Belated Friday Rant and Rave

Due to the press of real work and getting material ready and packed for the precinct caucuses, I fell behind once more. So here is a belated Friday Rant and Rave for your perusal and edification.

Rant - the weather Thursday. After raining most of the afternoon, around 5pm the mercury began falling and the rain turned to snow. Of course, all the earlier moisture on the ground froze into to sheet ice underneath the new snow. It made the journey to deliver the precinct materials an adventure. Nothing is more awe inspiring that watching the semi beside you passing you while sliding with all wheels locked. It was slicker than snail snot for a while.

Rant - the utter confusion at the central committee meeting as they tried to go over the precinct captain instructions. Why someone doesn't make the by-laws and rules more uniform so that there could be a simple set of printed instructions I do not know. Oh wait, I take that back - if that happened there would be less room for back door politics.

Rave - the nice clean snow covering all the brown grass. After weeks of dry and relative warmth, it is good to get snow and more normal temperatures.

Rave - three security fixes for programs I often use released on the same day.

Rant - three security fixes for programs I often use released on the same day.

Huh? Moment - Why does Molly like to sit in the snow? She will use her nose and paws to create a snow hill in the yard, then climb up on the hill and sit, surveying her domain. When you call her to come in, she will disdainfully turn her head, give you the doggy eye, and radiate the "Why would I want to leave my throne to go in where it is warm?" vibe. I suspect she is waiting for this friend to come over and join her.

Maybe it is just innate to Border Collies?

Dream Awakening

Do you ever have dreams that feature something just so wrong that it wakes you ranting out of a sound sleep? I sometimes do. In fact I had a dream like that last night.

It was a very detailed dream in which an elderly German gentleman was trying to convince me to buy and market a fluggenmuffler. What is a fluggenmuffler? In my dream it was a device that that performed some sort of factor of 100 conversion. I.e. if you put 100 lbs. of junk in one end, only one lb. came out the other. If you put 1 lb. in the other end, 100 lbs. came out the original end.  An amazing device that would solve world hunger and pollution in one fell swoop. After all you could put 1 grape in the front and out would come a 100. Sort of like the loaves and fishes in the bible. But you could also put 100 tons of industrial emissions in the other end and have only 1 ton come out the other. The ideal purification device. Just feed the pollution stream through it a few hundred times and your pollution issue is no more.

So what did I wake up ranting about? Well, the device neither heated nor cooled the local environment and drew no power. My poor physicists mind was immediately up in arms about the apparent violations of the laws of thermodynamics. So I woke up ranting that no fluggenmuffler can violate the laws of physics like that. Once I was awake enough to realize it had been a dream, I was busy looking around to make sure no one had heard me ranting in the night. Fortunately Molly slept right through my awakening and ranting. Since only the dog and I were in the house, my rant remained a secret.

Shortly thereafter I fell back to sleep, only to awaken with the same rant from the continuation of the same dream. I can't tell you how vivid the dream was. I finally fell asleep for the rest of the night, but, in a rarity for me, I could remember the dream in detail when I woke up this morning.

The embarrassing thing is that most people wouldn't even think of comparing the parameters of a dream to the possibilities of reality. I guess that is what happens to us physicists when our dreams intersect with the laws of the known universe - the known universe always raises a fuss.

So what wakes you ranting at the wrongness of it all?

Dreary Friday

What a dreary day it turned out to be. It was sunny early and then the dull gray cloud bank rolled in with the falling temperatures. Tonight it is hanging just above freezing and drizzling with a chance of turning to snow around midnight. Tomorrow is supposed to be cold all day. I want my sun and heat back!

I went over to mom's for supper tonight, which was a real treat since it didn't involve my own cooking. Not only that, it got me away from an ailing computer so I didn't feel the need to put it out of it's misery. In fact, this post is being written on it even as I ramble on into the darkness. So maybe abscence does make the heart grow fonder - at least as far as ailing computers saved from mercy killing goes?

Think kindly of me vacuuming and cleaning tomorrow. The amount of Molly fur on all the floors has gotten to the point where even I cannot stand it anymore. So tomorrow is the day to have a cleaning and vacuuming and clothes washing frenzy. I might even have to wash the kitchen floor.

So what are you doing Saturday?

What I Did This Afternoon

I spent most of the afternoon making sun spinners for the church bazaar and crafts sale tomorrow. I thought about just putting up the picture and making you guess what it was, but then decided that might not be fair.

A few sun spinners hanging low in the shop:

You'd be amazed how much sun these doodads can sparkle and throw about with just a little air motion and some sunlight. Given I have a few thousand old software CDs (I am a true pack rat), this is one of the uses I have put them to. I also use them to make custom Christmas trees - maybe I'll finally get a picture of one of them up here one of these days. (You can also spot Molly's shop bed in the background if you look carefully.)

The only bad thing about making the spinners is that spending all afternoon beading and knotting with mono-filament line in the low humidity has left my finger tips tender and cracked. Tender enough that some keys are painful to type and makes correcting errors a interesting task.

So what did you do today?

The Drunks Only Come Out On Friday

I swear that this must be a full moon time. The loonies were out in force today. And my original post for this evening was eaten by Blogger, leaving no trace. All I need now is a drunken phone call at 3am to make the day complete.

The day began with an assortment of odd people calling. Most were of the sane to moderately loony ilk, but one definitely made it to full on loony status. With just one call. Mr. X, as he shall be known for now, made it to the loony hit parade. No getting to the point of the call with Mr. X. He suffered from verbal diarrhea in the worst form. After about fifteen minutes, he finally came to the first "point" of his call. He had "heard" something on the radio in Denver and thought is was a great idea and why weren't we damn well doing it. So after some more meandering, he final came out with what he had "heard". He "heard" that Denver was forcing all those who applied for welfare benefits to work fixing the city streets. That immediately raised the bullshit detector to high alert since: 1) cities in general have nothing to do with welfare programs and 2) the insurance premiums for having unqualified people working in and around heavy equipment would be prohibitive. When queried, well, he hadn't actually "heard" it on the radio, it was at a bar. Things were beginning to become clear. Mr. X was inebriated and getting more so (at 10am no less). When it became clear that the welfare plan wasn't going to fly, Mr. X changed tactic and wanted to know if he could get a ride. I told him I had a meeting to attend, but he might want to call xxx-yyyy (the local police department number) and they might indeed give him a ride. I hope he enjoyed talking to them. If he is typical of the few serious drunks around here, the police already know him, where he lives, and how long he needs to be held to sober up.

Mr. X reminded me of a gentleman I first met shortly after becoming Mayor. One fall Friday when it was nice but with a brisk breeze, I am walking around the park when a gentleman seated on a park bench yells at me (and anyone passing by) to please hand him the bottle of whiskey by his feet. By the next lap around, there is one empty on the ground and he is still asking for someone to hand him his full bottle sitting at his feet. One more lap and he is turning belligerent, screaming at anyone who passes. It is also clear that he is so drunk that he cannot stand up and make the two step journey to his full bottle.  I called the police and told them about the situation (he was too drunk to even reach down and get the other bottle by his feet and was turning belligerent towards those using the park). Even if he hadn't been belligerent, I would still have called the police since the temperature had dropped 30 degrees in the last hour and he would soon be in danger of hypothermia because he had no coat. The police arrived and immediately knew the gentleman. He was a highly decorated Korean war veteran who would go off the deep end drinking about every three weeks, The rest of the time he was a nice and upstanding guy. So the drug and DUI test officer talked to him for a bit. He was told he could either be taken to the hospital so his BAC could be monitored or he could be taken to the holding tank where someone would have an eye on him. In no case would he be taken home and in no case would he get his other bottle of whiskey. After several attempts when it became apparent that he could not get up, a couple of the officers helped him over to the car for the journey to the tank. That in my mind is one of the great things about a small town. The officers knew the gentleman, knew what needed to be done, did it, *and* treated the gentleman with respect.

Most of the other things today concerned matters that I am not at liberty to talk about. Lets just say it was a day of strange meetings and even stranger conversations.

Late this afternoon, I went to the open house and grand opening of the new Adult Education and Family Literacy Center at the local community college. The program has grown over the years and is now in a new facility (new to them). The program teaches GED and ESL courses. I was surprised to learn of the size of the GED program. They currently have ~100 GED students and ~20 ESL students.  One of the things that sets the program apart is that they have a child care nursery in the building so that young mothers and fathers can bring the kids to a safe and fun place while they are in class. Studies had shown that the number one impediment to young single mothers and families pursing a GED was child care (in many cases it was the pregnancy and birth of the child that had caused  the truncation of their education). This way the problem is addressed and the education happens.

Well, I've got a funeral to attend in the morning. Goodnight for now.

Friday and Loonies

Fridays seem to have a feel all their own. It makes no difference what the season of the year, Fridays have a certain sense of dreariness all their own.

I always suspect that it is because Friday is the day we get the agenda set for the next weeks city council meeting. That is so that it can go out to the council via the police force Friday night / Saturday. That way everyone has a chance to read any and all background information in the packet, consider the item coming up for consideration, and hopefully act as a more informed representative. Some weeks the agenda is easy to put together, other weeks it can be challenging, and still other weeks it is battle to pare it down to what is timely.

Friday is also the day that is usually used for meetings concerning miscellaneous topics. For example today I had meetings concerning economic development, land development, water issues, and state government relations. Sometimes interesting, sometimes a waste of time. And of course, no Friday would be complete without what I call the Friday loonies.

The Friday loonies are the people that have put off calling, on any and every topic, until Friday afternoon. They suddenly go loony and realize they need to call *NOW* to get that 4 hour job done today. And of course they want whatever it is to be fixed/changed/removed/replaced in the next hour. They always wait until an hour before the normal city labor force goes home and then call to request the solution be implemented immediately. I'm growing old and cynical now in my 5th year as mayor. I now ask when they first noticed the problem. An amazing number of callers spotted the problem a week ago, but now need it fixed in the next hour. Amazing.

Oh well. There is always the entertainment value. One of my favorite loonies was Mr. X.

I remember when I first became mayor. I had one true loony that called on the last Monday of the month, regular as clockwork, to ask when I was going to stop the flying saucers from buzzing his house, He wasn't talking about a child's toy either. He believed in full fledged UFOs buzzing his house. After several months of this odd pattern I finally talked to the local mental health clinic to see if the symptoms rang a bell with them.

The first words out of the director's mouth were "Oh, that must be Mr X!  His health benefit always runs out the last week of the month and so he goes off his drugs for the week."  He then went on to assure me that Mr. X was not violent, just suffered from this particular form of Xenophobia when off his medicine.

Relieved that it wasn't a violent loony, I came to expect and even enjoy the calls. After about a year, he finally called one night (he always called at about 11pm) and caught me in the wrong mood. So when he started in, I asked him if he had tried the aluminum foil hat since I had heard that aliens were afraid of people with aluminum foil hats. Stunned silence from him. Then a quick goodbye as he rushed off to try it. I spent weeks waiting before each council meeting to see if a man in an aluminum foil hat would be sitting in the audience.

Mr. X continued to call for another 6 months and then suddenly stopped. That concerned me - was he hurt or injured and needing help or ... I talked to mental health people to see if there was some way for them to check up on him (I never did know him by any name other then Mr. X). The director got this funny look on his face and then said he thought he could explain the absence of calls. Turned out that Mr. X had finally become eligible for a new program that covered his drugs all month long and so didn't run out in the last week of the month. Pretty good evidence for the efficacy of the treatment, at least to my mind.

Well, off to the excitement of bed. (No more loonies to keep me amused.) (Larry, see what fun you have in store when you become mayor?)