Reptiles In LA

And we don't mean the folks in the film industry even though the title fits. No, we mean the man-eating alligators of Southern Los Angeles. Or at least one, name of Reggie.

LOS ANGELES - Reggie the alligator reappeared Monday after vanishing for 1 1/2 years in an urban lake where the reptile turned up in 2005 and repeatedly skunked would-be 'gator wranglers.

"After 18 months of hibernation or just eluding us, Reggie has decided to show himself," City Councilwoman Janice Hahn told a press conference next to Harbor Regional Park's Lake Machado.

Hahn said she had asked the Parks and Recreation Department to put a fence back up around the lake.

"Reggie is older, Reggie is bigger, and he's probably hungry, so I want to make sure that we keep the public safe," she said. "He's a wild alligator and he's unpredictable and we're not really sure what his behavior will be."

Reggie was an illegal pet allegedly tossed into the 50-acre lake by a former Los Angeles policeman when it got too big. It was spotted in August 2005 and caused a stir until disappearing the following October.

Reggie was probably visiting the old stomping grounds in the sewers. Or hanging out in the gym to get himself bigger. *Gasp* Maybe he was on steroids to get bigger more quickly.

Quiz Time!

1. Someone who sees conspiracies involving "The Government" in every, single incident that happens is:

a) Certifiably insane. 

b) An embarrassment to even hardcore conspiracy theorists.

c) Extremely fortunate that breathing is an involuntary reflex since that person would otherwise forget to do so.

d) Rosie O'Donnell.

e) All of the above.

As with most multiple guess tests, the "All of the above" answer is correct.

Let's look at the facts in the manner taught us by our nation's foremost civil engineer and demolition expert.

–  The overpass was made of concrete and steel rebar.  This would mark only the 4th time in history that fire has melted steel.  The first 3 of course trace back to the morning of 9/11, when - the government would have you believe - burning jet fuel miraculously managed to weaken steel to the point of bringing down WTC 1, 2, and most notably, WTC 7, which housed secret WorldCom and Enron e-mails.

–  The collapsed section of the so-called MacArthur Maze, which distributes traffic to and from the Bay Bridge, is said to be "draped like a blanket" over the roadway below (damning images of collapse available here), clearly suggesting a controlled, orderly demolition.

–  The driver of the tanker that caused this catastrophic damage (presumably an employee of an as yet unnamed American oil company) managed to walk away from the crash nearly unscathed and reportedly "hailed a taxi" to flee the scene.

–  Below this roadway is housed "a Caltrans property full of equipment being used to rebuild the Bay Bridge."

–  In 2005, a few months after Governor Schwarzenegger hand-picked a new director of Caltrans, the agency came under a wide-ranging investigation, including FBI subpoenas for documents that Caltrans was conveniently unable to find.  Documents, perhaps, that were located in the Caltrans facility directly underneath the miraculously collapsing roadway.

–  To date, Schwarzenegger has been curiously silent about these amazing coincidences, further proof of a cover-up.

–  The collapsed section of the interchange connects the San Francisco Bay Bridge (Interstate 80) to Interstate 580.

–  It's Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution that requires candidates for President to be natural born citizens, rendering Schwarzenegger ineligible.

–  8+0=8; 5+8+0=13; 8+13=21

–  580-80=500; 5+0+0=5

–  21, 5; Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5…

Coincidence?  Numbers don't lie.

Sigh. Again, for the ClueProof:

Steel yield strength reduces to 20 percent of its initial (room temperature) value and ultimate tensile strength is reduced to 40 percent of its initial value at 600 °C. Concrete compressive strength is reduced to between 30 percent and 50 percent of its initial value. Concrete tensile strength, which is already low, is also reduced to 30 percent.

Nothing is built to withstand the loss of 80% of its initial strength. Nothing. Well, other than Rosie's sanity. Incidentally, despite the furious doomsaying from the media, San Francisco's commute today went normally. Amazing how people can actually cope, isn't it? Maybe it was a conspiracy by the Governator to make public transportation more accessible and desirable, eh Rosie?

Is There An Exorcist In The House?

I wrote last year about Red Sunset Maples and Zombie Squirrels. Some people thought that was a humorous piece, but it wasn't. It was completely serious. We appear to have a budding zombie squirrel infestation here at the Crabitat. And I have real, photograhpical evidence thereof. I happened to walk out onto the back deck to see how the newly opened pool was doing and did a double take. My wife had left the vacuum hose and the pole handle for it in the pool after she finished vacuuming it earlier. I really didn't notice at first, but then something caught my eye. There was a lump on the pool rim right where the vacuum handle was sticking out. On closer inspection, it was a furry lump. On even closer inspection, it was a wet, furry lump. Namely, a zombie squirrel wannabe. Apparently, at the last minute, after hurling himself into the pool, he rethought his plan and clambered up the pole.

We're either going to need an exorcist or a suicidal squirrel counseling hotline real quick around here.

(The squirrel is fine, just waterlogged.)

Toilets In The News

In a move sure to warm the cockles of Sheryl Crow's heart, officials at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility in Hutchinson, Kansas have adopted her suggestion to save the earth. They are restricting the amount of toilet paper the inmates can have. It's not quite one sheet at a time, but they are cutting the amount the inmates can use each month.

Officials say the prison has long had a limit, but they learned recently that it hadn't been enforced. Increased enforcement began this month.

Under the prison policy, inmates are restricted to four rolls of toilet paper each month or on an "as-needed" basis.

Steve Schneider, public information officer for the prison, said officials also restated restrictions on other personal items, including soap and toothpaste, as a result of stockpiling and overuse.

The increased enforcement has angered many of the more than 1,600 inmates housed at the facility.

"Some take this for granted," inmate Carl Kennedy said in a letter to The Hutchinson News. "But in here it's part of a safeguard for widespread infections. We use it to blow our noses, clean sinks, toilets and tables."

Prison officials said the policy could save the prison nearly $600 each month if each inmate uses one less roll each month.

"There are a lot of things that individually don't cost much," said Kansas Department of Corrections spokeswoman Frances Breyne. "But when you multiply that by hundreds, it makes a drastic impact."

Schneider insists inmates won't go without toilet paper. Charmin four-packs can be purchased at the prison canteen for $2.70, and anyone who produces an empty roll will receive a new roll of toilet paper.

Well, prison isn't supposed to be a picnic, is it? On the other hand, inmates in a jail in the Spanish "enclave"* of Ceuta didn't have a problem with too much toilet paper clogging the pipes. Nope, it was something completely different. They caused the sewer to back up with hashish.

MADRID, Spain - Courthouse maintenance workers responding to a complaint about a clogged toilet found 30 pounds of hashish in a pipe leading from a restroom used by prisoners, officials said Monday.

The custodians found the drugs Friday at the Palace of Justice, a building that houses courtrooms and jail cells, in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the coast of Morocco.

Maybe they should limit the number of bags of hashish they can bring into the jail? Just a thought.

* Enclave is a fancy way of saying colony, apparently. Ceuta is located in Morocco and it kind of makes Spain's claims to Gibraltar look pretty weak, doesn't it? It isn't like they have any high ground, morally speaking.

At The Risk Of Beating A Sacred Cow….

There has been a lot of interest in the "$100 laptop" project led by Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. The goal is to provide a very cheap, flexible laptop that can actually be run by an electrical charge generated by a hand crank. Only the project has just announced that the $100 laptop will now cost $175. And it still isn't ready to go into production.

The founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aims to deliver $100 laptops to schoolchildren in the developing world, has said that the machine will now cost $175 and may not start production until October.

Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who heads the not-for-profit project, said that it was now "at the most critical stage of its life," but remained optimistic about its prospects, adding that new countries, including Peru and Russia, had inquired about taking part.

The rising cost of materials – in particular nickel – is responsible for the increased price of the machine, an OLPC spokesman told TimesOnline, while the roll-out had been pushed back because of changes in the design, which were "not unusual in technology development projects."

At least seven countries – Uruguay, Nigeria, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, and Libya – have expressed interest in buying the green and white machines, which have a crank so that they can be wound up by hand, but the project requires orders for three million machines in order for manufacturing and distribution to begin.

Mr Negroponte said that the computer, which has indoor and outdoor reading modes, will now be able to run Windows in addition to its own open-source operating system, which was developed with the help of Red Hat, one of its sponsors.

I guess it's just the engineer in me coming out here. (One of the best bosses I ever had defined an engineer as someone who could figure out how to do something for $100 that any damned fool could do for $200). Why are they developing this at all? Why not buy the design (better yet, get the company to donate it) to an old, reliable tank of a laptop computer, update it with a hand crank charging system and run with it? Seriously. The old laptop I got for my son is simple and indestructible - and it does everything a basic computer needs to. With the costs of components plummeting as they are, I imagine one of those simple machines could be produced very cheaply these days - probably close to the new figure at least if not less. (Disclaimer - I am not a computer engineer, maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like at least worth looking into, doesn't it?)

Wolfowitz Fights Back

Paul Wolfowitz when on the offensive today against the accusations being made against him at the World Bank. And he hit back hard.

WASHINGTON - World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz on Monday decried what he called a "smear campaign" against him and told a special bank panel that he acted in good faith in securing a promotion and pay raise for his girlfriend. He reiterated that he had no plans to resign, and President Bush gave him a fresh endorsement.

In a prepared statement to the panel, Wolfowitz said the institution's ethics committee had access to all the details surrounding the arrangement involving bank employee Shaha Riza, "if they wanted it."

Wolfowitz told the panel, "I acted transparently, sought and received guidance from the bank's ethics committee and conducted myself in good faith in accordance with that guidance."

The special bank panel is investigating Wolfowitz' handling of the 2005 promotion of bank employee Riza, who was scheduled to appear later in the day.

The controversy has prompted calls for the resignation of Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war in his preceding Pentagon job. The bank's 24-member board is expected to make a decision in the case this week.

Bush, meanwhile, said Wolfowitz "ought to stay. He ought to be given a fair hearing."

Wolfowitz lamented that the controversy over the pay package was part of an effort to oust him from the office, which he has held for nearly two years. The institution's mission is to fight global poverty.

"The goal of this smear campaign, I believe, is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader and must step down for that reason alone, even if the ethics charges are unwarranted," Wolfowitz said.

He called the charges "bogus" as well. I'm glad he's pushing back against these tactics. These nasty little anonymous selective leaking techniques for priming the media are really getting out of hand. That the media continues to play along with these campaigns is one of the reasons I believe they are in decline. I think people are getting fed up with the hyped-up Scandal Of The Week™ campaigns.

Your Toy Is Reading Your Mind

Get the tinfoil hats ready. Engineers are working on toys that can read your mind. Really.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game — a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb — portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

An interesting idea. But it raises a rather serious question. Who is in control of whom? Think about that for a second. If you have to concentrate in a certain way to make the toy perform, who is being trained? Interesting, isn't it?

Riding The Cannonball

Casey Jones, he died at the throttle,
With the whistle in his hand.
Casey Jones, he died at the throttlle,
But we'll all see Casey in the promised land.

His wife and three children were left to mourn
The tragic death of Casey on that April morn.
May God through His goodness keep them by His grace
Till they all meet together in that heavenly place.
(The Ballad of Casey Jones)

On this date in 1900, John Luther "Casey" Jones died at the controls of the Illinois Central Railroad's Cannonball near the town of Vaughan, Mississippi. Legend has it that when his body was pulled from the wreck of the engine, he was still clutching the whistle and the brake. He was the only fatality in the collision and it is believed his decision to stay at the controls saved the lives of the passengers riding the train that night.

At 11 o'clock that rainy Sunday night Casey and Sim Webb clambered aboard the big engine and eased her out of the station and through the South Memphis yards.

Four o'clock of the 30th of April. The little town of Vaughn, Miss. A long winding curve just above the town, and a long sidetrack beginning about where the curve ended.

"There's a freight train on the siding," Casey yelled across to Sim Webb.

Knowing the siding there was a long one, and having passed many other freights on it, Casey figured he would do the same this night.

But there was two seperate sections of a very long train on the sidetrack this night. And the rear one was a little too long to get all its length off the main track onto the siding. The freight train crews figured on "sawing by"; that is as soon as the passenger train passed the front part of the first train, it would move forward and the rear freight would move up, thus clearing the main track.

But Casey's speed-about fifty miles an hour-was more than the freight crews bargained for.

But when old 638 was within a hundred feet of the end of the siding the horrified eyes of Casey Jones and Sim Webb beheld through the gloom the looming shape of several boxcars in motion, swinging across from the main line to the side-track. In a flash both knew there way no earthly way of preventing a smashup.

"Jump, Sim, and save yourself!," was Casey's last order to his fireman. As for himself, Casey through his engine in reverse and applied the air-brakes-all any engineer could do, and rode roaring 638 into a holocaust of crashing wood that splintered like match boxes. Sim Webb jumped, fell into some bushes and was not injured.

When they took Casey's body from the wreckage (old 638 had plowed through the cars and caboose and turned over on her side a short distance beyond) they found one hand on the whistle cord, the other on the air-brake lever.

The original form of the Ballad of Casey Jones was penned by Wallace Saunders, a black engine wiper on the Illinois Central railroad who had been a friend of Jones.

The Last Of Its Kind

Here's an interesting article from today's Telegraph. The finishing touches are being put on the newest, and possibly very last, royal coach for the British monarchy. The coach is being built in Australia by probably the last living person with the requisite knowledge and skill to build one of these magnificent, obsolete conveyances. Jim Frecklington, the builder, also built the last coach added to the royal coach fleet in 1986. Before that, the last addition had been in 1902. Carriage building in general is kind of a lost art.

The newest addition to the fleet of royal carriages is being given the finishing touches in Australia before being flown to Britain as a gift to the Queen.

A time capsule containing elements from centuries of British history, the royal state coach Britannia has been designed and built as a labour of love by Jim Frecklington who learned his trade working in the Royal Mews.

A proud monarchist, he is probably the only man alive capable of building a royal carriage on such an epic scale.

He has lavished years of hard work and mortgaged his home in Sydney to help towards the estimated £620,000 building costs and the Australian government has also loaned financial assistance.

The project has the approval of Buckingham Palace and has been overseen by Prince Philip, a renowned carriage driver.

In 1986, to commemorate Australia's bicentenary two years later, Mr Frecklington, 57, designed and built the Australian State Coach which was a gift from Australia to Britain. The coach is used regularly by the Queen for the State Opening of Parliament.

Before that the last coach to be made was in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII.

Mr Frecklington's labours on Britannia included scouring the globe for the finest materials and the few remaining craftsmen and women with the requisite skills and knowledge to build a traditional state coach. It is unlikely that anything remotely like Britannia will be built again.

The coach incorporates bits of wood and metal from many historical events or objects. Wood from HMS Victory and Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose. A piece of metal from a Lancaster bomber that flew with the legendary "Dambusters" of the 617 squadron and lots of other things. Fascinating and quite beautiful even if it isn't the most modern of ways to get around.

Special Delivery

The Animal Uprising™ appears to have a deadly new trick up its collective sleeve. This one is really unpleasant. Imagine getting your mail, opening up a package and finding out, too late, that the occupant of the package was a poisonous snake. That's right, the vipers are mailing themselves to people.

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Postal workers in a Brazilian border town knew there was something suspicious about the shipments from Argentina and were stunned to find scorpions and poisonous snakes in the express mail.

The contraband animals, which also included iguanas, tortoises and lizards, were discovered when the workers had the boxes X-rayed.

A spokesman for the federal police in Foz do Iguacu, the town on the border with Argentina and Paraguay where the incident occurred, said animals shipped into the country often end up in Europe "where they charge three, four, five times as much."

Television stations broadcast images of brightly colored tropical snakes coiled and stuffed into plastic containers, the kind typically used for take-away orders at the deli counter.

The contraband animals had crossed the border from Argentina and were being express-mailed to Brazilian cities, police officer Emerson Rodrigues told TV Globo.

Oh, sure. The media tries to blame humans for doing this, but our readers know better. It is the reptiles themselves who are doing this. This is their spring offense. We urge readers to remember that a Louisville Slugger is your best friend for checking the mail. Just beat the heck out of every envelope and package to ensure that there are no poisonous snakes inside. Bonus: The neighbors will leave you alone after they see you doing this a few times.

To The Rescue

Stuart Rothenberg, who's been doing politics for an awfully long time, is not dismissing the possibility that Fred Thompson could very well win the Republican presidential nomination. The conventional wisdom, long held by Rothenberg, says that candidates who enter the race after about April 15 have no chance. Rothenberg has rethought that.

I'll admit that I have had a hard time warming to the idea that former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), whom I first saw as minority counsel during the Senate Watergate hearings and whose TV and movie credits include "Die Hard 2," "The Hunt for Red October" and "Law & Order," would run for president. And it seemed, at least initially, even more difficult to imagine him as the Republican nominee next year.

But try as I might to dismiss the idea of a Thompson candidacy, I no longer can do so. It isn't that the former Senator from Tennessee is such a good fit for the role of presidential candidate. It's simply that none of the other cast members is a perfect fit either.

As every political analyst on the planet has observed for months, all of the top-tier GOP hopefuls face serious obstacles on the road to Minneapolis, and there clearly is a vacancy in the race for a mainstream conservative who doesn't have a reputation as a troublemaker within the party.

Thompson surely has assets both in the race for the Republican nomination and in a general election, the single most important being that he both looks and sounds like the president of the United States of America. Don't dismiss the "he sure looks like a president" factor. It's important.

The voice alone is good for several percentage points. Where that will really be devastating is in a debate, incidentally. It is, I think, significant that someone who has been analyzing politics for as long as Rothenberg has been is not discounting the possibility of Thompson winning if he enters. It is beginning to look increasingly like he's going to jump in judging from stories all over the media these days.

“Justice Had Overtaken Evil.”

The words of Robert Rosenthal about the guilty verdicts at the Nuremberg trials. Mr. Rosenthal helped prosecute the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. After he had accomplished 54 missions over Germany flying a B-17. Mr. Rosenthal was awarded 16 medals, including the Distinguished Servive Cross. Mr. Rosenthal passed away at age 89 on April 20, 2007.

Rosenthal served in the 8th Air Force, the bomber command created a month after Pearl Harbor to bring Germany's war machine to a halt through high-altitude strategic bombing. The idea was that long-range, fast-moving bombers could fly unescorted into enemy territory in daylight and rain down destruction with impunity.

But there were too few support planes, among other unforeseen difficulties, and the bombers proved to be a fat target for German fighters and antiaircraft guns. Casualties were enormous; only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate.  

Rosenthal, a 25-year-old newly minted lawyer, had sought out the challenge. He enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and, when offered noncombat duties, insisted that he be sent to fight.

"I couldn't wait to get over there," he said in an interview with Donald L. Miller for the book "Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany" (2006).

"When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the center of the world, the place where the democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis," he continued. "I was right where I wanted to be."

Robert Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 11, 1917, and went to school in the borough's Flatbush neighborhood. He was captain of the football and baseball teams at Brooklyn College, from which he graduated in 1938. He graduated summa cum laude from Brooklyn Law School. He had a job at a law firm in Manhattan when World War II started.

After his flight training, Rosenthal was assigned to the 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, later known as "The Bloody Hundredth." He was stationed at a base in East Anglia in England.

Miller wrote that Rosenthal never talked about his passion to risk everything to fight Nazis. A rumor arose that he had relatives in German concentration camps. When asked directly, he replied, "That was a lot of hooey."

He said: "I have no personal reasons. Everything I've done or hope to do is because I hate persecution. A human being has to look out for other human beings or there's no civilization."

Mr. Rosenthal, thank you for your service.

Barukh Atah Adonai, Eloheinu, Melekh HaOlam, Dayan HaEmet.

Spring

Sulfide Of Lead

This month's Smithsonian magazine is devoted to "Destination America". There are a raft of interesting articles about a number of places in the US. I've been to a couple of these. Cajun country down in Louisiana (Lafayette and points West. Mud bugs and amazing music.) and Galena, Illinois. If you haven't been to either, I recommend both. But Galena was a particular favorite (even though there was a very memorable jam session in Lafayette involving carbon composite guitars and a woman vocalist who could turn Little Feat's Sailing Shoes into  even more than it already is - that's another story.) But I have had a very special place in my heart for the study of the American Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant for many years. My visit to Galena was a personal high point, even though the town represented a low point for Grant himself. I use a coffee mug I got there depicting Grant's home (presented to him by the town after the war) quite frequently. The article in the magazine is worth a read.

A concentration of 19th-century architecture, from Federal-style storefronts to Italianate mansions, has earned the town the sobriquet "outdoor museum of the Victorian Midwest." It attracts more than a million visitors annually.

Fox and Sauk Indians first mined the area's rich lead deposits (processing the soft, grayish metal into body paint). White settlers, who arrived as early as 1690, named the town after the Latin word for lead ore, galena. As miners flocked there in the 1820s, the rural outpost grew into a busy river port; steamboats the size of football fields hauled its ore down the Mississippi. By the 1830s, Galena's population (1,000) had surpassed Chicago's (100). Civic elders believed their thriving port would soon become the Midwest's leading city.

In the closing decades of the 19th century, however, Galena spiraled into decay as lead, used in everything from ammunition to industrial pipes, gave way to steel, and steamboats yielded to trains. By the 1950s, its downtown was filled with dilapidated taverns, diners and boarded-up buildings.

Then, in the 1970s, Chicago-area artists began seeing potential in the fine lines and handcrafted detail of Main Street's storefronts; soon they were transforming the Federal-style buildings into art galleries and studios. Today, with more than 1,000 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, 85 percent of Galena has been declared a national historic district. "This is the real thing," says local historian Steve Repp. "There have been only cosmetic changes, nothing more, since the 1860s."

The National Register list includes the two-story, brick structure that once housed the Grants' leather-goods store, in which the future general also failed to distinguish himself as a salesman: "He would rather talk about the Mexican War than wait upon the best customer in the world," local jeweler John Smith would later recall of his friend.

The town's major architectural landmarks, however, lie beyond Main Street. On steep bluffs overlooking the Galena River, steamboat captains and mine owners built imposing mansions. The houses sit on wide, grassy lawns, surrounded by towering oaks and maples, affording panoramic views. Built between 1840 and 1890, many combine elements of various styles—pointed arches paired with ornate turrets, for instance. Others offer unadulterated examples of a distinct style: some of the nation's finest Greek Revival architecture is here.

Worth the read and worth the visit if you can manage it. It is a very nice town with a lot of surprises. Galena (according to my coffee mug) means sulfide of lead in Latin. And they mined a lot of lead there before the mines finally closed.

UPDATE: Lars Walker, proprietor of Brandywine Books, point out that Grant's memoirs are a classic. So they are.

Pool Harbor, Revisited

Last year, I told the story of my Father's Day "present." I titled that post Pool Harbor, because my present was the wife and kids surprising me with the information that she had bought an above-ground swimming pool. Yahoo. Pools are a lot of work, if you have never owned one or are lucky enough to be able to afford someone to take care of it for you. Oh, once you get the chemistry right, it's not really hard work. But it is constant. The pool always needs something. Pools are a lot like cats.

So today, it is a bright, sunny and really warm day here, so the wife and I went on what constitutes a date for us these days. We went shopping for some things we needed, including pool supplies. We trundled off with three main missions: Pool stuff, tree food stuff and the one thing I needed: a nipple wrench. Now, don't get your hopes up or fear for my wife (trust me, she can take care of herself). Despite the interesting name, these nipple wrenches aren't something you buy at that place with the three giant Xs you can read from the interstate. No, a nipple wrench is something used to remove the thing you place a percussion cap on on a black powder pistol or rifle. The nipple. For some reason, when they were selling me the accessories for the howitzer, they missed that one.

Logistically, the sporting goods shop was first on the list. So we went in search of the nipple wrench. Which was fairly easy to find since they put all the black powder accessories in one place. There, that was easy. Hey, we need targets, too. And look over here….. Well, $100 later, we escaped that store. I'm not buying anymore nipple wrenches. They are apparently bad for your wallet.

Off then to the pool store. We had intended to get enough chemicals to get the pool opened up and maybe for a month or two. But the young man who practically tackled us when we walked in the door informed us that they were having a sale and it was a good time to buy the chemicals for the entire season. Aren't bargains great? So we ended up with more than we'd planned in the back of the Subaru. My wife, who was driving, said she could feel the difference in the way the car handled. Damn that nipple wrench.

So, off in search of tree stuff. We wanted to make sure the Red Sunset maples get off to a good start. We thought the local stores would have all that, so we went back to our town. This, it turns out, was a mistake. Apparently, the local store, despite an enormous annual seasonal greenhouse and plants and outdoor stuff piled all over the parking lot, doesn't much like trees. There were no tree fertilizer spikes, no Mir-Acid (for some pines), no nothing. Well, as Meatloaf so angst-fully observed, two out of three ain't bad.

Back home, I locked my nipple wrench away before it could make me spend again and changed. My wife and I then proceeded to start readying the pool. Set up the pump, fill the filter housing with the new sand from the pool store. Go to assemble. Send the wife to town to try to find nuts to replace the ones she stored in a safe place last fall. Because that safe place is so safe it will never be found and the filter can't be assembled without those two nuts. (Or with the two working on it, apparently). Meanwhile continue getting all the other myriad things together and assembled. Hoses, clamps, fittings. Um, which hose goes where?

Find manual. Find hose connection diagram. Hoses, clamps, fittings. Then find helpful markings on filter housing that tells you what goes where. Learn new and interesting word combination. Wife returns with nuts. Nipple wrench still safely locked away; she only bought nuts. Put everything together Remove covers over intake and outlet into pool. Find out pool is over filled with spring precipitation when geyser makes appearance. Learn another new and interesting word combination. Get pump started and try to reduce geyser more quickly even though it is doing its level best to take care of the problem by itself. Begin unfastening rest of pool cover.

Check hose connections. Find leaks, Tighten fittings. Check hose connections. Find leaks. Tighten fittings again. Check hose connections. Discover you know words you never even knew you knew. Tighten fittings. Decide you need plumbing supplies you can't get at this time of day on a Sunday. Give up. We haven't even started fooling with chemicals.

I told you. They hate me.

UPDATE: Well, thank you, Memeorandum for picking this up as a featured post.