Who turned the thermostat down?

For those not following the news, it has been chilly here in the suburbs of Hell, and the forecast is Not Good. As in lows below zero° F not good by Monday.

About that 133 vehicle pile-up first I don’t drive much less drive on freeways, and second that was more than 40 miles to the west of Casa de El Poeta. That’s middle of Tarrant County, we are in Dallas County and on the far east edge of Dallas County. Also nobody we know was involved because they’re either working in Dallas when this went down, or they are recovering from not-COVID illnesses.

I might have mentioned we got a new shower, and that I took pictures.

And I was a little more flippant than I wanted to sound on the 133 vehicle wreck. There was an elevated roadway leading across a floodplain to a bridge, which froze over much easier than the roadway in contact with the ground and was covered in a sheet of ice from moisture condensing out of the air on the road surface and freezing on contact. This formed a sheet of “black ice” that local drivers see about once a decade or so. Basically the first warning they had there might be ice was when the tires started to slip as the car or truck went sideways. Basically none of the people I know were in the area when the mess took place, something I’m very glad for.

But, I have a new shower and in a couple of hours I’m going to test how it works.

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Playing another kind of warlock in a new RPG, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I started playing a new character in a new (to me) kind of fantasy RPG based on Palladium’s system. Our DM uses a different kind of character generation for games like this, where we role-play our character’s childhoods to determine our stats. The warlock class is completely different in Palladium in that their warlocks use elemental energy from one of the four aristotelian elements, and the character has to choose which “sphere” of energy he or she is going to use to cast their spells from. If your character chooses a single sphere they get three spells per level, but you can choose 2 spheres and get only 2 spells per level but have a wider variety of spells to choose from. I chose earth and air spheres because I had the best selection of healing spells with those, and because the warlock class was a pretty decent fighter without the use of magic.

I mentioned that we have a T-gurl living at the house, who moved in so that she wouldn’t have to sleep in her car in the church parking lot. Well we had a minor crisis at church tonight. Membership had gone through the name tags and updated them for all the new members we had gotten recently and the old tags were taken from the holders and put in a little file holder made for business cards so that there were enough tags for all the new and current people. The T-gurl was not a “current” member, so the tag holder we had altered to cover her old name with her feminine name was cleaned up and used for someone new and the old tag with the masculine name was put in the file. This caused a minor crisis for the T-gurl because it made her feel like her new identity was being denied in favor of her old masculine identity, which was something that was happening to her at her parent’s place. As you can imagine this was emotionally devastating for her, but we managed to find a way to repair most of the damages before everybody went home, in a way that affirmed her feminine identity as valid. Oh, and one of my old GF who was on disability for being bipolar and dyslexic and more than a bubble off kilter was there too as she had recovered enough to be allowed to drive again (I have never known her when she wasn’t on disability, I seem to attract people like that until they get back on their feet emotionally or at least get stable enough to function at some level in society).

Coming up on the 18th of this month I will finally be doing that ritual to end the spell to reflect the intentions of the guy who tried to kill me back in 2001 and who died back in 2002 after I started the spell to reflect his intentions back on him, but as I didn’t know he had died I kept the spell going through a second publically dedicated tool and that tool (hat) wore out and fell to pieces like the first. Well come the 18th I will burn those hats in a public ritual and dispell that public magic, and dedicate a new hat to creating good, safe bicycle infrastructure for the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell. Just because I can’t ride at the moment doesn’t eliminated the need for infrastructure. I am not the only person riding a bicycle in this city. Expect to see some pictures from that ritual that night or the next day.

When we changed our cable package to include HD we also got a lot more channels that were HD only, which means I have that many more channels to ignore for lack of anything new or interesting to watch, except there are a few that sometimes have decent motorsports programming even this time of year. One of those channels will be covering Formula E racing, a spec series of all-electric racing. Personally for something like this technology I would prefer a spec motor with a maximum weight and volume for the battery and any controller, so that battery and controller technology would be pushed hard to develop as those are the parts of the e-vehicle matrix that are the stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance of EV in the mainstream. For commuting the infrastructure problem has been solved as there is always a place to charge when you’re at home, and there are more and more quick-charge stations popping up across the country for filling up for point-to-point driving that is outside the round-trip from home range of your vehicle. But anyway, this means I will be watching more Formula E, which means watching any Formula E because I did not have access to a channel before.

And I have yammered enough. I need to get to bed.

PSA, Opus

I find links in the craziest places, on Wreck-Free Sunday

I was reading my web comics today and the guy that does The Oatmeal comic was invited to the preview the Google Car. For those blessed with the ability to ignore anything outside your particular area of interest, Google has been spending the last several years working on the driverless car to eliminate the human factor from car wrecks, specifically the human factor of aggression behind the wheel. I’ll let you read the link for yourself and see what you think. 6 things I learned from riding in a Google Self-driving Car

On the health front I’m still dealing with allergies from something airborne in the last week of December. Whatever might be growing this late in the year I have no idea (the Pollen.com report says there were 9.8 grains of allergen per cubic meter, but not grains of what allergen). Currently I am dosed with what the dosage chart says is the maximum amount of diphenhydramine (generic Benadryl) and stay functional and I’m still dealing with a stuffed head. And the fact that I’m dealing with pollen allergies at the end of December is another reason I call this place the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell…

The service at church tonight was on impermanence. The congregation did a little artsy crafty thing and created a mandala out of sand that after a few minutes for pictures was then dumped into a jar to be used for an incense burner. We had about 10 minutes to make it, all improvised.

Wasn’t it pretty?

We had a meeting of the RPG group yesterday and we played Nightbane again, with lots of role playing and no combat. Well a little bit of combat to try to capture a “bug” from the Nightside that was kidnapping people and making golems that looked like the kidnapped people and taking over that person’s life with a “bug” inside the golem to run that golem. They created the golem with a small amount of the blood of the person being copied, and to maintain the spell and the shape of the golem the bug had to get a tiny amount of blood from the victim every other day. What we were trying to learn was where they were keeping the victims of the copy spell or if they had a supply of blood to keep the spell going while away from the victim and only go back at infrequent times. However the bug was about as fragile as you would imagine a giant insect to be and unable to take a single punch once the golem was broken. Seriously, one swat and the bug was splattered like runny scrambled eggs. Hard to get information from a bug in that condition…

And it’s time to put this one to bed before I take a good-night dose of diphenhydramine and go to bed. The chart says for a person of my weight the bedtime dose is 6 of the pills I have, so after I finish the post I’m going to shake out 6 pills and head to bed.

PSA, Opus