Storm Update

Hurricane Sandy passed by pretty much uneventfully.  No flooding, no trees down, no power loss - not even a flicker.  The weekly summer storms we had this past season were much, much worse than this in terms of straight line wind speed and rate of rainfall. 

Considering the 33+ families in the U.S. that will have one less place setting to manage this Thanksgiving because of this event, the discovery that my lower door jamb in my garage is slightly rotten and lets in a dribble of water when it rains for two days straight merits no mention whatsoever.  

Our hearts and prayers go out to the ones truly affected by the storm.

Nothing to See Here. Move Along.

This is a scan of one of the pages of a flyer that came with one of my kid’s Lego sets.  As I look upon this scene one question comes to mind: “What the heck kind of community is this modeled after, anyway?”

What am I talking about?  Well, let’s look at all of the obvious criminal activity (simultaneously!) going on in broad daylight within one block of a police station:

• One guy overturning a trashcan on the street
• Two guys breaking into an ATM
• One guy breaking out of prison (or trying to break someone else out with a crowbar)
• One guy who has just stolen something (maybe gold) fleeing an officer by driving on the wrong side of the road (either that or he has decided to park his car on the wrong side of the road next to a fire hydrant in front of a police station)
• One guy mugging a lady
• One guy on a moped who has just stolen something (probably money) fleeing an officer 
• One arrest in progress on the street
• One guy stripping a sportscar in the distance (I don’t think he is just changing a flat based on the way he is dressed)
• Two (or three, its hard to tell if the guy holding the money is a gang member or a cop) guys being arrested on a distant rooftop as two more guys zipline down to their comrades.

Smiling cops (one of which appears to be dressed in riot gear and waving a gold brick) block the roads and K-9 units and multiple command centers have been dispatched.  Meanwhile, an officer with a bullhorn shouts something to the chaos surrounding him -  perhaps he’s asking if anyone remembered to bring their firearm in to work today...

I wonder what life is like two whole blocks away from the police station.  Frankly, based on what I am seeing here, I half-expect Snake Blitzkin to be living there.  I have no idea what is going on in this neighborhood of Lego City but it seems that an airstrike is long overdue.

If this is what life is like around the Police Station, I can only imagine how bad things are around the Firehouse...

The Gibberish Before the Storm

The grill has been moved.  The deck chairs have been placed in the garage.  The outdoor table has been nestled against the railings.  A while ago the 75-foot trees in the backyard were removed in response to this summer’s unrelenting storm-a-thon...  

In other words, the hatches are as battened as they are gonna get.  

Here I sit writing this while enjoying a nice glass of imported sake... You know, drinking this with the right cheese/cracker combo really brings out the full-bodied flavor of the alpha particles.  So I guess it’s now a race between “tumor” and “super powers”.  Frankly, as long as it’s not a tie, I’ll be cool with either outcome.

Speaking of sake, I cannot believe how hard it was to get this stuff.  Oh, it’s not like I put all that much effort into it.  It’s just that it’s 2012 and I’m a Generation-X’er, see, so I kind of expect things to be pretty much magicked into existence at my whim. I simply can’t believe I had to, like, drive to more than one place than Siri commanded me to go to get the stuff.

I wouldn’t even be drinking this now if it weren’t for GeneSplicer casually mentioning the beverage several weeks ago.  Combined with the fact that I am almost hyperbolically easily swayed and the fact that GeneSplicer is more than trustworthy when it comes to alcohol, his “casual mention” morphed into a “Ludovico Technique scene from The Clockwork Orange imperative” so off to the liquor store I went.

The ABC store employee I spoke with earlier this week about slaking my now-unquenchable rice-wine lust was less than helpful.  I asked “Where can I find sake?”

I wish I was kidding about this next part, but I am not.  This slob (doing what I now recognize as the “morbidly obese baby-boomer world-weary slouch”) shifted his mass slightly in my direction and said “Sake?!?  No sake!!” in a Japanese accent that was spot-on... assuming you were a character from a 1940’s Bugs Bunny cartoon, of course.

Slightly sickened, I left and went about my life.

Today, I took advantage of the impending storm to do some city-based Geocaching and knocked out half a dozen while wearing my Invisibility Cloak.  For those of you that don’t know and/or simply can’t be bothered to click on the hyperlink embedded earlier in this sentence, my “invisibility cloak” is simply an off-the-rack Day-Glo orange safety vest.  I wear it to find caches that are in highly peopled areas, ironically to not draw attention to myself while I am mucking about with lampposts or hotel air conditioning units. As far as I know, it works great - especially today with so many utility guys around.  

Where it does not work well whatsoever is inside of an upscale wine shop, I found out today (a cache was near one, so I went in, you see).   Oh, they were polite enough, but, since I was covered in mud and burrs and brambles (they weren’t all in parking lots) and wearing the “cloak” I was as about as invisible as if I were to “Gangnam Style” into the place completely nude with fifty lit sparklers sticking out of my behind. 

They carried the sake I had been subconsciously directed to buy, so that’s cool.  After our transaction was completed I was asked if I was “on damage control”.  I assumed she meant that I had, on some level, the power to make Hurricane Sandy not be happening.  I lamely said “No, I have been working in nearby parking lots and they make us wear this so we don’t get hit by a car”.  

Absolutely perfect response with no context.  Very suspect response if, say, you had just spent the past ten minutes knowledgeably arguing the merits of hyper-specific Merlot-Franc blends with the proprietor who your wife happens to be friends with.  

She just said “Hmph.  Good idea.” in that tone of voice you pick up when you know the other person simply refuses to believe the garbage that just spewed from your mouth but nevertheless refuses to pursue it any further.  Now, that’s what I call customer service!

The rain is falling gently but steadily and the wind is mild but unrelenting.  As a precaution (well, precaution is a little strong... let’s say “talisman”) we have allowed the boy to sleep in our bed tonight.  Assuming electricity holds, I will let you know whether he proves to be our talisman or we prove to be his.

Good luck, everyone!

Sho Then I Shez to the Guy, I Shez...

It's been a while so let's throw some stuff up on The Fridge. As usual, the notes are based on what he tells me the stuff in his drawings "are".

This is one of my favorites, mainly due to the detail, but also because it's the four-year-old's first attempt to write out the word "astronaut" by sounding it out himself.  

“Where did the "H" come from,” you ask?  Not really sure, but his occasional unconscious insistence that this is an acceptable way to write the letter "S" seems to have been "learned" at a much earlier age.  For example, here is a snippet of a drawing he did about 10 months ago, where you may recall he said the first word here was the word "best":

So, if that (admittedly thin) theory is correct, "AHRNit" becomes "ASRNIT", which is how you or I would pronounce the word anyway if we were completely hammered.  

Hmmm... come to think of it, he did smell like bourbon and he was significantly more potty mouthed than usual when he couldn’t find his “[expletive deleted] orange crayon... no, not that one you [expletive deleted], the good one for [expletive deleted] sakes” when he drew this...

Life's Ambition Du Jour

Someone (probably not Mark Twain, though, according to The Google) once said “golf is a good walk spoiled”.  I imagine that goes double for Geocaching.  I was having no luck finding anything along the five-mile Noland Trail this morning and I got tired of dealing with my maybe-jumpy GPS so I just decided to simply enjoy the hike in the crisp early-morning autumn air instead.  

Isn’t that a great view?

For someone who has never actually been camping in his life, I am starting to get a pretty good collection of intro-level stuff as a side-effect of this new hobby.  The way I see it, the things you see in the pic on the left can be divided into four categories 1) stuff I already owned and knew I needed with me 2) stuff I wish I had with me at one point or another during a Geocache outing 3) stuff I hope to never have to use but really should have with me just in case and 4) stuff that is probably unnecessary but was cheap and small enough that I couldn’t resist impulse buying them when confronted with all the cool camping junk that is out there.

Category 1 things: water bottle, food, Geocache trinkets, and a notebook.  

Category 2 things: the daypack itself, leather gloves, Purell, knives, multitool, flashlight, rainhat, towels, baggies, trashbags, extra pens, extra paper, duct tape, insect repellant, sunscreen, and the Invisibility Cloak

Category 3 things: first aid kit, camping matches, emergency blanket, hand warmers, biodegradable Biowipes, DayGlo marking tape

Category 4 things: whistle/compass/thermometer/magnifier combo, extra carabiners, magnesium fire starter (I’ll admit, I saw the last one on Survivorman  - I figured they were, like, $100.  They are closer to $3.  They rock.)

I am sure that there is a fifth category of things that includes items I can’t think of now but will probably be mentioned during my eulogy: “If only our dear friend had simply thought to carry a [insert inexpensive, tiny, extremely obvious doohickey here], he probably would not have needed to pass on so prematurely... Or at least so slowly and horribly... Well, certainly, there would not have been the need for the dozens and dozens of small, oddly shaped caskets you see before you...”

What?  Oh, the Invisibility Cloak?  That’s just what I call the orange and yellow reflective vest there on the left. My wife thought I bought it for safety reasons, too.  Nope.  Let me explain.

A lot of these caches are in cities, you understand.  I guess if I was the type that simply didn’t care to “play the game” properly I wouldn’t bother with the whole stealth thing.  But, since I do want to play right, at least half a dozen cache finds have been thwarted by the fact that, say, a dude looking for fake sprinkler heads at lunchtime in the parking lot of the Red Lobster attracts unwanted “help” from passers-by.  

“What are you doing?” they ask.  “My dog lost his ball” I answer.  “Oh, what kind of dog?” they eagerly say, and, lacking a follow-up response based mostly on the fact I know very little about dogs and the person I am talking to clearly does, out comes the chloroform again and... Well, perhaps I’ve said too much...

I suppose I could answer the “What are you doing?” question with “Why, I’m minding my own [expletive deleted] business.  What the [expletive deleted] are you doing?”  then give them the “Whassup? Whassup?” hands, but that seems like that might result in “help” from uniformed officials of some kind.

Meh.  Best just to play the game right and be stealthy.  

Much like a orange and black bestriped tiger is somehow invisible in the middle of a grassy plain, a notebook-carrying person in a plain white cotton t-shirt, grubby jeans, mud-covered boots, and a vest you can see from space is likewise utterly transparent.  Think about it. Do you care what the guys on the side of the road are digging up or burying or whatever?  Me neither.

This getup was especially helpful for my last two finds today, both in the middle of well-trafficked parking lots, and both dealing with mucking about with light poles (one about thirty yards from where the GPS said it should be).  Even if the vest is overkill, it does give me the confidence to go after ones I would normally have to retrieve at night or start a dumpster fire nearby to serve as a distraction.  

The same stealth rule goes for the Noland Trial. I have walked it before but I had never appreciated (or even noticed) the huge number of people out there at all times - jogging, taking a stroll, or walking their dogs.  In that case, the “Invisibility Cloak” is the daypack itself (the vest inside, of course).  No one is going to notice a guy with a backpack suddenly departing the main path and striking out through the brush over the hill - he clearly knows what he is doing and where he is going.  A guy dressed as a jogger doing the same thing is probably going to be pegged as some dude going off to take a whiz. 

Anyway, about a quarter mile after I made the decision to give up searching for today and just walk the trail with my pleasantly heavy daypack strapped to my back I stopped near a bench to tie my bootlace. I stood up and looked into the woods and noticed an almost comically-straight 18-inch-wide Nazca line of trampled ivy leading into the forest “for some reason”.  I decided to check my Geocaching app on a hunch and, sure enough, I was fifty yards from a cache - an almost completely wedged shut (thanks, multi-tool!) ammo box under a rotten log right at the end of the beeline of squashed undergrowth.

Since I now knew that my GPS was operating properly I resumed the hunt.  I didn’t find all of them along the trail during my four-hour outing this morning but I found enough to be satisfied.   The two city ones I found after my hike that brought my total up to twenty were just icing on the cake.

What?!  It’s almost midnight?! Maaannn... Sorry to end this article all “Deus ex machina” on you and junk but I gotta get me some sleep.  The end.  More later.

Omnicron Imperative (Part XII)

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KA-WHAAAM!!!

The hangar on the outskirts of Lockport, New York disintegrated suddenly and a millisecond later a hundred-yard-wide ball of crimson fire took it’s place. Smoking sheets of corrugated steel and half-melted airplane parts rained down for half a mile around.  

Several smaller explosions followed as a fuel depot near the site of the former structure erupted sympathetically generating huge billows of oily, ebony smoke that curled toward the heavens. A few minutes later fire trucks and ambulances on the way to the scene roared past two figures trudging toward the highway.

"Sweetheart?"

"Yes, love?"

"We have been together for forty years..."

"Forty-one, actually, love," the septuagenarian woman responded as she returned the remote detonator to the depths of her bedraggled knitting bag.  Several squad cars rocketed by in the direction of the mayhem. 

"... and in all that time," the man in the fedora continued, "I believe you have blown up every single conveyance we have ever used as soon as we were done with it."   He halted and mashed a glowing ember that had fallen to the ground with the tip of his cane and lifted it to the panatela clutched between his teeth.  After a few quick puffs he inhaled deeply and continued walking.

“Mustn’t leave tracks.  DNA and so forth.  You know the rules, dear.  Besides, in order to be the best we need plenty of practice to stay in tip-top shape.”

“Yes, I know,” he sighed.  “Still, it would have been nice to be able to ride a little while instead of having to walk all this way.  The heel of my shoe is giving me fits - I think it’s about to come off. When we landed that so-called spacecraft in this cow pasture the locals reckon is an airport I thought for sure we were closer to the main road...”

They shuffled onward a while.  The woman spoke.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better soon you will be able to sit for a spell and practice your trade, assuming Mr. Twikowski’s fancy gold envelope is accurate.”

“True, that,” he said and absentmindedly crushed out the cigar between his forefinger and thumb before dropping it onto the rocky path.  This demonstration of his near-immunity to pain never failed to make an impression on the people he was sent to interview. 

Today would mark his five-thousandth ‘customer’, as he called them.  He smiled a little.  

They reached the highway and the man in the fedora waved his cane a little at the traffic that had slowed to gawk at the inky cloud roiling into the sky behind them.  Eventually, a blue Ford Escort pulled into the shoulder and ground to a halt.  A smallish, squat man reached over and rolled down the passenger side window a bit so he could be heard.

“Wow!  You folks okay?  You need a lift somewhere?  You’ll both have to sit in the back - the door handle’s fallen off that side and the lock’s all rusted shut in any case.  Sorry ‘bout that.”

“That would be most kind, young man.  Downtown, if it’s not too much trouble,” the woman said.  The couple climbed into the rear of the vehicle and the driver made a quick U-turn and headed in the direction of the city proper.

They rode in silence for a bit, the man assessing the damage to his left shoe and the woman preparing a small Semtex charge about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

“Really, forty-one years?” he asked.

“Yes, dear, forty-one,” she responded as she wedged the device underneath the driver’s seat and activated the receiver.  Both stared out the window for a while at the various defunct businesses that lined the street - businesses awaiting an upturn in the local economy that could once again support four trophy shops for every nail salon.

After a few more blocks he reached out and held her hand.

“Happy anniversary, sweetheart.”

(To Be Continued...)

Omnicron Imperative (Part XI)

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The Brothers emerged fully suited and on the run less than fifteen seconds after their spacecraft bounced and slid to an ungraceful halt.  Lightning briefly illuminated the muddy service road through the vineyard that acted as their makeshift runway.  With visibility limited to just yards, the signpost declaring their landing site to be the Weinberg Melerischen was almost completely obscured by the near-horizontal grey mist.

Neither spoke.  Even if it weren’t for the vow, they probably wouldn’t have anyway.  They didn’t need to as children and they didn’t need to now. 

Half a dozen similarly be-robed figures began expertly dismantling the radar-transparent craft and carting the pieces off to barns and workhouses in the area.  Forty-five minutes from now there would be no evidence that anyone had ever landed there, or, in fact, that the spacecraft had ever existed.  The speed and efficiency of the members of the monastery rivaled even that of ANON’s Red Team. It was good to have them as allies.

The raucous laughter of the drunken tourists in the tasting house corrupted the comparative silence between the peals of thunder and thirty-knot gusts that roared through the Gewürztraminer vines.  The Brothers glanced at each other in resigned acceptance as they shut the door and brushed themselves dry in the rear vestibule.  Their job wasn’t to judge the excesses of others - their’s was to locate and eliminate the threat HERO identified two hours and four thousand miles ago.

Their internal radios crackled to life. Twitchy’s already tinny voice reverberated irritatingly throughout their internal organs.

“According to HERO your target is a Canadian banker named Wayne DeLeque.  He has been funneling monies to the Omnicron folks for years under the guise of a charitable organization called ‘Global United Peace Unlimited’.  He is here, allegedly, on  fundraising mission,” Twitchy continued, his machine-gun keystrokes audible in the background.  “But I doubt very much if his wife would approve of his secretary staying in the same room as him at the B&B where you are.  Tsk, tsk, and shame, shame on the both of them...”

“Anyway, his photo is in your goodie bag as is a card key to his room. Remember, he has been known to travel with at least two hired goons so be careful... or at least try to remember to clean up after yourselves.  We don’t want another fiasco like that time in Dunkirk.  Remember, sanitizers won’t be there to bribe the press and mop up another bloodbath this time.  ANON Central out.”

The Brothers rolled their eyes at each other and, as soundless as a pair of spectral cats, navigated the centuries-old oaken staircase that led to the rooms above.

(To Be Continued...)

More Geocache Trinkets

I found my ninth Geocache this weekend. The weather was crisp and the hiking trail I was on was surprisingly abandoned. Only one other person - a lady bicyclist and her dog - passed by during my two hour outing. 

I have been dutifully documenting my cache swag trades (well, when there was stuff in there to trade, anyway) and so far I have given away five of the little wooden GPS units I made - only five more to go.  This weekend I built some yo-yos out of a spare dowel and a leftover board from the Pallet End Table project.   

The wood burning iron I used to etch the designs into the wooden GPS units was good enough to get me used to the process but the cord is very short, I only have one nib for it, and it didn't come with a stand.  Pretty limiting and really unsafe. 

Despite the best efforts of the useless Sears slob slouching against a cash register and testing the elastic limits of a shirt that was probably a 60% cotton, 40% food-grease-stain blend, I managed to locate and buy a new Weller wood burning kit.  Not top-of-the-line by any means but a significant upgrade from the "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" version I had been dealing with before, plus, at $18, the price was right. 

I cut the disks for the yo-yo halves using a two-inch hole saw chucked into my drill press. Maybe the aged wood was tougher than I thought or maybe the saw teeth are really dull but the cutting process took a long time.  Not only was the disk-making incredibly noisy (it sounded like I was sawing through a couple of fighting cats) I felt like I was within about half a degree from the wood's ignition temperature the whole time. This part of the project was unpleasant enough to where I decided to make only seven of these things instead of the ten I originally planned on. 

I hit the disks with the sander and glued in the dowels, leaving enough sticking out the end where I could chuck them back into the drill press to use it as a sort of "poor man's lathe".  I spun up the press and beveled the string groove a little and buffed out any remaining rough parts. 

After cutting the extra dowel length down with a coping saw I burned in some free-hand "artwork". Each one has "snowurchin" and a serial number on the front and a design on the back.  Each simple design is different. 

After a quick wash in diluted gel stain the yo-yos were spray sealed and a three-foot string was added. Done. Project time - about two hours from start to finish.  

"Do they 'yo'?" you ask.  

Yes, yes they do, but not very well. I mean, they come back and I even got one to "sleep" but you ain't gonna be winning any competitions with these things.  I guess the strongest claim I could make is that they are more functional than the wooden GPS units I made, but just barely. 

But as far as achieving the goal of being cheap, clearly homemade, interesting, and quick-and-satisfying-to-produce: mission accomplished. 

I like fabricating my own Geocache swag for trade and the boy is interested to see what trinkets I will emerge out of the woods with next (pic on left), so I think I will keep this up for a while. 

I have three ideas for the next series but I am not sure yet what I should do next. The first idea is a little wooden race car, the second is a leather and barnwood necklace, and the third is a series of little wooden three-page books (I have already written the story).   I think I like the car idea best, though.  

Meh... We will see.

The Panopti-Con

There.  Done.  

The last of the stuff we had squirreled away in the storage facility during the house moving process was cleared out of the unit today.  Yeah, sure, all the actual “house” stuff was moved a long time ago but in order to eke out a little more wiggle room in the garage I needed to keep a pressure washer, a chainsaw, a push mower, and a tiller in there until my wife’s folks could come and get them.

You may recall that I once referred to this place as “The Least Secure Storage Facility in the Whole Wide World”.  Now that the last of my stuff has been moved out, I guess there is no harm in telling you why the place is only marginally better than unloading your U-Haul full of stuff beneath the nearest freeway overpass and asking the hobos living there to “just keep an eye on it for a few months”.

About 10 years ago the wife and I used this facility to keep our junk in after Hurricane Isabel twisted and bent our home into an exciting and interesting new shape.  A decade later, here we were again looking to store our meager possessions while we were in-between homes. 

I wasn’t surprised to see that we were still in their files even after so long a period - nothing electronic really ever dies, after all.  As a matter of fact, I was pleased that we really didn’t need to go through much of the paperwork associated with storage facility rental.  Tiny and easily-ignorable red flags pathetically tried to get my attention after we were told that our original 4-digit code was still valid, but to no avail.

One day I fat-fingered my code in and, lacking options, pressed the star key anyway, fully expecting the gate to just sit there while the keypad beeped at me. Instead, the gate rumbled and squeaked open as usual.  What luck!  Time to buy lottery tickets!

Right?

Umm... no.  Remember, our code was still valid after being a non-customer for 10 years.  I can only assume that is also true for every other customer over the past ten years...

Let’s say to keep in business 200 units are taken at all times. Let’s also say that people use the facility for two months on average.  Finally, let’s assume that everyone chooses a 4-digit code randomly and everyone’s code stays valid forever.  That gives (roughly) a 70% chance that any 4-digit number would open the gate.

Bad, but it gets worse.

Over the course of the house move I needed to transfer stuff with my truck a few dozen times.  I tested my “70%” theory by just putting in any old numbers I felt like when entering and exiting the “secure” area.  After about the sixth time coming and going and never once being rejected (a 1% probability, btw), I got the feeling that 70% was way, way low.

For fun I punched in three numbers, then the star.  Open Sesame!  How about two digits then the star?  Yep, the gate opens.  Surely not one digit, though... Sure enough, it did.  How about eight digits?  You betcha!  Only when I only pressed the star key preceded by absolutely no digits did the gate just sit there.  

So, the intimidating, barbed, chain-link gate is less an “obstruction to theft” and more along the lines of “urban post-modern kinetic sculpture ”. Nice...

Bad, but it gets worse.

One of the units we rented was a 10-foot by 10-foot enclosure with a dead-bolt type lock on the front that fit a padlock.  Once the latch was slid and the padlock was in place the corrugated steel door could not be lifted.  At least, that’s the theory.  

One time when shutting the unit I discovered the door wobbled by about 3/4 of an inch in its tracks.  After I clicked the padlock home I glanced around the security-camera-less facility to make sure I was alone and shifted the door a little and tried to lift it.  No problem.  Even with the lock in place the door easily slid upwards about five feet until the lock impacted the roof of the unit.  I closed everything up and gave this some thought.

What to do...  what to do...

Obviously, I was not going to blog about it right away.  Reporting the matter to the probably unscrupulous and clearly not-detail-oriented owners seemed risky.  Moving all the stuff to another place would require at least a dozen more trips I had neither the time nor the energy for.  The stuff was insured, there were no real irreplaceable things in there, and all the “high” ticket items were all the way in the back of this very densely packed unit, anyway.  Furthermore, this unit was smack in the middle of an aisle of completely identical ones and 200 others just like it populated the whole place.

As I get older I am dismayed to discover that the solution to a shocking number of life’s problems is to simply “do nothing”.  It’s just never been my style, you see.  But, fine, let’s play “Purloined Letter” and hide all my junk in plain sight and see how it goes...

It went fine.  I wonder, though, if I shouldn’t go back there and at least try to get my seven bucks back for the padlock we bought from the owners...  

So... How About Them Knicks?

Again, not enough for a cogent theme.  Here are a few paragraphs of personal, wacky, snoozy, project-y, puzzle-y, and site-update-y things, though.

Personal: I helped out at the church barbecue this weekend.  The rainy weather made cooking 640 birds take much longer than usual so I was really feeling it after hoisting and flipping eighty pound racks while inhaling a dense cloud of chicken-scented buckyballs for six hours.  On the upside, my contact lenses were finger-lickin’ good afterwards...  

Wacky: I figure there is an exact right level of specificity regarding menu items and packaging for foods. If you are overly specific or too vague, the food becomes horribly unappealing. For example, Chicken Nuggets probably sound ok, whereas Bird Nuggets or Animal Nuggets do not and, on the other side of that coin, Disease-Free Domesticated Chicken Nuggets also sound gross.

Snoozy: We took down eight trees out back and planted three new ones in their place.  The old ones, as majestic as they were, were very nearly pushed over on top of the house a few times during this summer’s storm-a-thon so money well spent, there.  Dudes who take down trees for a living are surgeons or magicians... maybe both.  I think two of the new ones will survive (the trees, not the lumberjacks - I am sure they are fine.).  Not so sure about the third.  They were all planted in what was basically 18 inches of pure clay, so we will see.

Project-y: Started building little knick-knacks to put inside Geocache boxes.  The ones you see on the drying rack in the pic are meant to be little wooden GPS units.  They are 2.5 x 1.5 inches and are made mainly from part of an old (1930s-1940s vintage) maybe-maple table top I salvaged from the side of the road.  The buttons were cut from a leftover oak dowel I had sitting around.  The coarse tools I was forced to work with (coupled with a clear lack of planning or skill) resulted in an obviously-hand-crafted look, which is cool. These ten took about two hours total labor.  Once they have been used up I will make a new set of ten items, this time I think home-made yo-yos or little leather and wood books... not sure yet which.

Puzzle-y: Wow!  It has been a super long time since I have posted a hint for the Puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page.  Here is the fourth hint for the New Desk Puzzle:

Hint #4 (Posted 10/02/12): Nyvpr qvqa'g xabj gur nafjre, rvgure.

It is encoded using ROT-13 to avoid spoiling the fun for those who don’t want a hint just yet.  Need more hints or just want to check out the other puzzles?  Check the sidebar (up near the top, there) and Good Luck!  Send me an email or just leave a comment if you have figured it out.

Site-Update-y: I added a new book to my reading list, cleaned up the sidebar a bit, and completely removed the WolframAlpha stuff I had there.  In the old days (like a year or so ago) you couldn’t shut me up about the benefits of the site and its awesome “computation engine”.  Now, though, every damn time I ask it anything at all it times out or gives some half-baked interpretation of my input or basically says “I can tell you, but I’m gonna need about tree-fiddy.”  I respect that they need to make cash, but good grief, people, rein it in a little.  

See you soon.