On the veloway Saturday, I was stung by a flying insect -- bee, wasp, I don't know; I didn't see it. But I felt and heard the wings as I swatted it away from my thigh where it stung. It hurt a bit, but was easy enough to ignore. Today it feels like a fire-ant bite, and that's after the camphor itch-alleviator. This is the first time I've ever been stung by an insect.
Someone I know had heard that it wasn't safe to shower during a thunderstorm and didn't know whether this was something to be worried about or overblown.
I didn't know, so I spent quite a while today reading about lightning safety. There's some inconsistency evident from reading so many varied sources, but yes, consistently, showering during a lightning storm is more risky than not to a significant extent. The danger may be greater with conducting pipes (copper) than not (PVC), but the tap water itself is significantly conductive.
My summary and the advice that I gleaned for myself would be: whenever you can hear thunder, a nearby lightning strike is possible. Postpone a shower until after the storm if possible (and avoid contact with water, metal, and electrical fixtures around the house -- cordless phones and cell phones should be safe). If you do take a shower, then make it as brief as possible. Don't take a bath.
Risk-wise, the chance of getting hit by lightning in one's lifetime is much better than one in a million (much better than winning any big lottery!!). I'm not sure if that statistic was calculated over the U.S. or the world. But since Florida is one of the four or five most dangerous states in terms of lightning activity, we know the risk is not spread evenly across the U.S. and people in Florida need to take more precautions than people elsewhere to achieve similar risk levels.
Here's a short article on the topic for the opinion of another second-hand researcher: Some say storms and showers don't mix
This site quite a few links: Personal Lightning Safety
Scouring the web to find what temperature my refrigerator should be was tougher than I would have guessed. Here's what I ultimately found:
Neat trick to measure the fridge temperature without buying a thermometer for the purpose: put a glass of water in the fridge and then use an instant-read cooking thermometer to get the temp. I finally used my instant thermometer! I've had it for a while, but it seems that I only cook meat for myself at home every year or two.
I've disliked my bedside alarm clock radio for a long time. I think it was in early high school, but maybe even before that, one Christmas everyone in the family got Sony "Dream Machine" bedside dual-alarm clock radios. They were fine except that the clock or alarm time could only be set in the forward direction, so to set an alarm five or ten minutes earlier, one had to cycle all the way around.
Also, when setting an alarm, if I mistakenly let up the button that had to be held down while setting it—it had to be pressed relatively hard—it would change the clock time! (despite your not holding down the button that needs to be held down to change the clock time). When this would happen, I might have to go look at what time it is in another room if I hadn't noted it, and then wait while both hours and minutes cycled to the correct time again. If I didn't notice the time had changed, which has happened as I'm usually setting my alarm at bedtime when I'm tired and ready to sleep, then the alarm naturally won't go off when expected, which can be bad.
I was in Target a few days ago, so I decided to check out the alarm clocks and low-and-behold they had a suitable replacement and it is another Sony "Dream Machine." I'll leave off the laundry list of features: suffice it to say that a decade has apparently been enough time to make lots of significant improvements. Including being able to cycle both ways to set hours and minutes. It's smaller and better looking too.
One thing that strikes me as really funny is that the instruction manual says it is an "FM/AM PLL Synthesized Clock Radio." Yes. PLL. Phase-locked loop. The feature list spells out the acronym. Who who is not an electrical or computer engineer would know or care what a PLL is? Even then, many EEs and CEs might not know. I happen to because we studied them as part of a class I took and as a project I implemented a specific type. Very weird.
If you search Yahoo Images for austin texas, then a photo I took of an Austin City Limit sign next to a Travis County sign is third. That's a pretty common search.
One Austin eighteen year old guy with a blog on Xanga decided to use my photo as his background. He linked directly to the image so whenever someone loads his page, it loads my photo.
He's got white text over that image. What was he thinking? It's almost completely unreadable. A little easy web research and I learned that that's par for the course with Xanga. Apparently Xanga is where teenagers go to blog unreadable nothings for the most part, as The Calico Cat descibes it ("most of the teenagers seem to have figured out how to make their blogs nearly impossible to read by using awful color combinations, fonts, backgrounds, layouts, etc").
Xanga is also the home a pro-anorexia community: (Pro Anorexia on Xanga and Elsewhere: Or, How to Be Anorexic). Xanga even has an Pro Anorexia blogring.
Calico links to an exceptionally readable blog by an anorexic, suicidal, heavy drinking sixteen year old girl, who frequently engages in consensual statutory rape with men in their late twenties: Carrie's Site of Negativity.
Carrie's blog is so perfectly stereotypical, that I have to sit back and question whether it isn't some elaborate hoax. But there appear to be quite a few blogs in a similar vein. Someone would have to go to a lot of work to make all this up. Of course, assuming they really are just teenage girls, there's no reason to believe that they aren't making up half of it anyway. If they are only making up half of it, then that's still plenty scary.
I recently finished James Michener's Hawaii while on vacation with family in Maine. It's a long book, so I've been thinking about Hawaii for a while now. From Michener and the images and pictures on television and in magazines, Hawaii appears to be quite the island paradise. I got the impression from Michener that while Hawaii was partially made that way by the industry of humans over the long course of history, the paradise of Tahiti might be even more dramatic, and Bora Bora the finest jewel of them all.
This has certainly piqued my interest in visiting the Hawaiian islands. I imagine that I'll get there before too long.
With that all in my mind, what I realized in Maine, was that it is really quite the paradise of its own.
Where the mountains meet the sea. There are over three thousand islands off the rugged granite coast, with a couple beautiful beaches. This summer I finally rode a schooner on a two hour tour of Penobscot Bay. A number of years ago my parents took a amazing camping trip where they joined a group that rowed dories to different islands off the coast and camped on them.
The Maine summer grass on lawns is naturally lush and full, with a lot of clover, and one could spend whole summers barefoot. In fact, I have. Summer proceeds like this: Strawberries and black raspberries. Maine blueberries. Blackberries. All except the strawberries grow wild and plentifully.
The plant life is vibrant and includes in abundance such standouts as sugar maples, tiger lilies, and dandelions. The summer air is fragrant with the smell of the modest milkweed.
Tall trees cover the hills that grow into mountains and ponds, lakes, and other wetlands are present in abundance over the land. (Mosquitoes find Maine to be a paradise as well.)
I can't say enough about the joys of abundant Lobster but to say that it's amazingly tasty and healthy and I could enjoy it every day for weeks on end. In fact, I have (every day of a two week vacation in 2003).
I'm focusing on the spring and summer here, but fall and winter have their own charms.
A few weeks ago a friend sent me a wedding invitation. It was returned to her with "Undeliverable" stamped across the top. I cannot imagine why. The only thing slightly unusual: the address was written in cursive and Boulevard and Apartment were not abbreviated. Such is the custom for formal letters. The numbers and cursive writing were all very clear and readable.
So I sent a letter to the Postmaster of Bluebonnet Station (78758) two weeks ago. The letter included a scan of the addressed envelope so he or she could properly evaluate the situation without relying on my description. It's been two weeks. No word yet.
Today is "Take Our Children to Work Day." There are clowns, balloon animals, face painting and all kinds of cute little one's down in the cafeteria and the children can occasionally be seen in the halls too. It's a fun injection of energy and I'm glad they have it.
Bad just goes to worse this Monday. I had to travel home to make a telephone call (more on that ridiculousness in a future entry) and as I closed my car door with the same hand that was holding my keys, I lost my grip on my keys and locked them in my car. Anticipating that this might happen some year, I'd given an extra set of keys to a friend. Unfortunately, he's moving to North Carolina and he packed and moved my keys. So that spare set sits in a huge pile of boxes in a garage in North Carolina. That's no help.
Fortunately, I was able to call a friend on my cell phone and she gave me a few locksmith numbers from the yellow pages -- specifically, Yahoo's yellow pages which sorts results by distance from a given address (thanks Yahoo). The first three entries were just zip-codes and didn't have addresses listed, thus implying that they are mobile operations, which is just what I need right now.
I called Abracadabra and they are setting someone out. It'll be $20 cash or $25 credit card, which seems reasonable to me. In fact, even if my friend in South Austin (who isn't moving) had my keys, this might be preferable in some ways to her driving across the city. But it may have its own downside because breaking-in to my car by a locksmith is more likely to do damage than using a spare key.
So now I'm writing this up in the laundry room where I can keep a watch out for my man from Abracadabra. I've got my laptop and my book, so I'm lucky to be well prepared for this waiting game.
Update: Marcus showed up, a real big guy with curly hair in a little, old, green Geo that was making some ugly noise but he said the car was as dependable as a rock with over 160K miles, just one clutch replacement and three or four oil changes worth of maintenance. Seeing my Corolla, he mourned his own reliable Corolla which a teenager ran into, totaling it. So we got along real well talking about Toyotas and other groovy, reliable things. He reminded me of a glass-half-full version of someone else I know who is more likely to find the glass half-empty.
First Marcus tried using a couple of wedges to slide a pre-bent metal wire down the edge of the window. That didn't work. He then used a wedge and an air bladder to open the door enough to get in a long wire with some rubber on the end that he used to pop the lock. That was successful.
He advised me that I should get some spare car keys made (beyond the one sitting in a box in North Carolina). I said I had some up in my apartment, but the apartment key had been locked in the car with the car key. Well, friends Marcus was, because this is the point where Marcus gave me the advice that could have saved me the time and money of having him unlock my car. My apartment complex office keeps apartment keys for all their units. Doh!
I had a friend's truck for this past weekend. In addition to work, I took it down to Town Lake for a jog, to Dobie Theatre for Good bye, Lenin!, out to a frisbee game, and finally back to the airport to pick up the owner. It was a good experience. I learned that I don't want a truck.
The suspension had a sort of role-ly feeling. I sure wouldn't want to try an emergency avoidance maneuver a highway speeds. The width made it something of a tight fit in some lanes. The size made it hard to park. The turning radius was pathetic. Fortunately, I didn't have to buy it any gas. I soon found myself looking down enviously at the small, nimble cars around me.
It's probably worth mentioning that isn't the first time I've driven a truck, though I don't recall ever driving a pickup before. I've driven moving trucks from North Carolina to Maine and back and from North Carolina to Texas and back (though the last time I did that, I didn't go back). Those were 10' or 14' moving trucks. I've driven 17' foot moving trucks full of band equipment around Durham, N.C. I've driven a 15 passenger van (which later pulled a car trailer and car). Generally it's been fun and entertaining, part of some big project of moving lots of stuff. When I've had the moving trucks for a couple extra days as part of one-way-move contracts, I've even enjoyed tooling around Durham and Austin in my oversized ride.
At the end of the day, I'll stick to my Corolla, though I'd rather have a Prius. Maybe I will someday, but I just paid off my Corolla a year ago now, so I'll have to wait a little while for it to wear out.
P.S. that Town Lake link that I discovered to use above has some nice pictures of where I like most to go jogging. I really should take some such photos of my own.