Biscuit City

This week I finished reading reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which is about an attempt to go back in the past and prevent John Kennedy’s assassination, so I am thinking more than usual of the various events and waypoints in time that bring us to where we are. I’m sure we’ve all played “what if” with our lives. What if my parents have never met? What if I had been born sooner or later than I was? What if I had not met my spouse? What if I had not taken the way home that resulted in someone running into me at a traffic light? It’s a tangled web we weave, and one that can go off in a number of different directions. (Ray Bradbury has a terrific short story about this phenomenon called “A Sound of Thunder.” You can read it at:

http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/sound_of_thunder.htm

I recommend it highly if you haven’t read it.)

There’s a principle called the Butterfly Effect, that says even a small thing (such as a butterfly flapping its wings) can cause large changes (like creating a hurricane). And writers of fiction, at least, seem to agree that in spite of their characters’ best efforts to change things for the better, all in all things may turn out worse. As the little guy with the big ears said on the Kaiser Permanente commercial, “It’s complicated.”

It’s also complicated for writers who try to mirror reality (or an alternate reality). My novel, which is now in revision, had a character die at a certain point. A friend who is a wonderful writer told me that I should not kill the poor fellow off so soon in the interests of several characters’ development. She was right, so I just badly injured him so he was around for a couple of years longer. But–everything is connected to everything else,  in fiction as in life, so I had to go through and change every reference afterward to him being dead. It took some doing, but the book is the better for it.

When I was making the changes, I first was thinking, “But this isn’t the way it happened.” Then, of course, I realized that it could happen any way I wanted it, unlike reality. Probably under the influence of King’s book, I was thinking of the steps that led to my having another flat tire last week. I was fixing Becky’s piano lamp and found it needed a new socket. So I took myself off to Rice’s Hardware, one of my favorite places. To avoid traffic, I can go down a couple of streets in my subdivision, cross a semi-main road, go through an alley behind the shopping center, swing around the end and there I am.

As I was coming up to the entrance to the alley, I found it was blocked by a tree company’s truck clearing a tree damaged by Sandy the storm so I couldn’t use my customary entrance. I turned left and got into the alley at the next entrance down. While driving behind the shopping center, I hit an almost invisible pothole and knew instantly I had killed the tire. So, it was off to the tire place to get a new tire. At least the rim wasn’t bent.

And so I thought, what if I had deferred my trip to the hardware store? What if I had gotten out on the main road instead of the alley? What if I had seen the pothole and avoided it? Maybe I could have avoided a ruined tire, but on the other hand, I very well could have had a head-on with a tractor trailer on the main road and had damage much worse than a bad tire. Mark Twain’s story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” is about trying to change life for the better and making it worse.  Here’s a link to that story:

http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Twain/Mysterious-Stranger.htm

So, whether it’s life and reality or a novel, we as people and as writers need to make the best choices we can and then see what happens. Perspective helps; good friends help; practicing faith, hope and love all help. We’re all in this; we’re all in this together; and we’re not in it alone.

I wrote a while back about how various appliances in my house keep conspiring to break and also incite their mechanical/electronic colleagues to follow suit. I wrote about the keyboard on the the desk top (“big” computer, as we call it) giving up the ghost and how I replaced it with a wireless model that installed itself.

Well, the machines weren’t done. One day this past week I could not get my laser printer to work. It has been a great printer, with none of the fiddling and groaning and screeching of the deskjets that made me want to throw them out the window, even if they did print in color (when they printed.). But the laser printer wouldn’t print anything. This is a problem for a writer trying to print a draft of a novel.

I ran through the troubleshooting checklist, re-did all the connections, re-installed the software, and tried some other things suggested by my colleagues on the Write by the Rails Facebook page after I had moaned about my recalcitrant printer. Nothing worked. After trying all day to get the thing to work, I finally concluded that the printer itself overdosed on voltage when the lights flickered during the storm a week ago Monday. I have the printer on a filter, but apparently it wasn’t enough. So, I bid farewell to Mr. Laser Printer and ordered a replacement. It came in a couple of days; I installed it, and I am in laser printer heaven once again. I just hope the printer part of the All-in-One doesn’t make any suggestions to the faxing or scanning part!

A Korean dish made from acorn meal. Yum, yum!

Let’s see, the weight of an acorn is typically about  2.9 to 6.8 grams, or on average, 4.9 grams. The formula for an object dropped from a height, let’s say 50 feet is h = -16t ^2 + s where h is the final  height, t is the time in motion in seconds and s is the initial height. (Are you impressed that I am so mathematical? So am I!) So, if an acorn is dropped from 50 feet, its time to the ground is 0= -16t^ +  50. that gives us a time to fall of  1.8 seconds. Ignoring air resistance (because I don’t want to fool with it), the velocity of the acorn as it hits the ground about 58 feet per second, or about 33 miles an hour. Not too shabby for a lazy little acorn! It hits whatever it hits (the ground, a squirrel, a car, my head) with enough force to hurt. (Technically, the amount of force is 0.048069 newton, more or less. Now you know.)

Anyhow, with so many acorns falling, I got to wondering about acorns. I know that mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, which is a kind of life principle whether it applies to businesses or my weight through my lifetime. I found out that a lot of different animals eat acorns, including squirrels, which is why we have so many squirrels around our neighborhood. I tried putting out bird food for a while, but the squirrels ate it. I used “squirrel proof” feeders and found that there is no such thing as  squirrel-proof feeder–squirrel resistant is about as good as it gets.

People eat acorns too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to start fighting the squirrels for a taste. They are used as food in several cultures.Acorn meal can be used in some recipes calling for grain flours. 

The jack in this case is a literal jack, not the figurative one in the title. I’m feeling kind of post-ironic, which is why I’m writing about car jacks. They’re part of technology (so is a stick, for that matter) and I’m a little tired of digital technology this evening, having spent the better part of the day trying to get my formerly reliable laser printer to recognize that, yes, it was connected to a computer, without any success. Truly a first world problem.

Anyhow, I was coming out of Staples last week when a nice fellow told me my right rear tire was nearly flat. I suppose the classic take on that would be to go around and look at it, but I couldn’t see why he would be making that up, so I drove the mile or so home to change it. The car, my Mazda 6 wagon, Misty 6, didn’t feel like it had a flat–you know, that thump thump thump that warns you something is amiss with your voiture.

So I got out in front of my house, and the helpful fellow was telling the truth. The tire was flat. It wouldn’t even register on the tire gauge. Now, we had had AAA for about a gazillion years and used it a few times but I had come to believe that we didn’t need it since we don’t drive that far. (Helpful hint: you can get a roadside assistance plan from your cell carrier for far far less.) And it always seemed it took the nice AAA people an hour to come fix the problem, which they were very good at.  I didn’t have an hour since I am, like most people I know, overscheduled, so I opened the hatch and took out the spare which I was hoping was a real spare but it was a doughnut, one of the most disgusting things ever created. It does the job but it looks darned stupid doing it. Having to put it on negated the man point I had accumulated by changing my own tire. I know, it saves weight and money (the car manufacturers’ money), but I don’t have to like it.

I unfastened the poor excuse for a lug wrench–it even had a pivoting head so you could make a complete circle with it when taking off the lug nuts. If it didn’t snap off, since it was made metal the next step up from tin foil. I loosened the lug nuts and then went to look for the jack, which was secreted in one of the several and mysterious compartments in the cargo bay. I couldn’t find it. I thought I was stuck and then I figured the jack in my other car, the Chevy Impala,which goes by the name of the Gray Ghost, might work and be sturdier to boot.

So, I looked in the boot of the Ghost and found it readily underneath the full-size spare and soon had the wagon jacked up and the flat off, ignoring the warning on the Chevy’s jack to only use it with the vehicle it was intended for. Don’t tell me what to do! Probably the warning was put there by OSHA. I exercised my right to ignore perfectly sensible advice.

I put on the doughnut, threw the flat in the back and hied myself to the friendly tire repair place we have used for years. The flat had a nail in it. The fellow who took the orders at the tire place had told me on an earlier trip there to have a tire plugged that when business was good more people had to have nail holes patched in their tires since there were more construction trucks about strewing nails all over the public roadways.

My tire was patched and remounted in about 20 minutes. I could have put it back on myself and gained another  man point, but I was tired from all the excitement.

I did whatever it was I had to do, and as I pulled up in front of the house, I thought about looking in the owner’s manual for the location of the jack. It was in a thoroughly concealed secret compartment I couldn’t even tell was there. And so I lost another man point for reading the directions..

Final score, for those who are keeping score:

On the plus side–+1 for removing the tire and putting on the spare
                           +1 for ignoring the warning on the jack.

for a total of         +2 points so far,

but

deduct one point for not remounting it  -1
and one point for using a doughnut       -1
and one point for looking in the owner’s manual -1

So the total man score for the afternoon was -1, which is the score I pretty much carry. I suppose I could pretend it’s my golf score, but I know nothing about keeping score in golf, which is another deduction, so that gives me -2. I’d better quit while I’m ahead, which is the best advice I could give myself (and ignore).

The past couple of days have been like a big snowstorm without the snow. No shoveling required.

The start of the day featured light rain and breezes. I went over to visit my dad at his assisted living place and got some bread. Surprisingly, there was plenty at the local Food Dog. Bottled water, too. Many places are wiped out of these items.

I did some editing and writing and read a bit in my book, Stephen King’s 11/22/63. Impelling book. I’m about 1/4 of the way through and it’s well done.

The wind and rain continued to pick up during the day. Right now (about 5:30 PM) the strength of both continue to be noticeable. The wind and rain are supposed to be at their worst from about 8 PM this evening until about 2 or 3 AM this morning.

I’ll blog more later.

9 AM Tuesday

The high winds did pick up about 8 last night, but when we went to bed about midnight, I wasn’t aware of them. I think they were running about 50 mph and then calmed down.

This morning we have light breezes and a little rain. Areas to the north were impacted far more than we. THe pictures of Manhattan are incredible. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected.

Everything’s closed today. We can get out fine, but I’m feeling the need of a day to regroup. Hope everyone is well. I’ll be back to the usual nonsense tomorrow.

Take care.

Well, it has been an eventful week here in Northern Virginia. It’s Sunday evening, about 8 PM, and about four days ago the media outlets have been talking about the possibility of a combination hurricane/tropical story named Sandy and a nor-eastern resulting in a massive storm system the Weather Bureau is calling Frankenstorm. It is about 650 miles wide and potentially will affect 60 million people.

The media have themselves all in a lather, which attracts viewers and readers and listeners, and they are all urging people to “prepare” for the storm, which is readily done, unlike the derecho we experienced in June. Because of that experience, during which we lost power for twelve hours, I stocked up on batteries and an emergency radio. We keep a lot of food and water around, so we should be in good shape.

This is a kind of strange experience, akin to awaiting a big coastal snow storm, but without the snow. At least we won’t have to clear that away. Fairfax County Public Schools, where I taught, canceled classes for Monday and Tuesday this afternoon. That’s highly unusual, and makes me think they know more than we do.

So, we’re “hunkering down” (interesting phrase–I wondered where it came from and I found it’s of Scottish origin. Here’s a link to a good explanation of the origin: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hun1.htm ) and waiting to see what happens. I’ll update this tomorrow morning when the wind and the rain are expected to arrive.

Monday morning, 7 AM: We have some rain and some wind, but the worst of both is not expected to arrive until this evening. Stay safe, be well, and call when you get there. As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us every one!”