The April Showers Theory.
So yesterday it was sunny and 80F. Today it is raining and 52F. I know that it is April and April showers bring May flowers and all that, but why does it have to be cold and rainy? Granted, I should be happy that it’s not snowing, because snow at this time of the year in these parts is not uncommon at all. At least the leaves are popping nicely.
My theory is that the somewhat eccentric weather of this spring will bring us some fun storms to chase this summer. We’ll probably get flooded out again in the autumn but at least we’ll have beautiful weather to enjoy in the meantime. Once the rain stops.
The Friday Night Light Show.
So Earl, Scott and me just got back from a Friday night field trip. After watching two episodes of “Hot In Cleveland” on the DVR, I declared that we were going to go for a ride (though it had nothing to do with what we just watched). I grabbed two fluorescent bulbs from the basement (after confirming that they worked) and we hopped in Earl’s car and headed out to the countryside not too far from where we live. When I found the perfect spot, we pulled over on the side of the road. Earl asked me to put on the warning flashers.
We were parked under the Marcy-Massena Power Lines. The lines are 765kV and are among the highest voltage lines in North America. The voltage is so high on these lines that the experts call this line an Ultra High Voltage line.
Earl and Scott stayed in the car and watched as I hiked into the field headed toward the closest tower. The first thing I noticed is that there was a slight crackling sound coming from the tower itself. Apparently an insulator was losing a little bit of current to the air around it. Once away from the headlights of the car, I noticed that the fluorescent tube in my hand was somewhat illuminated around my grasp of the tube. Once I touched the tube to the ground, the tube lit up impressively; there was enough light coming from the tube that I could see the writing on my t-shirt. Earl and Scott were able to notice the light.
I then walked back to the car, crossed the road and into the field on the other side. I was now walking away from the closest tower (and the crackling noises coming from the insulators) where the three spans start to dip down a little bit. I noticed a repeat of the tube lighting up around my hand, but it was brighter this time. This makes sense, since the wires were a little bit lower than near the tower. I touched the tube to the ground and it lit up impressively, much more than it did the first time I tried it. Earl and Scott were my witnesses and noticed that it lit up. I picked it up, reducing the light to just around my hand again, and swung it around whilst making light saber noises.
My video didn’t come out good at all. Because I was standing in complete darkness and the light coming from the tube was being powered by EMF (Electromagnetic Field) Radiation coming from the lines, I didn’t have a lot to work with in capturing the video.
I need a better setup without being paranoid about the crackling noises coming from the tower and being questioned for my eccentric activity. I need to borrow a friendly farmer’s field.
Update Sat 21 Apr 12 0006 EDT: I forgot that it was Friday night and not Saturday night. I updated the blog entry accordingly. Duh.
The Power Lines Fascination.
Warning: This blog entry is super geeky.
I have always been fascinated by power lines. I’m surprised that I haven’t been overly fascinated in the “Transformers” movies and the like, because as a little kid I thought that the poles and towers that carry powerlines across the country side kind of looked like people.
After taking care of some family business up in my hometown today, I took the opportunity to take some of the less-traveled backroads home. The ride is actually shorter if you can successfully navigate your way through the twists and turns of the Tug Hill Plateau and I was able to do this successfully. It was a beautiful day for this sort of adventure and since I was off from work, I wanted to savor every moment.
The route home included driving by the Bennetts Bridge Hydro-Electric Plant, one of two power plants on the Salmon River in Oswego County, New York (the other plant is the Lighthouse Hill Power Plant).
Built in 1932, Bennetts Bridge has two sets of powerlines coming out of it. The pair of towers carry a total of four circuits. By the looks of the towers, one set was installed before the other.
When I see the pairing of these towers standing along the side road, I actually see a “couple” with one wearing a hat.
The lines on the left are on the older towers. The circuit on the right side of the right tower is a higher voltage than the others, though I don’t know the voltage of these lines. This is the first time I have been able to peg a date on these towers, knowing that Bennetts Bridge was first put into service in 1932. This pair of lines heads toward Syracuse, where it joins the other lines distributing power across New York State near Caughdenoy, which is wear the Great Blackout of 1965 originated (Aunt Clara’s participation in the event notwithstanding).
I decided not to take photos of the power plant itself because there were warning signs all over the place discouraging such activity and I wasn’t in the mood to get into a hassle with the security patrolling the area.
If you’re ever up in that area, the Department of Conservation has built a wonderful park area around Salmon River Falls, with a ranger stationed nearby to answer any questions you may have. When I was in high school it was common for some of my classmates to go up on the falls to party on the weekend. I lost a couple of classmates that fell off the falls.
It’s an especially beautiful drive in autumn as the leaves turn gorgeous shades of colors in this neck of the woods.
The Common Sense Equation.
You are approaching a traffic light that serves multiple lanes in one direction. The left lane is a left turn only lane and will have a protected left-turn arrow to move traffic efficiently in that direction. The middle lane has a straight-through lane and the light will turn green for your direction after a set amount of time has elapsed for those turning left. The right lane is a right turn only lane and there is no restriction as to when you can turn right, other than the approaching of other traffic headed in your intended direction.
You are in the left hand turn lane waiting for your protected arrow when you realize that you wanted to go straight through instead of turning left. What do you do in this situation?
1. Proceed to turn left as originally planned and then go around the nearest block or find a turn-around to get back on your desired course.
2. Jimmy your car to the right and try to get in front of the other vehicles waiting to go straight when the light turns green, potentially blocking those behind you that are waiting to turn left with the protected arrow but hopefully getting enough out of the way and waving a sheepish “thank you” to the person that you’re now blocking in each lane.
3. Drive straight through the intersection when the protected arrow comes on, flipping off the opposing traffic that is turning left on the left turn arrow they see in tandem with the one facing you.
Would anyone like to guess what the car in front of me did a few moments ago?
The Holding Pattern Hostility.
I am currently on hold with Time Warner Cable. Our internet is down again and has been down since 0600 this morning. The lights are indicating that the modem is not receiving a signal. We have rebooted everything multiple times. I even had Jamie boot random household appliances just to be safe. The dryer is working just fine, by the way.
Time Warner is obsessed with rebooting the modem. I understand the reason for their obsession but their new phone automation system gives you just three simple steps to reboot the modem and then refuses to do anything else until you have hung and called back after rebooting the modem. Oh, quick tip, screaming WHY????? at the drugged out robot woman doesn’t help. And I don’t know what kind of computer she is doing her informational lookups on, but it sounds like she’s banging on an IBM Selectric with her elbows and waiting for the ticker tape to punch an appropriate number of holes. Perhaps that’s why she sounds stoned.
I tried to avoid calling into Time Warner completely by using their chat system on my alternate Internet connection. I did this on two occasions, Matt first told me that my modem was no longer registered. I did it again when John told me that he couldn’t help me and that I would have to call an escalated support level with a case number.
And that’s why I’m on hold.
~~~
I have just finished the call.
“Hi Christopher, I was told to call this number. I have a case number if that will help.”
“The case number doesn’t really do much for us, what’s your home phone number?”
Mind you, the stoned woman looked up my account and determined who I was, where I was and what I wanted using her IBM Selectric all based on my phone number and then automagically transferred me to Christopher, who needed my home phone number to proceed any further.
Oh, he needed the last four digits of my social security number. Not to sound overly hostile, I avoided the “it’s none of your business” standard response that I usually use and opted to append my four digits with, “I look forward to Time Warner supplementing my governmental entitlements since they have my social security number for no reason since it’s not legally an identification number.” My digits are my business.
Christopher took a hit from robo-woman’s bong and said, “Wha?”
Christopher told me to reboot the modem. I blinked my eyes rapidly for five seconds and I said “all done.” He said that I did good (even though I was 56 miles from the modem, sitting in the Jeep near work) and that he did see that I had rebooted the modem but he couldn’t get the modem to respond. I thanked him for the encouragement and worked my blinking eyes into a samba with a twitching nose. It’s all about the magic, apparently.
Christopher then asked if we had done anything with the modem recently. I resisted the urge to say that many kinky things happen in our basement but none of them involved the cable modem and instead I opted to say that no, it’s just been sitting there doing its thing.
He determined that a tech needed to come out to the house. I braced myself for their next available date being in 2014 but was very surprised to learn that they would be out to the house today between 3 and 5 p.m.
Good thing we have people at home today!
I thanked Christopher for his time by offering him a cookie. He politely declined but said that if no one showed up not to panic because they’d be there some time.
While it is very obvious that I am thoroughly a geek, I don’t know how obvious it is that I DESPISE internet connectivity failures. As one of our more expensive luxuries at The Manor (we pay for the “Ultimate Internet Experience” which equates to pr0n without video hesitation), I expect our service to be up and running 99.99999% of the time. If Ma Bell could keep dial tone to the farther reaches of our country in middle of the last century and meet that uptime criteria, there is no reason that 21st Century technology can not follow that precedent. Like Steve Jobs, I expect perfection from my technology and I am vastly disappointed when my expectations are not met.
Let’s hope that the repairman is on time and helpful.
The Bike Ride Anticipation.
It looks like this coming weekend might give me the opportunity to hit the road on my bike for the first time this season. I am really anxious to get out there and go for a ride in the countryside; it’s good for both my physical and mental health. It’s almost meditative; I lose myself in my breathing (as it echoes in my head) and my head quiets down.
My goal is to do a 100 mile ride before Memorial Day. I have a lot of training to do.
The Way to a Good Day.
I have been listening to political radio during my commutes for a while. I figured that as a responsible American, I should be well informed as to what is going on inside the Beltway and find out who is vying for the big chair in the Oval Office during the 2012 presidential elections.
I have decided that this contributed to what I now call “My Winter of Darkness”. Now granted, Earl and I had some stuff going on this past winter with the death of our fathers and I needed time to grieve properly and find my way through all of that. And heaping the chaos of Washington into the mix certainly didn’t help matters. At all.
So this morning I decided to go back to what I used to do, and that’s find a great song on the radio and to crank it up as I drove along the back roads to the office. My father never listened to talk radio. He read the newspaper, he watched news broadcasts, but he wasn’t a talk radio kind of guy. Before we had our first FM radio in the family vehicle, we listened to 62 WHEN, a Top 40 station out of Syracuse. Mom occasionally listened the local pickin’ and grinnin’ country station, but Dad always had WHEN turned on whenever he drove somewhere. It was a good radio station and listening to songs that I remember from that station remind me of sitting in the back seat of the ’71 Heavy Chevy we had. I think listening to radio back and forth to work, and everywhere else we went, contributed to my dad’s seemingly constant happiness.
I need to remember that.
So I listened to 70s on 7 on my way into work this morning and so far it has been a stellar day. I’m smiling, I’m trying to make the smile infectious and quite frankly, it feels much better than worrying about what political idiot is doing something politically asinine today.
The First Sweet Sixteen.
Sixteen years ago today I went on my first date with a very handsome man named Earl. Now I know that I sound like Gloria from “Modern Family” because I am mentioning the anniversary of our first date. And even though it has been 16 years since that first date, which included a very long ride through the mountains of Vermont, chatting as we got to know each other, I still smile when I think about getting to know what love was all about as we talked and laughed and cried in my little 1994 Hyundai Excel. His hand on my knee was a natural right from the very start. And while I have love for several in our life, there’s no one that can make me see fireworks or make my heart flutter like my husband can.
The journey feels like it started just yesterday and I’m still smiling because of that day on 4/13/1996.
I am such a hopeless romantic. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Increased Sanity Approach.
A couple of days ago, my internet friend Séan tweeted about an article that talked about 15 things you should do to make your life happier (or something like that). Here’s a link to the article.
The basic gist of the article is that we should stop worrying about what others think about us. Much of what we do that results in stressing ourselves out involves doing something that doesn’t resonate quite right because we are doing whatever we’re doing in order to make someone else happy because we are worried about what they think about us. (As a quick aside, I apologize to all of my English teachers in high school for the hideous syntax I just used to construct that sentence. I don’t think I left anything dangling but sometimes I write the way my brain processes something and we all know about the organized chaos I have up there).
Anyways, since reading that article, thinking about it and having a good discussion about it with Earl, I have come to the realization that it’s absolutely on target. I have made a conscious effort to not worry about what others may think about me in a variety of situations and it has markedly lowered my stress level. So I got a little more ‘ranty’ than usual on a conference call yesterday. I got my point across (using sentence construction much like that paragraph that precedes this one) and things are happening that need to be happening now on one of my work projects.
In all honesty, I wouldn’t be walking around with a mustache the size of a small country if I truly cared what people think about me, but there are some things here and there that I am self-conscious about and this has slowed me down and deterred my original path in the past. Dropping the charade of trying to impress and just doing my thing because it’s true to me has lowered my blood pressure and put a bigger smile on my face.
And if people notice a bigger smile, then they can share the happiness I’m feeling. And that’s always a good thing.
