What was I thinking?

A few days ago I had a rather severe senior moment. Or junior moment. Or something.

I was doing my job. I was writing some Java code and made a weird typo. I think I was trying to type a left parenthesis and went way off target. I suddenly had a strong feeling that I had done the keystrokes that I would have done had I been typing on an IBM 029 Keypunch.

Through most of my time at New Mexico Tech we wrote our programs on decks of punch cards. I was good at touch typing on them. I knew how to type all the special characters.

So when I felt that I had regressed to my key punching days, I panicked.

I searched for a chart of the key punch's keyboard layout (isn't the Internet wonderful?) to see if I had indeed been confused about the kind of keyboard I was using.

I wasn't.

Neither of the key punch's parentheses was anywhere near where my misguided finger was going. I just slipped. I hope.

But this gave me the opportunity to reminisce about my college days and to be amazed at how much things have changed in such a short time.

It's been more than 30 years since I've used keypunches. But there is one behavior that I picked up from using them that I wish I could unlearn.

If you look at the keyboard layout chart you'll see that there are "Numeric" and "Alpha" keys where a normal keyboard's "Shift" keys are. Letters on a keypunch are all capitals. Pressing the Numeric key and a letter key gives you the special character on the letter's key. Numeric-N gives you the left parenthesis, for example.

In normal use of the keypunch you would rarely use the "Alpha" key. The Alpha key would be used only when a program card is used. The program card could set to make certain columns to behave as if you were pressing the Numeric key when typing. If anything shows up in the first six columns of a line of Fortran code, it has to be numbers so you could make a program card that effectively presses the Numeric key for you when typing in the first six columns. If for some reason you needed to type an alphabetic character in one of those first six columns when such a program card was used, you'd have to press the Alpha key. I was an expert at making useful program cards that would do numeric shifting, tabbing, duplicating, and whatever.

Anyway, I used only the left shift key when typing on a keypunch.

To this day, I use only the left shift key on a computer keyboard. When I need a capital Q, A, Z or an exclamation point, I press the shift key with my pinky and my ring finger takes over the pinky's duty. My ring finger gets quite a workout if I have to type something like "WES SAW A WAX SAX!"

I suppose I don't really need to use the right shift key but I wish I could.

Fire!

I check the traffic map before I leave work. Today there were some yellow diamonds right by home.  The details of the incidents said that there was a fire in the field in the northeast corner of the intersection of Bear Valley Parkway and San Pasqual Valley Road. We live in the southwest corner of that intersection.

Before I left work I saw the details up to about 4:34 PM.

Jerry called to say that I ought to take a different route home since traffic on Bear Valley Parkway was very slow.

Before I got home, Jerry and a neighbor got to watch a palm tree go up in flames.

I got home and went down to the field at the end of the road with my camera to watch the goings on. Of course, I took a movie. It's pretty dull. We get to see helicopters fly around and drop water on the fire. I missed the fixed-wing plane dropping the pretty pink water.

Here's the dull movie. The most interesting thing about it is the strobing of the helicopter blades that makes it look like they spin very slowly.


This is a map of the area. We live in the house toward the bottom. We watched from the person standing in the field. The helicopter landed at the helicopter. The fire was somewhere around the fire. And there's another marker under the buttons just to keep the fire in the picture.

View Neighborhood Fire in a larger map


The fire is out. Its origin is suspicious.

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits...

Jerry and I went to La Mesa today to have lunch with his mother and her neighbor, Mary. I explained to Mary as we went into the Olive Garden that Jack's investment strategy was that if he liked a company's product he bought shares of the company. He owned a lot of the Olive Garden (and Red Lobster and whatever else Darden Restaurants owns).

Anyway, that's not really part of the story except that we were away from home for about five hours. When we were pulling into the driveway Jerry wondered why the front yard was flooded.

This is the view of our flood from in front of the driveway.
And from in front of the neighbor's driveway.

And from the end of the street.
Jerry called the city and left a message on their answering machine. Then he called the Water Conservation Hotline. That call got forwarded to the police department's dispatcher who got the message to the water department. Somebody came and determined that the break was on the city's side of the meter (whew!).

They're going to come back and dig up the street to find the shut-off valve from the water main. I wonder how many of our neighbors will be without water and for how long. Darkness is upon us so I don't know how many pictures of work in progress I'll be able to take.

We've got buckets of water ready to use to flush the toilets and fresh water drawn.

I tried to get a wrench on the shut-off valve at the meter but decided that the break was on the pipe before it got to the valve so that wouldn't do any good. On the way through the lake I would sometimes sink quite a way. The poor gophers...I hope they've all drowned.

Troubles brewing!

The last few weeks of 2008 brought me some distress in the coffee department. And distress regarding coffee is, to paraphrase Martha, a bad thing.

The roasting chamber of my coffee roaster had developed a crack near its top. It had done this before. The crack slowly grew but it didn't break apart. I didn't want to put any stress on the crack so I didn't wash the pot for a long time. Finally I couldn't see into the pot so I broke down and washed it. The next time I roasted it broke.
I'm guessing a bit of water got into the crack and expanded while roasting and blew the crack apart. As I said, this had happened before. When it did I bought a second roasting chamber before the first one's crack finally gave way. The replacement gave me grief. The lid didn't fit well and took a lot of effort to get it to go on. That made roasting a chore. So I bought a yet another pot. So I had an emergency backup pot on hand. With a Phillips #1 screwdriver I was able to adjust the backup pot so the lid goes on easily. And life went back to normal.

(It turns out that I have yet another backup roasting chamber. My first coffee roaster died with a terrible screech last year so I bought a new roaster. It, of course, came with its own roasting chamber.)

The last week or two gave me something new to worry about. The handle of the portafilter, the thing that holds the coffee grounds for an espresso maker, developed a worrisome jiggle. When I'd put the portafilter into Silvia's group head the handle seemed to go a bit further than the filter. Yesterday I went to Whole Latte Love's web site to order a replacement but then got involved in other chores. (Hey, their 10% off sale goes through tomorrow!)

But that was too late anyway. Last night while making our New Year's Eve party's coffees the handle came off.
And life got complicated.

Fortunately, I'm a guy. Guys can fix things. Guys got duct tape. Well, duct tape wouldn't hold a portafilter's handle on. But guys also have Vise Grip locking pliers.

The pliers hold real good!
They'll work just fine till a replacement portafilter comes.

And life went back to normal.

By the way, while we're on the subject of coffee, here's a picture of what occasionally shows up in Silvia's drip tray. The iridescent film is so pretty.

MLM: Miss Ketola and other terrors in the library

Librarians always seemed to be terrorizing me. Was it just me or did they have issues with all children, those little defilers of their sacred temples? Or did they have special, unwritten rules for the little boys?

At Pueblo Junior High School the librarian was Miss Helen Ketola. She was the epitome of scary librarians. Here is her picture from my 8th grade yearbook (that I had modified slightly):

Miss Helen Ketola

Librarian

There are a couple of incidents with Miss Ketola that haunt me.

One day I was reading in the library and had my feet on the chair on the other side of the table. Miss Ketola came up to me and flung a rag on the table in front of me, told me that chairs were not for feet and demanded that I dust it off. I dusted it and NEVER put my feet on a chair in her library ever again. The lesson was a good one but I think that the method was a bit extreme.

Then one day I was looking for something like "The World Almanac and Book of Facts." I wanted to know when something like an eclipse or meteor shower was going to happen. I asked Miss Ketola something like "Where are the almanacs that tell me what's going to happen?" Her answer was "You stupid child, almanacs can't tell you what will happen! They tell what happened in the previous year!" (She didn't say quite those words but that was the tone of her answer.) I was so stunned that I couldn't explain that I knew the almanac would have the information I was looking for and still wanted to look something up. I left with my tail between my legs.

I must have made peace with Miss Ketola. At some point of my stay at Pueblo I worked behind the desk at the library. I don't know how I got that job. Was it an honor or penance?

There was a bit of terror in the junior high library that I brought on myself. There was a book on taxidermy that I checked out. I thought it might be kind of neat to stuff my own small mammals and frogs. It got scarier and scarier as I read through it. You have to kill the animals! They suggested several ways. There was putting them in a jar with ether. That put them to sleep then suffocated them. That was a peaceful way for them to go. A quicker way was to poison them with cyanide. "Just run down to your local drugstore and ask the pharmacist for a bottle. Be very careful with it. Just a tiny bit on your tongue will kill you almost instantly." I didn't want to kill little animals it turned out and I didn't want to kill myself. That was the end of my taxidermy career.

Back then could you really get cyanide at your local drugstore? Or even ether?

At Los Alamos High School we didn't have a library. We had an "Instructional Materials Center" (what we called "the IMC").

The head of the library's IMC's Code Enforcement Department was Mrs. Arntzen.

Mary Jean Arntzen
Librarian

I really don't remember much about Mrs. Arntzen. The reason I remember anything about her was because an English class assignment. I don't know what we were studying. It could have been English poetry. For the assignment I wrote a parody of "The Constant Lover" by Sir John Suckling. I called it "The Constant Shover/Ode to Miss Arntzen" (I thought all librarians were unmarried). The premise was that if you broke any IMC rule, you were summarily shoved out of the building by Ms. Arntzen. Who amongst us hasn't broken a library rule? She was a busy woman.

Lucky for you I didn't keep a copy of my poem. It wasn't very good but it was well received by the class. Apparently they had similar feelings about Ms. Arntzen. All I remember about the poem was the title and that it ended with her shoving "A dozen dozen from their place."


I'm outta here!

It was a dark and stormy night

We had a mostly uneventful trip home. We packed up the car and stopped at the Coffee Booth on our way out of town for our morning fix. We saw a white car in Otowi Station's parking lot but it wasn't Sophie so we didn't stop. We drank our coffee and, as a result, had to stop at the McDonald's in Bernalillo. We filled up with gas in Albuquerque, ate lunch at Taco Bell in Grants, stopped at various rest areas, filled up with gas in Flagstaff and continued west.

The monsoon season apparently officially started June 15. It had been quiet so far according to this story (that you might have to register to read...besides you who live in monsoon region probably already knew that). I'd say it came roaring to life yesterday. We drove through some rain after we left Flagstaff and it was clearing up as we approached Kingman. There was some interesting looking weather to the north of town when we arrived. I thought it might be foggieness coming from rain evaporating from the desert. It turned out to be dust.

We had to get our afternoon coffee so we drove through town and found a Starbucks. While we were waiting for our coffees, the wind started blowing. Hard. The mat inside the door was flapping in the wind even though the door was closed. The door sang a mournful tune.

Then the rain came. They got an inch and a quarter in this storm and most of that probably fell (rather blew by...it was horizontal) while we drank our coffee. When it let up a bit we drove a few blocks and had sandwiches at a Subway.

The rain had ended by the time we finished eating. So we got back in the car and kept going.

The rain came back. It was extremely heavy for hours. We had to stop at a rest area because we needed to rest and get fresh air. We got quite wet running for the shelter. We waited for the rain to let up again then continued our journey.

We stopped at another rest area because the rain was so heavy we could hardly see. But that time we didn't take advantage of the services. We would have been completely drenched in about three seconds.

The rain continued, very heavy much of the time and sometimes it was a normal pitter-patter, almost all the way to Barstow.

The most amazing part of this storm wasn't the rain. It was the lightning. We had never seen so much lightning. It was constant, close, and was everywhere from horizon to horizon. We could see the scenery even though the sun had set long before. Who needs headlights when you have so much lightning?

We made it to Barstow and trusty Motel 6 had left a light on. They were down to smoking rooms. And it turned out that their air conditioning wasn't working. I slept fine but poor Jerry didn't.

We hit the road at 6:00 and got home by 10:00 after a stop at Tom's Farms and the post office. I got a jury summons!

Accidents happen

One of Jerry's and my favorite artists is Randy Chitto who makes the greatest turtles. Now and then we diversify. Last year we got one of his bear storytellers, "The Warrior's Journey to the Stars." As you'll see, it's a big bear with a small on his lap. The small bear is held in place with a metal pin.

One day recently the piece was being moved and the small bear got bumped and shifted a bit. In moving it pried the toe off the large bear.

Here are the bears and the toe.
The chip from the toe came off in one piece and fit back into place with none of the light colored clay showing. I sent a note to Randy asking what sort of glue he recommends to reassemble the piece. He said that the small bear had been glued on with five-minute epoxy. I figured if that's the glue for the original piece it should be good for the repair. I had that kind of epoxy on hand.

I glued the toe back on.

After that set (I gave it half an hour to set while I held the toe in place much of that time) I glued the small bear back in place. I had the big bear lie on its side so the small bear rested against a bit of epoxy on the large bear's arm and sat with its pin in more epoxy in the big bear's toe.
If you're looking for the repair, you'll see it. But it looks pretty good for all it's been through.