Mark's Blog

Vista Point

I sit here in Marin County, looking back to the city. My back rubs against the cold cobbled stone that I'm leaning against, my car parked a short distance away. A brisk wind blows in from the Pacific Ocean, accenting the cool night air. I'm not particularly comfortable, and yet I find myself lost in my own thoughts and soon forget my discomfort.

The last week has been tough. Anybody who knows me knows I'm a bit of a homebody. I like my house, my neighborhood, the normalcy of regular day to day life. Sure, I love vacations as much as anybody, but I always enjoy the return back to normal reality at the end. This being the first time I've spent any significant time away from my wife and my family, has made the whole "being away" a thousand times worse.

San Francisco is a beautiful city. The hustle/bustle of the Financial District where I've been; the thousands of shops and eateries; the people (oh, the people!); the architecture; the hills everywhere that seem to define the very city itself. Between the class I was taking, the shopping, and all the walking I have done, I have certainly tried to keep myself busy.

Tonight was my last night here. I realized that I simply had three things I must do, since who knows when I'll be back here again? And off I went, darting through the city. Finding Lombard Street and driving down the crazy twisty/turny one block section as I descended Russian Hill was exciting, if not somewhat scary (mostly getting to the top before going down). Seeing Alcatraz Island with my own eyes. And finally, seeing and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is dark. The Golden Gate Bridge is lit up beautifully, it is truly a sight to behold. And as I move my eyes away from the bridge across the bay, I see the city in all of its glory. The city seems so peaceful... the lights let you see the arcs of the hills. The skyscrapers rise from the lights all around, clearly showing their size and yet seeming to fit right into the landscape. The soft lights accent the Bay Bridge as it stretches off into the distance. I sit and admire the view, quiet in my own thoughts. I have no idea how long I've been there, but a tiny high pitched voice pulls me back.

"Say-see-naa! Say-see-naa!"

Just a short distance away, a little girl, no more than 3 or 4, is excitedly pointing at the same thing I'm seeing. Her parents are by her side, smiling and enjoying both the view and their daughter's excitement at the same time. I don't know the language they are speaking, but I don't need to know to understand. It is a family, sharing a moment together.

And it really strikes me what has been so hard about this whole week. I'm alone. In a city of hundreds of thousands, I'm really all by myself, without the people I truly love with me to share the experiences.

I feel my eyes water. I'd like to blame it on the cold wind blowing into my face.

But I know I really can't.

I'll be home soon.

Spammers, again

Some spamming scumbag has decided to use my personal domain as his "return" email, using randomly generated email addresses to make sorting near impossible.

What joy - I'm averaging ~10% legitimate messages in my inbox - everything else is bounces from various locations for spam that wasn't delivered.

What is even more fun is when I get an automated "nasty-gram" from a site telling me that I'm sending them spam. Here's a clue, dipshits - spammers never use legit return addresses, so turn that option off for everybody's sakes. I'm already pissed about dealing with the deluge of bounce messages - I don't need to be told off about sending somebody spam when I'm not.

One hell of a Christmas Present

1:47am on Christmas Morning brought our second child - a baby boy named "Declan". He was 7 pounds, 6 ounces, 20 inches long. Thinking that having a Christmas baby just wasn't quite unique enough, my wife "decided" to make the birth a bit more exciting by throwing a prolapsed cord into the mix - one emergency C-Section later, and our beautiful baby boy was born. Everybody is healthy and doing quite well.

Father (that would be me) is exhausted, and once I publish this, I'm going to bed. Little sleep in nearly 48 hours - with the all the excitement... and just for fun, throwing Christmas in the mix - has got me pretty much wiped out. :)

Bookmarks

As I sit here in my web browser, I just finished making another new "catch all" links folder for bookmarks I've created in the past couple of months. I now have six of these, and in them are all kinds of interesting sites that I've found/read about that were intriguing enough to want to not forget about.

How do other people handle this? I used to organize them all nice and neat, had a really good system for tracking everything, but I suppose I just got lazy since it always seemed like the site I was bookmarking was unique in some way. I have really important/regularly-used bookmarks on my "personal bookmarks" toolbar, categorized somewhat. It is starting to get to be a mess, and yet I find myself periodically thinking "What was the name of that neat site I found blah blah blah months ago?" and sifting through several hundred bookmarks across those (now 6) folders to find it.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this, and my system works fine. Hmm.

You know it's bad out there....

.... when you hate Hillary Clinton with the intensity of a thousand suns, and would rather dig out your own liver with a rusty spoon and eat it then have to deal with her as your Senator for another 6 years, and yet you STILL plan on voting for her in the upcoming election.

Bah.

I have a problem

I admit it - I have a problem.

See, I'm a winter sports junkie. Bobsled, luge, skeleton, skiing (downhill and cross-country), speed skating - I eat that stuff up like a junkie in search of a fix. Winter is always a great time of year for this stuff, and I try to watch as much as I can.

So you can only imagine that these 2 weeks every 4 years are like a dream come true. Winter sports on, every day, hours and hours and hours on end. Every sport imaginable, even things for the wife like figure skating, and the "sport" of curling, which is entertaining as all heck to watch (if only because we can both say "we could do that!")

Problem is, there just aren't enough hours in the day. I can't take it all in. I want to, but even I have limits to how long I can sit on a couch and watch TV non-stop. I didn't know I had limits before, but the last few days have shown me I do, where my legs finally say "Hey, you, up there... wanna like, maybe get up or something? Because seriously, we are considering quitting and going to somebody who might actually use us? Okay?"

So far, no problem, right? Just an enthusiastic sports fan, soaking up all he can while the opportunity shines?

See, but I do have a problem. You only need to go into my downstairs room to see.

There, right above the TV we hardly ever use, I have not one, but two VCRs.

To the right of the two VCRs, there sits a big huge stack of blank VHS tapes.

And right on top of the TV, there sits a big huge sheaf of paper.

On them are the network schedule for every day of the Olympics. And 5 hand-written pages, outlining the current and future contents of thirty 8-hour videotapes... complete with written directions on when and which VCR to put tapes in, what schedules to setup on each VCR, the works.

You see, with the exception of Ice Hockey, I intend on recording every broadcast minute of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Every. Single. Minute.

Why? Even I can't answer that one. Like I said, I have a problem. This is a winter sport's dream, something that only comes every 4 years. I can't possibly absorb it all for the next 2 weeks, so the only way I can possibly see it all is to tape it and go back to it later on. Except the reality is, I doubt I'll ever get through a fraction of the tapes I'm making over the next 2 weeks. I'm taping ~225 hours of programming. Even FF through commercials, that is still a TON of content to watch.

There is something to be said about laying back on the couch and watching a downhill skiing competition though - especially when it's July and 90 degrees out. The irony is delicious, and the reality is I won't remember a thing about who wins what a few months from now, so it will all be new by the time I get back to them.

And in the meantime, when it is all done and the VCRs are put away, the tapes are labelled and put away, and life returns to normal - those tapes can gather dust on my shelves - right next to my complete 20-tape set of the 2002 Salt Lake Games.

It's really sad

When I read stories like this one at CNN, you realize just how bad things can really get.

Here they are, these people have experienced this horrific tragedy, and do you think they would band together to help each other get out of the mess?

Nah, let's steal a bunch of guns and shoot people who are trying to help others.

It's time for Bush to send in the troops - not the panzy-ass National Guard troops, but deploy some of our Marines there. Simple orders: If you see somebody robbing somebody, shooting at somebody, etc. - shoot to kill.

Fuck the justice system, those scumbags don't deserve to still be breathing oxygen.

It's price gouging, pure and simple

So Katrina makes landfall, and does a hell of a lot of damage to the gulf coast, including damaging a large number of oil rigs and refineries. Obviously everybody knows gas prices will be rising as the strict law of supply and demand kick in.

Can somebody, somewhere, explain to me exactly how this crisis effects the gas that is already sitting in the storage tanks in the ground at gas stations in the Northeast?

Some of the gas stations in the area are raising their prices already - and we're not talking about the normal slow raises that occur with Labor Day coming and everything. We're talking a 30 cents jump today. I expected the prices are going to go up dramatically over the next week or so, but only as new gas is being delivered to the service stations in the area.

There's supply and demand, and then there is price gouging.

The joys of owning a home

A couple of days after coming home from vacation, we realized that the well pump (a jet pump in our basement since our well was a shallow one) kept coming on every 15 minutes or so, even when we weren't using water. After going through the usual diagnosis (looking for leaking faucets, outside faucets left on, etc.), we killed all water to the house and watched with concern as the PSI slowly but inevitably decreased even though no water was being used. It would hit the cut-off point, the pump would turn on, recharge the water tank, turn off, and the process would begin anew.

Uh-oh.

Got a well-recommended plumber to the house, and told us something we really didn't want to hear - the most likely cause of what we were seeing was a failing foot valve. Sadly, one of the few parts of our water system not in our basement, but buried in the well itself.

Tricky thing is, we had no idea where the hell the well is.

A lot of phone calls later, we realized that none of the previous owners did either, and the only guy (who was still alive) who had any chance of knowing was the guy who originally drilled the well - in 1965. Didn't even bother pursuing that avenue, as I sincerely doubt he would remember. Got our plumbers to come out and use a deep metal detector to try to find the well casing. Got a hit quite close to the house, near where the piping came out. Great!, I think.

Proceed to spend a very sweaty 3 hours digging about 3 feet down, to find a very old, VERY rusty screwdriver. No well. Fuck me.

Plumber comes back out, and we spend a significantly longer time going over the whole yard. Mark out 2 spots, one with a very large feedback and another smaller one. Gather a few family members, and we dig down again, about 2 feet down or so.

To find a nice big fat metal casing, about a foot and a half long, just sitting buried horizontally there, leading to nowhere. No wonder the detector lit up like a Christmas tree. Whoever filled the front yard had a sick sense of humor. Bastard(s).

Daunted, but with the same problem still hanging over us, we said "f this" and rented an mini-excavator which my brother-in-law has become quite adept at using (he is building his house). It was starting to look more and more like the whole damn yard was going to have get dug up to find this damn well, and I'd be damned if I was going to be doing it shovelful by shovelful.

Insert wife going away on to a meeting for 3 days, so Dad is on his own with daughter.

Father-in-law and Brother-in-law come over this morning, as scheduled, to help. (Translation: I'm stuck in the house with 2 1/2 year old who can't be left alone, so my in-laws are doing the work while I sit inside. If you guys are reading this, I owe you BIG time!) Couple of quick holes later, we realize that this is going to need the systematic approach, and proceed to dig a nice 20 foot long trench in my front yard to find the damn piping.

Did I mention the big sharp teeth on the excavator yet? Oh yeah, nasty ones, designed to cut into the dirt.

And rubber piping too.

Got the pump turned off nice and quick, watched as all the water in my pressure tank spewed out into the big trench in my frontyard. Thankfully we only cut the pressure hose, not the suction (supply) hose, so the new pump we are installing should be alright. Dug the rest out, found the well cap (finally, after 2 weeks!), and finished up.

Father-in-law attempted to help re-prime the system, but I think the foot valve is totally blown at this point, so the water we are using to re-prime the system is just pouring out into the well below.

So, no water (at all, not even a trickle), with a dubious chance of getting it fixed tomorrow (it should qualify as an emergency, so we'll see what happens).

Oh yeah, I did mention that the wife is away, so this all has to happen around said earlier mentioned 2 1/2 year old.

Ah, the joys of owning a home.

Tip of the day

Drying a wet handkerchief in the microwave for 3 minutes - not a good idea.

Especially the fire thing.