Avogadro's Number

Just about anything

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We’re moving

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The first week in March, my housemates and I were notified the owner of our property had sold it, and we had 30 days to pack and move.

Yeah right. Like that was going to happen. It finally dawned on all concerned, including the new owner, that packing up a three bedroom, huge office, really old-fashioned kitchen, a double-car garage full of stuff, a 50foot by 15 foot workshop full of parts and equipment for an electrician and handyman, a 50foot by 35 foot storage building full of several hundred video arcade games and assorted parts, a two-stall and tack room barn full of the overflow from everything else, as well as numerous sheds, pieces of equipment, lumber, and miscellaneous bits and pieces scattered over the 3.5 acre lot, while hunting down a new place, or places, to hold all this, while also holding down jobs enough to pay for it all, was not something that could be done in 30 days.

So they gave us 60 more. We have until the end of June to do all of the above. Fun times.

Since I’m the one with the most part-time of jobs, and the best packer, I’m packing. And packing, and packing, and… do we really need to keep all five of these? Yes? Ok…. and packing and packing.

Idaho Falls? I’m in Idaho Falls?

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Well, I was. Taking a break from insanity, I went to Idaho Falls to visit a friend. Eighteen hours by bus, leaving late in the afternoon, arriving at noon. When I got out at the 2am stop, I realized something. There was snow on the ground. Yes, intellectually I knew there was snow in Utah and Idaho in the winter. But I’m from Los Angeles. We keep our snow sensibly on the mountains, and go visit it from time to time. We don’t live in it.

Snow there was. I got some great pictures of snowy mountains and houses and reflections in the window of the passengers on the bus. My camera was of the type that sucked its lens back in when turned off, so having an attachable filter was a non-starter. But the pictures remind me of the trip. They don’t have to be shared. [*sniff*]

So for a week, I stayed in Idaho Falls, where the temperature never got above freezing. The house was warm, the company marvelous, the futon couch comfy if difficult to get out of. I was introduced by my host and his two sons to anime. I enjoyed it very much. It snowed several times, but nothing substantial. Enough to make snow angels. I could ask no more.

My host, Bob, took me on a tour of the highlights of Idaho Falls, which took all of an afternoon. I did get some pictures of the Falls of Idaho Falls, which were lovely all frozen over. I also meandered around the neighborhood taking pictures. [Here]I found when I got home that I had managed to gather a collection of prints of various creatures meandering thru the snow. Find them here.

On Sunday, Bob and I took off fairly early for Yellowstone. It was quite likely Yellowstone was closed, but since I was in the area, I wanted to go as far as I could. So off we went, thru the Grand Tetons and the snow. I took five thousand pictures, well, ok, 4,990, of pine trees covered in snow, gorgeous vistas as we topped a hill, trees covered in snow, and lakes and rivers and mountains and trees covered in snow.

Jackson, WY, was fun. Touristy, but fun. We did in fact make it all the way to the south entrance of Yellowstone, which was closed. But driving the roads of the Grand Tetons National Forest with nobody else on the road was a delight. I got a great example of how to drive on ice and snow without having to flinch about running into someone else. It was a tad slippery.

We took the long ‘way round, coming in to Jackson. We took 26 to 89, then north thru Jackson. When we came home, the GPS said the shorter route was over Teton Pass. I don’t do really well on twisty mountain roads, but I was fine with Teton Pass. I couldn’t see over the side because the snow had been piled at least 8 feet high. Part way up the pass, Bob flipped a switch, saying 4-wheel drive is for wusses, but in this case it might be wise. I gave him a startled look and asked, have we been driving without it all along? Yup, said Bob. Swell.

We did stop sliding around so much, which was good in the face of oncoming traffic. There were a couple of places where the two lanes, one each way, got very… shall we say, friendly. Fortunately when we went around the “friendlier” corners, there was no oncoming traffic. One of the niftier sights along the pass was the crowd of skiers along the side of the road. The vans were letting them off there, and were going to pick the skiers at the bottom of the hill.

The following day, my day of departure, the trees were covered in frost crystals. None of the pictures I took captured the incredibleness of trees seemingly covered in diamond crystals. Ohmy it was gorgeous.

At noon, I got back on the bus, headed south. My days of frost and snow were over.

A Christmas to remember!

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It was a season to remember! Beth ran into a high school chum, married, with three kids, in a bit of a bind. Housing was an issue, as the chum was running into problems with his insurance company with regards to payment for his house that burned down. It looked like the family would be spending Christmas in a homeless shelter. So Beth invited them to stay in the “big room” out back. Kenny moved in with his girlfriend, Beth, Tom and I all cleaned the place up, and the family moved in the first part of December.

All went well, for about three days.

December turned out to be the second wettest since recordkeeping started in 1887. This compounded a problem we didn’t know we had. Apparently the septic tank had never been drained in all its fifty year existence. We found this out when it backed up into the only shower in the house. And stayed.

The landlord sent out the plumber, as always. The plumber got the rooter machine out, to once again remove the tree roots from the main drain. Except… it didn’t help. That’s when we found the entire system was full, and with all the rain, wasn’t draining. And no one knew where the clean-out was. The landlord called the previous owner trying to locate it. No luck. Meanwhile, we have no shower. For three weeks, we have no shower. There are now six adults and three teens living on the property, with no shower. I thank all the Powers that it was December and not July. Several of us made repeated visits to friends and family to use their showers.

A plumber with the proper tools was located just after Christmas and the two-weeks-without-shower mark had been passed. There was much fidding around with equipment and on December 31. The septic tank was unburied late in the afternoon, thus rendering our front yard more of a wasteland than usual. No one was going to come out on January 1, or on Sunday, January 2.

And then, one of the people living out back died two days before Christmas of complications of alcoholism. In the back yard. The family thereof descended upon us, with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And raiding of the refrigerator, eating anay and everybody’s food without replacing it, using every pot and pan we collectively had and not washing the dishes. Charming. Not. Washing the dishes was taken as permission to get them dirty again, and eating what little still remained in the fridge.

Meanwhile, this poor family of five is living in a house with no shower, only one toilet still working, the back bathroom sink only having cold water, the kitchen sink piled with dishes, with all these crazy people mourning the dead guy while simultaneously deciding they should be cheerful “for the kids” for Christmas. The family had continued negotiations with their insurance company, and a few lawyers, and it looked like they were going to be able to move into their new place in January.

January 3 dawned bright and clear. The family in the “big room” moved out so fast you could hear the thunderclap of the air closing in behind them. I’m sure they wished they had stayed in a homeless shelter. It would have been less crazy. Mid-day, the septic tank company showed up, drained what they said was probably 50 years’ worth of stuff, and we had the shower and second toilet back in operation. The first toilet kept working, and we found out it had been an add-on, and so drained into a different septic tank. The family of the dead guy decamped, including the remaining resident out back, leaving the three of us alone in the house once more.

Happy New Year!

It has been a year!

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I hadn’t realized it was so long since I posted. From my Facebook posting:

So we come to the end of another year, on the Grrrrrgorian calendar (Gregorian, for those without dogs). For some reason, my brain keeps thinking “Julian” calendar, mostly because I feel very julienned by this year. Some of the bits were cooked to perfection, some left too raw, and a few, blessed few, fried beyond recognition. The rest? Comfortably done.

So starts a new year, with new beginnings. From Semisonic’s song, Closing Time, comes the wonderful line “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Let’s see what kind of beginnings 2010 brings.

CERN and the Large Hadron Collider

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A friend just emailed me a piece on OMG the Large Hadron Collider may destroy the earth by creating black holes. Please keep in mind, news media do not make money if no one views their material; controversial subjects generate viewers. Even if the controversy is more twenty years in the making. My friend wanted to know if I, her science geek friend, was concerned. My reply:

Well, the Mayans’ calendar cycle ends in 2012.

Anybody who’s read Thrice Upon A Time by James Hogan is familiar with this scenario. Will it? Don’t know. “The math says…” The math has been proven wrong on things before. Will courts be able to stop it? Temporarily, maybe. Permanently, don’t know. There’s always someone to speak to the other side of an issue. Are we in danger? Don’t know. It would be better if we could put the thing in space. But then we have the question of microscopic black holes falling into the sun. Same same.

The problem is that man is a curious creature. Someone, somewhere, some how, will do something that will wipe us out. Or send us to great heights. Or both at the same time. We can stop being “man” and become stagnant, as the fundies of all religions want us to. Or we can chance dying, and reach for the stars.

We’ve got a pretty good track record on that. Doubt it? Antibiotics. Open heart surgery. Traveling faster than 40 miles per hour (it was once believed traveling faster than 40 would automatically kill you). I’m very biased. I would not be alive today without all the benefits of man’s reach for knowledge.

The downside to that is that a few people are deciding for the rest of us. But tell me when that isn’t the case? There are always those in the know who make the decisions, at the family level, the company level, the government level. Someone decides how much to tell everyone else, whether with intent to manipulate the outcome, or just because there’s too much info and “my presentation is only an hour.”

The headline, will the Large Hadron Collider save or destroy the earth, is an annoying piece of agitprop. The LHC won’t “save” anything. It’s pure esoteric research. Info that comes out of CERN and the LHC may not affect our daily lives for decades. The spin-offs from existing particle accelerators took years to develop. I don’t expect this to be any different.

What may come out of LHC is information on how to manipulate gravity. That’s my personal wish. Gravity affects things on a macroscopic level, but not on a microscopic level. Why? How does gravity propagate? We can manipulate light and subatomic particles, but we don’t even know how gravity happens, much less how to manipulate it.

Should we? Ask that of the caveman who first dared to tamed fire.