Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Johnny Carson; The DaVinci code

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My erratic (well not so erratic, considering its frequency) weekly posting seems to continue. I have no explanations so please don’t ask.

• First up today is the death of Johnny Carson. Being only 30, I don’t have a whole lot of knowledge of the span of his career. What I do know is that my Father once either took a night off at work, or came home early (twenty-five year old memories aren’t perfect) to watch Carson sing the song Rhinestone Cowboy. The only thing that I can actually remember from the show that he was so famous for is a line that was not even spoken by him, but by Ed McMahon, “I have in my hand an envelope, a child of four can plainly see these envelopes are hermetically sealed. They’ve been kept since noon today in a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls’ porch”. That was the bit that they used to start the “Carnac the Great” skits, which is really all I can remember of the show. Well, along with some of the lame insults that he would hurl at hecklers during that skit. Strange and obscure stuff along the lines of “May unwanted house guests arrive and drink milk directly from the carton”. I was very young when I saw these shows and I remember that the lame curses were far funnier than the skit itself. I had always attributed that to my youth at the time, but in googling up some of the old dialogues I found that the lame curses were the only thing that made it memorable.

I think that most people in my generation (born in the mid seventies) know who Johnny Carson is/was, but remember him more for the parodies of him that Dana Carvey did on Saturday Night Live. They were, of course, exaggerated, over-the-top takes on Carson for sure, but it is strange that I think that Carvey (in makeup) looks more like Carson than Carson ever did. That is probably just me.

The reason that I think we need to pay a bit of respect to Johnny is that I can not think of any other entertainer, in any genre, that was able to keep so many adamant fans for three decades. In the channel-surfing world of today it is difficult for anyone to maintain and audience for a couple of years, let alone doing a stretch like Carson did. He stepped down not necessarily at the height of his career, but while he was still hugely popular, and he never did a comeback. He had his run, he was happy with it, he retired to live outside of the public eye. No comeback tours, no cameos in movies for a quick buck, he was done. I can’t think of any other celebrity that ever rode the wave so high, followed it to the beach, then simply walked away -Completely and Forever-. I’ll bet that his phone was ringing until the day he died with offers for movie cameos, tv spots, radio commercials and etc. and he never did any of it. Whether it was his pride, health or other that kept him from doing it, that leaves the world to remember him at his best. As it should be.

• I finally finished reading The Da Vinci Code several days ago. I was only reading the book based on a whole lot of reviewers saying that it was like the second coming of Christ. As it turns out, Christ’s second coming was not quite what I had expected.

The Da Vinci Code is of a genre that I never read. I am not sure if it would be classified as a thriller, mystery or action novel, but I usually only read fantasy or horror, this was certainly neither of those. The book just casually picks you up, then throws you into the maelstrom that is the story. I am not going to talk about the plot at all, since my wife is now reading the book and actually reads this site. What I will say is that I was fully immersed in the book until about page 370. It was moving so fast that I had read more than half of the book and still thought that it was just the introduction (a far cry from the trudging through the swamps for a month that you get used to in fantasy novels). I really thought that it petered out a bit towards the end, but that might be a personal issue.

The book does a pretty remarkable job of mixing the historical information into the story, though there were times that I felt like I was reading a lame history book; Who the hell cares if the glass pyramid outside of the Louvre has exactly 666 panes of glass in it if that fact is not going to be important later? Many historical buildings are tied into the story, probably just because the guy spent so much time researching them that he had to put all of them into the book, regardless of how well they tied into the flow of the story.

Being that the book is called The Da Vinci Code, and being that all of the clues that were left were actually written down, I actually solved a few of the codes in my head several pages before the primary characters did. Not that I am a genius or anything, but there are only so many ways that one can simply use letters to create codes. The first one that I had solved, long before the primary characters, said “O! Draconian Devil”. The book is called The Da Vinci Code, FFS, wouldn’t Da Vinci be what you are looking for in the lettering? I did, as did probably everyone else that has ever read the book. Imagine that, it is an anagram for Leonardo Da Vinci. I really did my best to not solve the word puzzles in my head after that, thinking that I might inadvertently stumble onto the ending without reading the book. That was, thankfully, not going to be an issue.

The ease of the first couple of codes made me question whether the rest of the world was simply stupid, however, the codes got more advanced. The codes, in fact, got so advanced that that they weren’t even codes anymore. The codes became an issue of interpretation of sentences. That is where it started to get out of my hands/mind as far as trying to solve the puzzles myself anyway.

Without going too much further into description of the book, I will say that I liked it. I didn’t particularly care for the way that it ended, but it was an ending. I am now of the camp that believes that it was only a best-seller for the sake of the religious overtone. The novel Angels and Demons is a previous work from the same author (which I have ordered online) that is supposedly a much better book. After finishing that one, perhaps I will be able to give the author some props, who knows.

The Incredibles; Support our Troops; Evolution Vs. Creationism

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Once again I have taken a week off from posting. Again no real reson why. Laziness would probably be the most realistic reason. Either that or just a lack of anything to write about.

I had intentions of getting something typed out on Sunday, however, the wife and I decided to go see a movie before her free passes expired. The movie that we went to see was The Incredibles, which I had been wanting to see ever since it hit theatres, while she went only grudgingly even with free passes.

The thing that amazed me the most about the movie was the size of the audience. The movie was released on Nov. 5, 2004, we went to see it on jan. 16, 2005, two and a half months after release, to find the theatre at about 85% capacity. It was showing in a pretty small theatre (as most older movies do), and only had three showings that day, so maybe I shouldn’t have been quite that surprised. I honestly thought that there would be my wife, myself and about another three people there, hah. And I really thought that there wouldn’t be any children at all, which I based on parents getting sick of their children’s constant begging to see it within the first month after release. Again I was way off. We were among about four couples that were there, every other group had multiple children. Expecting the audience to be small, we didn’t arrive until just a couple of minutes before showtime, which meant that we were in the second row, staring up for two hours to watch it.

Why are the theatres designed that way in the first place? They could make it a bit wider and add a couple of seats to each upper row, maybe even move all of the upper seating closer to the screen (at the same height of course) and add an extra row in the back. I have never had a problem watching a movie from an aisle seat, and the back row is just about the best view in the house. I guess there are reasons why they have them set up the way they do, I just will never understand them.

How was the movie? It was everything that I had expected (of course I had read a lot of reviews going in), and far better than the wife was expecting. It was certainly the most entertaining cgi film that I have ever seen, of course I have only seen a few of them. The characters in this movie were so much more realistic than what you normally see in animated films. There are many layers to each of them. For the majority of the movie I found myself almost forgetting that they were super-heroes, right up until one of them got mad and used his/her powers in anger. The visual quality was amazing, the story was pretty good (though it seemed to try a bit too hard to be dramatic) and the dialogue really carried it. Simply put, The Incrdibles has set the bar pretty high for cgi films; It’s no longer about cutesy little fish and worn out fart jokes.

• While on the way to the movie, I noticed yet another “support our troops” sticker on the back of a car. I didn’t realize until recently that almost all of those ribbons are actually magnets (I had assumed that they were stickers). Seeing this one had reminded me of the mission that I have undertaken in my local area. The thing about those little decals is that they are supposed to be displayed vertically (at least they are done that way traditionally), yet some people put them on their cars in such a manner that it looks like a Jesus Fish. Normally I wouldn’t get upset about this type of thing, but in light of the war in Iraq being based on the delusions of the religious nut that leads our country, it pisses me off. It makes me think that they put it that way on purpose, which makes me think that they probably voted to reelect Bush. Which is sick, sad and wrong.

So I decided to set the world right. When I get to work, as well as when I leave, I walk through the parking lot and take the liberty of putting their ribbons on the car properly. I only change the ones that are very obviously meant to look like the Jesus Fish. There are some that are halfway between, but it looks like the people just put them that way so that you could read what was written on it horizontaly, those I let go. I am sure that this really won’t make a damn bit of difference to the world as a whole, but it sure does make me feel better. I did find that there are limitations to my desire to straighten out the ribbons though. For instance, in the parking lot of the movie theatre I saw one that needed to be changed, I left it alone. It is one thing to do this in the tiny little town that I live in, quite another to do it in the Metro-Phoenix area. That is to say that I really don’t think it is something I am prepared to die for.

• On sort of a similar topic, that being delusional religious people, I had a conversation with a guy named Rick the other day about eggs.

All my life I have believed that the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” was a pretty obvious gauge of religious belief. That is what the question is about, isn’t it? The way I see it, if you believe that the chicken came first that is saying that the chicken was created by someone/something. While if you believe that the egg came first, that would lend itself to the belief that the egg was the offspring of pre-existing animals that either cross-bred, or two animals of the same species that had a genetically mutated offspring. That would lend itself to the theory of evolution. Much like everything else in life, I never thought that anyone could believe that the question meant anything else (I always seem to think that everyone shares my views, right until they tell me they don’t). Rick, on the other hand, said that it was not anything like that. He said that the question was meant to be retorical, one of those meditiation thoughts along the lines of “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I have tried to find evidence of my presumption that the question was an argument for or against evolution, but have had no success. If you happen to know how/why this question came about, please shoot me an email, I am really curious about it. Even if you don’t know how/why the question came about, but you have always believed that the fundamental reason for the question was evolution, let me know that also. I am really curious on this one.

That’s about all I have for now. Tune in next time to see photos of the craziest bitch on the net (if Zelda is willing to pose, that is).

Plumbing; Roller Coaster Tycoon

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The new year marches on. It really seems pretty hard to believe that we are already midway through the ‘aught’ decade. I can remember the eighties pretty well, even the nineties, but if you were to ask me about anything that has happened since the calendar rolled over to 2000, the only thing that I could come up with would be 9/11. At least the only thing that I could come up with quickly. Were I to sit down and think about it for a few minutes I am sure that I could start to name off a bunch of crap that has happened since then. I don’t really want to though. Not to mention the fact that doing something like that would make me think about the president, which would lead to me thinkinking about all of the presidents there have been since I was born, which would lead to me starting to think that I am getting older. Not that there is anything wrong with getting, just that it is something that you usually associate with your parents, not something that you think would ever happen to you.

On that subject, I did get a bit of satisfaction from a comment that one of my boss’ daughters made. Apparently she still has a picture of me from the time I went to the prom with a girl in 1994 (which was the fifth consecutive year that I had been to a prom, still a stat that I am kind of proud of). I was twenty at the time. She said that I haven’t aged a bit since that picture, which made me feel good. Unfortunately, I think that she was only talking about the face part of the picture. The slowing metabolism that seems to come with the late twenties/early thirties has hit me full force, I have put on a couple of dozen pounds since then. My hair is graying more and more. It takes me more time every day to get up and walk without pain in my lower back (which is based solely on the fact that my entire adult life has always involved jobs with a lot of heavy lifting). My eyes seem a bit more sunken, I have wrinkles when I smile, the list goes on and on. Still, it was a nice compliment…If only I could feel like I was still twenty…

• The plumbing issues that I have been discussing since Christmas have been mostly taken care of since last Monday. I have additional parts at the ready to replace the rest of it throughout the house, but I have yet to do so. I had put off filling back in the ditch that houses the new pipe for a week, just to make sure that there weren’t any leaks, not to mention that we have been getting a hell of a lot of rain down here which kept leaving the hole partially filled with water, and the dirt I needed to put back weighing in at double what it did dry. I did take care of that yesterday, man it was a lot of work.

Let this be a lesson to all of you; If you are going to dig a ditch at your house for the purpose of plumbing, fill it back in ASAP. For some reason, most likely the fact that it had been wetted and dried so many times, the dirt was just about the consistency of nearly dry concrete by the time I started to fill the hole back in. It was so thick and heavy that I was afraid to try to do heaping shovelfulls for fear that I would break the shovel’s handle. The dirt was only like that for the first couple of shovelfulls from the mound though, unfortunately, that meant for each section of the mound. All forty feet of it. I initially started filling in a section of the trench completely, then moving forward to the next section. Problem was it was so hard to do the first couple of of throws each section that I feared I wouldn’t be able to get it all done if I continued in that manner. When I finally decided to just do the hardest part all the way down it started to go a bit better, except that by the time I was done with the hard packed stuff my arms were like jello. Fortunately for me the rest of it went it pretty easily, I just used the shovel like a rake/hoe and scooped it in (which would have been a much easier endeavor if I owned a rake or a hoe. I do own both of those, but the rake is a ‘leaf rake’ -yes, an absolute must own in a desert, when you have nothing with leaves-, and the hoe is a children’s toy that is about three feet in length. Both of them were at the house when I bought it, I never really thought I would need real ones). I finished that by about 10:30a.m. yesterday, and that was it for me as far as any sort of physical labor.

My plan had been to fill in the hole, then go ahead and replace the copper lines in and out of the water heater, you know, baby steps. If I do a little bit of the plumbing every weekend I will have it all done over a couple of weeks instead of waiting until something else breaks. Much like any plan I ever have, it all went to hell. Each process is always way harder than anticipated and usually takes twice the time I think it will. I will say again, though, that I really think the hard part is done now. Which I am not even sure I believe. Considering that I said that after I dug the ditch, after I ran the pipe under the sidewalk, after I drilled the hole through the wall for the pipe (both times), after I had the main water line run into the shed, after my father-in-law helped me tie it back into the existing plumbing, and now that the ditch is filled back in. That makes it quite a few times that I had speculated that the hard part was over, only to find that there was more ‘hard part’. I fear that every damn thing is going to be the ‘hard part’. When you live in a house that is more than a century old, you really should expect that things are not going to be as easy as they would be if you lived in a mobile home. Funny how I can say it, but I never believe it.

Enough about plumbing.

• The rest of Sunday was pretty much consumed by the damn Roller Coaster game. I would probably have felt pretty guilty about wasting away the day in that manner were it not for the fact that my wife was sitting right next to me playing it on the other computer. I don’t know what it is about these little ‘simulation’ games that sucks me in, but they always do. The wife actually seems to be a lot better at the game than I am. She can play the scenarios through while maintaining a near perfect park rating, while I am usually struggling to keep it at the 60% or 70% that is required. I am going to attribute that to her being a girl. Girls have, it seems, a knack for design (not the rides, but in general) that makes them far more suited for this type of game. While I use the ‘throw the shit wherever you can fit it in’ method, she kind of seems to think about it a bit more logically. I am not sure if she is going for an aesthetically pleasing layout, but I am sure that she does a lot better at the park layout than I do.

I can still be proud of the fact that I make damn near the most sick, sadistic coasters available. Well, not judging by the ones that they have on exchange on the RCT website, but I am getting better.

Roller Coaster Tycoon

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It seems that the little ‘Roaler Coaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack” Christmas gift has been a heck of a lot more entertaining than I could ever have imagined. I seem to have pissed away the last couple of weeks just trying to figure out how to build bigger, better, faster and more exciting coasters. While I still would not consider myself an actual ‘Tycoon’, I would say that I have a foot pretty firmly into the door of being a “Roller Coaster Mutual Fund Investor”, which obviously doesn’t carry the same punch as ‘Tycoon’, and which is also a bit confusing.

Much like in any game you play, I began to get bored with just following through the scenarios and trying to achieve whatever goal was necessary. I had noticed as I was playing along that my initial attempts at free form coasters were all rating as ‘extreme’ with nausea ratings to match, all the while having a pretty low excitement level. After a bit of guess and check work, I was able to determine that you get really high ratings in those areas when you put curves after very large drops, especially so if the curves were not banked. I did correct that in the course of the scenarios, but, I kept it in mind for the purpose of experimentation outside of gameplay.

One of the single best features of the second RCT game is that it gives you a coaster builder section. This section allows you to build a coaster without the obstructions in the actual scenario, and, more importantly, without wasting valuable time in the actual scenario. They let you save the coaster, then load it directly into your scenario later, provided you have enough cash to do it. This was the most educational part of the game for me, at least as far as learning how to make a ride that will attract people, and thus help me to win the scenarios. However, I am a pretty sadistic little bastard. I began to wonder just exactly how extreme a coaster could get; how much g-force they would let you build into the coaster and still be able to test and open it. That has really been the most fun part of the game.

To your right you will see the test data from my latest sadistic coaster. I am kind of proud of the 22.51 intensity rating, since the ratings seem to be loosely based on a 1-10 scale with anything over ten being extreme, or extreme with an adjective. The nausea rating doesn’t matter to me all that much, that is the whole point of the ride, isn’t it? If you want to go on a coaster and not feel sick, I am pretty sure they have those baby coasters out there somewhere. It is the G-Force ratings on this one that I am pretty proud of. The lateral G’s are because it is a launced coaster (meaning it is shot out of the gate as opposed to being pulled), and at damn near 5 G’s I am pretty sure that this alone would take your breath away. The negative vertical G’s is there only because they wouldn’t let me launch the thing downhill, meaning I had to make a hump which led into the huge drop. The positive 9.95G is the one that I am most proud of though, I mean, damn!

I can’t seem to find any conclusive proof regarding the subject, but I have heard that without the aid of a special suit pilots will start to black out at around 6G’s. Whether or not that is true doesn’t really matter though. Just imagine going a carnival ride like the “Gravitron”, which only does 3G’s, and multiply that by 3. I couldn’t move my appendages forward while riding on the gravitron, and it almost felt like the skin on my face was starting to slip off. If the forces were three times that amount, I likely would have been, at the very least, a bit sick. Man that is a lot of G-force.

The really sad part is that I may never know just how the ride would affect little pixelated sprites, as I have put that coaster into a couple of different scenarios and have yet to have a single passenger. Isn’t there some little, pixelated sprite out there that is being egged on enough by his little, pixelated friends that he has to ride it? If there is I have yet to find him.

I really should try to come up with something more interesting to put here, but the roller coaster game is calling me again. It is really a damn shame how easily I can get addicted to these mindless little games.

Hopefully I will have actual content here next post. Hopefully.

Plumbing disaster

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Well it seems that I decided to go ahead and take another week off of posting. Not that it was a conscious decision, just something that I noticed when I was uploading my last post to the archives. It seems that time goes into a bit of a warp during the holiday season. Either that or I was abducted by aliens and am actually typing this only a few hours after I last posted. The former seems more likely.

So, Happy 2005! I can honestly say that I don’t know where the last few years have gone. The last new years celebration that I can remember is the one leading into 2000. That is not due to the alcohol either. I think it is because that was the last time the wife and I actually went out to celebrate it, really celebrate it anyway. Not to mention that everyone made such a big deal out of it, being the changing of a millenia (if you choose to view it that way, since technically the next year would be the actual change). Which really doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it. They could have picked any arbitrary day throughout human civilization to start counting, they simply chose that one, now we celebrate it as if it is the day the universe were formed, which it clearly isn’t (except possibly to the very religious; though they don’t even seem to know exactly what year God finished the only week of work he has done is his fictional, omnipotent life). Yes, anyway, Happy New Year!

• Now on to the plumbing disasters!

A couple of weeks ago I began to talk about the plumbing disaster. Unfortunately, the situation sat in limbo until yesterday. It had to be fixed yesterday, regardless of cost in money or loss of limb, but I will get to that later.

Since this happened during the holidays, not a single one of the people that were supposed to come by to help ever did. This annoys me to no end. It is not like the people in question are really close friends, but they are people that I have done favors for in the past. Of course one doesn’t do favors for people expecting a favor to be returned, but when you are in a crisis and they are in a position to help, and choose not to, it really makes you think twice about the possibility of helping them later. Spite can be very powerfull, it seems.

The water situation had been getting progressively worse every day since the last mention of it. It was at a point where I would have to go out and turn the main water supply on and off at the meter when we needed to use it. Honestly, that wasn’t all that much of a hardship, but it was monumentally annoying. Imagine my wife trying to cook Christmas dinner, while I had to go out and turn the water on when she needed to use it. It was also pretty embarassing in that respect. I am a thirty year old man, I should be able to deal with such trifles on my own, instead I was feeling all but helpless. Especially since the water meter doesn’t shut off completely, meaning that even while it was off the situation was getting worse, and with the hardware stores opened really screwy hours due to the holidays, even if I had the knowledge to do it myself I likely wouldn’t have been able to buy the parts.

By Saturday the situation was pretty bleak. I turned on the water only long enough to jump into the shower and wash my hair. By the time I got back out to turn it off, the leaky pipe had managed to fill the 35+ foot trench that I had dug for the new line, nearly to the top. Being that the trench was fourteen inches deep, that was a lot of water. That was when I knew that there was no way I could turn the water on again, for any reason, until it was fixed. It was also that night that I once again spoke to Danny Padilla, who swore that he would come over just after church on Sunday to help me. He never showed, of course.

At 8:45am on Sunday, I went out to start the work. The first thing that I had to do was drill a second hole through the 18 inch thick brick, mortar and adobe wall. The first hole happened to come out exactly where an existing pipe was running and there was no way to get a connector on the new pipe, as it was far too close to the wall. The problem with drilling the hole is that your average drill bit isn’t 18 inches long. In fact, it isn’t even 8 inches long. They do make bits that are that long, and in the size that I needed, I priced one at the hardware store, it was 53.95, and it would not have worked with a standard 3/8″ drill anyway. What I had to do was buy a drill extension and use the largest masonry bit that I had to drill a center hole, with five more surrounding it, then find a way to clear out the rest. The cheapest, easiest way to clear out the rest was to use a spade bit, which is meant for cutting through wood, not brick and stone. It was the only option that I had to make the hole the inch and a quarter that it needed to be. There were sparks flying as the little bit chipped away the stone, smoke was coming back as it slowly made its way through the wall. It took almost ten minutes of constant drilling, with a lot of pressure on the bit, but I did get through the wall (again; the first time I drilled it through where it was wet from the leak, it was much easier, that was why I chose that location the first time…Too bad the existing plumbing was in teh way), the spade bit looks a bit more like an arrow than anything else now, I wonder If I could return it.

The hole in the wall was (what I anticipated to be) the second hardest part of the endeavor. With that behind me, I ran the PVC through the wall, slapped on some elbows and connected it to the pipe that I had already run under the sidewalk (If you have never tried to run a pipe under a sidewalk, btw, you really should give it a go sometime, best several hours of your life). Then I went ahead and laid thirty feet of pipe towards the main water hook up, leaving only a short section to make the final connections. Then I went back to the other side of the pipe in the wall and added an elbow and a ball valve, my house would finally have a water shut off! It was at this point that I realized that even though I bought way more connectors than I thought I was going to need, it would likely not be enough. I made the trip to the ACE hardware in neighboring Coolidge to buy more parts.

Funny thing really, when I got to the ACE I started to put parts into a basket. At first I was putting in just the parts that would be necessary if all went well, then I decided I better figure out the worst case scenario and make sure to have enough parts for that as well, since the worst case is usually where I always end up. Good thing I did too. (Much on a side note, I knew that PVC was cheap, but I had no idea just how cheap. While planning the worst case scenario, and buying the necessary parts for it, I went ahead and bought enough pipe, connectors and the such to replace the entire cold water line in my house. Total cost, twelve bucks, added to the twelve that I had already spent, so, 24 dollars to replace the cold water line from the meter to everything in the house. That is counting only the PVC though, the connectors that you need to actually hook into the faucets and water heater are far more expensive. In fact, I bought the connectors for the hot and cold lines in and out of the water heater today, brass nipples and copper pipe, for a total of 36 dollars. The only other expensive parts are the angle stops that let you shut off the water to the toilet, or the faucets under the sink, but those only go three or four bucks, so still not that much.) Back home I went, hoping that I hadn’t missed my plumber friend.

Mr. Plumber friend didn’t show up while I was gone, and not after I got home either. I whiled away a bit of time playing roller coaster tycoon, but by 12:30 I knew I had to get going or it wouldn’t get done. I went out to the water meter and, very apprehensively, cut the main water line. I made a major mistake on that; I had to make two cuts and I cut the higher one first. Being that the water doesn’t shut off completely at the meter I had to make the second cut underwater, as I could not pail the water out of the hole fast enough to keep it from being submersed again. Even after I had made both cuts (leaving just enough room that I could get an elbow onto the main line, completely bypassing the old one), I had to dig the hole quite a bit deeper to allow me to try to glue the connectionw while they were not underwater. With all of the connections made to the water meter, I went to check my newly installed ball valve. As hoped/expected, the water started to stream out of it within about a minute. Now, PVC glue is not meant to be used on wet pipes, so I didn’t want to actually shut off the valve and build up pressure in the line, so I loose-fitted a line to the shut off that ran ten feet away from the whole situation. I let it run like that for about an hour, just long enough that I was confident that the pvc cement would be able to hold the little bit of pressure it would be getting when I shut off the newly installed ball valve. For the first time in several weeks I had no water leaking on my property, of course I also had no way to shower or wash my hands. It was time for the hard part.

Several calls to the plumber friend had gone unanswered, and I had already cut the main water line and spliced into it, we had no running water until this was done. I decided to bite the bullet and try to make the most difficult connection myself. The problem there was that I had to try to cut through the old galvanized line, twice, to remove an elbow so that I could splice back into the indoor plumbing. The problem was worsened by the fact that 1) my hack saw blades were worn to shit, and 2) The most difficult connection was directly behind the water heater, leaving about six inches of workspace. I started sawing away with my little hacksaw, and sawing, and sawing. I spent about a half an hour trying to make just one of the cuts and I knew that it was just not going to happen. What I didn’t know then, which I do now that I have showered, is that I bloodied three out of eight exposed knuckles while trying, two on the right hand and one on the left. It was at this point that my wife suggested three things, 1) That we call her dad to see if he could help. 2) That I go to Circle K (kind of a code for buy some beer). 3) That I leave it alone for a while.

Turns out that she was right on all three counts. The father-in-law happened to have a Reciprocating Saw (most people call them sawzall, regardless of the brand), which was exactly what the operation required. I had a couple of malt beverages while awaiting his arrival, which really did soothe the anxiety a bit, and I wasn’t nearly as pissed off at the plumbing when he got here. It seems that the more angry you are, the less likely you are to deal with things rationally, or something. I am starting to believe all of those “temporary insanity” claims on murder charges might be at least partially true; I was going to kill the plumbing, and I really doubt that I was thinking that as a sane person.

The reciprocating saw couldn’t really fit in the space alloted, so we did have to pull the water heater out. It was probably better that way anyhow, as the natural gas line was actually so close as to be nearly touching the pipe I was trying to cut. Once the water heater was removed, the reciprocating saw took care of the pipe cutting in about one minute, for both cuts. As I look at my little knuckles I can only think that I really wish Mr. plumber friend would have shown up, that saw is quite the time/flesh saver. With the water heater safely outside, the worst case scenario presented itself; The “T” that I was hoping to join into was stuck fast, even though the line itself was loose all the way into the house. Thankfully, I had purchased all of the parts necessary to replace the whole damn thing. Within an hour (after the water heater was drained) we had it all hooked back up.

There are a couple of extremely minor leaks in the finished product, but I did purchase parts to fix them. I have yet to actually do that though, since I plan to replace all of the rest of the plumbing over the next couple of weekends. One drop of water per minute doesn’t really qualify as a leak in my books anyway, at least not when I think about what I was facing just a couple of weeks ago.

There are a couple of upsides to this whole thing, well at least one. Replacing that line has made it so that we have much better pressure on the hot water line, to the point that you can actually fill up a bath in less than three hours! Further upsides will come when I replace the rest of the existing water lines, but now that I have a main shut off valve, I am going to do that an hour or two at a time, on the weekends, so that I don’t stress myself out so much as I have done over this.

Finally, for plumbing related issues, it has been raining all damn day. That makes it so that I don’t want to go out and slop mud back into the water-filled trench to cover up the pipes. Is this proof that there is a GOD, and he really, really hates me?

To be fair, I really must thank my father-in-law for helping me when I really needed it. I guess they say that that is what family is all about. I wouldn’t really know. What I do know is that my wife’s father was the one that was here to help after all friends and acquaintances who said they would help didn’t. I am grateful for that, and I know that if the situations were reversed I would have done/will do the same.

December 28, 2004

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I decided that I better go ahead and throw something up here today, lest you all think that I died a horrible death and was not able to slap together a post in the last week.

The Christmas Holiday is always a pretty hectic time in these parts, especially this year. I had ordered a gift for the wife through amazon.com (which is not linked to or capitalized because I am a bit pissed at them right now). A couple of days later, I got an email saying that the item was ‘delayed in shipping’, but not to worry it would still be here in time. Of course the next email that I received from them said that it was out of stock, and wouldn’t be getting here at all. That sort of thing really sucks. Especially if you are like me, and don’t want to set foot in a department store anywhere between Thanksgiving and New Years, but I really had to in this case.

The item in question was not even any sort of a ‘white elephant’, it was just the ‘Titans’ expansion to Age of Mythology. While I was not able to find the expansion at the local Wal-Mart, I was able to find the gold edition of the original game, which included the expansion, and that was what I bought (it did cost a lot more than the expansion, but I needed it at that point). This is where doing your planning at least a couple of weeks before Christmas could really have helped me.

Angry Amazon stories aside, Christmas went pretty well. I did buy the latest Harry Potter DVD for my wife, while she instructed her Parents to buy the same for me, so we now have two copies of it (I kept my receipt just in case something like that were to happen, so it is not that big a deal). We all seemed to enjoy the day, it was a pretty good Christmas.

My wife gifted me the second ‘Roller Coaster Tycoon’ (well, the ultra, mega, version, with all of the expansions) game, which has been draining away most of my waking hours. The second RCT game has gotten rid of a lot of the issues that I was having with the first, but it has left a lot of them as well. I just enjoy the second version more since they give you scenarios where you don’t have to make any money at all, don’t have to have a good park rating, just have to have exciting coasters, and you don’t have to pay anything to build them. That was the whole reason I wanted to play the game in the first place, I wanted to build gnarly roller coasters and see if anyone would go on them. I did have a lot of deaths on my first couple of attempts, but who knew that you actually needed to put brakes at the end of the run?

The Christmas haul also had some socks and underwear. While, ten years ago, I would have hated to see such items as Christmas gifts, this year I was totally stoked. The wife managed to find some of the underwear that I failed to find in both an internet search, and a local store search. Add to that that the wife has been searching for said underwear for several weeks with the holiday approaching, and never found them. Imagine my excitement when I opened a package to find 8 pair of underwear! I may never have to buy underwear again! Well, that is certainly not true, but I am starting to think that, since the underwear are so hard to find, I may only wear them on special occasions from this day forward. Of course that is the type of bold statement that you could make if you weren’t married. For some reason, women seem to think that you should be wearing underwear every waking moment. Unless, of course, they are horrible sluts, in which case they might get confused if you offer them underwear.

One more thought for today, I have recently started to read the book “The DaVinci Code”, and I find the first few chapters to be a tad boring. I know that it has glowing critical acclaim and all, but it is (so far) seeming to be some sort of a history lesson. I am sure that there will be action in it at some point, but for now I am reading it solely because it has so much buzz about it. Perhaps every mundane factual mention in the first few chapters will come into play in the end, I don’t know. I will say that it has me intrigued enough that I want to to turn the page to see what happens next, and that is the hallmark of a good novel. I sure hope it starts to happen soon though, else I might just start to think that whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not I am reading about it..

The joys of owning your own home!

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The joys of owning your own home!

Several days ago I noticed a small pool of water next to the bathtub. I wasn’t all that concerned, surmising that the wife possibly had neglected to close the curtain completely while showering. I mopped up the little pool and that was that. Or so I thought. The next day the pool was back. I began to think that I might have a minor plumbing problem on my hands. Given the layout of my bathroom, the toilet and bathtub are slightly elevated and separated from the actual sink (which, it turns out is pretty fortunate), I knew that the problem was centralized to that area, an area of roughly three feet in width, maybe six in length. This seemed like just a minor little problem.

Several months ago we had had a similar water pooling problem. The previous problem was from a crack in the small line that runs to the toilet. While it took me a while to find a hose of the correct size, it was eventually fixed pretty easily. I thought that this problem must also be toilet related, as the bathtub is sitting over the top of an empty hole in the foundation of the house, so if it was leaking the water would be absorbed into the ground, not leaking onto the floor. The first thing I checked was the toilet itself. There was no water coming from any of the connections, I could not find any sign of water around the bowl or the back. A visual inspection showed no cracks in the porcelain, no apparent damage to the junction between the back and the bowl, I was at a loss.

The next thought that I had was that maybe I just needed to replace the wax ring under the toilet. That is usually the place that water leaks near a toilet. However, had the wax ring been the problem, two facts would have been really hard to explain. The first is that if the wax ring is broken the toilet will only leak when flushed, which was not the case here. The second is that my wife uses a blue tablet in the toilet, so if it was leaking from the toilet, the water should be blue, the water was completely clear. This, of course, left only one possibility. Why the aliens had decided to deposit a gallon or so of water on the floor of my bathroom every morning is something that I still don’t quite understand.

Much like in my Arthur Witles story, the alien theory didn’t seem possible, well, not after I thought about it rationally anyway. Sure the water could have been placed there by aliens, but then why didn’t they abduct me? Why didn’t they mutilate my cattle (this is easily explained, as I have no cattle)? What could their motive possibly be? Is there some sinister alien race somewhere that really just wants to make people slightly uncomfortable by making them stand in a small pool of cold water while they try to pee? This all lead to me looking for a more earthly explanation for the mysterious pool of water in the bathroom (but, if you are an alien, and you have a garden hose, and I catch you in my bathroom, there is gonna be hell to pay!).

The water pipes that run behind the toilet (and later to the sink) come from behind the bathtub. The next logical step was to think that one of them was leaking. Much of the pipe is attached to the wall with mortar, and is not possible to inspect visually. However, the wall was not wet, nor was the groud right next to the wall. I mopped all of the water off of the floor and then dried it completely with a towel. I then layed squares of toilet paper over the joints in the tiles to see which one got wet the fastest. The strange part was that the one nearest the center of the room got wet a lot faster than the ones that were placed near the wall. So, while I was pretty sure that the leak was coming from somewhere in that wall, I was not able to understand why the water was able to pass to the center of the room without ever touching the other pieces of paper. I eventually dismissed that question, assuming that the water was running below the tiles. Which would all make sense, since water seeks the easiest path to the lowest point before it will begin to pool.

I put off going outside to look inside the access panel behind the bathtub for a few days. I thought that, at most, I would have to replace the hot and cold water lines from the bathtub over to the sink (about five feet total for each line). It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I had a couple of local contractors (the cheap kind) that were going to come and take a look at it on Saturday, but neither of them showed up. So late Saturday night I went outside to look at what I was dealing with behind the bathtub, thinking that I could go buy a couple of parts at home depot and do it myself. When I raised the door to the access panel, I knew I was in way over my head.

The access panel behind the bathtub is a small opening (roughly 2 feet square) in the side of the house. Being that the house is over a hundred years old, it is also the only access to any place where the house is not placed solidly on the rock hard foundation (which is because the plumbing was added long after the house was built. Which also means that all of my plumbing is visible [except the drain lines], and also explains why they added a new room to the house to add incoming water -you try to chisel through three feet of underground, solid stone to run a pipe and tell me how it goes-). It turns out that the little area behind the bathtub can hold damn near exactly seven gallons of water before the level gets high enough to start seepin through onto the floor. I know that since that is just about how much water I was having to bail out once ever few hours. I was still at a loss though, there was not a damn pipe there that was wet. Every line going to the toilet, sink or bathtub was bone dry. It seemed odd.

Eventually, I decided to go around and check the room with the water heater (this was the room that was added later for the sole purpose of handling the incoming water supply). I found the problem. It was about midnight at the time, and I was armed only with a flashlight, so I was only able to ascertain that the leaking was coming from the first line that came in. The first three feet (vertically, as the rest of it was buried in concrete) felt damp, and the floor was pretty clearly wet. I had finally found the damn problem! Of course it was far too dark to try to see where the leak was, so I went to bed pretty content, thinking that I would be able to replace an elbow or something and be done with it. I mean, really, these old, galvanized lines usually start to leak at the joints first, they never, ever, ever start to leak on the straight line, especially when they are buried in concrete.

Sunday morning I found out that the old, galvanized line broke on a straight stretch of line, which happened to be buried in concrete. It really sucks to be the one-in-a-million when it is not the winning the lottery.

The pipe runs under the little room with the water heater for a total of about four feet. There is one line (the very first actual water outlet in the entire system) that runs straight up just inside the shed. This runs to a simple garden hose outlet. This is where the pipe is broken. The break is at ground (concrete) level, so there is no way that I can just cap it off. Leaving me exactly two options, the first being to let it leak seven gallons of water every few hours and bail it out, the second to turn off the main water (at the meter) and turn it on when we need it. I chose the latter.

This is where most people would call in a professional. This is also where I can absolutely prove just how blindingly cheap frugal I am.

I did speak to a couple of professionals, and I came up with the conclusion that they generally charge by the hour. So, what I needed to do was to make sure that, were I to hire one, they could get in and out of here as quickly as possible. That meant, “fuck the old plumbing, lemme see if I can find a way around digging all the old shit up.” That also meant that someone was going to have to dig a trench, about forty feet long, in which to place the new pipe. I like to think that I am a pretty proud person, and I really believe that I am, I am especially proud of the forty foot long trench that I dug, with my own hands, thus saving me paying someone else to do it. It did take in excess of three and a half hours, and I developed, then broke, then developed, then broke a lot of blisters on my hands. I also got myself hit in the right eye with a chip of something that made it so that I could’t even open my right eye this morning, but I saved myself a buck or two, and that is what it is all about (the thing about the blisters and the eye are both totally serious, one of the bosses actually wanted me to take time off of work to go have my eye inspected)! Plumbing must be fixed.

None of the contractors that I had spoken to ever showed up, but, as luck would have it, I ran into a friend (of sorts) who is a retired contractor, just as I was going to lunch. I must say that he really admired the trench that I dug. That trench is a damn good piece of work, but, as it is with all trenches, it must eventually be filled in. Perhaps I will be able to get a wonderful snapshot of it before I have to bury it again (yes, I am proud of my trench). He did ask that I dig it twelve inches deeper near the water meter, other than that he had no complaints. I told him what my plan was, to circumvent the underground plumbing by running a whole new line, and he was a big fan of it. While this will still be a pretty big endeavor (as the water heater will have to be drained and removed until the lines are replaced), it seems so much more possible for me to do it basically by myself. I just want to have someone there that actually knows what they are doing, just in case I try to do something completely stupid. While I don’t think I would do something completely stupid (in relation to my house), I know that there is evidence that shows that I would do something stupid. I have tattoos, for instance, need I say more?

So the trench is dug, the plan is in place, all I need to do is dig just a bit deeper near the water meter and knock out part of a wall that has stood for over a hundred years (which sucks. But since it is behind the bathtub you will never see it anyway.). I have someone who is going to help me (someone who is not only knowledgeable, but offering his services ‘pro bono’, provided that I do all the labor (so, like a coach). He has also said that he will gift me the copper line to replace the outgoing water from the water heater (which would be nice to have, especially since he is going to show me how to install it).

This horrible broken water pipe thing is shaping up to be a pretty good learning experience for me. It would really have been nice if it was not happening on the cusp of Christmas, but what are you gonna do? The thing is that after I (do all the labor) watch him make the connections with the copper pipes, I will know how to do it, and I will know it for the rest of my life. So I will be getting the gift of knowledge, and really, is there any better gift? Well, possibly running water, but I am working on that, and the gift of knowledge comes into play there as well…

What time is it?

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Rejoice! I have decided to update my page today! If you don’t want to rejoice you don’t have to, I am not really doing it myself. One of the benefits of having a little site like this, particularly one that is not read daily by more than a handfull of people, is that no one really gives a damn if there is new content or not. I am sure that the people who do read it must find some sort of satisfaction in it ( I am guessing here ), but that lends itself more to the ‘snooping around in other people’s business’ category. You read what I write, yet don’t care if I don’t write, you are just taking a peek into my life. That seems to be the actual defenition of a BLOG. However, I have never billed this site as a BLOG, and don’t really consider it as such. Most of the BLOGs that I read are either political, or spend a lot of time talking about current events. That is something that I am trying to avoid here. I do talk about the news when it gets me into a bitching mood, and the same with politics. Yet, if I were to start doing that exclusively I would lose the whole point of the creation of this site.

I just love to bitch. It is my life’s blood. The unfortunate side effect of that is that no one really wants to listen to me do it anymore. Sure, the wife will listen, but the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to care. So, when I type my bitch down (maybe the next USHER song, ‘type my bitch down’), it feels like I am venting it. It really does help to clear my head and get back into focus. I do have to pay the twenty bucks a year for the domain name, and eight bucks a month for the hosting, but that seems like small potatoes when I think about how theraputic the site is (not to mention that lots of men my age are paying quadruple that price to look at porn).

Now I will put the incoherent preamble aside and get to the bitching!

• What time is it?

I don’t know how many people out there are like me. I may just be that weird freak that everyone talks about. I always keep my wrist-watch in perfect time (well not that I call every day to make sure, but within a second or two is okay), yet I have a habit of setting the time on my alarm clock thirty minutes ahead (of course that has to be almost exactly thirty minutes, else I would be fucked). Why do I do this? Well, I want the alarm to go off early enough that I will be able to get out of bed. Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, I think that maybe it wasn’t really the alarm, or maybe it was in a dream (my dreams are usually very vivid). By the time I actually wake enough to look over at the clock, the alarm might have been sounding for several minutes. When I do eventually look to the clock, I think that it is thirty minutes later than it really is, that sort of shocks me back to reality. While it would seem that you would get used to it after a while, I still manage to get tricked every day.

The hard part, you see, is to get me out of whatever dream I am currently in. It is amazing how your mind can integrate real time outside noises into the little world you create while you are asleep. Last Sunday, for instance, the wife nudged me to tell me to turn off the alarm. Her nudge wakened me to the point that I realized that the beeping sound was not the garbage truck (in the dream) backing up for me to throw in trash. Yet, once I turned off the alarm, I was back in the garbage truck, rolling down the street to collect refuse from every house.

Sometimes it takes a couple of whacks at the ‘snooze bar’ before I actually roll over to look at the clock. While you would think that I would look at the clock and immediately register that I have it set thirty minutes later than it really is, it never happens. Almost always it shocks me into waking from a dream. At that point I do remember the odd setting of my clock, but, like I said, sometimes it takes a few whacks of the ‘snooze bar’ before I give up on the dream.

I suppose that I should thank the random fluctuations of time and space that I am not a sleep-walker. If I had that condition, added to the lucid dreaming, I might not be here to type about it now. Yes, I do know that everyone dreams, yes, I do know that they all seem real. But (and this is a very big but), have you ever gone out the next morning and dug a hole in your back yard based on a dream? Now that I am sounding like some whacked-out UFOlogist, I should mention that I only did that once, and to no success.

I would never have guessed that my little, innocuous story about all the clocks in the house showing a different time would have lead to all that. Of course I didn’t ever get to the point about all of the clocks in the house having different times, which was what I was planning to do a couple of paragraphs ago.

Anyway, the time is kind of based on what room you are in around here. With the exception of my alarm clock, I don’t think any other (functioning) clock in the house is more than a few minutes off. While one clock might be five minutes fast, and another five minutes slow, actual time will come into play eventually. I have never tried to get dressed in the room with the clock that is the furthest behind, yet I am pretty sure that time itself would have continued on. (i.e. I can pick a room with a clock that says I am not late, but the clock at work doesn’t confirm that decision).

Damn, it is now 11:11, 11:35, 11:44 or 11:01, depending on the clock I look at. No wonder I have weird issues with time…

Shootout in Florence

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Well, such as is the way of the universe, yesterday’s really short post went on to be within the top ten of my longest posts ever. I would like to attribute that all to my crack writing ability, as well as a good subject to write about, unfortunately, neither of those were actually the case. It seems that I am just a lot better at bitching about past experiences than current ones. I really don’t think that anyone out there is a bit different than me in that respect; it takes you years of thinking about an experience to get it etched into your long term memory.

Whether that experience was good or bad, it ceratinly left a mark on me. Do you remember what you got for your birthday in 1983? If you do, I would certainly like to know why, which is why I put the ’email me’ link on the bottom of the page in the first place.

Now, on to other stuff.

• It turns out that really freaky, weird news can happen right where you live…Even if you live in an extremely small town. I am going to quote the entire article from the Arizona Republic Web Site , as it might not be there tomorrow.

70-year-old dies after 12-hour police standoff in Florence
Liikely died of self-inflicted wound, authorities say
Dec. 14, 2004 02:40 PM:
Schools and several businesses in Florence were shut down Tuesday morning as a 70-year-old man held police at bay in a 12-hour standoff before he was fatally wounded by what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.

At one point in the standoff, around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Robert Schultz allegedly used an AK47-like weapon to fire 50 to 60 rounds at an armored vehicle with SWAT team members from the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office inside, said Cmdr. Jerald Monahan.

Deputies returned fire but it was unclear whether they hit Schultz. None of the deputies was injured.

Schultz barricaded himself after a conflict with his son escalated, authorities said.

The standoff forced the evacuation of a number of homes in an area south of the center of town near the residence on Circle Drive where the conflict took place.

Robert Schultz barricaded himself inside a bus-like RV in his back yard shortly after 8 p.m. Monday night and was pulled out by police shortly after 8 on Tuesday morning.

Following sunrise, police could see Schultz lying down inside the RV from which he fired at the armored vehicle. Police took Schultz into custody and he was flown to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he died around 11:30 a.m., Monahan said.

Florence High School along with the town’s middle school and elementary school canceled classes.

Florence police Chief Robert Ingulli said a number of students travel through the area where the standoff took place to get to the schools.

“The fear was that they would be in danger if gun fire erupted,” Monahan said.

The Florence Unified School District administrative office, located on the other side of a parking lot behind Schultz’s residence, was shut down along with four main roadways encompassing the evacuated sector of town.

After Schultz barricaded himself inside the RV, Schultz’s wife called 911, Monahan said. She told police that Schultz had a number of weapons inside, and when authorities contacted Schultz on a cellphone, he threatened to harm police, Monahan said.

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team responded and later called in the Chandler Police Department’s SWAT team to provide relief for its deputies.

Now, I do know the guy involved, it is a very small town. While I would like to think that there is some way to keep Assault Rifles out of the little town, I guess this is pretty much proof that anyone, anywhere can gain access to one. While you wouldn’t think that the guy, who is 70 years old would have one, I think this proves that he just might.

My question is, what did his son say to piss him off so much that he was ready to kill the world, or die trying? I suppose they will uncover more of what actually transpired during the standoff as time moves on, but, still, I really think it must have been something ‘earth-shattering’ to send him over the edge.

I really don’t know what happened to make him snap, I am not even sure if I want to know. What I do know is that I don’t want to piss off anyone in the family, or the in-laws for a very long time. Funny how I have become so attached to this life.

I guess that is pretty much normal logic though; Sure you hate your life, but, would you trade it for your death? Me, I have only x amount of years to be on this earth, and I plan to live every damn one of them! As far as going senile when I am seventy, talk to me in forty years…At which point I might bludgeon your children when you are not looking, then snap and start doing really hostile things. Only time will tell.

The most unfortunate part of this whole thing is that there is now a widow, the wife of the guy that died, who has no husband, no guns, no ammunition, but, a laundry list of things to be taken care of. I feel for her far more than I try to feel for him. Imagine being elderly, then having to pay for an unsuspected funeral, though if you have a ‘cache’ of weapons (which inludes an AK-47), I suppose you would be foolish to think that ‘natural causes’ would be the killer…..Yet,I guess the police probably did steal (I mean remove from the home) anything that had a hole in one end of it.

I seem to be a bit too upset about this issue to get involved.

Food stamps

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I don’t have a thing to talk about today. No news items of note. No pictures to share. This will probably be a pretty short one, even by my standards.

• So something that happened at work today got me a bit steamed. It was just something that a woman said in passing, as she was buying her groceries with food stamps. What she said was that she only got 99 dollars a month in food stamps, and “how am I supposed to live on that?” The thing is that she said it while I was being forced to remove some chips, ice cream and soda from her order so that she would have enough to cover the total, which I will get back to in a minute. What I found really strange about it was that she said this in front of about six people (all the rest of whom paid with actual cash, btw) as if she honestly believed that everyone gets food stamps(at least that was how it came across to me).

I am pretty liberal on most issues, and I think that providing food for people who can’t afford it is a necessary thing. Growing up, after my parents divorced, my mother was forced to go onto that type of government assistance. Imagine being the single mother of three, making 3.35 an hour, trying to provide a house and utilities. Her paycheck was never enough to cover the rent and all of the utilites, so she was forced to juggle; let one bill go unpaid one month, then a different one the next month. That was before the thought of what we were going to eat for dinner ever came into play. Without government assistance, we would truly have never had anything to eat.

My mother was very smart with her food stamp purchases though. We did get things such as chips and sweet cereal, but only when they were bought in bulk at a warehouse store. The rest of the purchases were almost exclusively of inexpensive items that could make several meals. Potatoes, for instance, get 10 pounds for a dollar, add a 1 dollar can of corned beef and you have just made dinner for four for about 1.33, since it only took about a third of the potatoes. The next day might have been chili, a couple pounds of beans for 50 cents, a bit of whatever kind of beef was on sale and some seasoning. Maybe two dollars spent there for a meal for four. Next day, maybe use another third of the potatoes and mash them, make some gravy (the little packs were like four for a buck at the time) for say 50 cents, meal for four for 88 cents. There was always bread, of course, but I am not going to count the cost of that, since we always bought it at a bakery outlet that sold outdated bread at 5 loaves for a dollar. There was also dairy stuff (milk and cheese and the such) but we honestly got a lot of that through a government food box program, which is much the same as the WIC program is today. I think you see my point. She could easily feed the four of us three meals a day, for a week, and probably get it done for about 20 or 25 dollars.

This was in the eighties, of course, so the prices on everything have gone up. However, the prices for things like dry beans and potatoes have remained pretty low compared to the prices of other things. Frozen meals leap into my mind as something that has gone up in price by several hundred percent since that time, unfortunately that is the type of thing that most of the people on food stamps seem to buy. I could understand that if it was because they were working full time, or even part time on multiple jobs, but in reality it seems that most of the people (at least in my experience) are on food stamps because they are just plain lazy. No job at all, not even looking for work, claiming that they can’t work because they have children. Thing about that excuse is that you have to enroll them in school eventually, it is the law, not to mention the best and cheapest day care service available.

In the defense of people like my mother, as I am sure there still are people in the position she was in back then, I know that not everyone that is on government assistance is like that. In fact, I remember seeing a story on the Discovery Channel some time back where a woman that had been on Welfare for several years had worked her way up to a decent job, then actually made voluntary donations to the Welfare program to cover the amount of money that they had issued her. Of course I can’t find a link to the story anywhere on the site, and google didn’t help either, but I saw the show and was truly shocked that someone could be that proud. Kind of the polar opposite of the type of people that I see around here.

A few paragraphs back, I was talking about the WIC program (the link goes to the Arizona Wic website, as the federal site ‘cannot be found’ when I click on it). To put the WIC program into a nutshell, they give families with low incomes necessary food items. Specifically, things like milk, cereal (nothing sugared, there are strict guidelines), cheese, fruit juice (actual juice, not fruit punch), eggs, baby formula for newborns, peanut butter, dry beans and etc. This program is so much better than the food stamp program though, since they can only buy exactly what each check they have says. So instead of buying soda, they have to buy fruit juice. Instead of buying Apple Jacks, they have to buy approved cereals like cheerios, chex, corn flakes and etc. (interesting side note, apple jacks was the sixth sweetened cereal that I typed into my address bar, and the first one that actually took me to a cereal website. Trix, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Pebbles and Sugar Smacks (( all without spaces, and all just www.name.com)) all lead to sites, but none of them are about cereal. In fact one of them leads to a page that has casino games and adult links. How fucked up is that?) This forces them to buy nutritious foods and dairy products, and makes it impossible for them to buy junk food.

The WIC program takes it so seriously that they randomly audit register receipts to make sure that all items purchased meet the WIC guidelines. They inspect every WIC approved retailer at least once a year. They even send out WIC agents with checks to try to buy products that are not covered. If a retailer fails any inspection, receipt audit, or field test, they are put on warning for some amount of time. If, during that time, they fail again, they are removed from the WIC program. They are damn serious about it.

I would really like to see some similar model adapted by the food stamp program. Unfortunately, the implementation of anything like that would cost millions, and is pretty unlikely. There is a glimmer of hope though. Most (possibly all?) states now have electronic food stamps, you know, like a credit card. This makes it so that the customer can never get back any change on any transaction (which makes it impossible to buy a nickel gum, then use the 95 cents in change to buy a beer- that used to be a real problem-). Even though most all retailers have scanning systems that can keep track of what a consumer buys, the sheer number of products that come out every year would make it literally impossible to try to keep up a list of what could and could not be purchased with food stamps. No matter how much I wish it was possible, it is just never going to happen.

I suppose that, in some parallel universe, it would be possible to set up food stamp only stores. If the store only carried healthy, nutritious items, and if you could only use food stamps at that store, you would have to buy it. Nothing like that could ever happen in this universe. Every major market chain accepts food stamps, and every one of them would be pretty unhappy if they lost the revenue of the non-paying customer. I really would like to just get a glimpse of that alternate universe though, just to see how it worked out.

• Now, to prove that I am a hypocrite, I offer you a quick anecdote from my youth.

When my parents initially separated, my mother and the three of us moved into a tiny little shack. The little shack had (to the best of my memory) three rooms. One room was the living room, one was the kitchen and one was a bedroom, which had a small shower in the corner. The actual toilet was a tiny, wooden building about twenty feet out the back door (yes, an outhouse). I believe that we were living in this one rent free, as my mom was working for the farm that owned it. Let us just say that it was not the most wonderful home. But, Mom left with nothing. She left Dad every posession, except one car, in order to keep us kids. (in hindsight, I think that dad was really just trying to prove to mom that she would not be able to survive without him. I think that backfired, since that just made her want to prove him wrong.). The accomodations got better with each move, so there is no need to feel sorry for me, my brothers or my mom. I will say that you have to really, really, really take a dump before you go sit in an outhouse, in Oregon, in the winter though.

We were living in that little structure as our birthdays approached (my brothers’ being only two days apart, with mine a month after). As you would imagine, there was not a lot of money to be spent on presents. Of course a birthday with no presents would really suck, regardless of how poor you happen to be, so we did get presents. The first present was an itchy, smelly, green military blanket, which was as good as gold to us. The house was perpetually cold, I am not sure if it had any insulation at all, hell, I am not even sure if it had both interior and exterior walls, it could have all just been plywood. Anyway, this gift was given to us all at the same time, thankfully, even though it was a ‘birthday gift’ (here I might also note that they were donated from some church, so you see religion is not all bad).

The proof of my hypocrisy? The other gift that each of us got was ten dollars in food stamps. Ten dollars that we could spend on any kind of tooth rotting crap we chose. For the life of me I can’t remember exactly what I bought with mine. I will gurantee that there was at least one box of Star Crunch cookies, they were like heroin to me, at least until I was a teenager. That is why I am a hypocrite, I would never have gotten the gift of junk food if you couldn’t buy it with food stamps. Hmmm. Funny thought just occurred to me. I can remember what I got for my birthday in 1983, but I can’t remember what I got last year. I must really have liked those star crunch cookies.

• Damn it! I forgot to bitch about the initial point that I wanted to make. You see, if the woman from the first paragraph had exchanged all of the items she was buying for the generic equivalent items, she would have been able to buy all of the stuff. Not only that but she would have had money (food stamp balance) left over. Why is it that when it is not really your money you will buy the name brand, while if it is your money (at least in my case) you will buy the generic in almost every instance?