The tree war—resurgam

Posted on May 20, 2006 by Marchbanks

The Austin Energy tree trashing moratorium is still in place, but that isn’t keeping them from from trying to chip away at it and weasel through loopholes.  The moratorium doesn’t cover “capital improvements” projects, and it’s just amazing how many of those there seem to be suddenly.

Three weeks ago I got a voicemail from someone saying he’s with Asplundh Tree Expert Company (local peasant opinion is that the “expert” part of their name is a black joke, given their documented history of slash-and-burn removals).  He wanted to talk with me about a project to replace the streetlamp pole on the southeast street corner opposite my house on the southwest corner.  I met with him a few days later, and found he wanted to cut back a hackberry on my east lot line (within the city’s easement, I believe) because the tree’s grown into the feed line for the street light.  He proposed a  two to three foot cutback.  That I don’t have a problem with; I don’t like the tree, it’s not in a good place, and eventually I’ll want to take it completely out.  However, then he got back on about wanting to go after my pecan and black walnut in the front yard and proposing 12-foot clearances away from the three-phase 68kV distribution line that runs across my north lot line as part of this same project.  This, as before, would mean removing half or more of each tree, leaving them mutilated, unbalanced, fragile, and liable to die.  I told him I wouldn’t agree to anything about them until (a) the moratorium is over and (b) the new guidelines are in place so (c) we all know what rules we’re playing by.  He took that as my answer for now, and went away again.  He wasn’t nasty about anything, but he did give me a bit of a stock “Good German” speech (i.e., “I’m only doing my job”).  I’ve heard no more since from them, although the Asplundherer said I could expect another proposed plan to come soon.  I have my copy of the May first work plan proposal, and my copy of the original work plan that Austin Energy and I talked about back in December, when this whole war started.  That one was pretty goddamn radical.  This one wasn’t that bad, but Lord, it wasn’t good.

Posted in Austin, Neighborhood | 6 Comments

Not your traditional Mother’s day card

Posted on May 14, 2006 by Marchbanks

Hey sailor, buy a girl a drink?Obviously this is the product of a fine mother such as yourself. But that's why I have fun. Happy Mother's Day --T

The inside originally read “Obviously not the product of a fine mother such as yourself.”  T obviously had her own ideas about that.

Posted in Family, Personal History | 1 Comment

These photos are unbeLIEVable

Posted on May 8, 2006 by Marchbanks

I’ve scanned in and repaired a few pix from my grandmother’s photo album now.  The scanning is going to take for-fucking-EVER because the scanner with Digital ICE enabled takes seven or eight minutes to complete a 600 dpi two-pass scan, but my GOD what I can do with that and the digital photo restoration extensions once I have the scan!

John D. and an iguana

My grandfather with a three-foot long iguana he bagged in Venezuela, about 1922

John D. and an iguana

The original

French peasant couple

A French peasant couple, snapped in their barnyard; early 1919.  Don’t they look just as though they stepped right off the pages of Stone Soup?

French peasant couple

The original

Desdemona Texas in the oil boom

A skyline shot of Desdemona, Texas during the oil boom of 1918-19.  You can count almost a hundred drilling rigs in the photo.

Desdemona Texas in the oil boom

The original

Posted in Family, Personal History | 10 Comments

The new printer is so. Fucking. HOT.

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Marchbanks

I had a helluva time with UPS trying to get possession of it (but that’s another story). Finally I got it in the house last night, unpacked it, set it up, and ran a few test jobs.

It is Teh Shiznit.

It’s physically taller but not as long as the LJ IIP it replaced, so I even regained a few inches of desk space.  A quick, sloppy ruler-check of dimensions suggests describing it as a 15” cube.  I unpacked and connected it (oh, did I mention it has its own built-in JetDirect network card, so I can leave it on for T to use without having to leave Syd on as well?) and ran the driver installation CD.  The installer found it at once, sitting right where it should be at 192.168.0.3, and dropped in the driver.  I had a bit of wrestling with configuration ’cos HP’s setup placemat left something to be desired, but two or three reboots on each side let me print a test page successfully.  I printed out a couple of CD covers that I’d been keeping around, waiting for a working printer.  The printer kicked out these pretty, saturated photo images that are MILES in quality beyond any other color printer I’ve ever had.

:: /me does Teh Geek New Hardware dance ::

Posted in Them Computin' Machines | 6 Comments

Asperges me, domine, and I’ll slam the door on you

Posted on April 25, 2006 by Marchbanks

My father was a good storyteller.  He was good enough that it was sometimes hard to tell when he left off the facts and went to embroidering for the sake of a good story, so any of his favorite stories get treated as suspect if they can’t be verified elsewhere.  This week, my mother and brother were emailing one another about something else and one of Dad’s stories, the one about the senior warden and the holy water, came up.  They didn’t remember the story properly, but I did.

The Episcopal Parish of St. Luke in Stephenville, Texas got started on about half a shoestring after World War II by a dedicated priest, Fr. Minter Terrell, and some of the Episcopalian veterans at John Tarleton Agricultural College (part of the Texas A&M system) on the GI bill.  The veterans and a few other students got to plotting with Fr. Terrell, made a concerted run and got themselves elected to the vestry, and launched a campaign to grow a church.  This being the end of the war and a college town, NObody on that part of the frontier had any loose cash, so finding a building presented a problem at first—but not for a bunch of former GIs.  Someone heard that Camp Bowie in Brownwood was selling off a bunch of the wartime barracks and other buildings, so they scraped together just enough money to buy the chapel for pennies on the dollar as war surplus and finagled the job of getting it moved sixty miles from Brownwood to Stephenville somehow.

The building they bought was used, according to some sources, as a chapel by German POWs as well as by Army trainees.  A contemporary German inscription in the narthex cloakroom, “Hans was here,” is still preserved.

Of course, in the Episcopal church you don’t just stick up a building and announce one day that you’re going to start having services there.  The church has to be properly consecrated by the bishop of the diocese, and of course there’s a liturgical celebration for doing this, which can be dressed up or down according to the tastes of the priest and the parish.  Fr. Terrell, being VERY High Church, laid on a big shindig with “smells, bells and yells.”  The building was to be consecrated by C. Avery Mason, then the diocesan in Dallas, to which Stephenville belonged, the dean of the cathedral, one of the canons, and everyone else they could dig up to make an impressive ceremony.  (Dad said he was a subdeacon, which sounds about right.  This is one reason I tend to believe the story.  Mother says she has a photograph of the procession, with Dad looking like “a beanpole” in cassock, cotte and biretta.)  The script went that the bishop was supposed to bless the church door, shaking holy water onto it from his aspergillum.  Then he would knock on the door with the head of his crozier and the senior warden (the president of the vestry), standing inside, would open the door and welcome the bishop into his new house.

That’s how it was supposed to go.  However, the building, as  buildings will that are newly moved onto a site, settled unevenly and was prone to sticky doors and windows.  The procession reached the door, the bishop blessed and sprinkled it, knocked with his crozier—and the door stuck.  The poor senior warden was tugging away from his side, trying to get the @!#*! door to move, and the bishop was left trying to stall for time until the door opened.  Just for something to do, he asperged the door again—at the same second the senior warden finally yanked it open, just in time to get a faceful of holy water!  He was so startled by the unscripted shower bath that he slammed the door, which then stuck.  Again.

The bishop eventually did get in, and the building was consecrated, but it was one of those OMG kind of moments.

Posted in Comanche, Family, Personal History | 2 Comments

I don’t have sprue

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Marchbanks

Half an afternoon of playing phone tag with my gastroenterologist’s nurse finally established that.  Whatever I have, celiac disease likely ain’t it.  This still leaves open the question of just what I do have.  I need to get by the lab to have a draw done for a new set of tests my GP wants to look over.  (I hate these differential-diagnosis diseases, where the doctor has to decide what I have by figuring out what I don’t have.)

One thing I’m about to have, provided UPS holds up their end of the bargain and delivers tomorrow, is this.  There’s a sale on for small and medium businesses, and if you say that’s what you are (through next Sunday, anyhow) you get $100 off the list price and free UPS ground shipping.  I resurrected Waring Stuph for the occasion (and I still intend, one of these days, to resurrect it for real) so for $299 plus tax I’m going to have a color laser printer!

This week is the city’s semi-annual big-trash pickup in our neighborhood, so I dragged a collection of Junque out to the front curb:  a dilapidated mattress set, ditto bicycle, scrap wood, a broken child’s easel, a chair used in a bar fight that’s now missing a leg, a pair of broken, rusty and peeling lawn chairs, a disintegrating formica-and-particle-board patio table.  It’s remarkable how much better the back corner of the lot looks with all that crap gone.  The next project, which can’t happen for two weeks, is to chain onto those fuckin’ mildewed euonymus bushes on the north side of the house and use Piet to snatch them out of the ground.  (Note to self:  get under Piet and find a place you can attach the chain without ripping off the back bumper.)

Posted in Health, House | 8 Comments

Something’s off inside

Posted on April 17, 2006 by Marchbanks

My family doctor wanted to see me today to follow up on my latest blood work.  He isn’t happy about it.  My red blood cell count is off, in amounts varying from slightly to significantly, depending on which measure you look at.  To translate it from Lab into English, I have too many red cells, they’re too small, their hemoglobin content is low, and they’re pale and washed-out looking.  This worries him because (1) I’m not female, therefore (2) I don’t have periods to screw up my blood work; hence (3) he doesn’t have a convenient explanation for it.  My serum iron level came back well within range, but the rest of it clearly suggests to him that while I may have enough serum iron in my blood, I’m not taking it up.  At the end of the visit he handed me an order for three or four different labs to be done, to rule out this and that offbeat condition.  At the same time I mentioned that my gastric specialist, whom I saw last week, wants me to go off for even more labs to test me for antibodies to sprue—which, now I’ve read a bit about it, is well within the range of possible causes.  I hope that’s not it, though I fear that’s what it may be.  When I mentioned the sprue antibody test, I saw a small “Aha!” light go on over his head, so I’m sure he’s going to be very interested in the result of those labs.  In passing he asked whether I was a regular blood donor, and when I said I was he hinted I might have to give that up until my blood work looks better, because regular drawdowns can aggravate iron-deficiency anemias, especially when another disease process is involved at the same time  Like a number of other conditions I have, sprue is chronic and once you have it, you have it for the rest of your life, and the only way to manage it is to stop eating and drinking an awful lot of things—and many of them, frankly, I ain’t willing to give up at this point.

Other than the sprue part, the GI guy said he was fairly well pleased with the results of the ’scopes he did on me last fall.  He removed one benign polyp from my stomach and saw nothing else interesting there, indicating I’ve got my reflux under good control.  He did mention seeing a few patches of epithelial cells in my lower gut he wants to keep an eye on in the long term, but again nothing seemed to cause him any immediate concern.

Posted in Health | 5 Comments

And the other thing I wish I had money to dive into

Posted on April 15, 2006 by Marchbanks

The cluttershop that had the clock shelves also had a section of fraternal lodge stuff, far more than the usual two Shriner’s fezzes that seem to be standard in such cases.  They’d bought out the regalia from more than one lodge (mostly Odd Fellows, but some KP and Elks too), and had these WONderful ceremonial robes, faux centurion breastplates, velvet tunics covered with dragons and gryphons, and all kinds of groovy clothes that you get to wear for lodge ceremonies.  They had banners, fluorescent signs, tablets, and I don’t know what else.  The robes were the best of course, all dating between 1890 and 1920 from the look of them— but there was no WAY I was gonna buy a robe with serious conservation issues at $60 and $70 apiece.  I was tempted by an ornate KP dirk, because my mother’s father was KP (I have a studio portrait of him in his ceremonial robes), but I couldn’t quite bring myself to it.

Posted in Minutiae | Comments Off on And the other thing I wish I had money to dive into

Shelving some ideas (among other things)

Posted on April 15, 2006 by Marchbanks

I have to figure out SOMEthing to do so I can put the router and the CD and floppy stacks back up off my desk, and get to essential things like the printer and the scanner, but I didn’t want more particle-board horrors.  Let’s go for something a bit more consonant with the rest of the house, yeah?

With that goal in mind, I went off toward the junque shops of SoCo to see if I could find a clock shelf the right size and length (about eighteen inches wide, and eight deep—enough to set the router on solidly).  The first several places I stuck my nose in seemed to have everything but, and when I finally did find a shop that had what I was after, they were asking $125 for it, which was way outside what I had available to spend.  The staffer at the shop had her brains turned on, and suggested “Why don’t you go to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store and see if they don’t have some older pieces of wood that you can make a make-do shelf from until you can afford a proper one?”  First cogent thing anyone had said to me all day, so I took her advice.

I walked out of the shop–and right into the path of a pick-up second-line band in feathered csakos and T-shirts, marching up the avenue.  Jo’s Coffee, a few blocks up the street, had got up an Easter pet parade and I happened to be there at the right time.  I’m generally happy to listen to second-line music, so I stood there until they were past me and down the block before I left.

I didn’t get to the Re-Store, though.  Driving up Lamar, I passed by the Bookcase Center across from Central Market and had an “Aha!” moment.  Those who have read my house pages know that the Bookcase Center built all our bookcases when we bought the house, and we were very pleased with them, so I pulled in to see what he could do.  A few minutes later, we’d agreed he would build a basic, utilitarian clock shelf for $25 and I could pick it up Monday.

Posted in Minutiae | 3 Comments

Goodbye Erwin, hello Syd

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Marchbanks

For the last eight years my desktop computer at home has been a Dell Precision 400 workstation.  I bought him in the summer of 1998 at the Dell Factory Outlet store, in the days when they had a bricks-and-mortar factory outlet on Research Boulevard.  I bought it principally because I wanted a desktop running Windows NT 4.0, which I needed very badly to learn something about, and the Precision, a high-end workstation meant for engineers and draftsmen and such, was the only system in stock that day that had NT installed on it.  Because every system needs a name, for network ID if for nothing else, I called it Erwin after the AI from User Friendly.

Erwin was a fairly hot-shit box for his day, with a 300MHz PII processor and an open socket to install a second one, 128 MB RAM, and SCSI drives throughout (4GB hard drive, and I don’t remember what the optical drive was any more).  Probably that’s why he lasted as long as he did, ’cos he had more upgrade potential than most.  Over the years I dropped in a second 300 MHz processor, another 128 meg of RAM, a second 11GB hard drive, and then a 36GB drive when the 4GB finally died on me.  He also got an upgrade to Windows 2000 when it came out.  In all, he was a good workhorse system.  His only crank was that the SCSI hard drives and cooling fans, running at the high speeds they did, were way WAY WAY noisy.

But as is so often true, the world moved on and Erwin didn’t. He got more sluggish with new releases of applications and more background processes, spent lots more time writing data into the swap file, and generally behaved like a geriatric.  I saw more and more clearly that we weren’t going to Work Out in the long term, but the question of finding money to leave him for a new system kept me with him.

Then my annual performance review came along, with both a respectable raise and semi-annual bonus, and they arrived not long after a coupon good for fifteen percent off reconditioned systems and monitors through the Factory Outlet. I started looking, and soon found a system that looked a nice fit for us.  Half an hour and $661 later it was bought, and two days after that it was delivered. I owned an OptiPlex GX620 in a medium desktop (Neo) chassis, with a 3GHz Hyper-Threading P4 processor (translation:  one processor that behaves as though it’s two), 1GB of RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, a 24X combination DVD/CDRW drive, and a 17” flat-panel monitor that is MILES brighter than the Erwin’s CRT.  I cut corners on the video card since I won’t be running games on it, and don’t need very high graphics performance.  Its case height and footprint are both lots smaller than Erwin’s (he was rather a chunky kind of box).

I spent Thursday night through Saturday getting the new system set up and configured (that’s what I was doing when I knocked down the shelves), and today I did the official cut-over.  Erwin has been retired and I’m writing this on his replacement, Syd (also a character from UF).  Despite his vastly superior performance, Syd’s so much quieter than Erwin that I can barely hear him when he’s switched on.  I think I’m gonna enjoy having him.

Posted in Them Computin' Machines | 8 Comments