The Plentiful Vintage

I am home. I actually got home last night. Old Bridge got 2+ feet of snow, so I had to spend an hour or so digging both the truck and Alex's driveway out before I could leave. Apart from a great deal of turbulence, the ride back was only eventful at the beginning.

Getting out of Alex's development was interesting, not because the streets weren't plowed (they were in pretty good shape, all things considered), but because the light for the left turn onto Highway 9 (as in "sprung from cages on...") wasn't working. Rather than chance crossing three snow-packed southbound lanes sans signal to get to the northbound side, I turned back into the development and drove to the other end of it where there was a bridge over Rt. 9 to the northbound side. Turns out the bridge wasn't working, either. There some sort of blockage, likely an accident or stuck vehicle that I couldn't see. Fed up, I turned right onto the southbound on-ramp and drove down to the first jug handle with a working signal, turned around, and finally got myself headed in the right direction.

The condition of Rt. 9 was a disgrace—barely plowed, yet with piles of plowed snow blocking access on and off the highway, many of them with cars stuck in them. This isn't some country road. It's a major route with three lanes in each direction. Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic. It got me to the Parkway, and from there things got much better.

The plows had done a much better job on the Parkway and the Turnpike. For the most part they were dry as a bone. The Palisades Parkway was a little worse, but still easily passable. After that things were a snap.

It's an amazing thing to be able to drive the Connecticut Turnpike (aka I-95), at rush hour on a Monday with traffic levels more akin to those at midnight. Connecticut and Rhode Island got about half the snow NY/NJ got. My own street was well plowed. All that remained to do was shovel out the driveway.

I hauled the snow blower up from the basement and started in. It was wicked windy out, but I managed to clear about half of the driveway. Then disaster struck. I must not have latched the side door properly. A gust of wind ripped it right off the side of the house, smashing the adjacent light fixture as it whipped around. It stayed attached only by the chain and spring that's supposed to keep it from opening wide enough to hit the fixture. I had to detach it to keep it from doing more damage. Bother.

Discouraged and beat from all the earlier shoveling, I gave up on trying to continue snow blowing into the swirling wind in the dark, and left the truck parked on the street. I went inside for dinner and a hot shower. I finished up this morning when it was much less windy and very sunny.

So, now I need to replace the storm door and probably the flood light fixture. I'd been planning to do the storm door at some point anyway because previous experiences with wind gusts had bent it slightly out of shape, making it both drafty and difficult to open and close. OTOH, I had just replaced the flood fixture a couple three months ago. That's annoying.

I am very tired right now. I woke up an 4 am and couldn't get back to sleep. Blech. I'd gone to bed at 10, so I did get some sleep. I don't understand why this only happens to me on weekends. On week days I always manage to sleep till the alarm goes off.

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So first I went into work and spent about four hours wrangling computers in the server closet. We have two servers that are meant to be rack mounted, but until today they never have been. The problem is that while our rack cabinet is deep enough to hold them, it is not deep enough to contain the rails they ride in. The rails are about an inch longer than the rack cabinet is deep. I would have to remove the rear door of the cabinet so the rails could stick out the back. The problem is that, like the cabinet's front door, the rear door has a lock, the key to which has apparently vanished from the face of the earth. I have the key to the front door, but it doesn't work in the back. So I wound up having to remove one of the cabinet's side panels, and then unscrewing the lock mechanism from the latch from behind.*

* The annoying thing about all this is that removing the side panels was a piece of cake since they're fastened with only four screws screwed in from the outside of the cabinet. Really makes you wonder how useful those locks are in the first place.

Once I got the rear door removed, and the rails and servers installed, I also had to remove the front door of the cabinet. The space is so tight that if I closed the door, it would press up against the fronts of the two servers, blocking the vents through which the cooling fans draw fresh air.**

** If I ever find the guy who sold us this cabinet, there are going to be words... and possibly the use of a baseball bat.

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I stopped at the Davisville Library on the way home, and while checking out a book there was informed that a book I'd requested was waiting for me over at the main library in Wickford, so I drove over there, too. Afterward I headed home, had lunch, and then drove down to the bike path to take a ride. Once I got there I remembered*** that I'd taken the bike out of the truck earlier in the week so there'd be room in back to haul some trash away, and that the bike was just then sitting in my living room. So I drove back home, got the bike loaded, and then drove back to the bike path. Sigh.

*** After looking in the back and seeing it wasn't there.

I did nineteen miles at just under 15 mph, a remarkably good time considering I hadn't ridden since last weekend. Right now my legs are probably stronger than they've ever been in my life. My times have been really fast for the last couple of months. I even hit an all time high of 15.5 mph on a ride about a month ago.

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After the ride, I mowed the lawn, probably for the last time this year. At least that's what I'm hoping. After I finished I let the engine run until it used up the remaining gas in its tank so that it'd be ready for winter storage.

Now to take a handful of ibuprofen and head to bed.

So here's the thing. I rarely post on Facebook anyway (and never on Twitter), and I'm certainly not going to crosspost either my entries or, especially, my comments in anyone else's posts from here to there. Please do me the same courtesy. Thanks, ever so.

I can see the utility in being able to crosspost entries if one is comfortable matching up their LJ personna with their FB one, much the same as many Dreamwidth inhabitants do with LJ. Although I've never gone out of my way to hide my real name here or over at b.org, I am not at all comfortable with that direct a connection, especially given FB's cavalier attitude towards privacy. And what I really don't get is why one would feel the need to to crosspost comments, which without the original entry or comment they are addressing are just nonsequiturs.

Lily White commented on DXMachina's LiveJournal post: "LOL!"

I also specifically disabled pingbacks (they are on by default), not that I ever do much backchannel, but who needs the potential agita? The point of a locked post is that only certain people can see it, and pingbacks breaks that rule. (Thanks to cofax7and serenada for the heads up on that part of this mess.)

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The accumulation of rainy days and mechanical failures kept me from setting a fourth straight monthly best, but I still broke 250 miles for August, which is very good. I'm now also 10 miles ahead of my 2008 pace, which was my best riding year so far. Alas, no ride to start September off because I was at work until after dark rearranging the server nook in anticipation of it being enclosed into a server room whilst I'm on vacation next week.

Joy. All the rain has caused the local water table to rise to where it is now higher than my basement floor. There's a good solid inch of water down there now with another couple of days of heavy rain to come. This past weekend I'd just managed to dry out the smallish amount of water that seeped in during the last big storm. Bother.

The one silver lining is that Sunday I got motivated to apply polyurethane to the two cabinets I've been building, and put them up on saw horses to make it easier. Thus they are currently high and dry. Go me! I did have to slog around down there picking some other boxes and pieces of wood up out of the drink, but I seem to have caught it fairly early.

Now off to Home Depot to purchase some sort of pump. I don't think the wet vac is gonna do it this time.

Back in the mid-sixties, my father flew for Aer Lingus on the New York to Shannon route. Shannon was the first duty-free airport, and my father took advantage of this by bringing us home various Irish and British foodstuffs, like Cadbury's chocolate (long before it became available here) and this weird rose hip syrup that was supposedly high in vitamin C*.

* I hated the stuff, myself. Every time one of us had a cold, a big spoonful got shoved in our mouth, and I always had to suppress a gag reflex. It was like when one of the Little Rascals was given a spoonful of castor oil. Somehow the subject came up during Christmas dinner, and I discovered that everyone else in my family loved the stuff, even to the point of occasionally sneaking a spoonful. Crazy, all of them.

One of the other things he used to bring home were these big ol' jars of Bovril, which was a thick, dark beef extract that looked and flowed a lot like molasses. It was basically concentrated cow. My mother used it for gravies and soups and anything else that needed beefiness, and we loved the stuff. Of course, when my father stopped flying to Ireland, the supply became restricted to tiny, ridiculously priced jars at gourmet shops, so that ended that.

I do a lot of my shopping at Dave's Market, a small local chain that has a somewhat higher ratio of esoteric products than, say, Stop and Shop, and the other day I noticed one of those tiny jars of Bovril. So I bought one. Tonight I decided to make beef stew, so it was the perfect time to crack it open.

I put a good dollop of the stuff into the Dutch oven with the rest of the ingredients, and then tried to puzzle out whether it now had to be refrigerated or not. Now I don't think we did back in the day, but I wanted to make sure. Lots of things have a "refrigerate after opening" warning on them now that didn't used to (ketchup, for example). The first problem is that being a tiny jar, the type face is, like, 3 pt. Even with my reading glasses I could barely make out the type. I actually had to get a magnifying glass. Ah, store in a cool dark place. Perfect. Then I looked at the front of the jar.

Suitable for vegetarians

Say what? How can concentrated cow possibly be suitable for vegetarians? I pulled out my trusty magnifying glass again to peruse the list of ingredients. There are lots of them, but none of them contain the word beef in them. Or cow. Or any other kind of dead animal. Huh.

Wikipedia clued me in. During the dark days of the mad cow scare, the manufacturer replaced the beef extract with yeast extract to "allow vegetarians to enjoy the rich taste" which is apparently code for "the European Union won't let us sell it otherwise." People complained (think New Coke), so once the ban on beef exports was lifted, they apparently reintroduced classic Bovril as "Beef Bovril." Dave's, unfortunately, carries plain old (New) Bovril. $3.49 for 125 grams of yeasty goodness. Sigh.

It smells about the same as I remember it did. I will see how it tastes in about an hour or so.

Despite going to sleep at a reasonable hour, I slept badly due to the combination constant pouring rain rattling off the case of the a/c and the stuffiness/humidity of the room with the window closed. I turned on the overhead fan to move air around, but it didn't help much. I got up at the usual hour, and went down to the basement to get some clean clothes from the laundry area only to discover that a good portion of the downpour was covering the floor of the basement. Feh.

At first I thought that the rain trap I installed under the one known leak had overflowed, but it worked as it was supposed to. Actually, there was very little water in it at all. There were two wet trails leading down to the floor from either side of the window by the laundry, so it may be that the force of the wind just drove the rain through the seals around the window. I'll have to remember to check the caulking there. There seems to be an awful lot of water on the floor just to be from that, though. I wonder if the water table has risen enough with all the rain so that the water is coming up through cracks in the floor.

The water was about a ¼ - ½" deep on the laundry side of basement, and the indoor/outdoor rug I have down on the floor in the laundry is completely soggy. Fortunately I didn't notice any real water damage on that side, since I've made it a point to keep things off the floor for the most part. Well, except for the bag of charcoal whose bottom fell out when I tried to lift it out of the water. Sigh.

Since I had to get ready for work, I left things as they were figuring to give it a good wet vaccing tonight. I headed for the stairs and looked at the other side of the basement for the first time, i.e., the workshop. That was underwater, too, and one of my nerd hole bench carcases was sitting right smack in the middle of it. Frell. Fortunately, I'd stacked the other carcase on top this one. I picked up both carcases and placed them on top of my rolling workbench, then dried off the bottom of the wet one as much as possible. Fortunately, it doesn't look like it was in the water for very long. The water stain only goes up a half inch or so, and the varnished surfaces didn't show any staining at all. I think I got lucky there.

So the plan is still the same. After work I'll be bailing with the wet vac, then hauling the fan down from the attic to get the air moving in the direction of the dehumidifier. If it's nice tomorrow maybe I'll hang the rug from the clothesline.

I have no current plans to move to Dreamwidth. I bought a permanent account here a few years ago, so there's really no incentive to leave. I don't get ads, and the assorted fannish dramas with LJ over the years have little impact on mostly non-fannish self. Besides, the name and logo just seem incredibly precious.

Today I started seeing posts popping up on my friends list that were crossposted Dreamwidth posts, each with a little note on the bottom saying that if I want to comment please do it over at Dreamwidth using OpenID. The "please' turns out to be meaningless because comments are disabled on the LJ posts. So, I tried to comment on one over there. It looks like you can't do it unless you're already a member. The reply box has an option for OpenID, but it's disabled. Thought it might be a browser issue, but nope, it's the same in both IE and Firefox. Can't reply unless you're a member. Honestly, life's too short.

So I guess that's adios. I wish y'all well.

The Sunday morning snow stopped early yesterday afternoon, leaving behind about 4" of medium weight white stuff. Around 3:00 I went out and swept off the stoop and the truck, then hauled out the snow thrower and unraveled the extension cord. 4" is right in the sweet spot for what the thrower can handle, and it made short work of what was there, even in the plow pile at the end of the driveway. I felt good to get it out of the way. No rushing about in the morning.

Then I woke this morning to the rumble of a snow plow. Ruh roh! Another 4" fell overnight, so I was out there this morning rushing about anyway. I am so over winter.

It was quite a lovely day today, sunny and well into the sixties, so I took a drive up to the Blackstone Valley path. Did 17.5 miles on the bike, and another three on foot... But I'm getting ahead of myself. Despite the lovely weather, I'd been having an aggravating ride as I approached the northern end of the path. The aggravation was due to the veritable multitudes of clueless people who were out and about, either walking on the wrong side of the path, or hogging both sides, or sauntering from side to side without looking to see if anyone was coming up behind them. I hope they all get the pox.

( Bad Language Behind the Cut... )
 

Spending most of this morning trying to fix my internet connectivity was not part of the plan. Basically the router couldn't see Cox's DHCP server to get an IP address. It had somehow become set to 0.0.0.0. There was about ninety minutes used on trying to fix things on my own, including swapping in my old, non-wireless router, but nothing worked. Then there was about an hour on the phone with Cox after that. About half of that was with their automated tech support system (which is actually pretty nifty), followed by connection to an actual human when the machine gave up in exasperation. The human eventually got it unclogged, although I'm not really sure what the root cause was, because he just kept babbling about possible causes, while trying all sorts of things at his end, or having me try stuff at mine.

Anyway, once it was unclogged, there was still the task of getting the router back up and running. We'd taken it out of the mix to simplify things while diagnosing the problem, and earlier in the process I'd reset as one of my early attempts, so a lot of settings had to be looked up and entered. There was also the part where you have to turn things on in a particular order to make it all work right. That was another hour or so. Bozhe moi.

It's all working now, though, and, as a gift with purchase, I now have a (longer than expected) list of all the wireless access points in my neighborhood.