Month: December 2008

Have I mentioned I dislike holidays? There’s just too much stress involved for me to have any sort of enjoyment during this season.

Now, granted, a lot of the stress occurs because I’m socially inept. I don’t like all but about a half dozen of the 6.7 billion people on Earth, so I don’t tend to have a lot of contact with random ‘folk’ and due to this I’m not well versed in the social customs of the humans I share air with. Even people I know, I don’t tend to really ‘know’ – which makes this whole holiday gifting ritual very stressful for me.

For example, today I finally broke down, took a mild sedative, and headed into the teeming masses to buy gifts for my roommates. I took one of my roommates with me and by the time we made it back to the car I think he was ready to kill me…

I usually give people money. Money is easy. If you give two people a hundred bucks neither feels the others $100 is somehow ‘better’… But I’m told that giving money is frowned upon because it is the easy way out…

No kidding… That’s why I do it!

Anyways, back to shopping: My first point of stress was simply, “What does ‘X’ need?” I wanted this gift to be useful and worth-while. Something that they actually needed – which I gather was my first mistake; apparently you don’t give people things they actually ‘need’ because this might insinuate that they are lacking in something… Buying someone a tie to make a better presentation at job interviews is, I gather, not a good gift even though it is really something they ‘need’…

So I start wracking my brain trying to recall what Kalira and Max do for expression, hobbies, even basic likes and dislikes, and drew a complete blank… I honestly don’t know anything about the people I live with…

After about an hour of pondering and finally deciding (with the help of Zeze) on a few possibilities I moved into what I’m calling a comparative analysis phase; where the gifts I was giving to each had to have the same or similar conceptual ‘value’ to the person receiving the gift. This caused another hour of agonizing over far too many variables and assumptions such as how the actual and conceptual value of the item compared to what I calculated the emotional ‘gift’ value to be… And then how those two values compared to one another, being as the gifts would be given at the same time and I’m sure some sort of emotional/logical evaluation of the others gift would be calculated.

It was at this point Zeze told me I think waaaay too much.

After thinking about this for a few hours, I guess I have to agree. Apparently gifting is a mostly emotion-driven enterprise and I’ve always been a bit off in my emotional content. Everything for me is a predicted outcome based on a lot of variables that has been tested at least a few times for variations…

Oh well, I picked up a few small items and hopefully I will have chosen sufficiently for the ritual tomorrow.

Yesterday I purchased the new intake and carburetor for the WarWagon… An Edelbrock Performer intake and 1405 600cfm carb.

The big-box-o-stuff should be here tomorrow, but I don’t see the weather being warm enough to install it all for a while – It was -14 here yesterday morning and I think it’s about -10 right now.

Believe it or not, I’m actually hoping it gets colder… We need 48 hours of -20 to kill off most of the pine beetles which are destroying the forests up here.

The house is working well in the cold. The foot thick walls hold heat quite well and so far we’ve only needed to run the one fireplace to keep it about 60 inside. Zeze went and bought an electric matress pad and Kalira still runs around half naked and ends every sentence with “I’m cold”, but it looks like they’ll survive. Max is actually proving to be the most rugged of the three…

Due to the low tolerances they’ve burned up most of the wood we had stockpiled. I need to see how much it will cost me to get some cut/dried delivered… Now that winter is here, probably a lot.

See, fireboxes are designed to run on coals, and due to the way the carburetion works, they’ll take 3-4 logs and make heat with them for 8-10 hours… Unfortunately my ‘city folk’ roommates don’t figure things are working if it isn’t a roaring fire – which does a wonderful job of blowing all the heat out the chimney and burning 5 pounds of wood per hour. Flames are all infra-red heat and, well, on the other side of a cast iron door that doesn’t do much.

What do they teach these kids in school these days?

Zeze did overclock the main firebox a bit by adding these very loud server fans to the air intake for the surround – which is an enclosed airspace around the firebox which uses convection to pull cold air in the bottom and blow hot air out the top. This increased the efficiency of heating for the living areas of the house, but it sounds like a server room in here all night.

Well, that’s about it for this update. Stay warm and safe out there.

You may have heard that the US government gave several large US banks a big loan to try and fix our fubar economy – which was caused by these banks writing loans to people who couldn’t afford them.

You may have also heard about the US automakers going to D.C. to get the government to bail them out – stating that, in effect, they are too good to file Chapter 11 like every other company in the US and need the same treatment as the banks.

Additionally you may have heard that the oil industry is lobying for handouts because they’ve been fleecing the population for the last two years and made stupid money – but now that everyone has caught on and is using far less oil, they need financial help to maintain all those new mansions and private jets they bought.

I think I have a solution to this problem:

Instead of giving taxpayer’s money directly to the automakers, why not pass a law that states that every US citizen of driving age is required to buy a Hummer, Tahoe, or F350? These grosly over-priced and over-sized vehicles will help the automaker’s bottom lines immensely.

Additionally, the 10-ish miles per gallon they get will help the oil industry by driving oil utilization back up.

Those unable to pay cash for these vehicles can get a pre-approved AIG-insured payment plan. That would give AIG another excuse for a cash infusion down the road.

Another solution would be to take examples from history:

When the wool industry in England was in recession, hundreds of years ago, decrees were passed that, when you died, you had to be buried in a woollen shroud. The French did something similar with linen.

Perhaps we should do the same here in America with SUVs… It’d be a direct purchase, like a regular casket, possibly with the same AIG-insured payment plan.

The difference is that the SUV costs less. Granted, the upolstery and woodwork aren’t as good as the casket, but you’ll feel less ridiculous about sticking it in the ground before you’ve finished paying for it.

A full-size SUV could even be used as a sort of family burrial chamber – when the contents of the SUV match the ‘dad, mom, 4 kids, dog, cat’ stcikers on the back window, then it is full and another SUV needs to be purchased for the next generation.

See, I just fixed all the problems… Too bad I hate politics eh?

Winter has finally come to the high country and it has been snowing on and off for four days now, which is nice. The down side to this is that I still have to drive to and from Aurora and the snow makes the trip kinda stressful in a slip-slide sorta way.

I’ve been off work since Thursday for the holiday, which is nice. It was looking like I was going to be working yet another company holiday but things changed for the better Wednesday… Now I get to pay the price though and try to do four days of work in two.

The house here at Ravenwood stays nice and warm, depending on who you talk to, even with the blowing snow outside. I’ve been perfectly happy to spend my days off in my recliner with a blanket over my legs and a nice cup of tea – my roommates on the other hand aren’t faring so well and alternately stoke the firebox to the point it gets a hundred degrees in the house or wander about half naked griping about the cold.

Speaking of tea, I made a big batch of “Russian Tea” that I’ve been thoroughly enjoying. For those that don’t know, this tea is made with the following, though you should adjust for quantity/taste:

• 1 cup of instant tea
• 2 cups of Tang powder
• 1 cup of Country Time lemonade
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cloves
• 2 tsp. ground cinnamon

This is truely good for what ails you as it is warm and has about a thousand times the vitamin ‘C’ you need in a day. My mother used to make a batch of this every winter for the inevitable sore throats and runny noses.