I just had a big fight, on Wreck-Free Sunday

Just to get things out in the open, Mrs. the Poet and I had a big fight, over the way my brain processes things now that I have brain damage.

The fight was over the way newspapers are placed on the table. I should mention that we subscribe to the paper on Wednesdays and Sundays, with additional papers at the discretion of advertisers. Mrs. the Poet was complaining she hadn’t finished reading Saturday’s paper when it was put in recycling. I told Mrs. the Poet that I didn’t even know we got a paper Saturday because every time I looked all I saw was Wednesday’s front page on the top of the pile. Mrs. the Poet said that I should just look through the pile if I wanted to see the current paper. My reply was if I don’t know there was a paper delivered that day how am I supposed to know to look through the pile for the new one? I mean for me this just makes common sense, put the newest paper on the top of the pile. There is even names for this, in computer terms it’s a LIFO stack, in physical terms it’s archeological filing. That way everyone knows when something new comes in because the top of the stack changes.

And this is stuff that would give problems to people who don’t have brain damage, and I have problems processing that I should deal with new data. I do the blog by following a set pattern of reading new messages in the Feed folder in my e-mail and filtering the links, then do the opening paragraph or sometimes two, then present the links with comments, then sometimes I have a closing paragraph. I have been using this format at least 5 days a week, down from 7, since shortly before this blog moved here in 2008. I had to change this format slightly when I was double-posting the blog to MySpace but after saying good-bye to them in January of 2009 the format and preparation has stayed pretty much the same since then. The only changes made has been dropping Sunday wrecks, then dropping Saturday posts completely after the RPG group moved start time up from 8PM (2000 hours) to gathering and setup at 1 (1300) and game at 2 (1400) which left no time to filter and post. But really I’m not dealing with anything “new” except the links, which aren’t “new” except for the information they contain. I do the same thing to the links every day, use the HTML for creating a link, copy and paste the URL in the proper place in the code, create the middle part of the link, then copy/paste the headline as the “title” of the link and close out the link tag. Add some cogent commentary and move to the next paragraph where I make a new link. If a bot could be taught to parse the headline from the code and text, and then make the cogent commentary I could be replaced with a few thousand lines of code, but the current State of the Art for AI hasn’t reached that point yet. When it does expect to see a new author for this blog, because I will pack it up and go on a long bike camping trip after I get my neck fixed.

And I almost forgot to mention for everyone to have a Happy Yule today.

May your days (and tree) be bright!

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

Advertisement

All alone with the crazy people, and the Feed

Mrs. the Poet is gone to NY to meddle visit with her family while I stay here in TX and keep the roommates from killing each other, or at least be on hand to hide the bodies if they do. So far everybody has fought with everybody else (except me) at least once, and in some cases they are on their second or third go-around. I really need to win the lottery so I can give them all a nice check or bag of $$, pat them on the head and wave bye-bye. Individually I manage to not do too badly interacting with them, but the homophobe just is not physically capable of interacting with either of the two transgenders without eventually going into blasphemy mode, and the transgenders’ sexual orientations are changing as they transition, so their relationship is getting a bit rocky as well. I can generally get along with just about anybody, but 2 of the 3 are starting to get on my nerves, and one got on my nerves a long time ago.

In better news I got some more parts for the Sprint T yesterday after I had already put the post to bed, a steering wheel and the brackets that attach the windshield frame to the body of the car.

The silver color of the wheel is because it is clear anodized aluminum at about 1/3 the weight of the same size steel wheel, and the other 2 parts are made from cast stainless steel, because that was the only metal that part was offered in. The vertical windshield posts are only offered in cast brass with or without chrome plating, so it’s not like there was any lighter alternative. And as I pointed out in an earlier post, the 30° layback of the posts I bought combined with windwings will lead to a relatively draft-free cockpit.

Up first, an OR rider discovers that sometimes the trees are your allies, and sometimes they are your enemies. Falling tree hits car, woman riding bike in downtown Portland More Cyclist struck by falling tree in downtown Portland From looking at the pictures, and not being any kind of horticulturist or anything but a half-trained structural engineer, it looks like something killed the root structure of the tree, because there is almost nothing attached to the tree below ground level.

Infrastructure! news from NYC. NYPD: 1,236 Pedestrians and Cyclists Injured, 14 Killed in September Vision Zero, or zero vision? That’s 13 dead pedestrians and one cyclist in just one average month…

Still in NYC… Treyger’s Texting-and-Biking Bill — a Big Distraction From Vision Zero Read the previous paragraph and see how many cyclists killed or injured someone while using a cell phone.

Some people can’t understand riding a bicycle in anything less than perfect weather, hence this drivel. Bike lanes in winter a waste of space Imagine banning cars in the winter because they take up too much space and people don’t know how to drive.

Our Daily Ted. Morning Links: SaMo approves bike share, SMPD targets bike & ped safety, and a blast from the BikinginLA past good links again today.

Why ride alone? Why cycle alone, when you can do it together? Well aside from the fact that I’m as likely to see another cyclist here in the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell going the same direction as I am as I am to see Bigfoot again (and he or she will probably be on a bicycle going the other direction).

Oz weighs in on the infrastructure question. Cycling injuries prompt calls for councils to boost road safety When an area with as small a population as NSW has an average of one cyclist hit hard enough to go to one particular hospital every other day on average, then you have an infrastructure problem. And as pointed out in the article, they have no real way of determining the safety of the built environment other than tracking ER admissions.

A bit of LifeStyle from PA. Memorial ride to honor bicycle enthusiast who was killed in hit-and-run And yes I know my feed is still rather heavy on the guts-and-gore I had with the old Feed, plus it takes way longer to filter out the chaff. But it still has less dead and injured cyclists than the old Feed.

A local UK bike ride raises money for bicycle charities after raising lots of money for the survivors of a drunk driver the first time. Charity bike ride in memory of Sheffield cyclist killed by drink driver set to return Isn’t that what I just said?

Last link, I’m not sure that this is a bicycle despite what the caption says. Watch this rocket-powered bike outrun a Ferrari F430 Scuderia Well it’s from Fox, and the bike does appear to have working pedals (and brakes!)

And that’s all the stuff that didn’t raise my BP or anything.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

Good news and bad news after visiting the Lab Rat Keeper, and the Feed

I keep tearing up my chainsaw on a Wreck-Free Sunday

In the ongoing project that is clearing the ice damaged trees away from Casa de El Poeta the new chainsaw is taking the worst of it, jumping the chain off the bar at least 5 times requiring bar removal to return the chain to its proper place on the saw. The manual said this was to be expected as well as frequent tension adjustments in the first 10 or so hours of operation as everything “wears in” to where it fits and runs well, and now I’m out of bar oil to keep “wearing in” from becoming “wearing out”. Add the sawdust in my hair from overhead cutting on the live oak and it’s just a mess.

On the subject of that live oak, I could not believe how dense the wood was from that tree. I could barely carry a foot long chunk of limb not even as big as my arm from the tree to the pile that future firewood is going just a few feet away. I had no problem moving hunks from the ash tree out front that were almost as big, which is more than 3 times as far. I could actually carry two logs of ash from out front easier than one of the live oak basically 10 feet from the tree to the driveway and another 15 feet over the driveway. I know oak is heavy but for some reason I figured the evergreen version would weigh less than the deciduous tree.

Mrs. the Poet is concerned that our tree may have damaged the fence that was taken out by excessive rain and soft soils back in the summer. I say the entire fence was destroyed in the summer, just not all of it actually fell down but she says, “Fair is fair and right is right” and if our tree damaged the still-standing parts of the fence then we should help pay for it. I find it amazing the things she wants to pay for now that I have a little money…

And I’m taking a lot of cordless tools and lights to church tonight because the ice storm took out the line from the pole to the breaker box at church. The big problems are that the breaker box is no longer up to codes and basically everything needs to be replaced before we can get our power hooked back up, since the breaker box came off the side of the building when the power line went down. I’m not sure how many times this makes the main panel being replaced, because I know that what is now our church was originally a duplex with a fusebox (or 2) instead of a breaker panel when it was first built in the early 1950s, and the breaker box we have now looks like it might have been installed back in the late ’80s. From what I can determine from second-hand information had the breaker box not been damaged when the line fell we could have just gotten the power hooked back up and called it a day as the existing box would have been grandfathered in.

And as the Icepocalypse fades into memory the high temperature for today appears to have hit 61°F and stayed there for over 2 hours so far, practically t-shirt weather after all the freezing we did last week. That means even though the lights are out at least we won’t freeze at church tonight while we make and charge our Yule Log.

And that’s all that comes to mind about things to be written about today, back to death and wanton destruction tomorrow.

PSA, Opus