More from The Bleat...

Just a snippet, to keep me humble...

I am always mystified by people who would rather die pure than live with imperfections. Every candidate will always disappoint, somehow. Any candidate with whom you agree 100% is probably unelectable. If your bumpersticker says DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR AYN RAND I'm not particularly impressed. ‘Cause she’s dead and none of that stuff is going to happen. Doesn’t mean we can’t keep the ideas in play, but if you don’t vote because no candidate vows to privatize the sewage systems and disband the Food and Drug Administration, don’t come crying to me when your marginal tax rate hits 71 percent.

Also, for future rumination: "I can't imagine a Jean Shepherd thriving in AM today." (Someday, someone might notice that Shep anticipated "flash mobs" by nearly half a century.)

Cheers...

Survivor: Pearland!

I took a few minutes yesterday to go from the MCC to the cafeteria to try to get something to go (they serve an excellent vegetable soup), but I misjudged their closing time and had to return to my work place empty handed.

The trip did allow me, however, to experience the "outside" for a brief time, and let me tell you, I was happy that the cafeteria was so close. The heat was oppressive.

When I got home after my shift, I spent some time cleaning the poplar lint off the cooling coil of the A/C, but that didn't fix the problem. Then again, I didn't have much faith in such an easy solution. On a hunch, I checked the house's electrical panel and found a tripped double-ganged circuit breaker. After resetting it, I returned to the A/C unit to find it humming.

Thinking perhaps the fan needed a little push, I used a twig to get the fan moving, and it started to turn under its own power for a bit, and then stopped without tripping the breaker. After a brief consultation with the repairman to confirm his visit this morning, we agreed that I might try to place a box fan on top of the unit to see if that might help cool things off.

There were only two flaws in the plan. First, since virtually all the windows in the house are painted shut or otherwise set permanently in the shut position, I needed a long extension cord to power the fan. Second, I also needed a fan.

Oh, and a third little wrinkle: as I was figuring out how to do all of this, I heard thunder in the distance.

Thunder implies rain (and in this part of the country, often lots of rain), which puts the kibosh on running unprotected electrical appliances outside for any length of time. Lee and I started to draw up contingency plans (she'd go visit a friend and stay over; I'd visit the Motel 6 on Nasa Rd. 1 in Webster and do the same). After packing the car, we took off for dinner at the Outback. By this time, the storm had neared and lightning was cracking the sky apart at a rate that barely gave your eyes a rest.

By the time we finished dinner, the storm had arrived over the restaurant and we drove back home through its trailing scattered showers, stopping at a Lowe's to pick up a 100-foot extension cord (always useful) and an inexpensive box fan. Upon arriving home, I arranged everything as well as I could, using pieces of tape to enclose the space between the new fan and the top of the A/C unit. I even managed to use the tape to keep the whole lashup safe from any rain.

Alas, the exercise was in vain. The air that ended up blowing out of the A/C ducts in the house was as hot as ever. In fact, we probably would have done better to ventilate the house with the ambient outside air, but lacking window screens, that would probably have introduced more wildlife into the house than I care to see normally.

In the end, Natalie went off to see some friends, while I sat and watched Big Trouble in Little China with Kurt Russell, which about fit the moment. Before going to sleep, I took a cold shower and moved one of the other fans in the house into the bedroom to keep the air moving. I got some sleep, but it felt as if I had to work hard for every minute.

Needless to say, I got up early, took another shower, and left for my shift in plenty of time to stop at the Einstein Bros. bagelry on Bay Area Boulevard for a reasonably nice start to the day. A call to Natalie confirmed the visit from the repairman, who spent 10 minutes replacing a burned-out capacitor and collecting $127 for his efforts. The house is cool again.

The shift ends in about 4 hours, after which I have "nothing to do" until 11 pm tomorrow night.

Cheers...

At the MCC...

When I visited the client's office on Thursday, I was given a heads up regarding a new requirement to certify the space-to-ground interpreters.

Words cannot express my eager anticipation of the process, and my sentiments were more or less echoed by Leonid S., whom I ran into at the MCC yesterday and who was being certified yesterday as well. (Long-time readers of my LJ might recall my mentioning Leonid in a series of posts at the end of 2000, when we worked together doing, um, space-to-ground interpretation).

Anyway, upon arriving at work for today's shift, it turned out that Mark L. was being certified this morning (about halfway through the first hour of my shift), so I got to see the process first hand, and also got to see a brief review of how to get at a load of helpful flight documents (although their usefulness in medias res is quite limited... you don't get to look stuff up while interpreting simultaneously).

* * *The layout of this part of the MCC consists of a rectangular hallway that rooms exit onto. By and large, the hall is 7 feet wide, which makes it just able to accommodate three 28-inch floor tiles across, situated above a subfloor which contains all of the wiring that makes this place tick.

Out of curiosity, I paced off the tiles and found the corridor to be 256 tiles "around." At 28 inches per tile, that's 597.3 feet for the loop. Any attempt to, say, do a one-mile walk during a break would require about 15 minutes and just over 9 loops of the hallway.

Such a stroll may end up being boring as heck, but it's exercise (which I notice I'm not getting enough of lately) and it's a way of staying away from the oppressive heat that lurks outside these MCC walls.

Cheers...