Showered

I've read about it, I knew about the danger, I thought about it, I believed the statistics, but I never thought I'd fall down in the shower.

I didn't get hurt, and I got off easy.

But I was really stupid. I soaped down, then stepped out with one foot to reach for something, and on the way back in it happened.

When my soapy foot in the shower started to go out from under me, I knew it was happening. They say these things happen in slow motion, and they are right. It's both slow motion and it's over before you know it.

I had something in each hand, and just refused to believe it was happening to me, so I didn't drop them, and I didn't try to stop myself. I just went from standing to sitting, to lying on my back with my feet up the front wall of the shower.

I've got one of those bathtub showers, so I was lying on my back in the tub. How in the world my legs got up the wall, I'll never understand. But what did happen was my flailing legs closed the drain on the tub and shut off the hot water on the way to their final resting place.

You've probably never tried to get in the position I was in, so it might not occur to you what kind of mess I was in. I was below the edge of the tub with my arms on the bottom. I was really in a low spot, and it took a while to struggle up to the point that I could even get my arms on the side of the tub and pull myself off.

All this while the tub filled with cold water and the frigid shower kept me nice and cool.

So I end up thankful for two things. One, that I didn't get hurt. Two, that I didn't have a web cam in my shower. I don't know if I could stand watching it.

House 3

The subject that just doesn't want to die: what's going on next door?

It's still a fiasco.

I ran into the guys that were going to do the rework next door. They had to clean up the yard, redo all the interior, and finish connecting the main house with a "photography studio" by a breezeway. This is the infamous maneuver that will "add 2500 square feet to the main floor and increase the value of the house by $500,000" according the the genius behind the plan.

By the way, they are still saying that it's 4 acres, which it is not. It's 2½ acres.

The house reworkers told me that they were going to redo the house by July 24th. That was on July 9th or 10th. They had what looked like a tricycle to mow the yard with. 2½ acres of yard should not be mowed by a tricycle from 1956 with a 24" cut. Especially when the lawn is 24" tall. They took 3 days to mow the front yard and then took a week off. The net effect was to mostly kill the front yard, which was at least green before, and to make the pile on the driveway larger.

I did learn some interesting things from them, though. This guy Chris Powell that drove a red truck and used to work there was a real piece of work. This is the guy that used to rev up his big truck, squeal the tires every time he left, and go into the yard, making ruts. He used to bring a four-runner ATV with him and go around in circles in the back yard, making muddy ruts everywhere while his dog chased him. This is also the guy that supposedly brought the machine gun out and was shooting it wildly around the back yard. He is supposed to be the guy that was dumping debris from other jobs on the driveway including the dirty diapers. He is suspected to be the guy that stole the dishwasher, refrigerator, and hot water heater. We were told that he took a bunch of the money he was paid to work on this house and used it on other jobs, in effect ripping them off. That's most of what we heard about Chris.

What about the fate of the house as told by the new workers? We were told that the Chiefs bought the house for $1.2 million and that they were going to move the parents of someone they just signed into the house. They had until the 24th.

My old neighbor that used to live in the house heard about this and gave the realtor a call. Besides being asked if he wanted to sign a contract over & over again, he was told that it was going to be finished on July 24th (no mention that it was already sold - which turned out not to be the case) and that it had been appraised for $1.2 million. He asked her how they could appraise the property for what was going to be done to it in the future, but they assured him that it was all on the up & up. I don't think they said "those figures are right, all ready" like in Fargo. It was such preposterous BS that he finally asked them if this was some kind of scam. "Do you want to argue or do you want to hear more about the house?" was the answer.

The 24th has come and past. I can't tell if anything other than mowing the front yard and ripping up the flooring on the first floor was done. A few days ago, a truck with a front end loader appeared on the driveway and is still just sitting there. Not much was going on until yesterday, when someone knocked on the front door of our house. It was the guy they "hired" to do the drywall next door (hired is in quotes because if they don't pay him then technically, he volunteered). He needed some water in a 5 gallon bucket from our hose. My wife asked him, "don't you have the water on next door?" Apparently, not. I would think a simple thing like a $40 a month water bill would not be that hard to maintain when you have a $1.2 million dollar house. They are obviously out of money if turning off the water is part of the plan.

There are clouds of mosquitos coming out of the pool and huge bullfrogs live there now. The weeds are really starting to take over and wildlife is the most active element around the house. It somehow reminds me of hopes and dreams that have faded away. There's no telling what the next chapter will bring, but I wonder how much the house would bring in at auction now? Certainly not $1.2 million.

The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty

I made myself "read" this book, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, which I finished this last weekend. Do you get to say "read" when you listen to an audiobook on your ipod? I say that I made myself read it because it wasn't very interesting, you just have to force yourself to keep plowing through it.

This was a favorable, but not blatantly biased (until that last chapter) portrait of the Bush family and their history. I don't know anything about the authors, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, or what their connection or motivation for the book was, but they had access to family members.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I have to admit that last summer I read Kitty Kelley's The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. That book was distractingly biased. After reading it, I assumed that the details were probably not accurate, as it felt too much like a smear job. One thing that Ms. Kelley made clear was that the Bushes were very secretive and that none of them would talk to her. That was one of the few things that stuck in my head.

In this book, the authors had some access, but still, it's not like they got to sit down with 41 or 43 and actually chat.

And it wasn't all flattering, I guess. They kept emphasizing how the Bushes would weep whenever anything emotional happened. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, I'm not sure I'd want that known about me, even if it was true.

I don't like George W. Bush, either personally or how he has run his campaigns or the country. I think he's the worst President this country has ever seen, and maybe will ever see. I think he's against science and dangerous to our security and standing in the world. I've wondered how in the hell anyone could still be driving around with "W '04" bumper stickers on their cars, you'd think they would be embarrassed. However, this book has done more to make me understand where Bush supporters are coming from than anything else.

I can see how they would think that the media is biased against them, but that is also somewhat sour grapes and thin skin. I do appreciate, on one hand, that each member of the family has gone out and made their own money, through their own efforts, but they did get a lot of investment capital from the family, too. So either side can be said to be right, the "It was all handed to them" vs. the "They made all their own money".

The thing that leaves me bothered is that 41 & 43 wanted to be President for no real reason. They didn't have some great vision for the country or understand what direction they wanted the country to go in, they just wanted to be President. Like it was their right. That's not good for the country. We need people that have a real vision, not a "vision thing".

The other thing that really irritates me is the emphasis on connections and friends. On one hand, that's great. I can see how they forge tight relationships and have and extend a lot of loyalty, but on the other hand, it's a peerage system. Not merit, but friendships. That's no way to run a country.

Burnett's Mound

If you go through Topeka Kansas on the I-470 southern bypass, you will pass by this distinct hill. It's called Burnett's Mound, I recently learned.

A tornado hit Topeka on June 8, 1966. It was rated as an F5 and said to be the 5th most costliest tornado in U.S. history.

I would have been 3½ at the time. My father liked to go back to K-State, his alma mater, in Manhattan Kansas, so we were always driving down this stretch of road. His mother was a housemother at the Tri-Delt house at K-State, and we went back for football games and the spring Open House. We had just been down this stretch in April or May when Open House was scheduled, so we saw the route just before the tornado. I don't remember when we went down the road after the tornado, but it could have been in October, when football started back. I still remember what the hill looked like, it was decimated. This is one of my earliest memories, and some of the worst destruction you will ever see from a tornado. Each year, I remembered the spot where the tornado had struck, long after they rebuilt apartments on the hill.

I looked into the site and visited it, and found an interesting story. The hill was called Burnett's Mound by the white men, but the Indians had a legend about the mound. They said that the mound protected the area from tornados. Ironically, the tornado entered Topeka by coming in right across the mound. Maybe the old Indian Medicine Man foresaw the event, but just had it backwards. Or maybe they were suckering the White Man into a kill box.

The site used to have a big cross on the top. I looked on a map and saw that there was a road called Skyline Drive that went right up to it. The article said that the cross was moved to a nearby cemetery when people going up the hill to party repeatedly vandalized it. I wanted to go see for myself, so I drove up there on the way home from a trip.

Skyline Drive was paved at one time, you can still see sections of craked asphalt in some places. Now it is all gravel with huge limestone boulders ringing its perimeter, probably to prevent cars from dropping off the sides. When you get about 3/4 the way out to the point, there is a big metal swing gate across the road. The road continues up to a large circular parking lot, which you can tell used to be the destination for people to come up, it still has a ring of protective boulders around it. The day I visited, there was a large spent fireworks pack in the middle of the old parking lot, so you can tell that someone celebrated the 4th up there in style. I'll bet the fireworks from the top were visible a long way off.

At the end of the lot is a stairway, an old stone one flanked by a crumbling concrete one with a bent hand rail. Graffiti is on every surface. The little stair leads up to a distinct mount on the point of the ridge, very small compared to the entire hill, but a perfect little dome at the end of the ridge. I found a surveyors bench mark by the remnant of the trail, but nothing else to mark the significance of the site. Wildflowers and a stunted little tree were all that remained. I was expecting a monument or a historical plaque, but the vandals surely destroyed that long ago.

The view from the mound is fantastic. I've always thought of Topeka as an uninteresting looking town, but from the mound, the downtown skyline with the capitol is actually very pretty. There is a huge water tank (the reservoir kind, not the tower kind) on the front side of the mound, it's visible from the highway. There is a road leading back to it and a tall chain link fence with barbed wire on top surrounding it. The trees have littered down debris on top of the tank, and it looks like something that nature is trying to reclaim, despite the highway-sign yellow it's painted in.

The place has a eerie feel, even without knowing the tornadic history. I kept wondering if it was an Indian mound in the classical sense, a place where they buried and honored their dead. Even with all the neglect and vandalism, I guess it still is.

Reality Check

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs.

That's straight from Wikipedia, but it is almost word for word the description given in last week's Science Friday episode where guest Elliot Aronson talked about his new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

The phenomenon of believing something so strongly that any proof to the contrary is simply ignored is easy to see in other people, hard to see in yourself.

He talked about people that had been convicted and sent to prison and then were later exonerated by DNA evidence and how prosecutors were reluctant to reopen these cases and sometimes insisted that they were still correct. This is an excellent example. Of course you aren't going to admit that you are putting innocent people in jail, that would make you a monster and everything you worked so hard for wrong and bad. No wonder people have elaborate mechanisms to support their denial.

Aronson used President Bush's going to war in Iraq as a huge public example of cognitive dissonance. And I have to agree, it fits perfectly. The original reasons have long since been abandoned, and a series of shifting reasons have cropped up as each reason falls apart by its own inherent weakness and incompatibility with reality. You see people on TV talking about what a great success this war is, and the banner moment of cognitive dissonance for this war when the President posed in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner 3 stories tall. The problem with this sense of Presidential disconnect is how many people still buy into it. They want to believe, despite all that has happened since.

The more I think about it, the more I think that conservatives and Republicans are the poster children for cognitive dissonance. And they have their chief Kool-Aid dispenser, Rupert Murdoch and his flagship propaganda platform, Fox News. I guess, "We Make Things Up, You Keep Believing!" doesn't have the ring of "We Report, You Decide." Although "We Distort, You Deride!" is pretty close.

Look at Nixon. He never admitted that he did anything wrong and history judges him as the most corrupt President we've ever had. Clinton eventually admitted his wrongdoing and is now looked back on fondly as a very popular President.

Republicans respect Bush for his "Stay the Course" strength and steadfastness, and they hate Clinton for his wishy washiness. Yet, if you're making a mistake, isn't it better to figure that out and stop it? Who on Earth is not going to make mistakes sometimes? I'd rather have a leader that recognized that his approach wasn't working and corrected himself. That's not indecision, that's a firm grasp of reality.

I found a truly baffling blog called Willisms when I was casting about for some additional material for this posting. It's strange, because it points to the overwhelming success of the Iraq invasion and how Democracy is spreading like wildfire across the Middle East. It says that everyone that supported Bush was right and the rest of the world is suffering from Cognitive Dissonance. Like Jon Stewart said on Bill Moyer's show "we can't even agree on what reality is".

One part of the Science Friday discussion that I thought was very interesting was about Abraham Lincoln. There's a book called Team of Rivals, a recent biography of Lincoln (that I bought and have not yet read) that talks about the fact that many of his cabinet were bitter political rivals that disagreed with him violently. There was a caller to the show that talked about contrition, and how it is the opposite of cognitive dissonance, and how powerful contrition can be at healing the problems caused by stubborn denial. I think Lincoln's power was constantly being in the presence of those that disagreed with him so he was constantly forced to reevaluate his positions. Lincoln struggled with some of the worst conditions a person could ever be expected to see, and yet persisted and triumphed in the end. He changed his mind about things, for instance Slavery. Initially, he was not going to free the slaves, but he eventually came around. He changed positions on many things, yet one thing he never did was give up on the Union. Despite 4 years of horrendous bloody conflict, military failures, and growing dissatisfaction with the war, he persisted and won. He changed his tactics many times over the course of that war, yet we remember him today as someone that stayed the course and finished what he started.

Does anyone believe our President and this situation is analogous to those times?

Stellar Formation

I was wondering how stars and planets form.

I sent the following email to The Naked Scientist, Nature, Science Talk, and Science podcasts:

"Why is north north? I'm guessing it's arbitrary and that East is actually just a word for Spinward, while West is just a word for Anti-Spinward, and North is the right-hand rule pole, while South is what is left. I'm also guessing that North is shown as up simply because most writing and science/history was developed in the Northern Hemisphere.

"This simple question lead me to the following question: Do all planets spin the same direction, and does the solar system spin (the direction of planetary orbits) the same way the planets spin?

"Do solar systems spin the same direction & orientation of the way the galaxy spins?

"Do galaxy clusters align in a plane and spin in similar directions?

"Why does a disk always develop out of the stardust, regardless of the size of the body?"

Then I kept thinking about it. I can see what the answer could be.

Imagine a huge cloud of interstellar gas. It's following the laws of gravity and momentum. If you follow a single particle in the cloud imagine how it behaves. It is going to be attracted to the center of mass of the gas cloud. So it starts to fall toward the center. But the gas cloud is attracted to the center of the galaxy, so it's not just sitting there, it's moving, too. Since it's moving, it's center of mass is moving. So it's falling continuously toward a moving target.

It's in orbit.

So the masses swirl in orbit around the center of gravity. Eventually, masses actually start to come together and they form little local pockets of gravity that orbit the big center and other smaller bodies are attracted to them and fall into their orbits. So you see how it happens. Satellites swirl around planets, which swirl around stars and form solar systems that swirl around in galaxies.

I wonder if it really is that simple.

Good Sport Cherokee

That's my car.

It's a 1995 Jeep Cherokee Sport with 320,000 miles on it.

Obviously, I believe in driving a car into the ground.

I may have just done that. It died on July 11th on a long trip back from Phillipsburg Kansas. It died in Topeka under a bridge under the Interstate of clutch failure.

It sounds like I'm writing a eulogy on the car, but it's not death, more like the final straw in deciding on retirement. For the first time, I'm considering getting a new car.

I'm getting it fixed, but it's really expensive. It started being some little clutch thing, and then grew to be a replacement input shaft, then encompassed a cracked transmission housing.

I had already authorized repairs, so each new thing added to the bill and was necessary in light of what had already been done.

I told the guy I was travelling with that it's sort of a family tradition to drive cars into the grave. Our old 1973 Buick Estate Wagon was the family car for years and finally died on the driveway of our house. This social embarrassement took us on most of our family vacations growing up. It had a 4 barrel 454 and survived though our high school days to be one of the first cars we drove. It was a mixed curse and blessing, as Dad was not reluctant to let us use it and we were not eager to be seen in it. But I remember my brother driving it 120 mph down the road, a very exciting time when I was 15. It was swamped and died one time in a flooded Buffalo River in Arkansas, but we pushed it out and started it up and it spat a geyser of water 30' out of the tailpipe and kept on going.

The next family car was a 1983 Dodge Prospecter Van. We thought it was really cool. Dad got it when my older brother and I were in college, so my younger brother is really the one that spent the most time in it. After Dad died, I drove it occasionally. By then it was old and had some quirks. I think it had about 140,000 miles on it around that time. I took it to Colorado once, slept in it even. It wouldn't start one time in Rocky Mountain National Park, so I opened the engine compartment (it's between the front seats), popped off the air cleaner cover and stuck a screwdriver in the intake and fired it right up. It sat just off the gravel drive under some pine trees for about a year with very little use and it wouldn't start. Rather than towing it off and letting it die, I told a friend that was on hard times that if he could get it started, he could have it. After fiddling with it for a week, he replaced the cables going to the battery for 93 cents and had a new car. They used to take it to ski vacations in Colorado and to Chiefs games as a tailgating party on wheels. This was an echo to my Dad bringing it up to K-State football games and having the most extravagent tailgate spreads you ever saw including Tippins pies. I used to have a picture of it in the parking lot of my college apartment with huge inner tubes tied to the top of it when Dad was going to Colorado for a summer vacation. I think my friend got over 250,000 miles out of it and sold it to someone who kept it going after that.

My first Jeep (the second car I owned) was purchased new after I graduated from College. I entered the Army and took my Jeep to Panama for 3 years. It had been from Colorado to South Carolina, as well as overseas. I sold it to my mechanic when it had about 175,000 miles on it. He drove it for another 8 years after that and just recently sold it to a guy that apparently gettoed it up, but still drives it around. That Jeep was stuck in a mud puddle up over the bottom of the doors when it was 3 weeks old. It lost several clutches, water pumps, and other major parts, but I always fixed it and kept it going. I used to say that it never left me stranded, which was stretching it, but one time it died in the Grandview Triangle during rush hour. It blew a radiator hose and ran up into the red before I pulled it over and shut it down. I had a knife with a screwdriver and other tools on it. I walked down the highway and found a 2 liter bottle and a 5 gallon bucket on the side of the road. I hopped a guy's back fence and asked to get some water out of the hose in his back yard. Walking these things back to the car, I went to work. I sliced the end off the hose and reattached it. Then I cut the bottom off the 2 liter bottle and made a funnel. Then I poured the water back into the radiator and filled it back up. It fired right up and took me home without any problems.

But this Jeep I love the most. It's only the third car I've ever had. I want to take it to Yellowstone this summer with me. It's hard to explain. It's like a brother to me. It's been there for so many times in my life, it's like a touchstone that I can't give up. I've seen the world though my Jeep and I can't just give up on it. After Yellowstone, I'll get a new car, and put this one into service as the haul around car. Maybe I can keep it for another 4 or 5 years. But no more long trips. I may never make 400,000 with it. It'll be like that old racehorse that now just hangs around munching grass and taking it easy.

Spirit & Opportunity

The compelling story of the Rovers continues to fascinate me.

They have lasted so much longer than anyone ever dreamed that it's hard not to think of them as alive.

I heard an announcement today that the next mission will be to the Martian North Pole to look for water. They said that they cobbled the vehicle and rover together from leftover parts from other missions. I'd love to raid their junkyard.


Imagine explorers finding the little rovers some day. Would future museum chroniclers want to preserve the little rovers exactly, or restore them to full functionality? Just cleaning off the solar panels, as the occasional dust devil does, will restore full power. Cleaning the dust out of the tires might restore them to full functionality. Of course, if explorers were there, there wouldn't be much need for the probes.


This next rover should have an atomic power source, which would make it last a really long time. Solar plus nuclear energy would make it conserve its fuel and function at night and through the winter. They also need a way of cleaning off the solar panels. I've heard that they are starting to figure a way to run a static charge through items and make them shake off dust like a dog shakes off water.



I am very interested in the possible terraforming of Mars, which is what I keep thinking about when I hear reports about the human induced climate change on this planet. If we become experts at how to start and stop holding heat onto a planet's surface here, maybe we can do it on Mars (or reverse it on Venus). They had an ocean there once, so maybe it's a matter of restoring the environment, rather than creating a situation for the first time. Martian terraforming efforts would also involve extending our asteroid shield to Mars (after we make one for Earth). What happened to Mars' molten core? Maybe they need a large satellite like our moon in order to get the constant tidal forces to generate heat in the core.



This is our future. When we think about getting our eggs out of one basket, the first logical place to look is at our neighboring planets and the first thing we need to consider is how we can inhabit them. Right now Mars is first on the planetary exploration list, but the real interesting exploratoin challenge would be Venus. Can you imagine coming up with a probe that could withstand the pressure (90 times that of earth) and temperature (930°F) of Venus? The Russian Venera 7 did, but only for 23 minutes on the surface. I'm thinking something like a giant solar panel out in space acting like a sun shade for the planet's surface and providing power to the inhabitants, too.

The only bad thing about dreaming about all these wild achievements is being born too early to see any of it.

The Road Less Traveled

I was driving my motorcycle to work today and was thinking about how much less expensive it was to drive my 45 mpg motorcycle versus my 20 mpg Jeep. So many people resist going with a smaller vehicle because of a perceived safety advantage and because of the comfort and convenience of a bigger vehicle. Yet better gas mileage would make the biggest and quickest difference in fuel consumption.

Obviously, I'm thinking of all this in response to the idea that we will some day run out of oil and we must either change our ways or have our ways changed for us. I would prefer to choose our direction rather than have it forced on us. Changing our energy profile will bring about a new economy and a new way of how society looks at transportation. Right now, the road symbolizes freedom, openness, and opportunity. There are no restrictions, you go where you want when you want. You get to see the world and experience the joy and freedom of zipping down the road and seeing all the beautiful scenery.



The challenge is to create a compelling new societal story that encorporates all those fun things yet motivates people to change the tools they use to enjoy those freedoms.


One of the things that spurred my thinking was the interaction between my polarized glasses and the plastic face visor of my motorcycle helmet. There were all kinds of strange colors brought on by the plastic and the polorization. Leave on the trees were blue green, patches on the pavement looked like oil slicks on water, and the sky had interesting patches of color in it. I wondered if some insects or animals saw this way. I wondered if some people saw this way and didn't know it was strange because that's the way they always looked at things. Sometimes it's useful to see the world in a different and strange way. What if this different way of seeing was a permanent change? Would you get used to it or always feel like something was a little off?

And what about a new world where we burned hydrogen or ethanol, or charged electric cars with solar, wind, or nuclear power. Would we get used to it? Would it seem normal after a while, after we had been using it for a while? I hope so and I hope not.

I remember what the world looked like before the clean air act and the clean water act. I remember what it was like when we had leaded gasoline and no catalytic converters. I remember what it was like when all adults smoked everywhere all the time. I remember what the roadways used to look like before we attacked littering and started picking up trash. Now I look out and see the clean clear sky and the clear unpoluted waterways and the clean highways and I remember that it wasn't always this pristine. I appreciate the change.

After all, the road symbolizes freedom, but if that freedom isn't taking us to a beautiful place worth keeping, what good is it?

4th of Disaster

Some days you should just stay in bed.

I had the 4th off. It was going to be hot, and we were overdue for mowing. My wife had to work a 12 hour shift that day, so it was just going to be me and the yard.

It was going to get hot, 91°. I went for a run and couldn't finish it, I was just not feeling good. The next goal was to get out there before the heat really started, and I was looking good for that. I had just rebuilt the mower, putting new blades on it and reworking the drive system so it would run better. I was looking forward to having the lawn mowed before it got hot. If I still had some work left in me, I was going to trim everything and turn over the compost heaps. Then I could rest inside during the remainder of the day, maybe do some reading and things I wanted to do for leisure.

I had my podcasts loaded in my ipod, got a good breakfast, and was ready to go. I went out and started the mower and drove over to the yard. I started the mower and went half way around the yard, but the mower didn't sound right. I found out that one of the blades was loose, so I took the mower into the garage and looked at the mower deck closer. The whole hub and carrier of one of the blades was just about to fall apart.

I retreated into the air conditioning. I wasted some time giving one of my cats a haircut.

Damn. I was going to get something done. I looked up the part diagram in the manual and figured out that it was a huge part. I decided that I would tear into it. I took this huge hub assembly out and then wasted about an hour trying to take it apart, since the pulley was still good. After trying to use the broken the vice in the garage to keep the shaft still while I tried to loosen the nut on the end of the pully shaft, I had to retreat to the basement. Putting the shaft in the vice and gripping the shaft with two vice grips was not enough to remove the nut. I decided it was time to give up and buy a new pulley. The place I order the parts from was open and they were working on the fourth. So I got the parts ordered.

I thought about the way the mower deck worked and realized that I could remove one of the belts and run the mower with 2 of the 3 blades. I had to struggle with removing the primary belt to get to the secondary belt. After another 20 minutes, I had the secondary belt off and reinstalled the primary belt. Cranking it up and engaging the mower made me realize something was not right. I had put the primary belt back on around the outside of a guide and it was off and badly scuffed. I reinstalled it correctly and went to work.

This was going to take a while, I realized. I calculated that it would take 50% longer with the missing blade and struggled to make the mowing match up. I got around the yard 3 times and the mower died.

It was dead and downhill. I had to put all the muscle I could to get it up the hill, onto the gravel drive and then over to the barn. What the hell? Why did it die?

I discovered that it was low on oil. Hmmm. That was enough to kill it? After finding the oil in the barn almost empty and searching out another can of oil in the garage, I refilled the mower, but it wouldn't start. Maybe the spark plubs were fouled. They looked nasty, but after 45 minutes of tearing into that and cleaning the plugs, as well as clearing the chambers with carberator cleaner, the mower still wouldn't start. I checked the fuse by removing it and the mower acted the same. It was cranking, just not firing and starting. If the low oil had been fatal to the engine, it would be seized, wouldn't it? About half way through the spark plug process, it started to rain. Of course, this was at the point that I had the most parts and tools strewn about, so I had to carefully push the mower into the dark barn.

I gave up on the mower. I wasn't sure what was wrong with it, but it was raining, so even if I could start it, I couldn't mow now.

But I had to get something done. I could still do the trimming. Screw the rain. I started to trim and the trimmer had to be repaired, then the line had to be replaced. I did that and got back on track and kept going. I got to the overgrown courtyard, and the rain picked up. This was the worst part of the yard, and I became very determined to finish it. Then I noticed that the rain was getting into my ipod and shorting it out. I removed it and threw it inside (it didn't work well for 2 days, then recovered when it dried out). By the time I finished the courtyard, it was raining very hard. That was it.

I cleaned up and kept going. I was going to buy dinner for my wife, but it was the fouth, so the places I went were closed. So I found a Hyvee grocery store open and got some meat to grill for dinner.

I started to grill the meat and the gas ran out on the grill.

I finished the dinner in the oven and collapsed in front of the TV.

But it was the fourth. So we went out and watched the fireworks in the fog and smoke. So it ended up being a good day.

The House Next Door 2

House flippers are on crack.

The house next door was purchased for $225,000 in 1990 by the last person to live there more than a couple of years. They sold it for $380,000 in 2001 to the previous crazy owner, who moved in 6 months later, that summer.

This is a continuation of the story that I first wrote about in the posting "Flip That House" on April 29th. Here we are on July 7th and the situation isn't much different.

That big pile of trash outside the house, remember that? They started dumping bags of trash over it. The bags had dirty diapers in them and burst open. Imagine living next to a house where they thought it was OK to dump bag after bag of dirty diapers out on the driveway.

I finally got pissed off and called them. There was this strange little game of cat and mouse trying to contact the guy. The number that the "owner" had given me was a loan & real estate office. The guy I talked to didn't answer the phone and the guy that did insisted I tell him what I wanted to tell the other guy. The guy asked me if I wanted to sign a contract. What the hell does that even mean? I wouldn't tell him anything, and he kept explaining that he was this guy's partner and I could talk to him. Finally, after some frustration that I would not get to talk to the owner, I started telling his "partner" about the pile of poopy diapers. You never heard anybody backpedal so fast. Suddenly, he had nothing to do with that property and he was all about getting off the phone and stopping our fruitless discussion.

Last week or so, a new For Sale sign went up.

They had not finished this little breezeway connection between the master bedroom and the "Photography Studio" that the crazy Cuban had built. They paved the area below the causeway and ran water to the building. This was the infamous $20,000 work that would increase the value of the house to $1.1 million dollars! It's not done yet. The yard is about 2' tall, completely overgrown, and the dirty diapers are still there, rotting in the hot summer sun.

The realty company is one I've ever heard of before. I spoke to my friend that used to live in the house yesterday. He called the realtors to ask them what was going on. They told him that they wanted $1.2 million for the house (remember, they only paid $605,000 for it 6 months ago, and it's in worse shape than it was). He went "WHAT! You've got to be kidding!" and the realtor immediately said, "Well, we'd be willing to negotiate... we'd be willing to take off a lot." So my friend asked, "A million?"

He was told that the entire house would be redone and ready for sale by the 24th of July and asked if he wanted to see it and if he wanted to sign a contract. He told them he'd be willing to look at it after they finished the work.

Like I said, house flippers are on crack.