I need to write something

Like seriously need to write. The only problem is I have no idea what I’m going to write about. It’s like that old science fiction story by Harlan Ellison, “I have no mouth and I must scream”, except I have to write something etc. etc. Which is where I started this piece about 20 minutes ago.

I guess I could mention what my son gave me for my birthday. The local grocery started carrying Shiner Sausage, a beef log kinda thing made near Shiner TX, where they make the beer. Yes, that Shiner. Anywho, they make the sausage near where the pagans have a campground for celebrating our Big Two holidays. You know how they have Easter and Christmas “Christians” that only show up in church then? Well our two big holidays are Beltain and Samhain. Beltain is pronounced pretty much like it’s spelled but Samhain is pronounced “SOW-wen”, not that that is important to this, but important enough to tell you about. I’m free-associating here, but there is a point I’m going to get to some time before I finish this. Yeah, where they make sausage is the landmark for turning off the main highway onto the little back road that takes you to the gravel road where the pagans’ campground is. I would tell you what the road is but telling you about the sausage factory already gets you too close to finding where us pagans dance naked in the moonlight. Because of my bad hips and knees I don’t actually dance naked anymore, I just kind of shuffle around in the dark and make passes at the lesbians, because they’re the cute ones. Anywho, sausage, birthday, my birthday is Tuesday, and Mrs. the Poet and I are going to go to the Red Robin because I get a free burger, and Mrs. the Poet gets the free one and I buy the one with the half-pound of beef, another half-pound of bacon, and a fried egg on top and endless fries. And a sundae, I also get a free sundae before I hit the meat coma. And that Sausage is a 12 oz. package and costs $7 which just goes to show that when you use local steers and local labor to make your all beef sausage it costs a bit more than commodity beef and overseas labor. I think it’s worth it.

Then I hope I recover consciousness in time to go to my doctor appointment next Tuesday. That part is a joke, because I never take more than a night to sleep off a meal like that. Now I might not be ready for much more than a cup of coffee the next morning, but I always wake up the next morning. Or if I don’t, nobody tells me I didn’t wake up the next day, and it seems like that would be something people would really like to tell me about: “Hey Opus, remember that time you ate so much you didn’t wake up for a whole day?” That kind of stuff, nobody has ever brought it up, so I’m assuming it never happened.

And the overwhelming urge to sit down and write has passed. Mostly. I still wanna write about the paper I found on designing intake manifolds, but mostly I found that if I did the math right I need to make a manifold with 2 plenums feeding 4 cylinders through 2 throttle bodies, and I need to make the runners 180° apart for the whole 720° cycle of the engine. That means I need to have 3 runners from one bank and one from the other bank of cylinders, or I could just have all the cylinders one each bank fed from one plenum and not worry about Helmholtz resonance because otherwise I’ll have an ungodly mess trying to get the runners and the plenum volumes tuned when I don’t have an engine with a 180° crank, which the LS engine doesn’t have. Some of the LT series are fitted with a 180° crank and I could use crossram and also use Helmholtz resonance to get tuned port charge effects, but those engines are like $50k and way out of my price range (free). Well free for the moment, when I start getting Social Security I hope to raise that to $500 for the engine. But yeah, crossram and the injector at the top of the runner to get that charge cooling effect from the fuel getting introduced at the top of the runner especially when I’m using E85. Now I had been considering doing a single plenum like the old TPI system, but the paper reminded me that fuel doesn’t like to stay mixed with air if there are any turns to negotiate. There are a couple of major turns to negotiate if I try to use a single plenum to feed both banks with long runners, unless I make a very tall manifold that doesn’t make the runners cross under the plenum. Even so, there is at least one turn taking the runners from vertical through the ~45° turn to hit the intake ports on a 90° V8.

And now I’m completely out of urge to write, meaning this stream of consciousness has hit a dam.

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Short post on my hearing aids

The irony of getting hearing aids is if I didn’t need to be able to understand speech, I wouldn’t even need hearing aids. This was hammered home as I tried to get to sleep last night, because I could hear all three noises made by the clocks in the bedroom, and the sounds of the dripping faucet in the bathroom adjoining the Master Suite of Casa de El Poeta. Seriously, I could hear every coyote, neighborhood dog, trash panda, and the opossum going by the bedroom window. I can hear cars on the freeway more than 5 miles away, as well as the tollway that gets within 2 miles. If it wasn’t for the noise in my head from the brain damage I would have the hearing of a teenager who had never been to a rock concert, because my healing factor is that awesome. I heard phones ringing in the business adjacent to the sound proof room I took my hearing test in, and there were no walls on that room that were on the outside wall of the office. Below 4KHz my hearing is perfect which made adjusting the equalizer in the hearing aids “interesting”. I mean most people who need amplification need it from 1KHz on up, meaning I’m losing 3 or more channels on the equalizer because I don’t have any loss in that band.

This is so annoying because I just want Mrs. the Poet to stop mumbling, when she’s just talking normally. So I need some help, but not much help. And it annoys the piss out of me that I need help. Like seriously annoyed. And it also annoys me that I can’t heal brain and nerve damage like I can other things like skin and muscles. What good is it to be the closest thing IRL to Deadpool and Wolverine if brain damage is outside my abilities? It’s like “You’re going to live forever, but gradually get more and more stupid as you get older.” Something else to get annoyed at.

And that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say, so rather than ramble on, this is auf wiedersehen.