Waiting for Sandy

Wait. That’s all I can do.

I moved into this house in the summer of 2003, just in time to get hit, in September, by Hurricane Isabel. According to Wikipedia, “Isabel in Virginia proved to be the costliest disaster in the history of Virginia.” I don’t recall if my electricity went out, but 1.8 million Virginians lost electric power, and I was probably one of them. I’ve experienced several power outages since I moved into this house. The electricity usually comes back on in two or three days. That may sound like a long time, but compared to people living in surrounding rural counties who lose electric power for two weeks or longer, a couple of days isn’t bad.

In August, 2011, my state was hit with Hurricane Irene. A house on my street had its metal roof peeled back and everything on the top floor was soaked by heavy rain. Another house closer to mine had a large tree toppled in the front yard. My next door neighbor lost part of her roof. And the electric power was out for a couple of days.

When a hurricane hits, the thing I worry about most is electric power. After a day, the grocery stores throw out all the perishable items. You go there to buy food and all the cold storage units and freezers are empty. There’s nothing but empty shelves behind those rows of glass doors. There’s nothing to buy unless it comes in a can or a cardboard package.

Without electric power, my own perishables last about a day. So I have canned soup, tuna, and salmon on hand. I have bread. In case the city water pressure is lost, I filled bottles with tap water. Before the storm hits I will half-fill the bathtub with water so that, if necessary, I can refill the toilet tank.

I removed my trash can from the alley behind my house and put it beside my house. I have new batteries for my flashlights and an electric lantern. I have a battery-powered radio. I have a full gas tank in my Jeep in case I need to drive out of the area. I have cash in case I need to buy something essential and the credit/debit card readers aren’t working. My cell phone battery is charged up.

The central heat won’t run without electricity, and Monday’s high temperature is forecast to be 53°F – on Tuesday only 48°F. So I’ve got my kerosene heater fueled and ready to fire up if necessary. The heater gets pretty hot; I can probably heat soup on top of it.

If my house rides out the storm without damage, the worst part of having no electricity will be no television and no Internet. Even after the power comes back on, cable TV and Internet are usually off for a few more days. It’s surprising to me how much I depend on TV and Internet. It’s more than entertainment. It’s more than convenience. It’s a feeling I don’t get from books: a feeling of being connected to the world.

I’ve prepared. Now I wait.

Timing

Lebanese Tourism Minister Fadi Abboud announced today that he wants to sue the producers of the US drama “Homeland” because, he claims, it wrongly depicts Beirut as a dangerous city that harbors terrorists. He is also demanding an apology from the show’s producers.

In other news today, a car-bomb explosion in Beirut has killed at least eight people and injured an estimated 80 people.

Anouk Home Video

I’ve posted about Anouk before. This video looks like a webcam recording. Anouk tweeted: “Who says I can't make music videos :-)”  Now she wants to find a producer through Facebook. Details at Anouk’s FB page.

Kimbra

According to idolator.com, 22 year old New Zealand singer-songwriter-musician Kimbra (full name: Kimbra Lee Johnson) has snuck onto Entertainment Weekly‘s “30 Greatest Artists Right Now” list. She’s at 29th place. For a young artist who has just debuted her first album, Vows, making EW’s top 30 is an accomplishment. But Kimbra oozes talent. I first saw Kimbra (I was already aware of her music) on Jay Leno’s July 9, 2012 show performing “Settle Down”, the opening track from Vows. What a great performance! If that performance was on YouTube, I would embed it here. I haven’t found it on YouTube, but I did find a video of Kimbra performing “Settle Down” at the front yard of the Spotify House. She doesn’t have her band with her so she’s performing solo. She uses a looper at the front end of the song for background vocals and uses a tablet keyboard at the back end of the song for organ chords. The result is impressive.

The official “Settle Down” video is below. It’s the same song – sort of – but with a rather strange video.

I’ll end this blog post with the third track from Vows: "Plain Gold Ring" recorded live at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne, Australia. As a commenter remarked, Kimbra “grabs the song with her hands and plays with it … it’s not dancing to the music, it’s dancing with the music.” I wholeheartedly agree; it’s something Kimbra does with all her music.

Words

My friend Kim says she is annoyed when she reads something written by someone with 12 years of public education who can’t use simple words properly, such as the words to, too, and two. I understand how she feels. I, too, have word annoyances.

I get annoyed when I hear someone pronounce cache as if it were spelled “cashay”. Cache is pronounced “cash”. It means a hiding place used especially for storing provisions or concealing valuables, or it can refer to the actual items stored in the hiding place. Military people often refer to finding a “cache of weapons” (and they are the worst offenders – they always pronounce it “cashay”). Computers have cache memory, which is a small amount of high speed memory used for storing frequently accessed data.

I’m not being picky here because, as it happens, there is a word pronounced “cashay”, and that word is the French word cachet. Cachet refers to a seal on a document and so has come to mean a mark of quality or distinction or authenticity, as in, “Suffolk County has a nice sports arena but it doesn’t have the cachet of the Garden.”

Another peeve of mine is when I hear the word homage pronounced “oh-mahjz”. Homage is a perfectly good English word and it’s pronounced “hom-ij”. Don’t try to impress me with faux French.

What is up with people wanting to pronounce English words as if they were French? Like turbot, the fish. It’s an English word and it’s pronounced “tur-bot”, not “turbo”. I even hear people pronouncing the store name Target as “tar-jzay”. For Pete’s sake people, the store’s logo is a target. Give it a rest. You’ll never impress anyone by mispronouncing words as if they were from another language that you wish you could speak – and then, when you do get the opportunity to use actual French words, you use the wrong word because you don’t know how to pronounce the word you meant to use.

The problem is that people want to sound better educated than they are. Hint: if you want to sound educated, get educated! Pick up a book on words and learn something.

The Sink From Hell

Through circumstances not relevant to this story I found myself living in the house in which I spent my childhood, in which I had lived from age 6 until I was 18. It’s a modest house, yet the four small bedrooms and two small bathrooms spread over two floors make it too large for just one person. Yet here I am.

And here, too, is the confounded first floor bathroom, with a sink that has been problematic for as long as I can remember. Water drains out of it at two speeds: slow and slower. It was always thus. When I was a lad, my dad would, on occasion, send me up on the roof with a sewer tape to run through the bathroom vent pipe all the way down to the sewer line in the cellar. We didn’t own a ladder that could reach the roof, so I had to climb out of a dormer window onto the 45-degree-slope shingled roof and work my way around the corner of the dormer while holding onto the only handhold available: the edges of the dormer’s roof shingles. It was a hair-raising experience due in part to the “slipperiness” of the shingles I stood on as their surface grit let loose underfoot, and in part to the knowledge that if I fell, I wouldn’t fall to the ground but directly into the concrete cellar stairwell. But snaking the bathroom vent line always got the water draining well again, and it became one of my chores. (Another rooftop chore was reconnecting twin-lead to the chimney-mounted tv antenna whenever a high wind tore it loose. I didn’t mind being on the roof. Heights didn’t bother me. Hell, a couple of times I jumped off the edge of the roof to the ground. I was a teenager. I was unbreakable. I could do anything.)

Every couple of weeks since moving back in, I’ve had to pour a bottle of drain opener into the bathroom sink to boost the ever-so-slow running drain back up a notch to just plain slow. This week was no different as I poured more drain gel down the drain, followed by boiling water. It barely made a difference. It was time to do something else.

Some people pour chlorine bleach into their drains. They swear it works. So I tried it. First, I flushed the drain gel away with water, then I poured a bottle of bleach into the drain. I left it to work its magic overnight. The next morning I ran water to see how well the bleach had worked. The result was: nothing. I might as well have poured a bottle of Evian into the sink for all the effect it had.

The brass-and-chrome p-trap was old and was getting corroded, so I bought a new plastic p-trap. When I removed the old p-trap I had direct access to the drain line, so I decided to snake the line.

Said drain line goes into the wall 2 or 3 inches, makes a 90° left turn and runs horizontally inside the wall for 20 inches. Then it tee's into a vertical pipe that runs up through the roof (the bathroom sewer vent) and down to the main sewer line in the cellar.

I snaked the drain as far as the tee but couldn't get past the tee. So I installed the new p-trap (ah, there’s a story there, too – every plumbing job I’ve done becomes a story) and ran water into the sink. As water filled the sink I turned off the faucet and to my dismay, the water didn’t run out at all. The drain line now seemed completely plugged.

It wasn’t, though. The water did drain out, just at an imperceptible rate. Leave and come back an hour later, and the water in the sink will be gone. Slow, slower, slowest.

I called a plumber – my regular, go-to plumber. The plumber has a really long motorized snake, and he snaked the line from the sink drain to the main sewer line in the cellar, but when he pulled the tool out, the line was still blocked. Water in the sink wouldn't drain, and now the water was black with nasty, oxidized, bio-matter goo that the snake had pulled out of the drain line. And, the motorized snake had flung the black nastiness everywhere. It was spattered across the plumber’s shirt, the sink bowl, the bathtub, the floor. He snaked it again all the way to the cellar, but again when he pulled out the snake the drain stubbornly remained plugged. He tried using a plunger in the sink but because of the sink’s design, he couldn't get pressure on the water.

Finally I told him that one of my chores as a boy was to occasionally take a sewer tape up to the roof of my house and run it down the bathroom vent pipe to open up the drain. (To be fair, he was probably arriving at the same conclusion.)

The plumber got out his ladder and went up on the roof and snaked the bathroom vent pipe all the way down into the sewer line and that did the trick. Problem gone. Of course, I could have done that and saved myself 76 bucks, except for two things: the part where I climb up to the roof, and the part where I climb down from the roof. Do not like to do that shit anymore. There was a tv show called "The Closer," and one character was gray-haired Lieutenant Provenza. When an investigation turned physical he was wont to tell his fellow cops: "I don't run", or "I don't hike", or "I don't climb."

You and me, Provenza: I don't do roofs.

Creepy-crawly

I saw this creepy-crawly on my door frame. I took a photo just because I could. It’s about a half inch long. Maybe you can identify it.

The Man With No Heart

I have a neighbor named Kristie. We live on different streets, and the back of her house faces the back of my house. She’s 42, a single mom with two kids. She’s been living in her house for almost a year, and yet until yesterday I had spoken to her only once, briefly. Yesterday she was mowing her back yard and I was running my string trimmer around the house and garage. I finished weed-eating at the same time she finished mowing. So I walked over to her and struck up a conversation. We talked a long time; the bright afternoon sky had given way to the darkness of night by the time we parted company. During our conversation I learned something that I found very interesting. She told me that her father, who lives “just down the road”, has an artificial heart. His name is Lennie Nugent, and he is one of only 60 people in the United States who have the heart. The FDA has not yet approved his artificial heart; it is still being tested and evaluated. Another 40 people had the heart but no longer have it because they have received transplants.

When I say artificial heart, I’m not talking about an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) that surgeons can implant into a patient’s chest to assist a weak heart. Lennie’s heart was in such poor condition that surgeons had to remove it. The heart he has now is a metal and plastic pump powered by air. His new heart is a temporary measure to keep him alive until doctors can transplant a human heart into his chest.

At first, just after he got his new artificial heart, Lennie was tethered by plastic tubes to a 450 pound machine in the hospital. Christie said they called the machine “Big Blue”. Big Blue is basically a specialized air pump that pumps air through plastic tubes to operate the artificial heart. But now her father is back home – tethered to a much smaller device that he can carry around like a handbag. It can run on battery power for two hours. However, a caregiver – usually his wife or Christie – must be with him at all times in case of trouble. There are various alarms on the device and someone near him must know how to respond. So Christie and Lennie’s wife received training, and the city’s EMS workers also received training. Lennie can leave home to attend church or dine out at one of several local restaurants that allow him to plug his air pump into an outlet near his table.

Someone recorded Lennie talking to a church group and posted the video on YouTube. In the video, Lennie talks about events leading to his getting the heart, and how having the heart has changed him and affected his family. If you’re interested in hearing Lennie’s story, you can watch him tell it below.

[Update: for more on Lennie’s story, go here.]

A Time of Butterflies and Sunflowers

Summer in central Virginia.

The Hooker Hookup Repudiation

I had just driven to the grocery store, parked my Jeep, and was walking away from it when I saw them: two hookers walking through the parking lot. One was white and one was light-skinned African-American. They were young - maybe in their early twenties. They were both very pretty. And they were both most definitely smokin' hot. How did I know for sure they were hookers, you might wonder. Partly their attire: both had tight white halter tops, very short shorts, and high heels. One was wearing what I call "stripper shoes" - those shoes with ultra-thick soles and very tall heels that Hollywood celebs tend to wear nowadays.

Still not convinced they were hookers? Ok, get this: As they strolled past, about 10 feet from me, the girl closest to me – the one wearing the stripper shoes – turned her head in my direction, smiled brightly, and said "Hello!" to me. I returned her hello, then turned and walked toward the store. Her hello had clinched it for me.

You see, I'm long past the age where women even notice I exist, much less smile and say hello. Unless, of course, there's money to be made by doing so. I guess working girls have to constantly be on the lookout for customers. But I wasn’t there to buy hot sex. To be sure, I was there to buy something hot – but in the store’s deli, not in the parking lot.