The Red Herring is Ailing

So this isn't good.

Or maybe it's not all *that* bad, but it might be.

Ignore the airbag light. That's a sensor we should replace, but they're hard to find. More worrying are the check engine and VTM-4 lights. Who knows how much that's going to cost to get fixed.

We'll find out. We've got 264,000 miles on this thing so it has fought the good fight, but if we could squeeze another 50,000 or 75,000 miles out of it' I'd be happy. But it's all going to depend on what's wrong with the thing. It's been very reliable up to this point, so I hate to see it go.

It does have a few other problems: Leaking power steering, and maybe a tie rod that's causing some unusual wear on the front passenger tire. We did get it to our mechanic today, so at least that part is over.

Don't want to break the bank. But Isaac says he wants to use this car when he gets back from his mission in 2028. We'll have to see if that happens.

And for this Honda Pilot, 2005, I do mean reliable. Aside from tires and regular maintenance, we've replaced the starter. Everything else has just been hanging on.

 

If this is Good, I'm Cranky

If this book is good, I'm going to be happy.

And really mad.

Peep the author: Hugh Laurie. Yes, the Hugh Laurie of Jeeves and Wooster, of Blackadder, of House. And the Hugh Laurie the pianist and singer:

He really impresses me with the depth and breadth of his talent.

So if this book is good, I'm going to have to say he's a polymath. And that's blatantly unfair.

Which is stupid to say. He's got the talents, it's a shame not to use them. And if I applied myself, I could do better than what I'm doing now that's for sure.

Still, the little green monster pops up. I almost left the book at the store just because of that. But I brought it home anyway because WHAT IF IT'S GOOD? I want to read it, so it's going to climb to the top of the reading pile.

Because it's important to remember that the talents displayed by others does not denigrate or limit the talent we may have, whether displayed or latent. We should strive to develop our talents and celebrate when others, even irritating polymaths like this, display excellent talent for the rest of us to enjoy. Their talent does not diminish us or ours. We should instead be inspired by that talent to better our own. That's where I am to be.

Whence the Electricity?

Interesting stuff here.

Here we are in the West, where hyrdropower abounds -- the city next door generates more than half of the electricity it needs through hydropower -- yet Rocky Mountain Power generates on. 4.8% of its electricity from hydro. That coal number is a bit unnerving.

Interesting that 10.7% of the energy it uses is unspecified. The legend on the other side of the chart says that the unspecified electric generation comes from renewable resources that the company itself doesn't own. I wonder if that's where customers like us, who have solar on the roof, fit in?

I'd be curious as well to see a breakdown on the sources of the market purchased electricity.

They are toying with nuclear at a spot near Brigham City, Utah, but that's only in the talking stages. While next door in Idaho Falls, they're a little bit beyond talk as they've got a memorandum of understanding for a number of small modular reactors to be built near the city's gas-fired peaking plant.

Rail 2.0

So the rail I built a few weeks ago worked. But not 100 percent. It was at an OK height from the concrete, but when we were using the stairs, it felt a bit short.

So this morning I rebuilt it, raised it a foot, and it's a lot better now.

I might add a third rail at the bottom, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do that yet.

Daisy tested it out and, like the first iteration, is completely indifferent to it.

I'm Not Sure But I Think This Sucks

From Butt-Head's "I'm not sure but I think this sucks" department:

A year ago, we had a pine tree in this spot, but we had it cut down because it was huge and dropping sap everywhere and covering a third of the neighbors' driveway (let this be a lesson to not only recycle more frequently but also to plant new trees further from the property line).

Many years before I placed an attractive array of river rock neath the tree, spreading out in fanciful swirly patterns.

Nature, favoring entropy, used the pine tree to cover said swirls with inch upon inch of pine tree debris, which I am now sorting through to rediscover the rocks so they can be cleaned and reclaim their former glory around the stump of she who covered them o'er.

I've done two hours of this today and only reclaimed two buckets of rocks 

This is going to take forever.

Since I have to redo everything anyway, I'm thinking of changing things. But it's going to take a lot of work. Once I've got the rocks cleared out, I have to finish chopping up the rest of the logs and removing some roots that were interfering with the original project more than a decade ago.

I don't know that I'll dig all of the roots out, but at least the parts that protrude above ground level. There's some in the patch, and one in the yard as well.

I'm sorting rocks out too. Big rocks from the smaller rocks, so I can re-establish the swirly patterns.

I'm using another rock garden that also needs to be cleaned out too as a staging area for the materials I'm moving As I said, this is going to take forever.

That Pretty Much Sums it Up for Me

 

I'm reading "The Town," by Australian author Shaun Prescott.

It's got echoes of Kafka, but in the small-town setting where nothing really happens and nothing that anyone there does matters, I'm getting more of a Groundhog Day vibe. But without the humor.

Not to say I'm giving up on it. I'll keep going. But it really is falling hard for the "small town people are either tragic losers or losers in that they don't realize how much of a bunch of losers they are" trope, and it's not all that entertaining.

Maybe it'll get better.

Leave it to Congress to do the Wrong Thing

News item:

The US House of representatives has passed a bill to make Daylight Saving time permanent in the United States.

Nevermind that their decision, if approved by the Senate, will make for sunrise times as late as 9:05 am in the depth of winter locally. They believe, bless their hearts, that they're doing the right thing.

From a guy who already suffers from seasonal depression, let me say thank you. I don't know what we'd do without them in charge.

Stephen Ambrose: Americans at War

When I opened this book and saw the first essay concerned the Civil War, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it.

But Stephen Ambrose being Stephen Ambrose, and me being a stubborn reader who doesn't like to give up on books, I read. And read. And kept on reading.

Ambrose, in 252 pages, takes the reader from the U.S. Civil War to today's world, accurately predicting pilotless aircraft and conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and shedding light on the events and figures in America's wars from the mid-1800s into the future.

I enjoyed his profiles of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton as a World War II buff.

But his essays on the homefront and later on the My Lai massacre were the best parts of the book.

Ambrose, in only a few dozen pages, took me beyond the rah-rah of a nation united into a nation I vaguely remember reading about in some of the history books we had a home: Fighting a racist war against Japan while maintaining a segregated army and putting Japanese-Americans into prisons for the duration. He took us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoping to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible to advocating for firebombing cities in the hopes it would end the war sooner.

Mistakes sown there led to similar mistakes in Vietnam, where racism continued to bubble and mixed signals really fuddled the mission of the US in that nation.

Ambrose, of course, has the advantage of looking back at history to see the rights and wrongs, but also reminds us that we have no control over the past and that the only control we have on the future is remaining aware of what's going on now. He mentioned this quote from humorist James Thurber, and it's really stuck with me:

That's something I'm going to try to remember myself.

Safe Wee

 

I renewed my radiation worker training at work today, so rest assured the world is that much safer.

Of note: There's a flaw in the training, at least in my way of thinking, and I believe I mentioned it the last time I took it. It's still there. And maybe it's just me. But they shouldn't show one way of doing thing and then go on to introduce new steps in the quiz portion of the training. Maybe they don't regard the quiz as a quiz. I guess the important thing is that the training is done.

Not that I use it all that much; not that I use it at all. But as a technical writer, it does help me get a better feel for what operators are required to do, and any bit of understanding of the process can make for better instructions.

And I find myself feeling old-fashioned. In this web-based training is the ghost of the practical exercise I did for the first time in a real-life mockup with a Navy nuke teaching the course. That was better.

Way too Late at the Movies: A Man Could Get Killed

Stumbled across a James Garner move from 1966 on the YouTubes tonight: "A Man Could Get Killed." It's your standard mistaken identity story where Garner, a representative of a New York bank sent to Portugal to pursue joint ventures for hydroelectricity development is mistaken for a spy searching to break an industrial diamond smuggling ring.

It's directed by Ronald Neame, who also directed The Poseidon Adventure. But no swaying camera motion because Irwin Allen wasn't involved.

It was odd to me that the film contained snatches of "Strangers in the Night," a popular song of the time -- and then I read it's the film that introduced the song. So it makes more sense now.

It's an okay film. Typical of the era, where it was meant to be a lot of things -- a comedy, a drama, etc., and never really succeeds fully at anything.

James Garner seems to have come into his befuddled everyman persona pretty early. He's the highlight of the film in my book, though the old European cars, particularly an Opel, Peugeot that would make Columbo happy, and a 2CV, are also worthy of billing.

Sandra Dee is also in this film, though I had to look at the Wikipedia page to learn that. I don't really know a lot of stars from this era.

James Garner pulling the James Garner face.