The Manic Mechanic

I know I haven't been the best at being a good blogger around these heah parts, so you'll have to excuse me for being busy, confused, angry, happy, uptight and introspective lately, even if that might all be in the span of ten minutes. Things seem to change abruptly with little notice. So far, most of the news regarding Jeff's parents and the fire have been okay. The house was nothing but a hole in the ground by Sunday. Paperwork regarding the insurance and other technicalities have been pushed through, and funds are available to begin reconstruction. We are all still wracking our brains regarding the contents of the house, more obscure items are still brought up. The more of these bits make it to the list, the more funds will be available to replace said items. It's not easy doing this from a distance, yet it gets done somehow.

With everything going on both up in Pennsylvania as well as around here, our nerves have been run roughshod. Jeff and I have been frustrated and sniping at one another, but as the week progressed that has softened. I tend to lose my cool a bit too easily still, as my now-damaged smartphone can attest. After 20 minutes in a parking lot trying to get the GPS to work without success, and an inability to even google the address of my next destination to enter the details into the car's nav system and five reboots (four of them not my doing) I beat the thing senseless on the steering wheel and threw it onto the floor. As immersed into technology I've been for 40 years, it still can rub me the wrong way. After the day of running around I had come home for a much needed trip to the bathroom, the same phone with the now increasing black hole of pixels consuming the display was used to locate a replacement display, the parts ordered for less than 20 dollars and one problem resolved before leaving the bathroom ten minutes later. So, yeah, I love technology as much as I hate it, I guess.

The weather here at Mayhem Acres has been becoming more spring-like, and as such, I've been doing more things outside. The pile of mulch that was suddenly abandoned will be distributed this weekend. The grass will need its first cutting this weekend as well. However, not all has been work and worry either. We had tickets to see the Pink Floyd cover band called "Brit Floyd" at the Lyric opera house. This was a fantastic show, good enough to feel like we were seeing the real Pink at their prime. The next day we went to see the Baltimore Orioles play an incredible opening day game against the Minnesota Twins. And this Saturday we have tix for Les Miserables being performed in Baltimore as well. Jeff's dad had insisted we keep to our cultural and recreational outings despite everything that has been happening. Doing so has kept both of us from being completely unbearable.

The two pooches have kept us on our toes, as is to be expected. Snickles is still a bit laggard in becoming housebroken, but is learning. It's interesting to see him take cues from Kodi. One thing about Snickles is his increasing awareness. He will watch Kodi perform some task or trick and follow right behind doing it similarly. The two of them get into extremely noisy play sessions in the evenings, at times ruffling our nerves. Surprisingly, Snickles is just as comfortable sleeping in his (now too-small) crate as he is curled up with either Jeff, me, or the both of us, sleeping through the night. Snickles is a burrower, he prefers to tunnel under the blankets and sleep against us, where Kodi stays on the surface. Snickles puts out heat like a small nuclear reactor, he is nice to have with you on a cool night. His nose, however, is almost always a sub-Arctic cold zone, and will get shoved against bare flesh without warning. The strangest doggy temperature anomaly, however, is Snickles' feet. One moment they are as cold as his nose, a little while later they feel like very warm palms. And, yes, he feels no compunction at pressing all four chilly feet against bare flesh right after slithering his way under the covers in order to warm them up. At least they warm up in a minute or so. That nose takes forever. Last night after spending a good amount of time in the basement lab, I had come upstairs. Snickles, who was sleeping with Jeff let loose a fusillade of protective barking when I had turned on the bathroom light across the hall. It scared the crap out of me, since I had never heard him use that deep, authoritative bark before. For a split instant I didn't know what was going on. After the both of us came to our senses and I calmed little Snick down, I realized that he is becoming protective of his "pack." I was proud of my pint-sized Doberman.

I have a nice surprise prepared for Jeff's dad in a week. One thing I heard him lament a few times was the loss of family pictures in the fire. A number of photos of his parents and relatives as well as shots of the kids and grandkids. The area where these photos were displayed was completely incinerated. But back in 2007 we had gotten one of those digital photo frames for his Mom, and I had brought those photos here where I scanned them and loaded them into the frame. I found the frame totally covered in smoke damage, and I'm not sure there is any hope for it. However, I dug around in the miles and miles of pretty files in the 25+TB worth of storage and managed to find the original scan files from each and every photo. In fact, when I had been scanning those photos, I would sometimes find another pic inside the frame as I removed the prints for scanning. I scanned everything. While the resolution of the scans isn't the greatest, it's enough to make a reasonable reprint, and I can retouch some of the oldest ones. A couple shots in particular are ones he said he missed the most, and those are ones I am going to print and frame for him and give him for his upcoming birthday. As much as he has talked about those destroyed photos, I believe he misses them more than the house itself. I didn't say anything to him about the possibility of having the scans since I didn't want to get his hopes up. Finding those files made my day. I just have to get some fresh photo paper and some more frames. I plan on bringing him future prints when he is least expecting of them, and I plan on having some ready to surprise him once there are walls to hang them on.

Sometimes I absolutely love technology.

Got some bad news yesterday. A fire in Jeff's hometown of Trevorton, PA took five lives. And in what is typical in small towns (Trevorton has about 1500 townsfolk) the people who lost their lives were friends of Jeff as well as his nieces. Yeah, everyone knows everyone in these small, old-fashioned towns, unlike the cold interchangeability of people in modern suburbia. And with these old towns come old houses that can go up in flames so easily. Jeff tells me that this house was basically only blocks away from the fire department. Things can change so horrifically, so fast.

Article at The Daily Item. Pictures here.

Please be careful.