Three years since my last meltdown. Given the environment I inhabit and a set of events that have occurred over the last two weeks or so, another one seems likely shortly.

- - -
To my most brain-dead computer student:
a) The universe doesn't care what you believe about it. It's about 13 billion years old, despite what your 'minister' tells you. Loftily informing people who actually know something about the world they inhabit that they're wrong (and, BTW, not even knowing how that ludicrous '4004BC' date was selected in the first place) just means that sooner or later nobody will ever, ever listen to a word you say about anything. Come to think of it, you may not have noticed that you're kinda at that point now.
a1) Incidentally, you're not a Christian. You neither behave nor think like one, and you sure as Hell don't follow any of his (ostensible) teachings.
b) The astronomical community is wholly indifferent to how you feel about the controversy regarding the status of Pluto as a planet.
b1) No, I will NOT waste printer ink - or my time - because you want the spacing between two particular words in your diatribe on the subject increased by .1pt.
b1a) Just because you SAY something is true ("The True Solar System"? Give it UP, man...) doesn't MAKE it true. See a) above.
c) Billy Graham doesn't give two farts in a snowstorm about you OR your inability to understand why obscure self-published books of Bible quotations don't match. And he WON'T care unless you send him money. And even THEN he won't know you from Adam. Oh, and BTW, whoever told you he's an "expert" on the Bible (IIRC the words you used were "the world's greatest Bible scholar") was either grotesquely misinformed or an outright liar. Thought you should know.

- - -
Pretty bad when you realise that someone you once chose to commit your life to is not only completely psychotic, but has probably been that way for quite a number of years and you didn't even notice. What does that say about that person? More to the point, what does that say about YOU?

- - -
Frakking heat. You try doing careful assembly of a complex piece of machinery when the combination of heat, humidity and UV is making you puke your guts out every time you walk out the door. Add to that the pressure from the person demanding that machinery's assembly (but who won't go out themselves because 'it's too hot') and there is no longer any reason to wonder why I'm considering burning all my ID and making a one-way trip to somewhere more pleasant. No, I'm not saying where. I'm not a "Batman" villian. I don't leave clues.

- - -
TVO used to show all kinds of interesting short documentaries, fifteen years ago. I once collected four: "Neon: An Electric Memoir," about classic neon signs; "Vita Futurista," about the Italian Futurist movement that was the first art of the Machine Age; "Mies," about architect Mies van der Roh, who (among other things) redefined corporate architecture in Toronto with his TD Bank buildings; and "Black Leather Jacket," about the cultural history of the article of clothing in the title.
Being foolishly thoughtful, I lent it out some time ago to a furry, who almost immediately "lost" it. This is me being surprised:


(BTW, if you're reading this, jerk, thanks for having made a difficult life just that little bit more unpleasant.)
I bring this up because I'm hoping that someone knows where I can find copies of these films. There's no torrents available that I can find, and there's little other information about them available so they'll be nearly impossible to locate commercially. TVO, of course, won't let me burn a few DVDs. (Copyright.) I want to see them again. I want to regain a sense that there's more to life than alcoholics, poisonous air, self-centered 'friends' and mental illness.

- - -
Okay, you can all go back to doing searches on FA for furry pr0n.

Busy day today.

Got the new louvered panels welded to the back of the Pontiac, replacing the melted taillights. Picked up a trailer-load (literally) of old bicycles and parts, and cut the bad rims off recoverable hubs. Took a bunch of scrap to the junk dealer. found some good wheels for the Cub trailer project. Picked up an old cabinet to be turned into a 1:24-scale house in the garden. Talked to a rather nice fellow at CN about purchasing the Paynes Subdivision (St Thomas to Glencoe, 22 miles.) Got it on the agenda at next month's council meeting.

Not bad, eh?

Nothing leaked, either; instead, my arms and legs are covered in tiny burns from the welder and grinder. But it's honourable pain.


 

An interesting extract from a book published in 2004, before Second Life and its bretheren came along. It's description of 'hybrid cyberspace' sounds exactly like SL, but it also suggests that there might be other ways of looking at and interacting with virtuality. In particular, the description of 'hypervirtuality' is intriguing... though how one would create such a non-space-dependant environment given the space-bound-ness of the current SL and OpenSim client and server software is thoroughly beyond me.

Fun to think about though.


 

I have to make one tomorrow, returning a call from Canadian National Railways. If it goes well I'll have had yet another complete change of direction in my life, a whole new project that will keep me massively occupied and loaded with new responsibilities for... years, probably.

That's a lot to burden one poor li'l phone call with, innit?


 

Tornado touches down in Yonkers causing extensive damage
YONKERS?

- - -

Been puppy-sitting this week. Not the best time I've had recently.

After a decent enough day yesterday*, today has been, well, blech. Hot and humid outside. Sunburned so bad at the track I look like a minor demon, and even a few seconds' exposure to the UV out-of-doors hurts like a sumbitch. My feet hurt cuz I walked the length of the pits at least a dozen times, in my hard sandals, and my arms hurt from having to stretch out to strap the car's axles to the trailer. Nothing on TV either. So I'm either watching golf** or randomly poking through FA.
Next two days I'm dog sitting, and after THAT I can finally get the Pontiac's rear end sorted out. And get the lawn cut.  But in the meantime, blech...

* We didn't have the new motor for the Chevy yet, so we took the Plymouth to Grand Bend for the Nostalgia Days event. Damned thing would NOT hook up, and if Melissa got it sideways at the start line the tires'd get into the slippery stuff and she'd have no traction for the rest of the race. Been a while since I saw a car burn rubber the whole quarter. BUT her best past was a 13.48 at 101 mph, so it wasn't a wasted day.
Unfortunately by the end of the sixth run the 440 was running pretty ragged, so we're gonna have to have a look at the carbs and plugs and maybe take a boo down the cylinders to see what's going on.

** "If you want to go for long walks in the park, go for long walks in the park. If you want to hit a little white ball with a stick, hit a little white ball with a stick. But there's no excuse for combining the two and putting the results on television." - Ted Hughes
But Melissa enjoys it...

I shouldn't find this funny, but it is.


 
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Extended my dry-stone wall in the garden before it got too hot this morning. Burned soem George Carlin albums to CD. Did the mail and shopping walk. Looked up engine data on the Max Wedge. Answered some messages. Watched a bit of TV. Played a pile of Same-X games.

All to distract myself from remembering that I have a funeral to go to later this week...

- - -

I should really find out if people want to come to a track-making party. I have all of four feet of track made up for the garden, and I'm going to need a LOT more. I have rail, I have ties, I have spikes, I have a jig, I just don't have much enthusiasm for that tedious task, nor for the even more tedious task of making switches, but ready-made costs too much. It might be fun to do, though, in a group. Like a quilting bee, but with more aluminum and less yarn.

Something to think about for later this summer. If you're reading this and interested, let me know?


 

Taking a break from the hot sun, so I might as well waste soem bandwidth here...

My big job for today was getting the Farmall Cub up and running. (For those who haven't seen it, it looks like this - this one isn't ours but it's very close.)

Last fall I put in a new starter and it still refused to start, and then I got distracted by the F100 and the Chevy, so today was the day I dug into the electrical system to find out what was wrong.
Guess what it was. Go ahead, guess.
If you said 'the new starter' give yourself a no-prize. :P

At least I can work on it standing up instead of lying on my back...

The two high-profile celebrity deaths this week have been summat overshadowed around here by the death of one of Melissa's oldest friends, one of the few who stayed by her when her life overturned some 15-20 years ago. He'd been suffering for some time with oen of those hrrible degenerative illnesses, and finally reached the point where it wasn't even possible to slow down its progression. The only thing keeping him alive was dialysis, and that just barely; they finally took him off the machine earlier this week and he was gone yesterday afternoon.

John was a genuinely good person. We'll miss him.

- - -

I always thought Michael Jackson was deeply misunderstood. robocoon articulates why far better than I ever could in this LJ post. Worth reading.


 

Despite which, I managed to sneak in some garden work and rebuilt the drystone wall separating the upper yard from the main street, using most of that salvaged brick I mentioned earlier. This time I used some silicone caulking to glue the bricks together; we'll see if it holds.

Now I just need to wait patiently for this damned heat to go away so I can start turning some earth...


 

Must be summer. The shade temp was 27C today, well above my tolerance limit. Gonna be worse tomorrow, but at least I'll be inside with the air conditioning.

Despite the heat I actually got some things done outside. The brickwork in the garden wasn't dry enough to be repaired so I spent the day... err, welding. (Just what you want to do on a hot day, right?) Got a new tailgate made for the trailer using free scrap steel - refrigerator shelving and some angle iron, to be exact. Unlike the old one this one will NOT fall off at inopportune moments, nor will it be subject to dry rot.

Then I got to work on repairing the damage to the Pontiac. Got the old sheet metal welded back together (the job I was doing when the fire started) and made a start rebuilding the lip that goes behind the bumper - when I ran out of acetylene.

Figures. But then, I've been doing a LOT of welding the last month or two. Might be time to look at leasing soemthing bigger than my li'l pony tanks.

Well, since I can't afford to buy welding gas until next week it leaves me with only one option - using the time to replace the intake and carb, finishing up the interior, stuff like that. All necessary, but frankly I'd rather be doing the body work. That's the part that shows...


 

The burn eased up enough today for me to do something I'd been planning for a couple of weeks - a trip to the dump, to scavenge some steel tubing and some good yellow brick to use in the garden - the brick, not the tubing. Tubing's for making a new tailgate on the trailer.

I found pretty much what I'd been looking for, as well as some concrete blocks that might be of use. I also spotted some metal that might be worth returning for later. But the very best part was finding a rarity - a Goodyear men's bicycle. Until that moment I didn't know Goodyear had made bicycles. It's clearly a 60s style but has a dropped upper tube reminiscent of English motorcycles of the 20s. Just what I wanted* for building a 'rat bicycle,' incorporating running gear from a Triumph mountain bike I picked up years ago for $1. The frame is straight and solid - in fact, it could easily be restored with little more than some paint, a chain and a few new spokes for the wheels. Why it got thrown out I do not understand. Maybe it wasn't 'cool enough' or some stupid reason like that. <sigh>

And to prove I actually did something there's a fresh gash across my left thumb. I really don't feel as if I've really been working if I'm not leaking circulatory fluid from somewhere.



* Okay, truth be told what I want is a higher-end CCM frame, like the one on my long-gone Duomatic, but this one will work out just fine.

Constant Readers will remember that I'm in the midst of a VERY long term project - the creation of a garden railway in the back yard. It's been about a year since I started, and except for a few spots the bare earth is nicely greened-in with ground covers. There's still enormous amounts to do of course, and that isn't even counting laying any actually track, but it's finally looking like something is happening there.
Of particular note today is that I finally dug up the two courses of bricks that had been intended to edge the small yard next to the still-unfinished brewery buildings. These bricks are the ones I recovered from the demolished hotel in Alvinston, and what surprised me - apart from their having been knocked every-which-way by frost - is how many of them didn't survive the winter. Half of them were cracked, even shattered, and are now only good for fill. And these were good, solid yellow brick too, from the 19th century, not the soft red ones made today. I'm guessing stress from the demolition process.
Happily I know another source for old brick and I should be able to finish the replacement wall this month, but it's irritating as heck to have to do it all over again.

CN is gradually replacing the mechanical bells at grade crossings with electronic ones. They sound much the same, but you can tell that they're fake. Glencoe still has one of the old metal bells, and it really is a pleasant sound.

There's a local freight that shows up in town now and again. It doesn't stop often because their major customers in town are gone, but we still get to see it pass through on its way from somewhere to somewhere else.
Until recently it was pulled by one or two of CN's fleet of rebuilt GP9s, occasionally by an SD40 or SD45 or even an SD50M, but the last few I've seen have actually been powered by an SD75 or Dash 9-44. Which is what you'd call overkill, given that it's only pulling a dozen or so cars on the flattest track on Southern Ontario.
Today's was an SD75, but what made it worthy of note is that it was being run long hood forward. For a minute I thought it was 1950...

I wish Glencoe would make more of its railroad heritage. Eight railroads used to pass through here once upon a time, and there's still a junction here with an ancient line now leased by the N&W, though it hasn't had a train on it in years. Trains created this country. I wish we cared more about that...


 

And I quote:

Delivered-To: g***@v***.ca
     [This is my current and correct email address, though I almost never use it in this format]
Reply-To: <africandevelopmentbank@indiatimes.com>
From: "afdbank"<adbank_donald@indiatimes.com>
Subject: Official Site: http://www.afdb.org Resident Representative
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 22:31:13 +0100
Apparently-To: ...
Apparently-To: <g***@v***.ca>
     [A misspelling of my usually-used address]
Apparently-To: <g***@v***.on.ca>
     [Finally, the address I usually use!]
Apparently-To: ...
     [Here it comes, the best part]
Apparently-To: <g***@astral.magic.ca>
     [OMP... this is the email address I stopped using in 1996!]

African Development Bank
Nigeria Country Office (NGFO)
Plot 813, Lake Chad Crescent District, Abuja, Nigeria... [end quote]

     Ah, Nigeria. Need we say more?
     But I must say, this is pretty lame even for the notoriusly inept Nigerian spammers. You'd think someone MIGHT have noticed an email account that had been dead for 13 years (and even the ISP is gone, absorbed into a larger entity.) But I guess if you can get people to pay you for a list of addresses, valid or not, you're gonna take the money and run.
     Funny that the scammers got scammed though, eh?


 

I'm no expert, but after making two of them (in the traditional manner, without patterns) I'm becoming quite adept at doing kilts. They're fun to wear, too; the ones I make are lightweight, hang and flow well, and feature a few modern refinements like Velcro closures and plastic snap buckles.

A couple of weeks ago I finished my second one, a short 'sport' kilt that hangs down to about the same point my favourte shorts do. Yesterday was an ONDR day at St Thomas Dragway, and because I thought it was gonna be warmer I wore the kilt to the track. (NB: I wore my shorts underneath it. It's too short, WAY too short, to go regimental.)

Well, I got a lot of looks - I think. I'm pretty sure most people were too shocked, or too polite, to say anything; however, I also suspect it was responsible for the unusually large number of conversations I had with total strangers. After all, a feller in a kilt has to be more outgoing than someone who's just in pants, right?

Unfortunately, though the sun was hot (and the UV index very high - I actually managed a second sunburn) the wind was icy-cold, and in just a short kilt and T-shirt I was kinda chilly. Nonetheless, I think when the weather is appropriate I'll be wearing it again - and when it isn't, it's back into my faux Amish gear I'll go.

It's all about style, right?
- - -
Money woes continue & actually get worse. But that has nothing to do with men in skirts.


 

For those concerned (and I know there aren't any of you) I sold off all my land in SL to two of my neighbours there. Couldn't afford either the tier fees or the cost of the premium membership.

First time I've been landless in SL since... well, since ever.

It's only virtual, right? So why do I feel homeless?


 

Being the plaything of chaos bites.

In one brief period I broke a hanger on the Pontiac's exhaust system, got a 2nd degree burn on my stomach welding it back together, found out that I'd miscalculated my money (since I cannot add two numbers together if there's a dollar sign involved this should come as no surprise to anyone) and I'm flat broke again, tried to cut off the end of my left index finger while cutting out some fabric (thank the gods I've had first aid training - it's reattached, though precariously), broke the exhaust hanger AGAIN, and wound up missing a meeting because the nightmares this all engendered ruin't my sleep last night.

This better be a learning experience.


 

First: read this, about my first-ever drag race yesterday. http://community.livejournal.com/motor_furs/1230593.html

Finished?

The more I drive the old Pontaic the more I love her. She seems to have no vices at all, and for a mid-Seventies GM car that is astonishing. Okay, I loathe the location of the fuel filler cap, and the manual choke is awkward to use, and the trunk has an odd and largely useless shape, but on the other paw she runs smoothly and quietly, she doesn't use a lot of gas, she handles acceptably even in hairy situations, and now I know she will uncomplainingly charge forward at full throttle with no more fuss than she'll make while motoring around town. Maybe less. And now that I have the seats from my long-gone XR4Ti installed up front I actively look forward to every drive I take in her.

Errm... I think I'm anthropomorphising her...




 

What do you THINK happened? I got a face-full of caution right back.

If one is throwing caution to the winds, it is important to remember to throw it WITH the wind, not AGAINST it.