The trip was certainly not without it’s obstacles though.

For one thing, the other day I broke my toe playing with our youngest, so I wasn’t really looking forward to stumping around all day on that.

To add to the fun, on the way out there, about 20 minutes from the park actually, we wound up with car trouble.    We stopped for a bathroom break for the little ones and the car didn’t want to start; not cool.    We ditched AAA long ago, but along with our car’s warranty service is roadside assistance.   Of course one number was missing from the sticker in the window.

We eventually got in touch with them and a tow truck was on the way.  I’d like to give a shout out to the nice gentleman who was travelling with his family and offered to have a look for us.   It’s rare these days, and I truly did appreciate it.   If the state police themselves hadn’t had to dispatch the truck for us, I would have taken him up on the offer.

Eventually the truck showed up (fairly quickly actually), and a simple jump was enough to get us on our way.    We’ll be in the market for a new battery soon.

Happily, we made it to the park and in the nick of time to pick up my line skipping Flash Pass (pre-paid mind you) before the cut off time of nooon.

We’d been watching the weather since there were scattered storms in the forecast.   Luckily the rain held off for most of the day and the kids had a blast.   The oldest got to go on half a dozen or so larger rides and spent time on the smaller ones with his brother as well.

Finally, when it started sprinkling, they started shutting down all the rides the Flash Pass is useful for, so we started heading out of the park.    We go out just in the nick of time, because as we started down the road the skies opened up.

Overall, it was a lovely, but very long day.

This morning I found that my coffee maker’s been applying for hospice care behind my back.   It still worked, but it’s making out it’s will.

It was a hot, humid, and busy day, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

I wound up working late tonight, there’s a whole long work related rant here, but I’ll leave it out for the sake of decency.   Suffice it to say, in the midst of dealing with that, I also had to contend with a series of tornado spawning storms, screaming children and this irritating heat.

To add a rotten cherry to the top of this excrement sundae, after we got the kids in bed we discovered that we have a hole in our roof that was leaking into the hallway and the light fixture over the stairs.

We’ve disconnected the light, the switch itself is off, but the circuit supplies power to half the house it seems.   Tomorrow I call the insurance company to see if it’s covered and considered storm damage.    SO not happy.

I guess when it rains, it really does pour.  @#$%^

I found a pack of 8, and set them on top of some stuff in my cart, where they promptly fell off and one of them broke.

Did I put them back on the shelf?  Nope, I bought them.

Friggin’ morals.

I have to say, they were delicious.  I hadn’t read the bag fully and thought they were potato chips, but I like cheese curls, so I didn’t mind.   I still miss the jalapeno ones I used to get from Big Lots.

These were quite good.   Plenty of flavor while not being too spicy, and the curls themselves were not to dense.   Sometimes you get ones that have collapsed some and have hard bits in them, but these were consistently good.

I can’t say that I’d want to eat an entire large bag of them, but the 2.375 oz bag I had was plenty with a generous amount actually in the bag.

If you can find them, definitely check them out!

But in the course of looking for places I might consider using a little waterpatch mastic, I heard an odd dripping noise.  I finally found it was coming from something that I had always assumed was a horribly misshapen grounding rod.

No, it was a pipe coming out of the wall just above the inflow pipes for the well pump, hooking upwards, and folded over on the end in some sort of DIY nightmare of a capping job.  The pipe itself is tied to a small hook under one of the floor joists.  It’s corroded to a point that it’s now leaking, and leaking into my basement.

Before I saw into this and put a proper cap on it, does anyone know what it might be?  Originally I thought it might be an air vent for the pump (I know little about pumps) but it occurred to me later that being filled with water is a bad thing if it were.   It looks to be about 1/2″ in diameter, and you’ll see in the second picture, has an attachment at the wall.    I have no idea what it’s for though.  Given the end was bent over, I assume it’s a vestige of something from years gone by, but I have no idea what.  And we have no gas on the street, so it’s not a gas pipe.

Any ideas?

Notice the bent end. From the weird squiggle, I've always thought it was a grounding rod. It seems the squiggles are just the twine they used.

Here’s the other end where it enters (or exits?) the wall.   The blueish pipe to the left is what we’re looking at.

This is where the mystery pipe enters the house. Note that these pipes are a few feet under ground as they're near the base of the foundation. We're looking at the blueish one to the left of those pipes, arching upwards.

Since the well pump is inside the house, it’s not a supply line.   Perhaps at one point the well pump was outside the house and it was the inflow line and someone simply didn’t want to fix the hole in the foundation.

UPDATE!  A user on one of the forums I frequent had what I think might be the best suggestion: a propane line.   He noticed that there were compression fittings near the base of the pipe indicative of gas usage.

The family of the previous owner did a kitchen remodel before they put the house up for sale, and there’s tile on the wall behind the refrigerator suggesting there may have been a stove there instead.  That location happens to be almost exactly above where this pipe is.

Thanks for the assistance everyone!

Well, tonight I was watching and there was a story about the budget battle in the House of Representatives.   Very quickly the representatives are heading towards another annual stale mate that may lead to a governmental shutdown, affecting thousands of innocent employees in the process.    Tonight, I sent my state rep, Jim McGovern, a suggestion, copied below.   If you agree with it, feel free to send a copy to your own rep.  It’s not pretty, it’s not ideal, but let’s face it, it makes sense.

I was watching the NBC news tonight, and the argument over savings of billions on the budget in the face of trillions in debt, and I had a question/suggestion.

Why doesn’t the GAO figure out what percentage over the amount we’re taking in we are over what we’re spending, and then the legislation adds 5 points for good measure, then slash EVERY line item by that amount?

That spreads the pain evenly.   The only sticking point might be negotiated price contracts (mainly in defense), and obviously no one’s going to like it.   But it’s hard to argue that it’s not fair.   The poor get hit, the rich get hit.  Corporate gets hit, the green folks get hit.  Frankly it seems like the only way that everyone could actually get behind a plan and since it sets a fixed amount that would be reduced across the board, it would be massively easier to implement rather than $10,000 here, a million here, $400.00 in ad spending there, etc.

Anyway, this is just a late night suggestion from your voter base.   Either way, it sounds like you folks are just spinning your wheels and will ultimately pass some spending bill that does only a fraction of what it needs to like usual.  But maybe a bit of common sense in an uncommon world is what’s needed.

Good luck!

Well today it got even worse.

I’ve had Google Voice installed on my phone for a while now.   I don’t use the phone capabilities of it, but it is nice to have text messages go to multiple spots.   I get them on the computer, but my phone vibrates to let me know I have one too.

Recently I noticed multiple app update notices all at once, and when I tried to upgrade Google Voice, the installation failed.  Ok, maybe there’s a problem in the package.

So I uninstalled Google Voice.  Now I can’t find it in the app store.   This usually means that it’s not supported on my version of Android.

So evidently, unless there’s a problem with the phone, and I’m going to try to reset it this weekend, you can no longer use Google Voice at this level of Android.  Google Voice isn’t supported any more on the Google created OS.

I’m really hoping it’s a phone specific problem and this isn’t truly the case.

Further aggravating matters, I tried to access the new web based Android Market site to look on there [I hate typing on my phone, even for searching].    However even after signing in, and I can see on the My Accounts>Orders tab a record of apps I’ve downloaded, there’s no device associated with the account.  Huh?

Frankly I’m not to optimistic there’s a fix here either.  Have a look at this.

I guess stay tuned for the newest Google ventures, the Google Fail or the Google Backlash.

I’ll let you know if resetting the phone helps.

But besides that, the idea of dragging a razor across my face is just a chore.   But, I get itchy if I don’t, so I do.

Normally I use a Gillette Mach 3 razor.  While I think the multiple razor concept is silly over all, this razor works fairly well, doesn’t clog too much, and is easy to clear when it does.

So when we got a coupon in the mail for a free Schick Hydro 5 razor, I figured it wouldn’t cost me anything to try it so we got one.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t care for it.

Frankly, the experience of shaving with this thing was about what you would expect in dragging 5 razors over your face: awkward.  The razor face is tall enough in this case that it’s hardly what I’d call nimble.  Plus, there’s a lubricating strip at the top and skin guards to the sides adding to the mass of the cutlery store you’re dragging over your face.

Granted I had a fairly heavy growth built up on my face, but no worse than I throw at the other razor, and in this case I found that getting into the under jaw areas was more difficult that it normally would be because of the shear size of the cartridge head.

In addition, I found I cut and nicked myself more with this razor than the other one.   Maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to it, but it wasn’t a comfortable enough experience that I wanted to spend any more time using it.

I didn’t read the literature that came with the razor, so I didn’t realize there’s a “flip trimmer” built into the head, but it also didn’t occur to me to miss having such a feature.    Even after looking at the site, I’m not really sure what this would be used for.   Perhaps I’ll revisit this at some point to see if it’s useful to hit the ends of my sideburns, but given the stack o’ blades, I’m not really sure how I’d do a clean job of it using this thing.

So, while I didn’t pitch it into the trash, I don’t think I’ll be abandoning my current razor any time soon.

* no compensation was rendered or solicited for this review.

UPDATE:   In the interest of fairness I gave this another try with a less aggressive growth to tackle.   I was all ready to say something moderately nice until I did my neck and it’s now all nicked up.

If any other companies would like an honest opinion of their product, feel free to give a holler.  I don’t imagine there’ll be much of a line though.

Anyway, Christmas night, after the kids had finally gone to bed, the wife and I were hanging out and got a craving for a soda.  It’s not something we keep in the house, so neither the kids or we will be tempted by it, but we do occasionally give in and get one out and about.

At any rate, being Christmas, precious little was open, but I knew where to find a 24 hour gas station with a nice fountain station, so I popped over.

Being in a fairly good mood, I was chit chatting with the cashier and casually inquired as to whether or not they had been busy that day.   They were one of the only games in town yesterday, so I assume they did fairly well.    What he told me surprised me a bit.  Yes, it was busy, up until about half an hour prior (I was there about 9ish).  The surprising bit was when he held up a stack of redeemed scratch off lottery tickets, saying “it’s been busy, look how many of these came in today.”

This struck me as interesting.  I know many people give scratch off tickets as a low cost gift with a potentially nice pay off.   I padded out the rest of the gift budget for my wife with $5 worth of them, for example.  But on a day where so many things are closed, I was surprised to see so many tickets redeemed.   I assume many of them were received as gifts, but what was the drive on such a quiet day to get them redeemed so quickly?  It’s not as if there’s much open to spend the money on, why not just wait a day or so to redeem them?

Has the economy gotten so bad, so dire, that people feel a need to redeem those tickets the same day?  Granted, that’s not to say people didn’t just “let them ride” and get more tickets in exchange for the winners, I’ve been known to do that with gifted tickets.   But there’s a fairly low amount that you can redeem those tickets for before you need the actual lottery commission, so realistically this meant folks were winning 5, 10, 20, up to a couple hundred and felt they needed to have that money in hand that day.

It was a bit unnerving as a sign of an economy that was looking a bit rosier.

Let’s hope it was just nothing.

The good news is that all of the packages I’ve sent out to customers have made it safely with everything intact including the replacement chess set I sent out.

The bad thing is that I still have a slew of pieces to make and get out in time for a Christmas arrival, plus a show this weekend.

Too much to do, no drive to do it AND there’s still the day job.