The Thousand Yard Stare

My backyard is somewhat of a haven for the neighborhood cats. It could be because my yard is equal parts sunny and shady – for the perfect mix of warming and cooling. It could be because they love the smell of lemon/mint grass that grows in one corner of my yard. Or, it could just be that I don’t have a dog.

Needless to say, it’s a cornucopia of different cat breeds, sizes, shapes, attitudes, and territorial urine marking capabilities.

Every once in a while, I will wake up in the morning and open my blinds – and see a cat sitting in my yard that looks exactly like one of my cats. It’s a tabby pattern that is pretty distinctive – and the yard cat is usually facing away from me, so after just waking up I’m thinking, “Hey, did my cat get out last night?”. I’ll bang on the window and the cat will look at me – and I’ll realize that it’s not my cat after all – the face is wide (male) while my cat is female.

Today, I awoke and opened my blinds, and didn’t see any such cat. Going into the kitchen, I opened the blinds in there so that I could begin my morning ritual of making coffee – I spied what I thought was a black cat outside – that looked like my OTHER cat. Having been fooled so many times before, I chose to turn away and continue with my coffee exercise regiment.

Having completed the pre-flight checklist, mug in hand, I glanced back out the window. It was still there. I looked closer….the cat was motionless.

I parted the blinds, then knocked on the window – because at this point the fog of morning had not lifted. No movement.

I squinted, took a sip, and looked again, and realized I was looking at a small black bucket in my backyard.

*sigh*

At least it wasn’t my cat.

 

I like cloudy days. Today has been a moderately cloudy day, with some showers and some sun.

There’s also been some wind.

In the past, I’ve liked the sound of fast wind whipping through the trees. That is, I liked it until I became a homeowner.

If the wind is whipping through the trees – I’m guaranteed of two (separate and unrelated) outcomes.

First Outcome – Annoyance Level: Medium

I have a lot of trees. Which means I have a lot of branches. With wind, it means I have a lot of dead branches scattered around my yard. It’s not the tree branches that are a pain, it’s getting rid of them all. You’d think a tree would lose most of it’s dead branches quickly. Not so.

Second Outcome –  Annoyance Level: High

In my neighborhood, I live almost at the end of the street. The “L” shape of my house turns my front yard into some sort of scientific wind tunnel whereby all the neighborhood garbage collects there. It especially is crappy on recycling day – everyone’s recycling blows into my yard. Walking around my yard picking up other people’s recycling is almost as much fun as disposing of dead branches.

Please excuse my lame header. Not sure why the original* became corrupted. I’ll do better. Promise

 

 

 

 

* Of which I cannot find a backup of on my computer. For shame.

When I was a younger lad, my mother insisted on buying us carob rather than purchasing us chocolate. I’ve honestly no idea why she did that – although maybe she had a little somethin’ somethin’ going on with the guy working at the health food store.

Since I was quite the sugar fiend, I think she was doing it to prevent the mystical migraines that I would have daily – although these days I’m sure it was because I wasn’t eating anything for lunch except Cheez-Its and maybe a single Babybel Cheese. I’ll never forget the little red wax pouches those little cheese things came in. By the time it was lunchtime, the red wax was sweaty, and the cheese was warm. Capri Sun was the name of the game for drinks. I still cringe every time I think about how nasty those were – especially warm.  My worst memory of those is the last sip, where your straw sucks at air, and you’re inhaling warm air, warm juice, and whatever carbon dioxide you’ve already breathed into the thing. But THAT WAS MY LUNCH. That’s it. I don’t know how I managed to live on that – since I pretty much quit eating Cheez-Its after a few days.

Anyway.

What this meant is that it was very, VERY rare for there to be junk food in the house. The one treat I was allowed to have (occasionally) was Fruity Pebbles cereal – which is about as close as I was allowed to get to sugary nirvana. Most of the time, the house was stocked with random peppermints (picked up from one of my mother’s many forays into restaurant cuisine), or some really plain Tea Cookies – which were no match for my ravenous-chocolate-loving appetite.

Occasionally, somewhere around Christmas time, shortbread cookies would show up. In my sugar feasting ways, I would eat shortbread until I was sick of it. Another poor substitute.

So, my mother went with carob – the cheapest, palest imitation of chocolate there was.

Only in truly, TRULY desperate times did I eat it. Of course it was always, “Eat as much as you want!”. Ick.

To this day, whenever my brother and I are talking about sweets, we’ll invariably ask each other if there’s any carob in the house. And then chuckle.

What were my parents THINKING?!?!?

When I was in middle school (or junior high, if that’s what you call it these days), I got into a fight with a kid.  This was before I went to New Zealand – so I hadn’t had the pleasant experience of being attacked/beaten up for no reason other than I was a stranger in a strange land.

So, at the time, I think I was working in the library – and ran AV equipment to the classrooms. (Can you imagine? Me? The AV guy?) One day I ran a piece of equipment to a room, but somehow got the rooms mixed up.
One kid in the class started laughing at me.  I don’t really “get” what he thought was so funny, but he did.

I’d see him in the halls, and he would kind of snicker and laugh. I don’t remember how we ended up discussing the actual fight that was going to take place? It’s kind of foggy, it’s been a few years……

So, at the end of one day, we met up at the front of the school.

So before we start to “throw down”, I’m like, “You want to go across the street? To my house? We won’t get into trouble….”

Keep in mind, that I had lived across the street from this school all my life (house pictured on the left – below).

He said, “nope”. SO, I immediately pushed him down and had my arm over his throat.  I wish I could say that there was some actual knock-down punch-o-rama fight, but that’s not how I rolled. So, he’s struggling, and can’t get up (submission?).

Then the school administrators come and get us and take us to the office for fighting.  I find out his name is David as well, and his mom’s name is the same as my mom’s name!?!? So we’re in the office, and I’m freaking out because I’ve NEVER been in THIS much trouble. Sure, throughout elementary school I talked back to teachers and started trouble, but never fighting.

So the principal says, “Well, it’s the end of the day, we’ve notified your parents and I’ll need to see you tomorrow morning”.  I’m EXTREMELY freaked out, tears are streaming down my face, all I can think is, “What will my parents think?”.

So I get home. I’m trembling. We sit at the dinner table, and my parents are there and my dad says, “Well, what happened?” So I tell him, and he says, “Why didn’t he want to come over on our property? Idiot.” My mom really had nothing to say.

The upshot is basically that my parents didn’t care.
So, the next morning I go in, and the Principal sits us down and looks at me. “Son, do you know what advantage you have here?”

“No”

“You’ve NEVER been to the office – your record is clean. SO, I’ll give you a choice, either you can take detention for a number of weeks, or you can choose suspension”

I’m thinking for a minute, and the other David is looking at me like it’s a no brainer. Since my parents didn’t give me crap – I say, “Suspension”

David looks at me like I’ve lost my absolute freaking mind. Even the principal was surprised.  It had something to do with that whole, “this will stay on your record FOREVER!” So the principal says, “I’m going to leave you two to discuss.” and he leaves the room.

Knowing that I have the advantage, and get to choose, David is really freaking out now. “Dude, we need to take detention. My parents will KILL me if I get suspended.”

Those were magic words to me.

I said to him, “Suspension”.

He begged and pleaded, but I decided to screw him over.

So the principal came in, and looks at me – “did you decide?”.

“Yes. Suspension”

David breaks into tears.

We got “Unsupervised Home Suspension” – so the next day I spent at home watching TV and eating cereal. Not so bad.

I’m pretty sure his parents made his life hell.

My parents never said anything about it – and despite it “being on my record” I never heard anything else about it.

In what I had assumed would be a herculean task actually boiled down to almost four hours of research, installation and troubleshooting.

It’s truly nice to know that Google has my back – and that no matter WHAT it is that I’m trying to do, SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE has already attempted it – and gotten an answer.  Even if that answer somewhat “bends” the expected parameters, computers only understand ones and zeros – so there’s a way around EVERYTHING.

I’m being somewhat cryptic intentionally, but it’s nothing illegal – just something that a service provider didn’t officially support, but due to programming’s inherent characteristics, a single symbol can render operations functional.

In other news, my heater is now out – not sure why. The iThermostat people say that the control unit is not getting information from the air handler – and I checked all the breakers, they’re all good.  Now I’m poking around inside the control module armed with instructions on how to actually reset the unit (beyond turning the breaker off per TXU).  Two days in cold. Brrrrrrrrr.

Hooray! I figured it out!  The air handler has two separate breakers. Both were not in the “tripped” position, but they weren’t letting any juice through. For the minimal electrical work I do around the house, my GB Instruments Circuit Alert has saved my ass a number of times!