarantella on a cross wrench. Inelegant but it works), jacked the car up one half turn of fine metric threads at a time, got the wheel off, manhandled the spare into place, lowered the jack with the same endless repetition of half-turns, and watched the tiny spare compress, compress...  There was a vertical inch and a half, easy, between the wheel and the parking lot when it took the weight from the dinky jack.  And my phone was ringing.

     Tam.  Outside the fence in the visitor's lot (from which my location was quite effectively screened), wondering if I had been abducted by the NSA or what.  I mumbled some kind of explanation, put the borrowed tools and kneeler back, and eased my car into a nearby space.

     Oh, when I was putting the jack, trunk floor and so on back, guess what I found hooked to the underside of the trunk floor?  Guess?  ...Yeah, the jack handle.  Well, how convenient.

     I eventually let Tam in the gate, we moved the tire to her car along with my briefcase, etc., etc. and headed home.  And that, dear friends, that is the "suck and fail" portion of the festivities.

     The tire needs a new stem.  It may need a new tire, too.

     On the other hand, double gloves and a ushanka-style cap made a huge diffidence in comfort. So at least there's that.  And I have certainly now broken in my new gloves. 
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* Look, unless you're leaping right onto the high-speed freeway or driving a very, very old car, that's all it takes.  Really.  

Geosynchronized

     The Russians are watching!  The Russians are watching!

     --India, they're watching.  This is the Clarke-belt view from an Elektro-L weather satellite 

Baby, It's Cold Outside

     And not in any cute-1940s-duet way either; it's just blamed cold: 3 degrees, 30 mile an hour winds (with gusts overnight as high as 50!).  Get stuck outdoors in this stuff and you're at risk for frostbite almost before you start to feel cold.

     The sirens never stopped running last night.  Between slick-frozen roads, space-heater mishaps and trees falling before the combination of temperature and wind speed, emergency services have not lacked work.

     The Midwest isn't Hell -- but at the right time of year, you can buy a bus ticket to the coldest circle from here.

The Whole Wide World

     The title of this post is the title of a 1996 film about the life -- or some of the life -- of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, perhaps best known as the man who breathed life into Conan the Barbarian.  He wrote considerably more than that; in fact, he wrote quite a lot, especially for a man who took an early exit.

     Howard's own story is altogether too complex to cover in a blog post.  The Whole Wide World doesn't even try; based on a memoir by Novalyne Price Ellis, who dated him off and on for several years prior to his death, it's a fascinating look at the writer at the peak and abrupt end of his career.  Well-written, the brilliant Vincent D'onofrio sinks right into the character of Howard and Renee Zellweger seems equally at home as Ms. Price. 

     It's a relatively understated film but has considerable emotional impact.  Unless your taste in movies runs to nothing but, well, barbarian swordsmen and fighting sailors, you might like it, too.

The Snoozer(s)

     Rannie, napping next to Tam this morning.  One of them didn't want to be in the photo.

Ow

     Jeepers, my back hurts!  I did hardly anything yesterday -- swept snow from my car and the walks, shoveled a very little -- but perhaps even that was too much while still recovering.  I certainly slept with great enthusiasm, all of last night and most of yesterday during the day.

     Today will be mostly indoors, I think, and nothing too strenuous.  By Monday morning, we're supposed to get another 3" of snow, plus or minus.  Once that's fallen, back to the digging-out, or sweeping out if it stays cold enough (or gets cold enough again -- we may flirt briefly with 40 degrees this afternoon, forty above, that is).  That's one virtue of the extreme cold, at least the snow stays lightweight.  But will the warm-ish spell augur wetter, heavier snow?  Stay tuned for our next exciting episode!

The Sun-Worshipper