Speaker For The Diodes - June 20th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"The thing is it should be decades now since anybody was surprised by animals making and using tools. Oh, it used to be trendy to say humans were the only animals who used tools to blush, but that crashed once animal researchers tried actually looking at the animals they were researching. Today we know that humans are the only animals who toss the warranty registration cards for their tools in the kitchen drawer that will never be cleaned out because it's too hard to fully open and too depressing to sort fully through.

"Meanwhile we see animal tool use all over the place and providing an important part of the economy such as it is. For example, nearly two-thirds of all Craftsman tools are sold to tree-dwelling creatures not more than eighteen inches long. Nearly the entire world supply of rotary sanders have been purchased by squirrels, which is one of the ways to distinguish them from chipmunks, who prefer belt sanders."

-- austin_dern, 2009-05-29

02:53 pm - Sounds of a Saturday, Missed Opportunity

A sound gently calls me from sleep,
Unique cry with indistict words,
The jangle of bells on a horse;
The arabber goes up my block.
I want to go out there and ask
If he has bananas for sale,
But I'm in too much pain to stir.
I listen as he passes by.

11:49 pm - Uncooperative Machines and Body, But I Got A Cute Line Out Of It

So there I was, at two in the morning, turning a blender with a socket wrench ...

I accepted a spur-of-the-moment invitation last night from fidhle for Chinese food and a chance to watch that episode of The Unusuals that I'd missed. This was a good thing. (OT1H I worried that going out yesterday might reduce the odds of my getting anywhere today; OTOH I knew I felt well enough to go out last night, but had no way to be sure I'd feel well enough to go out today whether I stayed in last night or not.)

On the way home, my "check engine" light came on, and my average fuel economy reading for the trip so far was only 16 mpg instead of the expected low 20s for highway travel. I pulled over at a rest stop halfway home to let the car cool off in case that would get the warning light to turn off, since there was no chance of actually figuring out what it meant and fixing it. When I started up again it was still on, but went out three miles later, and my overall average fuel economy for the trip was 18.6 -- so the second half of the trip was about 21 mpg, back in the expected range. Not sure how worried to be, but given that pretty much anything going wrong with the car is automatically a big deal with my budget, I worry. (I still need to get the brakes done, too.)

The other thing that happened on the way home was that I got an intense craving for a milkshake, and while I knew where to get one at that hour, I knew my blood sugar was a bit high and it wouldn't have been a good idea ... but then I remembered, "hey, I have a blender; I can make a healthy milkshake when I get home."

But once I'd put yogurt, milk, a banana, cocoa powder, etc., into the blender, and switched it on, all I got was a rasping buzz, the sound of an AC motor generating heat instead of rotation and threatening to generate smoke. Sure enough, when I looked at the underside of the pitcher and tried to turn the thingie by sticking the handle of a spoon into the socket, it wouldn't budge. So I went looking for something with better leverage. I wanted my milkshake, and didn't want to waste the ingredients, and while it did occur to me to just shake the milkshake very hard, that wouldn't have chopped up the banana...

Fortunately, the 3/8" to 1/4" drive adaptor for my socket wrench fit the bottom of the blender's pitcher. (*whew*) So there I was at two in the morning, turning a blender with a ratchet wrench.

Even more fortunately, once I'd gotten it to move a little bit, the electric motor was able to spin it when I stuck it back on the base, and I got my darned milkshake. But I knew I had to tell the story just to use the line, "There I was at two the morning, turning a blender with a socket wrench."

Slept fitfully, woke in way too much pain to even roll over, eventually managed to get up, take meds, finish the poem I'd started writing in my head while I was hurting too badly to move, and grab some breakfast, but I still wasn't really in much shape to try going anywhere ... an hour and a half ago I finally got to the "moving well enough to get up, and get ready to go out" level, but looked at the time, realized how late it would be once I showered and dressed and drove forty minutes or so, wished it were at least two hours earlier, and decided to write this entry instead.

Missed another party (three parties, all tonight, in fact, not counting the convention I already knew I wasn't going to get to, but even in the best case I was only going to get to one) -- bleah -- but I did manage to do something fun and social last night. Missed Baltimore Pride, too, for that matter. Argh. Maybe I can get down to Bowie to see Mom and do laundry tomorrow, which won't exactly feel like "being social" (family's a different category, y'know?) but will get me out of the house and feel like I've done something. Or maybe I'll manage to knock off some to-do list items.

I did manage to slowly edit a couple of photos to upload to Flickr and schedule for future Shutterchance postings, while waiting to see whether my body was going to let me do the other things I'd wanted to do ... and throw out a pile of other photos that turned out not to be worth showing anyone once I saw them at screen size instead of back-of-the-camera size. Some are macro subjects I can try again; others were grab shots ("a picture just jumped up in front of me needing to be taken -- good thing my camera is with me") that I either screwed up or decided weren't so interesting after all once I had a second look.

(Some of the ones I blew, I don't feel all that bad about: if I see something while I'm driving, I just wave the camera in the general direction but don't take my eyes off the road to aim and frame it, hoping that I left the camera in a useful mode and the autofocus (if I've got an AF lens on at the time) does its job. When one of those turns out to be the car's headliner and windowframe, or blurry trees, oh well, so be it. Controlling the motion of my vehicle is way more important than getting the shot. When you see a photo I shot from a moving car, and I wasn't a passenger, it's one of the times I got really, really lucky with the "wave the camera in roughly the right direction and hope real hard" technique, and will usually be seriously cropped.)

Oh, that reminds me, I should've stuck my photo of an arabber next to this morning's poem. Lemme go edit that entry to include that. (Regarding that poem: I don't know whether the arabber i heard this morning was one whose cart is pulled by a pony or one whose cart is pulled by a horse, but one of those words scanned better than the others, which I deemed more important.)

I really do need to get out more, see friends face to face more often. Somehow.