New Year's Eve Day

     By dint of remarkable luck and a complete absence of planning, I have New Year's Eve off for once.  All day, in fact.  --Some planning was involved, I guess, but not for a holiday.  I was holding back a vacation day in case Mom needed additional surgery, which has been put in hold in favor of less-invasive treatment.  So the left-over day was "use it or lose it," and today was the very last chance to use it.

     So far, I have slept in extravagantly, followed by a breakfast of such stunning decadence that Tamara demurred on one course: she skipped the stuffed cherry pepper omelet (pickled green cherry peppers, with a thin slice of prosciutto wrapped around some kind of hard, light cheese filling each one -- dice with some olives and hot pickle and you've got a fine omelet filling).  Along with that (and her choice), a small stack of Swedish pancakes with blueberry jam between each layer and a little applewood-smoked bacon on the side.  Yum! 

"Well, Here I Am..."

     ...Which is one of the last lines from the Firefly episode, "Objects In Space."  Set during a sleep shift, it has a certain dreamlike or nightmarish quality, which is about how I feel at the two-thirds point of the three days that go from "early" to "earlier" and back to my normal shift, when I pull one of the earlybird fill-ins.  Usually they're just one week in three, but between holidays and vacations, I have been the predawn engineer every other Sunday-Monday for several weeks now and more to follow.

     I'm not complaining -- it's mostly indoors and there's no heavy lifting! -- but between lost sleep and being awake when one usually sleeps and vice-versa, I inevitably get a funny Monday evening stretch of wakefulness, having come home and stayed awake as long as I could manage, then slept deeply and fast and bobbed back to the surface a long way from Tuesday morning.  I'm not usually awake enough to take on anything very challenging, so I just read, watch TV or hang out online for awhile, drifting until the sandman calls once more.

     Indeed.

I'm Tired

     ...Tired of running as fast as I can just to not lose ground too quickly.  The bank that holds my home loan keeps pressing me to swap my 30-year, fixed-rate loan for a 15-year one, same payments, fixed and lower interest, but they want $2.5K up front and it all sounds too good to be true.  What's in it for them?  Then there's the little problem of just having bought a car and therefore not having a couple grand to sling around.

     Found a network of deep cracks in the driver's-side front tire of that car, along the sidewall near the rim.  Not sure what that is but it doesn't look promising.  May need new tires before winter is over.   

     I need a new mattress.  The one I have now was old when I moved to this house, seven years ago, and it's hurting my back to sleep on it.  (I don't use box springs, that's way too soft.  I'd sleep on a 3" slab of foam like an RV mattress but it's too much trouble finding the stuff and it's unfriendly to fitted sheets when you do).  Well, there's $500 or more and that's not happening soon.

     There are still funky things with the plumbing and some of the natural gas piping seems iffy to me in terms of support and routing; I've got a plumber coming in to have a look and give me estimates.  I'll do some water plumbing myself but we're short on shutoffs and some of the things I want redone had been plumbed with field-crimped PEX, fine if you're a plumber and use the tools all day every day but impractical for doing one's own work.  Yeah, more expense.

     Meanwhile, my peers and I went without raises from 2008 until, h'mm, a year and a half ago, and that was 1%, with  more of the same to follow.  Not complaining, either: at least a half-dozen of the other technical-type people have been laid off.  Meanwhile the grocer, the mechanic, the utilities and skilled trades all want more.  At least gasoline prices are down.

     But it's tiring.  At the end of it, if I am very lucky, I'll have a house paid for and enough coming in to pay utilities and eat.  And that's if I work until I'm 72.  50 is the new 30, right?

     UPDATE: So, the plumber just added some hangers for the line; he used the good bubbles and found no leaks.   But the "Check Engine" light came on on my way home from work.  Oh, and have I mentioned we haven't had any dial tone since Friday?  Internet service is int rmitt nt, too, which makes Tam exercise her vocabulary in interesting ways.  I just ran the phone tree with AT&T twice; asking for high-speed Internet repair got me to "Your call did not go through."  Asking for phone line repair got me deep enough into the automated process that they sent a big old slightly-hot jolt of ringing voltage down the line, which did make my phone ring (weak ramping to normal) and lo, we now have dial tone -- and the robot proudly told me, "The problem does not appear to be in AT&T's equipment."  This is incorrect: there's a water leak at the neighborhood terminal box (or whatever you call it, honkin' big transition from glass or a fat copper digital multipair cable or wigwaggy-flaggy to the old-fashioned  UTP) and it's messed up our phone service before and been "repaired," I suspect with a wad of chewing gum which has now dried out.

Patrami Hash?

     As I suspected, thick-cut pastrami makes a very nice hash -- diced potatoes, diced pastrami, a little onion, a little this and that.  Yum!  I scrambled an egg in the middle of mine and splashed on a little hot sauce.  Any of the brisket-based deli meats will do (or you own home-made brisket or roast beef leftovers) for hash -- in my experience, the home-cooked ones are best but it's hard to go too far wrong.

"Family Christmas" Was Saturday Evening

     And it was nice.  Some years, it's been kind of stressful but this year everyone who could attend was determined to get along.  My great-nephew and his step-brother (ages 5-and-half and 4-and-a-half) went on some kind of sugar-fueled small-boy rampage involving new toys and a game of catch with plastic cars, but even that was relatively pleasant and avoided running into people or furniture.

     My Mom gave new anti-SAD lights to the adults, which will be a welcome addition to the office at Roseholme Cottage.  Look out, short days, Mom's doin' Science back at you! 

A Happy Day-After-Boxing-Day To You!

     I do hope the Brits and Canadians aren't too bruised?  --After an entire day devoted to pugilism, I mean.  But they do have so much fun with it.

     Christmas (etc.) traditions around the world are not quite as uniform as you might think, and those socks or that tie may be a much better present than you realized -- at least, if you encounter Iceland's Yule Cat!  (No, not just in the funny pages.)  So I hope you neither cried nor pouted, and that you received a nice new sweater in plenty of time.  (Rannie approves, BTW.  But she would.)

About That Clumsy Anti-gun PSA

     --The one that shows a child taking a handgun from his mother's dresser and bringing it to school so his teacher can "take it away?"  Even the State of California Department of Justice (Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General) "Tips for Gun Owners" page clearly addresses the basic notion, showing it to be dangerous and a violation of state law.  (Yes, California has "safe storage" laws, with the express intent of preventing minors from having unsupervised access to firearms.  Agree or not, there they are).

     ...And the page's "Rules For Kids" section is straight from NRA's "Eddie Eagle" gun safety program: Stop!  Don't touch!  Leave the area.  Tell an adult.  AG Kamala Harris and the NRA, at nearly opposite ends of the political spectrum, agree word-for-word on what a child should do when encountering an unsecured firearm -- and it isn't "take it to school and give it to your teacher."

     I found that out with a fifteen-second web search. The production company could have done the same but instead produced a message so inept that even many anti-gun people are crying foul or "false flag," and just this once, I don't blame them.   Oh, it's fun when one's opponents make mistakes, but this was so over-the top that it's almost sad -- or, if applied in the real world, tragic.

     (The video has been made "private" on YouTube, but the producer's web-page still has a Vimeo version, which shows up in search engines if you search on her name.)

The Fink On The Shelf

     Every Day, No Days Off uses the Shelf Elf to wish you a Merry -- and un-surveilled -- Christmas!  Never thought I'd agree with Dick Cheney about this, but in this one instance...well.

Holiday Just In Case

     Internet service at Roseholme Cottage has gone very iffy this Christmas Eve, so I'm posting this (with a timer on it) while I can.

     Merry Christmas to you and yours, or appropriate wishes for whatever midwinterish holiday your family celebrates on or about this day.  Humans have been marking the shortest day of the year since about the time they figured out there was one, and whether by Divine Plan, some careful calendar-nudging and/or chance, quite a few religions have significant dates that fall near it.  Celebrate!  Feast! --And know that the seasons cycle onward, the planet yet spins, and sunlight and warmth will return.  There are a couple of months of heavy slogging to get through, and fortified by this holiday, slog we will. 

Ferguson, Berkeley...

     I was going to link to the latest news out of Berkeley, MO, which is right next to Ferguson, MO in more ways than the map shows.  Alas, the "major news sites" are so full of adware and tracking bugs that with ad- and script-blocking turned on, most won't even load at all.  You don't need that junk sneaking into your computer, so the best I have is a snippet of live-streamed video in which some idiot lobs a firework at the gas station where the latest mess occurred, while the place is crowded with both police and local citizens.

     Tempting as it might be to just let the whole place burn to the ground  (the dead, after all, get along just fine and treat everyone around them exactly the same), I doubt anyone could throw a lit firework into a gas station from far enough away to be safe if the place did go up.  The act is a microcosm of the greater mess: if the fire catches, neither side is getting out alive.  They're packed in too close and, like the crowd at the gas station, when a new ball of flame arcs in, they're just milling about.

     Not unexpectedly, a nearby convenience store was looted, too, and you can find raw video of that on the web, too.  One of them concentrates more on another amateur photojournalist, stepping over debris and through a shattered door with her smartphone held high, looking around as though expecting a clerk to pop up from behind the jumbled mess of the counter.

     Those of us on the sidelines are milling about just as uselessly as the crowd at the gas station, everyone trotting out their old familiar slogans and attitudes, examining the situation though the lens of our own preconceptions and -- surprise! -- reaching the same old moss-covered conclusions.  In the latest mess, police shot a young man who they say pointed a gun at them -- and indeed, a gun was found at the scene.  There doesn't look to be any video of the event, so it's all down to eyewitness testimony.  Nope, there is surveillance video and it appears to support the officer's version of events.  Will that help?  Time will tell.

     Might be time everyone took a giant step back.  Even if just for one day.  25th of December ought to be a suitable choice.

     If you were looking to me for answers or even well-formulated questions, better keep looking.  I haven't got any.  Things didn't get this bad in St. Louis -- or anywhere else --  overnight and they're unlikely to get better in any greater hurry.  But it sure wouldn't hurt if everyone would stop stirring the pot.

In Anti-Gun Land....

     .....Every day is Rat-On-Your-Parents Day!

     Yes, go look -- it's a PSA that suggests kids ought to take guns from home and bring them to their teachers at school. (So they can "feel safe.")  Kids, don't do this.  It doesn't end well for you or your family.  It's a Federal crime -- several Federal crimes, in fact.

     Watch it and picture, instead of a gun, a Bible, a Torah or a science textbook that contradicts their account of creation.  Maybe Mom or Dad's copy of National Review or Mother Jones, a union membership card, a Masonic ring....  "Here, Teacher.  I don't feel safe with this in my house."

     This isn't a good trend.  The video shows a clean, orderly home; the adult female, presumably the child's mother, is well-groomed and calm; there is no sign the child's home is anything but a little above-average, or that the child himself is mistreated.  The only "bad" thing in the home is a poorly-secured firearm (and just how well have you childproofed your power outlets and household chemicals?).  But it's A-OK in the PSA producer's view for the child to substitute his own judgement for that of his parent -- or at least it is when the topic is a G-U-N.

     Maybe this PSA just ignorantly well-meant but I figure book-burnings aren't all that far behind.  "Wrongthink!  Ungood!"  And oh, how we will come to love Big Brother.

My Job Description Says "Tech."

     In fact, it says "Engineering Technician."  It does not say "Witch."  When you call me with a minor problem in something I'm not all that familiar with, five minutes before it absolutely, positively needs to be running -- and it's able to do so as-is -- it's probably not going to be changed to suit your desires. 

     Maybe next time, you'll check it well ahead of need?  Probably not.

     The list of co-workers I'd willingly go mountain-climbing with keeps getting shorter.  "Oh, damn, all these carabiners are no good.  And wow, that rope sure is frayed...."  Harrumph.