Drainage

Sink now drains and drain does not leak. Will still need to be replaced shortly, but until then, I can brush my teeth and wash my hands and dishes. Joy!

I need Joe the Plumber

Well, not the famous one who's not actually a plumber, or Joe for that matter, but the metaphorical Joe. There is a Joe the Plumber about 10 miles away and according to the updates on his website, his business and notariety have picked up tremendously. I hope he keeps the momentum, given that he is actually a licensed plumber and sounds like a nice guy.

Currently I have no kitchen sink, so I've been using the bathroom sink. The bathroom sink has clogged up semi-regularly since I moved in, but hot water and a draino type treatment have done the trick - that, or the neighbors getting their drain unclogged made my lines run better. This sink clogged up today and for the first time will not get unclogged. (No I have not dumped anything larger than remnant tea leaf flakes into it.) So I took the drain apart. The bit that I've been told is the AC drain which branches into my drain was clogged full of orange, sandy goo. My suspicion is that whatever this crud is, it is leaking into my drain and clogging it with sand. Which Draino doesn't touch. The clog has to be further than 12" into my drain which is as far as I can reach. (Don't get me started on how useless plumbers snakes are.)



Now I need a plumber to fix it. I'm not sure if the plumber is also the person to fix the AC drain - I need to stop the crud from getting in there or the problem will repeat. I'm hoping I can just get the drain unclogged for now, though, and here's why:
I have a new sink to replace my cruddy looking, non-level, stained on.
I have a new faucet to replace my cruddy looking, backwards hooked up, rust flaking, leaking one.
I have a new drain stem to replace the one that leaks.
I have a new drain segment to replace the one that clogs, although it may be unnecessary.
I have a new vanity cabinet to replace the one that is water damaged and ugly with glued on knobs. However, the new vanity cabinet is not assembled, and I don't want it to get water damaged either while this whole mess gets figured out.

There's a little irony going on as my new dishwasher arrived just this morning and my primary complaint is that I can't wash dishes. Rather I don't really want to wash them in the tub even though it got a good cloroxing just yesterday.

So, I've looked up plumbers on line and sent an email to the date asking for a recommendation. We'll see what kind of response I get. As the toilet and tub still work, we're only at semi-emergency status. But I don't want to get ready for work without a sink. That's what camping is for.

Mapquest v Google Maps

I've been a Mapquest user for years. But I'm being converted to the extra freaky Google Maps because I can search for something nearby where I want to wind up, then actually find my destination on the map, *mark it* and get directions to the more precise location. I'm not saying Mapquest won't allow this, but I was unable to stumble across how to do it.

I got directions to my friend's parents' house out in the desert. It feels like it takes 6 years to drive there, but really, it's about 90 minutes. Go to the glass studio, head north another 7 miles, then exit through the mountain passes and go another 40 miles. Turn right off the freeway, make a left after the Lowes, and then a right. Couldn't be simpler. But the addresses in Lancaster are bizarre. Street K, Avenue Q, and whatnot then subdivide these into M-12 and N-13. Mapquest didn't want to help me figure out the specifics.

Turns out I Google-mapped the address last Christmas because it was still in my memory cache. I hit a wrong button because the computer is responding slowly today, and the street view popped up. Yep. That's their minivan, in their front driveway. So I checked out the view, looking for points of interest. (There are none in Lancaster from what I can tell.) Then it took me stepwise backward through the directions with the street view. When I got a couple turns back, I clicked down the road view until I found the Lowes. Then I checked for visual cues near the freeway exit. Cool tool. Powerful. Frightening.

I'm one of those people who believes that guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. Every useful tool, and some less useful things, can be used for good or ill, and likely as a weapon. Every time I'm searched for knives before boarding a plane I think about how long it takes to twist my free can of soda in two to get two jagged cutting blades. Or how one could mess with someone's vision shooting shaken soda at them. Or how one could use a shoelace or bra strap as a garrote. And I wonder anew at why they bother searching for pocketknives.

There's a weird mentality about useful tools. Some tools are clearly so overwhelmingly dangerous in the hands of the average user that they must be restricted for the common good. Some require training but have wide adoption, like automobiles. There are other tools which are commonly seen or used as weapons, but for which there are innumerable functional uses, which are much less dangerous than cars, but which are banned for air travel, like pocket knives. I carry one intermittently because they're danged useful, but I don't want to lose it at the airport. Yet pocket knives are relatively safe in terms of how easy it is for the average user to seriously hurt someone with it. If you have someone who is deft with personal injury via pocketknife, they probably don't need the pocketknife. By that point the restriction is useless, so really it's just taking a useful tool out of responsible hands.

Which brings me to safety strategy.

For the average person, it's enough to deter crimes of opportunity. Your neighborhood can dictate which opportunities are most likely. Some neighborhoods are generally safe enough to leave doors and windows open most of the time. In some this can be done part of the time. Some are actively dangerous at any time. One adapts to the local threat level. For me, I lock car doors and windows (also keeps out spiders), lock my condo doors and windows, and try to be alert when walking somewhere alone. That's pretty much enough. Reasonable measures against low threat means unlikely to be a crime victim. Not impossible, but unlikely.

But if someone is targeting me or you specifically, it's extremely hard to provide sufficient protection against the threats. This is why we have the Secret Service providing multi-person round the clock details on each of their clients. It's not enough to lock the doors, one must also rent the hotel rooms above and below, clear out local airspace, use dummy cars, bulletproof glass... and still there are large risks. One of the bravest things I ever seen someone do? Obama standing in front of crowds of a hundred thousand people, out there in front of God and everybody, before the election, and speaking. Seriously. A hundred thousand people can love him, but one crackpot can ruin everything.

Why am I going here just before thanksgiving? Because Google Maps is one of those nebulous, frightening things which my search just reminded me. I'm sure 98% of people use it for good. Probably more. They probably don't think it's dangerous just as they don't consider their car to be the deadly weapon that it is. I fear what this does in the hands of someone who really has it in for you. And the Air Force base that was so easy to spot on the map last year is hush-hush this year, so the google folk are cluing in too. Still and all, it's harder than ever to hide.

Fortunately, most of us don't need to hide and don't have people coming after us. I want to keep living in a world where that is true. I believe that cooperation is more likely to lead to long term survival than power struggles. I also believe that more information in the hands of many is generally safer than less information or restriction on information. But it's hard to reconcile this belief with the creepiness of a street level into my friends' window.

Fun Stuff

Playing around on the web today, I found fun stuff.

• All kinds of crafty links which inspired me to add the sidebar "Artsy Fartsy".


• Someone has spent quality time reconstructing the history of plate tectonics. In Pictures even.


• Search images by color, for instance lots of orange and a little green. I can't figure out how to do a picture capture to post. My fav freeware or a PC is faststone capture, but I don't think it works on Macs. Then I'd have to save it somewhere, upload it, then post it. And I'm too busy playing with it to bother.

In case I don't update soon, I'll be driving to the back of beyond (aka over the mountains and through the char to my friend's mother's house I go) for Thanksgiving. Next year, I'm hoping to have the shindig at my place. But until then, Cheers! And Happy Thanksgiving.

You Breathe That?

I went into the Valley today to blow some glass. Lots of glass. I had an ornament commission to fill. And it would be a slam dunk but for my oddly low yield. I kept getting some spiral fractures from the top of the ornaments while putting hooks on. In a normal day when I make, say 35 ornaments, I might completely bungle at most 2 or 3 and have a similar number of odd looking seconds. Today, I completely destroyed 9 ornaments and had about 7 "seconds". Of about 50. Which means I doubled my scrap rate. Nuts!

I'm going to go medieval and blame the bad air. Normally when I drive into the Valley, I can see all the way to the mountains on the other side of Burbank. Today, I could barely see to the next exit. It's been quite a few days since the fires got put out, but the air is still filled with ash. It was almost possible to look directly at the sun due to the filtering effects. It looks nasty and grey with a sickly yellow tinge. It reminded me of my old bedroom carpet. Or what I imagine London in the days of coal heating to look like. Yuck.

Fortunately, my air seems pretty clean in comparison. And I work in a HEPA filtered cleanroom for part of the day. But there is ash "dust" on my patio and stoop. I wonder if it's blowing over from the Valley.

I've been watching (and by that, I mean listening to while doing other stuff like blogging) lots of TV programs about the history of Earth and related science. Whenever someone says "oh, volcanic eruptions can disrupt crops somewhere else" I can say, "well, maybe, but it wouldn't be *that* bad, would it?" Yes, I know about the year with no summer after Krakatoa or a similar volcano blew. I know that intellectually. Kind of how I know I have too much stuff but don't really believe I have too much. It's different when you see it. And it wasn't until I noticed the halo around the sun that it really clicked.

I think I was slow to believe because I've never lived anywhere that air got trapped before. In Boston, I lived within 2 miles of the ocean and 2 hours from mountains. In Minnesota, the wind picks up speed across Alberta and North Dakota before sheering across, so it's got some good momentum going. It does not stick around. Here in the LA area, it's alarming to see the air on some days. One day I drove over the 405 into LA and there was a distinct line where the air was clear on top and greenish underneath. Bleah. My little valley has a good air flow down to the ocean, thankfully keeping it pretty clean.

Now I get it. Yep. A big impact crater can throw a lot more crud into the air than a coupla bad fires. A really bad volcano can block out the sun too. Thousands of volcanoes would be tough to take. There seem to be a lot of scientists pointing out that there were lots of volcanoes when the "great dying" of 250 million years ago and the dinosaur wipe out of 65 million years ago. And I just learned why - andipodal effects. Remember how the tsunami of a couple years ago was triggered by an earthquake? Similarly, a big meteor impact can cause vulcanism on the opposite side of the globe.

It appears that the 250myo event had a roughly 7 mile diameter meteor impact which caused most of Siberia to get covered in sympathetic lava. Something like that is bound to wreak a little havoc. In this case 99% of life on earth died off and dinosaurs rose from the rubble. I don't know which volcanoes triggered for the 65myo dinosaur di-eoff event, but it was likely a 6 mile diameter meteor so presumable there were some. I'm starting to think there's something to that volcano theory after all.

I'd also never gotten a good explanation for "hot spots" that create things like Hawaii, until just now - antipodal effects of impacts causing weak spots and compressions on the opposite side of the globe. This works for me. It makes a lot of sense. And seeing Hawaii's hot spot is still going strong, so it makes more sense to me now that volcanoes so coincidentally timed would continue to spew effluvia for enough years to really stick it to everyone. So... what was opposite the start of Hawaii's island chain? It makes me want to print out a large map from google maps and piece the continents back together. Well, I want to do that anyway.

And I also wonder, does an impact that large change the earth's orbital position relative to the sun at all? Even a mm? I should do the calculations... Could it change the rate of rotation or the angle of tilt? Because that would also mess up the existing life forms. I wonder also, when Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, did anything spew out from an antipode? We got the good view of the impact, so we wouldn't have seen the back. Or does gas not transmit the shock as well as water or solids? Or was it just too small for Jupiter to notice?

Anyhow, the air was dirty today.

New Carpet 'n Stuff

Here's what my room looks like with new carpet and some of the stuff out of the way.



Here's the old (top) and new (bottom). If you notice something that looks like a patched hole in the old carpet, that's because it's a patched hole.



They're not terrifically different, but I'm very pleased with the new carpet. The difference is that the old carpet was in really bad shape. It was dingy, matted, patched, and from the view of the bottom, stained from numerous incidents. The new carpet is more orangey dunn than mossy grey. Just for kicks, here's the sample on the old stuff.


Now for the technical details. Here's ripping out the old carpet. The image is dark, but does show several patches on the door side, probably where a previous owners dog liked to dig. They told me the carpet was not the original. I don't know how old it was but it was pretty gross. I'd always planned to replace it, but after putting all my stuff on it, the idea got overwhelming. But there are good sales in these trying times.


This is how the installers bundled the carpet remains for removal. They created a knot by slicing a 2-3" strip of half the width, slicing 2 parallel lines in the roll, and twisting the strip through the resulting loop. Pretty handy. They kept their knives sharp.


The carpet pad is an upgrade partly because I requested it and partly because this particular short-nap carpet seems to call for it. It's much cushier.


Then the carpet gets laid out and rough cut to size. They replaced the threshold tack strips but reused the remainder. They lay out the carpet like this, bang it onto the tack strips on one side, then put the spreader in. They stretch the carpet across the room and bang the opposite side onto the tacks. Then they do the other direction. Finally, they do a final trim on the edge and tuck the ends downward.


I highly recommend having professionals do this task. It took them longer than I rather thought it would but they did a nice job including sweeping up before and vacuuming afterward. And moving all my stuff...


Starting here, ALL of this stuff got taken out. And all the stuff under the bed, which is designed to allow a lot of storage.


Some got put in the in-progress kitchen


and the rest on the patio.


Someone walking up the staircase to the upper 2 units would have this view of my patio totally packed with stuff. It's mostly cleared back out again, but not entirely. And I took 4 purses and my old mauve suitcases out to the recycling and left them with another box labeled "free purses". If no one picks it up I'll go grab it and donate it somewhere. It still works, but I haven't used it more than once in the last 10 years. Very little other stuff left though. Yikes.


I'm making a standing offer of temporary SoCal accommodations for anyone who is good at organizing and editing stuff.

Reno Binge

I mentioned I was getting new carpet in the bedroom, right? While gutting my kitchen and sitting on the supplies to replace my bathroom sink and vanity. Yep. The bedroom is my only carpeted room; the rest is tile or Pergo-like wood-like floor. They guys are here right now and literally the only place I can sit down is at the computer. I've been hovering over them, seeing how it's done.

I'd had some notion that the carpet stretcher went all the way to the edge of the wall and the tack strips and somehow attached the carpet to the strips of nail points. Not so. They stretch the carpet from edge to edge, but the spreader stops a half foot shy of the other edge and they just bang the carpet onto the tack strips with a hammer, or in this case, the back edge of a dull hatchet. Or the front edge in corners. And trim with utility knives. The edge at the threshold is done by taking a blunt chisel and cramming the carpet egdge between the tile and tack strip.

One reason I didn't do this earlier is that my bedroom is packed with stuff. The store said they moved furniture so I signed up. They technically don't move boxes of stuff, but they did today... My bed is designed to be a storage unit, and there are boxes aplenty underneath, plus I had a half dozen other boxes of stuff. And 4 shelving racks of clothes, a dresser, and 2 end tables. They'll put the bed back and the furniture, and hopefully the furniture racks. I tipped them $20 already. It's a hard enough job without being movers too.

I'm always amazed at how fast someone who is dispassionate about my stuff can move it. They date unloaded the kitchen cabinets in the time it took me to shower. It would have taken me 3 days. Now the trick is putting everything back. One problem is that I don't want to put everything back just as it was because it was not working for me. But I can't leave it on the patio! I swept and washed the patio last weekend and this weekend it's even dirtier - all sorts of ash dust in addition to the usual sand colored dust. Ah well. I'll post some pictures. The piles of stuff are kind of horrific.

My neighbors are currently moving out (bummer) and are in the process of just getting that last little bit of stuff, which takes as long as the first 95%. The movers in Boston call that the "chowder". Or rather, the "chowda". They've let the carpet guys use their parking space so they don't have to walk far. We've been having discussions on how to get rid of stuff. She gave away a complete set of JD Robb books to a battered women's shelter fundraiser just before I moved in. I think once I have a good storage system for seasonal decorations and scrapbooking/art stuff, it will work better. And I have to part with sweaters. I did wear some last year, but really, I don't need a full set anymore. I know this but...

So I'm sitting here, with my view totally blocked by the giant pile o crap from my bedroom. Knowing intellectually that stuff needs to go, but able to think of good, or at least marginal, "reasons" why I need to keep it all. No wonder the top real estate market in growth mode is storage units.

Oh, and I bought a new dishwasher last night. Not to worry, I will not be keeping the old one.