I predict more head-gasket failures. Gas-price-driven head-gasket failures.

When fuel goes up, more drivers choose the lowest grade, even if it makes the engine knock (or "ping," for the those to whom KNOCK sounds like ping) as a consequence.
 
Knock was a big deal in the early '70s, when cheaper, lower grades of fuel came onto the market. State laws also began to curb the use of lead as an octane-enhancing additive, a practice which seems as weird to us today as spiking your dinner with ground glass to cure constipation.

Big old V-8s with 10:1 compression ratios rebelled, however, knocking like ten-pins on acceleration, particularly in the summer under high ambient temperatures and the load of air-conditioning.
 
Oil companies accordingly raised the price of higher-octane fuels as they became more popular. (Can't argue with that, though it doesn't sweeten our relationship.) So cash-strapped customers kept buying the lower grades, and their motors kept on knocking.
 
Modern engines aren't supposed to do that, of course: They're made to run on the lowest-grade fuel, which in the U.S. is about 87 octane. Onboard computers adjust for it, so there's no reason to buy 89 or 92.

In theory and design, of course. Reality is somewhat different.

I'm convinced many of the problems people have with cars are attributable to Detroit's climate. (Yes, GM also has an Arizona Proving Ground. But Arizona is not Georgia, where humidity matters. It took the 1993 switch to R-134 refrigerant—and its serious heat-transfer problems—for carmakers to build air-conditioners lean enough to make commuting comfortable in a Houston summer.) There is a tremendous loss in efficiency when an engine is breathing 100° humid air vs. 40°. Engineers know this, but I don't think they consider it important. After all, EPA tests mileage under "normalized" conditions that never change, and that's what goes on the sticker customers see.
 
So when we stamp on the pedal climbing a hill in July with the MAX AC loading not only the compressor but the alternator, we are pretty much on our own. Throw in low-octane gas that bursts into flame before the spark plug gets around to snapping, and you have KNOCK: Pistons compressing a fuel-air mixture that is already afire and expanding. Irresistible force meets immovable object. Victim: head gasket.
 
No one in my family has ever blown a head gasket. I used to replace them on other people's cars, and it always baffled me how they blew out in the first place. This is a flat sheet of (used to be) asbestos with big holes in it, and it seals the space where the hollow cylinders mate with the domed head. Lots of heat and pressure happen right there, and that's why head gaskets are reinforced with copper or steel rings that flatten out when the head is torqued down at 50+ foot-pounds. A bullet cannot penetrate a head gasket once it is installed. But a few thousand attempts to contain expanding, burning gasoline can.

My dad always taught us to back off the throttle if our engine knocked. The sound told you something was wrong, and out of respect for the mechanicals you ought to do what you can to stop that noise.

Others I knew would just keep on driving, or stab the gas pedal to "drown it out." Having rebuilt engines by hand, I could only cringe.

As people of the land, we were reared to know that machines are supposed to break. It is entirely unnatural for an invention of man to go on forever. Only the spinning earth does that. Everything else is subject to wear, tear, and time.

So I've never blown a head gasket. With any luck, neither will my wife, daughter, or son.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 625 words, total size 4 kb.

The day started out funny, anyway.

I dreamed I'd been written into an episode of Frasier. Or wandered into it from the frozen-foods section of a small market, as it were.

In any event, Frasier, Niles, and another character or two were hosting a small gathering in Frasier's apartment, and Martin, for reasons established earlier in the plot, couldn't serve enough coffee to make himself happy. He kept swinging the hot carafe around, offering to fill anyone's cup, but everyone dodging him declined.

Meantime, in the midst of all the commotion, I announced my intention to mix myself a martini. Frasier half-turned to Niles and muttered, "This ought to end well."

I started snickering so hard, we had to retake.

That's the biggest hazard of putting a nonprofessional actor into the middle of a top-rated comedy production. Here the Charles/Burrows/Charles company was paying thousands of dollars a minute for the best talent working every aspect of its taping—caterers included—and here this n00b Rittenhouse can't hold his laughter. David Hyde-Pierce could be excused for muffing a take, because he brings in a fourth of the Nielsen numbers; the rookie, however, will not be invited back.

if a dream is all i have to report today, I am not serving you well.

So: I mowed the lawn.

Unless you're from the Gulf Coast, you may not know that St. Augustine grows in vines along the surface, its wide blades sticking up at all angles. My own patch of it is, best I can tell, 50 years old; the roots run deep and the vines form thickets that crisscross and choke off most anything that tries to germinate amid them.

Three weeks of more-or-less constant rain prevented me from mowing while promoting a growth rate more characteristic of 1950s radiation experiments gone wrong. Another couple of days and I'd have had to rent a brush hog. As it was, I could only use half the mower's swath at a time.

Still, it felt as if I were processing a giant salad. The edge trimmer left wet spots as it sliced through runners creeping out onto the sidewalk. As for the soil, if it had a dipstick, it would read full. Water is standing over the city meter, a foot deep. The curb weeps.

We are having a wet one in North Texas. And that's all I gots today. 

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 399 words, total size 3 kb.

Wolf Dog ran out of food today. Rather, I let him run out of food.

You do not want a hungry 90-lb. German Shepherd around your house. Especially not when at least a couple of the residents can't climb trees yet.

The situation is more complex than it sounds. Regular Houseketeers will know that Wolf Dog eats raw meat. I started that more than a year ago when his teeth looked yellow and I learned it would cost nearly $200 to get them cleaned. Then I discovered raw-feeding and the local chicken-processing plant, and Wolf Dog thought we'd hit the lottery. Raw meat every day. Rittenhouse rules!

But I knew he was running low last Thursday night, and Friday was too busy to break away from work, and Squeeky will not touch the stuff. So, by Sunday morning, we were flat out of comestibles.

So I trudged up to Medium Box Grocery to see if I might luck into a clearance sale on drumsticks. Woot! Leg quarters in big plastic bags, $.39 a pound. I grabbed the last three.

Yes, raw-feeders are lunatics. We give people food to dogs, and we don't even cook it. We ignore the reassuring commercials from Iams, and the advice of veterinarians to buy the dog food only sold at vets' offices, and we feed our dogs exactly what dogs would eat if humans weren't around to manufacture kibble for them.

/rant

Wolf Dog thinks I'm a hero. 'Nuff said.

today I made a few preface gestures toward tearing out the ugly picture windows that have annoyed me since we bought this place six years ago. Aluminum-framed, single-pane, cloudy even when they're clean—I get mad just looking at them. I already have the replacements standing by out back, waiting for a rain-free day to install. I'll cover that in a separate piece.

Today's special moment, though, was going around the outside with a power screwdriver taking out all the fasteners I could without triggering actual collapse. The fasteners hold aluminum strips that secure the framed glass to the aluminum structure. They are tiny, rusty, sheet-metal screws suitable for a size of flat-tip screwdriver I only own one of, and because these were last turned during the Eisenhower Administration, my screwdriver blade sheared off almost immediately.

I got to thinking about fasteners.

Did they all start as the "slotted" variety, suitable for turning even with a thumbnail, dime, or pocketknife? You could always get one of those out no matter what you had on you.

Yeah, then that Phillips genius came up with the cross pattern, and made a fortune selling the only screwdriver that would fit. Then Allen bowled everyone over with his six-sided reverse-socket-head configuration, available in metric and Imperial measures. At least you could, in a pinch, fit the head of a small cap screw into it, then turn it with Vise-Grips.

General Motors was the first company I knew of to adopt the Torx, which everyone called the "star" pattern, and they used it only on headlamp housings, confounding mechanics nationwide. Then some fool put a dimple in the middle of the Torx and called it "security," as if thieves would never think to drop into a hardware store on their way to steal something. Oddly, the only place I see security-Torx is on playground equipment. Would jungle gyms be circulating like crack through the underworld except for the security Torx screws holding them in place?

Clever as they are, engineers will never create a fastener that can defeat a determined bathroom-stall disassembler. I don't know who goes into a public restroom with a toolbelt, determined to cripple the stall locks, but so far he's hit every airport and mall in the country. He can dismantle any toilet seat in seconds, while I can't crack a screw in a window frame with all afternoon at my disposal.

But I can use a chisel. We'll see if that proves necessary tomorrow, when the great Rittenhouse picture-window replacement derby begins.

Pull up a lawn chair and place your bets.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 680 words, total size 4 kb.

As illustrated by my dependence on decongestants, I am not completely averse to the taking of modern medicines. And yet, by the grace of God, my mother very nearly avoided disaster only by stopping her pill regimen.

Mom's in assisted living by choice, having lost her husband (my father) late last year and declined my eldest sister's invitation to live with her. So she stays about one mile from me and I'm her financial and medical caretaker.

She spent a few weeks in rehab after Dad's death recovering from a back injury. That was the first I realized she was on about 10 medications for high blood pressure and diabetes. (A diet of rich food and sugary snacks had taken its toll over 82 years.) After she moved to assisted living, the paramedics had to be called twice to revive her after blood-sugar spikes rendered her unresponsive. I couldn't get her physician interested in solving that problem, so I hired a nurse practitioner at a local hospital whose geriatric program operates on a "limited medications" philosophy.

Within hours, they had nixed all the blood-sugar depressants and put her on insulin as needed to smooth out the high spots. Now, two weeks into the regimen, she has even gone a few days with zero insulin injected, and a couple of days with just three units.

What had spooked the practioner into such a dramatic change in regimen was, Mom's renal (kidney) function showed about 33 percent of normal. Ten percent means dialysis. What was taxing them was ... metabolizing all those godforsaken pills.

so, if i understand correctly, doctor #1 was propelling Mom toward kidney failure through inattention, while a practitioner spotted the problem instantly in the course of routine lab work.

I wonder how many other dialysis patients would not have been in that state but for the failure of their doctor to realize what he was doing to them.

I am not a lawsuit guy. I do not expect doctors to be perfect in their decisionmaking. What I do expect is, when you are paid by Medicare for virtually anything you do with old people—including pedicures, believe it or not—you ought to at least look at their status once in a while. This guy never saw Mom until she checked into the hospital after the aforementioned blood-sugar episode. And he only saw fit to tweak one dosage of one pill in response.

You could say I'm being hard on him, projecting my own guilt over not being with Mom every day. I can't accept that. I—and you, another taxpayer—lay out enormous sums of money to give our parents and grandparents medical care they could not otherwise afford. Without that subsidy, the doctors would have to lower their rates dramatically to make up for the lost business.

Lots of old people don't know how, or are not willing, to take care of their needs. There's no easy answer to that.

At the very least ... ah, what's the use.

Maybe he's just a bad doctor, and I'm blessed to have caught this before it got much, much worse.

Thank God for that.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 523 words, total size 4 kb.

Self-experiments have shown that antihistamines alone don't stop my eyes swelling shut in the springtime, and the only solution is the ingredient in Sudafed, pseudoephedrine.

Unfortunately, since I last bought PSE over-the-counter, things have gotten complicated.

Pseudoephedrine is a building block of methamphetamine, the white-trash drug of choice that can be cooked up with little or no education in a garage, coffeemaker, and probably even a pair of battery-powered socks if the humidity's just right.

Way back in the early '90s, when crack was more the fashion, I could buy a bottle of 100 pseudoephedrine tablets and go sniffle-free for months. Then the feds, frustrated that meth was becoming more popular than midnight basketball leagues, mandated blister packs for PSE tabs, figuring that if prison wasn't enough of a deterrent to meth-makers, sore fingertips would stop them cold.

(Can I help it if I think drug addicts are kind of funny? Yes.)

Imagine the DEA's surprise when not a single meth producer quit the business to sell Amway. So they took it up a notch.

let me set the stage here for saturday's exercise: Wal-Mart has the most tragicomically understaffed pharmacies in the retail industry. Do not ever be under the misapprehension that you can just get a prescription filled there while you wait, unless you enjoy studying the growth of cobwebs.

A cynic might claim the point of a dilatory pharmacy is to encourage waiting customers to shop the rest of the store, racking up sales. That cynic would be correct. And yet, there are not enough goods and services even in a Wal-Mart Supercenter to fill the time it takes to get a bottle of pills filled, labeled, and paid for, even if you get your oil changed and memorize the warning labels on every item in the store. So I don't take a prescription to Wal-Mart unless I plan to return the next day anyway.

Little did I suspect that a mere over-the-counter drug purchase would be tantamount to buying a Class IV narcotic. With an out-of-town check and no ID.

First, the name "over the counter" no longer technically applies to pseudoephedrine, because it's behind the counter. Out on the cough-and-cold rack, all I could get my hands on was a card bearing a picture of the drug—the restaurant scene in Brazil comes to mind—then go beg for a box from the pharmacist's clerk, who was already working a line of four people with real ailments and, of course, lots of questions and out-of-town checks.

So I stood clutching my little vinyl graphic rendering of an actual PSE package, nasal passages drizzling in anticipation of a month's worth of free breathing. But the next obstacle after the wait-time was, they couldn't sell me more than one package of 24—exactly 3½-weeks' supply. So I would have to return—after what, a day? week? two weeks?—for more.

Then, before I could get my hands on even one of the precious tablets, I had to sign a page of legalese which boils down to, "I promise not to go home and cook up little rocks of meth to trade for sex with truck-stop prostitutes."

Finally, I handed over my driver's license, then paid for my ostensibly over-the-counter drug on the spot, which—have the retail geniuses at Bentonville factored this in?—further delayed anyone behind me needing a real prescription.

Bag in hand, I ran screaming through the store to Squeeky, who was filling her cart in the grocery department. I begged her to buy a second blister pack for me, promising to mow the lawn, paint her toenails, iron her socks—anything to save me from coming back to this horrible place in less than a month.

she took her own credit card to the pharmacy while I pretended not to know her and hid, out of camera range, in the toy section. We had arranged a rendezvous on opposite sides of the kids' bicycle rack.

"Are you enjoying your visit to Wal-Mart?" I asked, with a lilting French accent, pretending to study tire treads.

"Ouí," she replied. "But zee, how you say, pharmacees is out to lunch."

"Horreurs!" I announced. "Zees will not deux!" I stormed out to the car in a Gallic sulk.

Twenty minutes later, Squeeky emerged into the warm afternoon with a little white bag, which I felt strangely compelled to trade sex for.

It must have been the accent.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 734 words, total size 5 kb.

Wanted: Customer-service employee to process papers at government office. Must have a countenance that suggests intestinal blockage. Minimum four years' experience heavy sighing. Must not be able to communicate in any language other than office argot, and expect same in others.

At least, that's how I would have written the ad.

Encounters like these—not even so much as a "Hi," as I entered the office—are what make the rare encounter with a cheerful government employee so precious. Every great once in a while I meet one of those, and they make my day. Maybe it's the clown working the driver license camera who says something silly just to make you smile. Might even just be the short, male Hispanic supervisor who makes a Marx Brothers run through the facility and gets everyone laughing. (You've seen one of those, right? I think every medium-sized workplace has one.)

And so, realizing this would not be one of those, but a control group experience, I resigned myself to several minutes of dreary silence while my paperwork was scrutinized for any disqualifying error. Or maybe I could have turned in a 9th-grade English essay and still gotten what I came for.

No, that's wrong. They do care about what they're doing. To the exclusion of all else, including the pleasure of a nice conversation to pass the time at work. Lord knows, I tried. Nothing doing.

i still enjoyed monday because i had nearly killed myself on Sunday. Nothing like the weekend for a death-defying stunt.

I had hung a children's swing from the giant elm tree a few weeks ago, but it never quite sat right. A knot in one of the ropes I'd looped over a branch maybe 20 feet up had failed to cinch, causing the swing to yaw and walking one rope toward the other.

Determined to get it right, I borrowed Captain Garage's mountaineering equipment (the man has one of everything) and set about dragging myself up a branch about 2/3 my own diameter. I had not been up a tree since childhood, near as I can remember.

Trees are significantly harder to climb as a full-grown person. No matter how strong one might be, the sheer bulk of an adult is exceedingly difficult to balance and motivate along a rough, cylindrical surface. Add to that the realization of what might happen to one's spinal column, family, and status in the neighborhood ("He fell out of a what?") in the event of a plunge, and any thoughts of swinging limb-to-limb curdle as one hugs the bark like one of those pincher-grip dolls.

There's a reason all the Olympic gymnasts are teenagers.

The climbing harness I borrowed was only for safety. In case I slipped, I was counting on the rope, draped over a limb, to give my wife below just enough resistance to let me down slowly. The actual climbing would have to be done exclusively by me, and I haven't seen the inside of a gym in months.

Fortunately the elm's big branches grow in parallel along the route I planned to take, and I was able to sort of walk on one while leaning on the other. Heavy on the "sort of"; they were almost the same height. But I managed to get up there fairly quickly and to wedge myself in place while cinching up the swing's errant rope.

A few minutes later I began to climb down and found the going considerably more difficult. Backward is harder than forward, especially when you can't see behind you and you're hugging wood as if your life depended on it. Which, incidentally, it did.

I made it back down with a few nasty scratches, mostly from clinging and sliding on the bark. Whereupon I triumphantly yanked on my end of the safety rope ...

... and the knot fell apart.

Squeeky glared. Rittenhouse shrugged. It's not like I actually needed it up there, right?

See you tomorrow. I hope.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 669 words, total size 4 kb.

The mother of all fire ants attacked me last night.

While I slept. The coward. I have six red welts with pinpoint orange peaks, waiting for me to foolishly scratch them off, whereupon the stinging would multiply to remind me, You knew that would hurt, didn't you? But you did it anyway, because humans scratch at hard things on their skin the way dogs bite their own stitches.

Instead, as a responsible, experienced adult, I scratch around the little red battlefields where my immune system seems to be warring against whatever calling card the ant left behind. Days, this will take, with Yoda syntax added for emphasis.

Ants are an especially fearsome insect because they never give up. Willing to sacrifice themselves in waves, and to work 24-hour shifts, they will eventually accomplish their mission. For carpenter ants, the mission seems to be eating the core out of my hackberry tree, or maybe my house, which they also have a trail encircling. For fire ants, it is the ruination of all likely picnic spots and neighborhood yard sports. That, or their queen has bet long on Amdro stock, so they win, one way or another.

this week, the elephant in dallas' living room is our neighbor Farmers Branch, which passed some sort of ordinance last Saturday requiring tenants to prove their right to be in the U.S. when signing a lease.

I have chosen not to get distracted by immigration issues because they merely split my party in half and benefit the opposition. My belief is, the other party raises this issue every 20 years or so and puts a fresh spin on it, and we take the bait every time.

This go-round, it's national security at stake. As if Al Qaeda has ever done anything conspicuously illegal in preparing a strike. No, that particular bad-guy prefers to operate within the law until all assets are in place, then hit hard. Running operatives across the border at night is risky, along the lines of smuggling a pistol through airport security. Get caught, and your whole operation fails. So they don't take preliminary chances.

but farmers branch, insecure over its status as not-rich-enough-to-be-Addison and not-big-enough-to-be-Dallas—and, I suspect, frustrated that it can't police even its own apostrophe—has decided illegal aliens are its most pressing problem.

The real mistake here is not bigotry, but ignoring the concept of federalism. In plain language, FB's trying to do Washington's work. It is the State Department and Congress who set unreasonably low quotas and high hurdles for people who just want to come here and work. The Border Patrol can't keep up with all those hungry people streaming across the border.

But the municipality of Farmers Branch has no right or responsibility pertaining to immigration law. It is a city; it should be doing city things, like maintaining street lights and parks. And I would bet that if opponents had calmly spelled this out for them—instead of just ranting about the inhumanity of the proposal—the voters might have sent this proposal to the trash can.

Who in Farmers Branch appreciates federal intervention in, say, the local school district? Well, it works both ways. The feds don't like FB meddling in immigration law. You know, the Tenth Amendment, and all that stuff we thought only historians cared about.

But this isn't a debate about what's right. It's about how we feel. And those debates always end up in court, where they don't belong.

to wrap the day up, Squinx and I took Wolf Dog to Big Box Pet Supplies Inc., one of the few places he doesn't terrify everyone who lays eyes on him. But this may have been the last visit for him. He spent the whole time marking every vertical protrusion in the store, most of which were already rusty and yellowed from other dogs who'd gotten there first. I spent most of my time scurrying around for paper towels and cleaning spray, and the rest monitoring him constantly in case he tried to take another surprise whiz.

We made one more stop at Big Box Natural Foods Corp., where I was disappointed at the dearth of hemp waffles.  But the coffee aisle kept me amused, as there is evidence of a simmering conflict between organic and nonorganic users of the in-store grinder.  A harried staff member tried to make peace through signage:

I'd have paid admission to see the complaint that triggered such an admirably restrained response.

That'll do for today.  Thanks for reading.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:11 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 777 words, total size 5 kb.

Dawn opened up a sunny, springtime Saturday, just right for scaling a ladder and making final adjustments to the gutters I put up two weeks ago.

On the patio below, Little Roo found my plastic pack of drill bits irresistible. While I cut tin to make a splash shield, he studied the battery-powered drill. We took a mid-job swing break for the good of both of us.

Squeeky took him inside for his afternoon nap while I drove the last sheet-metal screws home. As I packed up the tools, a spattering sound got my attention.

Rain. On a sunny day. Two minutes after I finished a job that needed water-testing.

I set my glasses inside and took an observer's position out under the eaves. Two spots will need some touch-up sealer. Not bad for a total novice.

The day didn't start so auspiciously. We cracked a dozen eggs for breakfast, and the shells formed an impenetrable sand bar in the sink trap. Thinking the clog was farther downline, I rented a 25-foot manual sewer snake and went at it from three directions: outside wall, roof vent, and inside, under the sink. Only upon disassembling the trap did I see the jam-up that had, until that moment, resisted all the might I could bring to bear on a plunger.

For the record, a dozen eggshells ground in a disposal could be used for construction aggregate. Finding and clearing that mess swallowed a good 2½ hours.

Eh. I had the precipitation concinnity to lighten my afternoon, so overall it qualified as a Good Day.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 03:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 488 words, total size 3 kb.

Thank you for calling Supracelia Bank. I'm the artificially perky young female voice least unacceptable to the most focus groups. Please key in your 84-digit account number.

OK, I got it. I will now transfer you to another department.

Hello, I'm the perky girl's identical twin. Because I don't trust her (she stole two of my boyfriends and never, ever, asked before taking my lip liner), please key in your 84-digit account number again.

Ouch. Please re-enter your 84-digit account number. For the record, holding each button down for two seconds won't help me remember it.

Thanks! I got it. Okay, now let's go through all the menu options you don't want. You can interrupt me at anytime with your choice.

Sir, that option is not available to either of us. My sister probably would have gone for it, though.

If the option you need isn't on the menu, say "Problem customer."

Uh-huh, I thought so. For security purposes, please enter the last four digits of your Social Security number.

Great! With that, plus your Caller ID, we can identify you to all of our call centers.

While I verify that, let me remind you that you can get up-to-date account information online at www.supraceliabank.com. Let me spell that out letter-by-letter for all the Web illiterates out there.

Hold on. I still have a few more hoops to put you through before letting you talk to a real person. See how I got a reputation as a tease, while my sister just let anyone have a shot? That's why she's working the front lines, taking calls from the great unwashed. I'm the one you have to impress to get what you want.

What's that? Okay. Key in your date of birth, using two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and four digits for the year. You don't need to specify B.C. or A.D.

I got it. Now, just for fun, enter your 84-digit account number again.

That's clever. You text-messaged an anatomically impossible suggestion.

Tell you what: I'm willing to let you talk to a real person if you'll just key in your 84-digit account number one more time, plus give me your mother's maiden name. Also, if you want to place a bet on an upcoming major-league ball game, I can help you with that for a small cut.

It's been a whole minute since I reminded you that you can get up-to-date account information online at www.supraceliabank.com. As if you haven't already tried, and that's where you got this toll-free number. Nevertheless, I'll spell out the URL again, because I just like to.

Hold, please, for our next available agent. Here's 25 minutes of low-royalty music our focus group found least intolerable.

You've reached the call center for Supracelia Bank. Please call back during business hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 485 words, total size 3 kb.

We have to convene about the Squares.

Just today came news of a plan to award the R rating to any movie with "depictions that glamorize smoking."

Anti-Soviet behavior, I'm sure, will be next.

A couple of weeks ago, some office Square or other hoisted a black flag of sorts in a stairwell. A nasty-gram warning everybody not to smoke in there. Threats of fines and imprisonment. It wasn't official, just a Square who can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke.

I've smelled it, too. But nobody's smoking in the stairwell. You can't see any smoke, for one thing. Further, there are no ashes on the floor. (It is impossible to burn a cigarette—especially in a windless area such as a stairwell—without leaving ashes behind.) And from my building-guard training, I know the difference between fresh smoke and the kind that's been pumped through a ventilation system. This is stale smoke, hours old, from another room. Probably a quirk in the HVAC system is pushing it from a smoking break-room into the stairwell.

But that's not good enough for Vigilante Square. Dallas has trained him that even the faintest trace of tobacco smoke is cause for a National Guard callup. Reserves, even.

Somebody, somewhere might be enjoying himself, and must be punished.

i know this is a lousy picture. But did you ever try to photograph ducks in your front yard at sunset?

They will not face you, for one thing. Once they detect a mobile human, they turn away and begin that halting, wary duck-escape walk just to show they're onto you.

So a face-on shot would prove impossible. Or a sharp still of any kind, because the twilight dictated long exposure.

What, I suppose you've got ducks in your suburban yard?

Wolf Dog and I ran into them later on our walk. They were a couple of feet off the sidewalk, and they waited until we got fairly close to make their escape ... flying in a straight line in the same direction we were walking. So we encountered them again three minutes later, whereupon they naturally assumed we were stalking them. Brainless animals, these ducks.

finally, although it's going to cast me as Art Linkletter (was he born 78 years old?), I have to relay how Squinx' word power continues to dazzle me. This afternoon she took great pride in telling me she could buckle her own carseat belt.

These things are stiff, designed for adult use, with a plastic spring-clip that can pinch ferociously anyone who tries to work it with any sort of trepidation. You have to show it who's boss.

So, I sat watching as Squinx put all her strength into successfully buckling the plastic snap, then got one of the metal buckles but couldn't quite make the other one drop into place.

"This one's not paying attention," she said.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 522 words, total size 4 kb.

Partisan politics has no place on this site. So, while I can't ignore the ongoing primaries, I do promise not to upset half of you by taking sides. I just have something to say about candidates in general.

Let us promise not to vote for someone who "needs" to be president.

Politics attracts certain types of defective personalities. (I know we're all defective in unique ways and degrees.) One type in particular should not hold elective office. This candidate:

• loves to be adored by crowds
• has not succeeded in anything but politics
• changes to accommodate polls
• will do anything to win

This personality has a gaping hole that the owner fills with others' attention. He needs therapy, not the presidency.

While he may be an excellent candidate, he will be a lousy officeholder. Reason: The day-to-day work requires skills and willpower that have little in common with campaigning.

This person wants to win, in order to be loved. Once in office, he will continue to pursue those ends at the expense of the republic.

Please keep him out.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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greetings!

I actually knew a guy who would say that upon entering a room. I was tempted to reply, "Responses!" but I knew he wouldn't get it.

apologies for the unexplained absence. A speaking engagement took me four hours outside town, which made for an all-day event, most of it spent in the car. Having not driven that far in about 18 years, I am happy to report that Detroit's seating accommodations have greatly improved. I did not have to use my day-planner for lumbar support until the seventh hour.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, however, still regards speeding as a crime against humanity. I passed no less than three black-and-whites lying in wait, and that many more who'd already scored. It's the laziest kind of law enforcement: You sit roadside pointing an expensive gadget at unsuspecting motorists until the LEDs tell you to do something. No discernment involved. The state could train primates to do that.

I blame it mostly on the feds. In 1974 they required state governors to sign a pledge attesting that a majority of their citizens were driving 55 mph or less, and the only way do that honestly was to equip state troopers with radar guns and a priority: Speeding is a mortal sin.

Troopers being troopers, this became a near-military operation, with increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance, helicopters, and in some states, fake highway maintenance crews spying on motorists. It never got that bad in Texas, but the state police changed from being the traveler's friend to the stealthy enemy of his driving record.

Even though Newt Gingrich's Congress returned speed-limit power to the states, the troopers seem not to have gotten the word. They still obsess over their digital readouts while ignoring tailgating, failure to yield the fast lane, and its derivative, passing on the right. I think they came to regard these violations as their friends, obstacles to the high crime of 56+ mph. Those laws could also be enforced from helicopters, but without the threat of lost federal funds, that won't be explored. It's so much easier to meet one's quota sitting roadside with your finger on a button.

texas' interstates have evolved in other ways. There's a Starbucks every 200 miles now, and I know their corporate planners are depressed they didn't reach that market before the landscape swallowed the last remnants of Stuckey's. You could've gotten those buildings cheap at one point, along with the pecan log roll billboards stretching 50 miles in both directions. Now rural porn peddlers have reclaimed what the weeds haven't.

The state has also helpfully added hurricane evacuation route signs every few miles along I-45. As if any Houstonian fleeing a storm is going to try I-45 again. Last time it was F.A.R.S.S.* in the wake of Katrina that compelled every car owner south of Huntsville to fill his trunk with oatmeal bars and join his neighbors in the biggest traffic jam the world has ever seen. The smart ones checked Yahoo! Maps before departure, and they were in Kansas by noon, via back roads. Others sat idling away tankfuls of $3 gas under Sam Houston's gaze until the storm passed 80 miles to the east.

Today, as they leave each rest area, motorists are aided by signs proclaiming eisenhower interstate system. I'm not sure how this enhances their journey ("Honey, why don't we try to enjoy this road a little more, knowing a former World War II general approved its plans?"), but I trust our federal overseers to tell us exactly what we need to know, especially as we concentrate on merging into a four-lane highway.

I kid the bureaucrats. They built this fine transportation system for my use, and they only ask 18.4 cents per gallon of gas to do it. Along the way, I get to study American anthropology in the form of billboards. Who knew there was such demand for microsurgical vasectomy reversal in the rural areas? I suspect there is some connection between this and the former-Stuckey's porn emporiums they stand near, but I haven't figured it out yet.

i got home after bedtime to find everyone asleep. Brushing one's teeth seems to take three times as long after 10 p.m. I slipped into a bed full of warm family members and said my thanks. It's the weekend now. See you Monday.

* Fear of Anal Rape in a Sports Stadium, a coastal hysteria promoted by rumor agencies CNN, ABC, CBS, etc.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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rather than observe a set date that's always too late anyway, Texas could simply mark the arrival of spring with sirens.

Big screaming yellow neighborhood horns have gone off twice in the last three weeks, warning of tornadoes on the horizon, or maybe it was the 13,000-point Dow.

This time around, I had just left the house to pick up Squeeky, Squinx, and Little Roo at the airport, a 15-minute trip, and although the skies looked purple there was no precipitation. It took five minutes for that to change, and another two minutes for the rain to begin roaring down too fast for the wipers to clear it.

I passed two cars whose drivers had badly underestimated the depth of the waters they were fording. *Shrug.* I had a pretty good idea where the low spots were on this, my commuter route, and what I could not guess I augmented with the power of observation: When you see a wave in the road, slow down.

what i did not know was that the pilots in charge of my family's safety had already ricocheted to Oklahoma City. So I sat in the cell-phone zone at Love Field a good 45 minutes before Squeeky could tell me her whereabouts. They'd left Houston optimistic for a landing in Dallas, but 500 mph wasn't enough to beat the storm front. They would remain north of the Red River until the clouds parted again.

until all this happened, I'd had a relaxed evening. Right after work, I took Wolf Dog for his walk to the beat of Latin musica. The house they're raising up the block is in the foundation stage, and one of the crew thought to bring a boom box to pass the workday. Conjunto is the official music of construction, I have noticed. Back when our house was getting new underpinnings, I could always tell whether the crew was still in the crawlspace by the music coming up through the vents. For several months, I could have rented the living room out for salsa lessons.

Wolf Dog and I stopped for a moment to watch the progress. Hard to believe just a month ago, a house stood here, full of memories. Then I clambered up onto it and took the gutters off, and a week later it was rubble. The gutters have a second life on the back of my house now. All that's left of this place is the address.

But I won't get sad about it. I'd seen the inside, and it needed about $30K to make it salable. This is the downside of letting old people live their last years in the same house they reared their children in. Eventually, they can't keep the place up. It's too big and the little tasks grow too numerous and expensive, and then they go exponential. When you stop trimming the trees, eventually the eaves and roof suffer. Let the paint crack, and the wood beneath starts to rot. By the time the old folks are out, the heirs are looking at too much, too late. It will appraise below market, and because the mortgage is paid off, that sum will look pretty good anyway. The time and effort needed to fetch a higher price just isn't available. Not even a "cute young couple" wants to take it on. It will go for wholesale.

Now a McCastle is underway. Someone will pay for it three times what other houses around here sell for, which has us neighbors-to-be scratching our heads. Why would anyone pay that much to live among us?

When the last one went up, Wolf Dog and I found ourselves passing it just as a potential buyer was giving it a lookover. A thirtyish blond female in a Mercedes with California plates. I asked if she planned to move in. She said she was thinking about it, then started quizzing me about the place. How long has it been on the market? Eight months. Why so long?

Uh, probably because he's asking 300 percent of what the houses on either side are selling for.

She still claimed it was the best price for a house this size in all of Dallas County, and I believed her. One thing I've observed about Californians, they arrive here feeling like we would if we walked on the moon. At one-sixth the gravity, we'd feel like Superman, able to leap tall buildings, or craters at least. Californians can make down payments bigger than what we leave to mortgage. All they have to give up is the climate. And the attitude, which most of them do.

one hour after her last call, Squeeky is touching down in Dallas. For all the craziness around here when we're all together, this house seems so empty without them.

It's been a productive break for me. Now it's time to be Daddy again.

Thank you for stopping in. I'll be back tomorrow.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Spring continues to roll across the landscape, marked by tufts of fur from the heavily molting Wolf Dog. This is from five minutes' brushing:

I put food in one end, and fur comes out all over.

The saving grace these days is, he's much less oily than when I was feeding him commercial dog food. I stopped that long before the poison scare and went to raw meat. He thought we'd won the lottery.

I'll spare you all the hippy-dippy reasons for raw-feeding one's pets. I was just led to the idea when I noticed his teeth yellowing. I inquired of several vets what a cleaning would cost, and the price staggered me. That he would be put under for the procedure didn't surprise me, but I still didn't like it.

Reasoning that wild canines don't see dental hygienists (or enjoy much of a dental plan at all), I thought, Wait, that's it: Nature provides them with dental care built right into their food supply. It's the bones. They crush bones and clean their teeth as a matter of course.

As Providence would have it, my neighbor works for a chicken-processing plant just a few miles away. Sure, she said, we sell raw chicken to people for dog food. Wings, thighs, livers, gizzards—the stuff that gets less than top dollar as people food—available in 20- and 40-lb. boxes at the wholesale rate. Just call ahead and swing by with a cooler.

That was about a year ago. Now it's routine, and he still acts like a puppy at feeding time.

tonight, lying on the floor behind me, he leaps to his feet each time I move. He's nervous with the family away, even though he knows when I'm solo he gets more attentive walks and at least one trip to the dog park.

That, or he's forgotten I walked him two hours ago.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 08:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I have to pass this every day.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Guttering a house is man's work. It relies on the masculine qualities of geometric thinking, upper-body strength, and a willingness to suffer sheet-metal cuts.

I wrote about acquiring the gutters here. The project took on a certain urgency with our spring rains. Water spills too fast for the French drain to draw it out to the alley, so much of it ends up in the crawlspace, unsettling me. Too many vital structural members down there, all of them made of wood. They don't actually get wet, but they're within a foot or two of the waves, and that's too close. In my annual inspection down there, I want a moonscape to creep across, not a swamp.

Also, the gutters we acquired were so long I could only store them flat across the backyard, where they turned the grass yellow unless I moved them a couple of feet each day. So this stuff had to get installed, pronto.

This project could not have been more timely. Wife and kids out of town, a free 10-foot ladder from the last moments of a garage sale, and Sir Galahad available for a couple of hours when I needed help. The big blessing was, I had enough to do the whole back of the house, which is where I needed it most.

Online how-tos suggest cutting gutters with tin snips, and that worked almost as well as using them to pick one's nose. I got out the hacksaw and hearing protection, because the sound of sawing through gutters is the stuff Hell is made of.

the inevitable one-hour trip to Big Box Home Improvement came about the two-thirds mark, when I had to buy pipe and adaptors to link the middle downspout to an underground drain pipe. This should have been a 30-minute trip, but Big Box had no pipe, prompting a drive to Other Big Box, whose fittings came in a matching color. So there will be another trip to the first Big Box for refund.

It always takes longer than I think.

While I studied the pipe fittings at Other Big Box, the sound system played "Got to Get You Into My Life," and I had to restrain myself from dancing right there in the aisle. I loved that song as a kid. Was it Earth, Wind & Fire? google check Yup. And tons better than the Beatles' original, which sounded like a band trying to be the Beatles. In '78 I went looking for the single at Don's Record Shop, a little retailer who probably got mowed down years ago by the Internets, if not by ... google check ... he's still there!

Don was a balding hippie who loved music, and he had the widest -- and only, for that matter -- record selection in Bellaire. He could find you anything, and charged accordingly. Singles were $1.25 plus tax. I don't know what he charged for albums because I only bought them at the head shop/record store that opened in my teens, and always had a wall o' Fleetwood Mac LPs, the one with the naked boy and old man that would've been banned today.

Ah, where was I? Earth, Wind & Fire. (I'll grant them an exception to the serial-comma rule, like law firms.) The era of huge black bands with a happy horn section. They could even cover the Beatles and make it more fun than the Beatles ever were. Even a dumb original like "Groove Line" had so much momentum, you paid no attention to how hokey the lyrics were. A fushion of Motown and disco, it was. I could listen to that stuff all day.

the job turned into an all-day affair, as these things tend to when I don't know what I'm doing. My dark jersey bore white sweat stains—hard to believe that much salt comes out of one's skin—and all the ladder-climbing and stretching rendered my jeans unwearable. They were already unfit for polite company—the aft crotch showed underwear if I leaned over—and I heard them tear a little bit each time I got more than 30 degrees of thigh angle going.

But there was work to do, and yards of guttering before I sleep. The arms do the work, but it's the legs that hurt afterward. Once I gooped sealer into the crevices and retired the buzz saw (long story), I showered and settled into a yoga pose that brought the calves back to life. Sir Galahad dropped in for port and cigars, and we stared disbelievingly at the soupy mess we poured out of the bottle he brought with him. Something terrible had happened to the port. Cosmic rays? Neither of us dared taste it. So we killed most of a Corona 12-pack and solved the world's problems out on the back patio. The gutters did not fall on us, a plus.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 06:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Spring is here, meaning it's time for the Byron Nelson, which means people standing under giant umbrellas with lots of TV cameras on them.

The Byron Nelson is a rain god. He visits North Texas every year at the same time to bring us precipitation. He also goes by the name Tornado, and we have Tornado watches, like when you put out cookies and milk for Santa. Those of us who aren't part of the actual Byron Nelson rituals scan the skies each day looking for his blessings.

His closest followers made a bronze statue of him out at Las Colinas (Spanish for "the cleansing"). When it gets wet, they get happy and applaud.

They gather each day to observe silence while special Byron Nelson priests swing silver wands at the sky. Then it rains, and they all go home. But they come back the next day. This goes on for two weeks.

By the end of this ritual, everyone's sunburnt and exhausted, but happy. They go to parties celebrating the Byron Nelson rains.

Me, I just like the water for my lawn. Guess I'm some sort of Philistine.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In Squinx's 4½ years we have been spared an emergency-room visit. But in the six months since Dad's passing Mom has had to go twice.

The E.R. compels use of its complimentary valet parking, and my only complaint is the adjective "complimentary," which, like "people's democratic republic," suggests the opposite. But without any choice I meekly handed my keys over to a kid I knew I had brought no cash to tip. And so a new experience began.

However, I learned that, if you're discreet, no one will say anything about your Bluetooth and your texting. Just, for God's sake, choose vibrate mode. Nobody in an E.R. thinks a tinny rendition of "Afternoon Delight" is funny.

it's the boredom in places like this that drives people to cell-phone diddling. That's one aspect of the emergency room you'll never see on television, the boredom. I saw one orderly at his station, desultorily browsing an Internet message board, and was tempted to yell "STAT!" just to make him jump. He might've welcomed the interruption. I doubt the hours and hours of nothing-to-do were part of his job description, and on a Sunday night there are no managers around to make work for the tedium-afflicted.

Hollywood's many renditions of the emergency room don't include the great yawning stretches of nothing-happening, or the flat expressions on most everyone's face, but one element they get right is the fetching female intern. This one chewed gum and could have passed for my daughter, if I'd started reproducing at 14 and my daughter had finished med school before high school.

Watching her and the others work reassured me that years ago, I wisely chose against a career in medicine. I would have failed at the intern stage. Reason: the parallel multitasking.

As a writer, I can go from tapping out an essay at the computer to hammering in concrete forms around the driveway, then back to writing with no confusion at all; in fact, I write better that way, engaging the physical and the mental alternately. But give me four patients with dozens of vital signs and symptoms among them, and I'm liable to send the geriatric to labor & delivery and order a CAT scan for toe fungus.

i might have just as much difficulty telling the various players apart. They all wear scrubs now, and even the nurses sport stethoscopes, so trying to figure out the players is harder than sorting out who's who in a pit crew. Mom, born in the 1920s, assumes all the males are doctors. I have concluded that the M.D.s are the ones who talk the least, and with one exception, I have that correct.

As we prepared to leave (Mom is fine, BTW), I overheard a doctor come as close as I imagine doctors ever get to actually chewing out a patient. A fellow who'd ambled in and taken a bed next to Mom's told the attending physician he was a Katrina displacement whose hypertension meds had run out. The doctor apparently knew more about his case than that, because he promptly replied that a) people who'd relocated after Katrina were supposed to have been looked after already; b) the emergency room was not the place to get prescriptions for chronic conditions; and c) it was the patient's responsibility to keep up with his meds, not to wait until after they'd run out and symptoms had returned. I felt like a snoop, but I had no choice other than to hear all this through the curtain, which, following his lecture, the doctor parted and walked out with a disgusted look.

Under the curtain, I noticed the man's shoes. All-leather cross-trainers, bearing the name of a professional sports star known all over the world. Easily a hundred bucks. 

Flashback to 1989: I'm interviewing a man who'd asked his fellow parishioners to help a homeless family get past the monetary "hump" of deposits and first-month's-rent that he believed was keeping them in a shelter. By the time I heard about his project, he had succeeded in getting the husband employed and the family into an apartment, so I went to see him for the story.

He spoke with unusual candor, and I had to use discretion in what I published so as to keep the writeup positive. (There are some harsh but firm realities in dealing with homeless people that most of us would be disturbed to learn.) One of his more revealing observations from working with this family -- and with others at the bottom of the income scale -- was, "Most poor people regard medical bills as optional."

Later I would learn that two out of five hospitals operate at a loss. Today, as a homeowner, I subsidize the county hospital district with more than $300 cash per year. I do not want to think about how much of that goes to cover unpaid bills.

I'll spare you the rant about how mandatory charity cheapens the act and fosters resentment on both ends. It's one of those things I prefer to ignore (one of those things you can't say) and then, in moments like Sunday night at the E.R., it slaps me in the face. I'd say the doctor I overheard felt entitled to dress down a customer he knew was unlikely to pay him for the service he was about to provide. Wouldn't you?

we checked mom out three hours after admission with a pain pill and instructions to take it easy. The valet stood by as I helped Mom clamber into the truck. As he handed me the keys, he asked, "Is that your momma?"

"Yes, she is."

"It's good to take care of your momma." And he trotted off to fetch the next car.

Yes, it is.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 08:19 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I've never intentionally posed as someone who's on top of the world. Yet, I managed to do just that in front of one of my good friends. Twice.

Early in my Dallas years, I was the lucky recipient of tickets to the annual Margarita Ball. This is a charity event for which the price of admission is a single, unwrapped toy. The reward is all the margaritas you can drink, streaming from assorted fountains around a hotel ballroom full of dandied-up philanthropes having a great big time.

But to get in, you also have to have a ticket. They can't be had for a price, but are dispensed exclusively by the ball's directors, one of whom I met as a fellow board member of the Dallas County Young Republicans. At a meeting, he handed me two, and when I read the fine print ("formal attire"), I nearly laughed out loud. I had just bought a tuxedo, and the rule is you have to wear a tux twice a year to beat the cost of rental. This would be my second black-tie event that season.

I asked the club president, Matthews, if he wanted the second ticket, but he demurred. He planned to have some neighbors over that night to show the inside of his recently restored house, which he'd just moved into. So I called Sanders -- who's always up for drinks -- and we signed up a couple of dates.

At that time I also owned a pair of frequent-flyer tickets I had no intention of using, so I traded them for the night's use of a limousine. I'd also learned long ago that ladies in little black dresses like champagne. Sanders and I were into bourbon that year, so we had the car stocked for everyone's needs.

When we picked the girls up, we found ourselves just a few blocks from Matthews' house with half an hour to go before the ball even started. I suggested we drop in on the party. Sanders agreed, then added the two most apropos words I've ever heard: "With drinks."

We strolled, laughing, into Matthews' living room in full formal attire, accompanied by our slender, sequined dates and ice-cold highballs. The neighbors sat speechless, having forgotten even to stand for the ladies. Matthews directed our party to a tour of the house, and Sanders had the nerve to ask his wife to freshen his drink. Which she did.

After circling the floor plan, admiring the hardwoods, china, and appliances, we left pretty much the same way we came in. No one in the living room had moved. Matthews saw us off from the front porch, and as we clambered into the car I noticed some of the guests craning their necks through the front picture windows, wondering what sort of people this new fellow Matthews would be attracting to their neighborhood. I'd have paid admission to hear him explain to them what they'd just seen.

So we did it again the next year.

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