Month: December 2009

bookmark_borderJesus Saves

Posted on by PaulaO

There’s an old joke about the devil and Jesus seeing who could write the best program within a certain time frame. During it, the power goes out. When it comes back on, they get back to work and, of course, Jesus wins. Reason why? Jesus saves (his work).

If you need that ‘splained, well, I dunno.

Anyway, normally I am a big believer in using “autosave” when I write. I use OpenOffice.org which has this feature. Yesterday, I was writing like mad. Had about, oh, four new pages done. And for some dumbass reason, my laptop rebooted.

Insert silent cursing, silent staring, silent rage. Silent because it was at night and Precious was asleep. Had it been the daytime hours, well, it would have been loud and it would have scared the dogs.

OpenOffice has a lot of different options in regards to saving your work. One of them is “always create a backup copy” and the other is “save autorecovery information every” and there’s a drop down menu with time choices. The backup option is not an automatic save option. What it does, basically, is when you tell it to save, it first puts the old copy somewhere then saves the new copy. So if when you last saved and was on page 42 and this save is on 52, the 42 page version is saved somewhere and the 52 page does the usual save thing. AutoRecovery, meanwhile, sets aside copies of the current document at the time interval you specified. If, for some dumbass reason your computer reboots, when you next open OpenOffice.org, it will give you a menu to auto recover that document (and any others you had open at that time).

This has saved by cute butt cheeks many times. My Dell had a series of fits where it would randomly lock up and I’d have to unplug it and take out the battery. Back then, I had the timer set to 5 minutes. I was also writing a lot back then and in 5 minutes, that could be several hundred words lost. But the autorecovery is annoying because when it is doing that, the program momentarily pauses. You can’t enter text. It royally messes up any writing flow you had going. So once the Dell got over its fit, I moved it to 10 minutes. Then when my writing started to be so sporadic, I changed it to 20.

I suppose it is a good thing that I just moved it back to 10.

And speaking of saving, I also realized I’d not done any backups in a long time. I used to be quite religious about it, even making backup copies of my WIP folder in several places. That is on my agenda for today. That and take over the world.

Oh, and I can’t believe I never announced this! On October 28, 2009, OpenOffice.org 3 was downloaded for the 100,000,000th time (that’s one hundred million) since it was released just over a year ago.

bookmark_borderHouse Projects: Enjoying

Posted on by PaulaO

Now that the snow has melted, I was able to finally take pics of the dog ramp. Boy, did it come in handy during the heavy snow!

For those of you not up to speed, this was the old “ramp”:

4’x8′ top section, mostly flat with tilt due to crooked porch

4’x8′ bottom section. like the top, it is/was plywood. it was kinda sorta connected to the first section but that connection kept breaking as did the 2×4″ support “joists”. because they ran up/down this section (gotta run or you won’t make it) it always wore down first.

And this is the new one:

5’x10′ top section

bottom sections. both are 8′ long. first is roughly 4′ wide; second is roughly 3′ wide.

Mucho bettero, eh?

5 4×4 posts, one 8′ and the others 6′ with one cut in half for the bottom section
9 2×6 joists, 3 were 10′, the rest were 8′
Strongtie brand hangers and brackets (strongly recommend these things)
8 “dek-blok” cinder blocks under the posts (we likey lots!)
Umpteen 5/4×6 deck planks
Blue Million screws

No clue as to cost. Way more than we expected and slightly more than we could afford but, frankly, it is going to last a long time. That was the goal. I think we accomplished that.

bookmark_borderFirst Snow Part 3

Posted on by PaulaO

Hoooooleeeee Cow, Batman.

Power finally came back on yesterday afternoon. It went off Friday at about 5, came back on a half hour later, then went off at 6 for good. The snow continued until early Saturday morning. When it was all done, we had 14-16″ overall, with deeper places in protected areas. It was beautiful and frightening. We sat up late that night, listening to branches break, the sounds like rifle shots. Some were really close but most were far enough away we felt safe.

The idiotic woman in charge of the post offices around here wanted people to go to the post offices. Leicester P.O. had no power. The mail from the day before had not been picked up so nothing had been left for them to even sort by flashlight. One clerk was asked to stick around in case the trucks ever arrived with mail. She even had tiny little generators delivered to some post offices. (Later we found out that no one was at the mail distributing building. No one could get there. Trucks that had managed to make it there sat lined up with no one to drive them and no one to empty them. No power to run the machines. So why did that idiot demand people risk their lives to go sit in the dark when she KNEW no mail was going to be delivered that day?!?)

Lorna had parked her car on the road. Even turned it around so it faced in the direction she’d have the best chance of getting out. Ha. When she’d parked it, the snow was already higher than the bottom of the door. When we got up that morning to let the dogs out, we knew there was no way she was even going to try. No job is worth it. Something we had learned a long time ago. Jobs can be found, lives lost cannot be recovered.

Sometime on Sunday, a big truck following a scraper showed up to clear our little road. We felt perhaps there was a light at the end of this snow covered tunnel. Later that day we could see that the types of vehicles going by were not just big huge trucks with chains but also some smaller cars. So we put on clean clothes and left to find some hot food. We’d have loved to go to Waffle House in Weaverville but figured the roads in that direction were worse. We had heard that Leicester Hwy was clear-ish so we went to Asheville that way. Wow. What a trip it was. The road that goes by our house wasn’t too bad except where it was down to one lane due to trees and huge drifts. One stretch of road had at least a dozen trees down, all in a nice row.

We went to Denny’s, had far too much to eat. We went to the fish store nearby (they were open!) and bought a battery powered air pump. We also went to the car part place to get Lorna new windshield wipers. Then on to the grocery store which was the biggest mess I have ever seen. Nothing had been plowed and the entire place was one big half-frozen slushie machine.

Lorna went to work Monday (and managed to deliver to about 500 of her 700+ boxes).

Meanwhile, I was without my CPAP machine. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I became a very grouchy, and on Monday night, a quite violent bundle of nerves. No one was hurt but I’d reached my tipping point. If the power was not going to come back on Tuesday, we were taking me to a hotel where I could sleep.

But the power did come back on. I went to bed around 7pm, woke up briefly at 2am, woke up at Lorna’s insistence to pee and drink at around 5. Woke up again at 10 with Mikey chewing on my foot. The dizziness is gone and I am not nearly as grumpy. I will be going to bed early tonight, too, but not as early as I did last night!

Saturday morning. The truck was covered by the bamboo and the snow. Monday I managed to get it free of the bamboo but couldn’t make it to the road. Tuesday I made it almost to the road until it started sliding sideways. Now it is sitting in mud, snow, and ice. I’m going to try again soon. Thing is, it’s tires are baby butt smooth and the gas tank is sucking fumes.

This is part of the reason the power was out for so long. Not only did the snow weigh down trees, it also piled up on the lines themselves. Out back, where the cable is closer to the house, it got to be at least 6″ around.

The finches at the thistle feeder. We were swamped by birds during the storm and for most of the days since. Lorna refilled all the feeders Friday night and each day would go out and sprinkle some on the ground for the ground-feeding birds.

Our ladder. Check out the snow!

bookmark_borderFirst Snow

Posted on by PaulaO

Well, the weather folkses was right. It is snowing. They predicted it would start around 6am. It was starting as sleet when Lorna left for work at 6. I finally dragged my butt out of bed at about 9:30 and it had turned to snow.

The dogs (and me!) greatly appreciated their new ramp. Sam tried to jump up like he always does and forgot the slick snow. He slipped and fell fairly hard but the idiot just tried again. The first section is 5×10 and we thought it would be plenty of room for them all. But I saw the first photo and realized we have some big dogs!

We love our bamboo but it can be problematic in the winter. I don’t think it is leaning into the road. Later I will carefully go out and check. We read an article several years ago that said not to knock the snow off of them unless you have to. Can’t remember why.

Fort Rooster still stands! Solid as a rock that building is. We wanted to cover it this summer but never got around to it.

From where I sit at my ‘puter, I can see 3 bird feeders and two suet feeders. The birds and squirrels keep me entertained. One day while I was busy elsewhere, Lorna sat her and was amazed at how many she saw in that time period.

bookmark_borderHouse Projects: Finishing

Posted on by PaulaO

Yep, we’re finished. Well, basically. Almost.

The other night, we finished marking and cutting the planks for the first sloped section. We put them into place to see if we had enough that night. Today I took them back down and added a center joist. We thought we could get away with not having one but, nope. It was interesting doing it myself. Mike’s been going out with me when I worked on it during the day. One day he stayed up on the porch and gnawed a bone, pausing whenever I started cussing. Earlier today, though, he was able to get down onto the ground with me.

When Lorna got home (much earlier since she got help on the route today), we got to work. First she dug holes for the two end concrete pier things. Then we squared it up and hung the last two joists. With that in place, we then measured out the width of the planks and cut all that we had. Then we did the two drill system and set the first section’s planks. The last board will have to be replaced. It didn’t quite fit and needed to be notched. I was using the new cordless circular saw and it was dark and….let’s just say it’s not pretty.

By this time, it is quite dark and very cold. But we wanted to get the damn thing done! We are supposed to get a snowstorm starting in the morning. Being able to let them out the back door vs me walking them outside was important. The new Porter-Cable drill has an LED light. Between that and a flashlight, we drilled one pilot hole and put in one screw on each end.

The first 5×10 section is done. The first sloped section, roughly 4×10, is done. We will replace that last board later. The third section, roughly 3×10, is planked up to about the last 3 planks. We ran out of wood. So close!

I’ll get a better photo tomorrow. That’s Jo at the bottom, being a wimp and not wanting to get up in the dark.

We want to add some lights since the ramp now extends far beyond the reach of the pitiful back porch light. We got some solar marker lights and that’s all they are good for – marking. I put one in near the top the other night. Our goal is to use all solar so we can keep it lit while not wasting energy. We may use motion sensors, not sure yet.

Like I said, it was quite dark by the time we were done. We cleaned everything up (Lorna had gathered the wood scraps earlier before it got dark) and let the dogs out. Sam has been going out the back door all along anyway since he can jump all the way up from the ground onto the porch. The girls, however, were quite freaked by the thing. PopCorn didn’t like the noise it made when Lorna walked down it ahead of her. Joella went down but didn’t want to come back up. We finally ignored her and come in, taking away her audience. It worked and within a few seconds, she was barking at the door.

bookmark_borderHouse Projects: Planking!

Posted on by PaulaO

Yep, that’s right. We finally laid the first section of planking today.

Over the last several days, whenever it wasn’t too damn cold, I went out and did a little something each day. One day I put up the last post on the first level. Another day I cut those damn angles I bitched complained about earlier. Another day I did the bracing on the first slope and replaced another with a pressure treated one.

Normally, Lorna has Mondays off but had to work yesterday. So, she got today off in exchange. We started off in the usual way by getting breakfast at Waffle House followed by a trip to the bank and then Lowes. A few days before, we’d picked up the pressure-treated 2x4s, some solar lighting for the back, and we treated ourselves to an early Christmas present. We got a Porter-Cable 18v cordless set. A circular saw, a reciprocating saw, a drill, and a light. We knew we’d need a second drill for when we laid the planks. The battery circular saw I’ve wanted for a long time and goodness knows all butches want a reciprocating saw. Nothing to do with Freud, though, but with Tim Taylor.

Anyway, today we got two more concrete pier block things and a pack of doohickeys for the drills. Bits, shanks, etc. We finally got home and got to work.

We had to finish all the bracing so I got down off the porch (my legs will be soooo glad when this is done), gave Lorna the measurements and she cut them. I then put them up while she cut the next set. This deck may not be perfectly square and it may look ugly but by george, it ain’t moving. The blocks came in real handy for doing the bracing.

After that, and with only one slight deviation, the first problem was the first plank. Because of the tilt of the porch, the right-hand side (as you look at it from the ground) is higher than the left-hand side. The board did not fit flat against the porch so we had to….well, let’s just say it was complicated. We did, however, have to adjust two boards to compensate for the slight “fan” we were getting but we kept telling ourselves “it’s a dog deck, not a tap dance floor”. When we got to the first set of posts, instead of notching the plank, we just cut it just short enough to fit. Same thing for the end. It went rather fast! We did one board at a time until we figured out what we were doing then measured and cut a bunch and put them down. With one of use using one drill to do pilot holes, the other either held the plank in place or started driving the screws.

All of this stuff before was important and we got a lot done each day even though it never looked like it. But seeing that top section covered felt a helluva lot better!

We got six planks ready for the next part (barely half of what we need total) but it was getting cold and we were tired. Not a good combo when using a circular saw. Other boards are measured and marked although too long for me to cut by myself. Instead I may re-work some of the first slope and get the final section ready. We decided to prop the ends up on two more blocks. They’ll be partially buried in order to make a good slope.

We’re going to have good weather for several more days. Cold but clear. Maybe an hour or less each day and we may get it done yet!

bookmark_borderHouse Projects: Angles

Posted on by PaulaO

Flat is good. Level is good. Then comes angle/slope. Not so good.

Level will always be level. Angles have 360degrees of difference.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) has rules for wheelchair ramps. The slope is 1:12, meaning for each inch down from top to the ground, the ramp must be one foot long. So a 20″ front porch would need a 20′ ramp. According to one website, the board would be cut a mere 5degree angle. Of course, there’s other things to take into consideration. It may be 20″ down to the ground from the porch but if the ground slopes further away or higher up, the length changes. My front ramp is actually fairly flat and is about 35′ long because while there’s a dip between where it ends and the porch, it is about the same height.

This is a dog ramp and I don’t think I’ll ever take my chair down it. There’s the mud and the poop and more mud and still more poop. Both of which are a major PITA to get out of tire treads. So we’re looking at a steeper slope. Probably around 10-15 degrees.

We at first thought we’d use a special bracket but it wasn’t as simple as it looked. So then we decided to hang the two boards on the support posts. But how to give them both the same slope? Good question. We initially measured the gap and it was really close. But then that nasty Square issue came up again and screwed it all up. So we’re gonna have to cut the ends, dammit.

I hate cutting angles. I really do. Because of other mistakes, we do have some scrap wood I can practice on but still, I hate cutting angles. We only have to do it to two boards.

For those following along, the first section is 5’x10′. The first slope will be about 4’x8′ and the next will be 3’4″x8′. It is not as wide because that section will start on the inside of the posts vs the outside like the ones hanging now. But then I just looked at the photos above and I see we made an error. Actually, technically, we made 3. Heavy. Sigh.

We got very little done on Tuesday. It was not too cold but the wind was nasty. We got three posts set up and got the two boards hung. It takes a long time to do stuff because we aren’t as young as we used to be and we aren’t all that sure of what we are doing. Anyway, it started raining Tuesday afternoon and with the cold, we headed in. Tuesday night it poured rain here. The river is up again, higher than it was the last time. Then Wednesday morning the wind was enough to cause some problems. There’s limbs and trees down all over the place. We lost power at the house for several hours. It was dangerous taking the dogs out! Even when the wind died down somewhat, the back was a mud pit and there was no way I was going to get out there. Today wasn’t much better. The storm front is playing havoc on my pain levels. Tomorrow looks better and I may try cutting the boards to at least get that part done. What we may do is put up plywood on the first two sections then lay another piece down for the last section. Saturday and Sunday it is going to be snow, sleet, and/or rain. Again.

bookmark_borderThe Gay Agenda and Stonewall

Posted on by PaulaO

It seems that there really and truly is one. Not the joke one (which I found a looong, quite Queeny version and finally the shorter, better version) but a real one.

I started some research because I once again saw that phrase “gay agenda” and wanted to know more about it.

I did a Google search. There’s a news clearing house place called Gay Agenda, by the way.

Next was Wikipedia with an article titled “homosexual agenda“. That’s where I hit pay dirt. It was first used in 1992 so it is a fairly new term and has been used a lot since then. But I was really intrigued by this:

In 2003 Alan Sears and Craig Osten, president and vice-president of the Alliance Defense Fund, an American conservative Christian non-profit organization, offered another characterization:

It is an agenda that they basically set in the late 1980s, in a book called After the Ball,[15] where they laid out a six-point plan for how they could transform the beliefs of ordinary Americans with regard to homosexual behavior — in a decade-long time frame…. They admit it privately, but they will not say that publicly. In their private publications, homosexual activists make it very clear that there is an agenda. The six-point agenda that they laid out in 1989 was explicit:

1. Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible(…)
2. Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers(…)
3. Give homosexual protectors a just cause(…)
4. Make gays look good(…)
5. Make the victimizers look bad(…)
6. Get funds from corporate America(…)[1]

After the Ball[15] is a book published in 1989 by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. It argues that after the gay liberation phase of the 1970s and 1980s, gay rights groups should adopt more professional public relations techniques to convey their message. It was published by Doubleday and was generally available.

According to a Christian Broadcasting Network article by Paul Strand, Sears and Osten argue that After the Ball follows from “a 1988 summit of gay leaders in Warrenton, Virginia, who came together to agree on the agenda” and that

“the two men (Kirk and Madsen) proposed using tactics on ‘straight’ America that are remarkably similar to the brainwashing methods of Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist Chinese — mixed with Madison Avenue’s most persuasive selling techniques.”[16]

(source)

There is a real agenda. A 6-point list and everything! How cool is that!

But there’s a problem. If that is “our” agenda, it is kinda boring. I mean, isn’t that what religious groups have been doing for eons? Can’t we come up with something more original? Replace ‘gay’ with ‘Christian’ or ‘Baptist’ and you’ve got what I was being taught by the Baptist Student Union way back in ’85. (golly, that was nearly 25 yrs ago! i am so old)

I have a theory. Ready for it?

I think that as long as we LGBTQ folks keep being wusses, we ain’t ever gonna get civil rights. We keep trying one state at a time, quietly, somberly, accepting defeat after defeat. Sure, there’s civilized protests, there’s crying, there’s bitching and moaning. But there’s no real action. We need to be uncivilized. We need to stop crying, bitching, and moaning and DO something.

What if folks had voted to take blacks’ right to vote away? What if they were given that right only to lose it again, gain it again, lose it here and gain it there? Do you think for one single second they would be raising money for the next attempt? Making YouTube videos and Twitter-ing? Hell to the no! There’d be riots, protests, screaming anger in the streets. Blacks gained their rights because they truly believed they were entitled to them. As a group, they’d had enough and fought. Where’s the gay version of King? Of Rosa Parks? Of even Malcom X? Where’s our Maya Angelou? Our Jackie Robinson?

We queers need another Stonewall. We need another riot in the streets. We need to stand up and shout. Loudly. We need to come out of the closets and make our real numbers known. If every person who was truly gay were to wake up in the morning with purple skin, I betcha there’d be some changes. We wouldn’t be able to hide anymore. Our Clark Kent Cloak would be gone and we’d be forced to DO something. With hiding comes the luxury of civility and silence. We can’t afford either of those anymore.

There are groups out there who are Doing. There’s Soulforce but, bless their hearts, they are just too polite even while being arrested. UFMCC had great potential to do more but lacked the initiative gumption care balls/ovaries. (noooo, I’m not still bitter and angry)

Our agenda is wrong. If it is true that they come up with this Great Plan, then they must be have thought it would not take this long. ‘Cause it ain’t working. It is too gentle. It set the stage for us to continue to be gentle and polite and oh so civilized. We need to stop doing that. We need some queen to smack a cop with her purse again. We need a dyke to get fed up with being screamed at by women in the ladies room thinking she’s a guy. We need to put down the Wall Street Journal and take up the On Our Backs. We need to turn the television off of L Word and go outside to the Real World. We need to stop planning and be spontaneous. We need to stop blending in and stand out.

We need another Stonewall.

bookmark_borderHouse Projects: Square

Posted on by PaulaO

Let’s just say that while we got a lot done on the dog deck today, we didn’t get much done.

To recap, day 1 (Friday) we got the lumber and misc. stuff. Then we had to make a path for the truck to get to the back porch. I probably drive better in reverse than I do forward. We got the truck unloaded and the lumber sorted and stacked.

Sunday was “lay it out and see what works day”. What this also means is that it is “return to Lowes and get what Paula miscalculated”. We got the old ramp taken down (easy since it was about there anyway), the ledger board hung, the two end piers/blocks in place. We also spent a lot of time telling dogs to move (which progressed to move dammit then on to, well, other words), a lot of time trying to keep dogs out of the way, and a lot of time “discussing” what is going where and why.

Today (day 3) we managed to get the frame for the flat section done. Sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Ha. It would have been, and boy we were flying high on our sense of accomplishment, except we got to the end board. Then we crashed and burned.

There’s this thing called “square”. It basically means the two pieces are at a perfect 90degree angle from each other yet still lined up properly with the other corners. There’s one method of measuring from corner to corner, diagonally, and making sure the two measurements are the same. Then there’s the 3-4-5 method. Neither one works if the people with the saws and tape and Porter Cable drill have no freakin’ clue what they are doing. At one point, I even called my brother in NJ. Hey, he’s a guy and guys are born knowing this stuff, right? Apparently not. But he does know the 3-4-5 geometry is correct and even sent me a little .jpg of it. My baby bro is such a geek, bless his heart.

[if working with something very very important to make perfectly square, the 3-4-5 method along with batter boards and tons of string and several plumb bobs is the way to go. but if your feet hurt all the way up to your ears, and “close enough for gov’t work” is a valid statement, then the diagonal measurement is cool and groovy]

We eventually got it fairly close. The posts are level, the joists are level, the diagonal measurement is off by less barely an inch. Probably the most squared part in this entire house. We also learned the true purpose of cross braces. By then we were mentally and physically exhausted. We wanted to continue, wanted to get more of the frame work up, but we couldn’t quite figure out how the brackets worked. Our brains were too fogged up with mechanical and mathematical stuff. So we cleaned up the area and hobbled inside.

Lorna’s car is having difficulties (it has over 240,000 miles on it) so she is having to take tomorrow off. It is supposed to rain in the afternoon so we are going to try and get the sloped part figured out and framed. We shall see.

Meanwhile, just to show you how screwy our house is, I present to you the ledger board (which is level) and the back porch. Click the image for a close-up view.

That really freaked us out yesterday. We dug out a second smaller level just to make sure the other one wasn’t broken. Why is the porch sloped so much? No clue. It was re-planked a number of years ago and they were just as freaked as we were. Decades ago, when porches were uncovered, they were sloped to help the rain water drain. But this porch is covered. (shrug)

Below is the first section. The braces need to be replaced (we used scrap 2x4s we had). The short post in the middle of nowhere is the leftover post from the old ramp thing. There used to be two but the other one pissed Lorna off and she ripped it out of the ground. We will probably pull that one out, too. If you look to the right, almost directly under the righthand joist, you’ll see two pieces of wood barely visible. There were longer ones there which I removed then stuck two shorter ones into the holes. We’ll more than likely leave them that way. Oh, and check out the bow in that middle joist! We didn’t see that until it was done. Kinda explains why it was not cooperative.

Now, how to make the next section slope? 16′ x 4ish’. I hate cutting angles.